Alberta: politics and provincial hubris

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2024 (552 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You could call it an attempt at vertical integration, if you were in a charitable mood.

Or you could just call it a remarkable example of political hubris.

Fresh from endless complaining about federal government interference in provincial jurisdiction, Alberta’s provincial government and Premier Danielle Smith now seem intent on interfering in, well, all other levels of government.

First off, there was the argument that Alberta should be allowed to form its own pension plan, replacing the Canada Pension Plan, and that Albertans deserved to loot the CPP pensions of other Canadians in the process.

Then, there was the idea of new provincial legislation stopping the federal government from making funding arrangements with Alberta municipalities without express provincial permission.

And who could forget that the Alberta government has also decided that it has some sort of right to decide the acceptable ideological bent for any research that the arm’s-length federal funding bodies might sponsor in Alberta universities and colleges?

“We want to make sure that this funding does align with provincial priorities,” Alberta Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney said. Just the thing that every scientist or researcher wants to have as oversight: a provincial government making sure their work “aligns” with “provincial priorities.”

Now, the UCP brain trust has taken aim at Alberta’s municipal governments, introducing legislation that will allow the provincial cabinet to remove duly-elected municipal councillors or mayors from office, as well as given cabinet the ability to amend or repeal municipal bylaws.

“We are doing this in order to protect the provincial interests, by ensuring municipalities are governing affairs that are within their jurisdiction,” Alberta Municipal Affairs Minster Ric McIver said, adding that public perception of firings would keep the provincial government from firing councillors unreasonably.

“I think that the cabinet would be at great risk of being held accountable at the next general provincial election, and it might cost them dearly,” he said.

(Oddly, Alberta municipal councils and candidates who make the wrong decisions are equally held accountable at elections — a concept that seems to escape McIver completely in drawing up legislation that suggest arbitrary dismissal and/or overwriting legally-passed municipalities bylaws is the preferred course of action.)

“Provincial priorities” — “provincial interests”: it’s a broken record of self-justification by a government that wants to impose its own agenda, not only within provincial jurisdiction, but on all other levels of government as well. So does father — in the form of the UCP government of Alberta — actually know best? Well, of course they do.

They’ve written the proof of that directly into legislation, where they say, without a hint of irony, “the Government of Alberta is best positioned to understand and determine the unique needs of its population.”

By their own word of law, Alberta cabinet ministers are better positioned to understand thousands of technically detailed research projects than the independent, experienced panels whose job it is to direct funding to research. Better positioned to understand municipal issues than elected municipal governments in Alberta, municipal governments who hear from their voters on a much more direct level on issues than provincial cabinet ministers do.

To quote George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Dictionary.com summarizes the concept behind that quote succinctly: “The sentence is a comment on the hypocrisy of governments that proclaim the absolute equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite.”

Having complained so much, and for so long, about overreach by other levels of government, you would think that the government of Alberta would know what overreach looks like.

Apparently, it’s only overreach if someone else is doing it.