Invest Alberta CEO Rick Christiaanse wants B.C. companies to expand eastward

Rick Christiaanse seems like a natural fit for Invest Alberta. Not only does Christiaanse have experience in both the public and private sector with organizations like Sport BC, Translink and Telus, he’s a B.C. transplant happily living in Alberta.

And while Christiaanse insists that his main role is in getting companies to expand to Alberta, not necessarily relocate, his job lately has involved talking to businesses from B.C. and around the world and getting them to lay down roots in Alberta.

Three years in to the CEO role, he’s been pretty successful—something he attributes to the province’s economic climate. “The objective is simply to drive investment from around the world to the province that will diversify the province from oil and gas,” he says. “Oil and gas will always be important and it certainly has been growing and will continue to do that. But it’s time to do some other things as well. That mandate was intriguing to me.”

Among those other things? Establishing an Amazon Web Services data centre in Calgary to the tune of $3.5 billion in investment, bringing an $11.5 billion carbon neutral project from Dow Chemical to the Edmonton area and landing a 74,000-square-foot indoor vertical farm from Ontario-based Goodleaf Farms. Oh and Fortinet, the global security giant that already has a huge presence in Burnaby, is slated to open a new cutting-edge cybersecurity tech hub in Calgary.

Christiaanse sees his former hometown as a major opportunity. “We’re reacting to an incredible amount of demand that we’ve seen for a while now,” he says. “Industrial land is about one-tenth of the cost it is in the Lower Mainland. And you can buy a house in Edmonton for $500,000. You can’t buy anything in the Lower Mainland for that. So as companies look to expand, especially as they need logistics or distribution, it’s become economical to do that in Alberta and ship it back to Vancouver.”

Another argument for expansion to Alberta, says Christiaanse, is around red tape. Alberta’s provincial government has a minister, Dale Nally, in charge of red tape reduction. “Some people laugh at that,” he says, “but Alberta has eliminated about 30-to-40 percent of its regulations in the last three years alone. I was talking to a business a couple weeks ago that was looking at putting something in Ontario. They estimated with re-zoning and everything that they could put all the pieces in place in two years… we did it in two weeks.”

Christiaanse notes seven industries that Invest Alberta is targeting, including energy, agriculture, technology, logistics and distribution, food services, life sciences and forestry. And while Calgary is growing tremendously to the tune of some 100,000 a year, Christiaanse argues that places like Edmonton, Airdrie and rural Alberta are also well positioned. “We’re growing by about 220,00 people a year right now in Alberta and will double our population in the next few years. It’s pretty amazing to see,” he says.

He also insists that Invest Alberta’s strategy isn’t about stealing B.C. companies or investment, it’s about growing the Canadian economy as a whole. At the same time, the former B.C. resident has borrowed some of his old home’s strategies around economic development.

“B.C.’s always been really good at telling its story to the rest of the world—we’re mirroring a lot of what they used to do and seeing that impact,” Christiaanse says. At the same time, B.C. has kind of changed its model on how it goes to market. It’s gone a little quieter compared to where it used to be. So it’s been an interesting transition in that regard.”