Is Steve Bannon Coaching Alberta’s UCP?

“Unaffordable blackout regulations”?

It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Alberta’s United Conservative Party started September by issuing a wildly misleading statement calling the federal government’s proposed 2035 net-zero electricity generation rules “unaffordable blackout regulations.”

This kind of nonsense is the UCP’s schtick, after all. They got it from the Republicans south of the 49th parallel — speaking of which, does anyone remember “death panels” when Obamacare came along? Same garbage, different issue.

Now they’re so deeply into it they’d probably embarrass Steve “Flood the Zone with Shit” Bannon, Donald Trump’s first chief strategist and senior counsel.

What’s disappointing is the central role of Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz in the UCP’s effort to flood the media with BS to stink up the joint. As Bannon famously said, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”

Schulz’s willingness to stoop to these kind of tactics is disappointing because, when she ran for the leadership of the UCP in 2022, she appeared to be one of the more sensible and credible candidates, someone with a little depth, a little decency and a solid critique of the eventual winner, Danielle Smith.

She promised a calmer, more grown-up approach to government. “I hear every day that people are tired of the drama in politics,” she told Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid in July 2022. “I get it. The Twitter wars, the entitlement, the policies that create chaos and division. I don’t have time for that.”

Alas, she was wrong when she said Smith’s approach, which she described as “a car crash waiting to happen,” would get the NDP elected. But she was certainly right when she said Albertans deserve to “actually see some humility [from] a government that can admit when it makes mistakes.”

But I guess she didn’t really mean it when she said she didn’t have time for a government that just stirs things up for the sake of the fight — and, as Bannon advised, the disorientation that intentionally creates.

Schulz promised “compassion and common sense in addition to conservative values.” But that was then. Now she is in the thick of it, delivering division, fake crisis and transparent balderdash that treats Albertans as if we’re all dopes.

Well, I suppose under the circumstances, the UCP is entitled to have reached that conclusion.

Still, it’s disappointing to hear Schulz, of all people, telling us not strictly accurately that “Ottawa’s unaffordable blackout regulations will increase costs and hurt grid reliability for businesses and families, all for targets that aren’t feasible or realistic.”

“In numerous spots, it’s clear that there is room to negotiate specific issues within the proposed regulatory standards,” observed University of Calgary environmental law professor Martin Olszynski, a frequent critic of the government’s environmental policies and claims about the Constitution. “But at the same time the province wants to portray this as an all or nothing proposition.

“‘Unaffordable blackout regulations’ is the 2023 version of the ‘No Pipelines Act,’” he said. “A pretty transparent messaging trick that assumes Canadians and Albertans are stupid.”

Still, even when times are grim and disappointment fills the air, the UCP gives us a chuckle now and then.

“To date, the federal government has provided inconsistent and often misleading information about these flawed regulations,” Schulz huffed, presumably an effort to cast doubt on the feasibility of the goal of the regulations in line with the Alberta government’s policy of always moving the goalposts farther away to ensure we never actually adopt renewable or carbon neutral solutions.

But to say that unironically days after Smith’s stream of excuses and tall tales about her seven-month moratorium on approvals of new renewable-energy electricity projects requires real chutzpah.

Indeed, on Friday, the Globe and Mail reported that the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, contrary to Smith’s story, never passed a motion calling for the freeze.

Like I said, not surprising. But still disappointing.

Ugly Pride flag comparison surfaces in Red Deer

Red Deer Catholic school trustee Monique LaGrange has aroused a fierce controversy by publishing an image of children waving Pride flags under another photo of German children in the 1930s waving swastika flags, with the caption “Brainwashing is brainwashing,” the Red Deer Advocate reported Friday.

The school board issued a statement saying that the board member does not speak on behalf of the board, although she speaks for at least 14.29 per cent of the seven-member board if you want to get technical about it.

Meanwhile, though, it’s interesting to note that this execrable comparison may have been introduced into Alberta by John Carpay, best known nowadays as the lawyer who hired a private eye to tail the chief justice of the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench. (On Aug. 21, Carpay and another lawyer for the so-called Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms were fined $5,000 each and barred from ever again practicing law in the province by the Law Society of Manitoba.)

In November 2018, Carpay was in the news for making making a similar statement to the one posted by LaGrange.

Speaking at a news conference organized by a right-wing video blogging site, he said, “How do we defeat today’s totalitarianism? You’ve got to think about the common characteristics. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hammer and sickle for communism, or whether it’s the swastika for Nazi Germany, or whether it’s a rainbow flag, the underlying thing is a hostility to individual freedoms.”