This week in AB: December 2, 2025

The MOU, UCP AGM, recalls, scandals, and health... oh my.

ABLeg

If you want to keep up with Oral Question Period but refuse to put yourself through the unnecessary assault on your senses by actually watching it, I am still providing a summary on BlueSky (with snark, fact-checking if I can find it fast enough, and GIFs).

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

The UCP has extended the fall sitting another two weeks, so instead of putting me out of my misery on November 27, it will continue until December 11. Hooray.

I also sat down for a brief update on recall petitions with Markham Hislop of Energi Media on Wednesday.

Speaking of recall

As of today, Tuesday December 2,, there are 14 recall petitions that have been approved by Elections Alberta. In addition to the nine I mentioned in the last newsletter on Monday are:

• Glenn van Dijken, Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock; member statement

• Jackie Lovely, Camrose; member statement

• Nathan Neudorf, Lethbridge East; member statement

• Jason Stephan, Red Deer South; member statement

• Searle Turton, Spruce Grove-Stony Plain; no member statement submitted

MOU is just a fancy name for an IOU

Danielle Smith and Mark Carney made a big deal about their big deal: a memorandum of understanding between the two on what they will do to make a new pipeline deal happen.

I’ve mused privately (since I can’t find it written out) about whether the regulations that the Premier targeted were really necessary for the federal government to maintain. Oil investment in North America as a whole has been down since the 2014 downturn, and through two rounds of “drill baby, drill”. I know political narratives don’t have to be true but I still pay attention to reality so I can gauge their “truthiness”.

Ah, but the shale boom! Long story short, the shale boom was inexpensive to invest in and the product wasn’t as great as what they’d hoped they were getting. It’s still oil, but it’s so light that it has to be mixed with a heavier crude to be useful. Hence, its sudden rise and fall.

Ever since I found out that the 80’s recession was felt far beyond Alberta (it was global, and oil price specific), I’ve been skeptical of whether government policy is the be all end all. Therefore, I look outside of Canada to see if things are different elsewhere. If they are, perhaps it’s something we’re doing here; if it’s not, it might just be political rage bait.

If oil companies were not shoveling funds into U.S. projects while Canada had “investment killing regulations” then, to my way of thinking, they weren’t investing. If U.S. companies are laying off employees in oil and gas under the “drill baby, drill” leadership at the same time it’s happening here, it’s bigger than “Liberal policy bad”.

The tanker ban was also a red flag. In the same way that Danielle Smith’s anti-trans legislation codifies something that was already in observed in practice (banning bottom surgery on those under 18 years of age), the tanker ban codified something that was already voluntarily observed— for some 40 years. It was political grandstanding to mollify a segment of voters but it didn’t actually do anything new.

As Ken Boessenkool points out in a recent article for The Line, Danielle Smith and Mark Carney made a grand political play with their recent Memorandum of Understanding: to accept the Trudeau-Notley climate plans. At the UCP’s annual general meeting over the weekend, the separatists in her party took umbrage to the fact that the UCP leader would lower herself to make any deal with Ottawa on principle, but also because getting deals with Ottawa is bad for the separatist agenda. While it’s certainly not impossible to keep the true believers following along with 200 year old grievances, it is far more difficult to convince new recruits that the past matters more than their present and future.

WTF did Danielle Smith do?

In a feature-length profile over the weekend, the Globe and Mail’s Tom Cardoso, Carrie Tait, Mark MacKinnon, and Stephanie Chambers published an in-depth investigation into how one Edmonton businessman managed to secure hundreds, and hundreds, of millions in public contracts as a middleman.

This story didn’t begin with Danielle Smith but it did unearth a much stronger connection than she was willing to admit existed. Specifically, why would a leadership candidate be meeting with a public employee in AHS procurement and a client who regularly procured hundreds in millions for the procurement department before she was elected?

As the Premier herself said, she meets with business people and Albertans all the time; which is probably true.

Does everyone she meets with end up receiving $70 million dollar contracts paid in full but remain unfulfilled for a year with government-appointed goons allegedly stepping in at multiple levels to stop people from asking questions about it?

Does her chief of staff always rent houses from their family and hire their other family members for government jobs?

Do those clients end up hanging out with her chief of staff on election night? Are they also related to her ministers?

As many people have said, other premiers have gone down for so much less and it just goes to show how effective these people were at riling people up while they were in opposition. They made everything a five alarm fire and it was accepted as such.

Now that it’s their problem, it’s just business as usual. Prices go up, prices go down. Meh.

Of course our friends benefit— you should want to be our friend, too.

We sign an IOU, sorry, MOU, with the Liberal PM and it’s a victory; someone else does it and it’s an alliance bent on screwing Alberta over.

Not going to lie, the fact that her base didn’t let her get away with it entirely (for their own ends, to be sure), was still somewhat, if fleetingly, gratifying.

They aren’t listening to anyone else.

Does healthcare get better if you pay more?

So many industries rely on this idea; if it costs more, it’s better. In principle, I agree with this if we’re talking about furniture, suits, or Wagyu steaks. Sometimes, however, you’re just paying more for the name.

As Alberta moves forward with its push for private delivery of public health services, it’s easy enough to demonstrate. The people who were working in they public system are being moved to the private delivery. Did they get better at their jobs? Did they learn more before moving out of the public system? Did they improve their skills? No; they just do the same job in a different space and charge more for their time.

It’s different when they’re being shoved out of one space into another. Would one say that private practitioners in the U.S. would do a worse job if they took an opportunity in Canada’s (mostly) public system? Maybe some would, but it doesn’t make sense. Most people take pride in their work. Everyone wants to get paid more (there’s an affordability crisis don’t you know); but eventually that pay isn’t going to change their work ethic. Some might try harder at the start but if they’re a poor worker, they will fall back into that habit no matter how much you pay them.

This is the core issue with the UCP’s Bill 11; they are pushing staff out of the public system to build the private delivery system. It costs more, it has less responsibility, and it is just one more way that this government is propping up what people want to believe over the facts.

Poor staff will underperform no matter how much they’re paid or who signs their cheques; exceptional staff will overperform. Fund the services, the infrastructure, and the staff, and we will have a functioning healthcare system. Defund public to subsidize private and we will have a dysfunctional system with an incentive to charge more for the same services without meeting the needs of the public.

Final thoughts

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On BlueSky

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