The UCP Declares War on Bike Lanes and City Councils

Beset by allegations of health care contracting corruption, international coverage of a self-inflicted measles epidemic, anger at municipal political parties nobody wants, increasingly aggressive pushback against their separatist project, and a couple of former caucus members looking for a way to breathe new life into the corpse of the Progressive Conservative Party, Alberta’s United Conservative government would really like to reset the narrative.

What would work to put pro-Canada Albertans on the back foot before they get enough signatures on a petition that would sink Premier Danielle Smith’s separation referendum for five years, convince Edmonton and Calgary voters to dump progressive city councillors in October’s municipal elections, get worried seniors’ minds off the UCP’s disastrous health care policies and unite the party’s restive and radicalized base before the party’s annual general meeting in November?

Attacking trans kids has mostly flopped. Five-minute cities? Pffft! Attacking the Libs in Ottawa has lost its allure as Prime Minister Mark Carney tries to fend off the depredations of Smith’s favourite American politician. Even that hardy perennial, promising a high-speed rail line between Edmonton and Calgary, has lost its lustre now that everyone knows how much the premier’s husband loves choo-choos!

What’s left in the MAGA playbook that might work?

Bicycle lanes!

I mean, seriously, what could be more woke than bike lanes? MAGAnificent!

Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen, who hails from the rural Innisfail-Sylvan Lake riding in Central Alberta, has already put his oar in, complaining about bike lanes in Calgary and threatening to bring in legislation that will ban them.

On Saturday, the UCP turned loose another of their big guns on the issue — Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams, resident of the hamlet of La Crête, population 4,000 and one of the province’s current measles hotspots in northwest Alberta’s Peace River riding.

That means Williams can pretty well say whatever he likes about people in Calgary and Edmonton and the folks they elect, and there’s no risk the voters in his riding might send him back to work at the hamlet’s gravel pit any time soon.

Williams, hitherto best known for his harsh views on abortion rights (he’s against them) and his porn-star moustache, teamed up with Postmedia’s Rick Bell, the UCP’s favoured conduit to the party base, to read the riot act to those woke, progressive city councillors the UCP can’t stand.

“Do your damn job,” Williams ordered them. “If they’re doing their jobs and they’re making decisions that are in the interest of their ratepayers around affordability and safety and creating livable communities then I will let them have as much bandwidth as they need to do that.”

Disagree with him about what needs to be done, though, he threatened, and “I will course-correct them. If you’re trying to do my job and the provincial government’s job you will be put back in your lane.”

Asked to explain what he had in mind by his simpatico interlocutor, he wouldn’t. But we all get the picture, as intended.

The UCP runs an authoritarian government, and they mean to get more authoritarian.

Now, up to here Bell’s column was just about woke stuff generally — do not go declaring a climate emergency, Williams warned, as long as the UCP denies that there is one.

But Williams just couldn’t stop himself from veering into the bike lane.

“Williams mentions a judge ruling Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s plan to remove three Toronto bike lanes unconstitutional,” Bell wrote. “He thinks the court decision is ‘beyond bananas’ and removing bike lanes is for the province to decide.”

Obviously, Williams — like almost everyone commentating on the decision of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling last Wednesday — doesn’t know what the ruling actually said.

Basically, Justice Paul Schabas’s decision says governments have the right to make policy decisions, including removing bike lanes, even if they put people at risk.

But if they put people at risk while demonstrably ignoring the evidence and making patently false claims about what their policy change will achieve, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms may come into play.

And while politicians may not like that, and you can even make a coherent argument that it ought not to be that way, it’s not bananas.

Legal experts say the circumstances in the Ontario case are so unusual and egregious that they won’t establish a precedent and will almost certainly never be repeated elsewhere.

Williams responds: Hold my beer!

In fairness to Ford, hating on bike lanes and public transit is sort of a family tradition. Alert readers will recall how the premier’s late brother, former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, declared upon his election in 2010 that “the war on the car is over!” It wasn’t, but at least it shows that in Ontario this isn’t just a MAGA thing.

Interestingly, Dreeshen’s plans are too much even for some right-wing Postmedia commentators.

After spending a lot of time complaining about bike lanes in Edmonton, columnist Lorne Gunter conceded that the province shouldn’t be meddling with decisions made by city councils. If city voters don’t like them, they should vote for politicians who also don’t like them.

“The UCP government should butt out,” he concluded, qualifying that a little by suggesting the province could refuse provincial funds for bike lanes. They won’t butt out, of course, as long as butting in keeps our minds off the things they’d prefer that we ignore. And they’d really, really like us to all vote for a municipal political party with the UCP stamp of approval in October.