When it comes to developing sweeping policy changes or building provincial budgets, Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) likes to do it in the dark.
But, a sympathetic Albertan might ask, what about all those telephone town halls? What about all those online surveys? Didn’t the government even strike a star-studded panel to engage Albertans about an Alberta pension plan?
Well, says Bradley Lafortune, executive director of Public Interest Alberta (PIA), it’s true the UCP Government starts consultations. It just never finishes them.
“Not really, anyway. ‘Consultation’ is a well-worn and usually substantively useless exercise undertaken by neoliberal governments of all stripes,” he explains. “They say, ‘We want to hear from you.’ But you’ll never hear back from them until they’re ready to inflict damage!”
Under Premier Danielle Smith’s version of the UCP, secrecy and sham consultations have reached a new level, Lafortune says. “We don’t even get ‘what-we-heard’ reports anymore.”
Once upon a time, when Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives were in charge, the government would at least publish heavily sanitized and condensed summations that gave voters a sense of which way the wind was blowing and what the government wanted.
No more. Example: The UCP now says it won’t release the results of its pension engagement process – that is, its effort to pump the tires of an idea most Albertans hate, taking over the Canada Pension Plan fund and using it to prop up industries favoured by the government.
Obviously, the government didn’t get the answers it wanted – even though it made a point of having no place in its multiple-choice questions where respondents could express their opposition to Alberta pulling out of the Canada Pension Plan.
They must have found ways to express their opinions anyway. After all, the government is prepared to break its own freedom of information law to keep us from knowing what Albertans think about the about Premier Danielle Smith’s dream of a massive pension grab.
Why? Well, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement last summer that it wouldn’t release the report, Alberta’s FOIP law be damned, because “the ministry may be impacted upon the release of this records’ package. The applicant may further release the information into the public domain.”
We can’t have that, can we? In other words, in Danielle Smith’s Alberta, politics trumps transparency and legislated accountability every time!
Now, Smith claims it’s all just a matter of timing. Sure, she’ll make the results public – but only after her Cabinet has decided what to do about them, she told the audience of her free CORUS Entertainment radio program last Saturday.
“Once those cabinet decisions have been made, then all of the reports associated with that decision making become public,” she said. Cabinet deliberations, of course, are traditionally cloaked in secrecy. So this is precisely bass-ackwards to the way a government committed to openness and democracy would handle such a question.
“In the face of this secrecy and bad theater masquerading as listening,” Lafortune said, “PIA decided to do something completely different.
“Instead of asking Albertans to participate in the annual snooze fest the Treasury Board organizes, after which it’s completely ignored by the offices of the premier and the finance minister, we’re actually trying to find out what Albertans really want, so we can publish a ‘People’s Budget,’” he said.
The process, which is now under way, will be open and transparent, Lafortune promised. It will ask Albertans what their priorities are, and what they’d like to see change. “We will listen to people, we will release what the people have said – their raw answers – and then we will build an alternative People’s Budget based on the results we’ve heard.”
The survey – which is found here – remains open until January 12.
Lafortune says PIA has already received hundreds of responses, which mainly reflect “an Alberta that Danielle Smith doesn’t understand.”
“At the end of this process,” he said, “I suspect we’ll have an alternative budget that reflects the Alberta that most of us know and love. Not one where we blame Justin Trudeau for everything from the price of oil to an Oilers loss, or one where we beg Donald Trump to notice us. But an Alberta where we build things that reflect the best of our nature: fairness, strength, and support for every last person, now and into the future.”
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