Last week in AB: September 17, 2025

Pieces of the UCP, government insurance, the cost of the UCP, and more

Alberta

The fight for the right is underway

Last week, Danielle Smith had something nice to say, again, about Mark Carney. For the perpetually aggrieved half of her support base — the ones for whom she pushed the Sovereignty Act, more privatized health services, vaccination fees, a provincial police force, lowered the requirements for a referendum, implemented tax cuts while staring down a deficit, book bans, and attempting to placate with the Alberta Next Panel — this is unacceptable, not what they voted for, and a betrayal.

Ms. Smith claimed that she was trying to stop a separation referendum by giving them everything else they say they want (basically), which had Cam Davies of the separatist U.S.-inspired political party announcing that her spurned supporters are more than welcome to come snuggle with him instead.

Meanwhile, the question that provoked the above answer from the Premier was about her predecessor, Jason Kenney, announcing that he will take a public role on the pro-federalism side if a separation referendum were to find its way to a ballot. Ms. Smith added that Mr. Lukaszuk’s “Forever Canadian” campaign to get enough signatures for the approval of Alberta staying in Canada is “a separation referendum”.

“There is a risk that people will answer ‘no’. Then what?” She asked.

Gee, Premier, seems like something you should have considered before stoking separatist sentiment, lowering the bar for them to get their own referendum, and scaring people into trying to get ahead of it. The rules (which can be changed at any time by a government trying to appeal to separatists) currently state that questions on a similar topic cannot be asked within five years of the other.

Political strategists Stephen Carter and Shannon Phillips discussed this on an episode of The Strategists. Mr. Carter said that the question Mr. Lukaszuk was putting forward was something that Canadians and separatists in Alberta alike would each find appealing, whereas a separation referendum specifically might only be appealing to those in favour, making it more difficult for them to get the signatures required to even get the question on a ballot at all. Unintended consequences and all that.

Mr. Kenney’s reemergence into the political sphere came shortly after the UCP changed the referendum requirements, but this latest foray also comes at a politically significant moment. The Alberta NDP had made the requisite denunciations of a potential referendum, but seemed to make the calculation that they didn’t want to get behind Mr. Lukaszuk’s movement. It’s a move I agreed with so as not to offer the UCP an opportunity to make it specifically partisan.

In my observations, if it comes down to a conservative v progressive position, more people in this province can be swayed to vote based on the ideology associated with it, rather than the content of the policy itself.

With that being said, the Alberta NDP launched a new sign drop this week.

From Sarah Hoffman on X; order here

Mr. Lukaszuk, as a former Deputy Premier in the PC government, was also the face of the 2023 “lend us your vote” campaign, asking former PCs who didn’t want to vote for Danielle Smith’s UCP to “lend their vote” to the NDP, who had made it pretty clear they only really thought about reaching out to those voters at election time.

I don’t begrudge them for it; they wanted to keep outside influences from influencing the direction of the party but it was a trade off. The trade off was that a political party who had been in government wasn’t able to capitalize on the fact that Alberta became a two-party state because they really wanted to keep it small and familiar behind the scenes. It’s a choice.

Enter Scott Sinclair and Peter Guthrie, and their desire to bring back the PC name. Conservatives do agree on a lot of things, generally. They don’t generally support entitlement, cronyism, or corruption. They do generally support fiscal prudence, accountability, and a reasonable limitation on what government needs to stick their nose in. However, because conservatives generally agree with those things, and the UCP under Danielle Smith seems to have an aversion to those principles, Scott Sinclair wouldn’t support the UCP’s big spending budget, and Peter Guthrie resigned from Danielle Smith’s cabinet.

According to a recent email from the Alberta Party, the UCP has been sending cease and desist letters to stop them from trying to use “Progressive Conservative”. The Alberta Party voted to change their name in August and are still awaiting the ruling by Elections Alberta.

Now, I’m not a lawyer. Ms. Smith has claimed that it would “cause confusion” if there was a renewed PC party after Jason Kenney took it over and demolished it, replacing it with something that welcomed Danielle Smith; something many former representatives and members were repelled by when then-Premier Jim Prentice welcomed her floor crossing.

My arguments against the UCP having any claim to the depiction is that they failed to stop Derek Fildebrandt’s Freedom Conservative Party from changing their name to Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta, or the Wildrose Loyalty Coalition from being created. If they couldn’t stop Wildrose parties from popping back onto the scene, how can they stop PCs?

If Albertans are smart enough to figure out that the party run by a former Wildrose leader is the Wildrose Party they want to vote for, I’m sure they can figure out which one most accurately represents an Alberta PC Party, too.

Public insurance is coming to Alberta

Before technology, miners used to bring canaries into coal mines to warn them of toxic gases. Something about their lungs being different than those in humans and if the canaries keeled over, the miners knew they had to get out as quickly as possible. It was an early warning system. In Alberta politics, at least while there’s a conservative bobblehead in power, we have our own “canary in the coal mine” and his name is name is Rick Bell.

When Mr. Bell published an article claiming Danielle Smith was “getting tough” with insurance companies and threatening them with the good time of not having to lose money in Alberta anymore, it was an especially hard sell to me. I’m not his target audience, of course.

Mr. Bell’s target audience is average Albertans who have lives and keep up with politics through his quick read articles on their way to the sports section. I’m not throwing shade — the SUN catered to rural (where I grew up) and trades-heavy spaces. I used to buy a SUN newspaper every morning the season I worked at a weigh scale and I read him, too. My mom would bring SUN newspapers home from work (she was a heavy-duty parts person) before that, and when I was in junior high, one of my friends’ sister was a SUNshine girl.

I was once his target audience — probably been reading him since I was in middle school — I’m just not anymore because I do know what’s going on in politics and I know what his role is. He’s the guy taking a balloon and making it into the shape of a dog, or a an elephant, or a set of mouse ears. He blows things up and twists and ties them into something that looks surprisingly like something else; he’s the reason conservatives think actual news is a “propaganda arm of the government”. He’s also our canary in the coalmine; setting the stage and floating a trial balloon on a new narrative soon to come out of the mouth of our own government.

If you’ve been reading me for at least two years, I’ve been talking about how private insurance companies are on their way out. The good times are gone and they’re not charities, or governments, trying to provide a public service; they’re a business and they exist to make profit. As politicians rage against the science (and the subsequent obligations that land on their desks) of climate change, insurance companies have been eyeing our new reality with careful analysis and their standard risk assessment — and they are getting the f*ck out of dodge.

So, when Rick Bell comes out with a column talking about “incompetent” insurance companies and says Danielle Smith is threatening to make public insurance a reality in Alberta if they can’t make it cost less, I’m just noting the birth of a new narrative aimed at priming the public for a government announcement.

The canary (and irony) is dead; Alberta is getting public insurance and a bootstrap pulling, free market-can-do-everything-better cheerleading, small government libertarian is going to be the face of it.

A penny for your thoughts

Danielle Smith announced new mandatory information will be available on Alberta driver’s licences and ID cards; country of citizenship.

In certain circles, there is a fully accepted belief that voter fraud is a problem in Canada; the same circles that demanded Alberta ban electronic voting machines because they couldn’t be trusted but now use AI to sound smarter on social media. Sigh.

Ms. Smith claimed that country of citizenship is used to access benefits provincially. It is not; for most benefits, we use residency. People can be temporary residents or permanent residents without having to apply for citizenship in Canada, and they get access to all the benefits we do, including being able to get a driver’s licence.

Fun fact: my first two children were born in the U.S. as my spouse was working down there on a temporary work visa. We (Canadian citizens) moved back to Canada when they were toddlers and once they became teens, discovered they were not eligible to get either an Alberta licence or an ID card because they weren’t yet Canadian citizens and had no legal status in Canada. If people without legal status can’t even get licences and IDs to put their citizenship on, it looks like yet another solution in search of a problem.

Not being a citizen does mean they cannot vote in any of our elections; not municipal, provincial, or federal. Voter lists typically wouldn’t include them, either, because that little box you check on your taxes (to share your information with Elections Canada/Alberta) only works if you’re a citizen; it’s based on information from your tax returns, which include your social insurance number, and your social insurance number denotes citizenship.

There are a few services based on a person’s legal status in the country but it’s not exactly something that would get the base foaming at the mouth. One of my 27 jobs taught me that a SIN beginning with a 9 means those individuals aren’t eligible to receive career and resume writing assistance, which is a government-funded service available to the rest of us.

The new licence/ID cards will also have our Alberta healthcare number on them. The Premier noted dimly that there are more healthcare numbers in Alberta than residents and claimed to not understand why that would be. You never know if she’s just saying anything because she actually doesn’t know or if she’s trying to foment more distrust in government institutions. Anyone who has lived outside of the province, like her Environment Minister, knows the answer to this.

Healthcare is provincial. The Charter protects our right to move anywhere in the country and sometimes we do. If you lived in Saskatchewan before moving to Alberta, like Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, you would have had a healthcare number in Saskatchewan but would have to apply for an Alberta healthcare number once you became a resident here. Like Ms. Schulz, your Saskatchewan healthcare number didn’t disappear when you left, and your Alberta Health Number (AHN) would have been created anew. If you or Ms. Schulz moves back to Saskatchewan, the AHN would still exist, but you would both go back to using the SK number because these benefits are based on your residency, not citizenship.

When I returned to Alberta after living in the U.S. for a few years, I didn’t have to apply for a new AHN because I already had one and it remains attached to my name and birthdate. I didn’t actually know this then and I did reapply, but was told it would be the same number as before.

Getting rid of paper healthcare cards is a good thing and I’ll not complain about that overmuch. I do, however, have some misgivings about the Premier and her party’s support for putting citizenship on our ID.

First, Ms. Smith added a question at the Alberta Next Panel about denying healthcare coverage to newcomers to the province based on whether the UCP deigns to give them special approval. That’s messed up and really anti-Canadian but not surprising. If the province is going to start deciding who is allowed to access healthcare, based on citizenship rather than their legal status in Canada, that’s a huge overstep. Again, messed up but not at all surprising from them.

Secondly, it just looks like more imported U.S. bullshit. They’ve got ICE stopping people of colour and sending them off to camps or deporting them if they don’t have their papers — or even if they do, in some cases. It’s possible Danielle Smith thinks she’s making it easier for us in Alberta to prove our citizenship in case we’re stopped by masked men claiming to work for the government, but it’s also a chilling thought from a person who started a provincial police force to take direction from her government.

Albertans on the hook for more UCP boondoggles

The UCP has been very costly for Albertans. Under Premier Jason Kenney, the UCP pumped $1.5 billion into a pipeline that stops (empty) at the U.S. border, lost over $200 million in oil by rail contracts, almost $600 million by cancelling the super lab, repealed mining legislation and then put it back, followed by Danielle Smith pushing privatization of lab services and having to pay almost $100 million to buy them back, giving companies the okay to mine anyway, getting massive pushback and backtracking, costing Alberta a few hundred million for their trouble.

That, unfortunately, isn’t even an exhaustive list, it’s just what I recall off the top of my head.

We also know that the UCP’s push for more privately-delivered surgeries is costing us more. Ms. Smith claimed that publicly-provided surgery costs weren’t calculating the “true cost” correctly, but it’s not rocket science. Public hospitals are bigger, provide more services, and because the costs of the facility are shared amongst all of those service provisions, surgeries would cost less in a public facility than a private one. However, something else is afoot.

I took my mom to an eye appointment the other day; if your lids become “hooded”, AHS covers an outpatient procedure that snips some of the skin off so you can see better. We have an appointment next year because it wasn’t deemed hooded enough to be covered. They offered the procedure at her own cost and it would be $2500.

I was taken aback because I took her to an eye appointment in 2018 where she had her other one done. That day, they told her it would be $400 if she wanted to pay for the other one herself.

I remember this well because I am also getting older and I was like “that’s not a horrible price…” and it has stuck with me because I keep getting older every year. In seven years, the price has gone up $2100. Yes, these are just one of the many surgeries that the UCP has pushed to private clinics with special rates for different providers.

Let me just remind you that Alberta Health is still paying it, so we are still paying it. It’s the same procedure, it just became seven times more expensive under the UCP’s stellar track record of financial mismanagement for ideological purposes.

Final thoughts

Thanks to everyone who reads, shares, and becomes a free subscriber. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work; to those who have, your support is greatly appreciated!