In its perpetual sea of political blue, Alberta’s two biggest cities stand out as islands of progressive resistance. In the 2021 municipal elections, Calgary and Edmonton elected progressive councils, while in the 2023 provincial election, the NDP won every seat in Edmonton and a majority of those in Calgary. Now, it seems, Danielle Smith’s UCP government has decided to punish them for their disloyalty.
Bill 20, the “Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act,” would give Smith’s cabinet the ability to fire mayors and councillors, overturn bylaws and even postpone elections if it sees fit. The only constraint on this power would be public outcry and with a majority government, that might have to wait years to be heard. For a government that complains endlessly about federal overreach, its new Bill 20 plumbs some impressive new depths of hypocrisy.
The proposed bill doesn’t technically run afoul of our Constitution. It dictates municipalities are entirely beholden to the provinces that created them, which means they have no real legal standing. “They absolutely can exercise this control over both those cities or any city if they wish,” University of Alberta law professor Eric Adams noted in an interview with Global. “The province could make Edmonton and Calgary disappear if they wanted to through legislation. But just because you have a power, of course, doesn’t mean that it should be exercised.” Even Tyler Gandam, the president of Alberta Municipalities and mayor of Wetaskiwin — hardly a bastion of progressive politics — described it as a “power grab.”
The bill’s first target could be the proposed amendment to the land use bylaw in Calgary that would see the city move forward with the so-called “blanket upzoning” recommended by its Housing and Affordability Task Force. Her stated opposition, not surprisingly, is informed by the federal government and its interest in “rewriting the zoning laws” in Calgary. Yes, bigfooting Calgary’s city council on this issue would pretty clearly put the province at odds with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his promise to eliminate housing “gatekeepers,” but that’s a fight for another day — and one neither is particularly anxious to initiate.
But Smith’s looming fight with Naheed Nenshi, who will almost certainly become the leader of the Alberta NDP in June, is a different matter entirely. Bill 20 is a gift for the probable future leader of the Opposition, who will get to brandish his credentials as a former mayor and remind Albertans about the importance of both strong municipal leadership and political independence. Indeed, with the Alberta NDP’s path to power running straight through cities like Calgary and Edmonton, as well as smaller urban centres like Lethbridge, Red Deer, and Medicine Hat, this UCP attack on cities seems particularly ill-advised.
It may even stir some resistance within the UCP’s ranks. Take Back Alberta, the group that now essentially controls the party’s executive and clearly influences many of its policy decisions, is led by someone who self-identifies as a “decentralist.” As David Parker told the National Post’s Donna Kennedy-Glans back in January, “I believe in localism. I believe we need to take power away from institutions.” Now, Parker and his fellow travellers will have to decide what they believe in more: their supposed principles or their proximity to power.
But Smith’s attack on the independence of Alberta’s municipalities will resonate far beyond its provincial borders. It is a reminder to other municipal leaders across the country — especially in provinces with their own conservative premiers — that their independence and autonomy is now clearly in jeopardy. It would not be at all surprising to see this legislation taken up in places like Saskatchewan or Ontario, where Doug Ford has already meddled in municipal political issues many times before.
It may even turn up the heat on the long-simmering conversation about the need to invest Canada’s cities with more constitutionally guaranteed authority than they were given back in 1867. In the 21st century, as the demand for commodities like oil and gas inevitably start to wane, Canada will need to develop new sources of economic strength and opportunity. Those will be found almost entirely in our cities, where the vast majority of people and our centres of knowledge and learning are located — and where they can be combined to develop, harness and commercialize knowledge and ideas.
We won’t be able to do that effectively if our major cities are mere vassals to their respective provincial governments. Yes, constitutional change is hard at the best of times, even during challenging moments when it is most necessary. But if the Trudeau government is looking for a way to advance its political argument against the provinces and their corrosive impact on Confederation, Smith’s new legislation offers a pretty tempting target.
Stupid is as Parliament does
For a party and leader who love to mock Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his background as a former high school drama teacher, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives sure do love to stage their own theatrical performances. The latest was in Parliament where, after being rebuked by the prime minister for his chummy visit with a group of anti-government extremists, Poilievre described Trudeau as “wacko.”
Speaker Greg Fergus, who radiates the same defeated energy as an exhausted schoolyard monitor, politely requested that he withdraw the statement. Instead, he offered to replace it with something just as inflammatory and personal. As the Globe and Mail’s Campbell Clark wrote, “That’s the kind of non-withdrawal the Speakers have been rejecting for decades, and Mr. Poilievre, a veteran of 20 years in the Commons, knows it. It would have been easy enough to say he withdrew the unparliamentary word — MPs do so all the time, with wildly varying degrees of sincerity — but he obviously wanted to be suspended.”
Why? Because Poilievre knew it would be yet another opportunity to rile up his base and mine their already well-explored pockets for some more money. Sure enough, the fundraising email about the supposed outrage of the leader of the official Opposition being “censored” arrived in Conservative inboxes across the country later that afternoon.
I have a lot of thoughts about this. One of them is that we need some sort of prerequisite for becoming a member of Parliament that requires a candidate to have worked in some non-political role for at least five — and preferably 10 — years. Said work could be as a banker or a teacher or an electrician or a heavy mechanic — anything, really, provided it’s not adjacent to politics or the practice of it. With all due respect to anyone under the age of 30, there’s very little they bring to the table that wouldn’t be improved by a few years of spending time in a workplace that doesn’t revolve around their intensely held political beliefs.
Another is that we should avoid pretending this represents some sort of breach of decorum and decency. The Toronto Star’s Althia Raj wrote on social media that “we will remember this day in the history books,” but with all due respect to my fellow columnist, I would bet very heavily against this. The House of Commons has long been a stage where the sort of behaviour that would earn a rebuke for our young children is somehow celebrated and even cheered on by fellow partisans. I would love to see that change, but we shouldn’t pretend that anything on Tuesday was new or noteworthy in that regard.
The final thought I have here is that we should be willing to see Poilievre for who he really is: a performer pandering to the worst instincts of his own audience. He does not believe in things like decency, respect or civil discourse. If anything, he holds those values and the people who represent them in contempt. There is no institution he’s unwilling to debase, no convention or tradition he wouldn’t thumb his nose at, and no pool of social capital he won’t deplete in his quest to attain power. If that doesn’t sound very conservative, well, maybe that’s the point here.
Calgary’s arena deal looks worse by the day
For as long as I’ve lived in Alberta, I’ve opposed the attempts by wealthy NHL owners to extract money from the public for their new arenas. When I lived in Edmonton, I was a steadfast critic of the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Daryl Katz, a billionaire who has in more recent days fought with a homeless shelter over a donation he promised. I didn’t think it would be possible for a city to strike a worse deal than the one Edmonton’s council did with him.
Well, I was wrong. I’ve written about the arena fiasco in Calgary a few times, one that will see the public chip in $515 million so a group of wealthy NHL owners (including Murray Edwards, one of the wealthiest people in Canada) can have a new building for their team. I’ve also wondered many times why a nominally progressive city council would give a conservative premier a unanimous vote in support of building it right before a provincial election. We’ll get back to that part in a moment.
But as new reporting from the CBC’s Scott Dippel shows, the deal looks even worse than even its biggest critics thought. While the Flames ownership group will pay $17 million in rent (a figure that will increase by just one per cent annually, falling well below projected inflation rates in the near future), that money all comes from the people buying tickets and attending the games. The city, on the other hand, is fronting more than $800 million in costs — and it’s tapping its capital fund to do it. That’s money, of course, that could go to any number of other priorities, from public transit to roads and infrastructure.
As former councillor and mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas noted on social media, “The public is funding 97% of the new arena. Flames ownership will cover 3% of costs for 100% of profits. This is the biggest wealth transfer from public to private hands in city history.” Nice work if you can get it, in other words.
I still don’t understand why the current council approved this, much less unanimously. From a purely political perspective, it gave a provincial conservative leader on the verge of a closely contested election a huge victory in the city where everyone knew the election would be decided. It’s not like they’ve been repaid for their political generosity, either. Smith’s government has repeatedly punished Calgary of late, from its draconian new Bill 20 to the baffling decision earlier this week to withdraw its funding for the low-income transit pass program so essential to many people.
As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.” Indeed, it is — and it’s bigger than ever in Calgary and Alberta right now.
Debunking the Globe and Mail’s latest anti-EV column
As I’ve noted before, some of the Globe and Mail’s pundits — Eric Reguly and Andrew Coyne, come on down — have published some puzzling takes on the popularity of electric vehicles and the pace at which they’re being adopted around the world. But the one they just ran from Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, might just take the cake here.
He hangs his piece on the recent announcement by Honda that it plans to invest many billions of dollars in Ontario to build a new battery plant — yet another in a string of these announcements by major automakers. A wide variety of politicians, from federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, see the prospect of more jobs, investment and tax revenue here. Nunes, on the other hand, apparently sees a disaster in the making.
“The move saddles Canadians with a product for which enthusiasm is tepid at best,” he writes. “Down the line, when a lack of return forces these automakers to rethink their investments, we may ask ourselves: what were the billions given to these companies actually for?”
It’s a little difficult to square the global data, which sees EV sales rising to 17 million this year, with the idea that enthusiasm for them is “tepid at best.” Nunes also seems to think the gap between the number of people expressing interest in EVs and the number actually buying them is a measurement of their actual enthusiasm — rather than, you know, the inability of EV makers to match supply with demand.
“If you believe consumer surveys,” he writes, “EV sales should have totalled more than 900,000 (56 per cent of Canadians expressed interest in going electric, remember?). The actual number of EVs sold in 2023? Fewer than 186,000. The same goes for 2022, when just EVs accounted for just eight per cent of sales despite 68 per cent of Canadians reporting interest in bolt-powered autos.”
Blaming consumers for the inability of automakers to deliver them the cars they want is an interesting strategy. So, too, is blaming automakers for failing to bring down costs the way they had projected back in 2017, as Nunes does, without at least mentioning the existence of a pandemic and the inflationary impact it and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have had on all businesses — automakers included.
It’s worth mentioning Nunes’s affiliation with the Breakthrough Institute, where he’s the director for federal policy, climate and energy. It describes itself as an American environmental research organization, but it’s one with a clear preference for promoting the use of nuclear energy and natural gas. Its co-founder, Michael Shellenberger, recently joined the advisory board of Jordan Peterson’s “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,” which DeSmog describes as “an international climate change denial organization with ties to the far right.” I’m not suggesting any sort of guilt by association, to be clear, but it’s important to be aware of the ties — and conscious of the possibility that Nunes is engaged in a bit of concern trolling here.
Either way, his stated concerns about the delayed arrival of cost parity between EVs and gasoline vehicles are moot. Yes, that date has been pushed out from 2025 to 2026 and now perhaps 2027 or 2028, but it will arrive — and all the major automakers know this. China’s EV makers are rapidly driving down the cost of their vehicles and selling them in greater numbers into international markets. It won’t be long before they’re establishing joint ventures in North America and bringing them into our markets. The legacy automakers only have two choices here: adapt or die.
In Canada, as in the United States, the governments are doing what they can (and, I’d submit, should) to help them adapt. This may come at the cost of some new tax credits and other government incentives. But the alternative — letting a wave of low-cost Chinese EVs dominate the market — would be far, far more expensive in the long run.
And that’s the real point here: the choice isn’t going to be between EVs and gas guzzlers. That choice has already, in effect, been made. The choice will revolve around whose EVs we end up driving and where they get manufactured. Those pretending we can somehow reverse this industrial transformation are not much different from those a century ago who suggested the Model T was a passing fad and horses would still be the preferred mode of transportation. If there’s risk in the federal government’s investment in electric vehicle manufacturing capacity, it’s mostly in it not going far or fast enough.
Pierre Poilievre’s revisionist history
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the latest iteration of the CPC leader’s “Debtonation” series, one in which he again compares Canada’s fiscal situation to that of Greece and all but predicts a similar economic collapse. I’m not interested in boring you with the details of his thesis, and I’m pretty sure I’ve already unpacked it once or twice on Twitter already. But there was a bit at the end of the video where he compared current Canadians to the generation right after the Second World War that I thought deserved some attention.
Poilievre, as we know from his repeated rhapsodizing about electricians “catching lightning from the sky,” is prone to flights of rhetorical fancy. And, sure enough, he takes viewers on another fun one when talking about the postwar generation. “What did they do? Did they take a decade off while they borrowed money and lived off their grandchildren? No. They had protected their grandchildren’s freedom, and now it was time to protect their finances. They immediately got to work. They cut wasteful spending. They paid off all their debts. They tripled the size of our economy. And they handed over the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen — all before they were old enough to retire. If they could do that then, imagine what we can do now.”
Yeah, about that. The postwar period was actually defined by a massive expansion in the size and scope of the Canadian state, one that included the creation of Old Age Security, the Canada Pension Plan and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. This was funded in part by a growing consumer economy, one that shaped and fed similar booms in the United States and eventually western Europe. But it was also underwritten by the growth in income taxes, and especially high marginal tax rates.
As the Fraser Institute’s Livio Di Matteo wrote, “the pre-World War II marginal tax rate on taxable income between $1,000 and $2,000 in the dollars of the day was four per cent. By 1942, it had increased to 44 per cent. For taxable income between $10,000 and $15,000, it was 13.7 per cent before the war, but fully 69 per cent by 1942. While these rates came down after the war, they remained substantially higher than they had been before the war. By 1971, for instance, the average Canadian was subject to much higher average and marginal tax rates than had been the case in 1946.”
Whoopsie daisy. In other words, the postwar generation was defined by their willingness to pay higher taxes in order to both retire war-related debts and fund new social programs that protected a wider range of people. I doubt this is the lesson Poilievre wants his supporters to learn. But I agree with him on one thing: if they could do that then, imagine what we can do now.
Recommended Reading
I’m still playing catchup from a week spent in Vancouver and on the island, but here are some of the pieces that are in my to-read queue.
Over at CBC, Aaron Wherry covers the trend of Canadian leaders doing longer-form interviews on podcasts and other soundbite-resistant mediums. “A cynic might view explainer videos as just another way for politicians to promote their visions and set the agenda, without having to deal with the input of journalists,” he writes. “In a splintered media environment, there might be even more room to do so.
“But these videos might be addressing a real public appetite for depth, explanation and understanding — the same sort of desire that has, in part, driven the rise of podcasts. When Pew surveyed Americans about their podcast habits in 2022, 55 per cent of respondents said a ‘major reason’ for listening was ‘to learn’ — the second most-cited reason.”
This, to me, seems like an unalloyed good. We should be encouraging politics in full — or, at least, fuller — sentences, and this is a step in that direction. Yes, most of these interviews are with podcasts that aren’t overtly political, and so the questions will tend to be a little softer than they might if posed by, say, David Cochrane. But I’m of the view that the more we can hear from our political leaders, the better.
Over at The Line, meanwhile, Justin Ling showed what good journalism looks like (to me, anyways) in his coverage of the protests at Columbia University. He didn’t arrive with any preconceived notions or agendas and wasn’t there to prove a point or confirm a bias. He just went there to ask smart questions and, when given answers, follow up on them appropriately. We could use more of that, I think.
That’s all for this week. Thanks to everyone who sent me a kind note about my win at the National Newspaper Awards, and thanks again to my colleagues at Canada’s National Observer for helping make that possible. If you haven’t subscribed already, I’d strongly encourage it.