You probably thought the 2023 Alberta election campaign is over. It’s not. Oh, Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party won the May 29 election with the most seats, 49 to the NDP’s 38. But some debate remains about what that victory means for Smith and her mandate.
More to the point: Did winning the election give Smith permission to now push ahead with her more controversial ideas, namely withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan to set up an Alberta pension plan and abandoning the Canada Revenue Agency to create an Alberta agency to collect personal income tax?
These are contentious issues made more so by the fact that even though Smith repeatedly supported them before and after becoming premier, she declared she would not run on them during the election. “They’re not in our campaign because I think we’ve got so many things that we have done that we’re excited about,” said Smith during the first week of the campaign. She ducked questions from then on by saying she’d need to do more “consultation” on the issues after the election.
In reality: Because these issues are unpopular (according to opinion polls), Smith didn’t want the 2023 campaign to turn into an unwinnable referendum on a provincial pension plan.
But just weeks after election night, Smith resurrected the proposals from their shallow grave. She sent a mandate letter to Finance Minister Nate Horner instructing him to release an in-house report on an Alberta pension plan and then consult with Albertans “to determine whether a referendum should be held to establish an Alberta Pension Plan that will increase pension benefits for seniors, reduce premiums for workers and protect the pension interests and benefits of all Albertans.”
In the letter, Smith doesn’t do much to hide a position that hearkens back at least as far as an op-ed she wrote as a Calgary Herald columnist in 2003. “In the case of pensions,” she wrote back then, “not only does the Alberta government have the constitutional authority to take back this responsibility, it has the obligation to do so.”
Did her win give Smith permission to withdraw Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan and Canada Revenue Agency?
Smith also pushed the idea during last year’s UCP leadership race. And her November 2023 mandate letter to then-finance minister Travis Toews directed him to look into creating a provincial revenue agency and “review and provide recommendations regarding an Alberta Pension Plan that will increase pension benefits for seniors and reduce premiums for workers.”
But then Smith did her best to bury the contentious bodies during the election campaign before ordering Horner, with the election done, to dig them up.
Smith has said if a provincial pension plan is determined to be a good idea, Albertans would have the final say in a referendum. Referendums, though, are funny things—and not in a humorous way, unless their outcome is to name a new ship Boaty McBoatface. A referendum can easily be manipulated with emotion, half-truths and outright lies. Just look at Brexit and the mess it has created for the British economy.
So, does Smith have a mandate to push ahead with her pet projects? Legally, yes. As leader of a majority government she enjoys the support of the legislative assembly. She can do pretty much whatever she wants on issues under provincial jurisdiction (don’t get me started on the Sovereignty Act—that’s a column for another day).
But does she have “permission” from the general public to push ahead?
Mount Royal political scientist Duane Bratt doesn’t think so. He says it’s not just a matter of Smith ducking the issues during the election but that she and her candidates attacked the NDP for suggesting the UCP had a plan to pursue a provincial pension plan. Indeed, Smith accused the NDP of spreading “misinformation,” Lethbridge-East candidate Nathan Neudorf said the NDP was using “negative fear and smear tactics,” and a UCP ad accused NDP leader Rachel Notley of outright lying.
The debate became one of semantics, with the UCP denying NDP claims that Smith wants to “steal” Albertans’ pensions. At the nub, though, was the UCP’s combative refusal to talk about contentious issues that Smith was clearly interested in pursuing post-election.
“I think she had a clear idea that she was going to do it anyway,” said Bratt. “She just didn’t want to do it during an election. And that, I think, is a false promise.”
Smith, of course, won’t see it that way. As far as she’s concerned, the election outcome, winning 929,000 votes and 49 seats, gives the UCP a mandate to follow through with policies whether she campaigned on them or not. Smith, after all, argued she had a legitimate mandate to introduce the contentious Alberta Sovereignty Act last fall—after winning 42,000 votes in the UCP leadership race.
Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal columnist.
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