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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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Henson started her flower farming business in 2013, first growing in her yard and then adding a half-acre farm in 2017. Back then, next to nobody was focusing on locally grown cut flowers, she says, and for advice she found two farmers in Saskatchewan. Now “there are oodles.” Other than large commercial growers, the cut flower industry isn’t well tracked by provincial or federal agriculture—“When I do my taxes I still have to circle ‘other’ when it comes to crops,” Henson explains—but a meetup of flower farmers in central Alberta last winter had over 50 participants. The business of flower farming, particularly small-scale producers growing for a hyper-local market, is on the rise in the province and is creating an alternative to traditional floristry, an industry that relies almost solely on imports.

The flourishing of businesses providing Alberta-grown blooms direct to local consumers is a revival of sorts. In 1906, for instance, Walter Ramsay left his job as a school principal and took a chance on plants. He erected nine massive greenhouses, each about three-quarters the length of a curling rink, in what is now downtown Edmonton, and grew roses, carnations and chrysanthemums to supply his flower shop.

The business of flower farming, particularly small producers growing for a hyper-local market, is on the rise in the province.

And at Blackfalds, near Red Deer, Central Alberta Greenhouses covered eight acres, growing flowers to supply its seven flower shops. Started by Walter and Myrtle Good in the 1930s, the family-run retail–grower operation passed through three generations and survived for over 70 years. Kim Wickwire, a recently retired horticulture instructor at Olds College, worked at one of the company’s retail shops in the late 1980s and recalls that most of their flowers, including “some of the best roses,” came direct from the farm.

Wickwire taught the floriculture courses at Olds College starting in 1989, drawing on her experience in growing and selling flowers and in floral design (creating arrangements). The college’s horticulture program was started in 1963 by Buck Godwin, who included curricula to support Alberta’s floral industry. Godwin tested annuals and perennials for field and greenhouse cultivation and was always on the lookout for foliage, including grains or shrubs such as pussywillow, that could add interest to arrangements. He was well known for his dried flowers and grasses, and perfected techniques to maintain colour and form, which he recorded in the manual Alberta Supernaturals. After retirement, Godwin cultivated his own farm and supplied fresh and dried flowers to florists throughout western Canada. This included sales on the farm, explains Wickwire: “Florists wanted fresh, and were more than willing to come out to Olds from Calgary, Red Deer or wherever, weekly.”

Ramsay, the Goods and Godwin, as well as various other growers providing cut flowers throughout the 1900s and into the early 2000s, showed that Alberta farms could supply the floral industry for at least part of the year. But—like a child plucking petals one by one from a daisy in a game of you-love-me, you-love-me-not—a parade of cumulative changes over the past decades has largely sent floriculture, quite literally, south.

Imported flowers have been part of floriculture almost since the first commercial flower shops opened. Ramsay brought some stock from other suppliers to his Edmonton shop. In Canada, flowers delivered from BC and Ontario extended the season for florists and added variety. (Those provinces are still the biggest producers of cut flowers in Canada.) These were bolstered over time by imports from California, Florida and the Netherlands. But flowers were still considered a luxury, and the cost reflected that. Wickwire says you only need to look at wedding bouquets. Her mother, married in 1948, had a bouquet of tule with just a few carnations. “It was all ribbon,” she says. “[Bouquets] still had flowers, but they were dear.”

Not long after that wedding, changes that impact how we get much of our goods—and what we expect to pay for them—accelerated. Expansive highway networks, refrigerated trucks and improved air travel meant that flowers could be shipped from greater distances. The floral industry added more players: flower brokers, wholesalers, shipping experts and more, with attendant infrastructure such as massive refrigerated warehouses.

While flowers from South America were part of the floral industry even as far back as the 1980s, in 1991 the US government enacted the Andean Trade Preference Act, which encouraged South American farmers to develop viable alternatives to coca cultivation and cocaine production. This move was followed by various trade agreements, including the 2011 Canada–Colombia Free Trade Agreement that saw tariffs on various products, including cut flowers, reduced or eliminated. Today about 30 to 35 fully loaded flights per day leave Bogotá, en route to Miami, the flower distribution hub in North America. From there, they’re flown or trucked to wholesalers across North America. In 2021 Canada imported $123-million in cut flowers, of which about 70 per cent came from Colombia and Ecuador, with the US and the Netherlands making up the bulk of the rest.

The movement of a large chunk of the industry to South America, where days are long and labour is cheap, makes it almost impossible for Canadian growers to compete. Local production of the “big three”—carnations, roses and chrysanthemums, popular for their longevity and their variety of colours and forms—went into free fall. Carnations were the first to go. They all come from South America now, says Jill Langille of Pacific Coast Floral Wholesale.

Rosalie Wesenberg, whose grandparents started Central Alberta Greenhouses, saw the change first-hand. She remembers when her family stopped growing carnations in the late 1970s. Eventually they had to import the flower from Colombia to supply their own shops. They stuck with roses the longest, but finally took the last acre out of production in 2004. The entry of grocery stores into the cut flower market was the coup de grâce for many local growers. Grocery stores have power because of volume, says Langille, adding that they’ll book their roses for Valentine’s two years in advance to get a fixed price. Today, Canada has just one large commercial rose grower: Eurosa Farms on Vancouver Island.

Wading into the bleak landscape of flower farming could seem like folly given how the last half-century has gone. But a new wave of growers in Alberta are betting they can carve a niche in the traditional flower market with their fresh, seasonal, specialty “slow flowers.” They can offer more-delicate products, like sweet peas, that don’t travel well, and there’s the bonus of supporting small, mostly women-owned businesses and infusing energy into rural communities, agriculture and agritourism.

Henson first got her inspiration while living in Belgium, where her husband was posted. “People there spend a chunk of change on fresh flowers every week,” she says, “and I was fascinated by this.” She started buying weekly flowers too, and loved how they changed seasonally—hyacinths and tulips only in the spring, for instance. Back home in Cold Lake she missed these flowers and wondered if there might be a market for seasonal blooms. There was, and her business now offers bouquet subscriptions and elaborate dried flower and foliage bouquets that extend her season. She avoids using dyes, paints or bleaches, uses no preservatives, and grows the flowers without pesticides or herbicides. When they’ve reached the end of their natural life, she encourages tossing them in the compost.

Henson shares her thoughts on the sustainable flower-farming business with her friend Clara Qualizza of Meadow & Thicket Farm Flowers in Wildwood (an hour west of Edmonton) in their The Sustainable Flowers Podcast. She knows that most people don’t want to know the back story of every bloom, but she’ll grab opportunities here and there, in social media and personal conversations, to inject the message that ethics, not just aesthetics, can be part of flower purchasing decisions.

Growers in Alberta are carving a niche in the traditional market with their seasonal “slow flowers.”

Kristen Primrose, of Primrose Lane Farm, near Cardston, takes a similar approach. Farming near Waterton Lakes National Park gives Primrose and her husband, who also raise Highland cattle on their 130 acres, an added sense of responsibility. They make all their own compost, practise “no till” to preserve soil integrity and use trees and wind fences to harvest snow. Their goal is to plant 100 trees or bushes a year to help stave off drought, filling their ponds and creating “a little microclimate of nature,” Primrose says. She has a subscription bouquet service, does the occasional wedding—specializing in elopements—and hosts U-pick days and workshops. These in-person events provide opportunities to share her commitment to seasonality and sustainability.

Many of Alberta’s new flower farmers are serving as one-stop shops for consumers by providing floral design as well. Moira MacKinnon of Edmonton’s Love & Fantasy Flowers  came to the industry as a florist, but her early exposure was disheartening. “Right away I kind of knew that something wasn’t right,” she says, noting the “tons of [floral] foam”—the single-use plastic foam that’s ubiquitous in the industry—and heavily packaged imports. But serendipity knocked, and she was able to move to her grandparents’ large suburban house, where she dug up the lawn and planted flowers. She quickly grew her business, which now includes a one-acre farm just west of Edmonton, and started by biking her flowers to farmers markets in a trailer tricked out to look like a chuckwagon. The chuckwagon and market sales are retired—her business model is now flower subscriptions, weddings and other events, and workshops. But still she’s aiming to overcome the industry’s big stumbling block: putting locally grown flowers into the hands of florists.

Even if a florist is philosophically interested in bypassing traditional floristry chains for even a fraction of their flowers, it’s tough practically. They currently have access to massive wholesalers with the click of a mouse. And they need flowers in volume and that meet standards such as stem length. To address these challenges, MacKinnon piloted the Cooperative Flower Network in 2023, which linked 11 Edmonton-area growers with 30 buyers. CFN sets product standards, and, by pooling flowers, can provide florists with the volume they need at a central location for once-a-week purchasing. Year one was so successful that MacKinnon is considering two more hubs in central Alberta and in Calgary.

They’re largely self-taught because there’s “not a lot of information out there for cold-climate growers.”

This sort of co-operation is a theme that echoes through the nascent industry. Growers reach out to fellow growers and share knowledge over coffee or through workshops, and scour the library and internet for resources, but they’re largely self-taught. “There’s not a lot of information out there for cold-climate growers,” says Primrose. The floriculture part of the horticulture program at Olds College, notes Wickwire, was cut in the mid-1990s amid declining government funding.

Luckily for Alberta farmers they have one of Canada’s leading advocates for the industry right here at home. Creating a sustainable floristry culture in the province and across North America is the fuel that fires Becky Feasby, a Calgary-based farmer–florist who’s operated Prairie Girl Flowers since 2018.

Like MacKinnon, Feasby got her first exposure to the industry through traditional floral design. She started a course but couldn’t stomach to finish it. “I saw that a class of about six students would fill two bins of garbage,” she says, adding that there was no effort to use alternatives to floral foam, to compost foliage or to recycle anything. She began searching for a better way.

An online search led her to the Slow Flowers Society, spearheaded by Seattle, Washington-based Debra Prinzing. Feasby was emboldened by seeing that others shared her view that floristry could use modernization. She’s since become a leader in sustainable floristry in Canada. To meet the need for education, Feasby started the annual Sustainable Flowers Workshop in Calgary in 2019, with courses for growers and florists alike that tackle the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social and economic.

Feasby cares and thinks deeply about floristry, giving the industry the scrutiny she thinks it deserves, given that flowers are so pervasive in people’s lives. She’s currently working on her masters in sustainability at Harvard University, comparing the environmental and social costs of growing roses in North and South America, weighing the nuances such as the carbon costs of heating and cooling greenhouses in colder climates against places where such inputs aren’t necessary.

She’s encouraged by the interest in locally grown, sustainable flowers. She says she knows the people driving it in Alberta are smart and committed and want to see things get done, but she’s also ever vigilant about ways the industry could be co-opted. Her workshops and social media posts challenge what sustainability means in the floral space, questioning the ethics of wild foraging, for instance, or of using invasive species in designs. She also advocates for making the industry more inclusive.

At the end of June, Prinzing, with Feasby’s encouragement and help, will bring the Slow Flowers Summit to Banff, the first time this three-day event—with its workshops and presentations on sustainable floristry—will be held outside the US. That it will come to Canada and have a full slate of Canadian presenters is testament to the flourishing industry here. MacKinnon and the Cooperative Flower Network will supply the workshops and demonstrations, delivering buckets of seasonal fresh flowers and foliage from the farms of Alberta growers, just a few hours from field to vase.

Adrienne Mason’s most recent book is Whales to the Rescue (Kids Can Press, 2022). She helped launch Hakai Magazine.

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That all changed one Friday in April of 2021.

Dunham, who co-owns and operates the Coffee Cottage in Innisfail with his partner, Shaun Steen, was chatting with one of their employees. The woman told Dunham that her child, who identifies as trans, wished for a Pride festival right there in Innisfail.

Dunham was inspired. He remembered the way he had been bullied and beaten as a gay kid growing up in southwest Calgary in the 1970s. “I had a lot of shame and I hid who I was,” he says. “I lived behind a mask, because I didn’t feel worthy of love.”

He decided that no kid and no adult in Innisfail should feel that way. “I ran up to Shaun, who was working, and I said, ‘We’re going to hold a Pride!’ And he just said, ‘OK, honey.’ ”

Dunham rounded up volunteers and sponsors. He earned the unanimous endorsement of his town council colleagues. Two months later, in June of 2021, Innisfail held its first Pride, a one-day event, in the parking lot of the Coffee Cottage.

As Dunham acknowledges, that first year’s event was a little bit heavy on earnest speeches and a little bit light on entertainment. But it was a hit nonetheless. In fact, due to COVID restrictions, the organizers had to turn dozens and dozens of people away.

In June of 2022 Innisfail Pride was a two-day event in the Legion Picnic Park, with more food, more music and a celebrity drag show featuring not just visiting drag queens but a number of (very) straight local community leaders who put on drag for the first time and took to the stage alongside the pros.

I had the honour to speak at the festival kickoff—and I must tell you, there was a fair bit of apprehension before the events began. Organizers and civic leaders were worried about the homophobia kicked up by the Convoy movement and by the rising tide of anti-gay and anti-trans legislation and agitation around the world. Just hours before the Innisfail event, in fact, the news broke that a gunman in Oslo, Norway, had shot 23 people at a Pride event there, killing two of them. It took some authentic Alberta courage for people to turn out and to speak out.

But no protesters or hatemongers showed up at the Legion park that day. There was no anger, no violence. Just warmth and celebration and a sense of new possibilities.

As I drove back up the highway to Edmonton that night, I thought about my own prejudices, my own preconceptions about rural Alberta. It’s dangerously easy and dangerously lazy to assume that a small town like Innisfail might be full of homophobes, transphobes and racists. What I saw on display that day in that park, though, was a generous community taking pride and joy in its diversity and its inclusion.

It’s bad enough that people outside Alberta often see the rest of us as hateful and angry. As Albertans we ourselves have to celebrate and share real stories like that of Innisfail Pride—because they are absolutely a part of who we are. We mustn’t fall into the trap of letting a few angry, frightened voices define us to the world—nor indeed to ourselves.

“Society has evolved and the town of Innisfail is no different,” says Innisfail mayor Jean Barclay. “Unfortunately, central Alberta has been stereotyped.”

“People say, ‘Oh, Alberta. Crazy redneck Alberta.’ But belonging is an Innisfail value,” she says. “There will always be a few very loud, angry voices. But after all the division of the last three years, it’s important that we stand up to hateful rhetoric.”

I love the Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, where big-city boy David Rose falls in love with small-town Patrick Brewer—and the two of them open a local business that becomes the beating heart of their community. That’s a TV show. But Dale Dunham and Shaun Steen have, in their own ways, made that fantasy a reality, sharing their love with the town they proudly call home.

“Dale and Shaun,” says Mayor Barclay, “give back to our community in so many ways. I am so proud to call them my friends.”

This year, Innisfail Pride is back—as a three-day event—from June 23 to 25. There are plans for an adults only, 18+ drag show on Friday night, and for more family-focused events including a talent show and carnival over the weekend. There won’t be a parade. It won’t be as flashy and loud as Pride in Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal. But it will be organic and homegrown. And it will be the pride of Innisfail.

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

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By mid-September, just a few weeks before Alberta’s municipal elections, the “best summer ever” had led to the (then-) most-ever active cases of COVID in the province, ICU capacity maxed out and over 15,000 surgeries cancelled. Our healthcare system was overwhelmed. It was all utterly predictable. Totally preventable. As the crisis swelled, however, our premier disappeared. Our health minister disappeared. Jason Kenney returned to Alberta belatedly to reinstate public health restrictions.

The UCP government’s mishandling of COVID, compounded with other unpopular decisions on health, education and the environment, had angered citizens. Though that fall’s candidates were running for municipal office or school boards and weren’t officially aligned with parties, voters fed up with our province’s poor leadership turned the 2021 municipal elections into a repudiation of the UCP—and an expression of a collective desire for better government. 

The 2021 election marked a seismic shift in council and school trustee composition across the province. The most obvious signals of discontent were Calgary’s and Edmonton’s rejection of conservative mayoral choices Jeromy Farkas and Mike Nickel with the election of Jyoti Gondek and Amarjeet Sohi. Voters clearly wanted to send a signal that Alberta is not a conservative monolith. The biggest surprise: It wasn’t even close. Voters coalesced around these two candidates in Alberta’s biggest cities. In Calgary, votes for the top two conservative mayoral candidates, even combined, didn’t add up to Gondek’s.

Surprises emerged across the province. This was a change election of a grand scale. The result was the most gender-balanced and ethnically diverse representation this province has ever elected. In Grande Prairie, Jackie Clayton became that city’s first female mayor. Similarly, Medicine Hatters also chose their first female mayor, with Linnsie Clark garnering two-thirds of the vote, and five of the city’s eight new councillors are women. Towns from Coalhurst to Innisfail also elected female mayors—Lyndsay Montana and Jean Barclay—and far more women councillors. Albertans in Fort McMurray and surrounding communities chose the Wood Buffalo municipality’s most diverse council ever: out of 11 councillors, four are Metis and two are originally from Pakistan and Nigeria.

Plebiscites and other ballot questions revealed the same trend. Calgarians delivered a resounding “yes” to the public-health benefit of adding fluoride to their water. Cold Lake’s questions related to access to healthcare saw almost 80 per cent of voters in that city indicate a desire for more family doctors. This was a clear message to Kenney and former Health Minister Tyler Shandro, whose battle with doctors began prior to the pandemic and has since prompted many local physicians to shut their practices.

While trustee races are rarely given as much attention as those for council and mayor, the UCP’s proposed K–6 curriculum had infuriated teachers and parents alike. In Calgary the four pro-UCP-curriculum candidates running as the Take Back the CBE slate were shut out. This pattern was similar with trustees across the province.

In a change year, Albertans were elected who rejected business as usual. The successful candidates worked in more socially concerned professions such as planning, public policy, teaching and community organizing. Importantly, they better reflect Alberta’s true demographics. While Kenney convenes a largely middle-aged, white, male, closed group of advisers and decision makers, voters took a turn towards more diverse and inclusive representation. This may be the greatest repudiation of the UCP.

The crux of the frustration was governance. Kenney remains a masterful campaigner in partisan politics. But his leadership inadequacies have been laid bare through mounting failures, including the Allan Inquiry (which served only to prove environmental groups did nothing wrong), the $1.3-billion spent on Keystone XL (which project was then cancelled, with nothing to show for it), his War Room (which has served only to discredit itself)—and his near-total abdication of leadership on Alberta’s COVID response.

Kenney and his confidantes control every aspect of the UCP. A narrow strain of conservatives provide the base, and Kenney “holds the pen.” His string of poor decisions seems rooted in fundamentally wrong assumptions about reality. Small pockets of Alberta—rural and urban—continue to hold on to the past. The UCP leader and his core supporters don’t reflect the Alberta of today.

Kenney became premier based on a simple premise: he seized on cultural conservatives’ desire to hold on to power, their belief that their tribe is the rightful owner of this province. Previous municipal elections, especially in Alberta’s biggest cities, had revealed a growing challenge to this tight circle. Naheed Nenshi and Don Iveson represented an existential threat to the status quo. Their tenures along with the provincial NDP’s election in 2015 demonstrated the walls of the Conservative castle could be breached. Alberta politics wasn’t so homogeneous anymore. Change to governance and leadership was possible.

As the province’s economy reeled under the weight of persistently low oil prices, however, Kenney found a receptive audience on the campaign trail for his message of restoring a traditional power structure. But his actual leadership style, as we’ve found out, evokes distrust and loathing across the political spectrum. Then COVID arrived, and citizens rediscovered the necessity of an active role for government. Not only did Kenney mismanage the pandemic response, some of his ministers broke their own government’s public COVID restrictions. Most revealing was their shock when the public was near-universal in its outrage. Kenney has now sustained the lowest polling numbers in Canada for most of his tenure.

My main takeaway from the 2021 municipal elections is that Albertans are open to a new generation of leadership. They rejected prospective leaders that come from the same school as Kenney’s UCP. Whatever small economic successes or vital COVID relief we’ve seen over the last two years are largely a result of outside forces—for example, the global price of oil or federal leaders’ efforts such as CERB.

Calgary’s new council, notably, began its tenure by doing three things that directly challenged Kenney and the UCP. First, they declared a climate emergency. This was an affront to Kenney, who has not only doubled down on fossil fuels but also ended a host of Notley-era programs designed to accelerate an energy transition. (Edmonton declared a climate emergency in 2019.) Second, mayor Gondek said she’d sign a deal with the federal Liberals to bring universal subsidized daycare to Calgary. Kenney had long said he wouldn’t sign on to the federal program (although weeks later indeed he did). Third, council protested the election of Sean Chu and called for his resignation when it was belatedly revealed that he had been found guilty of discreditable conduct.

Councillor Chu is a conservative of like mind to Kenney, and a test of governance for the UCP. Chu’s case raised the question of who should be eligible to hold office. The UCP did nothing to deal with this national embarrassment. Citizens across the province expressed frustration about Kenney’s lack of leadership, since the Municipal Act is the purview of the province—and Kenney himself had long promised “accountability” through recall legislation.

The lack of action is not too surprising. Just weeks after Chu took office we learned that Kenney’s UCP fired a female chief of staff, Ariella Kimmel, who had filed a statement of claim alleging widespread alcohol consumption and sexual harassment in a minister’s office.

The 2021 municipal elections were many things. They were a step toward respecting diversity and inclusion in this province. They reflected an understanding that climate action is vital, and that the oil and gas industry cannot dominate our economy as in the past. But mainly they were an expression that we want better government.

Brian Singh is a behavioural economist and data scientist and the founder and operator of Calgary-based research firm Zinc Tank.

The new mayor of Edmonton is a former federal Liberal cabinet minister (natural resources and infrastructure) and before that an Edmonton city councillor. He is the first person from a visible minority community to serve as mayor of Edmonton. Photograph by Jesse Cole.

Amarjeet Sohi’s Mayoral Victory

If ever there were a symbol of Canadian values, it’s Amarjeet Sohi. The ascendance of an Edmonton taxi driver—who immigrated from Punjab at 18 with nothing but the support of an older brother, who never attended college, who was once wrongfully imprisoned on terrorism charges in India—to the city’s mayor embodies national principles of fairness, inclusion and equity.

And yet Sohi himself knows these values aren’t guaranteed to all Canadians all the time. He hinted at this in 2016, when I interviewed Sohi, then Canada’s infrastructure minister, for this magazine, and again in September 2020, when we met for coffee a year after he lost his parliamentary seat. On both occasions he expressed disappointment with the state of civic discourse—the nasty divisiveness and outrage that have come to define our political zeitgeist.

Five years ago Sohi seemed more optimistic that integrity would triumph with the end of the Harper government. He appeared less certain in fall of 2020. Though Sohi remained motivated to help Canadians find and uphold our common values, he wasn’t confident that public office was the best approach anymore, hesitant to declare a mayoral run despite widespread support.

I got the impression Sohi was burned out. His wife of 27 years, Sarbjeet, had been diagnosed with kidney cancer just before his parliamentary defeat, and his brother Jagdev, a father-figure who housed and helped raise Sohi as a teenager, was gravely ill. When Jagdev died, a month after our coffee meetup, Sohi announced he would not seek the mayorship. He couldn’t imagine being reenergized to campaign and wanted instead to harness his introspection to write his memoir.

But Sohi’s story wasn’t ready to be written. Six months later, he entered the mayoral race as a sympathetic optimist prepared to tackle emergencies worsened by the pandemic, such as homelessness, opioid addiction and hate crimes targeting racialized women. His main opponent embodied the toxicity that Sohi stood against and worried could prevail. But it did not. Decency carried the day, and so did those core Canadian values that Mayor Sohi personifies.

Omar Mouallem is the author of Praying to the West.

Jyoti Gondek is Calgary’s first female mayor—and a woman of colour. From 2017 to 2021 she was the councillor for Ward 3.

The Gondek Coalition Tells a New Story About Calgary

Political coalitions—the bringing together of divergent groups of people for myriad reasons—are the key to political success. This is especially true in Alberta’s municipal politics, where centrists are often criticized for not picking a lane, pure progressives are, well, too progressive, and ardent conservatives don’t get the warm reception they often feel they’re owed.

Which brings us to the political coalition of Mayor Jyoti Gondek. Gondek’s victory in Calgary’s 2021 election was not guaranteed. Far from it. Questions swirled in political circles from the beginning of her candidacy: “Isn’t she a conservative?” “No way she picks up the Nenshi vote, right?” “Can’t someone outflank her from the left?”

On Election Day, however, Gondek and her team hit the perfect note: collapse and absorb the vote of her secondary competitors and overwhelm her principal opponent (conservative and UCP-aligned councillor Jeromy Farkas), becoming, in a resounding win, Calgary’s first female mayor—and a woman of colour rightfully telling a new story about Calgary,

What lies ahead for Gondek remains a blank canvas. She is many things to many people. A progressive climate activist, a centrist/sensible fiscal hawk, a suburban developer’s dream, a densification enthusiast. And for some on Election Day, it was simply enough that she wasn’t Farkas.

A mayor favoured by so many disparate groups inherits strategic challenges. Who does Gondek play to, and more existentially, who is she Her early priorities indicate a path of leftward lion (ardent advocacy against Quebec’s Bill 21, the declaration of a climate emergency, championing the federal childcare deal), perhaps to the dismay of some in her coalition. Whatever direction she goes, Gondek has much licence to act boldly—so long as she keeps her coalition intact for as long as possible.

Zain Velji is a partner at Northweather, a marketing agency, and was Naheed Nenshi’s 2017 campaign manager.

New CBE trustees Laura Hack, Charlene May, Marilyn Dennis, Dana Downey, Patricia Bolger, Nancy Close, Susan Vukadinovic. Photo courtesy of Calgary Board of Education.

Calgary Voters Embrace Public Education

The 2021 election became a referendum on public education in Calgary. For two and a half years the UCP government had been undermining public schools by cutting funding, permitting more charter schools, allowing unsupervised home-schooling, drafting weak curriculum and doing little to protect students from COVID-19. But the government’s ideological agenda—its emphasis on individualism, choice and parental rights—didn’t go over well with voters in October 2021. Parents, teachers, community organizations and everyday citizens became ignited and engaged. And their votes showed it.

Calgarians voted overwhelmingly in support of public education. Voter turnout in public school trustee races increased by almost 10 per cent overall over 2017—in one race by almost 20 per cent. Equally important was who was voted in. The four candidates running as the pro-UCP “Take Back the CBE” slate lost. Winning candidates expressed a need to strengthen and protect public education. Dana Downey, the new CBE trustee for Wards 1 and 2, stated in a campaign video: “I don’t support any movements that aim to weaken our public education system.” Newly elected CBE chair and trustee for Wards 3 and 4, Laura Hack, said she would “elevate public schools on the list of public priorities.”

A long-time CBE trustee, I’d been overwhelmed with emails and phone calls about the UCP’s proposed curriculum and its unwillingness to protect students and teachers from COVID. School boards took on an even bigger leadership role because this government was unable to see what was actually important to Calgarians. Neither the Calgary Public nor the Calgary Catholic school board, for example, agreed to trial even one subject from the UCP’s draft curriculum.

I didn’t stand for re-election in 2021. During the campaign, however, I was contacted by constituents and citizens across the city, asking: “If I want to take a stand for public education, who should I vote for?” This wasn’t my experience in the previous two elections. This engagement in the democratic process gives me hope for my children and all of our children.

Julie Hrdlicka was the Calgary Board of Education trustee for Wards 11 and 13 from 2015 to 2021.

New Edmonton councillors, top left to right: Karen Principe, Sarah Hamilton, Jo-Anne Wright, Anne Stevenson. Bottom left to right: Erin Rutherford, Jennifer Rice, Keren Tang, Ashley Salvador.

A Record Eight Women Elected to Edmonton City Council

The headlines following Edmonton’s 2021 municipal election tell a consistent story of an historic victory for the 25 women who ran for 12 council seats—eight won, the highest number ever, and two are the first women of colour on council. In five wards women came in second. Celebratory comments—“a glass ceiling has been shattered”; “we’ve come a long way”—are accurate, especially in contrast with Edmonton’s previous two elections. The council elected in 2017 had two women. In 2013, an election that lives in gender infamy, a sole woman, Bev Esslinger, won a council seat. This year she was one of three incumbents defeated—by a woman, Erin Rutherford.

But the historical significance of the new eight-to-four majority of women on Edmonton City Council may be less dramatic than reactions indicate. In 1989 voters elected six women as “aldermen” (a term Edmonton changed in 1995) plus Jan Reimer as the city’s first (and still only) female mayor. For almost 25 years Edmonton often had four or five women on council. Not incidentally, a pioneer of Edmonton’s gay community, councillor Michael Phair, served five terms beginning in 1992. 

Esslinger commented after her 2021 loss, “If more women run, more women will ultimately be elected.” That observation has some evident truth, but it also runs up against the data. More women are indeed running. Women comprised 34 per cent of this year’s council candidates, besting Edmonton’s previous record of 31 per cent in 2017. But this cannot explain the difference between eight and two women elected. What is likely is that in an election with only eight council incumbents, and with wards having been significantly redrawn and reidentified with Indigenous names, a host of factors led women to victory.

Individuals’ campaign strategies always matter. It is noteworthy that none of the eight women now on council took gender- or diversity-centred approaches to taxes, economic development, housing, safety or climate change, whereas some winning male candidates did. BIPOC candidates, who were likelier to foreground equity and inclusion, faced race or gender harassment, and their success rate was low. Ultimately, name recognition, fundraising, use of campaign media, vote-splitting, and endorsements, such as from outgoing mayor Don Iveson and provincial politicians, surely upended the electoral context.

The gender realignment on Edmonton’s city council is a welcome fact, but it is not a predictor of future election outcomes.

Judith A. Garber is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alberta.

Medicine Hat Women Work to Regain Voters’ Trust in Government

The face of Medicine Hat changed considerably with the 2021 municipal election, when political newbie Linnsie Clark defeated two-term incumbent mayor Ted Clugston with nearly three times the vote (66 per cent to 23 per cent). The 40-year-old Clark became the city’s first female mayor and now leads the city’s first-ever majority-female council.

What does this transformation mean for southeastern Alberta’s largest urban centre “I get that question all the time, so I’d love to know the answer,” Clark laughs.

Clark grew up in Medicine Hat, is a lawyer and worked in the city solicitor’s office. She focused her campaign on engaging with as many citizens as possible. “[We] connected with people and their values,” she said. “I felt like the city was drifting away from the values I hold very dear.” She called, for example, for better cost analysis of city and private-sector projects, and found many other Hatters had similar concerns. “Having someone you can trust who’s going to make decisions is really important,” she said.

Clark found the public eager to engage. Indeed, Medicine Hat saw a record-breaking 32 municipal candidates and a huge increase in voter turnout—up 20 per cent from 2017. Only two of four incumbent councillors were returned. She attributes Hatters’ desire for change to a desire for more transparency, but also to the pandemic, because people had grown restless after “an extended period of time in their neighbourhood and their homes.”

A few months into her new role, Clark is working to fulfill her campaign promises by setting long-term social, economic and environmental development goals. Helping her efforts to regain citizens’ trust are six new councillors, five of whom are women: Karen Ramona Robins, Allison Knodel, Alison Van Dyke, Cassi Hider and Shila Sharps. 

Kendall King is a reporter with the Medicine Hat News.

Innisfail Defies the Rural Stereotype

This small town has garnered attention beyond its own boundaries of late. Along the way, the community of some 7,800 people south of Red Deer on Highway 2 has defied the rural Alberta stereotype.

The first time Innisfail made headlines was during the Black Lives Matter movement that sprawled across North America and much of the world after George Floyd died at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in an unsettling scene captured on video. To many people’s surprise, anti-racism demonstrators also rallied in Innisfail in June 2020. They were confronted by vastly outnumbered counter-protesters, who attempted to provoke an altercation. The groups exchanged heated words, but the scene remained peaceful.

This situation unfolded during heightened tensions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which not unlike the BLM movement itself elicited opposing perspectives and passions. By late 2020 Glenn Carritt, an Innisfail councillor, was being openly defiant of public health protocols, supporting barbershop Bladez 2 Fadez’s refusal to comply with provincial health regulations and hosting a 400-person Easter party himself at his oilfield service business. In January 2021 Carritt resigned his position to run for mayor.

But Innisfail’s electorate, which turned out in record numbers last October, decided to vote for Jean Barclay, a progressive moderate who’d just served her first term on council. She received 2,025 votes to Carritt’s 626. Barclay had taken a strong stand that winter against local business owners’ defiance, posting to Innisfailians on Facebook: “Thank you for being responsible citizens and doing all you are doing for the collective good.”

Alberta’s 2021 municipal elections included a referendum on daylight saving time as well as one on equalization. But there was a third, unwritten referendum on masks, public health mandates and progressive values. And Innisfail’s outcome was a microcosm of what unfolded across the province. It also showed that despite rural Alberta’s reputation, clearly many people here are willing to put society’s well-being ahead of their own.

Simon Ducatel is a Sundre-based editor and reporter with Mountain View Today.

The post A Portentous Change appeared first on Alberta Views.

Prior to the pandemic, I did an ethnographic study to address this curiosity. For the sake of simplicity, I assumed rural Alberta constitutes those areas beyond the province’s largest cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray and Medicine Hat and their corresponding bedroom communities. Following the lead of American political scientist Katherine Cramer, I immersed myself in the regular conversations of 23 groups of acquaintances in 16 communities throughout rural Alberta. I showed up at cafes and restaurants, I joined groups of young families in their living rooms or on their front decks, I met with women’s-only coffee groups, I shared a case of Pilsner with a rural men’s baseball team. All told I spoke with 138 rural Albertans about politics in conversations that lasted anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours.

Over the course of this exercise I heard a few good jokes, more than a few phrases in Ukrainian, one heated debate over a game-deciding measurement in the town curling bonspiel, and, I’m afraid to say, startlingly high levels of political anger and resentment. Rural Alberta is far from a homogeneous region, and many issues unique to particular towns were raised. But on the whole, a high degree of agreement exists on three particular points.

Many rural Albertans feel a visceral anger toward Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government, largely placing the blame for Alberta’s current fiscal woes at its feet. This is unsurprising—Premier Jason Kenney has been fanning this sentiment for some time. But more interestingly, rural Albertans are also increasingly disillusioned with politics in general, expressing widespread scorn at the behaviour of politicians and parties of all stripes (many wistfully imagining a politics completely free of parties, which, according to a coffee group in Fort Macleod, “just sour everything”) and strongly convinced that existing parties don’t care about “ordinary people.” Finally, many in rural Alberta are increasingly convinced they are unfairly treated, overlooked and even looked down upon by urban citizens and “their” governments.

An exchange in a McDonalds in Drayton Valley strongly encapsulated this particular view, which emerged again and again across the groups I met. Asked if people in cities understand rural areas or their struggles, one resident nearly jumped out of his seat: “Absolutely not! We might as well be from different planets. And the government workers, the politicians, the professors from Edmonton They’re the worst… they simply don’t understand what it’s really like out here.” Added his coffee companion, “Most of [them] see us as rednecks who can barely get our pants on by ourselves. I don’t have a college degree, so I’m an idiot. That’s what they’re thinking. I worked from nothing to a senior management position in an oil company. But I’ll always be a redneck in their eyes.” His wife chimed in, “Oh, yes, they think we’re rednecks… It’s nice that you came out here. Nice that someone wants to listen. Do you think anyone will listen to what you write?”

Overall, a growing anti-establishment sentiment tied to this resentment was evident, a desire for some type of upheaval to address these concerns. This is certainly not new. I’d argue a good deal of rural support for the Wildrose party over the past decade was driven moreso by this underlying alienation and a corresponding populist desire to “throw the bums out” than by hard-right ideology. For some in rural Alberta today, this translates into support for “Wexit.” But it’s not difficult to imagine such resentment being exploited for even more troublesome and divisive ends. Not only did most rural citizens I chatted with express a strong admiration for Donald Trump (“someone who’s finally listening to ordinary people for a change!” declared a woman from Westlock), some also linked their own frustrations, their own sense of being overlooked, with a palpable resentment aimed at refugees and especially Indigenous peoples, who are viewed as the chief beneficiaries of exorbitant state support. In an age of increasing polarization, misinformation and, in many cases, tribalism and xenophobia, the potential exploitation of this resentment most worries me.

In the context of contemporary Alberta politics, in which the United Conservative Party government unveils policies that don’t serve rural Alberta well, I’m left wondering how this alienation and resentment can be addressed. How can this region be authentically represented

The notion that rural Albertans aren’t adequately represented in provincial politics likely strikes most readers as absurd. Rural support forms the backbone of the UCP. In the 2019 election the UCP garnered well over 70 per cent of the votes cast across rural Alberta, easily sweeping every rural seat and ensuring several rural MLAs have prominent roles in cabinet. And this is par for the course in Alberta. Aside from a few blips (perhaps the first term of Peter Lougheed’s government, the relatively short reign of Alison Redford, and the recent single term of the NDP), rural Alberta has formed the electoral base of basically every Alberta government going back to 1905. Likely no constituency in Canada has been so closely connected to political power for such a long stretch.

For much of this time rural Alberta reaped many benefits. The UFA and Social Credit governments clearly focused on rural regions, the latter spending massively on rural infrastructure throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The PC party under both Lougheed and Don Getty followed suit, using resource-padded coffers to build roads, schools, hospitals, hockey rinks and seniors lodges across rural areas while also supporting a variety of loan programs and subsidies for farmers, ensuring grants flowed to rural community and agricultural societies, and footing the bill for more than a few community-specific projects in the constituencies of well-regarded rural cabinet ministers.

This all changed with the advent of a neoliberal approach to economic development in the 1990s, focused on deregulation and low taxes as keys to attracting investment and spurring growth. The relationship between the government and rural Alberta shifted. Few in Alberta, urban or rural, forget the impact that cutbacks in healthcare, education and infrastructure had across the province in the early years of Ralph Klein’s government. For rural Alberta in particular, these cuts, in combination with the broader changes to the economics of agriculture unleashed by neoliberal-inspired free-trade agreements, fast-tracked a decline in municipal and individual economic prospects across the region. Rural schools closed, healthcare centres either closed or reduced their offerings, multi-generation family farms were sold off, transfers to municipalities shrank and infrastructure maintenance declined, youth hightailed it to urban centres and local businesses struggled mightily.

More broadly this period represented a turning point for conservative parties across much of the western world. Suddenly the central goal was no longer “conserving” much of anything. Rather, the goal became sharply reduced tax rates and regulations to entice capital investment—an aim that created jobs (although often for low wages) but weakened the state’s ability to provide the services low-density and increasingly low-income rural areas rely on.

Of course, this shift was welcomed with open arms by the province’s resource sector, and, in an era of strong oil prices and hefty resource royalties flowing to the government, who could complain The “Alberta Advantage” was in full swing—low taxes, low unemployment and high per-capita government spending—the holy trinity of Alberta politics. But underneath these developments in conservative ideology, this wholehearted embrace of a low-tax regime and oil and gas-friendly public policies, was the sacrifice of any coherent policy concern over the future of rural Alberta.

Kyler Zeleny grew up on a farm in central Alberta. He is a photographer–researcher and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017) and Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle (2019). Understanding the rural, he says, consumes him. Sleeping in his car, bathing in lakes, he tries to understand present-day ideas of the rural and how it has been visually represented. He has degrees from U of A and the University of London.

Since the Klein revolution, successive PC governments’ approaches to rural issues have been a mixed bag. The PCs did recommit, at least rhetorically, to the importance of rural Alberta in the last years of the Klein regime and especially under Ed Stelmach. Task forces were commissioned, reports were issued and money was spent, although these initiatives created little meaningful rural development. The Redford government did release a Rural Economic Development Action Plan in 2014, although this was derailed by the party’s historic loss in 2015.

The UCP has similarly failed to offer much in the way of a concrete rural development plan beyond its general province-wide pledge to “create jobs.” The UCP, to be fair, did announce in June 2020 a one-time $200-million allotment for rural infrastructure, although the president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta said “hundreds of millions” more was needed to properly address the infrastructure deficit that plagues the region. In fact, several rural municipalities are considering dissolving themselves entirely in the face of infrastructure upgrades they can’t afford.

In November Premier Kenney responded to concerned rural politicians by urging them to cut “red tape” to attract investment, as if the removal of a couple of forms or a less stringent approvals process is all that stands between rural communities and a cascade of new businesses knocking down their door, the beginning of a new golden age.

Even more surprising has been the UCP’s willingness to upset a large swath of rural voters with policy decisions. Rural regions witnessed scores of doctors threaten to leave their already underserved communities over a protracted contract dispute with the UCP government. Counties are warning citizens to expect drastic property tax increases as the province offloads policing costs and seeks to significantly reduce tax rates for oil companies. Many rural voices, most notably country music singers Corb Lund and Paul Brandt, were at the forefront of public opposition to plans to allow coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Taken together, it is increasingly difficult to see what lasting benefits rural Albertans have amassed over the last two or three decades in exchange for the rock-solid support they routinely granted conservative governments. Surely the oil and gas boom of the 2000s helped paper over much of this. Rural Albertans scooped up well-paying jobs in the industry, and companies contributed significant tax revenues for rural municipalities and extra income for farmers who had an oil or gas well on their land. But such opportunities are now few and far between, and some in the industry are refusing to pay taxes they owe rural municipalities. As of February 2021 they were over $245-million in arrears, with many companies additionally declining to honour their contracts with rural landowners.

Agriculture in Alberta does continue to generate billions of dollars of economic activity annually, although sharply declining profit margins have ensured that only the largest farms consistently reap strong returns. To make matters worse, the mega-size machinery now required by ever-growing farms is causing unforeseen, and expensive, wear to country roads.

Today the neoliberal chickens have come home to roost. Much of rural Alberta sits in a precarious position. Job opportunities are diminished, the population is rapidly aging, residents must travel farther to access schooling, healthcare and long-term care, rural students are more likely to drop out than their urban counterparts, rural infrastructure continues to deteriorate, revenue-starved municipalities are weighing drastic service cuts against significant property tax increases—while simultaneously facing the looming prospect of enormous liabilities associated with orphaned oil and gas wells—and, as the pandemic reminded us, decent and affordable internet often remains out of reach. Given the lack of interest from successive Alberta governments in authentically addressing rural issues, it’s no wonder citizens are feeling alienated and resentment is growing.

Rural Albertans routinely identify as “conservative” in opinion surveys; they vote overwhelmingly Conservative in provincial and federal elections; and in conversation they highlight fiscal prudence, self-reliance and personal discipline as characteristics they strongly value. Throughout my research, many scoffed at “political correctness,” were enraged by the salaries and pension benefits received by bureaucrats and politicians, and were very concerned with rural crime and the “soft” justice system that, in their view, condones such behaviour. Some are socially conservative, many are not. And above all, the majority do not like the NDP. This is a deep, essentially cultural, dislike.

But here is the rub. There is an important ideological disconnect between the political values of many in rural Alberta and those of the UCP, a disconnect even close observers of Alberta politics tend to overlook.

Not only have public opinion surveys shown that the majority of rural Albertans are actually “middle of the road” in their ideological leanings, I am convinced after having completed my ethnographic study (in addition to having lived in rural Alberta most of my life) that the conservatism most in rural Alberta abide by is not generally the anti-government, libertarian version that undergirds the UCP. Rather, most rural Albertans adhere to a more traditional version of conservatism that, to be sure, values fiscal discipline and self-reliance, but is also pragmatic and recognizes the value of prudent state investment in education and healthcare, in infrastructure and in sport and culture—the foundations of the healthy community institutions rural Albertans depend on. Furthermore, it is a conservatism largely built on a personal commitment to community, a willingness to volunteer and contribute to its well-being, rather than an obsession over the rights of the individual.

I have yet to hear a stampede of rural Albertans crusade for lower corporate tax rates or demand that oil and gas companies receive a property tax holiday, nor are many demanding the return of coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rockies or the sale of gas leases on the Milk River grasslands. I have yet to hear rural Albertans argue that we have too many nurses or teachers, or too many rural hospitals or schools. I have yet to hear rural Albertans suggest that existing supports for seniors in the region are adequate, or clamour for smaller provincial transfers to municipalities or regional economic development agencies, or an end to grants for community recreation or agricultural societies. I can also report that, despite frequent suggestions to the contrary on social media, the vast majority of rural Albertans are not aghast at the “loss of their freedom” inherent in requests to wear a facemask or adhere to “stay-at-home” orders in the midst of the pandemic. Indeed, there are blatant areas of tension between the policy preferences of most rural Albertans and the policy priorities of the UCP.

Rural Albertans, it is true, tend to harbour suspicions about government. But in talking with them it became clear that the crux almost always revolves around politicians “living-it-up in expensive hotel suites, jetting around on private planes, drinking $20 orange juice,” the relatively generous salaries and benefits of civil servants in Edmonton and, for some, the sense that newcomers to Canada and Indigenous peoples receive disproportionate state support (although several rural municipalities are making positive strides on these issues, creating “Welcoming Committees,” pursuing anti-racism initiatives and adopting treaty land acknowledgements at community events).

One can legitimately question the disconnect between a desire for government services and a refusal to acknowledge the role played by civil servants in providing these services, or the inadequate understanding of “who” in fact “gets what” from government. The larger point, however, is that most rural Albertans are not simply opposed to government full stop. Rather, they resent that some groups seem to get more than their fair share, while rural areas receive the short end of the stick. This conclusion strongly echoes similar findings in rural America, where research shows resentment of this sort—rather than an ideological commitment to anti-government neoliberalism—explains such strong support for conservative politicians.

Of course, far-right libertarian voices also emanate from rural Alberta. Such people seem disproportionately to occupy positions in rural UCP constituency associations, some becoming candidates themselves.

Despite this ideological disconnect, it seems incomprehensible to imagine the UCP losing ground in rural Alberta. What gives

Part of this is basic party identification. The UCP is now the only legit conservative party in town, a last line of defence against a return to power by the NDP. But beyond that, the UCP has done well to play to the anxieties of the region. Few in rural Alberta seem much bothered by the UCP’s desire to shrink the civil service. Nor were they opposed to the party’s repeal of the provincial carbon tax. As the unofficial spokesperson for a women’s coffee group in Tofield told me, following a lengthy conversation outlining their environmental concerns, “I have absolutely no other option. I simply have to pay more. I can’t take the bus. I can’t afford an electric car. And I couldn’t plug it in anywhere if I could. How is this anything but an extra tax on rural people?”

Paradoxically, given that corporation-friendly neoliberal policies by previous conservative governments helped put rural regions on the path to precarity in the first place, many rural Albertans view the province’s immediate prosperity, and their own, as tied directly to the revival of oil and gas. Thus, they largely applauded the UCP’s doubling down in this direction, especially Kenney’s anti-Liberal rhetoric, his Canadian Energy Centre “war room” and the “Fair Deal Panel.”

The UCP further created the Rural Alberta Provincial Integrated Defence (RAPID) Response to address rural crime, replaced the labour standards codified in the NDP’s infamous Bill 6 with the Farm Freedom and Safety Act, and established the largely symbolic Alberta Firearms Advisory Committee to “hear concerns about the federal government’s firearms legislation.”

It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to see how well such moves play throughout the region. But do any of them address the fundamental issues facing rural Alberta Which will create long-term jobs in a global context of declining oil demand Which will ensure that rural schools remain open, that doctors stick around, that affordable high-speed internet becomes available Which will address the vast rural infrastructure deficit Where, in any of this, is a coherent, consistent, evidence-based rural economic and community development plan

Modern economic trends have clearly been unkind to rural areas worldwide. Yet rural development scholars have demonstrated that the “death of rural” is not inevitable. Real economic progress and enhanced service delivery for rural areas is possible, but at minimum it requires a long-term plan.

As Lars Hallström, who directed the Alberta Centre for Sustainable Rural Communities at the University of Alberta from 2009 to 2020, put it: “A dedication to rural sustainability should inspire thinking around the linkages that exist. The question of rural physicians and rural healthcare is connected to rural health inequities which are connected to rural social inequities which are connected to rural capital flight and the changing face of agriculture and who stays behind, the closure of rural schools etc. You have to think about all of this as a collective. But the policy response under all Alberta governments since forever has been to occasionally throw some money at rural regions without much thought to any broader development goals. How will this actually support rural communities in a sustained way?”

In tandem with an increasing sense of resentment, support for Wexit seems to be growing in rural Alberta. I suspect some smaller oil companies, eager to be free of federal restrictions, will chip in some cash to back such a venture. But perhaps rural Albertans might try something different in their quest to upend the status quo.

Rather than Wexit, imagine a rural-based provincial party emerging in Alberta, running candidates only in rural ridings and advocating, first and foremost, for the well-being of rural Alberta. A “Bloc Rural,” if you like. It would lean conservative, no doubt, but more importantly, rural would be at its core. An existing party (Alberta Party?) might support many of the same policies, but the lack of a rural core will prevent widescale buy-in. Rural identity is a powerful force outside cities.

The new party would probably support the UCP’s efforts to address rural crime, fortify property rights, shrink the salaries of Edmonton-based civil servants—whatever rural Albertans deem important. But the party would also work to ensure doctors are recruited rather than driven out of rural towns. It would advocate for an education funding model that ensures no student has to ride a bus for three hours daily. It would demand affordable high-speed internet for all, maintenance of basic infrastructure in rural municipalities, creation of a subsidized transportation network capable of delivering rural citizens to specialist medical appointments in Edmonton or Calgary. Above all, it would craft a well-designed social and economic plan that provides hope for the future.

Given the resurgence of the NDP in Alberta politics, a new party consistently occupying a large number of rural seats would make minority governments much more likely. In such a scenario, a new party could demand a meaningful policy commitment to rural Alberta in exchange for its support, improving conditions across the region. As importantly, it might help stem a growing tide of resentment in the region before it becomes destructive. And while the idea may seem unrealistic, even letting one’s mind wander in this direction could be a helpful exercise in focusing on what policies are in fact in the best interests of rural Alberta. 

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By now concern has spread far beyond public sector pension holders. All Albertans have a stake in AIMCo, whether as citizen-beneficiaries of the Heritage Fund or as pension plan members or as private or public sector employers who pay into WCB-Alberta’s Accident Fund. AIMCo has lost the public’s trust.

With the creation of Lougheed’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976, the provincial government’s need for investment managers came into sharp focus. The Heritage Fund would eventually be worth billions. In the early years it was managed by the investment division of Alberta Finance, along with public pensions. Legislation in the late 1990s reduced political influence in the management of these funds, and the public subsequently paid little attention to the investments. But internal management concerns remained, such as trouble attracting investment professionals and securing budgets necessary to upgrade technology.

A 2006 government report recommended the creation of an arm’s-length public agency whose board would have “appropriate accountabilities and authorities,” including responsibility for appointing the CEO, determining a risk management framework, establishing performance targets and “ensur[ing] an optimal organization design, including compensation.”

The Ed Stelmach government liked the idea and in August 2007 appointed a “blue chip” corporate board chaired by Bay Street executive Charlie Baillie. The board included two female financial executives from outside Alberta and several prominent local businessmen, including Daryl Katz. No direct representatives of the pension funds whose money AIMCo would be managing were appointed.

AIMCo launched on January 1, 2008, with public servants in Finance moving to the new public agency. Then-Finance Minister Lyle Oberg suggested the change might enhance investment performance by one-quarter to one-half per cent. This nebulous concept, known as “value-added” (or, the greater performance said to result from active investment management), remains the central metric in compensation practices in the investment industry.

After an international search, AIMCo’s board appointed Leo de Bever as the corporation’s first CEO—both a controversial and a conventional choice. He was conventional in that he had over 35 years’ experience in investment management, having been chief investment officer for the public Victorian Funds Management Corporation in Australia. He was controversial in that he would oversee investments for AIMCo in life insurance policies that became problematic. And in 2012 First Leaside Wealth Management in Ontario went bankrupt amid accusations from investors that de Bever’s affiliation with that firm—he was a director at Leaside at the same time he was CEO of AIMCo—had encouraged them to invest in it. Leo de Bever left AIMCo in 2015 and was replaced by another industry veteran, Kevin Uebelein.

AIMCo manages investments of approximately $120-billion for some 30 funds affiliated with the Alberta government. It manages these through “pools” including real estate, bonds, equities and infrastructure. The corporation’s largest clients are the Local Authorities Pension Plan ($50-billion; 275,000 members); Management Employees Pension Plan ($5-billion; 12,000 members), Universities Academic Pension Plan ($5.5-billion; 16,000 members) and Public Service Pension Plan ($15-billion; 89,000 members). AIMCo also manages various endowment funds and the $17-billion Heritage Fund.

Each individual pension plan board determines its own investment policies, return targets and risk tolerance. Each determines contribution rates to ensure its plan’s sustainability. Board members do not wish to be in a position of raising contributions. They rely on AIMCo’s investment managers to earn returns that meet or exceed the long-term rates of return necessary to keep plans viable. This is why investment performance is so critical and why last year’s $2.1-billion loss so concerned pension fund members.

AIMCo’s board of directors is appointed by the provincial cabinet. While directors have a legal duty to act in the best interests of the corporation, their appointment can be rescinded by cabinet at any time. The AIMCo legislation does not enshrine a legal responsibility for the board to consider the best interests of members of the pension funds (as both the ATB Financial Act and the Credit Union Act require when it comes to depositors), and the perspectives of fund members are not represented on the board. This isn’t the case elsewhere—at the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, for example, of the seven-person board, four members represent public sector pension funds, with the trustees of four funds each appointing one director.

Prior to 2018, most AIMCo clients were required to use the corporation for investment management services: they could not “fire” AIMCo for any reason. Yet for the largest pension fund clients, neither AIMCo nor the Government of Alberta provides any guarantees of pension payments. In 2018 the Notley government introduced reforms aimed at shifting the power relationship between AIMCo and pension plans. AIMCo’s monopoly on managing assets was to be extinguished after five years, leaving plans the option to move some or all of their funds elsewhere. In late 2019 the UCP government passed legislation to reassert AIMCo’s de facto monopoly.

The change also handed more funds to AIMCo. Bill 22 swept the Alberta Teachers’ Retirement Fund ($18-billion; 83,000 members) and the Workers’ Compensation Board’s ($12-billion; 188,000 employers) funds to AIMCo, effective December 31, 2021. This change caught the ATRF and WCB totally by surprise. The government said the move would create “efficiencies.” While this rationale isn’t without some merit, subsequent problems at AIMCo  quickly undermined it.

Reaction to Bill 22 was swift and universally negative. Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, described the decision as a “hijacking of teacher’s pensions” and said the union would consider legal action. The ATA later announced that the teachers’ pension fund had outperformed AIMCo every year since 2012, and that it would be worth $1.3-billion less if it had been managed by AIMCo over that time. Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, was even more blunt, describing the change as “tantamount to theft.” Both groups said they suspect the UCP government wants to control how their pension funds are invested.

In an attempt to assuage concerns, CEO Uebelein wrote in a December 2019 Edmonton Journal op-ed that it was “absolutely clear” the government had “no say” over where or how AIMCo invests. This led to obvious questions about AIMCo board members being appointed by cabinet and the government’s ability to influence the board’s CEO appointments.

More criticism came in late December 2020, after Finance Minister Travis Toews signed ministerial orders expanding AIMCo’s control over the formerly independent pension funds. The orders imposed agreements that give AIMCo de facto vetoes over the funds’ boards’ changes to investment policy. The ATA said the ATRF board would face serious limitations in determining its own policy. Added the AFL’s McGowan: “It’s like a customer going to an auto dealership and saying ‘I want to buy a red car,’ and the dealership saying ‘Here’s your blue truck.’”

All Albertans should now be carefully watching the Kenney government’s pursuit of assets currently managed by the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). In May 2020 the UCP’s “Fair Deal Panel” recommended that this province “develop a comprehensive plan to create an Alberta Pension Plan and withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan,” in which event AIMCo would begin managing Alberta workers’ portion of CPP assets—roughly $40-billion. Soon many Albertans’ pensions—work-related and the one available as a right of citizenship—could be managed entirely by AIMCo.

Suspicion is rife that the Kenney government wants AIMCo to invest in Alberta’s sagging energy industry, which is experiencing low oil prices and prominent divestment campaigns by the likes of Norway’s government pension fund, New York City’s pension fund, HSBC (the world’s sixth biggest bank) and BlackRock (the world’s largest money manager). After the premier’s well-publicized trips to financial capitals yielded nothing—and particularly after Teck’s decision in February 2020 to pull out of its Frontier oil sands project—Kenney and his advisers have probably realized significant foreign capital is not returning to Alberta’s oilpatch.

AIMCo’s recent investments in local oil and gas companies—especially its role in overseeing the Alberta Growth mandate—have simultaneously reinforced concerns about the corporation’s compromised independence and created concerns about its less than stellar investment performance.

An April 2020 report from Progress Alberta titled “Alberta’s Failed Oil and Gas Bailout” found that AIMCo “has invested more than $1.1-billion in conventional oil and gas junior and intermediate producers and oilfield service companies.” It points out that Trident Exploration, which received $60-million from AIMCo, went bankrupt in 2019. Another company, Perpetual Energy, lost 99 per cent of its value following AIMCo’s investment.

AIMCo incurred huge losses—$2.1-billion—using a strategy one expert called “amateurish” and “a beginner’s mistake.”

The Notley government had directed AIMCo to allocate 3 per cent of the Heritage Fund’s assets to deserving Alberta companies, which it did from 2015 to 2019. The criteria were wide open: jobs, diversification, innovation etc. However, about two-thirds of the investments were in oil and gas companies and servicing companies, the majority struggling due to the collapse of commodity prices. No official accounting of the losses or expected losses of this $500-million portfolio has been given. But Progress Alberta’s report notes that “every publicly traded company that AIMCo has invested in under [the] invest local directive… has seen its share price fall since its investment.” The UCP officially ended the mandate in 2019—but Kenney’s subsequent $1.5-billion public “investment” in Keystone XL underlined an ongoing desperation to underwrite the energy sector.

Still more damage to AIMCo’s credibility lay ahead. In late April 2020, media reported AIMCo had incurred huge losses—roughly $2.1-billion—through a volatility trading strategy. Institutional Investor quoted a volatile-market specialist who called AIMCo’s strategy “amateurish” and “a beginner’s mistake.” The magazine added “the scale of the losses, and decision to shut down the program at its deepest nadir, suggest a grave lapse in oversight and governance.”

The response from the board and the CEO was hardly reassuring. “Markets behaved in a manner never before seen and the result was a very unfortunate loss,” wrote Uebelein in a press release. Mea culpas and promises to perform better failed to satisfy pension plan contributors already challenged by COVID-19, wage and job losses and a government hostile to the public sector. Two AIMCo staff associated with the volatility strategy were let go. Other executive departures followed, including Uebelein, who announced in November 2020 that he’d be leaving AIMCo before his contract expired, in June 2021.

Finance Minister Travis Toews was strangely silent throughout the affair, leaving communications to Uebelein. The corporation’s board, seemingly caught off-guard, commissioned a report to itself. The report pointed the finger at AIMCo management and staff, identifying problems such as “culture,” a lack of collaboration between risk and investment professionals, and imprecise strategy clearance protocols.

A government that had acted swiftly to remove Albertans from countless other public bodies—before their terms had expired, and despite an absence of scandals—removed not one member from AIMCo’s board. When board chair Richard Bird’s term ended in July 2020, Toews chose as his replacement Mark Wiseman, a former CEO of the CPP Investment fund—and a man who’d left his most recent position, at BlackRock, after violating company rules about relationships at work (which conduct BlackRock’s CEO called “deeply disappointing”).

The new chair will oversee AIMCo’s ongoing expansion. “There’s no doubt as we look at the merit, opportunities and perhaps risks of an Alberta pension plan, should the province go in that direction,” Toews said at the time of Wiseman’s appointment, “we will certainly need strong leadership.”

After the governance changes and the series of bad investments, the nub of the issue remains unresolved. Is AIMCo a good money manager?

Investment management is a complicated business that requires trust between the client and the manager. But the bottom line is that excellent investment management entails consistent, long-term delivery of financial returns to support pensions or endowments.

Differences sometimes exist between a client’s risk tolerance and the risks taken by their investment manager. At AIMCo, however, these differences can persist for years because of clients’ inability to shift investments to another fund manager. The potential for mistrust and conflict is thus considerable: a monopolistic investment manager not required to do as clients’ desire.

Meanwhile, AIMCo’s investment performance has been insufficient to overcome these concerns. In a 2016 study conducted for the University of Alberta’s Institute for Public Economics, “Alberta Investment Management Corporation: An Examination of a Corporatization Project,” I concluded that AIMCo’s performance, when compared with other major Canadian public pension managers, has been mediocre at best. In an extension to my study, in late 2020, I compared AIMCo’s 11-year performance against BC Investment Management Corporation and Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement. Of the major public pension plans, these two entities are closest in terms of size, clients and mandate. Over the 11 years, the average of AIMCo’s annual value-add was 0.43 per cent, BCMIC’s was 1.02 per cent, and the Caisse’s was 0.53 per cent. This suggests that AIMCo is adding value but lags behind comparable institutional investors. While any study of value-added is fraught with issues regarding the quality of benchmarks, these studies clearly suggest AIMCo’s performance has not been exceptional.

Such mediocre performance inevitably raises questions about the compensation paid to AIMCo staff (the corporation had 450 employees as of 2018) and executives. Since 2008, when AIMCo began operations, average compensation at the corporation rose from about $115,000 to over $260,000 by 2017. It fell to $210,000 by 2019, still almost double the average staff compensation at the time of AIMCo’s launch. The aggregate compensation of the top five officers of AIMCo grew from $7.2-million in 2008 to $10.4-million in 2019, or by 44 per cent. (By comparison, average weekly earnings across Alberta, 2008–2019, grew by only 26 per cent.)

Why do investment professionals command salaries many times those of other highly skilled workers—higher, even, than the salary of deputy ministers or the premier When you speak with investment professionals, their answer is always that the market highly values their skills and determines their compensation. And, to be sure, an examination of individual and aggregated data shows AIMCo salaries are not out of whack with the market.

Another answer would be that investment professionals have become the new priesthood, an offshoot from the economics profession. Here, math-proficient believers in rational expectations attempt to exploit minute pricing anomalies in a mythical free marketplace. Their beliefs discount or ignore the role of human emotions such as fear and greed. And yet, even after the egregious sins of this priesthood during the 2008 financial crisis, investors continue to endure portfolio managers routinely being paid millions, even from the public purse.

This disconnect from reality stems from the neoliberal belief in the sanctity of free markets, combined with an inconsistent application of their own rules. We have a tradition in Alberta of “free enterprise” governments telling independent pension clients who they must invest with, while exerting influence over a nominally “independent” AIMCo board.

To ensure that it’s public investment manager truly acts in the public interest, the Alberta government needs to change the constitution of AIMCo’s board by mandating the appointment of qualified representatives nominated from the clients whose money they manage. At a minimum, pension holders must be represented on the board of this public agency. Our government should also adhere to its stated free market principles and give public pension holders the ability to shop for a different investment manager. Both changes would be big steps toward holding AIMCo accountable.

Bob Ascah served as director of the Institute for Public Economics at the University of Alberta, 2008–2013.

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by James Wilt
Between the Lines
2020/$27.95/293 pp.

In his debut book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?, James Wilt, a former Calgary journalist now based in Winnipeg, systematically dismantles every conceivable anti-public-transit excuse. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with academics, transit planners and community activists, he largely focuses on how three recent “revolutions”—electric cars, private ride sharing companies and autonomous vehicles—are merely a continuation of the corporate manufacturing of car culture (which he terms “automobility”). Not only will these technologies not improve mobility, he argues, they actually increase congestion, deepen inequality, throw existing public transit into crisis and distract us from the real solution—which is, as Wilt persuasively argues with numerous examples, simply a properly funded, well-planned public transit system.

Countering politicians’ complaint that “public transit costs too much,” Wilt points to the high price of automobility: the costs to car owners (vehicle, fuel, insurance, maintenance, parking), plus costs we all pay (whether we own a vehicle or not) for road construction and maintenance; healthcare costs related to collisions, poor air quality, and isolation; and environmental costs due to pollution and land loss. Wilt reveals data showing that in Vancouver, for every $1 a car owner paid to drive, society paid $9.20. In comparison, riding the bus cost society $1.50, while cycling cost 8 cents, and walking 1 cent. This basic math is often disregarded by governments at all levels, including Alberta’s UCP government, which recently included new highway-building as part of its economic stimulus plan.

The automobility “revolutions” also cause harm to equality and democracy. Wilt outlines how private ride-sharing endangers women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and the elderly; exacerbates poverty; and exploits drivers and undermines worker rights. For example, Uber obligates drivers to be independent contractors rather than employees, meaning drivers have to pay all costs, and minimum wage and overtime laws don’t apply to them (some Uber drivers make so little income, they live in their cars). Wilt also details how autonomous vehicles risk our privacy by collecting and sharing personal data. Surveillance in all transit, he points out, reflects and reinforces systemic racism, disproportionately targeting poor people and people of colour.

Unfortunately, many people (including city councillors) have been fooled by the lobbying and marketing of Uber and Elon Musk—and also by Lime and Bird, whose scooters now clutter sidewalks in Edmonton and Calgary—into thinking we can rely on private ownership of transit. We cannot, and to this point Wilt pays good attention to buses, whose affordability avoids the public–private ownership issues plaguing even LRT. Wilt might, however, have noted that their affordability also enables transit implementation all at once as a system—which is necessary for public transit to actually work—rather than piecemeal construction. For instance, the Belgian city of Ghent changed its transportation system literally overnight; the result: car use fell, public transit use and cycling rose, congestion was alleviated, local business increased, noise levels dropped and air quality improved. Edmonton and Calgary could undertake similar overnight transformations, introducing truly convenient bus systems offering frequency, wide coverage, accessibility, heated main shelters and free fare. Who wouldn’t take the bus then And we too could enjoy healthy, livable cities. We could also improve buses between our cities—why wait for expensive rail?

As Wilt’s book makes clear, poor public transit is a political choice. We can’t afford not to implement public transit right, and right away.

—Kristine Kowalchuk is an instructor at NAIT and a co-founder of Edmontonians for Responsible Urban Public Transit (ERUPT).

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In those first months, geography mattered most of all. On December 31, 2019, China reported a cluster of cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei province. The illness didn’t have a formal name or a treatment or a known cause, only an epicentre. The first dozens of known cases occurred in the same region. Over the next few weeks, reports of patients with similar conditions began to pop up around the world, often tied to travellers from Wuhan: in Japan, South Korea and Thailand. On January 20, 2020, physicians in the US reported a confirmed case in a 35-year-old man who had presented to an urgent care clinic in Washington state with a four-day history of cough and subjective fever and a history of recent travel to Wuhan. Public health officials in Canada reported this country’s first presumptive case on January 25, 2020, a man in his 50s who’d flown home to Toronto from Wuhan three days earlier. He’d experienced mild symptoms on the flight.

By March, another certainty: How governments responded to this infectious illness would make a difference in slowing its spread and saving lives. Those that acted quickly—by initiating lockdown, shoring up health systems and gathering testing kits and personal protective equipment—buffered their population against COVID-19. Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, went into lockdown by mid-March, while, in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson stuck to a wait-and-see approach until March 23, when high infection rates made lockdown imperative. Two months later, about 44,000 residents in the UK had died from COVID, compared to 8,500 residents of Germany—or more than five times as many, despite Germany’s larger population.

Today, the virus is still making its way around the globe, including here in Canada. It’s doing so by exploiting the vulnerabilities that always put people at higher risk for disease and early death, disproportionately affecting those who are older but also who are poorer, marginalized or employed as essential workers.

There are ways to slow pandemics—and there are ways to blunt their impact in the first place. Over the first half of 2020, the pandemic illustrated in real time what public health experts have argued for decades: Government policies, even those seemingly unrelated to health, are a matter of life and death.

A government creates a resilient society by investing in things other than just health—making sure people aren’t poor, are educated, have housing.” DR. JIA HU, CALGARY MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH

According to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, only 25 per cent of population health is determined by the healthcare system—things like doctors and medications and hospitals. About 15 per cent is determined by a person’s biology and genetics; another 10 per cent by one’s physical environment, including pollution, water quality and civic infrastructure.

That still leaves half, which portion is driven by a person’s social and economic environments: early childhood development, education, social inclusiveness, the social safety net, gender and racial equality, employment, income, housing, access to safe and nutritious food. These social determinants of health are conditions people have little control over—where they are born, grow up, live, work and age—and they’re much more important in health outcomes than many of the lifestyle choices we make every day.

Most major maladies, including heart disease and mental illness, parallel the social gradient: People in the lowest socioeconomic groups have the highest rate of illness, even in a country with publicly funded healthcare. The poor are more likely to have unmet health needs, suggesting they have difficulty accessing the public health system, and they’re more likely to suffer from cancer, chronic illnesses and diseases affecting the heart. When someone is born into poverty in Canada, they’re at increased risk for disease and addiction throughout their lifetime.

Chronic illnesses weren’t always so closely tied to poverty. In fact, midway through the 20th century, heart disease and diabetes were diseases of affluence—most common among the wealthiest quartile of society, and decreasing incrementally thereafter. The poor suffered ill health, certainly. Tuberculosis, for one, struck much more frequently among less privileged populations. Cancer had no consistent trend, because the disease was generally evenly spread across socioeconomic groups. But by 1991–1993 the pattern had changed: Heart disease and diabetes, along with cancer and tuberculosis, were now more prevalent, and dramatically so, among the lowest income quartile of society. These findings are based on data from the UK, where, as in Canada, a public health system delivers healthcare regardless of ability to pay. But the system did not equalize health outcomes: Wealth also means health.

This is true too for COVID-19, an infection that, early on, was said to select victims indiscriminately. In the late spring of 2020 Canada’s top health policy researchers gathered—virtually—for the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Health Services and Policy Research. Dr. Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, Canada Research Chair in policies and health inequalities at McGill University, showed that, within a space of a few months, COVID-19 shifted from a disease of affluence to one of deprivation. People with lower incomes, more-vulnerable housing and less-lucrative employment were disproportionately affected.

Across Canada, COVID-19 started with travellers. In Montreal it initiated with Quebeckers returning home from spring break; many, like Quesnel-Vallée and family, had visited Europe and returned to their homes in high-income areas in the city centre. The first known case of COVID-19 in Montreal was reported February 27 in a woman who had recently returned from Iran. Over the next two weeks, cases appeared in more affluent neighbourhoods in the city. But as time passed, even with lockdown in place, COVID-19 surged and spread into high-density, low-income areas—a pattern that suggests people who do not have the space to physically distance or the luxury to work from home were defenceless against the novel virus.

“Physical distancing is a privilege,” said Quesnel-Vallée. “[COVID] is playing out along those social determinants in a way that wasn’t seen before in the extent of the spread and the speed of the spread.”

The same pattern repeated in Alberta. The province had its first presumptive case on March 5, a Calgary-area woman in her 50s who had been a passenger on the Grand Princess cruise ship. The next few cases were also travellers: an Edmonton man on the same cruise ship and a man who had travelled to the US for work. By March 24, Calgary’s northwest zone was hardest hit, with 29 cases, while the densely populated centre had only two. Six weeks later the picture looked dramatically different, with outbreaks in high-density residential areas, long-term care homes and poorer, rural areas. More than 1,500 cases and three fatalities were eventually linked to Cargill Inc.’s meat processing plant in High River. Twenty-three long-term care facilities and supportive living sites also had outbreaks.

By mid-July the Alberta regions with the highest per capita rates of COVID-19 were the lowest-income areas of the province. In Calgary the upper northeast quadrant had the highest incidence, with 41.7 active cases per 100,000 population. Here, according to Alberta Health Services data, 24 per cent of residents are sometimes or often worried about running out of food before they can afford to buy more, 28 per cent are immigrants and the average family income is roughly $30,000 below the provincial average. An outbreak arose in the County of Warner, just north of the US border, with 347.9 cases per 100,000. There, the average family income is some $34,000 less than the provincial average. Clear Hills County, in the province’s northwest, had 133.4 cases per 100,000, and 13 per cent of its residents are low-income. These data provide a limited perspective because they reflect outbreaks at a moment in time and, in rural communities, a smaller population. But they demonstrate the path that an infectious illness took throughout the province.

Calgary medical officer of health Dr. Jia Hu confirmed that social determinants are playing out in real time over the pandemic. “Usually it takes years, decades even, but here it took months,” he says. After the outbreak at Cargill, contact tracing helped unveil the factors contributing to the rapid spread of the virus: carpooling, low health literacy, crowded housing, people who kept working despite symptoms, due to fear of unemployment or need for income.

 “If you really want to deal with an outbreak, you need a resilient society,” says Dr. Hu. “A government creates a resilient society by investing in things other than just health—making sure people aren’t poor, are educated, have housing. You need that in addition to the acute response.”

People in homelessness often have really complex health issues. And if we think that isn’t a public health issue, then we’re mistaken.” KATRINA MILANEY, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY SOCIOLOGIST

What might this look like? If, for example, physical distancing from other people is the best prescription for protection from the novel coronavirus, housing must be part of our government’s health strategy. From early March, staff at homeless shelters across Calgary tried to reduce risk for clients. At Alpha House, staff asked clients to sleep in a head-to-foot configuration in an attempt to get more space between faces during a cold snap in March. Shelters began screening clients by checking their temperatures and requiring anyone entering to sanitize their hands. The Telus Convention Centre was turned into an emergency shelter with capacity for 350 people to sleep, and a hotel was reopened for people who needed somewhere to isolate. Even so, at least two-dozen people at Calgary shelters tested positive for COVID before the end of spring.

“If you look at people who have no home, they are automatically at a really strong disadvantage,” says Dr. Hu. “They are told to self-isolate and to wash their hands, wear a mask. Where do you wash your hands if you don’t have access to a bathroom And how do you self-isolate if you don’t have a home to self-isolate in?”

Katrina Milaney, a sociologist at the University of Calgary, says homelessness puts people at risk for many diseases but also stems from poor health. Illness hinders a person’s ability to make the kind of living that can pay for safe, spacious housing. The result is a population doubly susceptible to COVID-19: They’ve no place to isolate but are especially vulnerable to severe illness and death from this infection. “People in homelessness often have really complex health issues, chronic physical and complex mental health issues,” Milaney says. “And if we think that isn’t a public health issue, then we’re mistaken.”

She is concerned that a worsening economic crisis will drive more people into homelessness. “We need a spectrum of affordable housing options for everyone that needs them. That would be really good public health policy, and we’d see a decrease in strain on emergency services and healthcare.”

Likewise, the physical spaces around us directly affect our health all the time. Unsafe water and lack of hygiene facilities—a problem especially for Canada’s Indigenous communities—contribute to diarrheal disease. Polluted air and second-hand tobacco smoke cause cancers. Lack of open, green and public spaces worsens mental health.

Indeed, COVID demonstrated that people need green spaces where they can go without overcrowding. This is especially important in neighbourhoods where people live in tight quarters or multi-family dwellings without private yards. They need space to recreate. In Calgary the City closed several roads or lanes to cars to generate more safe space for walkers, runners and cyclists who had been packed onto pathways—an indication that the existing system isn’t enough.

“Some neighbourhoods have no local green spaces, parks or easy ways to get around on foot,” says Dr. Raj Bhardwaj, a family and urgent care physician in Calgary. “That affects people’s health directly during the pandemic, but when you look at the mental and physical health benefits, outside of the pandemic as well.”

Dr. Roman Pabayo, a social epidemiologist at the University of Alberta, says inequality has contributed to worse outcomes during the pandemic. He pointed to three ways that inequality leaves a population vulnerable to COVID-19.

First, inequality erodes social cohesion. “Social cohesion is like the trust and glue that keeps members of society together, leads us to care and to have compassion for each other,” he says. Cohesion matters when social distancing is the recommended prescription for a viral outbreak. The success of this treatment depends on the commitment of the population to faithfully adhere to what is a mentally, physically, emotionally and economically exhausting plan. Inequality makes it difficult for a community to share a sense of common fate. Social psychology research has shown that the sustained effectiveness of public health measures depends on a population’s willingness to make changes and sacrifices, but this momentum of solidarity slows in the presence of inequality. That makes it difficult to convince people of the value of an act such as mask-wearing to keep others safe. 

Second, says Pabayo, in more unequal societies the population is less likely to support social programs to protect the most vulnerable—thereby narrowing the buffers for people already at greater risk of getting and dying from the novel coronavirus.

And finally, inequality alone contributes to worse health outcomes. A 2019 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that as income inequality increases, so does the rate of cardiovascular-related deaths and hospitalizations. Income inequality is associated with higher infant deaths and reduced healthy life expectancy. In the US, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, life expectancy is shorter than in less affluent but more equitable places. Inequality adds fuel to mental health problems. In more unequal societies, people compare themselves to each other, resulting in anxiety and depression. Societies with greater inequality have lower levels of interpersonal trust and greater class conflict.

[Inequality erodes] social cohesion, the trust and glue that keeps members of society together, leads us to care and to have compassion for each other.” ROMAN PABAYO, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA SOCIAL EPIDEMIOLOGIST

The pandemic has magnified existing inequalities. In June, Statistics Canada reported that income inequality across Canada is likely to worsen with COVID-19, as work interruptions related to the pandemic fall disproportionately on financially vulnerable families. Social divides deepened; in July, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, said she had received reports that some Siksika Nation members were discriminated against at local businesses because of COVID-19 cases in the community. Hinshaw also noted earlier reports that Albertans of Chinese or other ethnic heritage and some religious groups were also singled out and discriminated against. “All Albertans of every heritage deserve better than that,” she said.

Government affects the social determinants of health, notes Dr. Lindsay McLaren, the senior editor of the Canadian Journal of Public Health and a professor at the University of Calgary’s O’Brien Institute for Public Health. They have levers to reduce poverty, for example. The fed and provinces long ago set up programs to support low-income families, including child tax benefits and a minimum wage. But these measures have not gone far enough to reduce income inequalities. Taking inflation into account, minimum wage in Canada peaked in 1976, at just over $11 an hour, according to Statistics Canada. In 2017 economists with the Institute for Research on Public Policy found that inequality had increased significantly in Canada since the early 1980s, although the situation stabilized after 2000, mainly as a result of a resource boom. The largest increases in inequality occurred in Ontario, BC and Alberta.

During the pandemic, governments announced additional income assistance programs for people in need, notably the federal Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) to support workers who lost income as a result of COVID-19. Federal and provincial governments mobilized large amounts of money in a very short time to support citizens during the pandemic, says Dr. McLaren. “It was just to allow people to survive this time, to pay their rent and to pay their bills. That’s all part of public health.” She wants more supports such as CERB throughout the pandemic and after.

Dr. Mike Paulden, a health economist and assistant professor of public health at the University of Alberta, says the people who stand to benefit most from greater public health measures and social programs are marginalized populations. But these people don’t often look like the people who make policy, he says, and so “they get less attention. When we spend new money on a new technology, drug, diagnostic or whatever it is, those who stand to benefit from it are much
more identifiable.”

Is an ounce of prevention really worth a pound of cure One large study from the University of York in the UK found that spending on public health improves overall health even more than spending on health systems does. The authors said that moving resources from the National Health System into public health initiatives—for example, creating more public housing—would be likely to improve overall health outcomes.

No similar study has been done in Canada to look at overall public health spending. And politicians aren’t always swayed by the cost-effectiveness of individual public health measures. A 2010 economic analysis of Vancouver’s Insite supervised injection facility demonstrated that, based on conservative estimates, the site prevented 35 new cases of HIV and almost three deaths per year—a societal benefit in excess of $6-million annually. A recent study from the University of Calgary’s Dr. Jennifer Jackson showed that supervised consumption sites have saved Alberta nearly $2.3-million in reduced ambulance and ER costs. These are the kind of savings “health economists would regard as a kind of no brainer,” says Dr. Paulden. But supervised consumption sites remain controversial here.

And when it comes to government spending on social programs that improve determinants of health, again the people most likely to benefit are those with the lowest incomes, who are often those with the worst health. But governments rarely prioritize social spending. A 2018 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported that, based on data from provincial reports from 1981 to 2011, a one-cent increase in social spending per dollar spent on health was associated with an 0.1 per cent decrease in potentially avoidable mortality and a 0.01 per cent increase in life expectancy.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Daniel Dutton, an assistant professor of community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie, says social assistance spending makes a real difference to individuals at highest risk of deep poverty. He worries that the people we already overlook will “be completely ignored as COVID sucks up all our available attention.” So far, governments have put more importance on the reopening of bars and golf courses than on handling problems most relevant to the other end of the income spectrum, he says. “I hope COVID causes us to critically reassess how we structure supports for those in society who are extremely vulnerable or whom we rely upon for critical services, such as grocery store employees,” he says.

 This pandemic shows no signs of waning. The main tools of protection remain the same as back in March 2020. Wash your hands, yes. Don’t touch your face, certainly. Wear a mask. But ultimately your risk for getting COVID-19 has a lot to do with things outside your control.

All Albertans of every heritage deserve better than being singled out or discriminated against.” DR. DEENA HINSHAW, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH

COVID-19 is a political challenge as much as a scientific one. The same was true with the early years of the AIDS epidemic, says the U of A’s Dr. Pabayo. Government officials repeatedly ignored alerts from physicians about a new kind of illness, a kind of Kaposi’s sarcoma with unusual features that was affecting, initially, young gay men or intravenous drug users. These warnings were dismissed. If governments around the world had listened to public health experts, especially in the US, where 1,292 people had died by the end of 1983, far fewer people would have succumbed to AIDS, Pabayo believes.

The same principle is at play in any public health crisis, he says. “A virus is not political, but the environment in which a virus takes hold is political.” 

The post The Pandemic and Public Health appeared first on Alberta Views.

Parks Canada didn’t even have to try to meet the growth target. Tourism in Banff National Park alone grew by more than 30 per cent between 2010 and 2017.

As if that massive increase didn’t strain already overcrowded parks enough, the federal government made entry to all of our national parks free in 2017. Banff and Jasper—with their gate revenues erased—had to establish new temporary parking lots, rent buses to move people around, hire extra staff to direct traffic, and cope with a spike in wildlife conflicts from naive new visitors. A lot of Canadians simply avoided the mess.

People like simple ideas and sharp contrasts. That’s why, for most of our national parks’ 134-year history, media coverage has framed the core conundrum facing the parks as “balance.” It’s easier to think in binary terms about a simple conflict between use and protection than to dig deeper into why traffic jams—rather than the peaceful enjoyment of nature—increasingly define the park experience.

I had coffee with a former colleague the other day. She told me the discussion in the mountain national parks now is not how to grow tourism but how to cope with massive overcrowding. They are even asking the Walt Disney Company for ideas.

Here’s an idea: Do only what you’re mandated to do. The Canada National Parks Act establishes the core mandate for the places we consider most special. The dedication clause in that law has not changed since 1930 in spite of numerous other changes to the law that gives our parks their existence. That’s no accident; it defines what Canadians want their parks to be.

“The national parks of Canada are hereby dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment… and the parks shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

That clause makes no reference to tourism. Our national parks are dedicated only to Canadians—not to visitors from the US, Germany, Japan, Korea or Great Britain. Yet Canada flogs its parks to the world as tourism destinations. Politicians and parkocrats alike boast about their role in helping Canada’s balance of trade. Mass tourism may frivolously generate millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases and create traffic gridlock in once-peaceful parks, but that’s okay because each tourist leaves a whack of foreign dollars behind—new dollars, compared to the recycled ones Canadians spend.

Parks Canada is today almost entirely captive to the tourism industry. Environmental groups warn against turning our national parks into versions of Disneyland.

The powerful influence wielded by tourism operators offers more evidence of how bad this mandate creep has become. When Rocky Mountains Park (now Banff) was first established, the government decided that the private sector should provide basic services—lodgings, food, recreational gear—to the Canadians who were expected to visit their new park. So, although national parks were meant to remain in the public domain, government made carefully limited provision for businesses to lease property and sell services that visitors would need. It was a pragmatic compromise meant to support—not supplant—the park’s core mandate.

Banff today has tattoo parlours, cannabis shops, high-end fashion outlets, bulk mail contractors and jewellery stores—hardly the kinds of essential services Canadians need in order to benefit from, be educated about and enjoy our natural heritage.

Passage of the Parks Canada Agency Act in 1998 helped lock in the shift from inviting Canadians to experience nature to making money from tourism. Meant to buffer Parks Canada from political interference, the new law also made the agency reliant on visitor fees. In effect, it codified a new, unofficial mandate: processing credit cards. Instead of riding the brake pedal on profit-hungry businesses, Parks Canada became one.

Parks Canada is today almost entirely captive to the tourism industry. Environmental groups warn against turning our national parks into versions of Disneyland. Ironic, then, that park bureaucrats are now consulting with Disney for advice on how to cope with mobs of foreign tourists.

The solution to this mess is not better tourism management; Canada’s national parks were never meant for tourists. If there even is a solution, it has to start with acknowledging that our national parks have no legal mandate for international tourism. They exist solely to help Canadians better know, love and protect our nation’s natural heritage.

Kevin Van Tighem’s latest book, Our Place: Changing the Nature of Alberta, was released in spring 2017 by RMB.

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