During this fall’s eventful session of the Alberta Legislature, the United Conservative Party (UCP) attacked the rights of some vulnerable Albertans to medical treatment, undermined the right of all citizens to public information, made it easier to keep citizens from exercising their right to use public land, and even tried to make it illegal for law-abiding citizens to obey federal laws.
Then they marked the end of the session yesterday by publishing a news release on the government website stating that “Alberta’s government was laser-focused on the protection and promotion of Albertans’ rights and freedoms, a theme that united all 13 pieces of legislation passed this session.”
This kind of inversion of the truth is characteristic of many UCP statements. Nevertheless, it must be said that even the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s famous fictional account a dystopian future would have stopped using the term “laser-focused” by now, surely the stalest lame metaphor in this province’s public discourse.
Denying the right of a few citizens to medical treatment was part of a trio of laws designed to victimize a tiny minority of trans people to satisfy the base MAGA urges of the UCP’s woke-obsessed base.
The Education Amendment Act, 2024, the Health Statutes Amendment Act and the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act each include measures based on the anti-woke hysteria used so effectively by the Republican party south of the Medicine Line.
The first bill will force students under 16 to get their parents’ permission if they want to change their names or pronouns at school; the second will prohibit physicians from treating young people under 16 seeking transgender treatment with puberty blockers and hormone therapies, even if their parents give permission; and the third will ban transgender athletes from competing in leagues not designated as co-ed in the name of protecting women’s sports.
None of this is necessary or addresses a real problem, and in some cases it will result in cruelty. But it will win votes for the UCP in certain quarters.
Premier Smith, who used to shed crocodile tears about the plight of transgender young people, has suggested she might use the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ “notwithstanding clause” if the provisions are overturned by the courts in the inevitable legal challenges.
The Access to Information Act will redefine cabinet confidentiality to include messages between ministers and political staffers, and among political staff, to shield the government from public disclosure of public information.
The new exemptions will prevent disclosure of any document created by or for the premier, any other ministers, or the Treasury Board, including emails. Well, at least this save government political aides from the inconvenience of using vaguely named Gmail accounts to avoid Freedom of Information requests, as is common practice now.
The All-Season Resorts Act, which Government House Leader Joseph Schow bragged about in that Orwellian press release will allow the government to exempt any developer from normal environmental regulations to build exclusive resorts that will never welcome ordinary Albertans. Professional Biologist Lorne Fitch will have more to say about this in this space this weekend.
Schow was also the sponsor of the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, which will have negligible impact on either farness or safety in sport, but provides the party base with a convenient whipping child. Well, the UCP certainly isn’t about to try, as at least one prominent U.S. conservative politician has done in such circumstances, “to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion.”
As for trying to keep law-abiding citizens from obeying federal laws, the UCP left that up to a fatuous Sovereignty Act motion passed by the Legislature that appears principally to be intended to hide the amount of carbon that energy companies operating in Alberta pump into the planet’s atmosphere. This will pretty well put paid to the notion of “ethical oil” from Alberta, but one suspects we’re well beyond that sort of pretence by now anyway.
The UCP position is that since the Canadian Constitution gives provinces jurisdiction over natural resources, Alberta’s Government can therefore order fossil fuel companies operating here not to obey the laws passed by Parliament. As was noted earlier in this space, one doesn’t need to be a constitutional expert to suspect that this is not going to fly if it ever gets to court.
But then that doesn’t really matter because the immediate goal of such grandstanding is to attack Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a Liberal. This is the same reason Ms. Smith and the UCP will never contribute to any “Team Canada” effort to save Canadians in other provinces from U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s plan to impose heavy sanctions on U.S. allies who don’t dance to his tune.
In other news, the UCP was willing, however, to agree to take $162 million from Ottawa to fund three extremely expensive drugs for rare diseases affecting a small number of patients who might otherwise face bills of $100,000 or more a year for treatment.
Credit where credit is due, this deal was part of the National Strategy for Drugs for Rare Diseases, through which the federal government has budgeted up to $1.4 billion over three years for bilateral agreements with provinces and territories.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
