For an interview with UCP-friendly Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell for his May 31, 2024, column, premier Danielle Smith proclaimed herself likely “the most freedom-loving politician we ever had in this country.” The context in which she said it, however, suggests that her conception of freedom is quite flexible. Smith spent the spring 2024 legislative session entrenching provincial power over municipal governments. Her approach earned her stinging criticism from people who study authoritarianism, as well as from municipal leaders—urban and rural alike.
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.
____________________________________________
