Alberta Premier Danielle Smith sent a letter to Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek this week chattering excitedly about plans to expand Calgary’s light rail transit system to Calgary International Airport.
She made sure it was posted to social media for all to see, along with a news release on the government’s website.
Efficient public transit from a city’s downtown to its airport, especially when the airport is right inside the city as Calgary’s is, is not a bad idea.
Smith’s epistolary pitch, however, looks, upon closer examination, like it’s mostly hot air.
First, the airport LRT idea is a promise, not a plan, by a premier who’s dug herself into a deep hole in her first month on the job and doesn’t really want to stop digging. This has the sound of a “good news story” intended to distract.
Second, it’s an aspirational scheme that doesn’t serve the city’s most immediate transportation needs and appears tied to a dubious proposed boondoggle, the scheme to run a tourist train to the Rockies that never seems to die no matter how many times it’s killed.
“Calgary is a world-class city; it should be connected to our province’s world-class parks,” Smith’s letter chirped, not mentioning that the highway goes right there.
Third, it seems to come with strings attached, in the form of Premier Smith’s obvious fondness for the oil industry’s dubious proposition it can pivot to creating “clean” hydrogen fuel using energy from natural gas, thereby squeezing a few more years of profit from fossil fuels and converting surplus petroleum-refining infrastructure to other profitable activities.
Premier touts hydrogen-powered locomotives
“I would also note the potential of utilizing hydrogen-powered locomotives in this endeavour, which would both reduce emissions and is aligned with our government’s vision to make Alberta a world leader in hydrogen technology research, development and manufacturing,” said Smith.
“The idea of having a link from the airport to downtown and perhaps to Banff, really interesting idea,” Mayor Gondeck told reporters, an answer portrayed by UCP-friendly columnists as praise, but more likely a polite suggestion she was mildly underwhelmed.
“These conversations have gone on for a long time, so to think that our provincial government is able to support us is absolutely very good news for Calgary,” she reminded her listeners.
Meanwhile, Calgary Nose Hill Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, who has a reputation for liking both guns and roses, picked up on this, complaining in a news release that not enough attention was being paid to the needs of residents of her federal riding on Calgary’s north side.
Noting that it’s been nearly a decade since $1.5 billion was allocated by Ottawa for an LRT line from the city’s northern suburbs to downtown but that the plan is no longer even on the table, she said: “I encourage my colleagues at all levels of government to ensure that the residents of north central Calgary are prioritized for public transit before projects that might have a tourism bent.”
Just last spring, Rempel Garner – who apparently divides her time among Calgary, Ottawa and Oklahoma – publicly mused about seeking the leadership of the United Conservative Party.
By late June, though, she had changed her mind, portraying the UCP in a remarkable Substack post as a disunited hot mess, rife with meltdowns, near punch-ups, smears, harassment and public bullying.
Michelle Rempel Garner … eyeing premier’s job?
It’s easy to wonder, though, if she might be anticipating that Smith’s recent political comeback will end sooner than later and give her another chance at pursing her political career in more congenial circumstances.
In a less competitive world, perhaps the two of them could co-operate to build a zeppelin field in north Calgary, with a lightning-fast LRT connection to the towers of downtown, finding synergies in hydrogen and steel rails.
Meanwhile, Smith’s mandate letter to her new finance minister – the same as Jason Kenney’s old finance minister – instructed Travis Toews to work with Energy Minister Peter Guthrie “to advance LNG and hydrogen initiatives in the province.”
In case you were hoping that was all, after complaining about the “Liberal-NDP caused inflation crisis,” the premier went on to tell Toews to keep planning to take over the Canada Pension Plan and create an Alberta version that “will increase pension benefits for seniors and reduce premiums for workers.”
I regret to inform readers that while that may be how Smith tries to sell the UCP’s pension scheme, it’s not how it’s likely to play out if they ever get their paws on our pensions, at least as long as there are tempting investment opportunities in cryptocurrency, alternative COVID treatments, and U.S. pipelines to nowhere.
The premier also instructed her finance minister to “provide recommendations regarding an Alberta Revenue Agency to collect all Alberta taxes including personal income taxes” – another expensive and pointless scheme intended only to advance the UCP’s sovereignist agenda.
As for her new minister of transportation and economic corridors (back in cabinet after a spell in the backbenches for office boozing and tolerating harassment among his staff), Devin Dreeshen’s mandate letter says nothing about hydrogen but instructs him to get cracking on “an LRT and rail link between Calgary International Airport, downtown Calgary and Canmore/Banff.”
Still no mandate letter for health minister
Premier Smith is yet to issue a mandate letter to her health minister, Jason Copping, who was also recycled from Kenney’s cabinet.
This is probably the single-most anticipated cabinet mandate letter, not to mention the one with the greatest political risk to the premier, since she will need to outline in it how extensive her plans are to purge senior Alberta Health Services leadership, restructure the big provincial health-care agency, and privatize publicly delivered health-care services.
But then, there’s no 2020-2021 AHS annual report either – despite the fact that for years it’s been released at the end of June or early in the summer. This year, though, it’s still missing in action.
The delay can’t be attributed to AHS. As in past years, the 2020-2021 annual report was approved by the AHS board at its June meeting and sent on to Alberta Health, as the provincial health department is confusingly known, where it has languished ever since.
More crypto-collapse Alberta fallout
And speaking of crypto currencies, the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX Exchange not surprisingly this week called off its plan to have one of its subsidiaries buy Calgary crypto trader Bitvo Inc.
On Remembrance Day, the company not long ago touted by the UCP as proof Alberta is open for business, collapsed into bankruptcy, taking Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices tumbling southward with it.
Meanwhile, Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally, occupant of what is by tradition the lowest-ranked portfolio in Alberta’s cabinet, was off to Austin today to attend the Texas Blockchain Summit, ” which bills itself “North America’s premier policy conference for the Bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain ecosystem.”
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