Social media, over the past 18 years, has created a new, and troubling, dynamic. Random accounts, run by actual voters— or third or opposition parties, governments (even foreign governments) paying for bots— that spew nonsense online yet are elevated in importance for clicks and likes, have done an incredible disservice to our political, and societal, landscapes. They also provide an opportunity for elected officials (and party supporters) to use the most ridiculous of criticisms from supposed supporters of “the other side” to discount all criticism as if they were equal.
With politicians, it’s difficult to tell if they know the difference and are simply acting in bad faith because it benefits them, or if they really don’t comprehend the difference at all. Neither is actually better than the other.
Listening to an interview Danielle Smith gave on December 11, I was left wondering if conservatives have given up entirely on being accountable. I also highly recommend Markham Hislop’s excellent summation. As the Premier listed off the values she, as a “libertarian”, shares with conservatives, she mentioned individual rights, family, faith, community, free enterprise, and philanthropy. Personal responsibility got a passing mention later on, but from a person who blames absolutely anyone else for any criticism, I’m not even really counting it.
During the interview— with a person who at some points just seems like he’s trying to find out how he can run into her after work; it’s kind of creepy— Danielle Smith said she felt public services would be better if outsourced to private industry, not-for-profits, and charities. All I could think of is that it’s the ultimate relief from government accountability.
If the private schools don’t have space for kids, it’s not the government’s fault. If the chartered surgical facilities can’t do more surgeries, it’s not the government’s fault. If the AHS procurement manager’s private procurement guy loses $49 million, it’s not the government’s fault.
Removing accountability from the government, for the provision of public services, is not a conservative vision; it’s just passing the buck.
Discounting ten-fold
The Premier also said that she learned she was very comfortable with conflict from personality tests the Canadian Federation of Independent Business gave their employees (and that seems like a rabbit hole I am not qualified to head into). She said that while some people have to get ten compliments to counter one criticism but because she looks “for the good in everything” when she hears criticism, she said she “discounts it ten-fold”. It’s an incredible admission for a person who is the leader of a province where almost 50 per cent of voters chose not to support her party.
That level of confidence might seem enviable on the surface but it reveals something much more important; she’s out of touch. Someone who discounts criticism to the extent that she claims isn’t really listening. It also helps make sense of the fact that she didn’t seem fazed by getting booed at her own convention; she’s also out of touch with what the UCP membership is demanding of her.
It’s now much less surprising that she heard the concerns of her former Infrastructure Minister and pooh-poohed them (and Markham’s piece will give an idea as to how she convinced cabinet not to take his concerns seriously).
It helps explain why she made the deer in the headlights face when she was asked if she was getting kickbacks from what is alleged to be massive fraud in AHS. She heard the criticism, she just discounted it ten-fold and didn’t think that anyone else might care that one Edmonton business person, the same one who ended up in the Skybox with her in Vancouver, also benefitted from almost a billion dollars in public contracts.
It explains how she thought she was getting away with continuing to send contracts his way right up until the most recent installment of the Globe and Mail’s expose on the abuse of public funds disclosed her meeting with Mr. Mraiche and the AHS procurement official while she was still a UCP leadership candidate.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it took ten months. Ten months of reporting, questions, and deflections, before finally getting through to her that the jig was up and the government had to act.
There’s still no accountability, however. When Matt Jones, one of the four health ministers, said they had cancelled two chartered surgical facility contracts with whom one of Mr. Mraiche’s many companies was tied, he shrugged off the suggestion that it was anything important. It was just time to review the contracts, they said.
I’ll be the first to defend a government’s ability to actually govern, in terms of doing things they didn’t campaign on, because a government cannot be hampered by their platform when facing unexpected circumstances. Jason Kenney, for example, had an unprecedented pandemic to deal with. It’s true he had not campaigned on vaccine mandates, or “lockdowns”, but no one wanted to be the unlucky government who had to deal with that.
It’s not, however, what Danielle Smith and the UCP are doing. They are not faced with unexpected requirements in need of managing as a government, they are explicitly making changes they claimed they weren’t going to implement. It’s not the same.
I empathized with the former Premier’s predicament when he so earnestly appealed to Albertans’ strong affinity for “personal responsibility” to get vaccinated so he wouldn’t have to bring in mandates. It’s just one of the many reasons I scoff at libertarianism; the utopia of everyone doing the reasonable thing so that government is unnecessary will never exist.
From warning labels to regulations and the law, there is ample evidence that while most people will do the reasonable thing, there will always be those whose actions necessitate intervention to protect everyone else… like Tweedles Dum and Dummer in Alberta’s Ministries of Energy and Minerals, and Environment and Protected Areas.
Trying to pull the coal over their eyes
Ever since Premier Jason Kenney and Energy Minister Sonya Savage first repealed the 1976 coal policy in 2020, there’s been a fight in the conservative heartland of Alberta; which has made things really awkward for the UCP. Mr. Kenney reinstated the former policy, and paused new development to engage in public consultation, but critics remained.
Some consultations took place, while others said there was a “deplorable lack”, and a joint review panel was tasked with providing environmental and scientific (not just opinion) analysis within the region. Then, in December of 2024, the UCP decided to try again, this time with the announcement of a “modernized coal policy”, followed by the UCP lifting the ‘moratorium’ a few weeks later.
Energy Minister Brian Jean claimed— with embarrassing regularity since his announcement just before Christmas 2024— that technology existed to be able to keep selenium from coal mining from seeping into nearby waters. He also claimed the UCP wasn’t going to allow “new” open pit mines, but wanted Albertans to consider the operation they wanted to allow to mine as “old”. Yet no matter how much he twisted the facts to meet the narrative he was trying to sell, local farmers, ranchers, and people who lived downstream just weren’t buying it.
His sidekick, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas Rebecca Schulz (who doubles as a stand-in supporter of fossil fuel development if Mr. Jean is not speaking), often appeared with the Minister of Energy to legitimize his tale.
UCP MLA Chelsea Petrovic, who had a weekly coffee meet up in her southern Alberta riding of Livingstone-MacLeod was forced to cancel them after the government withdrew the moratorium because her constituents were angry. Ms. Petrovic stated the events were meant to connect her with constituents and she didn’t like how they were choosing to connect with her, basically. A few weeks later, Rob Morgan, former president and CEO of Strathcona Resources and lobbyist for Explorers and Producers Association Canada, replaced outgoing President and CEO Laurie Pushor at the Alberta Energy Regulator.
Northback then applied for new exploration permits in May, which were approved.
Premier Smith chaired a town hall along with Ms. Petrovic, Ms. Schulz, and Mr. Jean in June to try and sell her brand of “listening” that works much better with people who don’t think the UCP’s policies affect them.
The people in attendance at the town hall in Fort MacLeod not only couldn’t be dismissed as “left-wing” but they also weren’t willing to risk their lives and livelihoods for whatever promises the Premier and her Cabinet had made to a foreign mining company.
Things were quieter over the summer as Benga/Northback Mines wound its way through appeals. Finally, on October, 2, the last rejection was received; however, they’d already moved on to their new exploration five months earlier.
Singer Corb Lund decided he’d had enough of the back and forth and applied for a citizen-led petition to put an end to the question of whether mining should continue on the eastern slopes. It was approved by Elections Alberta on December 8.
“I get a lot of flak about being a celebrity or whatever, and I should shut up and sing. And it’s like, well, I drink that water — like, I drink the water out of the Oldman River,” Lund said in a phone interview from Las Vegas, where he has been performing.
“My animals drink the water, my mother drinks the water. So I’m not a guy flying in from L.A. on a private jet. I am a sixth generation rural Albertan, and I’m just trying to keep the water clean.”
Mr. Lund has to reapply after the UCP’s Bill 14, legislation that ended all citizen-led initiatives that were not currently collecting signatures, received Royal Assent days later on December 11.
Though many were saying that the Minister of Energy, and the Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, and the Premier, were lying through their teeth about magical new processes that removed toxic levels of chemicals released from mining into the water, according to a December 15 article from the Narwhal, the Alberta government had been trying to stop a report co-authored by one of its own scientists on unsafe selenium levels still in the water from mines in various stages of “reclamation” from being published.
According to the other co-author— who is no longer subject to political interference from the Government of Alberta— said he would publish it himself if things didn’t get moving.
“I suggest you inform the [assistant deputy minister] and chief scientist that I simply don’t accept that they are refusing to permit the publication of our manuscript, and that they should remind themselves of their legal duties, as stipulated by the Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act,” Donahue wrote in the email, which he shared with The Narwhal.
He said senior officials should be asking themselves, “What is worse, the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems, or the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems and that we’ve returned to muzzling our scientists in an attempt to cover it up while the government tries to convince Albertans that coal mining is environmentally benign?”
This has been ongoing for five of the six years the UCP has been in government.
Ministers have been lying to Albertans. Premiers have been lying to Albertans. The President and CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator is, like the Premier herself, a former fossil fuel lobbyist. Northback has a new plan to bring economic benefits to a small town.
There seems to be no one in the Alberta government who would be willing to hold a mining company to account if they did poison water. There’s no one in the UCP caucus willing to hold their colleagues to account, and there’s certainly no one left in caucus who will hold the Premier to account.
The question, then, is who?
It’s one thing to say that the UCP does or does not listen to concerns from those who disagree with them on most things; like, say, progressives, or progressive conservatives, or conservationists, doctors, scientists… or just anyone who isn’t gleefully clapping at everything they say; I know I’ve come to expect that from the UCP. It’s quite another for them to try and find ways around their own voters to do what they want and that’s exactly what they’re doing with their coal mining agenda.
Those ranchers and farmers, and townies in southern Alberta are their voters. I don’t believe for a second that only people who didn’t vote UCP care about the water supply in rural Alberta.
I find it confounding that after fighting rural Alberta for five years, they replaced the AER CEO with a fossil fuel lobbyist. I doubt it’s coincidental that Northback applied for new permits months before even getting a final decision on their old ones. And while it originally seemed like Corb Lund’s petition was just caught up in the UCP trying to override the courts on the separatist’s question, maybe it wasn’t an unintended consequence at all.
I think it’s highly concerning that the governing party has gone to the lengths it has while still having two more years left with a majority government. Mostly, however, it’s concerning that they aren’t even listening to people who should be able to get through to them; their voters and supporters in rural Alberta.
If they don’t have any sway with the UCP, then I think it’s important to ask who does.
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Wake up everyone! This is Trumpism to the “T”. Lie, deny, blame others, push coal, undermine institutions, etc, etc.
I remain lost for words on how an entire caucus can be so afraid of the Premier that they've lost the ethics, integrity and principles they ran on in the last election.