Calgary-Shaw By-Election: Don't Get Too Confident

 First, congratulations to newly-elected MLA Kyle Campbell.  The win was decisive enough to not need a judicial recount, and to some degree sent a message to the United Conservative Party (UCP).  

This is not the overwhelming victory that it should have been.  Voters did not turn out in large numbers, and while a 500 vote margin is large enough to avoid a judicial recount, it's not anywhere near what should have been the case if people were actually paying attention to what is going on in Alberta politics. 

You can fully expect the UCP to argue a few things here: 

1. It's a by-election, and the turnout is so low as to really mean it was just angry NDPers who came out in numbers.
2. The vote was "split" because the Progressive Tory Party (PTP) garnered nearly 1,000 votes - stealing victory from the UCP

It's the latter argument that is more insidious because it presupposes that the existence of the PTP is invalid, and they should all be part of the UCP.  They will use this to attempt to undermine the PTP between now and next election. 

The logic will be something along the lines of "voting for the UCP will ensure the continuance of the conservative dominion over Alberta", and that "voting for the PTP is essentially voting for the NDP, and we cannot have the NDP in power ever again".  

Unite The Right Logic

The error in that logic is the supposition that conservatism is somehow a monolith.  In reality, as we are seeing in both BC and Federally, the language of "unite the right" is really a code phrase for a "takeover from within" of a party by its most radicalized socially conservative fringe groups.  

Federally, it's been a long, slow burn with the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).  The "unite the right" campaign began in the late 1990s and culminated in the merger of the Reform Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties under Stephen Harper's control.  I say control because while Harper was leader of the CPC, he was very careful to keep the social conservative wing carefully constrained so that the public wouldn't freak out at some of their more radical policies.  Since Harper stepped aside after losing the Federal Election in 2015, we have seen the CPC move ever further right, with increasingly radical socially-conservative policies become part of the policy book at each convention, and leaders that seem more willing than Harper to adopt those policies themselves.   That's a long burn - 25 years - but it was only that long because of Harper's tenure at the helm - had a leader with less focus on power been in charge, I would probably have been writing this kind of argument by 2015. 

The BC Conservatives have been speed running this same script.  The BC Conservatives ejected Rustad after the party narrowly lost the 2024 election.  The first half of 2026 was a leadership campaign which ultimately led to the election of Kerry-Lynne Findlay - who has made it very clear she is aligned with the more radicalized socially conservative wing of the party.  Rustad was already aligned, although somewhat more careful about what he said, Findlay is far more direct about it.  The BC Conservatives went from at least seemingly mainstream to radicalized in less than a year.  Since becoming leader, 9 MLAs have departed the BC Conservative caucus.  

The UCP suffers from a similar problem, with internal coups having resulted in the party going from "newly united" to radicalized in less than 10 years.  COVID no doubt played a role in that, but it's not hard to look at the party as it was in 2017 and what it looks like now and see that Danielle Smith is clearly beholden to a small, but organized and vocal group of radicals.  

In short, the "united front" of conservatives is not really what it claims to be.  It's a front for the movement's most extreme beliefs to take precedence.  

Upcoming Electoral Moments In Alberta

The Referendums

In just over a month, Alberta voters will vote in a series of 10 referendum questions - all of which are basically separatist propaganda questions.  If current polling is any indication, these questions should all go down to a pretty nasty defeat.  Of course, that supposes that a significant percentage of eligible voters actually vote.  It is not clear to me at all that will be the case.  

I fully expect Smith to ignore the results of the referendum and simply forge ahead with next steps.  Not because she has any mandate to do so, but because her career depends on that happening.

2027 Election

Next year's election is another matter entirely.  First, this fall is when Smith's second "Electoral District Commission" will release its revised electoral map.  Expect this to contain a significant amount of "gerrymandering" in the form of ridings on the edges of major urban centres being carved into "rurban ridings", and ridings where the UCP sees themselves at risk being creatively rearranged so that they are absorbed into safer ridings.  

Additionally, the UCP will probably step up its campaign against both the PTP and the NDP. 

Closing Thoughts 

The upshot here is that while the by-election in Calgary-Shaw is a definite win for people who are angry with the UCP, we need to recognize that we are not dealing with a party that cares one whit about "democratic mandates", and will push through whatever it feels like.  

Opponents of the UCP and the separatist movement in Alberta need to continue to organize and get their message out there.  Not just during campaign periods.  

The Shambolic Nature Of Government

Government, at the best of times is a chaotic creature, it's even more so when the party in power is driven not by a coherent philosophy, but rather by whatever happens to anger its base the most.  Nowhere is this more visible than in Alberta under Danielle Smith's UCP.  

The Smith-led UCP government stumbles from one issue to another with seemingly no intelligible strategy.  

One of the first things the UCP government did was slam the brakes on the deployment of renewable energy sources like wind and solar in Alberta, and subsequently issued a stack of regulations that more or less killed investment in that sector of Alberta's economy.   At a time when climate change is moving rapidly from urgent into crisis, this seems on its face one of the worst possible decisions to make - certainly not one which benefits Albertans in either the short or long term.

More recently, the UCP has become infatuated with attracting "Data Centres" (basically huge warehouses of servers designed to support "Artificial Intelligence" processing).  Now you can make this out as an effort to "diversify" Alberta's economy.  To an extent, there is a legitimacy to that argument - even if I personally think this is a poor way to go about it.  The problem I have with "Data Centres" as "engines of economic growth" is that the blunt reality is that very few actual residents of Alberta will end up with long term employment at those facilities.  Most of them run 24/7 with a small handful of technicians on hand to make repairs when a piece of hardware fails.  The actual monitoring of these facilities can be done from someone's desktop in another country ... and one person can monitor a handful of data centres at a time. 

If you will, as a business model, I'm sure data centres can be hugely profitable - they're basically leasing out compute time to companies that are running huge AI projects.  Short term, these Data Centres are profitable, but their marketability depends on how up to date their hardware is.  The problem that arises is that different generations of hardware have radically different cooling system requirements - so a data centre built for one generation may not be able to be used for whatever generation hardware comes next.  On top of all that, the hardware changes at a very high rate - so by the time the first generation hardware is amortized out, the cost of upgrading the existing building to accommodate new cooling systems may well exceed the value of the building itself - leaving Alberta with a bunch of abandoned warehouses in 5 years.

Now, what comes out this past week, but the lurching thinking of the UCP when faced with the issue of how are these data centres going to be powered.  Of course the UCP, being thoroughly in the thrall of the Oil and Gas sector, jumps to natural gas fired generation.  Do data centres need power?  Absolutely.  Should they be obliged to furnish their own power sources?  Also, yes.  

The first sign of a project not being truly viable is when "derisking" the project involves having government take over substantial aspects of what that business needs.  In this case, the UCP starts musing about forming crown corporations to ensure that natural gas is delivered to these generation facilities.  Think about that for a moment - the UCP thinking actively about forming a Crown Corporation - a party that is so far to the right that if you had suggested a Crown Corporation for any other purpose would have laughed you out of the room.  (Look at what they are doing to health care in Alberta - literally tearing it apart to sell it off to various private interests). Now, since then, Smith has said "no, I'm not going to do that" ... of course, it's Danielle Smith - you take her at her word at your own peril. 

The only thing consistent about Danielle Smith's government is her allegiance to big oil, and to Donald Trump.  Beyond that, this is a government that lurches from one crisis to another, devoid of any kind of coherent philosophy or strategy.  Smith has been described as a "political magpie" by Thomas Lukaszuk, and that seems an apt description.  She has no vision beyond the current matter that has her attention - and for Alberta, that's disastrously bad news.

Pieces Falling Into Place For Canada's Air Force

 I have suspected for some time that the decision around which direction Canada was going to go in terms of its next generation Air Force has been made, if not formally announced.  

The latest brick just fell into place, with Stephen Fuhr being appointed to head up the new Defence Investment Agency.  Fuhr has been critical of the F-35 for a long time, so I can suspect that will play _a_ role in where things are going next.  

While I have my own personal opinions about the F-35 vs Gripen discussion, this is more about the political game that is playing out.  

First, consider that Canada has decided to purchase the Saab GlobalEye surveillance aircraft.  The GlobalEye just happens to be based on the Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft, giving a boost to Canadian manufacturing as well as providing a fairly obvious level of cover as Saab and Bombardier would need to ramp up collaboration.  This provides reasonable cover for setting up the supply chains for Gripen manufacturing with Bombardier leading the effort.  

Then add to that Saab's very generous terms for the Gripen which would essentially serve as a restart of Canada's military aerospace program - creating jobs as well as providing a decent aircraft that appears generally well suited to Canada's needs.  

Meanwhile, the F-35 is a high cost aircraft with remarkably poor availability and high maintenance requirements, and Canada looking down the business end of increasing expense just to acquire the F-35, it's not hard to understand why Canada might just decide to pivot towards spending the same money on a platform that will create jobs and industry here in Canada.

My guess is that the Gripen decision has been made, but not announced.  Saab and Bombardier will be quietly setting up the needed manufacturing infrastructure in parallel with the setup needed for the GlobalEye program.  

The one major "fly in the ointment" here is the Saab using a license-built engine designed by GE, which theoretically could mean that the US could veto any sale to Canada through that license agreement.  However, this is potentially offset by Saab adapting the Gripen airframe to accept a slightly more powerful engine from Rolls Royce, bypassing the American veto entirely. 

Politically, the Carney government has shown us that it has both the internal discipline to take on a project like this without telling anyone who doesn't need to know about it, and the political will to do it even if it angers the current occupant of the White House. 

Personally, at this point in time, if the US wants to make everything transactional and volatile, it would seem to me quite reasonable to walk away from the F-35 program even if it is a technically superior aircraft.  I'd rather have an aircraft that meets Canada's needs without being dependent on the mood in Washington.