We’ve all seen how that has been going for the United States, and, frankly, for the rest of the world. The only word that captures it is “revolutionary.” Project 2025 has turned the US on its head and reset the country’s relations with everyone else.

There are probably only a few dozen people or so who have actually read the 920-page Project 2025 cover to cover. I don’t count myself as one of them. But I did read Alberta’s own little version of the document, and it was illuminating to say the least.

Like many Albertans I’ve been struggling to keep pace with the rate at which the UCP has legislated since Danielle Smith took the helm in 2022, often in unconstitutional ways that target minorities and override treaty rights. They have passed legislation, often in the middle of the night, that will leave extraordinary impacts on citizens of the province, alter the nature of our democratic society and could ultimately see Alberta remove itself from Confederation. On four occasions they have invoked the notwithstanding clause to override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some people, such as federal justice minister Sean Fraser, have described this approach as a form of “democratic backsliding” designed “to cater to a unique political opportunity that may be a good fundraising email but will potentially violate constitutionally protected rights of vulnerability.”

Similar to our neighbours in the US, Albertans are in our own anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex, in which we’re being pulled into the unknown by a MAGA-adjacent far-right UCP government.

It might have helped to see some of this coming. Turns out we could have, if only we’d read the Free Alberta Strategy sooner.

The Free Alberta Strategy was written in 2021 by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From at the height of anti-Trudeau sentiment in the province, and in the altered-reality state of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when so many radical ideas were incubated in a stew of isolation and myopia-inducing screen time. Anderson is a lawyer with a history in provincial politics who is now premier Danielle Smith’s chief of staff. Cooper is a political science professor at the University of Calgary. From is also a lawyer.

The document is a shade under 50 pages and contains a smattering of footnotes from Ted Morton, Jack Mintz, Lorne Gunter, Preston Manning, Pierre Poilievre and the Fraser Institute. Not exactly a non-partisan affair. And it certainly isn’t written with any attempt at neutrality or objectivity either. On the contrary, it is laced with incendiary rhetoric that seeks to demonize eastern Canada in simplistic and snide ways. It sets Alberta up as an oppressed victim of Confederation that has been “pillaged” by a federal government that has become an “existential threat to our province’s economic viability and the core freedoms of our people.”

The strategy asserts that “Ottawa has fundamentally breached its constitutional agreement with Alberta.” Accordingly, it has become incumbent upon the provincial government to “repudiate this arrangement on behalf of its people, to renegotiate its terms of membership in Confederation and, if Canada’s federal and provincial leaders refuse to negotiate, to form an independent nation.”

The authors then call on the government of Alberta, which at the time was led by premier Jason Kenney, to pass a Sovereignty Act that would allow the province to disregard all federal laws at its discretion; turf the RCMP and replace it with a provincial force; create independent provincial legislation for financial institutions, presumably to end federal regulatory oversight over banks working in the province; end equalization transfers; opt out of federal health, education, resource development, environmental regulation and property rights; replace the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta version; do the same with Employment Insurance; replace the federal government in international diplomacy and negotiation; and give the provincial legislature the power to make all future judicial appointments.

These are the strategic moves the authors believe will “offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against the Province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed confederation, or if necessary, as an independent nation.”

Albertans are in an anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex.

According to the authors “a vast majority of Albertans” agree that the province in recent years has been “economically terrorized by the Government of Canada.” “Eco-extremists,” they say, have looted the province of “well over $600-billion” through transfer programs.

Anderson, Cooper and From blame the federal government for increases in suicides, bankruptcies and overdoses. And they suggest the feds have “commenced a deliberate strategy to phase out and eliminate Alberta’s largest and most critical industry.” Policies such as the carbon tax, clean fuel regulations and environmental impact assessments are characterized as “assaults.”

All of this dramatically sets up an extortion play which is the core of the strategy: “In the event that Ottawa refuses to recognize Alberta’s provincial rights of sovereignty, and instead continues its strategy of economic tyranny, co-opted management of our resource sector and the marginalization of our citizens, it may leave our province with no other recourse but to leave Confederation entirely.”

Rather than co-operative federalism, this is shakedown federalism. It’s a “do what we say or we are done” extortionist strategy that is rooted in an inflated sense of grievance that doesn’t jibe with any discernible reality.

Politicians and political scientists are careful to acknowledge the real sense of grievance that some Albertans feel vis-à-vis their relationship with the federal government. You can’t argue with people’s feelings after all, but you can take issue with how they choose to rationalize and justify them. There’s nothing on the public record that could plausibly support characterizing the federal government’s relationship with Alberta as something equivalent to economic terrorism, as the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy assert. To the contrary, since 2010 oil production in the province has more than doubled, from two million barrels a day to 4.1 million barrels a day.

The Free Alberta Strategy didn’t get much traction with Jason Kenney’s UCP, perhaps because in year one of Kenney’s reign Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, ramped up investment in the TMX pipeline, which runs from Edmonton to tidewater at Burnaby, BC. The project eventually cost the federal government $34.2-billion. Even for Kenney it would have been a stretch to describe this massive outlay of public dollars as an “assault” or a form of “terrorism” committed against his province by the evil overlords in Ottawa.

But since Kenney was given the bum’s rush by the far-right separatist wing of the party he created, the strategy has come back into vogue. In fact, Kenney’s successor, premier Smith, is hewing closely to much of the plan.

Before going further it’s important to be fair to the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy and not paint them as being fully responsible for planting the anti-democratic seeds the UCP has sown since.

The trio of Anderson, Cooper and From were careful to recommend a transparent, democratic approach to adopting their strategy and, if necessary, a democratic approach to ending Alberta’s place in Confederation. They prescribed that their strategy be adopted first as official policy, that the policy be outlined clearly to Albertans and that there should be a democratic process to give the government the mandate to pursue the strategy.

Once the democratic mandate was in hand, after a successful electoral victory with the Free Alberta Strategy as a platform, they suggested a pre-referendum blue ribbon panel on provincial secession be held and that a detailed plan be drafted by policy experts, lawyers and members of the private and public sectors that would cover the full ambit of requirements to establish an independent Alberta. They argued for a full year to be given to consultations, discussions and debates on the merits of the plan and its risks and rewards.

Danielle Smith’s UCP did not follow this recommended process. Just as Donald Trump dishonestly denied any knowledge of Project 2025 during the last presidential campaign and then proceeded to implement vast portions of its radical agenda within his first year back in the White House, Smith’s UCP did not campaign on the Free Alberta Strategy’s tenets but have embraced them wholeheartedly since forming government. Smith’s UCP don’t, therefore, have a democratic mandate to pursue these ideas, by any standard. Yet they have implemented the components of the strategy at a ferocious pace.

First, through Bill 54, which made it comprehensively easier to bring about a secession referendum by reducing the number of signatures required, and then Bill 14, which was passed in order to eliminate any bearing the Charter of Rights of Freedoms and the Treaties might have on the process, the UCP has shown it intends to construct a credible threat of separatism that it can use to extort the rest of Canada.

They have taken the Free Alberta Strategy into Trumpian territory by running on one set of issues and governing on their opposite. Believe it or not, the planks of the UCP’s winning 2023 campaign platform were tax cuts, safe streets, mental health supports, education and career training, investing in tourism, improving healthcare for women and children, and a guarantee to maintain public healthcare. None of the ideas included in the Free Alberta Strategy were campaigned on by Smith’s UCP.

However, in December 2022, just two months after Smith won the leadership of the UCP, her party introduced the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, which achieves one of the Free Alberta Strategy’s major milestones. This really should have been a wake-up call to the electorate that under Smith’s leadership the UCP would tack hard to the right. “It’s not like Ottawa is a national government,” said Smith after the legislation passed its final reading at 1 a.m. on December 7.

UCP leadership candidates debated the Free Alberta Strategy in June 2022; most of them opposed Alberta acting as a sovereign jurisdiction. Travis Toews said it would create chaos and scare off investors. Brian Jean: “Telling Albertans… not to follow some laws is frankly irresponsible.” The winning candidate, Danielle Smith, endorsed the Free Alberta Strategy.

Provisions in the Sovereignty Act armed Smith’s government with a set of new powers to disregard federal laws at its own discretion. In effect, this kneecaps the role of the courts in this province, by setting the provincial legislature as the arbiter of the constitutionality of federal law.

In a radical revision of constitutional democracy, the act allows the provincial cabinet to decide whether it is in or out on specific aspects of federalism, including federal regulations and even enforcement of the Criminal Code by provincial entities. The dean of the University of Calgary’s law school, Ian Holloway, called the legislation an “unconstitutional gambit” and accused the premier of “engaging in a game of political chicken.”

Smith’s government furthered this line of legislation in late 2025 with the International Agreements Act, which seeks to put the province on an equal plane with the federal government when it comes to managing international relations. It asserts that no international agreement signed by the federal government is binding on the province. Something like a major climate change agreement would presumably not be binding on Alberta unless agreed to by the provincial legislature. This assertion of provincial autonomy over international relations runs counter to all norms of statecraft. But it is a tactic explicitly described in the Free Alberta Strategy, which states in its section on international relations that Alberta “can no longer afford to entrust its interests to hostile and unreliable federal governments. It must take full control of its own international and interprovincial trade and commerce.”

The UCP has also moved to establish its own police service. The Alberta Sheriffs Police Service (ASPS) was created through Bill 4, which came into force in November 2025 as the Public Safety and Emergency Services Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2). There remains a great deal of ambiguity with respect to these sheriffs’ purpose, jurisdiction and relationship with other police services in the province.

The sheriffs were originally established to do prisoner transport but evolved to take on traffic control roles and security around the legislature grounds. The latest evolution of the service appears aimed at broadening their authority and increasing their complement to the point that they could eventually be in position to take over from the RCMP at the end of the current policing contract, which expires in 2032.

Setting up a provincial police service is no easy task and doesn’t happen overnight or without extraordinary cost, so this is a half measure less by choice than by necessity. Nevertheless, it is a move drawn from the Free Alberta Strategy, which advocates removing the RCMP—perceived as an extension of federal authority—from its policing role in the province. It is notable that this is being done against the grain of overwhelming public opinion. A survey conducted for the National Police Foundation on the prospect of an Alberta provincial police force found only 31 per cent of respondents were in favor of replacing the RCMP, while three-quarters were satisfied with the policing services received from the Mounties. Seventy-one per cent of respondents said they felt the public had not been adequately consulted on the proposal, and 81 per cent said there were more pressing issues for the province to address.

On January 23, 2026, the premier sent prime minister Mark Carney a letter threatening to withhold “the necessary funding to support any new judicial positions in the province” until the federal government agreed to make significant changes to how judges are appointed in Alberta. Following the Free Alberta Strategy’s extortion tactic to a tee, and its strategic direction to assert greater autonomy over judicial appointments, the premier has for now stopped short of the nuclear option articulated by Anderson, Cooper and From, which recommends the provincial legislature appoint all future judges serving in Alberta.

Instead, the premier is proposing a major reform of the appointments process that would see the establishment of a special advisory committee comprising “four non-partisan experts—two from Alberta and two appointed by the federal government.” The committee would make recommendations to the two ministers of justice (federal and provincial), who would then be expected to “work collaboratively to identify the successful appointee(s).”

“Of course it is treasonous, of course it is illegal… and we’re going to have to have… help from abroad.” —barry cooper

The premier also wants this committee to influence appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada and make recommendations to the prime minister about who should fill vacancies on the top bench.

Federal justice minister Sean Fraser saw the letter as a threat to judicial independence and the rule of law, and told media “it’s essential that we have a judiciary who’s able to make decisions without fear or favour amongst those who have the power to appoint or, in theory, remove a judge from the bench.” The Canadian Bar Association and its Alberta branch also expressed “grave concerns” about premier Smith’s proposal, which they saw as a threat that if carried out would ultimately “punish Albertans by limiting access to a properly functioning justice system.”

Under Smith’s leadership the UCP has also toyed with the idea of breaking with the Canadian Pension Plan and establishing a provincial plan instead. Smith floated the idea—one of the main pillars of the Free Alberta Strategy—as part of a 2023 survey she put to all residents of the province who wanted to participate. It took 21 months for her government to finally release the results of the survey, which showed that only 10 per cent of respondents supported the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan.

The other tactical moves recommended in the Free Alberta Strategy—legislating an end to equalization payments and establishing an independent banking act—have yet to be attempted by Smith’s government.

Rather than co-operative federalism, this is shakedown federalism.

The shakedown approach to federalism that is the hallmark of Smith’s government clearly has its intellectual roots in the Free Alberta Strategy. The approach derives from an understanding of Confederation as being fundamentally unfair to western Canadians, who, according to one of its authors, Barry Cooper, have been under the thumb of an imperialist power structure seated in Laurentian Canada since before Confederation. It seeks to use the ultimate threat of separation as leverage to reset the terms of the Canadian federation.

For his part, Cooper—a committed separatist—does not believe the Laurentians are capable of comprehending “what they have done.” In an interview for this article, he characterized this as a “failure of imagination” to meet “the just complaints of Alberta and Saskatchewan.”

In June 2020 Cooper joined BC political talk show host Stuart McNish on Conversations that Matter to discuss Alberta separatism. Cooper articulated his theory that western Canadians have been exploited by the Ontario/Ottawa/Quebec imperial complex and went on to expound a sense of fatalism about the future of Canadian federalism. In his view, western Canadians will eventually conclude that the relationship with Laurentian Canada will never change or evolve in meaningful enough ways to make it worth remaining in Canada.

According to Cooper: “Eventually you have to do something. Of course it is treasonous, of course it is illegal, and of course it is going to be very unpleasant, and we’re going to have to have… help from abroad. We’re going to have to rely on the Americans. It will depend on whether or not Saskatchewan and Alberta have leaders who are willing to understand the very serious implications, which means among other things getting the Americans on board.”

Here, Cooper seems to have presaged the now well-publicized efforts of the Alberta Prosperity Project to conscript the help of the Trump administration in their efforts to split Alberta from the rest of Canada. And while the Smith government hasn’t overtly and explicitly declared its separatist intentions, nor openly courted the Trump administration’s support in becoming an independent state, it has legislated in a MAGA-adjacent, far-right fashion.

With Trumpian disregard for constitutional norms, Smith’s government has used the notwithstanding clause to attack the rights of organized labour and of gender diverse people in the province. With Trumpian xenophobia it has signalled an intent to crack down on immigration and the rights of immigrants and refugees in the province. It has introduced two-tier healthcare through Bill 11, and encouraged two-tier education by subsidizing private schools at the highest rate in Canada and increasing funding to charter schools at a rate three times higher than its increase to public schools.

These moves could be construed as a method of demonstrating the UCP’s alignment with the Trump administration. This is not insignificant, particularly in light of the US’s November 2025 National Security Strategy, which states that “we will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.”

Under premier Jason Kenney, a former federal cabinet minister in the Harper government and a committed federalist, the Free Alberta Strategy barely made an impression. Under premier Smith’s UCP, the strategy is being aggressively implemented.

Cooper was forthright in stating that while he hasn’t spoken with either Rob Anderson—now the premier’s chief of staff—or premier Smith in a number of years, he is “quite supportive of what she has done.”

The Free Alberta Strategy provides a clear window into the strategic logic and tactical moves premier Smith’s UCP will make in destabilizing relations with the rest of Canada and setting Alberta on a path to separation. As Project 2025 has done in the US, the Free Alberta Strategy has begun to fundamentally alter Alberta politics and society. It’s a reckless and anti-democratic plan that seems hell-bent on destroying Canada. Canadian citizens can orient themselves amid the chaos by understanding that Smith and her government are intent on pursuing the Free Alberta Strategy to its logical conclusion. If they want a preview of where this is all headed next, they need only keep an eye on our neighbours to the south.

Patrick Lennox is the author of At Home and Abroad: The Canada–US Relationship and Canada’s Place in the World.

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Laurence Decore

The mayors of today seem to have little idea how powerful they can be when they’re fighting for what is right for their citizens… when they are both courageous and, importantly, creative in marshalling the support of their citizens against an oppressive “superior” power. Alberta’s big-city mayors,after all, are elected by citizens who live and vote in as many as 46 provincial constituencies and 20 federal ridings. Premiers and prime ministers are all too aware of the potential electoral danger posed by a mayor who can rile up so many people over issues that closely touch their lives.

Unfortunately, courage and creativity in fighting ill-willed governments are not in great evidence these days. Too many people in all walks of life are bowing to political (and economic) power that has become so pervasive in our province that almost no one believes it can be fought. Too many politicians seek office for power, rather than to serve. They know how to be elected, but not why.

Much can be achieved by a mayor who brings courage, creativity and a sincere focus on public service to the office. Laurence Decore, Edmonton’s mayor from 1983 to 1988, exemplified those values more than any Alberta politician since Peter Lougheed.

Decore’s father, John Sr., a chief judge of the federal district court and a former Vegreville Member of Parliament, instilled in his son a strong social responsibility to work to improve the lives of everyday people regardless of their sex, ethnicity or socio-economic status. Laurence was taught that the purpose of politics is service, not power.

On the day of his swearing-in ceremony—held for previous mayors behind closed doors in the presence of family and “upscale” political supporters and donors—Laurence Decore at the last minute ordered that chairs, tables, linen, cutlery, tea and munchies be set out on the plaza in front of City Hall, and that buses be sent to senior citizens homes to bring people to a “swearing-in tea party.”

One of Decore’s first moves was to fire the previous mayor’s chauffeur and order the “limo” be sold. He drove his own modest Ford throughout his years in office.

Once, during a heated public debate over the publicly owned Edmonton Telephones’ request for a $1 monthly increase to residential phone bills, one of Decore’s advisers sent him a note asking why he was making such a big deal out of a small increase. The mayor replied it would take a dollar from the already meagre food budgets of the poor. He convinced the phone company to apply more often for much smaller increases.

Alberta Report mid-1990s. In 1993 Laurence Decore’s Alberta Liberal Party got within a few thousand votes (in the tightest 10 constituencies) of forming government.

Early in Decore’s tenure the city administration was topped by a powerful Commission Board of senior unelected bureaucrats. While the mayor was a token elected member, the chief commissioner chaired its meetings. The mayor was in effect subservient to change-resistant bureaucrats and their boss.

On day one of his mayoralty, Decore ordered that the locks be changed on the private stairway between the chief commissioner’s office and the mayor’s office. He chuckled at the shouted fury of the chief commissioner when the man discovered he would henceforth have to use a public stairway and glass-walled waiting room until the mayor admitted him.

He also evicted the once-powerful members of the Commission Board from their parking stalls under City Hall, giving these to elected council members. He ended the practice of firefighters ferrying the commissioners’ cars offsite to be washed. Council members were made top priority for invitations to public events; commissioners, who’d been first before, now came last.

Within a few months, Decore convinced council to disband the Commission Board, replacing it with an executive committee of elected councillors and, to his great dismay at now being the lone bureaucrat, the chief commissioner. Councillors were rotated yearly to ensure each council member an equal chance at Executive Committee participation during their three-year term.

With elected people back in control at city hall, the appropriate balance of power was finally restored.

Decore saw to it that the Citizen Action Centre—which answered citizen questions and helped people who had issues with the bureaucracy—was given authority to act on the mayor’s behalf in resolving a host of issues previously subject to time-consuming involvement by the mayor and councillors and any number of bureaucrats. Citizens were amazed at the refreshing speed with which their needs were now looked after.

Each Friday noon, Decore hosted a high school student council and their police resource officer for a pizza lunch in the mayor’s office lounge. He didn’t have a political agenda to impart; he simply listened.

Also, each week he and top representatives from the Citizen Action Centre and Edmonton Transit System visited a different seniors home to bring residents news of current happenings at City Hall, to answer their questions and hear their complaints and suggestions.

When he had time for a lunch on his own, he often would go to cafeterias or modest restaurants and sit in the middle of the room. Before he’d finished his meal, people of all ages would have approached him with everything from a handshake to a complaint about potholes.

As part of the city’s debt reduction strategy, many councillors wanted to privatize services such as waste removal and building cleaning. Decore passionately argued that city employees had higher standards because profit wasn’t their underlying motive. He convinced council to adopt a 50:50 split between the public and private sectors to keep the latter in check vis à vis standards and costs.

He maintained a healthy respect for unions. He may not have always agreed with their demands, but no union leader left Decore’s office thinking they didn’t get a fair hearing. When the City’s budget needed assertive trimming, he knew city employees would need facts if they were going to believe the city wasn’t just artificially setting the stage for wage cuts. He implemented a “cascade system” wherein each layer of management was thoroughly briefed about budget details, then assigned to impart those details to the next level down in the hierarchy. In turn, those people did the same with the next level, until finally every employee knew the facts.

Using this system the City won an international Government Finance Officers Association award for the humanity with which it had accomplished downsizing with a minimum of grief to employees.

Laurence Decore with a mobile phone in 1986, when mobile cellular telephone service became available in Edmonton.

When so-called “senior” governments did things that harmed Edmontonians by depriving the city of revenue or by withdrawing critical services that supported people, Decore was fearless in taking on those governments and in marshalling the active support of the city’s citizens in his battles.

In his time, his city’s ownership of Edmonton Telephones was unique in North America. But EdTel was prevented by premier Peter Lougheed’s provincial government from receiving a fair share of the revenue generated by long-distance phone calls made by the company’s own customers. Decore asked Lougheed to “make it right” many times but was constantly rebuffed. He decided finally to place public pressure on Lougheed, with a strategy that humbled the province and its publicly owned Alberta Government Telephones (AGT).

In complete secrecy, a dozen telecom consultants were brought to the city and housed in a downtown hotel. For several weeks they developed a technical strategy whereby EdTel denied AGT the information it required to know what telephone number was originating a long-distance call. This rendered AGT unable to bill EdTel customers for long-distance calls. As a temporary fix, AGT operators throughout Alberta were forced to intercept outgoing EdTel calls and ask what number the caller was calling from. This worked for awhile, until a councillor working on the strategy slipped it to the media that there was no reason callers had to give AGT the right number.

Decore had a giant LED counting display placed on the City Hall information desk. It showed the amount of revenue that EdTel was being denied, right to the minute. He placed newspaper ads with mail-in forms people could use to demand that the premier give EdTel its fair share of long-distance revenue. Tens of thousands of those forms were completed, returned and dumped on the floor at news conferences.

Finally, after a long period of non-response, Lougheed—who had never before known a political defeat—agreed to appoint retired Supreme Court justice Tevie Miller to conduct an inquiry into Edmonton’s claim on its long-distance revenue. Miller eventually sided with the City, and EdTel was suddenly worth tens of millions of dollars more than it was before. The EdTel Endowment Fund, created from profits from the eventual sale of the public company, paid $45-million in dividends to the City of Edmonton in 2023. It ended that year with a market value just shy of $1-billion.

The province’s municipal leaders should be screaming bloody murder.

On another occasion, minister of social services Shirley McLellan announced the government’s intention to withdraw provincial funding for pre- and after-school daycare programs. Knowing how many thousands of families—especially single-parent ones—would be devastated by the withdrawal, Decore met with the minister within days. He calmly informed her that as mayor he had more than 700 buses under his control, each of which could seat 50 moms and kids who were about to be denied these important programs. He asked her to imagine the political effect of 100 or more of those buses—each delivering 50 parents and kids to the front steps of the Legislature—for a giant protest.

The minister reversed her position the next day.

One more great example of Decore’s courage in standing against “greater” powers occurred when Conservative finance minister Michael Wilson was developing rules for the coming imposition of the GST. At a Big City Mayors conference, it was made known that the minister was considering imposing GST on city departments that are provided services by other city departments—for example, when the law department secures rights of way for LRT line extensions.

At the next Big City Mayors meeting, fortuitously held in Ottawa, Decore circulated a dummy copy of a powerfully worded brochure sized to fit inside every city’s monthly utility bill envelope. The brochure bluntly explained the federal government’s intent—and its ultimate inflationary effect on property taxes—and gave all the information necessary for people across the country to phone their complaints to Wilson and prime minister Brian Mulroney’s offices.

Once the mayors approved the strategy, Decore convinced Vancouver mayor Michael Harcourt to walk with him across the street to Wilson’s office and demand to be seen. Wilson could hardly ignore the mayors of two of Canada’s largest cities. He saw them, heard the strategy, read the dummy brochure, recognized the magnitude of their potential political threat… and nothing was ever again heard about imposing the GST on internal civic services.

Decore knew how to use political power. That’s what politicians do when they know why they seek office.

Years before becoming mayor, Decore, as chairman of the Canadian Multicultural Council, organized a lobby effort on behalf of organizations who wanted prime minister Pierre Trudeau to include “multicultural” in the description of Canada in section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau bitterly resisted, but in the end, the strength of Decore’s national lobby forced Trudeau to acquiesce. The Charter now includes this wording: This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians. That sentence enabled the flow of federal funding to support multicultural organizations.

After that, Trudeau harboured quite a dislike for the mayor of Edmonton. Decore simply didn’t care.

When, a few years later, new prime minister Jean Chrétien was forming his cabinet, Decore called him to promote Anne McLellan—an Edmonton MP well known locally but without national profile—as minister of natural resources, the ministry responsible for oil and other industries. He told Chrétien that McLellan was brilliant, a quick study and respected by the oilpatch. Chrétien, however, was determined to appoint a different MP, one with no connection to Alberta or the oil industry. The prime minister attempted to mollify Decore by telling him it wasn’t necessary to match ministers’ provinces of origin to the nature of their department’s responsibilities. The increasingly tense conversation went back and forth until finally Decore, by now quite ticked off, replied to Chrétien’s argument with: “Damnit, Jean… I’ll believe that when you appoint a fisheries minister from Saskatchewan!”

McLellan was appointed natural resources minister a few days later. She eventually became deputy prime minister.

When Canadian National closed the iconic Macdonald Hotel in 1983, it had become an embarrassment to Edmonton: a missing front tooth, a psycho-logical “downer” that dragged on Decore’s intent to revitalize the downtown. Learning that CN’s CEO was soon to visit Edmonton, Decore invited him to a meeting in his office. The CEO, Decore had heard, was a superior type who was highly conscious of his immense power and often dismissive of lesser mortals. When the CEO appeared, Decore had secretarial staff seat him in the glass-walled waiting room. Decore let him cool his heels in full view of the media for 20 minutes past the agreed meeting time.

When they finally met, after the CEO had explained all the reasons why CN could not possibly reopen the Macdonald, Decore unfolded a large black flag carrying the CN logo in white. He told the CEO that if a reopening were not announced very soon, he would fly the flag permanently in front of City Hall. Further, he threatened to organize a Pied Piper-style march from the City Hall flag-raising to the hotel, led by legendary jazz trombonist Big Miller. Decore threatened to nail up a proclamation at the Macdonald demanding that CN reopen the hotel as a display of its respect for a city whose broader region was responsible for more than half of CN’s national freight revenue.

At the same time, Decore told the CEO he would be equally difficult if CN continued refusing to entertain the relocation of its huge downtown switching yards, a move which would finally free the land to enable developments such as Grant MacEwan University. CN quickly announced the reopening of a significantly upgraded Macdonald Hotel, and within a year it was in negotiation with a councillor over the relocation of its downtown switching yards.

A few years later, as leader of the Alberta Liberal Official Opposition, Decore took his party to within a few thousand votes (in the tightest 10 constituencies) of winning the 1993 provincial election.

The man knew how to use political power. That’s what politicians do when they know why they seek office.

Alex Macdonald was chief of staff to former Edmonton mayor Laurence Decore (1983–1988) and an adviser when Decore became leader of the province’s Official Opposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Guthrie did was truly without precedent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Probably every generation thinks they’re at some crucial crossroads where the decisions they make or fail to make will reshape the future. In fact it feels like we have been living through a succession of such turning points, always on the verge of big change but somehow never quite making the turn.

After the 2008 global financial meltdown and the recession that followed, the worst since the Great Depression, pundits declared that we had got it all wrong, that the status quo could not hold. The financial chaos had revealed how costly the deregulation of the financial sector had been and how fragile was an economy built on massive mortgage-fuelled household debt. That many banking executives who had contributed to the crisis got huge bonuses while others were losing their jobs or their homes or were just hanging on made clear that things were indeed upside down. Political leaders talked about the need for a new morality, that we were seeing the dark side of globalization, that we could no longer tolerate corporate giants too big to fail. And yet in no time we were back to business as usual.

Or take climate change. A few years after the financial meltdown, Naomi Klein wrote her powerful This Changes Everything about how climate change will force the world to rethink, well, everything. It seemed no longer possible to ignore or pretend away the already evident consequences of climate change and the risks it poses to civilization. Extreme weather events were telling us our antagonistic relationship with nature could not continue. In Canada, pundits wrote that no political party could hope to win an election without an ambitious and credible climate plan. For a while we were making progress, albeit very modest given the climate crisis. Yet now it seems we are ready to backtrack. Not only can political parties run without a climate plan, they can promise to undo the limited progress we have made.

And then came the pandemic. COVID-19 exposed how woefully unprepared we were, how stretched we had allowed our health and social services to become, and the often fatal costs of privatizing long-term care. It made glaring the consequences of inequality and weak labour protections, as the poor, the marginalized, Indigenous communities, people of colour and frontline service workers were hardest hit.

COVID-19 made glaring the consequences of inequality and weak labour protections.

But the pandemic also showed us that better was possible. Governments of all stripes stepped up to protect our health and keep people and firms afloat, rolling out with unaccustomed speed billion-dollar programs that, for a time, even reduced poverty and inequality. Firms raised the wages of frontline workers who put themselves at risk so we could stay safe. We experienced the kind of solidarity that often comes with crisis, finding ways of helping each other and celebrating healthcare workers and others on the front lines.

In the midst of the pandemic, governments here and just about everywhere were talking about huge public investments “to build back better.” Change was in the air. And then inflation hit, the result of fragile global supply chains, war and greed. The pandemic programs were rolled back, as were the pay raises. There was no more talk of building back better. Even the COVID solidarity proved fragile, momentary, the now infamous “Freedom Convoy” revealing how angry many had become at government and how raw our differences. Social media, the major source of human connection through the lockdown, fuelled our outrage and magnified our divisions. Yet again the opportunity for change passed, the optimism and solidarity with it.

And now we face a new challenge. Donald Trump’s tariffs and insistence that Canada should become the 51st state have ignited an unprecedented burst of patriotism. Will this finally be the turning Perhaps to understand how to move forward we need to look back at how we got here.

It was not so long ago that most people assumed things would just keep getting better, that every generation would surpass the previous one. For decades after the Second World War, it seemed capitalism and democracy were not only compatible but mutually reinforcing, high profits and high wages could coexist, endless economic growth would benefit everyone. Unions were strong. Governments were active in the economy and in providing for our welfare. We owned things together—transportation, energy, cultural institutions, even a vaccine agency.

By the 1960s, in what has become known as the equality revolution, those who’d been left behind in the expansion of the welfare state were demanding to be let in and were making progress. Democracy was expanding, becoming more inclusive, more robust.

And then came the 1980s. While corporations and neoliberal think tanks had been fighting unions and the expansion of the welfare state all along, economic turmoil at the end of the 1970s gave the opposition their moment. The world was changing. Global competition was more intense. Former colonies were demanding more for their raw materials. Oil prices skyrocketed. Profits declined. Businesses raised prices. Inflation soared. Conditions were ripe for the neoliberal counter-revolution. Business leaders and neoliberal institutes pounced.

Defining neoliberalism is a tricky business. It’s a slippery concept and, like every -ism, is used in different ways and takes different shape from place to place and over time. Essentially it holds that competition in the free market is the route to freedom and prosperity, and that government’s role is to create the conditions for the market to work its magic.

As Karl Polanyi wrote in his classic work of economic history and social theory The Great Transformation, ideologies are often hijacked by powerful interests and transformed to support those interests. That was certainly the case especially in the Anglosphere as corporations invested heavily in a network of persuasion—media, think tanks, university chairs—to attack the welfare state and sell neoliberalism.

As a political project, neoliberalism is best understood as the single-minded focus on economic growth, the primary role of government being to create the conditions for business to thrive, stripping away as many of the barriers to profit as politics allows—capitalism with the gloves off. Competition in the “free market” would sort out the winners and losers. Inequality, in this framing, is not only inevitable but right. If the winners are unleashed, everyone benefits; good things will somehow trickle down to the rest.

The winners did win big, but without much of the promised trickling down. Instead, we got extreme inequality and increasing insecurity, as many, especially the young, find themselves competing for precarious jobs with few benefits or prospects, often working in cities where they cannot afford to live.

Neoliberalism has delivered corporate concentration, monopolies, plutocracy, a massive shift from public power to private power. It has even failed in its own terms. Profits grow but the economy not so much.

And yet neoliberalism refuses to die. It contains, it seems, the seeds of its persistence. Of course, those with power and privilege always try to hold on to both. Money talks, and with extreme inequality it talks louder than ever. Neoliberalism changed us. It changed how we view government and how we view one another. It changed what we think is important and what we believe is possible. It’s in how neoliberalism has changed us that it exerts its greatest hold.

Taxes are how we pay for the things we do together that we cannot do alone.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that we’ve organized ourselves such that our collective action problems—the ones we can only solve together—have hit the level of “polycrisis” while our collective toolkit has rarely been weaker. Decades of neoliberalism has eroded public power. Nowhere is that more evident than in how we have come to view taxes.

Taxes are how we pay for the things we do together that we cannot do alone. They are also the way we reduce inequality and deconcentrate power. The generations that preceded us were much readier to pay taxes than we have been. No doubt they grumbled—who likes paying bills?—but they kept voting for governments that raised taxes. That was how we got medicare, expanded education, built public infrastructure.

All that changed. Taxes became the third rail of politics, a no-go zone. Just think of the reaction of many business leaders to the modest change the federal government introduced to the capital gains inclusion rate in the 2024 budget. Even though it largely affects the affluent. Even though capital gains are still taxed at a lower rate than earned income. Even though Canada’s marginal effective tax rate is still the lowest in the G7. Investment will dry up, we are told. Why would it Investment didn’t suffer when not so long ago capital gains taxes were even higher.

People will flee, we are warned. Really Where will they go A telling study in the US puts the lie to the taken-for-granted assumption that when governments raise taxes on the rich, the rich take their money and run. Cornell sociologist Cristobal Young and his team recently published a study that examined whether millionaires do in fact move to lower-tax states when their state raises taxes. Their answer: no. Taking your money and moving to another state should be relatively easy compared to changing countries. But millionaires are less likely to move than any other income category, whether to avoid taxes or for any other reason. They prefer to stay right where they made their millions. The poor are far more likely to move, to escape poverty. Opportunity, community, quality of life matter more than tax rates. Of course tax increases have behavioural consequences, but so too do tax cuts.

Think of the language our political leaders use whenever they talk about taxes, offering us tax cuts as though those have no consequences, appealing to us as hard-working taxpayers as if to say we are paying taxes for what some “others” get—the hard-working taxpayer versus the undeserving. So we come to see taxes as a burden, punishment, even theft. No political promise seems to resonate quite as positively as the promise of a tax cut or a “tax holiday.” The revenue-neutral carbon tax, even as most Canadians got back more money than they put in, was made into a contentious issue.

Part of the “problem of taxes” is that people don’t like to be played for suckers, to think they are paying more than their fair share. Not only have we over the last decades shifted the tax burden from the rich and the corporations to the many, but the rich have become extremely effective at avoiding taxes, exploiting tax havens and loopholes, or even using illegal means to evade the tax collector. Ordinary people begin to think: If the system is rigged, why should I pay taxes?

Politicians have learned they should avoid any perception that they are “tax and spenders.” Yet all governments tax and spend. The questions ought to be:  What is it we should be doing together that we could not hope to do alone, and what is a fair and equitable way to pay for that What better way to constrain our ability to do big things together than to take tax increases off the table and treat tax cuts as a free good?

Not only were taxes off the table but government borrowing came to be seen as “for emergencies only.” We have been encouraged to view deficits as toxic and to measure governments on their ability to balance budgets. Here’s how this combination of tax and deficit phobia has changed our world: governments cut taxes on the promise that the cuts will generate so much growth that they will pay for themselves or will be paid for through greater government efficiency. But tax cuts never pay for themselves, and there’s never enough waste to cover the lost revenue. So deficits soar. And because deficits are supposedly toxic, public services are cut back. Quality declines. Wait times lengthen. We come to believe that we are no longer getting our money’s worth. If service is lousy, why not opt for a tax cut—even though that will make things worse—and why not support privatization, even if that makes services more expensive and less accountable?

Of course we need to be fiscally responsible, to manage fiscal risks, but that cannot mean giving priority to fiscal health over human health and the health of the planet. When the Trudeau government eschewed the long-standing commitment to annual balanced budgets, that was to the good. But fiscal hawks and much of the mainstream media continue to view deficits and increasing debt as a sign not that governments should raise taxes but that they must cut spending, regardless of whether spending was the primary cause and with no consideration of the human and economic costs of austerity. Robert Reich, after resigning from Bill Clinton’s cabinet, described the combination of tax and debt phobia as a conceptual straitjacket. And as we obsess over public debt, private debt breaks records and sets us up for more bubble-bursting.

Similarly, think about how we view government regulation. Regulations are how we protect the environment, labour and human rights. Instead, we have been encouraged to think of them as red tape, a drag on the economy. We are, it seems, ready to use the heavy hand of criminal law to regulate people but not so much giant corporations, despite their enormous power to drive prices and deflate wages, despite their devastating impact on our environment and on our democracy.

Yes, we have to take into account the costs of regulation, but we also need to consider what we lose through deregulation and regulatory capture, allowing corporations to self-regulate. Think of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the Gulf oil spill, Enron, and of course the 2008 meltdown. Bruce Campbell’s book on the tragic oil train crash in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, lays out in devastating detail how regulatory capture contributed to the disaster. Years before, a deadly E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario, traced directly to deregulation of the water system, helped bring an end to then premier Harris’s “common sense revolution.” And of course, climate change and nature loss are the most threatening examples of regulatory failure.

All this to say we have organized ourselves in a way that makes crises more frequent and intense and has undermined the tools we need to make things better.

Government has come to be viewed as the problem. Disdain for government now comes not just from those who have been ill-treated or who got the short end—that is to be expected—but from our political leaders themselves. Governments, we are told, should not interfere in the market.

Decades of neoliberalism—of favouring private power over public power and, for that matter, private debt over public debt—have left us with bargain-basement citizenship: government asks less of us, and we ask less of government. There is no society, we were told. Don’t look to government for help or to society for excuses. Look after yourself and your family. Not surprisingly, research has revealed an epidemic of loneliness, as many feel on their own to manage all the change that’s coming at them. If strength is not to be found through common citizenship, many turn to the people they know and like, often people “like them.” The trust and solidarity necessary to act together across our differences are weakened. If the future is not ours to shape, democracy itself is diminished.

The answer for Canada is in rebuilding our collective toolkit and rediscovering our collective power.

So, given all that, am I optimistic, and if so, how is that even possible I find comfort in Antonio Gramsci’s formulation “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” I am optimistic, in other words, because I have so decided. Pessimism or cynicism sucks out all the energy for making things better. Despair is not an option. Gramsci, writing in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s as fascism was on the rise, cautioned that we must not underestimate the hurdles nor assume that better is assured—only that better is possible and we must fight for it. In these in-between times things could flip either way.

Most of us know the future we’d prefer—living in harmony with one another and the natural world, with security for ourselves and our kids, access to health, learning and the arts, affordable housing, decent work, a balanced life, a secure retirement, liveable communities, peace. Polls bear this out. What’s missing is the belief that we can do big things together, that we are in fact in this together.

Despite this, I do believe there are grounds for optimism of the Gramsci sort. While it’s true that Donald Trump’s Republicans won the White House and Congress, barely, Americans also consistently voted for progressive measures such as higher minimum wages, paid sick days, reproductive rights—when given the choice. Polls show that Canadians are ahead of their politicians in readiness to tax the rich and rein in corporate power. According to a recent Abacus survey, over 70 per cent of Canadians believe the rich and corporations are not paying their fair share.

Big change usually starts outside of conventional politics and political parties—in civil society. Despite everything, many people are fighting to make things better and sometimes winning. #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Pride. Four Indigenous women decided to fight against a bad bill that undermined Indigenous rights. They lost that battle, but their efforts became a movement, Idle No More, whose impact continues to ripple. It’s been a very tough time for environmental causes, but we might take heart from the recent victory of a coalition of activists in stopping the mayor and council of Vancouver from implementing their plan to reintroduce fossil fuel heating in new homes and buildings, which had been banned since 2022. It was only through the tireless efforts of childcare advocates over decades that we are finally getting a universal $10/day childcare program. Disability activists made important if modest progress with the recent announcement by the federal government of a new disability benefit for working-age adults. Unions are making something of a comeback, bringing in some of the hardest to organize service workers. Recently 20 unions got a taste of collective power when they joined together to stop the Ontario government from thwarting a teachers’ strike.

If the many out there fighting—for decent work, for peace and against racism and hate and poverty, for human and civil rights, for electoral reform, for basic income, for climate action—can overcome the learned neoliberal competitive bias and distrust, to see that they are stronger together, who knows what big things could be achieved Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth examined hundreds of protests and civil actions globally, trying to understand what it takes to move the yardsticks, and what she found, to her surprise, was that if just 3.5 per cent of a population join together to fight—peacefully—for progressive change, they almost invariably succeed.

Previous generations built things. They gave us medicare, pensions, welfare, employment insurance, universal education, public infrastructure. They passed along a world better than they inherited. We have not taken good care of what they built. What will we build?

In the face of Donald Trump’s threats and tariffs, some are urging us to do whatever it takes to appease him, and many business leaders are calling for more of the same: even lower taxes, fewer regulations, no more climate action—peak neoliberalism. Some are pushing for greater integration even as Trump has made inescapable the dangers of our US dependence. The answer for Canada is not this; it is in rebuilding our collective toolkit and rediscovering our collective power—taking back the future and breaking free of neoliberalism.

Alex Himelfarb is an author and academic. He served three prime ministers as Clerk of the Privy Council, 2002–2006.

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Magnetite is a heavy magnetic iron ore used for coal upgrading and steel production. It is not in short supply and so is relatively cheap. To be profitable, a magnetite mine needs to be large to benefit from economies of scale. That is what did not make sense about the Micrex proposal. Their original plan called for a mine to cover 13 kilometres of public lands in the Livingstone Range. But by the time I became minister, the proposal had been scaled down to just 5.5 hectares—barely larger than a football field. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out why. At that reduced size, it did not trigger a legal requirement for an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the Public Lands Act. However, Micrex had actually purchased 36 square miles, or 56,909 acres of land. The smaller, revised proposal looked suspiciously like a toe-in-the-door strategy that would lay the foundation for future expansion.

There were good reasons for Micrex to avoid any type of EIS. The Livingstone Range is certainly the steepest and arguably the most dramatic front range in all of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. If you’ve never expeOttawa

More Alberta, Less Ottawarienced it, view the online video provided by the Livingstone Landowners’ Group. Or drive down the North Burmis Road, just to the west of Highway 22. Better yet, go for a hike there, or take a trail ride with one of the local outfitters.

The proposed mine was in the middle of the designated DU Ranch Heritage Viewscape. It provides home habitat to a prolific mix of bighorn sheep, elk, moose, deer and the usual mix of predators that feast on them—grizzly bears, black bears and cougars. The proposed smaller mine site was adjacent to the spring lambing grounds of a resident herd of 200 bighorn sheep. The access roads required by the mine would destroy native grasses that would be difficult if not impossible to restore. Storing topsoil on slopes that regularly experience 100-kilometre-an-hour winds would be either impossible or very expensive. The new access roads would also increase hunting pressure on the wildlife mentioned above—especially by Indigenous hunters who are not subject to legal limits or seasons and can hunt year-round. And of course, there are water issues. The Micrex properties cover much of the headwaters of the Connelly Creek watershed, a significant tributary to the Crowsnest River, which flows into the Oldman and then the Bow. Erosion from the mine and the access roads would inevitably degrade water quality.

It quickly became evident that Micrex did not make sense either economically or environmentally. Even at full production, the proposed mine would pay virtually nothing in Crown royalties—several million dollars a year—and create fewer than 10 full-time jobs. The bottom line was neatly summarized by a letter to minister Knight, myself, and other ministers, signed by 125 local residents in the Livingstone Landowners Group: “There is a proven economy in this area already…. It is based on ranching, home businesses, tourism, hunting, fishing and equestrian outfitting—all things that would be negatively impacted by a mine, no matter its size.”

I agreed! And so it’s time again for full disclosure. I know this area and many of its landowners quite well. My colleague and friend Rainer Knopff has lived there on and off since 1992. Through Rainer I met Dan and Puff McKim, who operate the historic DU Ranch, a purebred Hereford bull operation just off North Burmis Road. With Rainer and his sons, I have hunted the Livingstone slopes for elk, moose, deer and grouse. In the summer my wife joins us for hikes above the DU Ranch and fly-fishing in the Crowsnest River. The McKims are active in the Livingstone Landowners Group.

In the 2008 Alberta election, many of these same people helped to elect Evan Berger as the new MLA for Livingstone-Macleod. I had met Evan during my 2003 “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” speaking tour, and he had helped in my 2006 leadership bid. Evan, a third generation Alberta rancher, runs a mixed livestock–grain operation west of Claresholm. I immediately appointed Evan as my parliamentary assistant because I knew he could be a constructive bridge to the rural landowners as we implemented the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, which included all of Livingstone-Macleod. Evan was an effective advocate for his constituents, almost all of whom opposed the mine.

In my mind’s eye, when I imagined the Micrex Mine, what I saw was a second industrial scar on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes—like the Lafarge limestone quarries and cement plant in Exshaw. The Lafarge plant is located 80 kilometres west of Calgary, at the gateway to Banff, Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest cement plant in Canada. It’s located less than a mile from the Trans-Canada Highway, so you can’t miss it as you approach Canmore. And it is just plain ugly and totally out of place—a huge scar on the face of the Rockies, with large stacks belching smoke.

In 1906, when the mine and plant were first opened, it made good sense. Alberta was the poorest of all the Canadian provinces, with a mostly rural population of less than 200,000. And the Lafarge plant has served Alberta well, providing most of the cement that has built the province into the wealthiest province in Canada with a population of 4.8 million. One hundred years later, however, you would never build the same plant at the gateway to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So I decided that such a thing damn well wasn’t going to happen again on my watch.

The question was how. While I could have engaged either or both the energy and the environment ministers (there was overlapping jurisdiction), I decided the path of least resistance was simply to rope-a-dope it to death with one administrative delay after another. Without initial public-lands sign-off from SRD, it couldn’t go anywhere. While most of the delays were achieved simply by foot-dragging on administrative technicalities, there were two potential deal-stoppers for Micrex. One was the then-pending South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP), being developed under the newly adopted Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA). The SSRP encompasses all the watersheds feeding the Bow, Elbow, Sheep, Highwood, Crowsnest and Oldman rivers—basically everything south of Calgary and the Trans-Canada. The advisory committee for the SSRP, which I had hand-picked, would never recommend approval of project like Micrex, as it failed both the Act’s environmental (water and wildlife) and economic criteria.

When I imagined the Micrex Mine, I saw an industrial scar on Alberta’s eastern slopes.

The second trump card that I could have played was to refer the entire project for a full cost-benefit analysis by Alberta’s Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB). The NRCB reviews non-oil and gas natural resource development projects and any other development projects referred to it by cabinet. At a minimum this would have added at least another year to the approval process. It was also highly unlikely that Micrex could ever pass a full NRCB cost-benefit analysis, and the Micrex team knew this. Just the referral would have been enough to kill the project.

While I never played either of these cards in my multiple meetings with the Micrex lobbyist, I made her aware that I considered them as viable options. This worked as long as I was minister, but that came to an end in January 2010, when I was moved to Finance. My replacement at SRD was Mel Knight. Mel was a northerner and had little interest in either ALSA or conservation issues in southern Alberta. In the thinly populated north, when someone wants to invest millions of dollars in a new mine, they are welcomed. The Micrex promoters were alert to the opportunity presented by a new minister and were quickly in Mel’s office lobbying for SRD sign-off.

For the rest of 2010, I was much too busy at Finance to pay any attention to the Micrex file. I spent 12 months trying (unsuccessfully) to build a two-step budget process to get us “back in the black” by Budget 2012—an election year. In addition to four painful weeks lost to shingles in May, I was immersed in budget meetings with my officials and Treasury Board. But as December approached I was informed by Evan Berger, now minister of agriculture, that Mel was getting ready to approve the Micrex licence. Mel subsequently confirmed this to me, stating that the government could not and should not stop all development in the province until the land use planning process was completed. I responded that while this was true in the abstract, it was completely unacceptable in the specific context of Micrex. But Mel was not persuaded.

I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing?

The Federal, Provincial, Territorial (FPT) Finance Ministers semi-annual meeting was in Kananaskis on December 19 and 20. So, as I prepared for my second (and presumably last) FPT meeting, I decided to do something I had never done before—leak a self-serving story to the media. There were several cabinet ministers who did this regularly to curry favourable treatment by the legislative reporters. We all knew who they were, and I held them in contempt. However, given that I had already made my decision to resign from cabinet the following month, I figured I had nothing to lose.

I phoned Kelly Cryderman, then the legislative reporter for the Calgary Herald. Kelly is a cousin of Sonia Arrison, whom I knew through her public policy work at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. I had developed a cordial professional relationship with Kelly, so I was comfortable asking her for a favour: Would she mind asking me a question about how minister Knight was handling the Micrex file She responded, correctly, that this had nothing to do with the FPT meeting and would violate the unspoken rule of ministers not publicly commenting on each other’s work. I replied simply that I was asking a favour.

The FPT meeting in Kananaskis went according to schedule. As is customary at the end, there was a joint media scrum. Most questions focused on the about-face that federal minister of finance Jim Flaherty had done on Canada Pension Plan reforms—now favouring Alberta’s position of allowing private sector alternatives rather than increasing CPP premiums. But, just as the scrum was breaking up, Cryderman asked me about Micrex. She then did me the favour of quoting me verbatim in her subsequent Calgary Herald article: “Morton said, ‘It would be premature to approve a project like this before the regional plan for the South Saskatchewan region is finalized. … If you look at the policy document for the land-use framework, it identifies the Eastern Slopes in terms of priority use, as watershed and recreation—not mining.’ … Morton suggests the company’s application may be subject to review by the province’s Natural Resources Conservation Board.”

Less than 24 hours later I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing I replied that I was just repeating what I had told him before the Christmas break. He was not impressed. While this tactic unfortunately cost me my friendship with Mel, it did get the policy results I wanted. Cryderman’s article triggered a flood of phone calls and emails to both Knight’s office and the premier’s office—all opposing the Micrex mine. It took several months to grind through the formal process, but in April SRD announced cabinet approval of an order-in-council  mandating a full NRCB review of the Micrex proposal. But it never happened. Knowing that it could never pass the NRCB review, Micrex placed the project on hold.

So how was I able to block the Micrex mine I’d like to say because it was so clearly without merit. But we all know that governments routinely enact poor policy. Just look at the Stelmach government’s New Royalty Framework and North West Upgrader. The primary factors in the Micrex defeat were that it did not have any champions in the cabinet, in the civil service, or in any influential business stakeholder groups. Contributing factors were the lobbying and public relations efforts of local residents—the Livingstone Landowners Group—which were effectively communicated by their MLA, Evan Berger. While these factors probably would not be enough to establish a new program, they were sufficient to allow a motivated minister—me—to block a project that clearly violated our government’s stewardship and conservation goals.

After the 2012 election, in which both Evan Berger and I were defeated, Micrex almost succeeded in resurrecting their mining project. They applied for a mining permit on a piece of property adjacent to their earlier proposal. Since it was a different block of land, the requirement for the NRCB review did not technically apply to it. The Livingstone Landowners Group communicated this to me in November 2012, and I immediately passed on their concerns to Ken Hughes, the new minister of energy in the Redford government. Ken was a long-time friend of mine. He had grown up on a ranch near Longview, where his family had settled in the 1890s. He knew and loved the Foothills. I pointed out that the “new” Micrex proposal was not new at all, but just a clever attempt to bypass the requirement of the NRCB review. All the environmental issues were the same. Once Ken became aware of this, the permit was denied.

Ted Morton is a former Alberta MLA, cabinet minister and political science professor at U of C. This piece is an excerpt from Strong and Free: My Journey in Alberta Politics, U of C Press, 2024.

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Indeed, federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said as much when asked about the Sovereignty Act last December: “When I’m prime minister, bills like this will be unnecessary because I’m going to respect provincial jurisdiction.”

But is that what history tells us when we have a Conservative premier in Alberta and a Conservative PM in Ottawa?

Short answer: no. Here’s the longer answer.

In 2010 relations between the Conservative provincial government of Ed Stelmach and the Conservative federal government of Stephen Harper grew so hostile over environmental monitoring of the oil sands that the normally unassertive Stelmach declared, “Ottawa should stop sticking their fingers in provincial jurisdiction.”

The breakdown was so acute the two Conservative parties ditched their Stampede joint-caucus meeting.

That quote sounds like it was plucked from a recent fire-and-brimstone speech by Premier Danielle Smith about Justin Trudeau, a man she has called, among other things, a “virtue-signalling” prime minister who heads a government that wants “to shut down our energy and agriculture industries as fast as they can.”

Smith’s Sovereignty Act doesn’t mention Trudeau by name, of course, but he’s in there if you read between the lines.

Shortly after becoming premier, Smith said if Trudeau continues with what she calls his anti-Alberta policies, “Alberta will be relentless in our opposition and we will use every tool at our disposal to protect Albertans, their jobs and their future.”

Hello, Sovereignty Act.

Back in 2010 Stelmach didn’t have a Sovereignty Act, but that didn’t stop him fighting with Harper over healthcare funding and Ottawa’s plans to step on provincial toes by creating a national securities regulator. In 2011 the breakdown in relations between Alberta’s federal MPs and provincial Conservative MLAs had become so acute the two sides ditched their annual Stampede joint-caucus meeting.

In 2012 Alberta’s new Conservative premier, Alison Redford, felt that relations with the Harper government were so bad she opened an office in Ottawa with an annual budget of $850,000—an Alberta embassy, if you will—to “advocate Alberta’s perspective on important intergovernmental matters.”

You wouldn’t think we needed an emissary in Ottawa, especially when 27 of Alberta’s 28 MPs were Conservatives. But Redford realized that even though Harper was an ally on some issues he was an opponent on others, especially when going after Ontario votes. In fact, Harper kept his MPs on such a short leash that Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber quit the Harper caucus in 2013 to sit as an Independent, citing the “government’s lack of commitment to transparency and open government.”

The kumbaya myth of Alberta and federal Conservative governments getting along gets a boost every time this province fights the policies of a federal Liberal government. Most notable, perhaps, was the very public fight between Premier Peter Lougheed and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau over the contentious National Energy Program in 1980.

After Conservative Brian Mulroney became prime minister in 1984, however, western alienation continued to fester. The federal Reform Party rose to prominence, with its rallying cry, “The West Wants In,” and the party won 52 seats in 1993.

You could argue Alberta has felt aggrieved since becoming a province in 1905, a feeling that pretty much grew in lockstep with the province’s burgeoning prosperity after the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves.

Alberta’s population accounts for 12 per cent of Canada’s population, and Alberta’s wealth accounts for 15 per cent of Canada’s GDP, but the province doesn’t enjoy commensurate political power, holding only 10 per cent of seats in the House of Commons and just six of the Senate’s 105 seats (whereas New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, early to the Confederation party, have 10 each).

U of C political science professor Ted Morton summed up local conservatives’ frustrations a decade ago when he was a politician hoping to become premier: “No matter who’s in power in Ottawa, Alberta’s interests are always at risk.”

It’s something Smith, Poilievre and all Albertans should keep in mind. When looking at Alberta–Ottawa relations, it doesn’t matter who is premier or who is prime minister. The two jurisdictions will bump heads—and Alberta’s premiers will always complain that Ottawa has given them a headache.

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

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In the end Alberta achieved very modest job growth during Kenney’s time, roughly the same as comparable jurisdictions. The more notable outcome—and I’d argue the UCP’s actual agenda all along—has been a significant shift in wealth from workers to employers by cheapening labour. Alberta may have slightly more jobs now than when the UCP took office, but it also has more jobs that are worse: that pay less, to workers with fewer rights, toiling under worse conditions.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Kenney began his attack on worker rights by targeting teenagers. In June 2019 the UCP cut the minimum wage for most workers under 18 from $15 an hour to $13. Kenney’s rationale was that a lower minimum wage would mean more jobs. “Thirteen dollars an hour is a heck of a lot more than zero bucks an hour, and that’s the option here,” he said. There was (and still is) no evidence that lowering wages creates employment for youth. The only indisputable outcome was more money in the pockets of low-wage employers and less for students, many of whom were saving to afford rapidly rising post-secondary tuitions prompted by government funding cuts.

The UCP also left the regular minimum wage to languish at $15 an hour during Kenney’s time in office, despite the cost of living rising over that period by about 8 per cent. Some 300,000 workers, mostly adult women who have permanent and long-term jobs with large companies, bore the costs of this policy, while the beneficiaries were, again, low-wage employers.

Kenney also took a run at injured workers, reducing their workers’ compensation benefits by half a billion dollars over five years. This included capping wage-loss benefits and de-indexing them from the cost of living, removing an employer’s obligation to rehire injured workers, and radically reducing the likelihood of workers receiving compensation for psychological conditions such as PTSD.

According to one-time UCP labour minister Jason Copping, employers told him that “rising costs” put the Workers’ Compensation Board’s (WCB’s) “future state of sustainability in doubt.” If this is what employers told Copping, it is simply untrue. In 2020 Alberta’s accident fund was fully funded, with $13.7-billion in assets. Indeed, there has been so much excess cash in the accident fund that the WCB has since 2018 subsidized employer premiums by over $1-billion.

A different way to control workers’ compensation costs would be to reduce the number of workplace injuries. In late 2020 Copping introduced significant changes to Alberta occupational health and safety (OHS) rules, which he framed as “improving safety for Alberta workers and making workplaces safer.” In reality these changes gutted the powers of workplace health and safety committees to make workplaces safer—including eliminating the requirement for regular inspections—and made it harder for workers to refuse unsafe work.

Michael Hughes, a spokesperson for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, told the Edmonton Journal that the right to refuse unsafe work was key to workers protecting themselves during massive COVID outbreaks at the Cargill and JBS meatpacking plants. “We feel it may have actually saved people’s lives.” He said the Kenney government was reckless to weaken that right.

At the same time, the government cut enforcement. In the UCP era the number of compliance orders written by OHS inspectors to employers, directing them to remedy unsafe work, fell by 49.6 per cent, while the number of tickets written for violations dropped by 93.4 per cent. Charges laid against employers and fines levied also declined. Not surprisingly, laxer rules and phantasmal enforcement resulted in the number of serious injuries rising by 16 per cent during Kenney’s tenure.

Finally, the UCP made changes to Alberta’s rules about overtime that allow employers to impose so-called agreements on the averaging of weekly work hours. These “agreements” allow employers to delay the payment of overtime premiums. Minister Copping nonsensically framed these changes as “expanding choice for workers” when in fact the choice of whether or not to pay overtime is granted solely to employers.

The upshot of the UCP’s overtime changes is that employers can require employees to work up to 208 overtime hours per year (roughly five weeks of additional work) without having to pay any overtime premiums. Given that an estimated $3.3-billion in overtime was paid in 2018, the UCP’s changes transferred untold hundreds of millions of dollars from workers to their bosses.

These changes affected a broad swath of Albertans. But Kenney and the UCP particularly targeted public-sector workers. This began in June of 2019, when the UCP legislatively delayed wage-increase arbitrations (affecting 180,000 workers) that had been negotiated with the former NDP government. Public-sector workers—mostly women—and their unions had viewed the arbitrations as a quid pro quo for agreeing to a two-year wage freeze (2017–2019) and saw the delay as a betrayal. During the legislative debate over this bill, Kenney handed out bright-pink earplugs to his caucus. This juvenile behaviour set the tone for the years that followed.

The government rationalized the delay to give it time to get a handle on the province’s finances, which it characterized as “worse than expected.” The UCP’s assertion that the province’s coffers were bare did not, however, stop it from handing business owners approximately $4.5-billion in tax cuts over four years (tax cuts that did not result in meaningful job growth). In the interim the Kenney government set out to justify draconian legislative changes that would drive deep cuts to public-sector wages.

In September 2019 Kenney’s hand-picked panel on Alberta’s finances recommended cutting public-sector spending. It urged the government to erode the wages and benefits of workers who deliver public services (including doctors), either at the bargaining table or through legislation. The UCP wasted no time in complying and, before the year was out, passed the Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability Act, 2019. Tucked at the back of this omnibus bill was the Public Sector Employers Act, whereby the government gave itself the authority to impose a bargaining mandate on all public-sector employers, such as school boards, post-secondary institutions and Alberta Health Services. Employers were furthermore required keep their mandate a secret from the unions during bargaining, and the government gave itself a veto over any settlement that strayed from the mandate.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen.

Critics predicted these mandates would make collective bargaining a hollow and fettered process. Unions would go through the motions of bargaining with the employer at the table. Meanwhile, the real decisions would be made by the government in the back room, safely insulated from any consequences. This analysis turned out to be spot on.

The omnibus bill also gave the UCP the power to unilaterally cancel its province-wide agreement on physician compensation, which it did in February 2020. This move was unprecedented in this province; the Alberta Medical Association called it “outrageous.” The government then imposed a new agreement containing significant rollbacks in physician fees and other rights. Physicians were furious, and backlash from doctors and the public alike resulted in the government partially reversing course. After two years of bargaining (including a tentative settlement that was rejected by doctors in 2021), a new agreement was ratified in September 2022 with a below-inflation increase in compensation. In the interim, many doctors left the province, and many Albertans, particularly outside Edmonton and Calgary, faced difficulty accessing family MDs or specialists.

Finally, before going to the table with virtually every unionized public-sector worker in the province, the UCP also made significant changes to Alberta’s labour laws. The Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act was passed in the summer of 2020. In addition to making it easier for employers to thwart workers’ efforts to unionize (under the predictably misleading assertion that the UCP was “restoring workplace democracy”), this Act severely restricted picketing activities during a strike or lockout.

When collective bargaining reaches an impasse, workers can go on strike. The purpose of a strike is to apply economic pressure on an employer to agree to contract provisions that workers also can accept. Workers do so by withholding their labour (which disrupts operations) as well as by picketing. Picketing lets workers dissuade potential customers from doing business with a struck employer. Picketing can also stop or delay traffic into and out of a workplace, which makes it more difficult for the employer to carry on operations. The UCP altered Alberta’s Labour Relations Code to prohibit strikers from obstructing or impeding anyone who wishes to cross a picket line.

Workers sometimes also engage in what is known as secondary picketing in front of businesses owned by their employer’s customers or suppliers or in a public space. The UCP’s changes now require picketers to receive prior permission from the Labour Board to picket anywhere but at their regular place of work. And the UCP’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act gives the government the power to prohibit picketing in certain public places, including sidewalks, boulevards and roadways.

“These new rules have rendered legal picketing ineffective and effective picketing illegal,” said Susan Cake, assistant professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University. “This has tipped the playing field significantly towards employers, including the government, the largest employer of unionized workers in Alberta.” While the labour movement promised fierce resistance to picketing changes, it launched no legal challenge with any legs. Unions and their members have clearly been reluctant to violate UCP government laws, because of the significant and immediate consequences attached to doing so combined with the delay and uncertain outcome of court challenges.

The UCP’s Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act also interfered with unions’ ability to collect dues. Normally, unions present budgets to their members to vote on each year. Once a budget is passed, every member must pay the union dues required, to fund union activities. The UCP now requires unions to separate out the cost of “core” union functions (e.g., negotiations, handling grievances and educating members) from “political activities and other causes.” Union members are only required to pay the portion of dues devoted to core activities. Unions must get each member to annually opt-in for non-core activities.

According to Kenney, this time-consuming process means “no longer will union workers be forced to fund political campaigns of union bosses!” But the real reason Kenney wanted to interfere in internal union governance, according to United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 president Tom Hesse, was “to be disruptive, to foment dissent and to encumber unions so they can’t operate.” One knock-on effect of Kenney’s meddling is that unions are reducing their support to charities, community organizations and disaster-relief agencies in order to avoid the hassle of getting members to opt-in. A 2022 Parkland Institute study suggests this will entail a $6-million hit to Alberta communities.

When “bargaining” with major public-sector unions in core government services (e.g., education, healthcare, post-secondary) began in 2020, employers initially proposed wage cuts of 3 per cent to 4 per cent, followed by several years of wage freezes and other sector-specific benefit rollbacks. This pattern clearly demonstrated the government mandates at work behind the scenes. Union leaders began preparing and mobilizing members for strike action, and in October 2020 thousands of AUPE healthcare workers engaged in a one-day wildcat strike to express opposition to the government’s plans to privatize 11,000 healthcare jobs.

As contracts began to be settled in late 2021 and 2022, public-sector workers achieved modest wage increases ranging from 2.75 per cent to 4.25 per cent over four years. While better than initially expected, these settlements continued to fall far behind inflation. And given the demands placed on public-sector workers during the first years of the COVID pandemic, these miserly increases were also deeply insulting.

Post-secondary employers, facing government budget cuts and the government’s secret mandate, were particularly aggressive during bargaining. Faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton, a private university that receives significant public funding, struck in early 2022, and a five-week strike followed at the University of Lethbridge. The Lethbridge strike ended with an agreement that followed the provincial pattern. The employer’s unreasonable behaviour during the strike provided more evidence that the government, not the board of governors, was calling the shots at the bargaining table.

Much of the shift in the government’s demands between 2020 and 2022 can be attributed to the impacts of the pandemic. But even as the crisis revealed the importance and scarcity of healthcare workers, the UCP continued to do less than other provinces to support healthcare workers, including refusing to provide bonus pay to nurses. Alberta’s suddenly improved fiscal situation due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising oil prices also took away much of the excuse for imposing drastic austerity.

The UCP’s agenda has been to shift wealth from workers to employers.

The mistreatment of public-sector workers did not end at the bargaining table. The UCP pursued numerous “work-intensification” efforts in healthcare. In the fall of 2020, for example, it announced its plan to lay off 11,000 support staff in cleaning, food, laundry and protective services at AHS. In July 2022 all community lab services were handed to DynaLIFE Medical Labs, which move cost another several hundred public employees their jobs.

Kenney also cut funding to Alberta school boards, resulting in approximately 25,000 education workers and education assistants being laid off in early 2020. These layoffs, amounting to approximately 1 per cent of Alberta’s entire workforce, were announced via Twitter on a weekend, only days after Education Minister Adriana LaGrange had said school boards would see no funding cuts. LaGrange later said this was a temporary layoff in response to COVID school closures, and that funding would be restored once in-person classes resumed. Later she said 2,000 of those jobs would never return.

Teachers also saw the UCP hand the management of their pension fund over to the government-controlled Alberta Investment Management Corporation, despite AIMCo’s history of questionable investment decisions and poor returns. Teachers had to go to court to regain control over their pensions.

The UCP government also made drastic cuts to the post-secondary system, including slashing funding to the University of Alberta by 33 per cent between 2019 and 2022. The U of A responded by firing more than 1,100 people (mostly support staff) and hiking tuition by more than 20 per cent.

The government’s unwillingness to address the airborne transmission of COVID through meaningful public health measures means public-sector workers must now perform their jobs in unsafe workplaces. As of September 2022, Alberta’s WCB had accepted 22,478 time-loss claims for COVID, the vast majority of them from municipal, healthcare and education workers. This figure actually undercounts cases in education, because most Alberta teachers are excluded from the ambit of workers’ compensation.

Working very hard in unnecessarily dangerous workplaces for stagnant wages and declining job security is a recipe for burnout and attrition. The government’s refusal to allow school boards to require classroom masking (which directive led to high rates of illness and absenteeism) and its insistence on imposing a curriculum that is poorly designed (e.g., “find gravity on a globe”), age-inappropriate, plagiarized and often outright racist is demoralizing and exhausting.

In January 2022, 37 per cent of teachers said they soon planned to leave the profession or the province due to stress, exhaustion and anxiety. Long-time Alberta public school teacher and principal Sue Bell told reporters she retired early because of a lack of government support for teachers during the pandemic. “I would have worked for a few years more, but the last year-and-a-half just burnt me out. I was done.”

Burnout and illness among nurses are also routinely creating staff shortages, delays for patients awaiting surgeries and other medical treatments, and the periodic closure of rural emergency services. Not surprisingly, healthcare jobs now often go unfilled and other provinces are aggressively recruiting Alberta nurses. Heather Smith, long-time president of the United Nurses of Alberta, told CBC that her members “are just not prepared to deal with the kind of disrespect they’re feeling here in the province. They want workplaces that respect them and value [their] contributions… And they’re quite prepared to do it in other locations.”

Calgary emergency-room physician J. Edward Les wrote in the Calgary Herald about the long-term impact of the government’s treatment of doctors. “Physicians are running harder and harder to keep up, and in return they’re gifted with constant disrespect from governments and growing abuse from frustrated patients. It’s no mystery why family doctors are leaving in droves, and why we can’t attract enough new ones. The real mystery, perhaps, is why there are any good family physicians left at all.”

Things look no better under Kenney’s successor, Danielle Smith, who has asserted without evidence that staffing shortages have been manufactured by AHS. She has also mused about specifically recruiting unvaccinated healthcare workers. The value of hiring healthcare workers who are skeptical of basic infection-control protocols is hard to fathom.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen.

One of the most alarming outcomes of the UCP’s sustained attack on workers is the possibility that the morale and trust of many workers has been irrevocably damaged. This is especially bad in the public sector, as such damage can compromise the functioning of basic public services—doctor availability, ambulance response times, surgery wait times, high-school graduation rates, even worsening math proficiency.

In my experience, public-sector workers are used to recurring bouts of difficult working conditions. For the most part, they just persevere. This reflects that they have deeply held commitments to their students or patients, to their co-workers, to their sense of professional duty and belief in the value of publicly delivered services. It also reflects that they have invested in their careers and communities. Most public-sector workers can see that the cyclical nature of the work means better times will return. Rarely are working conditions so bad that leaving a public-sector job, the profession or the province is worth the cost.

But profoundly bad and worsening conditions with no prospects for improvement can shift this calculus. At some point a further harm or indignity, however small, can cause a worker to throw in the towel. Once a worker makes this decision, it’s very hard to get them to re-engage. This is because fixing the problem isn’t just a matter of the employer walking back that last bad thing it did. Rather, it has to fix the whole range of issues that led to this moment. Few employers or politicians are prepared to repudiate their entire agenda.

When a worker actually quits and moves on (rather than just quietly giving up), they’re unlikely to return. Potential replacements, having heard through the social media grapevine just how rotten things are in Alberta, can be tough to recruit. Only people with no better options would take a public-sector job in Alberta, given how badly the UCP treated their predecessors. This bodes ill for all Albertans, who would receive worse service, often in our most vulnerable moments. And it represents a damning indictment of the UCP government.

Bob Barnetson is a professor of labour relations at Athabasca. His most recent research is a chapter in Anger and Angst: Jason Kenney’s Legacy and Alberta’s Right (Black Rose, 2023).

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The soon-to-be-premier’s victory speech contained a lot of familiar rhetoric, but key elements of the speech caught some observers off guard. In a central theme of his remarks, Kenney contended that “we are one step closer to a government focused on prosperity so that we have the means to be a compassionate and generous society.”

The comment marked one of the few times a major conservative leader in Canada has said the quiet part out loud: that in neoliberal ideology, prosperity must come before compassion. Kenney’s tone was a noticeable departure from the tempered forms of “progressive” or “compassionate” conservatism that had defined the governments of Peter Lougheed and Alison Redford. It was also more doctrinaire than the pragmatic forms of conservatism under Ralph Klein, Ed Stelmach and Jim Prentice.

Later in his acceptance speech, Kenney elaborated on his view of what brought conservatives together to form the UCP. According to him, “This was never about uniting the right, because most people don’t situate themselves along some theoretical political spectrum. It has always been about uniting Albertans who understand the traditional values that have animated this province since its beginning; those who understand that in order to be a compassionate and generous society, you must be a prosperous one first.”

Kenney’s placing prosperity ahead of compassion played well in opposition. But it also helps explain his dramatic fall from grace.

In keeping with that spirit, Kenney then declared an end to Alberta’s days of “generously” contributing to the rest of Canada. The richest province in Confederation, he declared, would demand a fairer deal from Confederation.

Kenney’s placing prosperity ahead of compassion would play very well in opposition. Indeed, the notion helped pave the way to a majority UCP victory in the 2019 provincial election. But it also helps explains Kenney’s dramatic fall from grace.

Within three years of becoming premier, Kenney only narrowly survived a leadership review. He subsequently announced his resignation. In explaining his political demise, his allies portray Kenney as a victim of circumstances beyond his control. But other conservative leaders in Canada faced down the pandemic without losing control of their parties or their grip on power. In this sense, Kenney’s story is a cautionary one for conservatives and the broader electorate. Kenney’s brand of “prosperity first” conservatism proved ill-suited to governing—to bringing society together to face existential threats such as pandemics, economic calamities and climate change. Not only did it fail under those circumstances, it actually made things worse.

“Prosperity first” conservatism proved ill-suited to bringing society together to face existential threats.

Kenney consciously tied his brand of Alberta conservatism to a version of the prosperity doctrine that has dominated thinking on the religious right for generations. The mantra links hard work and individual wealth to personal virtue and, in religious circles, the will of God. On the flip side, a lack of wealth is associated with lack of personal effort or worth.

In political terms, the conservative version of prosperity doctrine promotes faith in capitalism, the accumulation of wealth, individualism and the personal responsibility that appears to underpin it. In this sense, prosperity doctrine has an anti-collectivist bent, an insistence on freedom from government overreach and a reverence for local and family autonomy (or localism). Many but not all of these features figure prominently in neoliberalism.

Alongside “freedom” and “autonomy,” “prosperity” remains one of the code words that animate Alberta conservative politics. From Social Credit’s “prosperity certificates” in the 1930s to Ralph Klein’s “prosperity bonuses” in 2005, the concept has permeated provincial politics throughout the past century. But not since the religious campaigns of Social Credit in the mid-twentieth century had we heard a leader articulate the doctrine so clearly, overtly and repeatedly as Jason Kenney.

Positioning prosperity ahead of compassion had the added benefit of matching Kenney’s leadership style. A March 2021 Viewpoint Alberta survey asked respondents to identify one word that best describes Jason Kenney. The top responses—including “liar,” “arrogant,” “dishonest” and “asshole”—mirrored what the survey heard from dozens of focus groups across the province. In more than one session, participants reached consensus on labelling Kenney as “a dick” (their word). This reputation served him well, at least in the beginning.

In 2019 Albertans were clearly in the mood for “a dick” like Kenney. Western alienation had reached a fevered pitch, with the Trudeau government in Ottawa embodying generations of Albertans’ animosity toward a so-called “Laurentian elite.” A second Trudeau victory in the fall of that year—despite the Conservatives receiving more votes than the Liberals—only inflamed tensions. Support for Alberta separatism reached 30 per cent in Viewpoint Alberta’s November 2019 survey, on par with support for separatism felt in Quebec at the time. Many Albertans wanted someone new to protect their interests against a “marauding” federal government and disrespectful fellow provinces.

Provincially, Alberta had been governed by what Kenney labelled “an accidental NDP government.” Months of UCP attacks on the NDP’s supposed coziness with the Trudeau Liberals and its tax-and-spend approach had taken a toll on the Notley government’s popularity. Add to this the alleged attacks on Alberta’s oil and gas industry by environmentalists abroad, and the UCP had successfully primed the Alberta electorate to seek out a bully or guardian to “stand up” for Alberta in 2019. Whatever his other shortcomings, Kenney’s “dickish” public persona fit that bill.

Kenney’s UCP cruised to victory in the 2019 campaign. The term “prosperity” appeared five times in the UCP platform. It also formed the core of the UCP-friendly Alberta Chamber of Commerce’s “Vote Prosperity” campaign in 2019 and was in the title of the Fraser Institute’s 2019 election primer (“Alberta Prosperity: A Plan for Opportunity and Growth”). Kenney’s half-hour election night acceptance speech was peppered with a dozen more references to “prosperity.” The three keys to that prosperity—jobs, pipelines and the economy—were emblazoned on Kenney’s lecterns throughout the campaign.

Moreover, the UCP’s platform committed the party to “Standing Up For Alberta” against “the Trudeau–Notley alliance” and “foreign-funded special interests.” Pledges included taking the federal government to court; threatening to “turn off the taps” on any province that opposed pipelines through its jurisdiction; launching a referendum on removing the equalization principle from the Constitution as “leverage for federal action” on pipelines; setting up a “war room” to advocate for the oil and gas industry’s interests; and establishing a formal inquiry into the funding of campaigns critical of Alberta’s energy industry.

In short, by identifying “prosperity” as a defining value of Alberta society, Kenney was able to paint his political opponents—the Trudeau Liberals, the Notley New Democrats, leftists, environmentalists and more—as enemies of the province. And he was able to portray himself as the ideal leader to stand up to them. Kenney’s brand and style of conservatism was a major reason the UCP gained control of government in 2019. Ironically, it would also be one of the reasons he lost control of his party and the premiership.

Once in the premier’s seat, Kenney set about fulfilling his campaign promises. The “Summer of Repeal” lived up to its billing, as the UCP undid years’ worth of NDP legislative achievements in a matter of weeks. In a bid to balance the budget and impose a neoliberal agenda on public institutions, Kenney and his ministers picked fights with teachers, doctors, nurses, healthcare aides, professors, environmentalists, Indigenous people, francophones and safe-drug-supply advocates, many of whom took the Kenney government to mediation, arbitration or court. Kenney lost most of those fights, but, true to his style, the outcomes seemed less important than the conflicts themselves. Victories by Alberta’s “opponents” only further fuelled Kenney’s need to keep fighting.

Even in the midst of the pandemic, Kenney lived up to his word in provoking other premiers and the prime minister. He went so far as to insult Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer as being “brain dead” for her concerns about the Line 5 pipeline in her state—which had recently seen a massive spill by the same Calgary-based company, Enbridge—and to pump well over a billion dollars into an ill-fated gamble to resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline. When these measures failed to produce results, Kenney blamed the Trudeau government for not doing enough to stand up for Alberta.

Albertans’ mood shifted, however, as the COVID-19 pandemic deepened. Most citizens called for compassion over prosperity as infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths mounted. Healthcare and other social services steadily climbed the list of Albertans’ priority issues; economic concerns waned. Prior to the pandemic, in November 2019, over a third (37 per cent) of Albertans named the economy the most important issue facing the province; this compared with just 17 per cent who cited healthcare. By August 2020, the gap had narrowed to just 5 percentage points (28 per cent economy; 23 per cent healthcare). This didn’t bode well for an antagonistic premier intent on prioritizing prosperity. The situation was worsened for Kenney by the fact that only 11 per cent of Albertans viewed his UCP as the best party to handle healthcare.

While some Albertans grew wary of what they saw as draconian public health measures, a larger and steadily growing proportion of citizens saw the government’s actions as too soft. In August 2020, over half of the province’s population (55 per cent) felt that the level of pandemic restrictions in Alberta were “just about right,” while another 35 per cent felt they were “too lenient.” These numbers had flipped by October 2021, with 55 per cent feeling that the government’s measures were too permissive and only 27 per cent saying they were balanced. This shone a harsh spotlight on the premier’s insistence on preserving prosperity (“livelihoods”) at the direct expense of public health (“lives”).

Few Albertans saw virtue in Kenney’s antagonistic leadership style when collaboration was needed.

Fewer still saw the virtue in Kenney’s antagonistic leadership style when empathy and collaboration seemed to be in order. The UCP’s equalization referendum in 2021 failed to generate much interest or support, for instance, with fewer than 1 in 4 voters bothering to show up and cast a yes vote. The inquiry into “anti-Alberta-energy” campaigns went over time and over budget and produced no damning findings. And the war room became a punchline after several public embarrassments, including its attack on a children’s movie and its twice using plagiarized logos. This, combined with several high-profile scandals involving ministers flouting public health rules (Tracey Allard’s “Alohagate”; Kenney’s party on the Sky Palace patio) and an ongoing RCMP investigation into Kenney’s 2017 leadership victory, further tarnished the premier’s reputation as the kind of leader Albertans needed in the moment.

Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw announces public health measures, March 2020. Photo: Government of Alberta.

Jason Kenney’s remaining champions often attribute his political demise to a series of unfortunate events. To them, if the pandemic hadn’t hit and the ensuing economic downturn hadn’t happened, Kenney’s prosperity-first approach and belligerent leadership style would have served him well. But those who frame Kenney as a victim of circumstance or a martyr for the times ignore two important lessons. Each is crucial to understanding the future of the conservative movement in Canada, particularly for those who would inherit leadership positions with federal or provincial parties.

First, Kenney is not alone among conservative leaders in terms of his inability to maintain public or caucus support. Leaving aside the revolving door on the federal Conservative Party leader’s office, Kenney is not the first conservative leader to be ousted by his party after reaching the premiership. In fact, he’s the third conservative Alberta premier to face that fate this century. Not since Ralph Klein two decades ago has a conservative premier in this province completed a full term in government. Compared to their counterparts in other parties and jurisdictions, it seems Alberta conservative leaders have had a harder time holding onto the premiership than gaining it in the first place. Why is this?

In part, Alberta conservatives suffer from an ailment that is the exact opposite of what political scientist George Perlin labelled “the Tory syndrome.” Under his theory, Canadian conservative parties languish in opposition because they lack the discipline of power. Rather than building their bases of power while out of government, right-wing parties tend to succumb to infighting. This distracts them from the important task of preparing to win the next election.

By contrast, Alberta’s conservatives have lately appeared more cohesive in opposition than in government. The need to mobilize against a common foe was incentive enough for PCs and Wildrosers to lay down their ideological and partisan differences following their defeat at the hands of the Notley NDP. Once in government, and once crisis hit, these old lines of division were laid bare. When Kenney’s popularity began to slide, and polls and party fundraising totals showed the NDP were poised to return to government, the UCP turned on its leader. Without enough power to distribute to all factions, lacking a consistent set of experienced staff in the leader’s office, and unable to rely on proven caucus management tools, Kenney’s coalition began to unravel from both top and bottom.

Indeed, it is worth examining how Kenney’s “dickish” brand of conservatism contributed to the fracturing of the very UCP coalition he had built only a few years earlier.

Put simply, prosperity doctrine is appealing when a large portion of the electorate has the luxury of focusing on personal gain above all else. A belligerent form of leadership is most effective when one’s primary opponents lie outside the party or the province, and when picking fights (as opposed to achieving policy goals) is the ultimate aim. And balancing between ideological factions is most feasible when you can allow individuals, families and local communities enough autonomy to make their own decisions. None of these circumstances were present in Alberta from 2021 to 2022. And they might not prevail here or in Canada more generally in the years ahead.

The premier prematurely declaring victory over a global crisis. He proved ill-equipped to manage the public health emergency. Photo: The Canadian Press.

Beyond personal wealth or economic growth, the pandemic encouraged many Albertans to think beyond themselves to consider the common good (or at least a common threat). As political scientist Robert Putnam might put it, Alberta became more of a “we” society than an “I” society. During the second and third waves of the pandemic, as hospitalizations and deaths soared, Albertans became increasingly concerned about threats to the healthcare system and to their fellow citizens. Kenney’s appeals to treat “livelihoods” with the same importance as “lives” was out of step with the public. His bull-headed persona and lack of empathy—not to mention similar qualities among his staff, who antagonized people daily on social media—only made things worse.

At the same time, many people within Kenney’s own party turned on the premier for supposedly forsaking their personal freedoms. But a global crisis necessitated a strong, centralized state response. Ironically, Kenney’s having cultivated anti-government sentiment, rugged individualism and local autonomy actually hindered him in maintaining party discipline and rallying broader public support for public health protections. In establishing unreasonable expectations among members of his party and caucus, who became similarly laser-focused on the virtue of personal responsibility, Kenney could not acknowledge, let alone address, real challenges that required mutual obligation and trust.

When rifts develop within conservative parties, their leaders like to lean on the notion that elected officials should represent the interests of their constituents, whether in the legislature through free votes or behind closed doors in caucus. In times of global crisis, however, the needs of the broader society take precedence over the desires of individuals and smaller communities. “Targeted” or “regional” measures such as calls for “personal responsibility” are politically enticing. But they make for ineffective public policy, as Kenney himself admitted when reluctantly instituting province-wide mask mandates, vaccine requirements and other public health measures. Viruses know no borders.

Such was Kenney’s predicament, albeit of his own making. Unable to rely on libertarianism or localism, he was ill-equipped to manage either his caucus or the public health emergency. It is easy to dismiss him as a victim of circumstance, and to believe that Kenney’s leadership style and brand of conservatism might have had success in other times and places.

But this ignores an important second lesson of Kenney’s demise.

It would be folly to consider the COVID-19 pandemic the last major collective crisis to confront Canadians. Climate change demands sustained collective response and state action, both within Canada and internationally. Income inequality and inflation have reached their worst states in generations, necessitating new conversations about how best to boost wages and employment, redistribute wealth and manage the economy to make life affordable for more Canadians. An exclusive focus on prosperity—encapsulated by Kenney’s appeals to personal responsibility (and by the Conservative Party of Canada’s ill-fated 2019 slogan, “It’s time for you to get ahead”)—is unlikely to resonate with a large segment of the electorate, let alone help address the angst felt by many Canadians.

The failure of Jason Kenney’s brand and style of conservatism to handle urgent, complex problems should be a warning sign to those who continue to laud his leadership of the conservative movement and dismiss his flame-out as the result of circumstances beyond his control. The “prosperity first” dogma and belligerent leadership that have come to define the modern conservative movement in Canada are great for riling up people who feel alienated from the political mainstream. If Kenney’s tenure is any indication, however, these ideas are incapable of uniting communities behind a common cause and only end up further dividing a society in crisis. That is the legacy Kenney’s champions must live with, and the challenge his successors inherit.

Jared Wesley is a researcher and professor of political science at the University of Alberta.

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