Albertans: Brace Yourselves for More UCP Attacks in 2024

The Alberta commentariat was asked: What can we expect from the United Conservative Party in 2024?

The Alberta commentariat has answered: More of the same!

Here are a couple of examples:

“2023: a roller-coaster for Danielle Smith and Alberta politics, with no signs 2024 will be any different.” — Don Braid, the unquestioned dean of Alberta political commentators

“To get an idea of what Alberta politics will look like in 2024, you don’t need a crystal ball. A rear-view mirror will do.” — Graham Thomson, the other unquestioned dean of Alberta political commentators

Can’t say I disagree very much with this assessment myself, with a couple of caveats.

First, there will be more of the same, all right. A lot more!

Like any grifter who has enjoyed a modest success with a scam, the Danielle Smith government is likely to double down on what appears to have worked for it in 2023 and do more of it in 2024.

So, for starters, don’t expect the effort to grab your Canada Pension Plan savings to go away, even if Conservative leaders in other provinces like Ontario’s Doug Ford and New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs don’t like it, never mind Albertans. (If you haven’t figured out by now that Albertans’ opinions don’t count for much with the UCP government unless they’re the same as Smith’s opinions, you haven’t been paying enough attention.)

Even if Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister and decides he doesn’t like it either, it will stay on the agenda.

Second, a number of truly terrible ideas talked about largely behind closed doors, but occasionally in public — as in the separatist Free Alberta Strategy co-authored by Rob Anderson, Smith’s office manager and Svengali, and the UCP’s policy resolutions at its fall annual general meeting — are going to stick around and likely turn into policy as well.

This makes writing the traditional list of predictions for the year ahead both easier and harder than usual for political prognosticators.

Easier, because you really only need to look at the list of bad ideas pushed now by the UCP.

Harder, because if you are or used to be a traditional newspaper columnist, as both Braid and Thomson are, you naturally feel some obligation to provide your readers with thoughtful analysis.

And how does one provide thoughtful analysis when the government’s obvious plan going forward is basically "Same shit, different year"?

Accordingly, in lieu of the traditional analysis, I have merely provided a list of 10 general areas in which we are likely to see more of the same — and I do mean more — in 2024.

I should caution that this is not a top-10 list, with the traditional No. 1 policy positioned at the bottom as a punchline. Indeed, it is not intended to be a joke in any sense.

Many of these trends are interrelated, and which one is the flotsam atop the swamp of UCP policy at any given time will depend on what appears likely to get the best results or the government’s short-term goals at that moment.

Still, we can expect all of these general policy trends to animate the Smith government in 2024:

• Resistance to any form of policy or market change that tends to mitigate global climate change, at least until the energy industry actually moves beyond its efforts to squeeze every last drop of profit from the status quo.
• Refusal to acknowledge the effectiveness of vaccines, and not just vaccines against COVID-19. Hostility and conspiratorial beliefs about vaccines and effective public health measures are a core part of Smith’s personal brand and a prime motivator of the UCP faction that delivered her victories in 2022 and 2023. So University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young is unlikely to see her wish for a working health-care system come true in 2024.
• Determination to drive forward the ideology of privatization, especially in health care. As history has shown in Canada and elsewhere, marketing privatization as a solution to a crumbling and underfunded health-care system is lent credibility by the chaos caused by other policies, such as the refusal to encourage vaccine use. Likewise, the UCP emphasis on coercive drug treatment instead of harm reduction programs can be seen as a deadly form of creeping health-care privatization.
• The Americanization of Alberta policy, and politics — no surprise, one supposes, for a group of politicians trained at the feet of an old Americanizer like Preston Manning. Whether it’s the fetishization of firearms, the slow-motion destruction of public health care and education, the obsession with targeting gay and trans rights, or doing the will of Big Tobacco and Big Oil, we’ve seen it all before south of the Medicine Line. What’s new with the Smith government is its sometimes shocking lack of understanding that the Westminster parliamentary system prevails in Canada. Hence Smith’s apparently genuine surprise that she does not enjoy the powers of a U.S. state governor.
• As per the Free Alberta Strategy, the advancement of “provincial rights” as if they were states’ rights in the American constitutional sense. Look for the war with Ottawa to last as long as the Trudeau government in Ottawa, but maybe longer, now that the UCP has awoken a potentially violent separatist minority in Wild Rose Country.
• Bringing local issues in progressive-leaning cities under direct provincial control. As we have already seen, legislation will be changed in the name of consistency to prevent municipalities from encouraging installation of heat pumps instead of fossil-gas furnaces, and the UCP is willing to fight to prevent Ottawa from giving housing subsidies directly to cities. This is already a trend in U.S. red states.
• Undermining First Nations treaty rights with the goal, one way or another, of eliminating them completely. Given Canada’s Constitution, this will not be an easy task for provincial governments like Alberta’s and Saskatchewan’s, so they will likely push here and there in 2024 but hope that a federal Conservative government can be elected to do their work for them.
• Likewise, undermining union rights through the creation of more U.S.-style anti-union legislation. We know from recent and past UCP policy resolutions that there is a strong lobby within the party for “right-to-work” laws to gut the ability of unions to defend their members. The courts and the Constitution stand in their way, however. Smith would love to be able to use her outrageously unconstitutional Sovereignty Act to circumvent them. But does she dare?
• Growing the role of corporations in drafting legislation to suit their own wishes. I give you RStar, the fossil fuel industry dream policy of having taxpayers pay oil drillers to clean up abandoned wells they have already agreed to clean up, for which Smith herself once worked as a corporate lobbyist. This is also a widespread trend in the United States.
• Inching toward an abortion ban. The UCP, of course, will insist this is nonsense and be quick to point out Smith’s apparently liberal views on the topic. Be that as it may, how can it be otherwise with people like Adriana LaGrange as health minister, Dan Williams as minister of mental health and addictions and David Parker as the leader of the Take Back Alberta faction that controls the UCP board? Their extreme social conservative views are well known. They are in prominent roles for a reason.

Have a happy new year.