The provincial government announced details of the Innovation Employment Grant this week. The tax incentive will allow companies to claim up to 20 per cent of their R&D spending, starting with an eight per cent rebate on their base spending that scales as their research budget grows. (The Logic)

Talking point: The grant—along with a $175-million investment in venture funding vehicle Alberta Enterprise Corporation, announced in late June—is in response to backlash from the tech community after the United Conservative government cut five tax-incentive programs in October 2019. The cuts, which included Alberta’s SR&ED, a research tax incentive on which many early-stage startups relied, amounted to about $400 million over four years. At the same time, the government cut corporate tax rates from 12 per cent to eight per cent by 2022. “I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding …reducing the corporate tax rate does not help a startup,” Cory Janssen, CEO of Edmonton-based AI firm AltaML, told The Logic. The new incentives, which will come into effect in January 2021, come amid a greater sense of urgency to diversify the Alberta economy. The province’s unemployment is among the highest in Canada as the oil-sector recession compounds the impacts of COVID-19. “I think that pushed the urgency that something needed to be done right now,” said Janssen. “There needs to be hope somewhere else because everything is so bleak in the traditional industries.”