Jen Gerson: Maybe this angry panel will fix it!

Alberta tries for Round 3 of the Fair Deal panel.

By: Jen Gerson

Well, what to make of this?

On Monday, I attended the final whistle stop of the “Alberta Next” panel: a cross-province tour featuring a panel of Albertans discussing the issues most pressing in the province. Issues like: immigration reform, allowing the province to collect its own personal income taxes, railing against equalization, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, and establishing an Alberta police force.

It was an attempt to recapture the glory of the 2003 Strengthening Alberta’s Role in Confederation committee, in which then-premier Ralph Klein held a panel to discuss the issues most pressing to the province. Issues like: allowing the province to collect its own personal income taxes, railing against equalization, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, and establishing an Alberta police force — and eliminating the Wheat Board.

The Alberta Next Panel was also an attempt re-live the glory of then-premier Jason Kenney’s Fair Deal Panel from 2020, the very one that saw the province really nail down the most important problems facing it right this very moment. Problems like immigration reform, allowing the province to collect its own personal income taxes, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, establishing an Alberta police force — and creating a referendum against equalization, which was subsequently held and passed!

(We still have equalization.)

And so, here we are again. Back on the carousel.

Oh, by the way, I hear my kids’ teachers are about to go on strike. Luckily, my provincial government has its eyes on the Real Problems: negotiating with other provinces to try to increase taxation points by a significant percentage in exchange for a reduction in federal transfers. And let’s not forget, re-opening the Canadian constitution to give Albertans more seats in a senate that rarely, if ever, overrules Parliament anyway; constitutional reforms that will rectify the monstrous over-representation of power held by the residents of … Prince Edward Island.

I’m totally sure that squandering decades of political capital making these kinds of changes will satisfy the full-blown separatist squad that has grown — frankly — understandably frustrated after watching two decades of Alberta politicians jerk them around with panels that do nothing to solve problems that our leaders insist are both imminent and existential.

If actually governing the province is out of the question, what option would be left but to separate?

And I guess that was the question I had forming in my head, while listening to a series of government propaganda videos on the pressing matters of the day: immigration reform, collecting income taxes provincially, forming an Alberta police service, creating an Alberta Pension Plan. What, exactly, is the purpose of this? Because nobody here wanted to hear the truth: that living in a Confederation entails both benefits and compromises. That existing in a nation requires negotiation between both the federal government and other provinces.

Nobody wants to be told that Albertans can’t and won’t get everything they want. Because nobody ever gets everything that they want in a human society. And, further, that they’d still face these problems as an independent nation, or as a state within America. In fact, the challenges inherent to cooperation would probably be even more formidable in those circumstances.

At what point do these panels cease to work as a tool to deflect and defuse understandable frustrations about the state of Ottawa, and instead serve only to foment anger that the politicians playing this game can’t control?

This last townhall was held in Calgary only by the most technical understanding of municipal boundaries. It was held in Spruce Meadows, a horse track and event facility situated at the edge of the city, inaccessible by transit. And while many people critical of this panel and its program did make the effort to show up — a particular shout out is due to the ever-entertaining young Communists who did their very best to call for revolution against the capitalist class — the crowd was disproportionately rural, and disproportionately pro-separatist.

And the room skewed more to the right as the night wore on and the more normal and less committed decided that Netflix was a better use of their time.

But don’t worry, a straw poll was taken at the end of the discussion of each successive grievance, and I have no doubt that a show of hands will be used to craft the illusion of consensus for a mandate along these lines of grievance. (I’m of the school that real mandates to pursue serious change are secured via elections, not rigged townhall meetings. But I’m hopelessly old-fashioned that way.)

This was a crowd that burst into applause when Premier Danielle Smith noted that the province had 15 outstanding court cases against the federal government. She said this with triumph, as if engaging in successive waves of lawfare unlikely to produce positive results was itself an accomplishment. We’ll have “filed dozens of lawsuits against Ottawa!” engraved on a plaque and put under Smith’s official portrait in the legislature.

Pour one out for Alberta’s growing army of prosecutorial talent. That’s real governance, babe.

I don’t need to re-hash all of the grievances point by point. If you’re this deep into the column, you’ll already know that Albertans take issue with federal programs that take more in taxes out of the province than they return in transfers and services. You will already be vaguely aware that these sore spots are periodically aired alongside a long-standing wishlist culled from powers and actions already taken by Quebec. These Albertans want to collect their own taxes, run their own police force and pension programs — essentially withdrawing from Canadian institutions as a form of collective punishment for ill treatment. “You like that fat pension plan? Well, I guess you should have signed onto more pipelines, povos.”

I’ll add immigration as the new arrival to the list. Given how completely Ottawa has botched the file in recent years, it’s hard to find an easy rebuttal to the principle that provinces — which oversee the social services provided to those newcomers — should have more control over who settles and where. At least, in theory.

As Alberta doesn’t get to unilaterally dictate policy goals like equalization or constitutional reform, the Alberta Next panel has come up with a few novel ideas for addressing these issues.

To rectify equalization, for example, Alberta wants to work with other provinces to shift the taxation burden; the provinces would collect more of their own taxes in exchange for reducing federal transfers. This would give the provinces more money to spend and allocate locally.

I could get on board with this idea in theory, except I can’t help but note that “more money for the provincial government” is not a phrase that lights the dark void in my soul.

This province’s fiscal management is nothing short of dreadful. Smith has dramatically run up spending in only a few years. Last I checked, we’re on track for a $6.5 billion deficit despite relatively healthy oil royalty revenues — revenues that allow this province to enjoy the most expensive per capita public services in the country with some of the lowest taxes.

I also really enjoyed listening to Smith use accounting jargon to obfuscate this fact.

During the panel, she crowed that Alberta’s “net debt to GDP ratio” was below eight per cent. (Great job! Up from zero per cent only a few years ago!) This is almost identical to the rhetoric Chrystia Freeland trotted out just before the federal government’s spending spiralled totally out of control.

This provincial government wants to run its own version of the Canadian Pension Plan — which, for whatever faults we might level, is well funded and performs extremely well. Better than the province’s own investment arm, AIMCO. And how much trust am I supposed to have that a provincial government won’t direct pensioners’ funds toward their own friends and pet projects ahead of investments that secure the best returns?

In Alberta.

On policing, polling consistently shows that the idea of replacing the RCMP with an Alberta/run force is neither popular nor considered a high priority — even in rural areas.

So the panel began to take on a looking-glass quality when Smith thought she’d scored a real hit when she challenged the (supposedly) urban crowd present to consider whether or not they would want the Calgary Police Service to be taken over by the RCMP.

Gasp.

Well, no. But I don’t want it taken over by a provincial police force accountable solely to your cabinet, either, ma’am.

The highlight reel of the evening included one exchange between panel moderator Bruce McAllister, who outrageously shut down a high school student who came to the mic to challenge the panel about the teachers’ strike and education spending.

McAllister cut the microphone and said the kid’s parents should have thrown him over their knee.

That clip made the rounds this week, but it actually wasn’t the worst exchange, to my mind.

My peak came when a man came to the mic asking about who would actually run an Alberta police force given that this government is itself subject to serious allegations of corruption and political interference with the health system’s procurement process. Allegations that are, right now, being investigated by the same RCMP this government is seeking to eliminate.

That was an extremely valid question, and it deserved a serious response. That did not happen. McAllister deflected it with a glib joke about how the RCMP wasn’t investigating the federal Liberals.

That was it, right there. That was this entire charade in miniature.

Near the end of the evening, an older gentleman stepped to the mic and got to the meat of the matter: fundamentally, all of these concerns and their remedies boil down to a simple question. “Do you trust Albertans to handle more of their own business themselves?”

I think that also was a serious question, and I think it warrants a serious answer.

I absolutely do not trust them.

I think that framing falls prey to the fallacy of a false dichotomy. Just because one thing — the federal government — is bad doesn’t mean the force opposing that thing is any better.

For all my beef with the feds, I think you’d have to be wilfully oblivious to buy into the claim that the current provincial government is more trustworthy or capable. From spending, to dysfunction, allegations of corruption and mismanagement, where is Smith’s government coming up green, here?

Even the panels themselves are indicative of a problem.

They’re misdirection. They exist to acknowledge emotions, not facts. They’re about telling the base what it wants to hear rather than going about governing the province and fixing the problems that can actually be fixed.

And, my God, does that not sound a heck of a lot like the way the Trudeau Liberals tried to run the country for a decade? Like being in charge was really one, long, drawn-out and divisive parade with Parliament serving as a backdrop.

The province may or may not be able to contribute to serious constitutional reform, or shifts to the way taxes and federal transfers are run. I mean, for what it’s worth, I hope they do. I just don’t think that’s going to be accomplished by another 25 years of angry grandstanding.

But what I am gauging Smith on is not how fierce she sounds when she talks about [insert current Prime Minister] Mark Carney. What I want is a province that demonstrates competence in the areas it does control: get the spending in line. Resolve the teachers’ dispute. Put the health-care system on more sustainable footing without miring the system in corruption and internal conflict. If we must host a public townhall, focus on something productive, like generating ideas to foster more innovation or economic diversification.

How about we just think about, you know, governing for once?

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