Licence to shill
The all-in-one government-issued identification is rolling out July 2, which will include a citizenship marker and our Alberta Healthcare Number. It’s also removing the dinosaur and replacing it with a pump jack. Because why would we want to showcase something that Alberta is celebrated for far outside our borders when we can be constantly reminded that oil and gas companies keep stiffing us with their unpaid property tax and environmental liabilities?
Berta.
I haven’t had a health card in decades. I don’t actually hate that it will be on my driver’s licence because it’s one less card I have to worry about. It’s too bad that isn’t why the UCP decided to include it.
Everyone who is born in, or resides in the province for more than three months is eligible for Alberta health. That number was attached to us even if we moved away. Even if, after we move, we get a new healthcare number in a different province, as would be required when we obtained residency in a new province. If we returned to Alberta, our healthcare number would be the same as it always was.
That reality stumped someone in the UCP brain trust who decided a massive conspiracy must be afoot. Their solution is to require a renewal of one’s healthcare number, and attaching it to a government issued identification that expires regularly is an easy way to do that. It will put added pressure on long-term care facilities and hospitals, who will now be responsible for ensuring identification is renewed in order to get paid.
As it happens, when my nana went into hospital in 2024, a week before she turned 93 in August., it was also a year her ID expired. She did not come back home, moving from hospital to hospice, and passed away mid-October. The Alberta government says that if you don’t renew your healthcare number, you could be liable for healthcare charges. That’s a load of BS, by the way— the provincial government is responsible for providing healthcare coverage. However, it certainly doesn’t mean that they can’t make someone’s life very difficult if the above situation were to occur (and it probably will). Hopefully hospital, hospice, and long-term care providers are considering how to renew government-issued identification/healthcare when the person they need to renew it for is unable to do it on their own.
Then we have the citizenship marker. This is also based on ridiculous claims of voter fraud but the UCP decided to create a narrative that Alberta is being taken advantage of by people who move here to work and then dare put their children in school or see a doctor.
I’ve said it before; it doesn’t matter if they’re Canadians coming from another province or people coming from another country— if they didn’t live in Alberta before, they have not contributed to public service costs here. Alberta’s public services are repaid, even by people who were born here, and they always have been.
The Premier wants to be able to withhold services from “unapproved” immigrants. Technically, the Premier wants Albertans to vote to allow her to withhold services so she can say “Albertans want to take these services away from temporary foreign workers and businesses will have to find a way to charm me, or my ministers, or my staffers into granting special approval to access services their taxes pay for.”
Does that make them sound too corrupt? Or just corrupt enough? I don’t want to lose anyone.
The reason I don’t buy this narrative is because people who are in Canada temporarily already have limited access to services. While I’m sure there are others, I’ll offer the ones I have experience with; income support and career and employment services. Funded by the government of either Alberta or Canada, these services are provided based on eligibility determined by the individual’s social insurance number, not their citizenship, because permanent residents have different access, which a citizenship marker cannot distinguish.
Feeling like the UCP is not telling us the truth about why they want this power is just one of the reasons I’ll be voting “no” to the nine.
Albertans should be voting this fall but not in a referendum
I enjoy some back and forth on the socials, even with people I disagree with (providing it’s civil and mostly connected to reality). I take it as an exercise in the Socratic method; questions that sharpen my own argument by forcing me to confront weak points or further strengthen them. I enjoy it because it often leads me to an “a-ha” moment of clarity, as above.
Why should Danielle Smith and the UCP not be able to withhold public services from people who come to our province to work temporarily? Because businesses also pay into the social safety net and services with their taxes. I’ve argued that they’re far too low in the past— especially since businesses are only ever obligated to pay tax on profit (after subtracting expenses) rather than total income— but even if that is true, their tax goes into general revenue and is used to pay for the same service a Canadian citizen who moves to Alberta from Saskatchewan has access to.
More than that, Albertans should be voting this fall— in a general election.
If Danielle Smith wants support for a sweeping change to government policy, she should campaign on them as if her political future depends on it.
Elections Alberta released an announcement Monday morning stating that it was “launching the largest electoral event worker recruitment campaign in Alberta’s history and one of the largest referendum recruitment efforts ever undertaken in Canada ahead of the province’s upcoming referendum on October 19, 2026.”
With ten ballot questions, Elections Alberta will print 45 million ballots, far exceeding the 1.8 million ballots cast in Alberta’s 2023 provincial general election and the 19.8 million ballots cast in Canada’s 2025 federal general election.
To achieve the 48-hour deadline to complete the unofficial ballot count, a minimum of 60,000 workers will be required.
SIXTY THOUSAND.
Expect Danielle Smith to pat her own back on Alberta’s job numbers in an attempt to “prove” separatist sentiment has no effect on the economy. The Premier may be exceptionally unpredictable in some things, but not everything.
Elections Alberta will be printing a singular ballot for each of the 10 questions, amounting to 45 million ballots, which the UCP has demanded must be counted within 48 hours, by hand (because the UCP banned electronic tabulators).
The total cost of the referendum is estimated to be around $37,000,000. For reference, the 2019 general election only cost $24,417,459 (page 72).
I’m not arguing that we should have a general election because of the cost— though obviously that is the most fiscally conservative option— I’m arguing we should be able to rely on the outcome as “binding”.
The results of these referendum questions are not binding.
I repeat: the results of these referendum questions are not binding.
Danielle Smith and the UCP can sweep it under the rug just like they did dismantling our public health and education in favour of private delivery at greater public costs. The Premier and her caucus can just say they’ll respect Albertan’s votes for a centre-right conservative agenda and implement legislative changes that do the exact opposite. They don’t have to ask our opinion on anything in between elections and they aren’t doing it because they want our opinion now— they’re doing it to avoid campaigning on unpopular policies they want to implement. They’re asking our opinion because they wanted to force a vote on remaining in Canada, and offer a bunch of controversial policy without having to worry about the outcome.
What they won’t do is ask us to put our votes behind the party, and the Premier, who wants to implement them.
Cowards.
Story time
In an effort to find something positive, I was reminded of an analogy that I was playing with over the past couple of weeks. While it was originally in reference to Pete Guthrie, as leader of the Progressive Tory Party, I think it can be applied equally to whichever opposition party you may like who is struggling to find oxygen amidst the UCP’s constant chaos.
That analogy came from the story of the tortoise and the hare.
The UCP has all the confidence that their capture— and subsequent hoarding— of the “conservative” name will preclude Albertans from voting for any other party. It has long been my position that by continuing to keep the “socialist” party on the far left, and acting like a far-right party that has been inhaling far too many fumes from their own press releases but putting on an Academy Award-worthy performance to the contrary, the UCP ensures that self-identifying conservatives will not be able to bring themselves to vote for anyone else.
Of course, their determination to redraw electoral boundaries in an attempt to make it almost impossible for Albertans to ever hold them accountable for their actions speaks to their fears that Albertans are not quite the braindead blue-voting loyalists they want to be able to rely on; but I digress.
Having integrity isn’t much of a headline-grabber in the world today. Scandal-free governments don’t get their name in the paper or lead the six o’clock news. Hard-working government representatives who are just doing their jobs can’t match the social media frenzy around the breathtakingly stupid people who are paid to shitpost and spin a story, offering simple solutions to complex problems or common sense solutions to problems that only exist in their rhetoric.
So, Pete Guthrie’s calm and steady-paced messaging is, like his predecessor Greg Clark, not showing up on many people’s radar. Yet, he is visible, if one goes out of their way to look, delivering reasonable policy options and promises to make government boring again. He’s not spouting toxic political rhetoric, and he’s not offering to believe in conspiracy theories— he’s just saying that our government shouldn’t be corrupt, our tax dollars shouldn’t be wasted, and we should be able to vote for competent people who will keep government running smoothly so that we can get back to our lives.
He is a tortoise, not a hare.
In my NDP-supporting circles, NDP leader Naheed Nenshi does not go uncriticized; neither does the NDP itself. Mr. Nenshi has been criticized for not being louder, or jumping into a topic faster, or hammering a winning message more steadily. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he can also be considered a tortoise.
And so I’d like to leave you with the reminder that the hare, for all its advantages and confidence, was really just running on the fumes after all that smoke was blown up its little hare butt. It had no fear of losing and got lazy. It wasn’t motivated to prove itself worthy because it felt it had no real competition.
If the UCP isn’t already— miraculously, considering its brief lifespan— that smoke-powered, bloviating, egomaniacal hare… it’s well on its way; simply by stacking the deck to eliminate all of its potential competition.
They’re going to use every advantage so they don’t have to work as hard. I can only hope that they end up sleeping through the race they needed to win, too.
Final thoughts
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Ask not what Mrs David Smith Moretta has done for us. Rather ask and acknowledge what she has done to us.
Now 11 separate ballots, one for each question. Hopefully colour coded and each into a separate box. I'd have to work really hard to create a cluster fuck bigger than this!
Vote in an advance poll or pack a lunch folks!