I feel the headache coming on, and I haven’t even mentioned “notwithstanding” yet. To legislate in this way, denying or suspending some aspect of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is called “invoking the notwithstanding clause.”

To get one’s head around the concept of “notwithstanding” isn’t easy. As a word, it seems to work against itself. The “withstanding” part seems simple; just a modified way of saying “standing with.” We get that, right I stand with you on the matter of children not being allowed to throw stones at one another on the playground. I find “notwithstanding” much more difficult to get my ahead around. If it’s easy-peasy for you, well, carry on. No sense wasting your time.

In its more normal use, notwithstanding isn’t hard to fathom. E.g., “Notwithstanding the rainstorm, the teams continued to play baseball.” Trust me, the Charter’s notwithstanding clause is not so simple. It’s more like: “We stand with you on the safeguarding of our sacred rights and freedoms—until we don’t.”

To get one’s head around the concept of “notwithstanding” isn’t easy. As a word, it seems to work against itself.

As I searched for a helpful definition of the political use of the word notwithstanding, I was delighted to find a reference to Wayne’s World. Some of you won’t get this reference, so pardon me as I explain. In the 1990s, comedians Dana Carvey and Mike Myers came up with a sketch for the comedy show Saturday Night Live. Dana played Garth, and Mike played Wayne, two teenage stoners who create a TV show called Wayne’s World that they broadcast from Wayne’s parents’ basement. It was a huge hit and went on for years, became a movie etc. If it’s something new to you, use Wayne’s World as a search term on the internet, and you’ll be watching a sketch in about a minute. One of Garth and Wayne’s signature moves was to say something that sounded out of character for them; i.e., serious or respectful. Then they’d pause and both would say, “Not!”

And that’s exactly how Alberta’s use of the notwithstanding clause part of section 33 works: “We agree to abide by the rights and protections of Canadian citizens as set out in the Charter—Not!”

When a word is troubling me, I look up its origins. The etymology of “notwithstanding” is an eye-opener. It doesn’t come from the modern world, as I thought for sure it would. I was looking for a definition like “a bureaucratic term invented to fuzzy up a simple concept.” But it’s actually a very old word (Olde and Middle English): widstandan. The ancient meaning was “to stand against or resist.”

A lovely thing in one of the etymologies I consulted was that the “wid” part of “widstandan” contains a very old connotation of the word “with”: that is, “with” as negative! Who knew So, when you say to someone “I’m with you on that,” and they stomp off, you might just be dealing with a historical etymologist.

So, in other words, the folks who invented the notwithstanding clause really did mean that it should convey the idea that we’d stand with one another on these grave matters of our rights and freedoms as Canadians—until such time as someone might wish to use the negative connotation of “with” and not be with you at all.

In the present instance of Alberta’s using the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—or, at least the first time Alberta used it, as this government has since invoked the clause three more times—the UCP government is saying (and this is not a direct quote):

“We do acknowledge that Alberta teachers have a Charter right to organize, which includes the right to form and join unions (under freedom of association). But we thought the teacher strike had gone on rather too long, so we used s. 33 of the Charter to force teachers back to work.” The notwithstanding clause had never been used in Canada to end a strike before.

When some new use of the notwithstanding clause is found, it generally goes to the courts for further argument and analysis. So someday, somewhere far down the road, we can probably expect a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that (no matter what the decision is) will be of little use to the Alberta teachers who went on strike last fall and were ordered back to work. But it might help teachers’ unions and other unions in the future.

Will Garth and Wayne of Wayne’s World be invoked in the eventual Supreme Court decision Likely—not.

Fred Stenson has published 20 books. A new novel, Carpenter Creek, is forthcoming from Thistledown Press in fall 2026.

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I was here on the lookout not for the last vestiges of a summer harvest, but for a guy wrapped in the Canada flag—literally, according to vendors. He was here just minutes ago, they told me. He was one of an army of volunteers across Alberta carrying clipboards and inviting people to sign a petition asking the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”

A simple enough question, you’d think. But in Alberta these days nothing is simple.

My flag-wearing volunteer was here, no doubt about it. He left behind evidence in the form of vendors who not only supported his petition but were happy to explain why. “I signed it,” said Julie Morrison, who runs the “Weird Neighbour” kiosk, selling pins, fridge magnets and custom mugs. She told me she believes in having a strong federal government. And she’d welcome the petition question becoming a referendum question in Alberta. “I like how it blocks them [the separatists] from ever doing this again,” she said. “We don’t need any more strife in our province. We don’t want to see every year there’s a new group, a new radical group that wants to separate, right?”

The petition was at the heart of the “Forever Canadian” initiative. The campaign was created by Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative MLA and cabinet minister who rose to become deputy premier. Now Lukaszuk is architect of this anti-separatist initiative, which aims to counter a pro-separatist movement being egged on by premier Danielle Smith.

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In a September Globe and Mail op-ed, Lukaszuk spelled out his motivation. Most Albertans, he wrote, love being Canadian. When anger at the federation does flare up, “the stronger will of Albertans and their pride in Canada douses the flames of separation, and we’re able to get back to the business of building a strong future for Alberta within Canada.” But recent more strident talk of separation is doing harm, he added. “[It] damages Alberta’s reputation, creates uncertainty, drives away talent and investment and divides communities.”

In an interview during the height of his campaign, Lukaszuk bristled at the suggestion the Forever Canadian initiative is partisan or the beginning of a political movement. “No one could ever say this is an NDP thing or a Liberal thing or a Conservative thing, because they’re all, in virtually equal numbers, engaged in this campaign and supporting it,” he said. “The overarching motivation is just pure love of this country.”

Lukaszuk said the campaign was keeping him “extremely, extremely busy” and that he was pleasantly overwhelmed by the response. He pointed to 5,000 volunteers who organized hundreds of petition-signing venues across the province, whether permanent ones inside local businesses or pop-up tables outside sports events, concerts, book fairs or anywhere else Albertans congregate for a few hours, such as the Smoky Lake Pumpkin Fair and the Andrew Garlic Festival. Lukaszuk also took a multi-week turn driving the group’s maple-leaf-adorned “Unity Bus” across Alberta to collect signatures. He said his daughter spotted a car sporting a “Forever Canadian” bumper sticker. Other volunteers noticed lawn signs. Amazing, he said—because his group didn’t produce any merchandise.

When it came to signing the petition, you had to be at least 18 years old, a Canadian citizen and a resident of Alberta with a physical address. And you had to sign in person.

Lukaszuk told his volunteers they weren’t conducting a sales pitch. They weren’t to entice people to sign, or engage in arguments, or even make the case for Albertans to reject separation. They were simply to invite people to sign. If someone said no, leave it at that.

Lukaszuk told me people had been signing up in droves. Forever Canadian’s official goal was to get at least 300,000 names, verified by the rules set by Elections Alberta, to move the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?” to the legislature for approval as an official referendum question in 2026. Privately, however, Lukaszuk told me he wanted to get many, many more signatures than that, because clearing the official bar so easily would itself send a message to the Smith government and all Albertans.

When I ask people why they’re signing, pretty much everyone gives me a quizzical look. The answer is so obvious. “Because I’m a Canadian citizen.”

When I asked people at various pop-up events why they were signing, pretty much everyone gave me a quizzical look, as if I’d asked a stupid question. The answer was so obvious. “Because I’m a Canadian citizen,” said Janet Johnstone, as she stopped by the booth at a dog park in south Edmonton. “I was born in Edmonton. I’ve lived here all my life. I love Alberta. But I’m Canadian.”

For Albert Kwong, who immigrated from China in 1978 and has lived in Alberta ever since (save five years in Ontario and 18 months in Vancouver), a united Canada makes sense economically and practically. “In a big Canada we support each other,” he said. “I think that’s the best way to do it, right?” And we can visit each other, too. “I just came back from the east coast,” he told me. “I can go to Toronto, go to the west, to Quebec. I don’t worry about applying for a visa. When I go to China, I need a visa.”

Lukaszuk said he heard hundreds of emotional stories, including from a woman in her 90s from Vegreville who asked a campaign volunteer to come to her home so she could sign the petition to honour her late husband who fought for Canada in the Second World War. Or the family that drove from Fort McMurray to Edmonton to sign the petition rather than wait for a pop-up event in town. (The campaign eventually got to Fort McMurray anyway, in late summer, with a petition signing in front of Mitchell’s Café.)

Lukaszuk said some Albertans signed with a mixture of love and a bit of anger: “A lot of them, refugees and immigrants as well, are mad. They’re angry. They say, ‘You know, people here just don’t realize how good they have it. What a great country this is.’ They just think it’s pathetic that we got ourselves into a situation where we actually have to declare our love for Canada, because it should be so obvious.”

Putting aside the monumental legal, economic and cultural barriers to separation, including outspoken opposition from First Nations, most Albertans are for staying in Canada. A Leger survey in May 2025 showed that 67 per cent of Albertans oppose separation. A CBC-commissioned poll, also in May, indicated that even though support for separation had grown from 12 per cent in 2020 to 17 per cent in 2025, 67 per cent of respondents disagree that Alberta would be better off if we separate from Canada.

But it wasn’t just everyday Albertans signing the petition. Lukaszuk’s initiative resurrected a number of other “old” Progressive Conservatives, once powerful and well-known local politicians who had disappeared into the annals of time, along with their party, but were now popping up like prairie dogs at sunrise.

Former premier Ed Stelmach, now retired and living on a homestead founded by his grandparents in northeastern Alberta in 1898, jumped back into the public arena with a social media post urging Albertans to sign Lukaszuk’s petition. “I support a strong Alberta within a strong Canada,” he wrote. In August Stelmach went on Ryan Jespersen’s Real Talk podcast. “I’m worried that if we rush into something like separation, do we end up with Brexit?” he asked, referring to the disastrous British vote to leave the European Union.

Two former conservative Alberta MPs, Ian McClelland and Brent Rathgeber, also endorsed Lukaszuk’s initiative, with Rathgeber going one step further to help manage the campaign.

They were joined by Richard Starke, a former PC MLA from Lloydminster, who, following the UCP–Wildrose merger in 2017, sat as the lone Progressive Conservative in the assembly. “I’m no separatist, I can tell you that right now,” Starke told me. “Separation from Canada would be an absolute unmitigated disaster for Lloydminster. We’d have a national border going down the middle of our city. It would be a train wreck.” He argued that by giving a sympathetic ear to a separatist sentiment, premier Smith is simply trying to score points with her base. “If an Alberta politician wants to gain some traction, we bad-mouth Ottawa, right That’s especially true when there’s a Liberal government in power.”

Danielle Smith’s critics from NDP and liberal points on the political spectrum also expressed support for Forever Canadian. Lukaszuk insists his initiative has nothing to do with partisan politics. But it’s impossible to entirely disentangle the issue of separation from politics. Premier Smith has introduced a series of policy changes to achieve her goal of creating a “sovereign Alberta” within a united Canada, a statement her critics call oxymoronic. Her tactic is a significant and, for many Albertans, troubling break from Alberta’s political past, where for decades premiers chronically railed against Liberal federal governments but stopped well short of encouraging separatists.

As premier 20 years ago, Ralph Klein suggested that on any given day 15 per cent of Albertans supported separation, a number he said he could manage. But in 2003 Klein had to deal with loud separatists at a PC annual general meeting. He ended up promising to push Ottawa for more provincial powers. But Klein clearly rejected splitting from Canada. “I cannot honestly see myself saying, ‘Here is a separation question, and dammit, unless you listen to us and unless we get our own way, unless you do this, unless you do that, we’re going to separate,’” Klein told reporters. “I don’t first of all see myself doing that, and I don’t know how the feds would buy it.”

A lot of petition signers are mad. They say, “You know, people here just don’t realize how good they have it. What a great country this is.”

Twenty-some years later, premier Smith is hoping the federal government will buy it, or at least take separatist sentiment seriously enough to give in to her government’s demands for more pipelines to help Alberta companies get more oil and gas to markets. To do that she’s trying to create a base beyond diehard separatists.

A September 25, 2025, Substack by U of A Ph.D. student and researcher Sam Goertz—“Is Separatism Mainstream in Alberta?”—looked at the complexity of Albertans’ feelings about Confederation. His work was based on extensive interviews done by the Common Ground initiative, which aims to find ways for progressives and conservatives to talk to each other, because “[c]itizens appear to have lost the shared sense of purpose and values necessary to debate matters of the public good respectfully, without alienating or disparaging their neighbours.” The project constructed an imaginary “typical” Albertan called Joe, who is not a separatist but is separatism-curious. “He wants Alberta to remain in Canada and make it work, but life has been getting harder lately, and maybe things would be better if Alberta went it alone,” Goertz wrote. “Or at least, Alberta needs to do something more drastic to get a better deal with Ottawa. [Joe] feels that Alberta has little power and that Albertans are neither well respected nor understood by the rest of the country.”

In late September I met a version of Joe at a pop-up event at an Edmonton dog park. He was biking home from work and stopped to chat with a couple of the Forever Canadian volunteers he recognized as neighbours. But he wasn’t prepared to sign the petition.

“I’m in the oil and gas sector,” he told me. “And I want to be a part of Canada. But I do see why people have frustrations, right?” He said he thinks his wife signed the petition a few weeks before. “I’m not against signing,” he added. “But I have some concerns, and I don’t know if people’s voices are being heard.”

When I asked for his name, he hesitated and said to simply call him “Brad,” because politics has become too divisive and he didn’t want to be a target. “People are very confrontational right now, and if there’s a reason to be frustrated with you for not being 100 per cent one way or the other, because you have some unanswered questions, I think people, unfortunately, want to spit venom.”

Some pro-Canada anti-separatists—even as they were eager to sign the petition—told me they were wary of Lukaszuk’s motivation. His criticisms of the premier go way back, to when he was a PC minister and she was leader of the Wildrose.

Lukaszuk has heard these and similar concerns: “Some politicians are reticent to get involved, because there’s a fear I may turn this into a political party and maybe unseat them or take over their leadership,” he said. “But that’s irrational for two reasons. One, because that’s not what I’m doing. That’s not what my plan is, period.”

The other reason, he said, is that the politicians, past and present, supporting his stay-in-Canada effort represent a wide range of views that would have trouble coming together. Political strategist Stephen Carter, who worked on Naheed Nenshi’s campaign for mayor of Calgary, agreed. “People can mark their ballot against separation in a referendum and then still choose Danielle Smith [in a general election],” he told me.

Lukaszuk said his ultimate goal is to not have a referendum at all. “I’m the last one who wants a referendum on Alberta separating or staying in Canada,” he said. “We don’t need to have a referendum.” Rather, he wants the legislature to adopt a formal policy rejecting separation. But he said it can’t end there. “Those who are either hesitant to sign or who are actually outright pro-separation… I may disagree with them, but they definitely feel that way, and we need to address that.”

One benefit of the Forever Canadian campaign, he said, is that it has helped to bring Albertans’ grievances into clearer focus. “Certain demographics are starting to reveal the epicentre of this anger,” said Lukaszuk. “There’s work to be done. When this campaign is all completed, we’re not going to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, separatism isn’t real, it’s not a threat.’ Because if we don’t start addressing some of these issues, fixing them and educating people on how things really work in Canada, this separatist movement will grow.”

The petition was the largest in Canada’s history, he said, adding the Forever Canadian movement has only just begun.

On October 28, 2025, Lukaszuk announced the campaign had “smashed” its goal. Standing in front of stacks of 61 boxes of petitions containing 456,388 signatures, he told reporters Albertans had sent a clear message: “Alberta is and always will be Forever Canadian.” The petition was the largest in our country’s history, he said. But he added that the Forever Canadian movement has only just begun.

Elections Alberta said it would verify the signatures and announce its results no later than January 6, 2026.

At farmers markets and dog parks and garlic festivals and beyond, across the entire province, the Albertans who signed Lukaszuk’s pro-Canada petition did so for reasons both unique to their own lives but also common to the group. One university student in downtown Edmonton told me he wants to keep together a country that so many of his forebears built: “Canada is a group of people made up of many other groups of people,” he said. “It’s not what we stand for as Canadians to be separating out into smaller chunks. We’re a country of immigrants and we’re a country of people who came together. Why would we want to disassemble something that we worked so hard to put together?”

Graham Thomson has covered Alberta politics for decades and writes a bi-monthly column for Alberta Views.

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President Donald Trump was wreaking havoc on the centuries-old American traditions of the rule of law and the accommodation of the tired, poor, huddled masses “yearning to breathe free” from persecution in their native lands. His administration unleashed an army of masked ICE agents to round up and deport non-citizen residents, both legal and illegal, to prisons in countries run by dictators. Even green-card-holding permanent US residents like myself were suddenly being denied re-entry or detained and threatened with expulsion.

I’ve made Montana my home for 20 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Calgary in 1993. I was drawn here by the chance to attend graduate school on a scholarship, then grew enraptured by the immensity of accessible wildlands, the progressive vibe of an American university town, and the beautiful and smart Swedish American mycologist I’d met. We married in 2011 and I happily set down roots for good.

Suddenly I’d be risking everything—first by trying to cross into Alberta, and then by trying to get back into my adopted US.

As a permanent resident I have most of the rights of a citizen. Because I can’t vote, I take seriously my other rights and responsibilities, namely the freedom to critique, challenge and condemn the government. In the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1918 that “it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about [the president] than about anyone else,” I’ve protested the new regime and stood up for the victims of its extrajudicial decisions. A homemade “Free Mahmoud Khalil” poster is taped to my front window and a “MAGA is American Fascism” banner hangs on my house in Missoula.

I work for a small conservation organization to restore wildlife connectivity along a transportation corridor between Glacier National Park and the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the only wound in the otherwise intact transborder Crown of the Continent ecosystem that stretches from Crowsnest Pass to Missoula’s doorstep. This work is both practical and symbolic to me, a way to knit a tiny bit of the world together at a time when it’s falling apart.

In late April, Banff was hosting a wildlife connectivity conference, Canada’s first, and I wanted to meet up with colleagues and old friends. But I feared the not insignificant chance that the capricious Trump administration would separate me from my lovely wife and my adult daughter, who lives in Arizona. It might prevent me from ever again seeing the 115-year-old home in Missoula I’d just renovated—painting it Falu red in honour of Sweden’s successful experiment with social democracy, a subtle rebuke to Trump’s lurch into autocracy.

Stuck on the American side watching the chaos unfurl, I began to have serious second thoughts. For the first time, I felt a tinge of the anxiety, insecurity and fear that millions of people around the world live with every day.

Premier Smith announced a new border security team—51 sheriffs with dogs and drones and the power to make warrantless arrests.

I’ve crossed the Alberta–Montana border more times than I can remember. It must be at least 100 times, maybe 150. It started when I was a young boy in the mid-1970s. My mother and father moved my brother and me from the blandness of Scarborough, Ontario, to a booming Calgary in 1971, the beginning of the glory days of Alberta’s enrichment and bedevilment by oil.

My father, when he wasn’t selling Sweda cash registers, became obsessed with slo-pitch. As a German refugee, his eastern Canadian childhood hadn’t included much fun. Life was simply work, school and church in the ghetto that was Cabbagetown. The move cross-country freed my father from the judgments of aging German relatives and sparked a new life in the thrall of southern Alberta slo-pitch.

Between the ages of 6 and 14 my brother and I spent more time at ballparks than in school, and every summer we’d travel to Great Falls, Montana, for the Can-Am Slo-Pitch Tournament. For my father and his middle-class, middle-aged teammates on the Calgary Jaycee men’s slo-pitch team, to cross the Medicine Line and defeat the Americans at their own game, on their own soil—this was their World Series. For my brother and me, it was a chance to chew grape Bubble Yum, which we smuggled back to Canada, and to stay in a hotel with a cloverleaf indoor pool, where we escaped the unrelenting Great Plains heat and played tag with the other slo-pitch orphans.

On one these trips, we got stuck at the border behind what would now be considered a vintage early-’70s Ford Econoline van painted tangerine. Four men with long hair and jeans—“hippies,” Dad called them—were standing on the tarmac laughing while the US border agents inspected their credentials. The hippies asked if I’d take a photo of them leaning against the van, as if they were going to be frisked; in mid-shutter, three border guards interrupted their fun.

“You think this is a joke?” one of the guards said, wresting the camera from my hand, while the others cuffed the hippies’ hands behind their backs and took them who knows where. “Do you think this is a joke?!”

But as the years and crossings passed, it seemed to me that traversing “the world’s longest undefended border” was, if not a joke, a mere technicality. As an adult looking much like those long-haired hippies, I’ve crossed the border in three vintages of Volkswagen vans (1968, 1974, 1991), and the only time I was ever checked for drugs was by the Canadians. The border agents wiped the blade of my pocketknife and the entire inside of the front window and then tested the dusty cloth for drugs. It was negative—and a warning to never smoke pot in my vehicle.

It wasn’t until September 11, 2001, that I realized how seriously the Americans take our common border. On that day, some colleagues and I, after a conference in Kalispell, were checking out of our hotel. There were many guests and too few staff, and I grew impatient, so I wandered back up to my room and turned on the TV. United Airlines Flight 175 had just turned the World Trade Center’s South Tower into a pillar of flame and billowing black smoke. I slumped on the bed and gaped. A replay of the first attack on the North Tower made it clear these were no accidents. The world had changed.

We drove three hours to the Sweetgrass border crossing, a place I knew well. But it was now occupied by Humvees and body-armoured soldiers, probably from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls. And there was a Black Hawk.

It’s a peculiar fact that the American military names their combat helicopters after Native Americans, purportedly as a sign of respect for the peoples and cultures the American military tried to wipe off the face of the earth. Of the five helicopters named for Native Americans, only the Black Hawk is named for an individual: a highly respected Sauk war chief who for decades battled his American antagonists. He fought for the British in the long War of 1812, which saw the White House and the Capitol burned to the ground.

It’s reasonable to doubt that Black Hawk would have approved of his name being attached to a flying fortress of war and a menacing symbol of American military might, but one thing is certain: Black Hawks are impressive to behold. I’ll wager that few Canadian civilians have experienced the ferocious visage and the deep, earth-shaking sound of a heavily armed Black Hawk in action, and fewer still at an Alberta border crossing.

On this day the Black Hawk—machine guns visible in both side doors, its rotors thumping out the sound of doom—hung about 50 feet off the ground, precisely over the crosshair created by the last yards of Interstate 15 and the 49th parallel. It pronounced, unequivocally, how easily the longest undefended border in the world could be militarized.

The line was long, the going slow. We were tense and uncertain, and anxiety—ours and theirs—hung thick in the air. Usually it’s the Canadian border guards that size you up when you’re travelling north. Now, in 2001, the Americans wanted to know who was leaving their country. But on that particular day of infamy, a car full of aging white men, one of whom had renounced his US citizenship and moved to Canmore in protest of the Vietnam War, didn’t sufficiently alarm them.

A six-metre-wide cutline comprises much of the Canada–US border, including between Alberta and Montana. The border has been undefended, but our provincial and federal governments are now spending big to “secure” it against trumped-up threats.

A week before the Banff conference was to start in spring 2025, I decided I would cross the border. I knew there was some risk of being denied re-entry into Montana. Trump’s raging hadn’t ended with illegal mass deportations. The US Border Patrol was harassing visitors and legal residents as they tried to enter the US; even unflattering opinions of the president on your smartphone could get you in trouble. But I wasn’t about to let some wannabe dictator in the White House determine whether I, a lawful, taxpaying citizen, could return to my country of birth to attend a conference among good people doing good works.

Besides, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to investigate premier Danielle Smith’s new interest in international border security. Traditionally, nation states secure their own borders against illegal incursions, but Trump was blackmailing the Canadian government with tariffs unless Canada “beefed up” its security to “protect” Americans against what he claimed was a scourge of fentanyl and illegal immigrants flowing across the border. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of America’s border problems knew Trump’s allegations were preposterous. Smith, however, jumped at the chance to impress a pathological liar who, we now know, was going to impose tariffs no matter what Canada did to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Ever keen to encroach on federal jurisdiction and embarrass prime minister Justin Trudeau, premier Smith announced, on December 12, 2024, a $29-million “investment” in a brand new border security team. Fifty-one new provincial sheriffs would use dogs and drones and be given the power to make warrantless arrests to help make America safe again. Eventually Canada’s federal government acquiesced to the premier’s request to outfit the Alberta RCMP with one of Black Hawk’s eponymous war machines. All of this, supposedly, to appease Trump’s threat of tariffs by securing the Alberta–Montana border against an alleged wave of fentanyl and illegal immigrants.

“If we succeed and maintain proper border security,” Smith said in a live announcement, doing her best to imitate the head of state of a nation at war, “I expect we’ll have a very strong relationship with the United States, as we always have.”

I got a late start from Missoula on April 22, Earth Day, and when I approached the Carway crossing the late afternoon was already casting long shadows. It looked deserted. No cars or trucks. No border guards up and about on the US side. I crossed the line onto Canadian/Albertan soil and pulled up to the window. I pushed my sunglasses onto my forehead and handed my Canadian passport to a kindly female federal border agent.

“Where are you headed?”
“Banff National Park, for a conference.”
“How long will you be staying?”
“Five days.”
“Do you have any guns, alcohol, tobacco or marijuana?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Here you go. Have a nice day.”

I drove north into my homeland, the rugged rangelands of the Blackfeet Nation fading into green circles of irrigated cropland. Not a sheriff, dog, drone or helicopter in sight.

There are actually six crossings along the 298-km Alberta–Montana border. Most people use Carway–Piegan or Coutts–Sweetgrass, or, in summer, Chief Mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park. Few people live along either side of the border, where Coutts, with a mere 300 souls, is the biggest urban centre. On the US side, just east of Sweetgrass, a 10-mile stretch of Border Road connects to local roads in Alberta and Montana as if the border doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the area is now being described like a war zone. Trump said in his first Oval Office press conference in 2025 that Canada, like Mexico, was allowing a plague of fentanyl to cross the border, “killing Americans” and “destroying families.” He said Canada was allowing “mass numbers of people” across the border. As a consequence, he announced a plan for a crippling 25 per cent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s words have little relationship to reality. Between 2022 and 2024, the US Customs and Border Patrol seized 61,900 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border, which is massive. At the entire Canadian border, a measly 59 pounds was found—less than 0.1 per cent of Mexico’s. The same pattern goes for unlawful border crossings. The number of illegal entries into the US from Canada has increased, from approximately 110,000 in 2022 to 200,000 in 2024, but this pales in comparison with the 2.3 million crossings per year from Mexico.

If US border agents were to search my computer, they could at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me.

A 2022 report of the US’s Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking concluded that “Canada is not known to be a major source of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids or precursor chemicals to the US.” The US Drug Enforcement Agency, with its $2.6-billion budget and some 5,000 special agents, doesn’t even mention Canada in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment; Mexico, however, is mentioned 85 times. Likewise Canada isn’t cited in the US Customs and Border Protection’s May 2025 report America’s Frontline Against Fentanyl—but we do learn that the US spends $7.3-billion per year to “secure” the Mexico border, and has invested in “123 large-scale drive-through X-ray systems… to significantly increase vehicle and truck scanning rates across the southwest border.”

In spite of the facts, our own federal government at the time—with an election on the horizon and Pierre Poilievre claiming he’d follow Trump’s lead and send thousands of Canadian troops, agents and helicopters to “take back control of the border”—decided it had to do something. “Whether some of the allegations about what is going on at the border are accurate or not, or credible or not, I don’t have the luxury not to take it seriously,” Marc Miller, Canada’s immigration minister, grumbled in an interview.

A month after premier Smith had beaten them to the punch with her $29-million “investment,” the federal government announced its own $1.3-billion enhanced border security plan, which included 60 drones equipped with thermal cameras and two Black Hawk helicopters, one of them allocated to Alberta. It tightened requirements for the temporary visas that some visitors were using to arrive in Canada legally but then enter the US illegally. It introduced its Strong Borders Act to anoint a so-called “border czar,” presumably the first such czar in Canadian history.

Carway is Alberta’s second-busiest crossing: 4,000 vehicles daily.

Premier Smith, not to be outdone by the feds, threw in an additional $15-million to set up three more Check Stop-like vehicle inspection stations in Alberta, two of them kilometres distant from the border. She then channelled a maxim from historical US oil magnate John D. Rockefeller—“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing”— and invited Fox News to come up “to enjoy some world-class Alberta beef” and to show Trump—and sympathetic members of her own UCP—how quickly she’d done Trump’s bidding. “That’s what I think the president wants to see,” she said. “That we’re taking this seriously, that we’re going to stop the flow of drugs and guns and people across the border.”

Canadian security experts were underwhelmed. There is a degree of “border security theatre,” said Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation. “We’re putting up hardware into the sky [such] as Black Hawks. We’re promising 24/7 surveillance designed to appease the United States.”

“If the premier wants to send sheriffs to the border, well, good on [her],” added Richard Huntley, who managed southern Alberta’s Inland Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) office in Calgary for 30 years. “But I can almost bet, in a year, they won’t have caught too much. I doubt it, sincerely.”

Predictably, both Smith’s and the federal government’s expensive efforts failed to appease Trump. His tariffs on Canadian goods not covered in the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement increased to 35 per cent on August 1. Why Because, according to a “Fact Sheet” seemingly conceived in an alternative universe, Canada deigned to retaliate with tariffs of our own (now cancelled) and continued in our “failure to arrest traffickers, seize illicit drugs, or coordinate with US law enforcement.”

It’s unclear how long Alberta’s border farce is meant to last, but it’s already proved fruitless and expensive. If Alberta’s sheriffs prove as adept at finding contraband as Canada’s federal border agents (which is doubtful), Smith’s “crackdown” will cost the public about $5-million per pound of fentanyl recovered. Alberta might also manage to detain and return a few terrified refugee families fleeing into Alberta, so that masked ICE agents can send them to whatever lawless hellhole the Trump administration has in mind.

The 24/7 Coutts crossing is Alberta’s busiest, especially in summer.

The wildlife connectivity conference in Banff was excellent. I asked my Alberta colleagues what they thought of their province’s foray into international border security. Most of them, if they knew anything about it at all, just rolled their eyes and sighed. Some expressed dismay at the similarities between Trump’s and Smith’s relentless performative politics. As I left, they wished me luck getting back across the border. Some offered me a place to stay if I couldn’t return to my wife and Falu-red home.

I tried to clear my digital devices of disparaging remarks about Herr Trump. The task proved impossible. As an amateur scholar on the rise of fascism in my paternal family’s Germany, I’m acutely aware of—and have researched and documented—America’s slide toward authoritarianism and the Trump administration’s use of fascist strategies to foment fear and consolidate power. When I moved to Missoula 20 years ago, I became acutely aware of the racism, militarism and jingoism that imbued American society, not to mention the trove of military-grade firearms that have been stockpiled by civilians. I began to warn my American friends that their homeland was ripe for an authoritarian turn. They mostly said I was nuts.

I’ve sent countless messages and emails and made innumerable social media posts about the dangers posed by Trump and his ilk. Before I left Banff I stored as much as I could on the amorphous “cloud” and deleted most apps from my phone. My laptop, however, held an enormous trove of “treasonous” material I was loathe to part with.

The problem is that by the time you get to the US border agents, you’re already in US territory. You can’t just turn around and go back if you sense trouble. If agents were to search my computer, there’s every reason to think they would at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me. And they might choose to teach me a lesson, to strike more fear into me or anyone who learned of my situation—which, after all, is why authoritarians stoke fear in the first place.

I wanted to try to cross at Coutts. Ironically, this is the site of the trucker protests in 2022, when 1,000 trucks blocked cross-border traffic for two weeks, and where the RCMP seized guns, body armour, a machete and a hoard of ammunition and high-capacity magazines. All of this was far more dangerous than a trickle of drugs and illegal immigrants. Yet premier Smith not only condoned the Coutts blockade but supported it.

Just as Highway 4 bends from south to east and I caught sight of the town of Coutts, I entered the Red Zone, a 596-km² quasi-military area within two kilometres of the border, along the entire Alberta–Montana border, where sheriffs on Alberta’s new Interdiction Patrol Team can make their warrantless arrests, just like ICE does in Trump’s America. Legal experts say the Red Zone—enabled by provincial legislation in January 2025—is unconstitutional. “How did we get here?” asked professor Shaun Fluker on the University of Calgary’s law faculty blog. “This is the stuff of authoritarian dictatorships.”

Coutts mayor Scott MacCumber said some of his neighbours share Fluker’s concerns. They’re worried they could be apprehended while out for a walk or riding their quad. “What will constitute suspicious activity to the sheriff patrols and what will not?” MacCumber asked.

As I turned south, the border crossing looming, my amygdala fired up like a welding torch. My heart rate quickened. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and thought about those fun-loving hippies being cuffed and dragged away.

And then, finally, there he was—a US border agent who had the power to ruin my life. I slowed to a stop and looked into the booth. My heart sank. With his long bushy beard and dark uniform, the man sitting before me looked like a Three Percenter hooligan in the insurrectionist mob that broke into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to hang Mike Pence.

I smiled and handed him my passport, my green card tucked between its pages.

“Howdy,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“Missoula.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Twenty years.”
“You have any alcohol or tobacco?”
“No, sir.”
He handed back my identification.
“Have a good day.”
“You too.”

A mile or two on, once I’d passed out of sight, I pulled over and leaned my head on the steering wheel. My cheeks streamed with tears. Not from the stress of the moment or the joy of making it back over the line, but because of the embodied knowledge that those bastards on both sides of the border are only just getting started.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil (RMB).

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There was “nothing to fear” in the New Eldorado of Alberta according to a 1910 federal ad campaign.

More than a century later, in August 2022, then-premier Jason Kenney launched a new ad campaign, “Alberta is Calling,” that once again peddled a vision of Alberta, this time seeking to lure workers from other provinces with the promise of low taxes, cheaper housing, higher wages and a mountain view. The first phase of the campaign targeted healthcare, trades and technology workers in Vancouver and Toronto with ads that ran online, on television and radio and on billboards and posters plastered at strategic locations—“Toronto’s busiest subway station is currently a giant ad for Alberta” said a headline in a Toronto lifestyle magazine in September 2022. A second phase of the campaign launched in March 2023, with ads across eastern Canada targeting workers in occupations facing labour shortages in Alberta, promising them a $1,200 “signing bonus” if they moved west. In March 2024 a third phase targeted skilled trades workers in BC, Ontario and Quebec, dangling the carrot of a one-time $5,000 tax rebate. All told, the ad campaign cost the Alberta government at least $10-million, plus the incentive money.

Since “Alberta is Calling” was launched, Alberta’s population has surged—by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024, a number that includes over 55,000 coming from other provinces (a Canadian record for interprovincial migration) and the rest of the influx from other countries. The province’s population boom—4.4 per cent growth in 2023 (above the national average of 3.2 per cent)—has been felt most in the cities. In 2023 Calgary’s metro-area population grew by 6 per cent, adding 96,000 people, while Edmonton’s grew by 63,000, a rise of 4.2 per cent. Alberta’s fastest-growing city, Airdrie, saw its population rise by 6.4 per cent in 2023, to 86,000, surpassing once-bigger cities such as Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat.

“The fact that so many people are coming to our province, I look at that as a positive, and we want to keep that going,” said premier Danielle Smith on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024. “Let’s have an aggressive target to double our population,” from the nearly five million people of today to 10 million by 2050.

“Why?” Newman asked.

“Because then we’ll be the second-largest province,” said Smith. “We want to build this place out so that we can actually have the political clout we deserve, because right now we’re being treated as a junior partner by Ottawa.

“I think people are coming to this province because they know we do things differently here. We respect free enterprise. We respect individual liberty,” she said. “We have an obligation to be that bastion of freedom. And I think we should welcome the people who want to come here and enjoy it with us.”

The ambition recalls the famous line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, [they] will come.” Except that in Alberta we’ve done the opposite—Alberta called, but didn’t first build out the field, so to speak. As a province we have not built the infrastructure or public services to absorb this many people this quickly. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts, advocates and policymakers noted the gaps and cracks that had been exposed and widening in Alberta’s public infrastructure and public services. Decades of government cuts, funding at levels insufficient to meet the pressures of inflation and population growth, deferred maintenance and a long-neglected infrastructure deficit led to cumulative impacts in which the structural pillars holding up public healthcare, public education, affordable housing, affordable utilities and public transit in Alberta were threatening to crumble. But instead of a sustained, long-term investment with a plan to fix these problems, we simply added to the load.

Alberta’s healthcare system has faced intense pressures that have resulted in widespread barriers to access for critical services. The reality for primary care is a painful one: the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) reported that in March 2023 up to 750,000 Albertans were lacking a regular primary care provider. While the Canadian Institute for Health Information puts the current figure at 15 per cent of Albertans aged 18 and over, the AMA projects that with the recent population influx the number of Albertans seeking a family doctor could soar up to 950,000.

Between 2020 and 2023 the number of family physicians accepting new patients plummeted 79 per cent province-wide, from 887 to just 190. The story is similar in every health zone: an 88 per cent decrease in the Edmonton zone, an 81 per cent decline in Calgary and a fall of 89 per cent in the South zone, where just seven physicians were accepting patients in a region with nearly 350,000 residents. The website Alberta Find a Doctor, which aims to connect those seeking care with a doctor, nurse practitioner or clinic taking patients, has posted to its search page a warning to Albertans that, due to the “limited availability of family doctors and nurse practitioners… it may not be possible to find someone accepting new patients close to your preferred location.” It directs the unsuccessful to call the AHS non-emergency line 811.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Albertans struggle to access primary care, the government celebrated a net increase in physician registrations: “More doctors registered in Alberta today than at any time in the province’s history,” boasted health minister Adriana LaGrange in October 2024. “We know Alberta is an attractive place to work as a physician.” The figures from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta show 518 additional registrations over the previous 12 months—but that increase barely accounts for the population growth in the same period. Even if all of those physicians were practising in comprehensive primary care (and evidence from CPSA, AMA and CIHI indicates they are not; overall trends show new doctors choosing specialties other than primary care), Alberta still faces what AMA past-president Paul Parks terms a “deficit position” due to “having lost 2,471 physicians” in an “exodus” from the province since 2019. In a survey of its members in September 2024, the AMA found that 58 per cent of physicians in rural, family and acute care in Alberta are considering leaving the province or medical practice altogether; 65 per cent of those physicians have acted on their discontent and begun making plans to get out by 2029.

Among nurses, a September 2024 study found approximately 48 per cent of them in Alberta are leaving the profession by age 35, putting Alberta among the bottom four provinces for losing young nurses. The ratio of nurses leaving the profession to those entering it has worsened by nearly 40 per cent since 2013. Polling by the Canadian Federation of Nursing Unions supports that figure: approximately 40 per cent of nurses across all age groups intend to leave the profession within one year, citing insufficient remuneration, overwork and understaffing, stressful work environments and a lack of work–life balance.

Glowing promises from Alberta in the Toronto subway.

In Alberta the UCP government’s campaign to dismantle and restructure Alberta Health Services (AHS) and divide healthcare provision among four new agencies has left nurses feeling their concerns are being ignored. The reshuffle is imposing new workload burdens and additional costs without improving working conditions or healthcare delivery. Instead of a comprehensive and evidence-based health workforce plan for recruitment and retention, the UCP government has relied on sporadic announcements of limited funds to incentivize more people into nursing, while increasing funding for private nursing agencies to provide temporary coverage. Over seven years of available data, Alberta’s spending on for-profit nursing agencies exploded by some 13 times, from under $400,000 in 2015–16, to more than $5-million in 2021–22. As nurses in Alberta enter another contentious round of collective bargaining, political commentator David Climenhaga notes that “we now have a system in which employers plead poverty to keep staff nursing wages low while they are forced to pay far more to nursing agencies for staff they can no longer operate without.”

Meanwhile, Alberta hospitals are aging past their useful lifespan, and bed space numbers still haven’t recovered from the Ralph-Klein-era cuts in the 1990s. The long-promised and -delayed South Edmonton hospital was shelved after the UCP government halted funding for it in the 2024 budget. Despite doubling in population, Edmonton has had no new hospital since 1988. Without the South Edmonton hospital, the Edmonton zone alone will be short nearly 1,500 beds by 2026 (when the new facility would have opened). It would require the equivalent of a new hospital in each of Edmonton and Calgary to meet the healthcare needs of the more than 200,000 new Albertans that moved here last year.

Public education in Alberta is under similar strain. After consecutive years of record-setting enrolment growth, schools in the Calgary Board of Education district hit 93 per cent use of space in 2023–24, leaving little room for the projected 8,000 new students. Only two high schools in the city were anticipated to be able to accept new students in 2024–25, as total enrolment had reached 103 per cent capacity. CBE is estimated to need over 40,000 new student spaces over the next 10 years.

The challenge for Edmonton public schools is equally daunting: to meet projected enrolment growth and catch up on the existing shortfall, the district would need 50 new schools by 2033. To cope in the short term, the district implemented a growth control model in 2020 that utilizes a lottery system for oversubscribed schools.

Overcapacity leads to unwieldy class sizes and increased class complexity, along with limitations on programming as music rooms and libraries are converted into makeshift classrooms and access for students with special or additional needs is constricted. Parents of these students increasingly feel pushed out the door towards charter schools that can promise lower student–teacher ratios and more resources (though charter schools are not obligated to accept all students).

In the public system 1,500 educational assistant roles are unfilled due to a lack of provincial funding. EAs are meant to help mitigate the class size and complexity challenges. Yet, when 3,200 EAs and other support workers walked off the job in a one-day protest in October 2024, parents of special-needs students were told that for “safety” reasons their children “should stay home.” The system—in which the province directs school districts’ budgets and bargaining offers—cannot function without these EA staff, but doesn’t pay them a living wage or offer adequate working conditions.

While the 2024–25 provincial budget claimed record-high investment in K–12 education, the funding increase to public schools was only 4 per cent. The Alberta Teachers’ Association estimates that per-student funding—already the lowest in Canada—would need to increase by 13 per cent just to hit the national average.

Contrast this with the unprecedented funding in 2024 to private for-profit and charter schools for infrastructure and transportation. Charter school student spaces are now set to double—to 12,500—and, according to premier Smith, government funding will enable “thousands” of new spaces for students in “independent” private schools. That’s on top of Alberta’s uniquely high allocation of per-student funding to private schools at 70 per cent of the public rate. As the public system remains underfunded, Albertans are seeing a strategic shift of resources from the public system to the private education market.

Post-secondary institutions have been similarly starved of public money. The province has cut its share of funding to colleges and universities while capping tuition increases for domestic students. As a result, public post-secondary institutions have seen per-student funding drop to historic lows. Their response, amid limited permitted revenue streams, has been to rely heavily on increasing enrolment of international students and greatly increased fees. But now, when the number of international students is being capped across the country, students considering studying in Canada may be reconsidering that option due to limited student housing, reduced access to healthcare and fewer pathways to legitimate work. This in turn has deepened the financial crunch for public post-secondaries, leading to even more deferred maintenance, deeper cuts to support staff and a greater reliance on contracted teaching staff.

New Albertans must have somewhere to live. While housing starts appear to have made up for some of the ground lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, the roughly 40,000 units that began construction in 2024 didn’t fully cover an additional 204,000 Albertans—even if one were to generously distribute five people per home. Affordable, government-subsidized housing faces an even worse shortfall: while 1,235 new units were funded in 2024, only 250 of those were completed between December 2023 and October 2024. Meanwhile, in Edmonton alone, the number of residents without stable housing hit 5,000 in 2024, up 2,000 in a year and having nearly tripled since 2020. This affordable housing deficit has led to expensive downstream impacts—approximately $1-billion annually, including more public money going to increased policing and security, medical care and mental health and addictions support. The only long-term solution to homelessness is housing—surely that is obvious. What is less clear is who should build those houses and how. To what extent should basic necessities such as shelter be left to market forces Should governments be obligated to ensure sufficient housing is built to meet the needs of the population they have deliberately sought to expand?

Not only housing is lacking at the local level. A 2024 report by the Rural Municipalities of Alberta calculated Alberta’s overall rural municipal infrastructure deficit at $17.25-billion. That includes deferred maintenance or replacement of roadways, bridges and water utilities that are vital to communities’ survival. Based on current provincial funding, that deficit will grow to $40.7-billion in 2028—more than doubling in three years. This state of affairs is a direct consequence of years of underfunding below inflation and population increases. In 2011–12, the provincial government budgeted $420 per capita for rural municipal infrastructure; by 2022–23 that figure had dropped to $150 per capita. Taking into account recent increases allocated in the 2024–25 provincial budget only sees a fraction of that lost ground regained—to $186 per person. A one-time grant program announced by the province in October 2024 to help small- and medium-sized communities address population pressures on infrastructure accounts for a mere 0.15 per cent of the total infrastructure shortfall.

Those wondering about the consequences of a few more years of infrastructure neglect might think back to Calgary’s dry, dirty summer of 2024, when council imposed city-wide water restrictions on residents and businesses after a crucial water main failed. As Alberta’s urban municipalities grow, so does the urgency for building public transit, emergency services, recreation facilities and services over and above keeping the lights on and the taps running. The economic reality for many municipalities, however, is challenging. The City of Edmonton, for instance, now receives less funding from the province than it did in 2009, before adjusting for inflation, even as the population of the city has grown by nearly 50 per cent.

The $10-million ad campaign worked. Alberta’s population surged by more than 204,000 between April 2023 and April 2024

Amid steady growth punctuated by spikes of immigration in recent decades, Alberta did not build the public infrastructure and services necessary to fully support that growth. This was a deliberate and explicit policy choice—enshrined again now in finance minister Nate Horner’s mandate letter from premier Smith—to hold provincial spending at less than inflation plus population growth. Collectively, as a province, we are now living with the repercussions—the day-to-day impacts of rapid growth without a sustainable plan. Instead of a plan, we have initiatives such as the “Alberta is Calling” campaign to bring in new workers.

The argument for bringing in workers has some value—of course we need construction workers to build new schools, hospitals and continuing care facilities, and teachers, nurses and support workers to staff them. Of course we need skilled tradespeople to support diversifying our economy, to develop renewable energy resources, to clean up abandoned wells—not merely to squeeze every drop of bitumen from the oil sands. But this is not, by and large, the objective of the “Alberta is Calling” campaign, nor of this government in general, which appears to favour piecemeal recruitment and retention, wage suppression and interference in collective bargaining and continued political antagonism toward public-sector workers.

For premier Smith, as she said on the Shaun Newman Podcast in January 2024, the point of quickly growing Alberta’s population is to increase the province’s political clout within Canada and to confirm Alberta as a “bastion of freedom.” But not everyone loved that pitch. In August 2024 a video clip of her appearance on the podcast was posted to X (formerly Twitter), where her call for an “aggressive target to double our population” drew scathing criticism from conservatives both online and at UCP-members-only town halls, where Smith spoke ahead of a party leadership review vote in November.

On September 12 Smith reframed her message on population growth, appearing to pivot hard with a press release that blamed “the Trudeau government’s unrestrained border policies” for infrastructure challenges in Alberta. Focusing on a federal proposal to relocate asylum seekers to Canada throughout several provinces, Smith declared “excessive levels of immigration to this province are increasing the cost of living and strain[ing] public services for everyone. We are informing the government of Canada that, until further notice, Alberta is not open to having these additional asylum seekers settled in our province. We simply cannot afford it.” [Italics mine.] In her statement, Smith emphasized that the province “has always welcomed newcomers who possess our shared values—and we will continue to do so.” As CTV News reported, “when pressed on what those ‘shared values’ are, a representative told CTV News ‘freedom, family, faith, community and free enterprise’ are important.”

The language recalled the ad campaign in the early 20th century that pitched Alberta as a homeland for self-made “pioneers” seeking freedom of opportunity. That promotion sold a version of the Canadian West that didn’t really exist, but in the selling it conjured a self-identity for the nascent Alberta. While not aligning with the reality lived by many Albertans over the last century, it created a mythology that politicians such as Smith can lean on to evoke an imagined past and the notion of an ideal Albertan. But the question is for whom and to what end?

An answer emerged on September 17, when premier Smith spoke to Albertans in a video address that began with a reference to “shared values” before announcing new funding for schools. The subsequent press release summed up the message: “The population growth has not only increased pressure in the public and separate school system but has increased demand for publicly funded charter programming and space needs.” Charter schools—a slippery slope to privatized education—would get infrastructure funding, and, in a policy unique in Canada, the UCP government will spend public money to build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure for private schools.

In other words, the UCP government’s solution to the problem of how to bridge the gap between the growing population and Alberta’s lagging public infrastructure capacity is to privatize that infrastructure and our public services as much as possible.

In fall 2024, like clockwork, the UCP government pulled the oil price card from its trusty deck of diversions, hinting about a possible deficit in the 2025–26 budget and paving the way for lowballing public-sector wages and cutting public services. At a crucial time in our province, when massive investment in and restoration of the social safety net is needed, the spectre of cuts, flight of professionals and another round of privatization and public infrastructure firesales looms once more. While newcomers to Alberta may be unfamiliar with this playbook, for some of us this recalls an Alberta we recognize all too well.

The spiral of chaos and dysfunction is a result not of incompetence but of deliberate strategy. When the systems we rely on are broken, and the purported “solutions” on offer merely cause more damage, the most vulnerable Albertans—the very young, the elderly, the poor, the disabled or those with complex needs—will bear the costs. Is this the Alberta we want to build?

Rebecca Graff-McRae is the research manager for the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta.

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Read more: “Four Newcomers” who answered Alberta’s call.

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Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024.  (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

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Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

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Still, the Venn diagram of people who shop at the hipster Old Strathcona Market, and people who might be expected to follow my work in the Senate contains a lot of overlap. So if I’m going to be recognized anywhere in Edmonton, it’s likely here.

“I just want to thank you,” the woman says. “I want to thank you for wearing a mask.”

It’s true. I’m at the market this afternoon wearing a sturdy N95. A couple of years ago, lots of people in this crowded market would have been wearing masks too. But on this sunny Saturday, the woman and I are pretty much the only two people still masking up—despite news reports that indicate COVID-19 rates are rising again and the flu season has arrived early.

She thanks me one more time, not just for wearing a mask in the market but for sharing videos and photos of myself, with my mask, on social media. She tells me how much it helps her to find the courage to mask herself when she sees me, a public figure, doing so.

If the sight of my mask makes you angry or uncomfortable, you should ask yourself why.

I thank her and continue my shopping. But her voice echoes in my ears.

Yes, I’m still wearing a mask. And yes, it takes some courage. Any time I post images of myself in a mask on my Facebook page, the insults and jeers come thick and fast, mocking me for wearing “a face diaper” or for being too stupid to know that COVID is “over.”

I’ve had strangers shout angry abuse at me as I walk through airports. But I think the most exasperating are the jokes and eyerolls from colleagues and family members, who seem to take my mask as a personal affront or insult. These friends and relations bug me—jokingly, but incessantly—to take it off, or tease me for what they perceive as my neurosis. I had one Senate colleague make fun of me for masking—only to tell me, in his next breath, that he was just getting over his fourth case of COVID.

People ask me: Why are you still wearing a mask Isn’t it uncomfortable or inconvenient Aren’t you tired of it?

Well, yes. It is. All of those things. And yet I mask. Even if that makes me an outlier.

I have what you might call “a high-risk lifestyle.” I fly on jam-packed airplanes twice a week. I attend many meetings and busy receptions with hundreds of guests. So the odds of my being exposed to the coronavirus are higher than average—and so are my odds of spreading it to others.

I have a personal health history that makes me wary. I shan’t bore you with details. Let’s just say that if I were to get COVID, it might be nastier than the average case. I’ve been careful to get every shot, to wash my hands, to mask in crowded indoor spaces. And, touch wood, I haven’t had COVID. Yet.

I confess, though, I do feel a glimmer of glee every time I trigger a troll with my mask.

Maybe that’s naughty. Look, I know people are tired of COVID, I know how badly we all want to forget how awful things were at their worst, how many millions died, how many more were left with long-term health consequences. Like a modern-day memento mori, my masked face reminds people of horrors they’d rather deny. But no matter how hard we wish it away, we’re still dealing with an infectious disease that can make some people quite sick, even though the latest mutations and variants are less dangerous than the original virus.

Perhaps my mask isn’t protecting me as much as I think it is. At this point, I accept that it’s also something of a talisman, to help me deal with my anxiety about catching this disease, or about spreading it to someone more vulnerable than I am. But I don’t apologize for that. If I am wearing a mask for my own psychological comfort, well, that’s not really anyone else’s business either. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of people harassing me about it, online or in person.

But my encounter this day at the farmers’ market reminds me that I’m not just wearing my mask for myself. I’m wearing it for all the people who are masking because they are seriously immunocompromised. Or because they’re caring for someone who is immunocompromised. I’m wearing it as a public figure, to give permission to everyone else who needs or wants to mask. I will go on masking, to tell them they are not alone. And to remind everyone else that this thing isn’t done with us yet.

So, if the sight of me, in my mask, makes you angry or uncomfortable Perhaps, instead of making fun of me, you should ask yourself why.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

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Smith’s penchant for exercising executive power—always under the pretext of challenging federal government overreach—has been on display ever since her first year as premier. Tucked away in the original version of her signature Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act was a clause empowering cabinet to unilaterally amend provincial legislation. Another clause empowered cabinet to direct various provincial entities, including municipalities, to disobey federal legislation. In response to widespread backlash, Smith removed the clause allowing cabinet to rewrite provincial legislation by fiat, which she had initially denied existed at all. But the bill as passed in December 2022 maintained cabinet’s ability to issue orders to provincial bodies to ignore federal legislation.

A year after her re-election with a secure, albeit diminished, majority in May 2023, Smith sponsored a trio of bills that built upon the Sovereignty Act’s engorgement of provincial power. As was the case with the Sovereignty Act, Smith made tactical retreats on some of the far-reaching bills’ most egregious language while maintaining their basic structure.

These laws, taken together, enable the provincial government to block federal funding from initiatives it disagrees with; make it easier for the province to remove elected municipal officials from office and rewrite municipal bylaws if they depart from the UCP agenda; introduce naked partisanship to municipal elections in Calgary and Edmonton; bring big money back into municipal elections; make it harder for vulnerable people to vote; and enable the province to further centralize power in the event of an emergency.

At the core of these legislative changes, according to University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young, is a “belief that conservatives are entitled to a political monopoly in the province, and that other perspectives are illegitimate,” with Smith using the levers of the state to produce outcomes in accordance with that perspective. “When we take all of the measures together, it really does look as though the province would like to turn the municipalities into administrative units that act on the direction of the provincial government, so it’s a centralization of authority and direction in the provincial government at the expense of elected officials at the local level.”

Smith’s changes will also make it easier for her foot soldiers in Take Back Alberta, the far-right activist organization that brought her to power and now says it controls a majority of the seats on the UCP board of directors, to achieve its stated aim in the 2025 civic elections of purging municipalities and school boards of anyone who disagrees with TBA’s religious fundamentalist and anti-democratic agenda. It looks increasingly as though Smith, when she talks about her purported penchant for freedom, is referring to the freedom for herself and her supporters to shape the province in their preferred and extremely narrow image.

Bill 18

The first legislative salvo fired against municipalities in the spring sitting was Bill 18, or the Alberta Priorities Act, introduced in April 2024, which the premier explicitly described as a way to hamper municipalities from working against the UCP government’s agenda. The legislation mandates that all municipalities, school boards, health authorities and post-secondary institutions, among other provincial bodies, seek provincial government approval before entering into any agreements with the federal government.

“We’re not going to allow the federal government to come in and work directly with the provincial entity that we give a regulated mandate to and circumvent the things we want to do,” Smith said, echoing the 2016 UK Brexit campaign in portraying the bill as “taking back control” of federal agreements. “We know the federal government, on certain issues, has a diametrically opposed view to what it is we want to do.”

In the same breath, Smith accused the federal government of imposing “an ideological agenda” with its funding commit-ments while denying her government was engaged in any sort of comparable behaviour. “When we do spending,” she said, “it doesn’t have an ideological tinge to it.”

Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi, a former federal Liberal cabinet minister, criticized the bill for creating needless red tape for municipalities, which he predicted will have tangible results on the ground. The need to constantly get provincial approval for any federal funding “will hurt our ability to move quickly on infrastructure projects, from small projects to the largest ones,” Sohi told the Edmonton Journal in April 2024. For example, in a post-Bill 18 future, support for the Rapid Housing Initiative, to which the feds contributed $12.5-million for Edmonton in September 2023, may not be so rapid.

Wetaskiwin mayor Tyler Gandam, president of Alberta Municipalities, says the entire notion of “provincial priorities” is a fraught concept, given the different needs of various municipalities. If voters in an Alberta municipality identify a priority, Gandam said, “that sounds like it’s a priority in Alberta,” which would make it a de facto provincial priority that ought to be respected. He added that he’s struggling to understand the province’s desire to insert itself into municipal arrangements with the federal government. “It just creates more hoops for us to jump through while we’re trying to build and maintain the infrastructure and communities we’re serving.”

Young says that while this legislation will create headaches for municipalities and other bodies, it has the most troubling implications for academic freedom, given federal funding for research grants through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In the 2022/23 school year, these bodies, known collectively as the “tri-council agencies,” were responsible for  a combined $317-million in grants at Alberta post-secondary institutions.

Her view that federal research grants are distributed by Trudeau is “not grounded in reality.”

The premier has openly expressed her desire to vet these grants to ensure “all people from all political perspectives are able to engage in a robust debate and have a robust research agenda.” As evidence for her concern, Smith, a former Calgary Herald columnist and long-time talk radio host, cited her belief that more liberal journalists and commentators than conservative ones are graduating from journalism schools.

Smith’s view that federal research grants are distributed by prime minister Justin Trudeau to reflect his ideological inclinations is “simply not grounded in reality,” Young said. “It’s an independent research adjudication process. The Trudeau government does not get to pick winners and losers when it comes to grant  from the tri-agency.” Grant proposals are evaluated by a review panel composed of volunteer experts who scrutinize each proposal based on criteria specific to each funding agency, as well as the agency’s broader policies and procedures.

The premier’s paranoid perspective on post-secondary grant allocations can be applied to municipalities, which she views as conspiring with Trudeau to undermine the province’s interests as she sees them. Nowhere is that more evident than in the province’s two biggest cities.

Bill 20

The centrepiece of Smith’s authoritarian streak towards municipal governance is Bill 20, the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, which made far-reaching changes in the two statutes concerning municipalities—the Municipal Government Act and the Local Authorities Election Act. Concordia University of Edmonton political scientist Elizabeth Smythe called this legislation an example of “[d]emocratic backsliding … at its most blatant.”

A crucial piece of Bill 20 is the introduction of municipal political parties in Calgary or Edmonton in time for the 2025 municipal vote (they may yet be introduced throughout the province). Smith has argued that partisanship already exists in the two major cities’ municipal politics, so allowing formal party affiliation will simply bring it out into the open, adding—according to a Municipal Affairs spokesperson—a layer of “transparency and accountability” to civic elections.

Young says this argument is not entirely without merit. Two of Canada’s largest cities—Montreal and Vancouver—have municipal parties. “In and of themselves, [parties] are not undemocratic or problematic,” she said. But, taken into consideration alongside other aspects of Smith’s approach to municipalities, “it’s hard to see this legislation any way other than through the lens of an articulated discontent with the choices that voters in Calgary and Edmonton have made at the municipal level—that it’s an attempt to ensure conservative control of those city councils.”

It’s important to consider this aspect of Bill 20 alongside its reintroduction of corporate and union donations into municipal elections, Young says. On a superficial level, this might even sound fair, with corporations and unions given the same $5,000 limit that applies to individual donors. But unions and corporations are fundamentally different entities. “It’s going to have a very asymmetrical effect,” says Young. “This is not an even-handed change to the rules.” A union representing thousands of workers, she explained, is restricted to the $5,000 limit, but if a wealthy individual owns, say, 10 companies, there’s nothing preventing that person from contributing upwards of $50,000 without breaking the law.

At the same time that it allows big money to dominate local elections, an underexamined piece of Bill 20 makes it more difficult for marginalized people to vote by eliminating the practice of vouching. The practice allows electors without ID (e.g., students, mobile workers, people who can’t afford to renew their ID) to be vouched for by another elector in their voting area under certain conditions; some 10,564 Albertans voted this way in the 2023 election. In a May 29, 2024, piece in The Conversation, University of Alberta academics Jared Wesley and Alex Ballos argued that banning vouching represents a “dangerous precedent that fundamentally undermines a cornerstone of democracy: accessibility.”

According to publicly available Elections Alberta data, a grand total of seven illegal votes have been cast in more than a decade of Alberta elections, all of which occurred in the 2019 and 2023 elections, leading Wesley and Ballos to call the elimination of vouching a “solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) president Paul McLauchlin, who serves as the reeve of Ponoka County, cautioned that making it harder to vote gives credence to conspiracy theories questioning the legitimacy of democratic elections. “And interest in municipal politics is already [low]. We get very low voter turnout,” he told the St. Albert Gazette. “Putting in higher barriers to voting only compounds these challenges.”

In this context, it’s worth considering premier Smith’s obsession with US culture-war politics, including efforts by Republican legislators to restrict voters’ ability to cast ballots through draconian voter ID restrictions, which Wesley and Ballos note overwhelmingly disenfranchise racialized and other marginalized people.

In its original iteration, Bill 20 gave cabinet the authority to unilaterally remove municipal elected officials from office under unspecified “specific circumstances,” and repeal bylaws that the government deemed not to be in the “public interest.” Alberta Municipalities’ Gandam called this aspect of the bill “a power grab that completely takes away from our democratic process at the municipal level [in which] our residents decide who represents them.”

By the time the bill passed its third reading in the legislature, this aspect had been amended to empower cabinet not to remove municipal officials but merely to initiate a recall petition against officials cabinet deems “unwilling, unable or refusing to do the job for which they were elected.” It clarified that bylaws could only be repealed in the event they’re deemed to be a violation of the Municipal Government Act, unconstitutional or, channeling the spirit of Bill 18, “contrary to provincial policy.”

Jan Novotny protesting outside of the Alberta legislature against the changes to municipal governance in Bill 20, Edmonton, May 6, 2024.

Bill 20’s critics weren’t satisfied with these minor modifications. McLauchlin of the RMA likened the legislation’s final form to a “large axe hanging over all of our heads,” one which risks making municipal politics in Alberta “unrecognizable.”

Gandam noted that under the previous version of the Municipal Government Act, the province already had the ability to dismiss municipal elected officials, which it had done as recently as December 2023, when the government dismissed Chestermere’s mayor, three city councillors and three administrators. But the investigation that preceded those dismissals followed a clear process, Gandam said. “The councillors were given the opportunity to correct their behaviour and their action, so that they could still continue on council. They chose not to, and that’s why they were removed from council.”

A thorough investigation found that former Chestermere mayor Jeff Colvin, during his two years in power, spent $53,000 on his city-issued credit card, mostly on meals, with some tips ranging from 50 to 100 per cent. Of 565 mayor and council expenses the investigation examined, just one adhered to the city’s policy on filing and approving expenses. The city also spent $1.6-million in lawyer fees, none of which were approved in accordance with the city’s procurement policy, including $22,000 for a lawyer to investigate councillor Ritesh Narayan—one of the three councillors ultimately spared from removal.

This existing power hasn’t been applied consistently. The UCP government declined to use it to order an investigation of conservative Calgary councillor Sean Chu, whom the Law Enforcement Review Board found guilty of sexual misconduct with a minor when he served as a Calgary police officer. This suggests there is a legitimate need for the provincial government to clearly articulate in legislation the circumstances in which it can or cannot investigate an elected municipal official. “But that’s not what we have here,” says Lisa Young. Rather, Smith has made it so cabinet can skip the sort of due process afforded to Chestermere’s municipal government and go straight to a recall campaign.

In terms of bylaws, the province already has the power to update the Municipal Government Act to prevent municipalities from imposing specific policies it doesn’t want, Young said, a power which former premier Jason Kenney used to prohibit municipalities from imposing mask mandates after he lifted the province’s mandate. With Bill 20, Smith has made it easier for the province to interfere in municipal affairs more frequently.

Young said these provisions of Bill 20 serve as a tacit warning to municipal leaders. “It could be used in a way to constrain what city or municipal councillors are actually willing to pass. If they know that the province is going to come in and veto legislation they’ve passed, will they go ahead and pass it, particularly when you couple that with the threat of dismissal?”

Bill 21

The final part in Smith’s trilogy of anti-municipal legislation is Bill 21, the Emergency Statutes Amendment Act, which gives the province the ability to take control of local emergency response without a municipality’s consent.

“Everybody’s come to the same conclusion: that we can’t sit back and wait for the fire to jump the border and burn down Slave Lake or burn down Fort McMurray or potentially burn down Drayton Valley,” Smith told reporters at a May 9, 2024, press conference. Smith claimed this change was a specific request from municipalities. Gandam had told the CBC in an earlier interview that while municipalities have requested more resources to manage emergencies, he’s not aware of any that have asked the province to take over their emergency response.

Nor is McLauchlin, who told the Edmonton Journal that rural municipalities want “collaboration, not control.” He characterized Bill 21 as the “latest attempt to reduce the authority of municipal leaders, with no clear explanation as to how this will do anything other than confuse and complicate emergency response moving forward.”

Lisa Young says that, like the creation of municipal political parties, the appropriate level of provincial involvement in emergency response is debatable. “But this legislation wasn’t introduced in a vacuum,” she said. “It was introduced after Bills 18 and 20, so it’s hard not to see it as part of a consolidation of authority in the provincial government at the expense of municipal government.”

Premier Smith spent the spring 2024 legislative session entrenching provincial power.

The failed effort to recall Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek in 2024 is a preview of the style of municipal politics Smith has emboldened through legislation. The recall petition’s public face was local business owner Landon Johnston. But Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt obtained a document outlining the coordinated involvement of figures with deep ties to the UCP and Take Back Alberta, with the aim of using the petition as a springboard for electing “common-sense conservative Mayor and Counsel [sic]” in 2025.

When former premier Kenney introduced the Recall Act in 2021, he set an impossibly high bar: the collection of signatures from 40 per cent of a municipality’s entire electorate within 60 days to recall a mayor. In 2024 in Calgary this amounted to 514,284 signatures. Under these terms the Recall Gondek petition was doomed to fail—as indeed it did. The petition collected 69,344 signatures, and of the 369 randomly selected by city officials for scrutiny, not one was valid.

But Young says the petition was surely successful as a “data-mining exercise” to obtain the names of people who could be willing to volunteer and donate to a conservative municipal party in 2025. “And it contributes to a perception,” she said, “that the mayor is unpopular, that there’s a good chance for someone to challenge her in the next election if she runs, and so it potentially can rally the party faithful under those circumstances.”

With Bill 20 empowering cabinet to initiate a recall process for local politicians that the provincial government deems unsuited for their job, Albertans can expect more such campaigns. Combined with its provision making the minister of municipal affairs, rather than city administration, responsible for validating a recall petition, it’s possible that future recalls will find more success.

A key figure in implementing Smith’s municipal crackdown is municipal affairs minister Ric McIver, a former Calgary city councillor and failed mayoral candidate. He earned the moniker “Dr. No” during his time on council from 2001 to 2010, owing to his penchant for voting against major city projects. Druh Farrell, whose time as a councillor from 2001 to 2021 overlapped with McIver’s, says his obstructionist instincts haven’t changed at all.

Farrell suspects that McIver holds a “grudge” from the 2010 mayoral election, which he lost to political newcomer Naheed Nenshi. Before McIver was appointed municipal affairs minister in 2021, he served as former premier Kenney’s transportation minister, a role in which he put up roadblocks against approval of the Green Line LRT expansion—one of Nenshi’s signature initiatives—despite McIver’s having supported the new line when he was a city councillor. “He couldn’t articulate what [his government] didn’t like about it,” said Farrell. “But they withheld approval because they could—and they’ve created a mess that we’re having to live with.”

McIver’s current role, however, allows him to meddle even further in municipal governance, making him a useful emissary for the UCP’s grievance-fuelled politics of “power and control.” “Now he gets to make decisions for cities without running for city council,” said Farrell. “It’s an excellent situation for him. He’s an authoritarian figure.”

Constitutionally, Smith and McIver have the power to do whatever they like with municipalities, which they’re fond of reminding Albertans are “creatures of the province.” Farrell ties this literalist reading of the constitution, which was written in 1867, to the UCP’s social conservative bent—a position bolstered by Take Back Alberta leader David Parker’s obsession with the “tyranny of the rainbow guard” and by Smith’s radical anti-trans policies. “They’re taking us back to when most Albertans lived on the family farm, not in municipalities,” she said. “It’s a step backwards for a modern society to go back to the way things were in the 1800s. You wonder what else they want to reverse.”

But with the overreach represented by Bills 18, 20 and 21, Smith has alienated rural Albertans too. “We’re being put into a smaller and smaller box, and the government is taking more and more authority away from us, which makes no sense based upon our past relationship with this government,” McLauchlin of the RMA told the Canadian Press. “It is extremely hard for a conservative government to make rural Alberta mad, and they’ve done that successfully in three acts.”

Jeremy Appel is an independent journalist who covers Alberta politics. His previous AV story “Just Say No to Drugs,” examined the UCP government’s approach to the overdose crisis.

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