Author's Note: I started writing something about the UCP's policy resolutions in October, but it seemed redundant. Now that the UCP has held their AGM, and these have been voted on, it's time to take a look at the shape of the party that results from it.
In September, the CPC held its policy convention and went full SoCon - passing every discriminatory, bigotry-laden policy put before them - and by significant margins. This weekend, the UCP said to the CPC: "Hold my beer".
Before the UCP delegates this weekend were some 30 policy resolutions, and they ranged from almost reasonable sounding policy ideas to outright conspiracy theory level crackpottery. The resulting policy is a pastiche of terrible ideas rooted in bigotry and ignorance.
There's more than a few that boil down to straight up conspiracy theory level stupidity.
At the top of the tin-foil hat level conspiracy theory stuff is Resolution 12, which reads:
The United Conservative Party believes the Government of Alberta should ...
d) Prohibit any land use or development planning initiatives that would restrict movement of residents as per Section 6 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
If you hadn't already guessed, this is the tin-foil hat conspiracy theory about "15 minute cities" being some kind of "open air prison" model where you won't be permitted to leave an area without permission.
Similarly, there's Resolution 5, which makes some very bizarre claims about currency:
The United Conservative Party believes the Government of Alberta should ...
a) Protect Albertans' right to have access to goods and services using cash and the option to bank with provincially regulated institutions that supply cash instead of Digital Currency
Yes, you read that right. There's some element within the UCP having a meltdown that "currency might go digital". I wonder if these people have paid attention to the last 40 years of banking increasingly digitizing everything? That ranges from auto-deposit of paycheques to credit cards and bank statements. It's all digital these days. Do they think that if they insist on cash it will magically make their credit cards work differently?
Of course, what would a conservative policy convention be these days without a dose of climate denialism. Sure enough, there are two such resolutions on the board here. Resolution 1 and Resolution 23. Resolution 1 is an outright "we deny that climate change is real" statement. That this was passed is not surprising.
Resolution 23 argues for a "Transportation and Utility Corridor" to be built either to Hudson's Bay or the Mackenzie Delta areas. There are many ironies to this one, but not the least of which is the obvious ignorance of just how difficult it is to run major infrastructure like roads, rail, and pipelines across tundra. Remember the railway up to Churchill that got flooded out a few years ago? Yeah - turns out that muskeg is a tad bit harder to build on that most of us realize - and that's before the permafrost layers melt because of climate change.
Then we get a handful of overlapping policies about regulated professions. I'll call these the "Jordan Peterson Resolutions". Resolutions 2, 3, 16 fall into this bucket. All of them boil down to complaining that complaints to professional regulating bodies have been made for public statements that regulated professionals made about various subjects which resulted in professional conduct complaints being made.
I will point out that in most of these cases, the complaints arise from the professional making comments that were outside their expertise (e.g. Peterson's comments about transgender people), or taking positions that simply weren't supported by actual science (e.g. Dr. Makis and his comments about COVID, and cancer). These kinds of statements are still professional comments, and because of the person's role in society (profile, etc), they are often granted a level of credibility that wouldn't be granted if it were you or I making the statement. These kinds of statements can be incredibly corrosive and damaging to the profession and society as a whole.
Further, membership in a professional college is entirely voluntary. The ethics for most major professions also emphasize that your responsibilities extend well beyond the doors of your practice for good reasons.
Then we get into the basket of Social Conservative pandering resolutions. These target everything from addictions and MAiD to education and transgender people. Resolutions 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 20, 22, 25, and 29 all fall into this bucket.
The level of transgender hatred that motivates these resolutions is stunning. Resolutions 29, 17, and 8 are overtly about transgender hate. Resolution 8 is a repeat of the policies implemented in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, both of which reflect a profound ignorance of transgender youth, and the risks they face early in their gender journeys. Resolution 17 is a variation on this same theme, but it basically attempts to strip children and youth of their rights by placing "parental rights" above them.
Resolution 29 is a "OMG, transgender women are predators" resolution that argues that transgender women have to be kept apart from other prisoners because "one might be a sexual predator". This kind of reasoning basically boils down to a rather narrow-minded perspective that says "if you ever had a penis or any kind of testosterone in your body, you must be a predator". It's sloppy generalizing based on two really bad ideas. The first is the broad idea that anyone who has ever been male bodied is going to be "sexually aggressive" - a silly generalization at best, and one that disregards the experiences of transgender women. The second is the misogynistic belief that women need to be "protected from men" (no, transgender women are NOT men). This resolution uniquely assigns a group punishment on transgender women based not on the individual's characteristics, but based on an assumption about the nature of that class of people.
Moving on to the attacks on education, we have resolutions 6, 8, 9, and 20.
Resolutions 6, and 9 along with a number of the "rights" resolutions in the pile, basically is about upholding the kind of "others are bad" bigotry so common in conservative movements these days. It argues that any kind of diversity and inclusion or other "affirmative action" program should be banned. This is more damaging than you might first think, because it really is aimed at erasing minorities from the post-secondary education system. These constructs exist because there are disadvantaged groups that otherwise would be unable to access post-secondary education. I'm not just talking about transgender students here. I'm talking about programs that are designed to enable those with disabilities to access post-secondary education, or exist to enable First Nations students who for a variety of reasons might not otherwise be able to access the programs. All of those programs would be endangered if the government were to implement it.
Resolution 20 is basically an import of the American practice of parents micromanaging what books are in school libraries. It is unquestionably born out of a paranoid belief that any mention of sexuality anywhere will magically turn children queer. (Hint: It doesn't work that way - trust me, if it did, there would be no 2SLGBTQ people in the world since we are bombarded with heteronormative messaging constantly) The purpose is, of course, to eliminate any material which might possibly be useful to a youth coming to terms with their sexuality. This will predictably result in a return to the era of the 50s through 70s where sexually transmitted infections (STIs) moved through the younger population simply because they didn't know any better, and girls who got pregnant were suddenly hidden away from society until they gave birth (and the baby whisked away to an orphanage because "respectable girls" are always virgins when they get married).
Resolution 25 is one of the insidious ones. It's really designed to make it almost impossible to complain to the Alberta Human Rights Commission about discrimination by imposing "the same rules of evidence as the courts". This is clearly aimed at enabling both racism and discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation. There is a reason that Commissions operate with a looser set of rules about evidence than the courts do - namely they are designed to deal with cases where the evidence may be more circumstantial, or simply does not rise to the level of demonstrating criminal (or even civil) wrongdoing. Implementing this will effectively neuter the AHRC as a body of recourse that minorities can use to address situations where their workplace has become hostile, or where they have been arbitrarily discriminated against.
So much of the policies in the UCP AGM book range from tin foil hat conspiracy theories to ultimately enshrining people's right to be hostile bigots to those that they don't understand or dislike it's really quite distressing. This is not a party of ideas, it is a party of small minded people who have decided that their bigotry should take precedence over the rights of others to live their lives in peace.
One can only hope that Danielle Smith and her caucus will have the sense not to implement any of this, but I suspect strongly that they will because they like power.
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