Thanks very much for the question.
As I said in my opening remarks today, I think what the IRA does for us is provide a model that can be followed and should be followed. The good news is that the federal government, as I've said, has received the memo. They've looked across the border and they see how well the IRA is working in terms of attracting and incenting investment, creating jobs and building industries.
There's a model there for us to follow. As I said in my opening remarks, and as our labour coalition has talked about in our reports, on getting to where the puck is, the answer is actually industrial policy in the public interest—the same kind of industrial policy that helped build our oil sands and petrochemical industries when Peter Lougheed and his PC government in the 1970s and 1980s realized that we were running out of conventional oil. He didn't wait for the market to decide. He didn't put his finger up to the wind to see which way the wind was blowing. He saw a crisis looming on the horizon, and he decided to use the levers of power to address it.
The answer is industrial policy. The best example is right across the border with the IRA. It's working. Doing nothing, frankly, is a dangerous option. As I said in my opening remarks, denial is not a plan. Delay will just put off all the investments that are necessary, and we may get left behind. That's our biggest fear.
I think the federal government has taken the necessary initial steps with the $80 billion they've earmarked in the budget. There's a framework for consultation and worker involvement in the sustainable jobs act, which is before Parliament right now. We are moving in the right direction, but because of our federal structure, what we're worried about is that the provinces may get in the way.
That's what we're seeing in Alberta. Just last month, our provincial government and our premier, Danielle Smith, introduced a surprise moratorium on renewable energy investment. It's that kind of thing that's going to trip us up. We're already losing jobs in oil and gas and have been for years. Even though production has been going up and investment is going up, employment is going down because companies are automating. They're automating our jobs away.
Our future lies in an IRA-style pivot towards a lower-carbon economy. That's where the jobs will be for all Canadian jurisdictions, including Alberta. That's where we need to go.