Danielle Smith's roadshow of resentment kicks off in Red Deer
To avoid a repeat of the raucous coal policy town hall in Fort Macleod, the UCP ensured the Alberta Next tour was highly stage managed, with party members getting first dibs on tickets.
This story was originally published at the Progress Report.
Attendees at the first stop of Premier Danielle Smith’s travelling “Alberta Next” roadshow in Red Deer were overwhelmingly supportive of her series of proposals to enhance Alberta’s autonomy.
This is likely due to the fact that free tickets for the event were released to UCP members before the general public, a source who holds a UCP membership confirmed to the Progress Report.
In June, Premier Smith announced a 14-person panel that would solicit Albertans’ input on six policy areas—equalization, a provincial pension plan, a provincial police force, withholding social services from some immigrants, constitutional reform and forgoing the Canada Revenue Agency. In the following days, the panel was expanded by two members, bringing the total to 16.
The town halls are divided into each policy area, with attendees shown a five-minute video before they were given the opportunity to line up and provide feedback on each issue. These videos, which have been criticized as “heavily biased,” are the same ones participants in the province’s online survey have to view before answering questions, which are themselves leading.
In the event’s final 30 minutes, attendees have the opportunity to provide more general comments.
Tuesday’s forum was moderated by Bruce McAllister, a former Wildrose MLA who is the executive director of the Premier’s Office. McAllister decided which questions and comments were permitted to exceed a 45-second time limit and which warranted answers from panelists.
To avoid a repeat of the raucous coal policy town hall in Fort Macleod, the government sent out a list of ground rules ahead of the Alberta Next kickoff, which included prohibition of “unauthorized” video and photography, a ban on “protest or advocacy materials of any kind (including signs or flyers),” and “zero tolerance” for hecklers or protestors.
During the segment on equalization, a member of the Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist Party was cut off after receiving jeers for advocating the nationalization of the oil and gas industry.
“I’m happy to try and give more than 45 [seconds] within reason. That stretched a little long,” said McAllister.
In her introductory remarks, Premier Smith acknowledged that Alberta Next is a continuation of the Fair Deal Panel former premier Jason Kenney struck in November 2019 to travel the province and catalogue grievances against Ottawa.
“You'll be quite surprised and delighted to see how much of that has guided our work in the last five years,” said Smith.
The panel’s 24 recommendations include almost all the Alberta Next topics, but the previous panel notably advised against one—provincial tax collection.
The vast majority of speakers on each topic in Red Deer were supportive of the government’s proposals, with some urging the government to forgo promised referendums on the proposals that generate the most support.
“You can evaluate what you're seeing in these meetings that you're having throughout the province, and you can just do it,” said one attendee.
During the civic elections of October 2021, then-premier Jason Kenney ordered a referendum on removing equalization from the Constitution, which was one of the Fair Deal Panel’s recommendations.
Sixty-two per cent of voters supported eliminating equalization, which takes a portion of revenues from federal income taxes and redistributes them to provinces with fiscal capacities below the national average to ensure all provinces are able to offer roughly equivalent levels of social services.
All provinces except for Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan receive equalization payments.
While rewriting the Constitution is well outside a single province’s purview, Kenney argued that the referendum result gave the provincial government leverage in negotiations with the federal government.
A speaker likened equalization to an individual being on welfare, suggesting that each recipient province should establish a plan to “get to a point where your GDP is high enough to be able to give funds back.”
University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, arguably the most mainstream Alberta Next panelist, clarified that equalization is “an unconditional transfer, so having measures in place to encourage provinces to develop resources or boost their economy is not currently a feature.”
Tombe declined to comment when McAllister later asked him to answer a question on tax collection later in the evening.
While the discussion of equalization was framed around resentment of Quebec for being a leading recipient of payments, discussions of pensions and police focused on how Alberta could emulate Quebec, which like Ontario has its own provincial police force, and unlike Ontario isn’t part of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP).
A provincial government survey from 2023 showed just 10 per cent of Albertans support a provincial pension plan, results which Edmonton Journal provincial politics reporter Matthew Black had to appeal to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner to obtain.
“I don’t understand why we’re still talking about this when a vast majority of Albertans said they did not want an Alberta Pension Plan, so why are we still bringing this up again?” said Deb Stott, a retired accountant who lives in Ponoka County.
Panelist Andrew Judson, a Fraser Institute board member, outlined the “elegant solution” his organization proposed in a recent paper of “immediately” establishing an Alberta Pension Plan that would supplement but not replace the Canada Pension Plan.
“Nothing prevents an individual from having more than one plan in their personal affairs. We've got TFSAs and RRSPs. We can certainly undertake that,” said Judson.
“I'm a vehement supporter of this idea about an independent Alberta pension plan, but it’s important to remember that Quebec didn't leave the pension. It never joined in the first place.”
After the pension discussion, McAllister conducted a straw poll, which showed a vast majority of attendees in support of an Alberta Pension Plan. He did the same for an Alberta police force, with the same result.
The government, as the premier acknowledged, is already in the process of establishing a provincial police force via Alberta Sheriffs, naming former Calgary Police Service deputy chief Sat Parhar as its chief.
“We are building that up, and I hope in the not too distant future, it's going to be at least double in size,” said Premier Smith.
The package of constitutional reforms proposed by the Alberta Next panel include elected senators, allowing provincial laws to prevail over federal laws in matters of shared jurisdiction, allowing provinces to select their federal judges, strict representation by population in the House of Commons and giving provinces the right to opt out of federal spending with compensation.
The premier suggested that Canada was due for another round of discussion over the Constitution, which last occurred with the 1992 Charlottetown Accord, but also acknowledged she doesn’t know much about Charlottetown, or the 1987 Meech Lake Accord that preceded it.
“I was just a university student when we went through the last couple of rounds. I’d probably need some guidance on even how to do that,” Smith said, adding:
I don't know how the last ones got called. I don't know if it was the coalition of premiers who said that we needed to do this, or if it was because Quebec didn't sign on [to the Constitution] in 1982, everybody felt a great desire to try to create some kind of mechanism so that they would come in. I don’t know if it was initiated by the federal government.
Panelist Bruce McDonald, a retired judge, said that it was the federal government’s initiative.
Before members of the public were permitted to speak on the question of restricting immigration, McAllister pointed to the panel’s three “first-generation immigrants”—acupuncturist Benny Xu, Dr. Akin Osakuade and disability support executive Sumita Anand.
He asked Xu, who was also appointed to the province’s mental health and addictions advisory panel in 2019, for his “perspective on how things have changed” since he immigrated to Canada in the 1990s.
Xu claimed that Canada is no longer “a place that is perceived as business friendly,” and is “more of a socialist country” than when he arrived.
Darcy Clarke of Red Deer complained that because of immigration he “can’t even recognize” his city anymore, because “the quality of people coming into our country do not assimilate to our cultures.”
“I know they bring their own culture, but they expect Canadians to change with their culture, and I don't agree with that,” he said without citing any examples.
Another local complained that immigrants are “allowed to come in and take from the social services”, while his wife’s disability payments are being clawed back.
He claimed, without any apparent evidence, that immigrants are being allowed to keep their full benefits because “they play the race card.”
Corbin Moore from the Stettler area said that “the levels of immigration that we currently have are unnecessary.”
“We have one simple thing—it’s called reproduction,” he said, suggesting that all the government needs to do is “support the traditional family.”
After the comments from the public, McAllister asked Dr. Osakuade to describe how immigration to Canada has changed since he arrived.
The Didsbury emergency room physician blamed “massive immigration” for “putting huge pressure on [the] health service, putting huge pressure on education and schools, on housing, on cost of living.”
“I'm so grateful to live in Alberta with an awesome premier who's fighting the fight to make sure that Albertans are protected from unregulated, uncontrolled, unvetted immigration,” Osakuade said in the most nakedly partisan remark of the evening.
Anand complained that more recent immigrants “are taking away our children and grandchildren's jobs for just $2 more an hour.”
More than one speaker floated the idea of Alberta not having any taxes at all.
Premier Smith conceded that an Alberta Revenue Agency would only be able to collect the province’s portion of taxes, and that the federal government would still collect federal taxes, which Alberta has no control over.
Michael Binnion, an oil and gas executive who sits on the panel, said that Alberta doing its own tax collection, like having its own immigration policy and police force, would be a way to “show that we can govern ourselves.”
Attendee Jeffrey Rath, a lawyer with the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project who faces multiple allegations of unprofessional conduct at the Law Society of Alberta, argued that there is in fact a “legal mechanism to stop sending taxes to Ottawa … and that's voting Alberta hell out of Canada.”
During the last portion of the town hall, attendees asked about eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies from provincial workplaces and removing any commitments to any CO2 reductions, both of which were overwhelmingly approved at last year’s UCP convention.
Smith promised anti-DEI legislation when the Legislature returns in the fall.
Wilf Massey from Red Deer called net-zero targets and decarbonization “absolutely foolish,” and CO2 a “fundamental nutrient for our health.” He said he was disappointed to still hear members of the Alberta government discuss achieving net zero.
The premier didn’t respond to that comment, but at the 2024 AGM she said that while she shares the oil and gas industry’s stated commitment to net zero, party members are frustrated by the “efforts of the federal government and a coalition of extreme environmentalists who want to stop the production of oil and gas altogether.”
Another attendee asked whether Alberta’s government would advocate that Canada withdraw from the “tyrannical medical, pharmaceutical, social and financial obligations” of the World Health Organization, which he claimed they have just days left to do.
McAllister attempted to move on to the next question, but Smith insisted upon answering.
“I'll look into this, but the word that I've been given is that this is provincial jurisdiction,” she said.
The roadshow continues Wednesday night in Sherwood Park, followed by appearances in Edmonton, Fort McMurray and Lloydminster in August, and Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie and Calgary in September.
Ugh! Why do we have to be ungoverned by these callow clowns? The UCP generated a brain drain by changing the fee structures for doctors and now there is an unconscionable scarcity of orthopedic surgeons among other specialists. City governance is also a clown show. Neoliberalism x infinity!