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The UCP will kick off a legislative session in the third week of May that will run until just before the start of the Calgary Stampede at the beginning of July. The party has orders-in-council already written and ready to roll out; substantial work has already begun on prospective legislation; and even as the balloons were still falling after Kenney’s victory speech at the Big Four Roadhouse Tuesday night, members of the transition team were working the floor, informally recruiting people. Along with a massive new caucus, the party has a government to staff.

Before the NDP arrived, Alberta’s corporate tax rate was at 10 per cent, very competitive with other Canadian provinces. To raise revenue after it was elected in 2015, the NDP boosted it two percentage points. There had been talk within Kenney’s camp of simply cutting it back to the old rate and declaring victory, especially with the potentially tricky politics of selling voters on a tax cut for big business.

Kenney, though, wanted to go big.

“We wanted it to be so significant that CEOs in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Denver would be forced to think about shifting some of their operations to Alberta,” said Kenney.

If Denver seems an odd addition to that list, that’s the “Mountain West” strategy, occupying the UCP leader’s mind.

Knight Legg is delighted Kenney went two points further, and thinks it will pay off handsomely for Alberta. The transition team chief told the Post that he and Kenney have already taken more than a dozen calls from CEOs whose interest was piqued by the tax cut in the UCP platform, asking how serious the party is about the proposal and how it will be rolled out. Knight Legg’s answers have been simple: they’re deadly serious, and the plan is to phase it in by knocking off one percentage point each year for four years. About a third of the companies that have already expressed interest are based outside Canada, he said, and none are in oil and gas.