According to a study by The Guardian, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies collected more than $30-million every hour in “unearned” profit during the first month of the Iran war, and stand to make “$230-billion by the end of the year if the price of oil continues to average $100.” That’s a pretty big “if”—but it does put an eye-watering number on the potential windfall for companies in 2026 compared to anticipated profits before the war started. And it’s why people began talking about a “windfall tax” on the companies.

“As the owners of the resource, Albertans should get the lion’s share of those profits,” wrote Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan in the first week of the war. “And the way to do that is to introduce a windfall profits tax on top of the royalties that oil companies pay in exchange for the right to exploit publicly owned assets.”

This wasn’t a sudden revelation but rather part of McGowan’s long-standing argument that Alberta must increase oil and gas royalty rates. And he’s not alone. A long list of prominent economists have been saying the same thing for years—and they doubled down as the Iran war dragged on into April. “Taxing windfall profits won’t worsen inflation; it will recapture unearned gains from corporations and resource owners and can be used to protect vulnerable populations,” declared a group of economists led by Nobel-prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz.

It all sounds straightforward. Indeed, about 25 countries had already introduced a windfall tax well before Donald Trump’s misadventure in Iran. And Alberta does have a sliding scale for oil sands royalty rates, where they increase relative to the price of oil. But this isn’t enough for critics such as McGowan.

Oil companies are suddenly awash in windfall profits—while we’re paying near-record prices for gas.

Oil companies are pushing back, arguing windfall taxes discourage investment. They quote University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, who in 2022 said in an interview that “having a government just enact an ad hoc tax out of nowhere based on just whatever they think the rate should be—that’s problematic because it creates uncertainty.”

We also bump up against the “symmetry argument,” in which oil companies, facing a windfall tax from governments during boom times, could then demand some sort of “calamity compensation” from governments when oil prices collapse—as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To save ourselves from jumping on the never-ending merry-go-round of arguments for and against a windfall profits tax, let’s just ask one short question: Would a windfall tax ever fly in Alberta The even shorter answer: No.

That’s not just because Alberta is governed by the fossil-fuel champion Danielle Smith. A windfall tax is part of a political suicide trifecta, along with raising royalty rates and introducing a provincial sales tax. The provincial NDP has also shied away from the trifecta. After campaigning in 2015 on implementing “competitive, realistic royalty rates as prices rise,” NDP leader Rachel Notley then performed a whiplash-inducing policy shift upon becoming premier. She went through the motions of a royalty review, then concluded the rates under previous Progressive Conservative governments were suddenly okay.

At the time, an irate McGowan complained that the NDP government was committing a “profound political mistake.” McGowan vowed to continue the battle for higher royalties, a fight that now extends to a windfall tax.

The public appetite for higher royalties comes and goes in direct relation to the world price of oil. When it’s over US$100 a barrel, Albertans practically march on the legislature, demanding a bigger share of energy revenues. When the price drops, so does the appetite. We felt the hunger pangs return last spring, watching our wallets drain as our tanks filled. In that context a tax on skyrocketing oil profits looked pretty good.

But even if there were a windfall profits tax, how would you, as an inflation-pummelled Albertan, benefit Alberta governments in the past have tended to spend windfall revenue to avoid making hard political decisions. The nadir of that unofficial policy came in 2006, with “Ralph Bucks.” Premier Klein, trying to boost his flagging popularity, gave a $400 “prosperity” cheque to pretty much everyone in the province. A lot of Albertans were happy. Like McGowan today, they saw it as a just counterbalance to high oil prices.

But there was no long-term plan, no saving for a rainy day; just a cheap political stunt. You could still argue a windfall tax is a good idea—but you can’t deny that Alberta has a poor track record of dealing with windfall revenues in the past.

Graham Thomson is an Edmonton-based political commentator who has covered Alberta politics since the early Don Getty era.

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First off, premier Smith could call an election anytime she wants—today, tomorrow, next spring. She needn’t follow the election-every-four-years convention. Under our system of government all she would need to do is ask Alberta’s lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature and direct the chief electoral officer to issue the writs of election.

Wait, you ask—what about our fixed-election-date law?

Alberta’s fixed-election-date law is an illusion, a piece of political theatre designed to evoke American-style politics. It disappears like a puff of smoke when confronted by the “reserve powers” of the province’s lieutenant governor. Here’s what Alberta’s Election Act says about a fixed election date: “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Lieutenant Governor, including the power to dissolve the Legislature.”

The fixed-election-date law is an illusion, a piece of theatre designed to evoke American-style politics.

Think back to the 2015 provincial election. At the time, Alberta had a fixed election “period” where an election, by provincial law, was to be held sometime between March 1 and May 31, 2016. But premier Jim Prentice wanted to go one year early (arguably to avoid campaigning during a looming recession), so he simply asked the lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature.

So, why would Danielle Smith call an early election?

Answering that question means moving from the world of misleading “fixed” election date laws to the more familiar world of cutthroat politics.

Thomas Lukaszuk, the former Progressive Conservative deputy premier who spent the fall championing the “Forever Canadian” initiative (trying to force a referendum that would ask Albertans “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”) told me he thinks Smith will go early because the NDP is dropping in public opinion polls: “If they (the UCP) are smart,” he says, “they’ll call a very early election and win a large majority.”

Peter Guthrie voluntarily quit his cabinet portfolio in February, was kicked out of the UCP caucus in April for criticizing Smith, and is now trying to cobble together a party to challenge the UCP. He thinks Smith will call an election early next year to get ahead of problems including a ballooning budget deficit and a troubled healthcare system. He expects Smith to introduce a “good news” budget in February and “call an election in March right afterwards.”

But nobody has explained how Smith would justify going early to the public. That’s a crucial consideration. Voters tend to view early elections as a manipulative move by a desperate government trying to avoid trouble on the horizon.

Besides Jim Prentice’s snap election in 2015, Don Getty called a one-year-early election in 1989 and Ralph Klein called one five months early in 2004. None of them gave a good argument for going early. Even though Getty’s government won the election, the premier lost his own seat in Edmonton. He could only return to the legislature after winning a rural by-election. Klein’s government likewise won the election but lost 11 seats, and its popular vote dropped by 15 percentage points compared to the 2001 election.

I’m not saying that calling an early election is the sole reason all these premiers lost ground, or a seat, or their entire government. But I would argue going early was an indication they were under pressure and wanted to strike while the iron was hot, or at least still warm.

Going early, though, sometimes pays off. Ontario premier Doug Ford, deemed by one poll to be the most unpopular premier in Canada in December of 2024, called a snap election in February 2025, almost a year and a half ahead of his province’s own “fixed” election date of June 2, 2026. He won his third consecutive majority government.

Ford shrewdly made Donald Trump the ballot-box issue: “We need a mandate from the people to fight against Donald Trump’s tariffs, the attack he’s [bringing] against our families, our businesses, our communities.”

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi suspects premier Smith just might similarly call a snap election in early 2026: “I’m not sure the premier herself knows, or her office knows. I think they’re changing their mind day-to-day, based on what they see in the wind. So we’re ready.”

As I write this, Smith continues to hold a strong grip on power, and her polling numbers are steady. I think Smith will stick to the “fixed” election date of October 18, 2027. But then again, there’s not much stickiness to a date that can so easily be unfixed.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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The question popped up last January when members of the United Conservative Party caucus used their voting power on a legislative committee to give all MLAs a 2.4 per cent pay hike—raising their annual base salary to $123,838, an increase of $2,902. The minority of NDP members on the committee all voted against the raise, saying it was tone deaf at a time when many Albertans were struggling with the cost of living.

The UCP members argued the raise was hardly an exercise in gouging taxpayers. MLAs hadn’t had a pay increase in more than a decade. In fact, because of two pay cuts, in 2015 and 2019, MLAs were actually making less money in early 2025 than they were in 2014, when the base salary was $134,000.

But even this small, once-in-a-decade hike created a PR headache for the UCP, not just because the NDP voted against it but because over the years conservative politicians in Alberta have made this into a political minefield for themselves.

Before 1993, Alberta politicians were not only well paid but enjoyed a “gold-plated” pension plan 40 per cent higher than the average Canadian politician. Realizing this could hurt the government in that spring’s election, premier Ralph Klein scrapped the plan altogether.

Klein’s move was politically popular but also a cynical overreaction that indirectly led to MLAs later finding surreptitious ways of compensating themselves, such as paying elected members to sit on various committees. That in turn created a crisis for then-premier Alison Redford during the 2012 election campaign, when the public discovered some MLAs had been paid $1,000 a month for sitting on a committee that hadn’t met since 2008. Redford apologized and ordered her MLAs to pay back “every penny” they had received.

Sandwiched in between these two crises was then-premier Ed Stelmach’s faceplant when, after winning the 2008 election, he and his cabinet colleagues voted behind closed doors to give themselves a whopping pay hike: 34 per cent for Stelmach and 30 per cent for the ministers. After a public outcry, and with the province hitting a recession, Stelmach announced in 2009 he’d be taking a 15 per cent wage cut. But it turned out he only cut his “premier’s allowance,” the extra money he was paid as premier. The cut to his total salary was closer to 5 per cent.

Public suspicions of government pay took another hit when Jim Prentice’s Progressive Conservative government in 2015 and Jason Kenney’s UCP government in 2019 announced 5 per cent pay cuts not as an altruistic move but as a manipulative negotiating tactic against civil servants in contract talks. Kenney went further, undermining the value of MLAs themselves. During the 2019 campaign he said, “Alberta’s UCP will give voters the power to fire their MLAs if they break promises.” In the party’s Twitter feed, “FIRE” was in all caps.

This plays into the cynical narrative that politicians cannot be trusted. And it’s not a far step removed from the argument that politicians don’t deserve a decent salary.

But don’t they?

BC’s opposition leader says politicians must be fairly compensated: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

The irony for politicians is that when they put the question to third-party experts, hoping to kill the issue, the experts say something like: “The premier’s compensation is inadequate and not commensurate with the duties, obligations and responsibilities of the office.” This was the finding of retired Supreme Court justice John Major, who in 2012 wrote a government-commissioned report into MLA pay and perks. He recommended that then-premier Alison Redford receive a $100,000 pay increase, taking her annual salary to $335,000, the same as a senior chief justice.

A mortified Redford rejected the recommendation.

But shouldn’t an Alberta premier at least be paid as much as, say, a deputy minister, a member of the civil service who today makes $312,884 Instead, Danielle Smith receives the base pay of $123,838 plus a premier’s allowance of $66,810, bringing her total “base” pay to $190,648. Add in some retirement benefits and it’s closer to $210,000.

By comparison, after a 16-year wage freeze, Ontario bumped up its politicians’ salaries by 35 per cent this year, with the premier now making $282,000. British Columbia’s premier makes $227,000.

In April, BC opposition leader John Rustad said politicians “who give up their prime earning years” need to be fairly compensated. He added: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

It’s a cynically framed comment that goes to the nub of the question over MLA pay and perks. It’s a particularly thorny issue in Alberta, where the actions of politicians themselves have made it an almost impossible question to answer.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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To top it all off, Guthrie used to be the staunchest of Smith loyalists, and was in fact the first UCP MLA to publicly endorse her in the party’s 2022 leadership race.

“Something doesn’t sit right with me,” Guthrie told the Calgary Herald after leaving cabinet. “It doesn’t pass the smell test, plain and simple. We should have core values, and being against corruption should be one of those, right?”

Without getting into the complicated details of what the Alberta NDP quickly dubbed the “CorruptCare” scandal—and putting aside the UCP later booting Guthrie from caucus altogether—the man’s decision to leave cabinet on a matter of principle was a monumental moment in Alberta politics.

What were his cabinet colleagues thinking that afternoon… Most tried to brush off the resignation while expressing support for the premier. But in my opinion the “best” response, in terms of bluster verging on chutzpah, came from municipal affairs minister Ric McIver. “People quit their jobs every day,” McIver said with a verbal shrug.

“People quit their jobs every day,” McIver said with a verbal shrug. But what Guthrie did was truly without precedent.

It was a laughable response. And I, standing an arm’s length away, had to stifle a guffaw. Cabinet ministers don’t quit their jobs with the same regularity as, say, high school students at McDonald’s. McIver, a political veteran, knows this. But what’s a politician to do when a well-respected member of the inner circle not only leaves but tosses a live grenade into the room on his way out?

What Guthrie did was truly without precedent.

Oh, we’ve had Alberta cabinet ministers quit over the decades. Lots have resigned their cabinet posts to run in leadership races. We’ve seen them quit over scandals. In 1983 solicitor general Graham Harle resigned from cabinet after he was caught by police in a government vehicle with a prostitute—and tried to convince Albertans he was merely conducting a one-man investigation into prostitution.

In November 2021 agriculture minister Devin Dreeshen quit cabinet after the news media reported on his heavy drinking binges in his legislature office, when staff would cry out “Shields up!” and lock the doors to prevent outsiders entering.

Sometimes ministers are sacrificed to defuse a scandal undermining the government. In January 2021 municipal affairs minister Tracy Allard resigned after a gaggle of government MLAs travelled internationally against pandemic restrictions.

But how often has an Alberta cabinet minister resigned over a matter of principle And how often while also pointedly criticizing their premier?

There is one similar case, sort of, on the federal front. In 2013 Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber voluntarily quit the federal Conservative caucus after complaining about the “boys in short pants” in the Prime Minister’s Office interfering in his ability to represent his constituents.

But putting principle ahead of political power and perks is rare. We seem to be in a post-responsibility world. Politicians, even those who are guilty of misdeeds, too often cling to power by their fingertips, refusing to quit. And their leaders oblige.

Take the notorious example of Alberta justice minister Kaycee Madu who, after receiving a $300 ticket from a police officer for distracted driving in a school zone in March 2021, immediately phoned Edmonton’s police chief. Madu later insisted he hadn’t been trying to get the ticket quashed but, as a Black man, was trying to determine if he was the victim of racial profiling.

An independent investigator, hired by the government, determined that even though Madu did not interfere with the administration of justice, he had attempted to interfere, and there was a reasonable perception he had interfered. Those should have been reasons to permanently boot Madu from cabinet, but instead, after giving him a time-out from cabinet during the investigation, Kenney merely shuffled Madu from the justice portfolio to labour.

And after Madu endorsed Smith in the UCP leadership race, she rewarded him by naming him deputy premier.

Voters in Madu’s riding of Edmonton-South West passed judgment by voting Madu out of office in the 2023 general election. Ultimately it’s reassuring to know that if politicians won’t do the right thing and leave, voters always have the power to kick them out.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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Starting with Ralph Klein 25 years ago, and continuing with his successor, Ed Stelmach, Alberta has had a series of premiers who, politically speaking, made a career of casting bedroom eyes at our southern neighbours. In 2005 Klein gave a speech at Harvard University on “Alberta’s Role in the North American Energy Sector.”

In 2010 Stelmach spent $56,000 on a half-page ad in the Washington Post to tout Alberta’s oil exports to the US while countering environmentalists’ opposition to the oil sands. “Improved access via projects like the Keystone XL pipeline will benefit the US economically and allow your country to continue to receive oil from a country whose environmental  and social goals are similar to yours,” said the missive (which the newspaper had rejected as an op-ed piece).

There was comparatively little talk then about more east–west pipelines. It was “ship, baby, ship”—southward.

Alberta’s unofficial mantra of the day was “Americans will always need Alberta oil.” Back then the Alberta government didn’t just do all it could to ship oil to the US; it shipped our heavy oil products to be upgraded by American companies.

Think of it as selling Canadian lumber to American manufacturers to be made into furniture.

Alberta is overly dependent on the US market for our oil and gas—and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

When Klein talked about Alberta’s “role,” he meant one where we supply low grade oil sands product to the US for refining. To spark an “oil rush” in Alberta’s oil sands, Klein introduced all kinds of incentives, including a tax break that was such a holiday for multinational oil companies he should have thrown in piña coladas and a cabana.

In his retirement years, former premier Peter Lougheed asked, in a 2006 interview with the magazine Policy Options, “What is the hurry Why not build one [oil sands] plant at a time?” But Klein and Stelmach were in a hurry to exploit the oil sands and send the product south—and thus shackle us even more closely to the US.

We approved pipelines that were the energy equivalent of FedEx. Fast delivery guaranteed. The hewers of wood and drawers of water became the pumpers of heavy oil.

As early as 1993, premier Klein butted heads with prime minister Jean Chrétien, who was worried that the new North American Free Trade Agreement he’d reluctantly signed would force Canada to continue shipping oil and gas to the US at the expense of Canadians during an energy crisis. Klein had warned Chrétien to leave the deal alone, not only because Alberta wanted to ship as much oil south as possible, but because he didn’t want to scare off potential investors in the oil sands.

This, of course, was before fracking turned the US into the world’s largest producer of oil—and a less needy customer for Canadian energy.

Stelmach eventually realized that Alberta was in effect shipping jobs south along with our heavy oil, and that we needed to do more upgrading and refining in Alberta. That led to his government getting involved in a project that would see the first refinery built in Canada in more than 30 years. But the Sturgeon Refinery, just northeast of Edmonton, has become a disaster with a $10-billion price tag (it might start making money in 40 years). The project was a victim of cost overruns, low prices for heavy oil and a “North American energy sector” geared to American companies upgrading and refining Alberta’s raw products.

We simply could not compete in the very marketplace we had helped develop.

In recent years Alberta began focusing on east–west pipelines—and blamed the federal Liberal government for not getting new pipelines built. But even then Alberta’s gaze was fixed southward, with premier Jason Kenney in 2020 throwing away $1.3-billion in a failed attempt to kick-start the troubled Keystone XL pipeline project to the US.

Ironically, it was the federal Liberals who actually managed to get a new pipeline built: the Trans Mountain expansion through BC, which tripled the original line’s capacity to pump Alberta energy products to the west coast. But it ultimately cost taxpayers $34-billion, because private companies wouldn’t take the risk.

Alberta premier Danielle Smith has said she’d love to see more pipelines stretching across Canada so that Alberta can sell more oil and we won’t be so reliant on the US. These pro-Canadian sentiments are nice—but pipelines are expensive and controversial and take years to build. And when it comes to changing the status quo, Alberta is caught in a trap of its own making

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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But it’s certainly the word Smith uses to describe how she is blurring the lines between the United Conservative Party and the United Conservative government.

The two, of course, are not the same. The party is responsible to its members. The government is responsible to all Albertans.

But that is not how Smith governs. In the weeks leading up to the party’s annual general meeting (AGM) last November in Red Deer, Smith embarked on a cross-province tour. She held a series of closed-door town hall meetings with UCP members where she reassured them she would table legislation to, among other things, crack down on gender pronouns in schools, ensure “parental rights” in education and protect Albertans’ supposed right to bear arms.

She fulfilled her promises, and in the fall legislative session also banned the use of ballot-counting machines in municipal elections and amended the Bill of Rights to give workers in government-controlled facilities such as hospitals the power to refuse to be vaccinated.

It is worth noting none of these were part of her campaign platform during the 2023 provincial election, where a majority of Albertans were concerned about affordability issues and the economy. These recent changes came only after listening to the demands of UCP members who passed policy resolutions on the floor of previous AGMs. Historically and by convention, governing parties usually treat such resolutions as non-binding suggestions—an opportunity for members to blow off some steam and share a pretense that they’re sort of running the show. The UCP’s resolutions, though, often pass overwhelmingly with little to no debate—and tend to end up as government policy.

Smith takes the resolutions so seriously that during last November’s AGM she held an “accountability session” on stage with two of her cabinet ministers to go over how she responded to the previous year’s resolutions.

During a year-end interview in December, I asked Smith how listening to 6,000 people at a partisan party convention to formulate legislation was democratic. “I look at them as a pretty big focus group,” she said of her members. “They come from all over the province, all different backgrounds, rural, urban, different perspectives.” Smith tellingly went on to say “we have to remember how politics works” and “I don’t become a leader unless I get the support of members.” She added she doesn’t simply take resolutions as fait accompli government policy, but first talks to stakeholders.

The government is responsible to all Albertans. But that is not how Smith governs.

However, Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt says Smith’s approach dangerously narrows the gap between party and government and is therefore undemocratic. “Governments have to balance the interests of winning elections and appealing to a large population versus just listening to the core, hard-nosed group of activists within their own party,” says Bratt. “That’s always been the pattern—federally, provincially, NDP, conservative, didn’t matter. That has completely been put on its head by the UCP under Smith.” It’s a strategy that could come back to haunt her, says Bratt, if she continues to formulate government legislation on the back of party resolutions.

In November, members passed contentious resolutions that included declaring sex reassignment surgery to be on par with elective cosmetic surgery, and therefore ineligible for coverage by Medicare. Another declared CO₂ to be pretty much nothing but harmless plant food and so the government should scrap its target to make Alberta net-zero by 2050. Because of the precedent set by Smith, she’ll have to explain during the party’s next “accountability session” what happened to those resolutions.

Smith, though, has learned it is better to speak to UCP members than to simply dismiss their directives—as then-UCP leader Jason Kenney did at his own peril in 2018 after promising members a “grassroots guarantee” on policy ahead of an AGM. When members passed a controversial resolution that would essentially “out” students to their parents, Kenney shot down the resolution: “I will take the resolutions adopted today as important input, but I hold the pen on the platform.”

Kenney was maintaining a boundary between his party and his (future) government. He went on to win the 2019 provincial election. But by ripping up the “grassroots guarantee,” Kenney arguably planted the seeds of his own demise when his socially conservative base turned against him in a leadership vote.

On the other hand, Smith handily survived her own party leadership review last November with a 91.5 per cent vote after letting her membership base dictate government policy.

You might think that to be undemocratic. Smith says she is simply being an innovator.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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The Alberta NDP is a political party undergoing a face lift. And the person holding the scalpel is the new leader, Naheed Nenshi.

The transformation began the moment Nenshi entered the race on March 11, 2024, 14 weeks before being declared the winner on June 22.

He flooded the party with tens of thousands of new members and captured more than 62,000 votes, or 86 per cent of the final ballots. Albertans signed up not to support the old New Democratic Party, but to join a “new” New Democratic Party led by a charismatic and nationally known former mayor of Calgary.

Nenshi’s leadership campaign was short on policy specifics but long on energetic promises to defeat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next provincial election in 2027.

The NDP was becoming the “Nenshi” Democratic Party.

Nenshi doesn’t like that description. In an interview for this column, he said, “the ‘N’ in NDP doesn’t stand for Nenshi any more than it stood for Notley. It’s a party with a huge diversity of views.”

Except that under Notley’s leadership the Alberta NDP was very much the “Notley” Democratic Party, not just because she built the organization from a rump opposition with four seats into government in 2015 and then emerged from the 2023 election loss with the largest official Opposition in Alberta history. Notley was a walking embodiment of traditional NDP values, social and economic.

Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up three years out from an election.

The NDP under Nenshi, however, is a work in progress. That’s because as leader of a political party Nenshi himself is a work in progress. “I’ve never been in opposition,” said Nenshi, who as Calgary mayor from 2010 to 2021 was his own boss. “We’re thinking really hard about how to reach out to Albertans in new ways. You’ll see a lot of that going forward, both for me and for my caucus colleagues.”

He is happy to bash the UCP government as “immoral and dangerous” while offering up the NDP as a “predictable, dependable and rational” government-in-waiting.

It’s all rather vague. But Nenshi insists he has a plan.

He wants to find a balance between attacking the UCP government while also offering up positive alternatives.

He is determined to flesh out a policy on healthcare, for example, by having MLA Luanne Metz, a medical doctor, travel the province speaking with healthcare stakeholders “to develop a really comprehensive blueprint for the future of healthcare in Alberta. So instead of healthcare decisions being made like a pinball machine based on whatever Danielle Smith heard on Tucker Carlson last week, and completely changing things around, we will be going into 2027 with a fully developed, fully costed program for healthcare.”

In other words, wait and see.

That’s pretty much Nenshi’s answer on many fronts.

While taking questions at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon in September, Nenshi refused to say where he stands on issues like a federal carbon tax, saying he wants to see who wins the next federal election. “My real goal is to hear from all of you about precisely what you mean and what kind of government would make sense for you,” said Nenshi, in the kind of pandering response offered up by politicians trying to avoid the issue.

Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up or box himself into a corner three years out from an election.

For politicians, being something of a mystery has an upside. They are a blank slate on which voters can project their hopes.

Conversely, blank slates are easy to defile. And the UCP has been busy trying to paint the former mayor as a Trudeau ally who botched Calgary’s Green Line LRT project. They want voters to see him as controversial, a risky choice.

But while that will work for the UCP base, it could otherwise be a hard sell. Nenshi is outspoken, skilled and charismatic. He poses a real threat to the UCP. That’s why so many anti-UCP Albertans, particularly those in Calgary, became members. They saw Nenshi as the best bet to take on Smith and defeat her in 2027.

Electing Nenshi as NDP leader was never about maintaining the course set by Rachel Notley. It was never about shoring up the New Democratic Party but about tearing down the UCP.

Nenshi’s followers boarded the NDP ship en masse and made him captain.

He is now promising to lay out a course to take Albertans to a new, better destination.

We have yet to see the map.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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My own story includes countless summer days camping/hotelling and winter days skiing. In fact, I was in Jasper paddling my feet in Jasper Lake alongside hundreds of others the day before the town was evacuated. We had no inkling of the disaster to come. Officials believed the main fire erupted from lightning strikes the following day, and, in the words of Jasper mayor Richard Ireland, moved with such speed and ferocity it “humbled the humans on the ground” trying to stop the flames.

The only thing that moved as fast was the finger pointing in the days after. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees said the provincial government had “refused to heed warnings from front-line wildland firefighting staff and bears responsibility for the disaster.” The right-wing sovereigntist group Free Alberta Strategy blamed federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault, saying that “while Ottawa fixates on climate change rhetoric, their neglect of forest fire prevention has left Alberta’s landscapes vulnerable to devastation.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was later determined to be earth’s hottest day on record.

Premier Danielle Smith, ever one to attack the federal government, suggested that jurisdictional barriers impeded the province’s ability to help fight the fire on federal lands. “We can’t just send equipment into federal airspace without coordination,” said Smith, who asked for a unified wildfire command with the federal government.

That’s a great idea. It won’t stop future megafires. It will make fighting them more coordinated. But, according to experts and both the Alberta and federal governments, the Jasper fire was so ferocious and fast, with a wall of flame 100 metres high and generating its own weather system of lightning strikes, no amount of coordination could have stopped it.

Critics blamed Parks Canada for not doing enough over the years to clear out swaths of deadwood created by pine beetles (with the scope of their infestation itself a result of a warming climate). While deadwood creates its own fire hazard, it’s something of a red herring when it comes to the Jasper fire, according to wildfire expert Mike Flannigan with Thompson Rivers University. He pointed out the pine-beetle deadwood had been on the ground for years, and this material “supports intense surface fire but generally doesn’t support crown fires.”

The Jasper fire was a crown fire, where flames race through the treetops and fire-fuelled winds expel burning embers several kilometres ahead, easily crossing fire breaks. It’s the kind of fire that hit Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016. “We can’t stop these fires,” said Flannigan, who has been warning us for years about impending wildfires. But even he was shocked by the immensity of Alberta’s 2023 wildfire season, which saw 2.2 million hectares burn, 10 times the yearly average.

Flannigan said better coordination between various levels of government is key to fighting fires, and that we’ll learn valuable lessons from the Jasper one. But in the end the main culprit is something of a taboo topic for the Alberta government.

“We are seeing more disasters because of climate change,” said Flannigan. “We’re seeing more extreme fires.”

Premier Smith, a loud and proud booster of the fossil fuels that are driving global warming, avoids even acknowledging climate change, preferring to spuriously blame our devastating wildfires on arson, careless humans, El Niño and, generically, Mother Nature.

Another scientific canary in the climate change coal mine is Andreas Hamann, a professor in the University of Alberta’s department of renewable resources, who studies how a warming planet affects forests. He says well-meaning plans such as the federal government’s commitment to plant two billion trees over 10 years to renew devastated forests are “pointless, unless species and planting stock are selected to survive anticipated climate conditions for the next 50–100 years. Otherwise they will get decimated by pests and diseases and go up in flames if climate change is not carefully accounted for.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was coincidentally later determined by NASA to be earth’s hottest on record.

But dealing with climate change is a tough sell politically in Alberta and Canada, and mitigation efforts are an easy target to attack for pro-fossil-fuel ideologues. In fact “climate change” has become a trigger phrase for deniers, who lump it in with what they dismiss as leftist “woke” language and who dismiss scientists as “alarmists.”

Climate change has become another weapon in our culture wars. The victims are countless millions of people around the world devastated by a changing climate. They include the residents of Slave Lake and Fort McMurray and, in the summer of 2024, the people of Jasper.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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