Ministerial portfolio busy for Taber-Warner MLA

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Sunny South News

By Trevor Busch
Sunny South News
editor@tabertimes.com

Since taking over in January 2026, Taber-Warner MLA Grant Hunter has been focused on the many duties involved with his position as Minister of Environment and Protected Areas.

Hunter detailed some of the work he has been doing as part of the ministry’s portfolio in 2026, with water management topping the list. 

“It’s very technical, it’s a big ministry, obviously it affects lots of other ministries and lots of places in Alberta. I’ve obviously been focused very much on the water file, that’s something that I’ve been very passionate about for years, and something that’s very important down in Southern Alberta here. So we’ve been working on putting together a 100 year strategy for water in Alberta, and that’s going to be a big, big piece of work that we need to do and we’re going to try to be able to work through that before the next election.”

Reviewing legislation passed several decades ago will ensure it meets the needs of Alberta moving into the future, said Hunter. 

“We’re also going to be reviewing the EPEA legislation (Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act), which is our major piece of legislation, addresses everything from environmental impact assessments to everything that you can imagine that is environment-related. So we’re going to be reviewing that piece of legislation. It hasn’t since it came about 33 years ago.” 

As AI data centres proliferate at an escalating pace around the globe, Hunter wants to make sure environmental regulations keep up with the pace of proposed development in the province. 

“I know there’s some concerns that people have out there about AI data centers. We will have the opportunity of being able to review whether or not we have a robust enough process in terms of environmental the standards for AI data centers, and moving forward. I mean, think about this: 33 years ago, there wasn’t even internet, so we’ve moved from having internet to now AI data centers popping up, or wanting to pop up all over Alberta, and we just have to make sure that we have the proper processes in place when it comes to environmental stewardship, so we’ll do that.”

Hunter’s ministry has also been fast-tracking sub-regional land use planning for various regions of the province.

“I’m working on sub-regional land use planning. We’re going to be doing 14 of these within a year. The vast majority of those are in Central and Northern Alberta, so that has a massive amount of work that needs to be done. To put that in perspective, when they did the first sub-regional plan that took four years. So we’re going to do 14 in one year, and so we’re putting a lot of resources into this. The nice thing about it is the first one that was done – they didn’t really know what sub-regional plans were, land-use plans were – and so they were able to figure out how these things work, and what’s the right approach to move forward. So we’ll have 14 of those that will move forward.”