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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As for Steve, it’s been 26 years since he first visited a GA meeting. Now 47, his relationship with recovery has been off and on. “I probably have 20 years of clean time combined,” he says. Roughly 180,000 Albertans, according to the Canadian Community Health Survey, have or are at risk for gambling problems.

Growing up in south Calgary, Steve bet on childhood marble or pool games, taken in by the highs of winning. By 17 he was sneaking into the Elbow River Casino. “I just couldn’t wait until I was 18,” he says. As Steve matured into adulthood, gambling took over his life. His debts became too high to keep his addiction secret. He lost a marriage “after being given 100 chances.” Family members started getting calls from banks and other lenders demanding Steve repay the money.

In 1999, when Steve attended his first GA meeting, Alberta’s gambling landscape grounded itself in the physical realm. There were casinos—his preferred type of play—as well as video lottery terminals (VLTs), bingo, scratch tickets and lotto and Sport Select slips to fill in with a pencil. With only half of Canadians using the internet as the millennium dawned, everything online was in its infancy. This included gambling.

Then “grey-market” gambling websites started to appear online. Registered in such far-flung places as the Caribbean or the Isle of Man, they were illegal and unregulated in Canada. The players logging on didn’t know or care. A Canada West Foundation report proposed that the problem was best ignored. “It is not clear that a reasonable market for internet-based gambling in Canada exists, nor is it clear that such a market could be created,” wrote Robin Kelley, Peter Todosichuk and Jason Azmier in 2001. The authors argued that in trying to capture these players, governments might just create wider problems.

The grey market grew, however, as internet adoption increased and the number of websites expanded. Eventually people began gambling through browsers and apps on their smartphones and tablets. Provinces decided the market was a threat, and responded by launching their own legal, publicly owned online casinos, including, in 2020, Play Alberta. Gambling activity spread further with the legalization of single-sport betting nationwide in 2021.

The following year, Ontario started regulating the online private-casino—dubbed iGaming—industry. This officially enabled online casinos, including those previously operating outside Ontario law, to be licensed by the province. In exchange they would pay a cut of their revenues to the provincial government. Ontario now has some 50 operators, which run 87 websites.

In a few short years iGaming has become a huge industry in Ontario. More than two million user accounts have been opened, of which one million are active. Gambling has contributed more than $1.6-billion to Ontario government coffers. The government of Alberta has taken notice. They want in on the action. Albertans have already been seeing ads for gambling apps and websites (e.g., on Hockey Night in Canada) that they can’t actually use, at least legally.

As the second mover in Canadian iGaming, Alberta could learn from—or ignore—Ontario’s lessons. Though our government has said Alberta will “massage” Ontario’s blueprint, provinces often simply copy policies. Alberta will also help set the stage for provinces that follow suit. This province’s approach could even shape the gambling industry abroad. But whether Wild Rose Country will put a good system in place depends on who you ask.

In June 2024 the Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, Dale Nally, took the stage at the Canadian Gaming Summit in front of a large photo of himself to talk about “Betting on the Alberta Advantage.” Hair slicked back, Nally introduced himself not by his actual title but as the province’s “Minister of Fun.” He noted Ontario’s “success” with iGaming, and said Alberta wanted to follow in its footsteps. He said Albertans watching sports see ads for things they love, like beer, trucks and gambling. “But there’s something we don’t like about the ads,” he said, in a recording shared with AV by a journalist in attendance. It was the disclaimer that says “Ontario only.” “So we’ve got to change that.” Nally told the gambling company representatives in the audience to come find him later, to pitch, because Alberta would soon be open for business.

Consultations followed with stakeholders, including First Nations and other land-based casino operators in Alberta. In the legislature, MLAs debated how Alberta would soon usher in a new era of gambling. Amendments to proposed legislation—including player-protection measures such as gambling education, advertising limits and financial outlays for harm reduction—were defeated. And then, in May 2025, the iGaming Alberta Act was passed. The floodgates are expected to officially open in 2026.

Minister Dale Nally noted Ontario’s “success” with online gambling, and said Alberta wants to follow in its footsteps.

What awaits Albertans is an experiment. Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and the UK have versions of iGaming marketplaces. But in North America the iGaming industry is still in its infancy. Besides Ontario, iGaming marketplaces exist in only seven US states. Online sports betting is more widespread, both across Canada and, according to the American Gaming Association, in 34 US states. Though quick to tout benefits—namely revenue—governments like Ontario’s are also facing consequences, including more gambling addiction and growing concerns over advertising, such as its effects on children and youth.

Steve is already hearing about these concerns in GA meetings, with the biggest change in recent years being how people gamble. Older people are still using casinos and VLTs, he says. “But the younger people coming in now are mostly online gamblers.”

Nally isn’t hearing as many reservations. The people he talks to want us to be like Ontario. “Albertans have said ‘Why don’t you do the same here?’” Nally told CBC in a 2025 interview about iGaming. “Why don’t you put in place safety measures Why don’t you stop the money from leaving the province, and keep some of it in Alberta?”

Putting aside the open question of how many people expressed such preferences to Nally, or what their interests are, governments have traditionally let revenue potential, not consumer input, drive gambling expansion.

The founding father of gambling economics, the late William Eadington, was skeptical of online gambling’s role in public revenue generation, because he felt more taxes could be collected from physical venues such as casinos.

Though the online market is bigger for operators—by virtue of its 24/7, borderless, portable access—governments don’t earn the same spoils. While the Ontario government takes over 80 per cent of the revenues from land-based casinos and VLTs, it takes only 20 per cent of online iGaming revenues.

Ontario’s iGaming private companies have collectively taken more than $7.6-billion in just over three years, five times the online gambling revenue the provincial government has collected. Publicly owned online casinos in Alberta and Ontario don’t have partners to split revenues with, meaning the government keeps it all. The Edmonton international airport currently keeps 15 per cent of gross gaming revenue from its VLTs, while 85 per cent is returned to government coffers. Alberta charitable casinos are currently taxed at 83 per cent of net revenue. But Alberta’s online iGaming casinos are likely to be taxed at only 20 per cent, as in Ontario.

In short, the province will receive a much smaller cut from each dollar spent in a new iGaming regime than it is used to receiving from other forms of gambling.

The Alberta government downplays the possibility of iGaming cannibalizing higher-taxed land-based gaming. When launching Play Alberta, it said this wouldn’t happen, due to the province’s focus on targeting grey-market gamblers. Nonetheless, it’s very likely. A consultant’s report commissioned by casino operator Great Canadian Entertainment suggested Ontario casinos could lose about $550-million annually from gamblers flocking instead to iGaming. And indeed Ontario casino revenues fell below target in fiscal 2023–24 by almost that very amount. For the government to avoid taking a financial hit, then, Alberta’s gamblers will need to lose more money—or more Albertans will need to start gambling.

Land-based gambling creates economic spinoffs through casinos and VLT venues. These include job creation and additional tax revenues from food and beverages, payroll and property. Ontario is losing these “silver linings” of gambling. When Play Alberta launched, its potential impact on casino revenues was enough for the Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations to file a lawsuit citing potentially unfair competition.

When William Eadington wrote about online gambling earlier this century, the massive global industry we live with today was, in some respects, unfathomable. But now professional sports leagues have given up their long fight against betting potentially corrupting the sanctity of their games. Governments have permitted marketing on a grand scale with few restrictions, as in Ontario. And they have  succumbed to the temptation to steer away from more-profitable gambling options for a smaller share of a larger pie.

In part, this is due to the spectre of grey-market gambling, which drives a narrative known in gambling research as overcoming “regulatory resistance.” Gambling proponents invoke the perils of the grey market (or illegal black market) to wear down and defeat resistance to legalizing gambling. According to a 2021 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, concerns include loss of consumer freedom, lower economic growth, and lack of safety.

Governments and consultants suggest that vast sums of money are currently being gambled away in unregulated markets. In 2020, as Play Alberta was being launched, Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) suggested Albertans were gambling away $378-million on the unregulated market.

Minister Nally, who didn’t respond to an interview request, spoke of the shadow side of the industry disdainfully in the legislature. “There are two parts that really are quite offensive,” he said. “One is that the money is not just leaving Alberta; it’s leaving the country for offshore destinations. So we don’t see a penny of that. And some of these operators are repugnant.”

Switching gamblers from unregulated to regulated gambling is called “channelization.” Some industry observers consider even 80 per cent to be a low goal. Ontario, which according to an Ipsos poll sees 86.4 per cent of its gamblers use the province’s regulated iGaming market, is chasing a 90 per cent channelization rate.

Unsurprisingly, channelization rates run lower in jurisdictions such as Alberta that have a single, publicly owned online casino rather than dozens of privately run websites that court the public with incentives to gamble and try to outmarket each other. In 2023–24 (the most recent annual report available), Albertans placed $5.3-billion in bets across all games on Play Alberta. That’s a 20.8 per cent increase over the previous year. After prize payouts and expenses, this netted the government $235-million. Prior to the 2020 launch, the province didn’t earn one cent from regulated online gambling.

The amount by which iGaming could expand Alberta’s regulated market is debated. Analysts project the new market could reach $1-billion to $1.25-billion at maturity. With 20 per cent of gross gaming revenue going to the provincial general fund—the same rate Ontario takes from iGaming partners—at least $200-million could be expected annually. Meanwhile $200-million is equivalent to only 0.25 per cent of the province’s projected 2025–26 total expenses.

For Alberta to avoid taking a financial hit, gamblers will need to lose more money—or more Albertans will need to start gambling.

So, is it worth it to allow all this online gaming Carrie Shaw, an Alberta Gaming Research Institute (AGRI) research chair at the University of Alberta, says she’s skeptical of revenue projections, because how much will get captured is calculated differently depending on who’s crunching the numbers. “I don’t know that the rationale for opening the market in Alberta is as evidence-based as it could be,” she says.

Take, for example, that no foolproof way exists to estimate the market size of Albertans wagering on grey-market sites. Often activity like this is measured through user surveys or web-traffic patterns, not spending data. Other information, such as the number of player accounts at a given online casino, is proprietary. Estimates vary too widely to tell a definitive story.

Though the province officially claims that Play Alberta has captured 45 per cent of the local online gambling market, data shared with the industry magazine Canadian Gaming Business by H2 Gambling Capital suggests the number is closer to “28 per cent of non-lottery gaming.” (H2 didn’t respond to an interview request.) A survey of online gamblers by Ipsos and the Canadian Gaming Association, an industry trade group, reported that only 22.7 per cent wager on Play Alberta. And of those players, just over half also gambled on grey-market sites.

If one assumes Play Alberta currently has 45 per cent of the market, with its 434,000 registered player accounts, the remaining 55 per cent of the market wouldn’t constitute 530,445 grey market accounts. Although Play Alberta permits only one account per individual, verified using government ID, players can sign up for accounts with multiple online gambling operators in iGaming or grey markets.

David Forrest, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Liverpool, says the average from UK Gambling Commission surveys is two accounts. But academic reviews of problem-gambling screenings suggest the number can actually be six or seven per gambler. Taking this into consideration can dramatically reduce the potential market size of iGaming in Alberta by several magnitudes. It can also distort channelization rates by making them appear higher by measuring total accounts rather than total players.

Forrest adds that attempts to survey gamblers on money spent are also challenging. Estimates range widely due to issues with self-reporting, including lack of recall or stating the amount wagered or the amount lost interchangeably.

Besides issues around the actual revenue potential of iGaming, Shaw at AGRI says other unintended consequences aren’t being properly reviewed. Online gambling, she notes, is inherently riskier than the in-person kind. Yet Canada already has insufficient public data on the consequences of gambling, whether detailed addiction rates, the number of calls to gambling helplines or the magnitude of harms such as gambling-related bankruptcies, domestic violence or suicides.

In 2018 Statistics Canada estimated 2.9 per cent of Ontarians have gambling problems or are at some level of risk for them. In December 2024 a Pollara report for Mental Health Research Canada put that number at a whopping 22 per cent. The Ontario Problem Gambling Helpline says it’s seeing a spike in calls. The scraps of evidence so far, wrote four Ontario psychologists for The Conversation in January 2025, “suggest a notable rise in problem gambling since [iGaming’s] introduction.”

Facing public criticism, Ontario banned celebrities from appearing in ads to promote iGaming—unless they’re promoting “responsible gaming.” It’s unknown whether this is having the intended effect. “We don’t have any evidence to suggest it’s having [an] impact,” Shaw says. And we know little about the long-term effects of online gambling ads on children and youth.

The biggest criticism so far, however, is that Alberta is moving ahead with the industry before crafting many of the rules and regulations.

Other than a plan for centralized self-exclusion that will enable patrons to ban themselves from all iGaming casinos at once—a feature Ontario still lacks—few specifics are yet known about Alberta’s iGaming market. Nally has said he believes responsible gambling should be a regulatory issue, not written into law. That way, he told the legislature, changes can be made “on a dime” as required by the market rather than requiring a legislative process.

That isn’t good enough for experts on gambling activity and addiction. “I think the onus is on the provider and the regulators to actually partner with [arm’s length] researchers,” Shaw says. Though researchers at the AGRI have a good working relationship with the provincial regulator, Shaw adds, the institute hasn’t been asked to perform independent research in the lead-up to Alberta opening its iGaming market.

It’s also critical to address a less tangible query: Will the consumer protections offered as part of an Alberta iGaming industry outweigh the negative consequences for the public writ large When discussing why an iGaming industry even needs to be created here, the provincial government publicly defaults to messages related to safety and responsible gambling. “Our goal is not to create new gamblers but to make existing online gambling safer,” Nally has said.

Brady Simpson, a University of Calgary doctoral candidate who studies gambling marketing, finds this messaging baffling. “What do you think is going to happen when these massive—in some cases multibillion-dollar—[companies] are able to inject their marketing dollars into Alberta The whole point is new-customer acquisition and then retention of those people.”

Simpson adds that such a permissive approach isn’t being taken with tobacco, alcohol or cannabis. Gambling too has health and addiction risks. Tobacco, alcohol and cannabis typically aren’t as close by as one’s phone, with its new, enticing, soon-to-be-legal gambling apps. At a minimum, says Simpson, “We should have limitations on marketing and accessibility.” Instead, the industry is “about to open the floodgates.”

What is happening now with iGaming in Alberta is familiar. It’s the same process every time Alberta expands its gambling options. The same questions, the same concerns, the same alleged drive to stamp out illegal activity, the same push to expand industry, the same lack of digging into how previous gambling expansion has affected people. It has happened before, here and across the country, and history is repeating itself.

Lobbyists are already pushing for an iGaming market in BC, but at present the government there says it isn’t interested. The Quebec Online Gaming Coalition—which includes member companies Bet99, Draft Kings and Flutter—has been lobbying for an iGaming market in that province since May 2023.

Yet this could be a moment to steer away from the old narratives and rationales that turned legalized gambling into a massive business.

When Nally spoke to industry insiders, he told them Albertans love to gamble. But the “Minister of Fun” also told the legislature: “I want to be perfectly clear: if you don’t gamble today, please don’t start tomorrow. That is not the purpose of this.” Meanwhile his government is projecting that Alberta’s gambling industry will grow. If this isn’t a mixed message, what is?

Steve has been in recovery since 2019, and he is determined to make it stick. “There’s a difference between abstinence and recovery,” he says. Previously he only focused on abstinence from gambling, which he saw as time off. Now he’s actively in recovery, which for him involves following a 12-step program and doing service work, including as an executive with Southern Alberta Gamblers Anonymous. He knows what will happen if he veers off course. “I won’t stop until I lose all my money. I’m going to be a liar. I’m going to be a thief,” he says. “I might as well say bye-bye to my family and my friends and my work.”

One thing he is confident about with Alberta’s new iGaming regime is that it won’t unleash a flood of new people with gambling addiction into his meetings. But not because they won’t exist. “There are thousands and thousands of compulsive gamblers in Calgary,” he says. “Yet every night we have a meeting, maybe 15 to 20 of us are in the room.”

Journalist Rob Csernyik has a forthcoming book from Sutherland House on gambling-related suicides in Canada.

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Read More: Who Wants Albertan’s to Gamble More?

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The post The Big Bet appeared first on Alberta Views.

Two houses down and kitty-corner from us are two seniors facilities. Just around that corner, where 13th St. intersects 9th Ave., is the playing field of an elementary school. According to City of Lethbridge traffic data, this intersection is the most dangerous in the city.

I have lived on this street for 19 years. Traffic here was always a bit noisy, a bit fast. But in the past few years something happened. As traffic volume increased after the pandemic, the speed, noise and aggressiveness of drivers multiplied. The street became a racetrack, not just for the occasional stunter but for a majority of drivers.

The noise is nearly unbearable most days; it often feels like a vehicle is driving through the house. And getting in and out of our truck in front of the house has become more dangerous. Drivers pass at full speed within inches of me. While we were unloading groceries one evening in 2021, a driver smashed into the back of our truck, pushing it into a tree, totalling it. Another driver hit my next truck parked in the same spot in 2023, smashing it into my partner’s car and totalling both.

One spring morning in 2022, while hurrying to make coffee, I left our nine-month-old bluetick hound pup, Jack, waiting at the back door for me. I forgot that Jack could open the door if it was unlatched. Soon he was out in front of the house. I raced to the front door just in time to see Jack sitting and waiting at the curb, as I had taught him, but fixated on a dog on the other side of the street.

Before I could get the door open and shout his name, Jack gave in to his excitement, forgot his training and began running across. A truck and trailer struck him. His body tumbled halfway down the block. The bloodstains were on the asphalt for a week.

In the chaos and horror of that Monday, when Jack seemed to wake up again and try to breathe—even before the vet told us it was agonal breathing, that he was already brain-dead—I was already making a vow. I would fight to make our street safe again.

In May 2022 I contacted our city traffic engineering manager to tell him about Jack and discuss the growing problem of speeding on our street. The man replied that his department already knew our intersection sees the most right-angle collisions—the most dangerous kind—of any residential neighbourhood in the city. He agreed to order a traffic speed study.

In November 2022 the city deployed the speed study along the same half block that Jack’s blood had stained. Over three days, during the hours that children were walking to or from the school around the corner, 74 per cent of all drivers—23,343 out of 31,764—were found to be speeding, with the top speed during school hours at 110 km/h.

The City’s response, to my surprise, was that the results of the study were normal, due to something the traffic engineering manager called the “85th percentile theory.” The theory—developed in 1961, when vehicle speeds topped out at barely 100 km/h—privileges, above all other considerations, the speed at which 85 per cent of drivers feel they can still operate safely. In traffic departments still using the theory, so long as the 85th percentile speed isn’t more than 10 km/h above the posted limit, there is no need to change the limit or take extraordinary measures to reduce traffic speeds. In effect, traffic engineers using the formula create an unofficial speed limit to reinterpret traffic study data so that it seems like only 15 per cent of drivers are speeding. And traffic engineers will even use the formula to raise speed limits.

The US National Association of City Transportation Officials says the 85th-percentile formula is “designed to fail.” When drivers see other cars going faster, they increase their speed as well, creating a ratcheting effect for speed that has no relation to actual traffic safety. The formula has a deadly blind spot for pedestrians and cyclists, because it was never developed for them or with their safety in mind. The theory was intended for setting speed limits on highways, where visibility is unobstructed and drivers are protected by the structures, materials and crash-safety systems of their vehicles.

Bad traffic theory is only part of the problem on a street like ours. So is street design. As with many communities in Alberta, city founders designed our wide old streets during the late 1800s not to be four-lane highways running through neighbourhoods but so that a full four-horse wagon team could make a U-turn. In 1906 the Alberta government legislated its first urban speed limit at 10 mph, to protect horses from the motor vehicles—or “terror wagons”—that were beginning to use the same streets.

Over the ensuing decades, drivers would begin to occupy the full width of our streets, but until the 1950s the primary users were pedestrians, cyclists, buses and streetcars. That’s when traffic engineers and governments began treating streets like ours, designed for horse and buggy traffic, as large arteries to move motor vehicle traffic quickly through our cities, with the assumption that “wider is safer.”

A 2023 Johns Hopkins study showed that, in fact, narrow streets are safer. Where speed limits are low, the width of a street doesn’t much affect traffic safety. But at 50 km/h, the wider the street, the less safe it is. That’s in part because more lanes and wider streets don’t give drivers more room for mistakes. They just make them drive faster.

And something else terrifying happens when a driver surpasses 50 km/h, on any kind of street in an urban environment.

The morning my puppy was killed, as I scooped up his body I heard behind me the driver saying over and over “I never even saw him.” The man was decent enough to drop off a few hundred dollars to pay for part of the emergency care. But for a long time I wondered how in the hell the driver hadn’t seen Jack. Of course it was my fault our puppy got out of the house. But Jack had been sitting, waiting, four lanes away from the approaching driver, with no obstacles between them. And how was the driver still going full speed when he hit Jack?

According to studies used by state and provincial governments across North America, the limit of brain processing speed causes a shortening of pupil distance in humans with any increase in rate of movement. As a result, even when we’re just walking, the faster we move, the narrower our field of vision. At speeds up to 40 km/h, a driver in a city has good enough peripheral vision to be aware of what’s happening on sidewalks and approaching streets. At 50 km/h, a driver’s field of vision narrows so that it becomes difficult to see a person or puppy emerging from a curb. At roughly 55 km/h—the average speed of drivers on our street—real tunnel vision begins to set in. By about 60 km/h and above—the speed of at least 15 per cent of drivers in the 85th-percentile regime on our streets—the vision cone has narrowed so much that drivers can see only the backs of the vehicles in front of them.

In other words, the man who hit Jack really hadn’t seen him. Nor was he a “bad driver.” Or at least no worse than the other 74 per cent of drivers on our street going above the 50 km/h limit every day, who because of the effect of speed on field of vision might as well be driving impaired.

But why did it take that driver so long to stop even after he hit Jack Why did his truck and trailer drag and roll my puppy’s body so far down the block, making death certain?

According to studies used by transportation engineering and safety associations around the world, reaction time for the average driver is 1.5–2.5 seconds. In the time it takes for anyone’s brain to process that they need to begin stopping, a driver going 60 km/h will travel at least 25 metres. Visual obstacles—our elm trees, bushes, fences, parked cars etc.—limit visibility to 19–30 metres in many places. Most drivers’ brains won’t begin to tell them to stop until after they have hit someone.

Once a driver does begin to brake, in ideal conditions the vehicle will travel at least another 30 metres, with a final total stopping distance of between 60 and 80 metres, more than half a block. When a vehicle is going 40 km/h, a pedestrian’s chance of surviving an impact is nearly 100 per cent. At 50 km/h, the chance of survival falls to 10–20 per cent. At 60 km/h, survivability flatlines to nearly zero.

According to data from the Canadian Traffic Injury Research Foundation and the US Department of Transportation, while pedestrians are involved in only 2 per cent of serious traffic collisions, they represent nearly 20 per cent of fatalities from these incidents (cyclist numbers are similar). A cyclist or pedestrian struck in a collision is nearly 300 times more likely to be killed than anyone inside the motor vehicle. Senior citizens are the most likely to be hit by speeders; aging impairs perception and judgment of the distance of an approaching vehicle, and it makes getting out of the way more difficult. Children as cyclists and pedestrians are most likely to be killed in a collision.

Drivers speed on streets like ours for one simple reason: no one is looking.

In a February 2023 meeting with the chief of Lethbridge Police Service (LPS), I learned that the city’s automated traffic enforcement system didn’t deploy a single photo radar vehicle on our street during the two years before the November 2022 study (due in part to the pandemic). In that meeting the chief promised a six-month “blitz” of our street with enhanced traffic enforcement. But with reportedly only seven staffed patrol cars available to LPS at any given time—for all offences, not just traffic—the blitz amounted to just 93 hours of patrol car enforcement over 180 days, or an average of just over 30 minutes per day for the entire length of a street that sees nearly eight million vehicle trips per year, or about 20,000 per day (with nearly 15,000 of these vehicles speeding, and 3,000 of them at extreme speeds). During that time, officers issued only 176 tickets, an average of one per day of the blitz.

Why so few tickets, with a speeder passing traffic patrollers every four to five seconds, and roughly two extreme speeders passing every minute Presumably a significant part of the 30 minutes “patrol” time per day of the “blitz” would have involved the act of issuing the lone daily ticket. But patrollers must also be selective, only going after the most egregious speeding. This is in part because, according to traffic officers interviewed, no judge will prosecute any driver going less than 10 km/h over the limit, due to speedometer calibration issues. But if the only reason for not ticketing all drivers going above 50 km/h is speedometer calibration legalities, why not just lower all city speed limits to 40 km/h Or, heck, why not lower them even just to 45 km/h and save at least a few more lives by being able to begin ticketing at 55 km/h The answer: Catch-22.

Since 2019, successive UCP governments have imposed a freeze on all new photo-radar installations in Alberta communities unless the locations are school, playground or construction zones. As part of its moratorium, the government also made it illegal for cities to use photo radar on any streets where speed limits are below 50 km/h (excluding school and playground zones). So, a city can keep the higher, proven-unsafe speed limit of 50 km/h, use scarce police resources to ticket only drivers going above 60 km/h, and still use photo radar on the most dangerous streets. Or it can lower speed limits but lose the right to use photo radar to enforce the new limits.

The blame for the province’s ongoing war on traffic radar might not just be the post-pandemic wave of anti-government libertarianism that Danielle Smith’s UCP rode to power in 2023. An apparent analytical failure in an automated traffic enforcement review report done by MNP for Alberta Transportation in 2018 could also have contributed to the governing UCP’s hostility—and the opposition NDP’s ambivalence—towards traffic radar. The first pages of the report repeatedly emphasize that traffic radar installations had only made “small” or “modest” impacts on overall traffic safety in the province—only 1.4 per cent fewer collisions and 5.2 per cent fewer severe collisions overall. But MNP based this conclusion on the impact of a relatively tiny number of installations instead of on total collision rates across cities and the whole province.

On the other hand, virtually every other jurisdictional report referred to deep in the body and appendices of the MNP report reached very different conclusions by using a far more meaningful metric: the impact of traffic radar at the street and neighbourhood level, within 500 metres of installations. These studies, from Arizona to Australia, show that traffic radar reduced the rates of speeding by up to 70 per cent, brought the extreme-speeder category from 15 per cent down to 1 per cent, reduced the number of dangerous angle collisions by up to 85 per cent and, most importantly, reduced the number of severe injuries and deaths by up to 68 per cent. (Closer to home, a 2023 review for the City of St. Albert found that traffic radar reduced “unacceptable speeding” by 92 per cent.)

The results of the UCP’s years-long war on traffic safety have recently begun emerging in bloody detail. The province’s collision data from 2020 to 2021—the most recent years available—show a 20 per cent uptick in pedestrian injuries and deaths, after a steady decline in the years before the moratorium on traffic radar. After one motorist killed a man in his 60s and another killed a 17-year-old girl at a crosswalk in early 2025, the City of Calgary reported that collisions in that city causing serious injuries rose by 20 per cent between 2023 and 2024 (from 2,424 to 2,908), and pedestrian fatalities jumped from four to 13.

In November 2024 the UCP government doubled down on its moratorium by cutting the number of existing photo radar installations from 2,200 to around 650 and prohibiting any photo radar anywhere but in playground or school and construction zones. The province said it might begin allowing individual applications for traffic camera installations on a case-by-case basis. But as one Lethbridge officer told me, local police and communities have no idea about the process or requirements for restoring photo radar to the streets that need it.

Decisions about where radar is needed will now be political and made by people who don’t live—or die—here.

Minister of Transportation Devin Dreeshen says gutting automated traffic enforcement will stop communities from using photo radar as a “cash cow.” But according to Alberta Municipalities, most of the province’s cities and towns don’t actually get any money from traffic fines for general revenues. In 2020 the province upped its take of fines from 26.7 per cent to 40 per cent. Except for those few municipalities without police and who need to hire peace officers, the rest must commit the remaining 60 per cent of fine revenues to community traffic safety programmes and victims funds.

UCP government restrictions on municipal funding have forced cities to stretch police budgets to deal with an exploding addictions and homelessness crisis, which limits police resources for human-operated traffic law enforcement. In another Catch-22, the province is making automated traffic enforcement more necessary at the same time it is taking it away.

If the move to cut photo radar was done to save Albertans money, the decision has been penny-wise and pound-tragic. When Dreeshen made his late 2024 announcement, he said fines from traffic radar amounted to $145-million annually across the province. Besides the incalculable cost of collisions to victims, their families and the community, the City of Calgary pegs the cost of medical response to collisions, lost wages, property damage etc. at about $1.2-billion annually. In Calgary alone.

No elected official in Lethbridge has publicly called for an end to the moratorium on photo radar. Even progressive politicians in this city publicly refer to traffic radar as “speed traps.” Neither has any called out the city’s culture of speed. No one seems to want to get between the addict and their drug—be it the minutes-behind soccer family in their minivan or the bird-flipping driver of the sport-lifted truck.

The majority drives, the majority speeds, the majority elects.

Some local communities, however, have recognized that traffic safety is a civil rights issue, and are beginning to make the safety of vulnerable non-vehicular users central to traffic policy. The City of Edmonton, and later Calgary, recently took the lead in adopting more 40 km/h and 30 km/h speed limits. Municipalities as diverse as Spruce Grove, St. Albert and Banff have been lowering their speed limits by adopting and implementing the principles of Vision Zero, a national and global traffic safety alliance that aims to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero.

Vision Zero rejects the use of the 85th percentile theory for setting traffic policy because it puts only the driver’s feeling of safety—not science or even common sense—above the safety and well-being of pedestrians and cyclists, the young and old, and all vulnerable users. Vision Zero challenges the notion of laying blame for a death on the vulnerable user, saying that cities and drivers must take full responsibility for the safety of all users of our roads. Traffic engineers must not sacrifice the quality of life of people in homes near roads by enabling speeding. And traffic departments should never wait for someone to be killed before taking action to make every street safe.

For help in my fight to make my street safe, I joined my neighbourhood association in summer 2022. In February 2023 I approached councillor John Middleton-Hope—a former officer and city police chief—and asked for his help. Middleton-Hope—who would campaign unsuccessfully as the UCP candidate for MLA in the December 2024 Lethbridge-West by-election—received from me a motion drafted and passed by the neighbourhood association requesting that the city reduce the speed limit on 13th St. to 40 km/h, install a permanent photo radar camera and take other measures to improve traffic safety here. (We were unaware of the province-wide moratorium on new photo radar at the time.)

In April 2023 councillor Middleton-Hope and the rest of Lethbridge city council also received a letter from a group of surgeons at Chinook Regional Hospital pleading for the city to reduce speed limits to 40 km/h city-wide, due to the high rate of injuries and deaths in collisions. That same month the Lethbridge Public School Board—alarmed by the data from the November 2022 speed study on 13th St., especially given the street passes an elementary school—also wrote to city council urging serious action on the speeding problem.

The City’s infrastructure services manager responded with an email to me and city council saying that although our intersection has a high number of collisions, it’s nevertheless “typical” of others like it. One graph in the manager’s letter compared our street to a commercial intersection that had exactly one more collision in a five-year period, most of less severity. Another graph compared the top speed on our street to a fence-divided block that is the transition zone for acceleration onto Whoop-Up Drive, where the posted speed limit is 90 km/h. Both of these other “typical” locations have had recent pedestrian fatalities.

Councillor Middleton-Hope—whose door-to-door campaign for MLA used “Safe Streets” as a slogan (referring to a drugs and homelessness crisis, not actual streets and traffic)—followed up with an email to me saying he felt the City had “done its due diligence on the matter.” In September 2023 Lethbridge city council approved a 40-km/h pilot project in Middleton-Hope’s own remote Paradise Canyon suburb in the far south of the city.

In November 2023 a hit-and-run driver struck a senior citizen on a crosswalk on 13th St., breaking his hips and legs and putting him in intensive care for a week. When I asked an LPS officer whether another senior in the city had survived after being hit by a motorist on the same day a friend’s son had been hit a block from our house in December 2024, he said he didn’t know, because “pedestrians are being hit all the time.” Too many to keep track of.

In 2024 LPS took several months to consider and then deny a freedom-of-information request I made asking for data on the number of pedestrian-involved collisions in the entire city over the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then, at 7:30 a.m. on January 21, 2025, at a marked crosswalk on a street just like ours in North Lethbridge, a motorist struck three children. It happened at another “accidental highway,” where thousands of cars speed through residential neighbourhoods every day. Fourteen-year-old Marcus, seven-year-old Juliana and five-year-old Joey Bucud—children of Filipino-Canadian immigrants—were holding hands as they crossed to go to school. Witnesses say the driver stopped but was in shock and unable to help. The children were airlifted to Calgary for emergency treatment and surgery, and at the time of writing are slowly recovering.

Lethbridge police have confirmed that our provincial government now bans the use of photo radar at the intersection where a driver ran over the three Bucud children. The intersection is near a school but not in a school zone, very much like our intersection.

The local community responded with love for the family and anger for the driver. Social media quickly blew up with calls for prison time for the driver. For not watching where she was going. For being a bad driver. For being a bad person.

I’d like to tell that driver something different.

I’d tell her how angry I was at the man who hit Jack. And then I’d tell her what I’ve learned since. That the man who killed Jack was no different than 74 per cent of drivers on our street or in our city. That the speed limit the City refuses to lower, or even enforce, creates a situation where drivers can’t see anything or anyone until it’s too late. That she’s probably not such a bad driver or a bad person and that she most certainly doesn’t belong in jail. That our government and local politicians and police failed her as much as they failed the Bucud family and mine.

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Premier Danielle Smith had released a video entitled “Alberta Transgender Policy” in January 2024. Scored with soothing acoustic guitar music, and with a watercolour painting of prairie farmland as a backdrop, Smith announced a host of proposed policies focused on transgender youth and 2SLGBTQ rights. Alberta’s queer and transgender community recoiled, and critics quickly denounced the measures as “the most draconian in Canada.”

Kim and Ashley Large, parents of an 11-year-old transgender daughter in Smith’s Brooks-Medicine Hat riding, sought an in-person meeting with the premier as soon as the video aired. “As parents and constituents, we needed to sit across the table from her and tell her what we know to be true as people having first-hand experience,” Kim said. When Kim and Ashley arrived for the interview in October 2024, after months of correspondence with Smith’s office, a staff photographer offered to take a photo of them with the premier. The Larges politely declined.

The meeting made Kim nervous. Since they’d come to discuss such an emotional topic, Kim decided to read a statement the couple had prepared in advance. First, she told the premier how their daughter, assigned male at birth, has always loved to wear girl’s clothes. “At the age of 3, there was a Snow White dress,” Kim recounted. By grade 3, their daughter was already firmly gender nonconforming. “I collected dresses from my friends and thrift stores and presented them to her,” Kim said. “And the look on her face. The joy. No one can tell me this isn’t her.”

As the premier listened, Kim described her daughter’s first appointment at the Pediatric Gender Services Clinic at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in the spring of 2022, how she told her parents she “didn’t want to have boy puberty or become a boy,” and how she returned to school for grade 5 as a transgender girl. Kim also told Smith how, after much consultation with doctors, counsellors and an endocrinologist, they decided their daughter was ready for puberty suppression therapy. “Our biggest fear was intolerance and wanting to shield my baby’s heart from the ugliness of the world. I can’t do that. But we can walk with her, supporting her always, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Kim then explained to the premier why she was worried for other trans kids in the wake of the government’s new policies. Kim cited a US study reporting a 72 per cent increase in suicide attempts among trans and non-binary youth in states that had passed anti-trans legislation. Medical decisions around youth transition, she told Smith, should be left to medical professionals, parents and the youth themselves—not to government officials.

After Kim finished reading her statement, she asked Smith if she had any questions. Smith had none. “Then she proceeded to tell us why we were wrong,” Kim said. Smith alluded that the medical establishment couldn’t be trusted on gender issues, for example, and snapped back when Kim referred to the new policies as “anti-trans,” insisting that youth can socially transition all they want. “She did not come to listen,” Kim said. “She did not care. She had a few talking points that she regurgitated at us.”

The moment that most astonished the Larges was when Smith told them that since their daughter had such supportive parents, she was going to be okay. “I didn’t know what to say,” Ashley said. “It was like she was saying ‘your kid’s fine. Why do you care about anybody else What does it matter?’” Ashley recalls the confused look on Smith’s face in that moment, as if she couldn’t comprehend why the Larges would oppose policies that wouldn’t personally affect their own child. “I’ll regret forever not asking, point blank, ‘What about the rest?’”

Alberta’s transgender community didn’t feel loved. They felt attacked. But they didn’t feel surprised.

“I want every Albertan that identifies as transgender to know I care deeply about you and I accept you as you are,” said premier Smith in her January 2024 video. “In the case of children aged 17 and under who identify as transgender, I also want you to know that you are loved and supported…. You never have to feel alone or isolated.”

Then she abandoned them. The following October, as promised, Smith tabled three bills aimed at controlling the lives of transgender youth. The Education Amendment Act, 2024, which the government says would require children under 16 to obtain parental consent before changing their names or pronouns at school and obligate teachers to notify parents if students 16 and over request the same. The Fairness in Safety and Sport Act, which would allow schools and sporting organizations to bar transgender girls and women from participating in sports alongside cisgender athletes. And the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024 (No. 2), which would prohibit transition-related surgeries and hormonal treatments for minors. Alberta’s transgender community didn’t feel loved. They felt attacked.

They didn’t, however, feel surprised. “We saw a real hyper focus on trans and queer people following the quieting down of the so-called Freedom Convoy,” said Corinne Mason, co-founder of the Queer Parenting in the Time of Parental Rights research project. Mason and their colleague Leah Hamilton—both parents of queer and trans kids—have been following the threats to Alberta’s queer and transgender community, and especially to trans and gender-diverse youth, since before Danielle Smith became premier. They noticed active bigotry towards Alberta’s queer and transgender citizens rising just as the anger against COVID restrictions was abating.

During the pandemic, the Canadians most angered by the government’s COVID measures had gathered to denounce vaccine mandates and other perceived injustices—a movement that culminated in the convoy to Ottawa and the blockade at Coutts. Their shared rage forged a kinship among the protesters. And when the pandemic restrictions ended, they didn’t want to dismantle the communities they’d built. The real Freedom Convoy, as it turned out, was the friends they made along the way.

The movement needed a new target. Railing against critical race theory never really caught on in Canada like it did in the US, and the “15-minute cities” conspiracy lasted about as long. For a while, the agitators focused on “Drag Queen Storytimes.” Alberta libraries had been hosting such events since 2017, at which drag performers read children’s books aloud, but organized actions against them only started post-COVID. Protesters showed up at story times in Calgary and Edmonton to intimidate and harass attendees. They accused organizers of sexualizing children, and held signs decrying “weirdos in drag” and “gender benders.”

The attacks against drag story time had mostly petered out by mid-2023, but the preoccupation with queer and trans issues stuck, especially in regard to youth. The agitators turned their focus from libraries to the legislature. Attendees at the 2023 UCP AGM in Calgary demanded the government take on issues of gender and sexuality in schools. Party members put forward and approved resolutions to require teachers to inform parents of their child’s intent to change their name or pronouns, to prevent schools from providing materials of a sexual nature to students, and to enshrine what they termed “parental rights” in legislation. The new policies premier Smith announced in her January video seemed borne out of these resolutions.

Canada’s Charter of Rights doesn’t protect parental rights. While Smith’s supporters are quick to quote a court ruling asserting that, as outlined by a Government of Canada site on Section 2(a)–Freedom of Religion, “parents have the right to rear their children according to their religious beliefs, including choosing religious education and choosing medical and other treatments,” they tend to skip the caveat that immediately follows: “However, such activities can and must be restricted when they are against the child’s best interests.”

Regardless of the legal reality of parental rights, or lack thereof, the idea acts as an effective rallying cry and recruitment tool. “‘Parental rights’ as a term is used to bring people into right-wing extremist movements under the guise of loving, protecting and wanting the best for your children,” Mason said. “Because who doesn’t want that?”

The tactic attracts a diversity of actors and broadens the political tent. “Under the guise of parental rights, you’ve got everyday moms, who might be concerned about what sex ed their kids are learning, in the same boat as the Proud Boys,” Mason said. White nationalists march alongside religious zealots. The only qualifications one needs to join this particular club is transphobia.

Ironically, these issues attract a wide swath of people, yet inspire wide-ranging policies about a community that is vanishingly small. While an accurate count of transgender youth in Alberta doesn’t exist, the 2021 Canadian census showed there are about 7,300 transgender and 5,200 non-binary people in Alberta, together comprising less than 0.4 per cent of the population 15 years of age and older. Chances are, the people agitating against transgender youth have never even met a trans person.

A rally outside Calgary City Hall on Feb 3, 2024, to oppose the government’s transgender policies.

The video came out, and all our lives shifted dramatically,” Mason said.

Life has never been easy for Alberta’s trans youth and their families. Now it’s even harder. “I can tell you personally we are all experiencing more insidious and sometimes more emboldened forms of harassment, discrimination, hate and threats,” Mason said. Soon after Smith’s announcement, Mason’s family was accosted during a birthday dinner at a restaurant. Diners at the next table noticed Mason’s partner’s T-shirt from Skipping Stone, a trans and gender-diverse advocacy organization. “They just started absolutely ripping on us as abusers and pedophiles and groomers,” Mason said. “They called gender-affirming care ‘mutilation.’ ” All this occurred in front of Mason’s child. Eventually restaurant staff kicked the agitators out.

Other parents of trans kids have similar stories. They’ve told Mason that Smith poured gasoline on an anti-queer and anti-trans fire that was already burning. “We are all living with that fire burning in so many parts of our lives. It’s at work. It’s at restaurants. It’s at our kids’ soccer practice. It’s at school. It’s at playdates.”

And it’s at the doctor’s office. Peer-reviewed medical research has found that for some trans youth an estrogen- or testosterone-driven puberty will exacerbate gender dysphoria and cause elevated stress. A prescription for puberty blockers provides youth and their parents time to explore future medical options for transition without risking irreversible changes to their bodies. Access to blockers is directly linked to better mental health and well-being outcomes, and in some cases will lessen the need for surgical interventions in the future.

Despite this data, trans patients have faced discrimination from healthcare providers. In the past year Mason has heard a growing number of stories of family physicians who, instead of simply prescribing hormones or puberty blockers, as they would with any other medication, now insist a trans patient seek specialized care. Trans people have also experienced heightened gatekeeping around referrals. General practitioners have refused to send young trans patients to gender specialists, advising them to ask again at a later date if they still want the appointment, thus discounting their medical needs as a phase they’ll grow out of. “The discrimination is getting worse,” Mason said.

This all seems darkly familiar to Victoria Bucholtz, a historian at Mount Royal University with a particular interest in the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century. In Alberta in 2025, she said, “we’re seeing the differential treatment of people based on perceived value—the idea that we’re not all equal and that some people’s rights are negotiable.” That, she said, “is definitely classic fascist behaviour.”

Bucholtz and other advocates feel the UCP’s new legislation is aimed at nothing less than the eradication of trans life. “Once they start denying our humanity around sports and bathrooms,” she says, “it gets easier to legislate us out of existence in other ways.” She predicts an exodus of transgender Albertans unless Smith’s policies are reversed.

This will come too late for some. “There’s already been trans youth who have taken their lives in this province because they no longer see a future for themselves,” Bucholtz said. “Last summer we lost a young member of our community, and their surviving family said they believe that it’s 100 per cent related to this.”

Premier Smith poured gasoline on an anti-trans fire that was already burning.

In September 2024 about 50 people assembled at Medicine Hat’s Athletic Park to participate in the nationwide “1 Million March for Children” protest. They walked to City Hall, where they rallied in favour of “parental rights” and against “gender ideology” in education. Julia Ingram, mother of a 13-year-old transgender daughter named Skyler, joined a group of counter-protesters up the street at the public library. “We were just there with our signs showing love,” Julia said.

They received no love in return. The parental rights demonstrators snarled insults at Julia and her colleagues and called them pedophiles. The worst part of the day for Julia, however, was seeing people she recognized in the crowd of haters. “I’ve been in the city for a long time,” she said. “I know there are people who don’t like me, and don’t like my family, and don’t agree with how we live. To be able to put a face to those people was really gutting.”

Skyler first switched to she/her pronouns in Grade 3. Her classmates didn’t understand the change and teased her. “It’s really weird being trans,” Skyler said. “But it was a big day for me.” Julia had met with Skyler’s principal, vice-principal and school counsellor in advance of the change. The school staff supported Skyler’s pronoun transition, but it took two years for the change to stick. Finally, in Grade 5, teachers referred to Skyler as “she” for the entire school year. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow. I’m actually being respected.’”

No transition journey is easy. Skyler’s father didn’t accept her identity at first. He does now. “We’ve come so far,” Julia said. “We went from wiping off nail polish before her dad came home, to her dad bringing her on a father–daughter trip to Lake Louise.” Just like Kim and Ashley Large with their daughter, ensuring Skyler is supported at home remains Julia’s top priority.

Skyler began her puberty-blocking therapy just a few weeks before the legislation came into effect. The thought of being denied the treatment terrified her. “Not to sound crazy, but I would be really messed up if I couldn’t have hormone blockers. Suicidal. Really depressed. Life would be hard.” Skyler has transgender friends, though, who won’t receive the blockers. “It really sucks for them,” she said. Two of them are gifted athletes who won’t be able to pursue sports under the new rules banning transgender girls from competing on cisgender teams.

In response to the UCP’s policies, Skyler created a YouTube channel, “ProtectTransYouth.” One of her first short videos featured distorted images of the premier flashing alongside screengrabs of news headlines related to the trans policies, all set to a nightmarish soundtrack of woozy funhouse organs—the aesthetic opposite of Smith’s video from the previous January. A caption encourages viewers to sign a petition to stop the legislation.

Julia believes her daughter’s outspoken nature and ferocity—her “attitude and life and brightness”—bode well for her future. “She’s gonna be the first trans kid to do a lot of things,” Julia said, beaming.

Skyler is specific. “I want to work at a nuclear reactor,” she said. “Or be an MLA.”

Not all trans kids enjoy such family support. Hawthorne Guthrie started transitioning when he was 14. His puberty was already in progress by then and it was too late to block it. Instead, he sought hormone replacement therapy (HRT). First, though, Hawthorne had to go through two years of appointments, diagnoses and consultations. Once the therapy started, his medical transition advanced quickly. Hawthorne grew his beard within four months of HRT, though he attributes this as much to his Mediterranean genetics as to the testosterone. “I’m Greek,” Hawthorne said, now 19 years old. “I was already halfway there.”

Hormone medications, whether Hawthorne’s testosterone or Skyler’s puberty blockers, do more than ensure trans youth feel comfortable in their own bodies. Fairly or otherwise, these treatments also allow other people to be more at ease around them. “Gender dysphoria affects every aspect of a person’s life,” Hawthorne said. “It’s not just a discomfort within the body. It’s a discomfort with how people perceive you.” The further a trans youth progresses on their transition journey, especially if they “pass,” the more they’re accepted. This acceptance affords them safety.

Had he been a 16-year-old trans kid in Alberta today, and living under Smith’s new laws, Hawthorne wouldn’t be able to access HRT and enjoy the solace the treatment brought him. Transitioning socially wouldn’t have been enough for him. “HRT was absolutely something I needed to feel fully comfortable,” he said. “That’s not the case for everyone.” He believes that without the therapy, he would never have been safe at school. “I’d be checking my head on a swivel every time I tried to walk into a men’s bathroom.”

Hawthorne grew up in a “nightmare household.” His mother didn’t support his decision to transition. She believed Hawthorne had been brainwashed by the “woke mind virus” and figured his gender dysphoria was a phase he’d inevitably get over. She came around eventually. Hawthorne’s father, though, never did and is no longer part of Hawthorne’s life.

Like many trans kids, Hawthorne found safety at school, particularly with two of his teachers. In his Ontario junior high, Hawthorne would spend many lunch hours with his school’s music teacher and leader of the GSA club. The two would sit in the music room, play guitar and talk. After Hawthorne and his mother moved to Calgary, Hawthorne’s high school English teacher became his new lunchtime confidant. “Sometimes I just sat beside him and read quietly,” Hawthorne said.

Both teachers provided Hawthorne with something vital and fundamental. “It’s so important to know that you have somebody around you who supports you, who respects you, who’s going to have your back, and who really sees you,” Hawthorne said. Such teachers are especially important for youth who don’t have such supports at home. “I grew up in an environment where I never felt seen. So just having those little safe spaces, especially with teachers, was amazing. It was everything.” Without safe people in safe spaces, Hawthorne might not have come out as trans at all.

Had these teachers disclosed their conversations with Hawthorne to his parents, the results would’ve been catastrophic. “If my being trans was thrown into the loop, that would’ve been really, really horrible,” Hawthorne said. “That’s an understatement. It would’ve been disastrous.” When questioned about the dangers of mandating teachers to out trans kids to potentially violent parents, premier Smith has said Alberta already has “child protection laws that will be strictly enforced.” Smith loves trans kids enough to rescue them after they’ve been abused, and maybe punish their abusers, but not enough to prevent them from being abused in the first place. In other words, why worry about preventing fires as long as we have a fire department to fight them once they’re blazing?

Two days after the UCP’s Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024 (No. 2) received royal assent, Egale Canada, Skipping Stone and several families in Alberta launched a lawsuit against the Alberta government. Lawyers claim the statute violates the Charter rights of young Albertans—particularly their right to security of the person, their right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment, and their right to equality.

Mason, and many of the families of trans youth they speak to, have invested their hopes in such legal battles and court injunctions. The outcome of this suit remains uncertain. The premier has already threatened to use the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter if necessary. “But at least we can tie these up in court for as long as we can in order for their families to have the most protection and the most access to life-saving care,” Mason said. The longer they can hold up the legislation, “the longer trans kids can continue playing on their soccer teams with their friends and enjoy their regular lives.”

In the meantime, transgender Albertans and their advocates are gathering resources in order to minimize the harm inflicted on their community. “There are already major pushes to build support networks to help trans youth who are struggling and facing negative mental health outcomes because of this,” Bucholtz said. And they want to make all Albertans understand what’s at stake. “It’s shocking how many people still don’t know what’s happening to us.”

Hawthorne agrees. “People don’t listen until we’re dead,” he said. “The time for polite allyship is over.”

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of several non-fiction books, including Driven, Pay No Heed to the Rockets and Walls.

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Newman asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glowing promises from Alberta in the Toronto subway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ted morton says YES

U of C professor emeritus and former MLA and cabinet minister

“Screw the West. We’ll take the rest.” That’s how a Pierre Trudeau strategist summed up the Liberals’ plan to win the 1980 federal election. With the promise of cheap oil and gas for central Canada, the Liberals won and enacted the National Energy Policy. The result was disastrous for Albertans. Capital investment and drilling rigs fled south. Hundreds of companies went bankrupt; thousands of Albertans lost their jobs or homes. Alberta plunged into a decade of deficits and debt.

This is how the Liberals have won elections for the past six decades: by promising and implementing policies that transfer wealth from resource-rich/voter-poor Alberta and Saskatchewan to voter-rich/resource-poor Ontario and Quebec—which together have 199 seats in the House of Commons, well over the 170 needed to form a majority.

The result Over the past 60 years, net federal transfers out of Alberta have surpassed $700-billion and now average $20-billion/year. Over the same time Quebec has been the net recipient of over $500-billion. In the most recent equalization program, Quebec received two out of every three dollars.

Alberta’s liability to predatory federal policies is structural. It is entrenched in the constitutional status quo. To protect our future, the status quo must go. We must either increase Alberta’s influence in Ottawa or decrease Ottawa’s influence in Alberta.

The key to the former was senate reform: an elected, equal and effective (EEE) senate, as in democracies such as the US and Australia. This was a principal policy of the Reform, Alliance and Conservative parties and strongly supported by voters in the Prairie provinces. But Senate reform is dead. In 1996 the Chrétien government enacted the Regional Veto Act, which effectively gives Quebec a constitutional veto. In 2014 the Supreme Court went even further, declaring Stephen Harper’s informal consultative Senate elections unconstitutional. Only by formal constitutional amendment, it ruled, can the Senate be reformed. No Quebec government will ever consent to this.

That leaves one alternative: decreasing Ottawa’s influence in Alberta. Some 23 years ago Harper, I and several others laid out a plan to do precisely this—the Alberta Agenda. We recommended that Alberta withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan and create a provincial plan; collect our own personal taxes; and establish a provincial police force to replace the RCMP. Better known as the Firewall Letter, it was widely denounced as too radical or impossible. Too radical Quebec already does all three. Impossible The Alberta Agenda was the centerpiece of my 2006 PC leadership campaign. I nearly won.

More recently Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith have succeeded where I fell short, first with Kenney’s Fair Deal Panel and the 2021 referendum to repeal equalization, and now with Smith’s Sovereignty Act. Both premiers have won majority governments campaigning on these issues. As Don Braid recently observed, the Firewall is now mainstream in Alberta.

jared wesley says no

U of A political scientist and former director of Alberta intergovernmental relations

If decades of polls, elections and government panels have taught us anything, it’s this: Albertans don’t want more autonomy. They want more respect. They don’t want less influence over national affairs. They want less politicking over Confederation. But this hasn’t stopped right-wing politicians and operatives from seeking to seal Alberta off from the rest of the country. Whether threatening to withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan or RCMP, bar provincial bodies from receiving federal funding, or disregard federal jurisdiction altogether, autonomists have advanced a radical, elite-driven platform unbefitting Canada’s most conservative province.

This is why Albertans have repeatedly rejected the autonomist agenda. Decades apart, two panels sought Albertans’ views on building a “firewall” around Alberta. Ralph Klein’s MLA Task Force (2004) and Jason Kenney’s Fair Deal Panel (2021) heard the same thing loud and clear: Albertans don’t want less to do with Canada. They want more say in how the country is run.

Most Albertans see autonomism for what it is: at best, consolidating more power in a provincial government they don’t trust; at worst, slowly paving the way to separation from Canada. Most are enamoured with neither prospect. Instead, polls show Albertans consistently support measures to enhance their voices on the national stage. Dating back to the days of the Reform Party, Albertans have longed for more influence in federal institutions. Recent Viewpoint Alberta surveys (part of U of A’s Common Ground project) show Senate reform, freer internal trade and more federal jobs in Western Canada are among the most popular solutions to regional alienation. Leaving the RCMP, CPP or Canada Revenue Agency and establishing the Sovereignty Act rank dead last, as these moves would lessen Alberta’s standing within Canada. Albertans want their governments to work together. A majority feel Canada is better off with a strong federal government.

This isn’t to dismiss the deep sense of alienation felt across the province. Since 2019 our Viewpoint surveys have shown that a majority of Albertans feel their province doesn’t receive its fair share of federal funding, that Ottawa treats their province worse than others, and that Alberta deserves more respect in Canada. It will be interesting to track these sentiments should Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives win the next federal election.

But these same Albertans feel a strong sense of belonging within Canada. A full 85 per cent report feeling somewhat or strongly attached to their country, just higher than those with the same connection to Alberta (82 per cent). This helps explain why autonomist fantasies fail to resonate with most Albertans: people don’t like being asked to choose between loyalties or shift power from one order of government to another.

In short, Albertans view themselves as integral parts of the federation. They simply wish more Canadians, particularly those in power in Ottawa, would see them in the same light.

Ted morton responds to jared wesley

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Critics portray the Sovereignty Act as new and dangerous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alberta has always had to challenge Ottawa’s central Canadian bias. In 1904 Frederick Haultain, premier of the Northwest Territories, urged Ottawa to admit Alberta and Saskatchewan as a single province: Buffalo. But prime minister Wilfrid Laurier refused. He didn’t want to create a province so large it might one day challenge the power of Quebec and Ontario. (That day has arrived!) He also refused to give the new provinces ownership of Crown lands and natural resources. Alberta Premier John Brownlee fought a long battle with Ottawa to acquire what every other province received at Confederation.

In the “Dirty Thirties” Ottawa used the discredited federal powers of disallowance and reservation to strike down Alberta policies designed to help bankrupted farmers and ranchers. Premier William Aberhart responded by cutting off funding for Government House, the office and residence of the federally appointed governor general. No lieutenant governor has resided there since.

Ottawa’s next attack on Alberta was Pierre Trudeau’s infamous 1980 National Energy Program. Premier Peter Lougheed fought the NEP tooth and nail. He cut oil and gas exports to Eastern Canada. He launched a constitutional challenge to the Liberals’ export tax on gas (and won!). He insisted that the principle of provincial equality be entrenched in the new constitutional amending formula—no more veto for Quebec. He demanded that a notwithstanding clause be added to Trudeau’s Charter of Rights, thus protecting provinces from policy vetoes by federal judges. And he made Trudeau add a clause to the constitution (section 92A) to give provinces jurisdiction over natural resources—and prevent another NEP.

Critics call the Sovereignty Act new and dangerous. But we’ve always had to challenge Ottawa’s central bias.

But now there is another Trudeau NEP—Justin’s national environmental programs: the carbon tax, Bill 69; cancellations of Energy East and Northern Gateway; clean-energy regulations that are easy for hydro-based provinces like Quebec but an expensive disaster for Alberta and Saskatchewan, which depend on natural gas.

Fighting for more Alberta, less Ottawa is not new. In politics the beneficiaries of the status quo never willingly give up their advantages. Change requires push. Kenney and Smith are only the most recent in a long line of Alberta premiers to push.

jared wesley responds to ted morton

Hinging on anti-Liberal grievances from the 1980s, Ted Morton’s argument is out of step with Alberta today. The proposed withdrawals from the CPP, RCMP and Canada Revenue Agency are also unpopular in Ottawa. Even Conservative governments place as low a priority on these ideas as most Albertans do. A signatory to the “Firewall Letter,” Stephen Harper had nine years in government and didn’t advance a single measure from the “Alberta Agenda” he co-authored with Morton.

For good reason. The measures are tough enough to sell in Alberta. For a party trying to win a majority in Ottawa, destroying popular national institutions would be political suicide. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, a one-time member of Harper’s government, knows this as well as anyone. It’s why he has openly supported the CPP and remained silent on other autonomist goals.

The same goes for the constitutional reforms Morton suggests. Reopening talks on the division of powers would jeopardize Alberta’s control over its natural resources, a hard-earned win in previous reforms. And Alberta already has an effective veto over constitutional reforms by virtue of the same law that grants Quebec that power. That too would be back on the table if we reopen the constitution.

Instead, a Poilievre government would likely follow Harper’s “open federalism” approach. This benefited Alberta, particularly as the federal government vacated areas of provincial jurisdiction. Harper also improved Alberta’s fiscal situation by restructuring fiscal federalism. In exchange for bolstering equalization, Harper shifted the Canada Health Transfer to a per capita formula, which brought Alberta an additional $1-billion annually. These reforms did more to address Alberta’s “net federal transfer gap” than any other initiative—aside from Justin Trudeau’s investment in the TransCanada pipeline.

Fortunately the autonomist agenda will likely melt away if federal Conservatives gain power. Aside from fitting an anti-Liberal narrative, the ideas are massively unpopular. Indeed, a provincial government that actually pursued them would struggle to win a referendum, let alone an election. That’s why neither Jason Kenney nor Danielle Smith ran on withdrawing from the CPP or RCMP. In fact, Smith flatly denied intending to tamper with pensions just months before launching a campaign to do exactly that.

Harper’s government increased Alberta’s capacity to act within its existing policy space and jurisdiction, without needing the drastic measures proposed by autonomists. Achieving greater influence for Alberta within Canada requires a co-operative federal partner and diligent work behind the scenes, not bluster from Alberta autonomists when their team isn’t in power in Ottawa. The autonomist agenda is, at best, all hat and no cattle.

Ted morton’s concluding response

Strengthening Alberta’s political autonomy is not about “anti-Liberal” grievances. It’s about Alberta’s constitutional vulnerability to predatory and destructive federal policies. The Liberal Party is not so much the cause as it is the consequence of the constitutional status quo: the ability of a national party to win majority governments with policies that transfer wealth from resource-rich, voter-poor provinces like Alberta to voter-rich/resource-poor provinces like Quebec and Ontario. “Screw the West. We’ll take the rest.” It’s simple and predictable.

And it’s getting worse. Lougheed’s three greatest constitutional wins—section 92A, the notwithstanding clause, provincial equality—have been erased or gutted.

Quebec has regained its veto over formal constitutional amendments. Section 92A has been stripped of any meaningful legal force. In the words of former Alberta chief justice Catherine Fraser, the Supreme Court’s acceptance of Ottawa’s “national dimensions” standard is a “constitutional Trojan horse that under the guise of fighting CO₂ emissions would give the federal government potentially unlimited power over provincial regulations.”

As for the notwithstanding clause: Lougheed saw that Trudeau’s proposed Charter of Rights could become a form of “disallowance in disguise”: a federal veto over provincial policies exercised by the Supreme Court rather than by cabinet. Neither Lougheed nor any of the “gang of six” premiers would have accepted Trudeau’s Charter without the addition of the notwithstanding clause.

Federalism is itself a form of protecting minority rights. Each province is a minority. But this version of Canadian federalism is now being sacrificed on the judicial altar of a new version of minority rights. This centralization of power in Ottawa has been fuelled by the Court Challenges Program, which funds the litigation costs of groups that the Liberals support and who in turn support the Liberals. Harper cancelled the program, but it was resurrected by Justin Trudeau. Pierre must be smiling from his grave.

Where do I advocate “reopening talks” on amending the constitution I’m advocating acting, not talking; adopting policy reforms that all provinces have the right to pursue. And how are these “massively unpopular” with Albertans Kenney and Smith campaigned on an equalization referendum and a sovereignty act, and voters gave them both majorities. Why does Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid—hardly a fan of the UCP—describe the once “infamous” firewall reforms as now “mainstream”?

If Albertans could renegotiate our relationship with Canada, we’d never accept the status quo. If Quebec had been treated like Alberta, it would have separated long ago. I’m not advocating separation, but the status quo must go. As Peter Lougheed said in the 1970s: The time is “Now!”

jared wesley’s concluding response

Albertans don’t want more autonomy; only a small number of conservative elites do. Outside of political backrooms, schemes like an Alberta pension plan, police force and revenue agency remain impractical and unpopular. Like zombies, these measures come back from the dead anytime provincial conservatives want to take on the federal Liberals for political gain. Designed to distract from failures at home and to unite a fractious base, autonomist policies are little more than props. If they were serious policy proposals, provincial and federal Conservatives would have advanced on them decades ago. They haven’t, and that’s good for Alberta and for Canada.

Outside of political backrooms, an Alberta pension plan, police force and revenue agency are unpopular.

Over decades of polling, elections and panels, the message is consistent: Albertans don’t want less Canada; they want more respect within it. The autonomist agenda is also a non-starter nationally. Most Canadians are bridge-builders when it comes to national priorities such as retirement security and public safety. Albertans are no different, according to our Viewpoint surveys. While aware that Alberta doesn’t get the respect it deserves in Confederation, they are overwhelmingly attached to Canada—even more so than to their provincial identity.

For these reasons they are far more likely to prioritize and support measures that bring Alberta voices to bear on national issues than to wall themselves off from Canada. Albertans want freer internal trade, more federal jobs in the West and more representation in Parliament. They don’t want to sever ties with the CPP, RCMP and CRA. And they don’t like being asked to choose between orders of government; they want their leaders to work together on issues that matter to them.

In other words, typical Albertans aren’t fed-up radicals seeking to upend the constitutional order. They’re jilted realists when it comes to Alberta’s place in Canada. They feel misunderstood and undervalued, but they have little interest in igniting firewalls and hiding behind them.  Indeed, a majority of Albertans prefer a strong federal government and can distinguish between a governing party they dislike and federal institutions they value.

When the federal Conservatives return to power, this will be good news for the majority of Albertans who want constructive intergovernmental relations. With no Liberal menace to haunt them, autonomists will fade into the shadows, and the real work of empowering Alberta and increasing its influence within Canada will restart.

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Every five years Canada’s census measures “core housing need”—the number of households whose homes are unaffordable, overcrowded or in need of major repairs. Housing is considered unaffordable when it costs more than 30 per cent of that household’s pre-tax income. In 2016 almost 1.7 million Canadian households, or one in eight, were in core housing need. But in 2021 only 1.45 million households, or about one in 10, were.

How is that possible, given everything we’ve heard about rents and home prices skyrocketing during that period Statistics Canada is clear as to why: “The COVID-19-related government transfers lifted many households above the housing affordability thresholds, helping pay for shelter costs like rent, mortgages and utilities.” The most recent census (2021) relied on 2020 incomes. But now that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and other temporary income supplements have been rolled back, the number of Canadian households in core need has undoubtedly risen.

The “CERB bump”—250,000 households temporarily lifted out of housing need—gives us an immediate hint as to who we’re talking about: overwhelmingly, households whose incomes were a lot less than the $500/week that CERB provided. In fact, almost four in five households in core housing need in Canada have low or very low incomes: 1.1 million of the 1.45 million of these households have incomes under $42,000 a year, which is less than half of Canada’s median household income. Of that number, 200,000 have incomes of $18,000 or less and can afford no more than $420/month for rent.

Core housing need measures only a fraction of the people who live in unaffordable, overcrowded or uninhabitable homes. The most egregious knowledge gap is an accurate homelessness count. According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, 235,000 people are without safe and secure accommodation at least once a year. But that figure is from 2014. More recently, biennial “point in time” counts have been interrupted by COVID. Even these exercises only count people who are found unsheltered, in emergency shelters or in “transitional housing” on one night in a little more than 60 of Canada’s more than 700 municipalities with over 5,000 people.

At least 70 per cent of 2.2 million college and university students in Canada live independently of families, the majority of them on very low incomes. Almost three quarters of these students live in unaffordable rentals—so that’s over a million more very low-income people searching for an inexpensive place to live.

A further 700,000 people live in congregate housing, including long-term care and other forms of shared housing (e.g., for people with disabilities). A high proportion of these people are occasionally homeless or live in institutions such as hospitals because of inadequate supply of supportive housing. In Ontario alone, nearly 43,000 seniors are on waiting lists for long-term care. There is no up-to-date information for Alberta—a problem in itself—but the province’s shortage of senior-care options is leaving increasing numbers stranded in hospital beds.

Tens of thousands of rooming houses have been lost in inner cities. You can’t find a room in any city in Canada for less than $500/month—more than half what most people on welfare receive. People are being turned away from overcrowded emergency shelters and ending up in growing encampments. Low-income seniors on fixed incomes are competing with service-sector workers and students who can’t find any affordable one-bedroom apartments. Increasingly these people are competing with desperate nurses, teachers and other young professionals locked out of starter homeownership.

If the housing crisis is an affordability issue, with the divide between rents and incomes widening rather than narrowing, why don’t we simply provide rent supplements—or increase welfare and minimum wage, or bring in a universal basic income—to bridge the difference First, because the difference between an affordable rent for a single person on social assistance in Alberta—$258/month—and the going rent for an average one-bedroom apartment in Calgary—$1,696—is dauntingly large. Even if welfare rates were tripled, there’s no neighbourhood in Calgary or Edmonton where that person could afford the average rent for a studio- or one-bedroom apartment. More importantly, it’s because there isn’t a sufficient supply of housing to meet the need.

In market transactions, the intersection of supply and demand determines price. However, if housing is a human need, it should not be subject to market forces. If apartments that are currently going for market rents were acquired by non-market providers (government, housing co-ops, non-profits etc.), and if short-term apartment rentals (e.g., Airbnb) were banned, that would help stem the loss of low-income rentals. But it wouldn’t necessarily create new affordable supply. And while demand-side interventions, such as providing livable incomes and renter protections, are necessary, these too would be insufficient.

In “A human-rights-based calculation of Canada’s housing supply shortages,” a 2023 report commissioned by the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate, I calculated the overall housing deficit in Canada. When one includes the existing housing deficit, the net loss of affordable housing stock, population growth and demographic change, Canada will need to build three million new homes for low- and very-low-income households by 2030, and two million more for median-income households.

Fewer homes were built in Canada in 2021 than were built in Canada in 1973.

How did we get into this mess? Put simply, a set of decisions made by governments in the early 1970s and then in the early 1990s had a huge negative impact.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, tax incentives had encouraged purpose-built rental apartments. The Canadian government eliminated these in 1972. At the same time, it introduced a capital gains tax but exempted a household’s principal residence. These changes were intended to encourage people to invest in their home and then sell it as they retired—an alternative to relying solely on pension earnings. A third element in this toxic mix of policies was municipal governments enacting stringent new zoning regulations to “protect the character” of neighbourhoods, ranging from expanding the areas zoned for single-family houses to increasing parking minimums.

Apartment construction plummeted. Condominiums, which were much more immediately lucrative for developers to sell instead of rent, became the norm in the narrow bands of land where multi-unit housing was allowed.

Mixed-income non-market housing had made up 20 per cent of new stock from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s (between 10,000 and 30,000 new non-market homes a year). By the late 1980s the federal government had begun to move towards private-sector provision of below-market “affordable housing.” Rather than financing large-scale public housing projects erected by provincial authorities, the federal government shifted to funding smaller co-operative, municipal and community-led housing. In 1971 over half of renters between the ages of 25 and 44 could afford to buy an average-priced house. By 1981 only 7 per cent were able to do so.

The federal government had completely off-loaded responsibility for affordable housing to the provinces by 1993. Many provinces further off-loaded the costs of low-income housing to municipalities.

The consequences Investing based on maximizing profits from existing housing—a practice sometimes called “financialization”—became much more lucrative than building new housing. Fewer homes were built in Canada in 2021 than were built in Canada in 1973. Over the past 30 years fewer than 10,000 new homes intended for low-income residents have been built in Canada.

Where are poor people supposed to go?

The federal government needs to return to policies it abandoned 30 to 50 years ago. It got back into housing policy with the 2017 National Housing Strategy (NHS) and committed, in 2019, to realizing the right to adequate housing. But its reluctance to engage in an honest needs assessment, one based on evidence of who needs what kind of housing where and at what cost, has led to it subsidizing unaffordable market rentals. Only 3 per cent of homes created under the biggest NHS scheme, the $26-billion Rental Construction Financing Initiative, were affordable to households in housing need, and all of those apartments were studios. Meanwhile, almost every economic report recommends that the federal government directly subsidize a doubling of non-market housing supply over the next decade: almost one million new or acquired public, community and co-operative homes.

Governments should provide free of low-cost land for non-market development. 

This new supply would reduce the number of “suppressed households” in Canada—people who wish to live independently but are forced to share by cost pressures: for example, involuntarily doubling up with roommates; adults living with their parents. And it would take some pressure off the young middle-income households currently forced to save up to 10 years in Calgary or nine in Edmonton for a 20 per cent down payment, while being locked in to the increasingly expensive and scarce rental market.

Five million homes for low- and moderate-income households might not seem to be achievable in a decade. However, Sweden built the equivalent—one million homes for low- and moderate-income households for a country that had fewer than eight million people—from 1965 to 1974. Canada constructed a million homes via CMHC, the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, for moderate-income households to buy and own between 1946 and 1960, when its population was less than a third of what it is today.

Based on what’s worked in Canada and internationally, here are some ways to get costs down and increase the supply of housing.

For starters, governments should provide free or low-cost land. According to many international reports, good land policy is the basis of any successful affordable housing strategy. Large-scale government acquisition and disposition was the basis of both the post-war Victory Homes in Canada and the successful non-market housing programs of the 1960s and 1980s. Depending on the location and size of the project, land constitutes between 8 and 23 per cent of total cost.

This land should go to non-market development. According to a 2021 Canadian study based in Vancouver, non-market developers operating from a social mission instead of for profit can produce units that rent for 40–50 per cent less. Market developers—and their finance providers—expect returns ranging from 19 per cent to 28 per cent, depending on risk tolerance. And non-market developers maintain affordability over time, compared to government subsidies to private developers. Under the NHS, private developers have affordability requirements of only 10–20 years.

Another aspect of land policy is scale, which is determined by the zoning of a site. This includes the number of storeys and units allowed, as well as design requirements such as open space, parking, setbacks etc. and mandatory financial and construction capacity of the developer. Even though constructing a multi-storey apartment building is much more complicated than a single-family home (for example, because of the need for an elevator), larger-scale development can be cheaper per square metre. Eliminating parking requirements can save up to $56,000 per unit, or up to 17 per cent of costs. Density bonuses of up to 50 per cent (e.g., a six-storey building instead of a four-storey one) could be provided to non-market or permanently affordable homes secured through a community land trust. This entity holds land and property for the purpose of long-term affordability. Small-scale affordable, accessible and energy-efficient apartments can be made possible on single or double lots through changes to building codes. While factory-built modular construction isn’t less expensive now, if its use were scaled up, it could increase speed and lower cost.

Long-term (35- to 50-year) and low-rate (e.g., 2 per cent) mortgages were the secret sauce behind the scaling-up of non-market housing in Canada. Upfront grants can help secure market financing and also help with long approval times.

To scale up low-cost housing will require massive changes to municipal processes and charges. Approval times for multi-unit housing range from three months in Charlottetown to a ridiculous 32 months in Toronto. Development charges range from $22 per square metre in St. John’s to $1,640 in Vancouver, where such charges represent 15 per cent of the cost of the home. Up to 60 studies can be required for one building…! Edmonton has been judged the best city for housing development in Canada, and it is no coincidence that Edmonton has been working hardest on simplifying zoning approvals since 2019. Development charges can be seen as an additional tax on newcomers for the “privilege” of renting or buying a home, and a further wealth transfer from renters to established homeowners. Renters already are likely paying higher property taxes. Land value taxes, and progressive property taxes, that is, levying higher rates on homes worth more than $2-million, for example, would be a far fairer way to tax infrastructure and amenity improvements—and to enable more-affordable housing.

The project I work with—the UBC-based Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART)—aims to show the potential impact of land, finance and approval mechanisms, so that Canada can once again produce genuinely affordable and adequate homes for low- and moderate-income households. Otherwise, under the status quo, we’re condemning increasing numbers of citizens to unbearable housing stress and homelessness.

Carolyn Whitzman is the expert adviser to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project and the author of the forthcoming Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC Press, 2024).

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