By now, we’ve all gotten used to conservative governments saying one thing and doing another. But few have plumbed the depths of hypocrisy that Alberta’s UCP government is mining right now with its contradictory approach to managing the province’s energy assets and their environmental impacts. While oil and gas continues to get the freest of passes, the province’s successful wind and solar industry is being held to the highest possible standard. If you didn’t know any better, you might think Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party was trying to sacrifice the province’s future in order to protect its past.
It wasn’t that long ago that Alberta’s wind and solar was booming with activity and investment. According to the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, Alberta was home to more than 90 per cent of all new renewable capacity in Canada last year. That activity wasn’t a reflection of subsidies or government support but instead, the high quality of Alberta’s wind and solar assets and an electricity market that encouraged its development. It meant thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new investment, most of which was concentrated in more rural and remote parts of the province. And then, without any warning, the government put a stop to all of it.
Its seven-month moratorium expires today, but it will be replaced with a bunch of new regulations — red tape, as conservatives otherwise call them — that tell landowners where and how they can build wind and solar projects. The regulations will create large buffer zones around “pristine viewscapes,” ban wind development on top-tier agricultural land, and require project developers to put down deposits against the cost of reclaiming and remediating their facilities after the end of their useful lifespan.
On their own, these new regulations aren’t automatically onerous, even if they fly directly in the face of the government’s own libertarian values. But when you compare them to the regulatory regime in place for other forms of energy development, the weapons-grade hypocrisy here becomes immediately apparent. As the Pembina Institute’s Simon Dyer said, “I imagine Alberta would be the only jurisdiction in the world to consider renewable energy riskier than oil and gas development.”
Alberta’s direct and documented exposure to the risks associated with oil and gas development makes that position even more untenable. There are tens of billions of dollars — possibly hundreds of billions — worth of environmental liabilities associated with its growing collection of oil sands tailings ponds which the companies responsible for filling them have done almost nothing to address. There are billions more worth of unreclaimed and abandoned conventional oil and gas wells dumped on the public by the oil and gas industry.
It gets worse. Despite record profits in the industry over the last two years, municipalities are owed more than $250 million in unpaid property taxes by oil and gas companies, a bill that actually grew by more than $40 million in 2023. “That’s not a regulator, that’s a cheerleader,” said Paul McLauchlin, the president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, in an interview with the Globe and Mail. If you truly are acting on behalf of Albertans as it relates to the oil and gas industry, and you’re allowing this behaviour to exist on the landscape, it’s quite shocking.”
And yet, for some reason, the government is focusing its regulatory attention on wind and solar. The oil and gas industry still doesn’t have to post a deposit when it drills new oil wells, and it doesn’t face any restrictions on its activity based on the type of agricultural land it’s exploiting. Indeed, while wind and solar project proponents have to come to a voluntary agreement with landowners, oil and gas companies can compel them to provide surface access for their operations. Calling this a double standard doesn’t do the differences here justice.
There are no restrictions on oil and gas development in “pristine viewscapes,” of course. As conservation specialist Phillip Meintzer noted, “Suncor plans to mine the McClelland Lake Wetland Complex starting in 2025. It has one of Alberta's largest & most beautiful patterned fens which took 10,000+ years to form. Should McClelland not be protected as a ‘pristine viewscape’?” And while it’s not oil and gas, there’s the province’s ongoing flirtation with the Australian coal mining companies that want to carve up the Rocky Mountains, perhaps the most iconic viewscape in the entire country.
As the Pembina Institute’s Jason Wang, Courtney Smith, and Scott MacDougall argued in a position paper, “the inconsistency between the treatment of the renewable energy sector and the oil and gas sector is especially concerning given renewable energy lowers costs to consumers, generates stable revenues for landowners and municipalities, creates job opportunities, and is a critical solution for addressing the climate crisis. This contrasts with the oil and gas sector’s troubling legacy of unfunded liabilities, and orphaned and abandoned assets. The Alberta government should make it a priority to improve its rules for the sectors with the largest issues, which need the most substantial reforms.”
Instead, it seems determined to do the opposite. And while that will frustrate urban Albertans who want to see their province start taking climate change seriously, it should infuriate the rural Albertans who overwhelmingly voted this government into office. They’re the ones who will pay the highest price here, both in terms of lost economic opportunities and the impact that will have on their community’s finances. According to new analysis from the Business Renewables Centre Canada, rural municipalities in Alberta would bring in $277 million in annual tax revenue by 2028 if all the projects scheduled before the moratorium proceed. With these new rules, and the market design ones have yet to be released, it’s a safe bet that some of that money — and maybe most of it — is now gone.
Those investments will get made in different jurisdictions, where the wind blows and the sun shines but the government isn’t determined to hamstring the companies that capture the energy they create. None of the UCP’s new rules for wind and solar will do anything to slow down the global energy transition, much less prevent their economic consequences from being visited upon Alberta. But its double standard on red tape and regulations will serve as a useful reminder to future generations of who was really in charge at the time — and what really mattered to them.
Jagmeet Singh is the Pierre Poilievre of Thomas Mulcairs
It should have been a moment to celebrate. After agreeing to a deal with the Liberals to create the beginnings of a national pharmacare program that will initially cover medications for diabetes and contraception, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh had every right to take a victory lap. Instead, for some reason, he decided to blow smoke in Justin Trudeau’s face.
“After tense negotiations with the Big Pharma-backed Liberals, we've secured the first step towards an NDP National Pharmacare plan - by covering birth control and diabetes medication. This means you will get the medicine you need with your health card, not a credit card!”
This feels like the sort of tweet Pierre Poilievre’s team might draft, one that draws heavily on petulance and political bravado rather than grace or dignity. It’s way, way off-brand for a party that used to be led by Jack Layton, a leader who defined himself as a “happy warrior.” But then, this is who Jagmeet Singh is: the Pierre Poilievre of Thomas Mulcairs.
There’s a certain irony here, since Singh’s initial value proposition — one laid out very bluntly to me by one of his supporters during the leadership contest — was as the NDP’s answer to Justin Trudeau. Both were stylish and social media-savvy politicians, and it was thought that Singh could bring some of the partisan sex appeal that had been lacking since Layton tragically died.
Now, it seems, he’s trying to be a knock-off version of Poilievre, one who blends anti-elite populism with social media snark. Alas, I don’t think it’s working any better than the previous brand identity did.
This is not the first time I’ve criticized Singh’s style of leadership. It won’t be the last. But if anyone in the federal NDP movement is listening, I have a suggestion: more socialism and less champagne. Singh’s obvious fondness for the finer things in life are just as dissonant to the traditional NDP voter coalition’s values as his populist pandering is to the more recent one. If the NDP is going to find its way back into the political conversation and escape its status as a perpetual also-ran, it needs to speak the sort of language that voters want to hear.
That doesn’t just mean attacking Justin Trudeau or Galen Weston Jr. or some other convenient target. It means proposing big ideas that fundamentally challenge our current economic orthodoxy in thoughtful and creative ways, rather than resorting to us vs. them binaries. It means lifting up the young Canadians, who are increasingly getting left behind. And it means walking the walk on this stuff — and, crucially, finding a leader who is capable of doing the same.
Congratulations, UCP voters — you played yourself
Say what you will about Jason Kenney, and goodness knows I’ve said plenty, but at least he tried to live up to the promises he made to voters. “Promise made, promise kept” was a signature phrase for the former Alberta premier, and he seemed determined to work through the list of pledges he’d made in his 2019 election campaign once he was in government. Danielle Smith, on the other hand, seems to have a different philosophy: promise made, sucker born.
As she noted back when she was an opposition Wildrose MLA, “you name a promise, Mr. Speaker, and it’s probably been broken. Such is life in PC Alberta. Promises aren’t meant to be kept. They’re meant to get you re-elected.” She was keeping notes, it seems, because she very effectively dangled the promise of a tax cut in front of Albertans to get re-elected last May by the slimmest of margins. Now that she’s actually in power, it seems, that promise doesn’t need to be honoured. Despite oil prices being the same as they were when she promised the tax cut, it seems that said oil prices are suddenly preventing her from following through on it. “Promised personal income tax cuts will have to wait a year and be phased in responsibly,” Smith said.
Oh, but that wasn’t all. In order to distract voters from the broken promise that will cost the average household $1,500 a year, she dangled a new carrot in front of the province: a $250 billion Heritage Fund by 2050. "Instead of spending all that non-renewable surplus cash on the wants of today, we will be fiscally disciplined, invest in the Heritage Fund annually, strategically pay down maturing debt, and slowly but surely wean our province's budget off the volatile roller-coaster of resource revenues," she told Albertans during her televised address last week.
As fans of The Wire will know, this sounds an awful lot like someone apologizing for the short con while they’re setting up the long one.
This plan to save for the future sounds lovely, even if it’s the same thing that any number of other Alberta premiers have said and then gone on to not do. But it’s designed to disguise her real agenda here, which is the further starvation of the province’s health and education sectors. Alberta already spends less than almost any other province on a per-capita basis for education, and it’s not much better when it comes to healthcare. Expect those numbers to start getting even smaller.
That’s because Smith has directed her finance minister to hold spending below the rate of inflation and population growth. That’s a de-facto cut in spending, of course, and it’s one that weighs on a healthcare and education system that’s already buckling under the pressure created by years of under-funding.
There’s a certain diabolical genius here, given that the province can tell people that they are, in fact, still raising spending in these areas. But those of us who understand things like inflation-adjusted and per-capita data will see this for what it really is: a stealth austerity budget, one designed to continue pressuring people out of the public healthcare and education systems and into private ones.
Smith is right to say that Alberta is too dependent on oil revenues, and that it has one last chance to get this stuff right. But if she genuinely wanted to get us off this particular rollercoaster, she’d implement a sales tax or some other more durable form of revenue. Norway, whose own sovereign wealth fund she referenced, is able to save its oil and gas revenues because it has a 25 per cent sales tax and a 78 per cent tax rate on oil and gas activities. Alberta is nowhere close to either figure, and nobody should take any politician’s pledge to save more money seriously until they decide to meaningfully close that distance.
The Alberta NDP needs to go big or go home
Last week, just as I was finishing the last edition of this newsletter, the folks at the Progress Report decided to name check me in a piece about why breaking the Alberta NDP shouldn’t break its ties with the federal party. I don’t want to get too deep into the inside baseball here, and you’re welcome to skip past this if that’s not your jam, but I think it merits a response.
Jim Storrie, a longstanding NDP activist who wrote the piece, suggested the provincial party’s ties with its federal cousins have plenty of organizational value. “There is great overlap between the sets of federal NDP activists and Alberta NDP activists,” he wrote. “I’m not talking just voters, but the serious volunteers who actually show up, conduct meetings, and do work. Party members who will actually do work are frustratingly rare and driving any of them out is nuts.”
That might well be true in Edmonton, where there’s a history of winning seats in provincial elections and even the occasional federal one. In Calgary, though, a much higher proportion of the party’s supporters and volunteers are of a more recent vintage. Maybe they were drawn in by Rachel Notley’s government, or her work in opposition, or some of the Calgary MLAs that pushed back against the UCP government. I doubt many — heck, any — were drawn to the Alberta NDP because of the behaviour of its federal leader or party.
And here’s the thing: the Alberta NDP can’t win any more seats in Edmonton. It already has them all. But it absolutely can, and must, win more seats in Calgary. That’s why it needs to open its doors as wide as possible to new voters, new volunteers, and people who are new to the city and province. If a conversation about giving NDP members a choice to also become federal party members, alienates one veteran Edmonton volunteer but attracts two new ones in Calgary, that’s a trade the party should make every single time.
There’s also an unmistakable hint of ideological purity testing in Storrie’s analysis, something that has long gotten in the way of the Alberta NDP growing its appeal outside its Edmonton base. “You canvass and knock doors to find out what problems people need help with,” he wrote. “You don’t knock doors for strategy tips from people who don’t even like you.”
But, of course, it’s not just about knocking doors to find people who do like you. It’s also about knocking doors to find people who will vote for you, even if they haven’t before. And all the like-minded doorknockers in the world didn’t prevent the Alberta NDP from deciding to announce a corporate tax hike in the middle of the last election, a strategic disaster that was immediately apparent to folks like me, who live on the outskirts of the NDP ideological bubble.
Alberta New Democrats are, of course, welcome to close ranks around their existing members, just as they’re welcome to ignore any advice that doesn’t come from people who grew up in the party. But if they want to actually form government again, it might be time to think a little bigger than that.
Required Reading
A few pieces caught my eye over the last week. The first was this fascinating take by former National Post publisher Ken Whyte (words I thought I’d never write, trust me) about the state of Canada’s cultural industries and the federal government’s failure to improve them. Whyte’s Substack consistently offers an interesting perspective on the book publishing world, and I’d say it’s well worth subscribing.
So too, is the Substack of Jonathan Malloy, who just happens to have been the supervisor of the political science department at Carleton University when I was getting my masters degree there. His essay on what’s actually happening at Canada’s post-secondary institutions, and why the concerns expressed on the right about the impact of equity and diversity initiatives is little more than glorified pearl clutching, is worth reading.
In the New York Times, guest writer Robinson Meyer laid out the threat posed by Chinese electric automakers to America’s own automaking industry. Anyone who thinks that EVs are a passing fad, or that our collective appetite for them is on the wane, should set aside the time to read it. Whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not, the Chinese automakers are coming for our garages — and they’re coming fast. As BYD Executive Vice President Stella Li told Yahoo Finance, “in China, the message is strong. If you are not investing for electric car, you are out. You will die. You have no future.” Well, then.
Their impact on EV battery prices is already being felt, with the cost of a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery getting cut in half in just one year. As tech researcher and author Tony Seba noted, these cost reductions are eerily close to the path he predicted more than a decade ago — one that will obliterate even the most optimistic predictions for the adoption of electric vehicles and battery storage of renewable energy.
And finally, since there wasn’t enough Alberta-specific content in this newsletter, here’s The Tyee’s Andrew Nikiforuk with a depressing analysis of the province’s ongoing drought — one that experts warned was coming back in the early 2000s, and one that could still get a whole lot worse. The photos alone are worth the click, but so too, is the writing tying it all together.