For Doug Horner, politics and agriculture are in his blood. Alberta's Minister of Advanced Education and Technology, Horner and three generations before him have been involved with agriculture. His father, Dr. Hugh Horner, was a former minister of agriculture, and several uncles were also politically active. In conversation with senior writer Lisa Williams, it's clear that Horner is passionate about investing in education and technology not only to meet the needs of a booming economy and population explosion, but also to ensure that the needs of future generations will be met. Excerpts from their conversation follow.
Q. As the Minister of Advanced Education and Technology, what is at the top of your list with respect to what you want to accomplish within your ministry?
A. We've been presented mandate letters from our premier, Ed Stelmach; that's something that hadn't happened for Alberta cabinet ministers in the past. These mandate letters establish the premier's vision of the government's priorities for our departments, and we (the ministers) will be judged by how well we meet these mandate letters. Stelmach also made these letters public. This means Albertans will be able to judge me in my role as minister by how well I've responded to my mandate letter.
If I were to bring the list down to one or two critical things, the first one is what we refer to as the Campus Alberta approach in the province. Under that Campus Alberta approach, we need to establish a framework of the roles, responsibilities and mandates of each post-secondary institution. Having moved down that path to get that done, we are also going to be better able to address the access, affordability and capacity issues that we need to deal with in our post-secondary institutions. That's a high priority for this department.
The other focus is our Technology Commercialization Taskforce. The value-added side to that is we've brought together a small group of experts and a larger advisory taskforce. We (Government of Alberta) want strategic advice from them in order to deliver the framework needed to ensure that the future technologies we create, as a result of investments in research and development (R&D) and our post-secondary institutions, are going to be commercialized here.
That broadens our economic base. We're an energy province, we know that, and probably will be for many years to come. At the same time, we want to be a technology province as well.
Q. You touched on the fact Alberta is an energy province, and that there's been major population growth lately as a direct result of that. How has that affected the growth of the ICT sector within the province?
A. I think it's given us the impetus to make it a top priority. Industry is certainly reacting, and trying to bring technology for productivity gains.
We've had rapid growth, some of it almost mind-boggling when you have a small community that grows by about 28 per cent in one year. I'm not talking about Edmonton or Calgary, but a small community just outside my riding. You get to see first-hand how that affects a community.
Technology R&D is going to be the driver for the productivity that we need because we have a labour shortage. Even though we have this tremendous growth and people moving in, we have a tremendous demand for more people to fill these spots. As that drives our labour costs up, companies and the public sector are going to need to turn to more technology solutions to help us deliver the services Alberta will need.
Q. Obviously the shortage would directly impact the education side of the equation, where you'll have to recruit people to fill the gap you're having within the ICT sector. How are you tackling that from an HR perspective?
A. Fortunately, over the past little while we have recognized R&D as a key to the growth of the province. In fact, a group called iCORE (Informatics Circle of Research Excellence) in Alberta was started eight or nine years ago to address that need. The focus of iCORE is to try to attract the brightest and the best in a particular field. A lot of that has been centered on the energy industry as well as the agricultural industry.
Our goal now is to expand those types of recruitment activities, and from a post-secondary perspective, train some home-grown talent. We have two or three of some of the best universities in North America, with a tremendously successful track record in research and attraction of research capital. We should be utilizing that strength, and we're going to make that a priority as well.
Continued: Governance and managing growth pressures
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