The Police Get an Ally atop Alberta’s Public Service

Dale McFee, chief of the Edmonton Police Service, will soon take over as Alberta’s chief bureaucop — pardon me, bureaucrat — Premier Danielle Smith announced Friday, surprising absolutely no one.

McFee will retire as Edmonton’s chief constable on Feb. 21. He will take over as the deputy minister of the executive council — cabinet — three days later.

The chief, Smith said in a short news release, “will bring a fresh perspective to our government’s work and will help us deliver on our priorities for Albertans.”

How fresh McFee’s perspective may be is a legitimate topic of debate, but it’s certainly much the same as the premier’s and her inner circle of political advisers, which no doubt explains much of his appeal to the United Conservative Party.

As such, his looming appointment as the province’s top civil servant illustrates the continuing politicization of the provincial public service under the UCP.

There is good and bad to this new reality. Obviously, it’s unfortunate that the honourable Canadian tradition of a neutral civil service committed to impartially implementing the elected government’s policies is disappearing.

On the other hand, it will make it easier for a new government to make the clean sweep of the top levels of the Alberta public service, required after decades of Conservative rule, that Rachel Notley’s cautious government failed to implement after 2015.

McFee has long been openly aligned with the UCP, often undermining Edmonton city council on such files as how to deal with the city’s growing homeless population, safe supply and testing of potentially toxic drugs and the police department’s huge appetite for tax dollars.

Under McFee’s leadership, the EPS was a key part of the co-ordinated public advocacy program by Alberta police leaders that used tax dollars to support the United Conservative Party’s abstinence only/only abstinence drug policy in the lead-up to the 2023 provincial election.

The advocacy program’s highly effective copaganda contributed meaningfully to the UCP’s re-election.

“I am deeply committed to our province and to driving positive change within our public service,” McFee said in a canned quote in the government’s press release. “I look forward to working with our public service to meet the goals and aspirations of our province.”

Again, whether that’s really his objective might be an appropriate topic for debate, but he can certainly be expected to work with the public service to support the goals and aspirations of the UCP.

Speaking of which, McFee’s next job came open when the previous holder, Ray Gilmour, was named interim CEO of the Alberta Investment Management Corp., better known as AIMCo, when the Smith government fired the Crown pension management corporation’s former CEO and its board of directors in early November.

The new chair of the AIMCo board will be the eminently unqualified former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, another example of the thorough politicization of supposedly neutral public institutions in the service of the UCP and its increasingly open sovereignist agenda.

As chief bureaucop, then, McFee can be expected to play a leading role in the creation of the Alberta provincial police, an idea opposed by most Albertans, if public opinion polling is to be believed, but which the UCP is pressing ahead with determinedly even as it covets the assets of our Canada Pension Plan retirement savings.

Alberta’s constitutionally dubious scheme to set up a border patrol force, also announced Friday by Smith, is a performative part of this effort, although in this case likely mainly intended to try to own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for not responding quickly enough to president-elect Donald Trump’s false claims that illegal migrants and drugs are flooding into the United States from Canada.

I ask you, do we really need to spend nearly $30 million to pay a few Alberta sheriffs to run around just north of the U.S. boundary with military assault weapons?

One shudders to think what the U.S. Border Patrol might do if these clowns accidentally drove across the world’s longest undefended border into militia country, also known as Montana!