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.

Of Trade Deals, Foreign Interference, and Conservative Leadership In Canada

We talk a lot about "foreign interference" in Canadian politics, but we don't very often talk about the single biggest source of interference in Canada's political discourse:  the United States.  For decades, we have quietly accepted the presence of American ties to various political groups and lobbying efforts, either turning a blind eye, or out of some naive belief that the US and Canada are much the same and therefore it's not really interference when there is cross border collaboration between various politicians and parties. 

Conservatives in particular have taken advantage of this, appearing regularly at US conservative conferences and networking events like the CPAC conference or the "Prayer Breakfast" events.  These connections are well documented, and sustained by events like Danielle Smith travelling to Mar-a-Lago, or former PM Harper's 2018 visit to the White House.   Visits like Smith's and Harper's are not mere social calls - they are very much "kiss the ring" moments where a "client" leader swears fealty to a more powerful leader.  That's important to recognize.  

American influence in Canada's politics is everywhere - it's so pervasive that we often don't think about it or give it the consideration it deserves.  The events of the last couple of weeks should give Canadians pause and motivation to reconsider that.  Let me draw you the picture I see emerging.

Anti-Transgender Hate Arguments

So, the other day, I ran across a new anti-trans group here in Alberta (shocker, I know).  This one calls itself "Women and Girls Alberta".  As you might expect, they make the usual assortment of arguments as to why transgender women have to be shoved out of society.  

Now, a few things caught my attention, and I think warrant a moment or two of my time to comment on.  

First is their discussion about crime and in particular violence towards women.

The opening assertion here is that recognizing trans women somehow erodes women's safety.  I want to be clear here:  I don't think anybody is here to discount the impact of violence on women - least of transgender women.  There's a "yabbut" here though: they are going to proceed to claim that transgender women present unique dangers to women because ... they had a penis once. 

There are a series of claims made in this type of argument to establish alleged danger, and I'm going to go through them and explain the problems with the claim and the evidence upon which that claim is based.  

Alberta, BC, and Ottawa All Walk Into A Bar ...

This is mostly going to be me processing yesterday's announcements in Alberta and BC.  I haven't quite worked out what I think of it all yet, and maybe by the end of this I will have come to some kind of conclusion ... I'm not sure.  What follows is going to be, at best, slightly ordered stream of consciousness writing.  

So, what was announced?  Well, basically, BC got a whole bunch of Federal funding for some major infrastructure projects with a guarantee that the Tanker Ban would remain in place; and Alberta got a commitment to build what amounts to a third line along the TransMountain pipeline route.  

But that's far from the whole story here.

The Formation of The UCP Sowed The Seeds of Its Failure

When Jason Kenney created the UCP he set up the preconditions for the party to get to where it is today, and its eventual demise.  What do I mean by this?  Kenney may have believed that he could control the extreme elements in the UCP in much the same way that Harper did so as leader of the CPC. 

Harper allowed the extremist factions in the CPC to exist and even to have something of a voice in the party, but at the moment that a given push looked like it would have a political cost for him, he would shut it down.  This was done through a combination of tools - Harper exercised considerable personal control over the party apparatus.  That meant that in large part, if you kept him happy, your career was secure.  The leader's office had the power to quash constituency decisions such as new nominees, and the "public face" of the party was carefully protected.  So, while the extremist wings of the CPC could make a certain level of noise - it was never enough to do more than keep their followers believing the party was aligned with them.  

However, Harper was able to do this because the Federal CPC is a much bigger entity than the UCP in Alberta - and although the Prairie Reform rump of the party clearly dominates it today, the party needs votes from outside the Prairies in order to have any hope of ever forming government.  Harper understood this, and was very careful to keep the extremes in check even though his own leadership depended on them. 

A party of the scale of the UCP is a much different animal, and that's where Kenney's choices failed. 

Separatists Lose In Court

Alberta's rump of separatists suffered a major setback last week, when a judge overturned the Chief Electoral Officer of Alberta (CEO-A) decision that set the signature gathering process for the "Stay Free Alberta" petition.   If you're interested, the full ruling is here (warning: it's lengthy, and full of legal technical language).

I'm not going to spend a pile of time here dissecting the ruling - while I understand most of what's written in it (I think), a deep dive would be tedious and relatively uninteresting.  At the end of it all, the ruling has the net effect of rendering the entire signature gathering process that has gone on since January this year to be a legal fiction which "never happened".  

How does that work?  Central to the judge's ruling is the declaration that the decision of the CEO-A to grant the petition was "unreasonable", and that the crown had failed to execute any kind of consultation with affected First Nations, therefore the decision itself was quashed.  In doing so, the judge effectively turned the next 4 months of signature gathering into a legal ghost - the paper exists, but the authorization to gather those signatures doesn't and therefore the signatures themselves cannot be considered. 

This is unlikely to be the last we hear of this nonsense though.  

Supreme Court Hearings on Quebec Bill 21

 The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) is holding hearings in the matter English Montreal School Board, et al. v. Attorney General of Quebec, et al.  Before you yawn and walk away, this is probably the single most important SCC case in 20 years.  I've written about the arguments in some depth here.

Among the issues on the table is very much the question "Does the Charter of Rights and Freedoms truly apply to all Canadians, or do we have a patchwork of rights where provinces decide what rights are available to Canadians living in their borders?".  Do I have your attention yet? 

Let's talk about that:

A Week In Alberta Politics

 Alberta’s politics are an awful mess right now, and this past week has been quite a spectacle even for Alberta. 

Devin Dreeshen kicked things off by making a fuss over bike lanes in Calgary (and Edmonton, no doubt). To put it bluntly, Dreeshen is a privileged little twit that lives out in rural Alberta - he has no experience with urban planning whatsoever, much less has he ever lived in a major urban area for any length of time.  He has no clue about what it takes to get around in Calgary or Edmonton.  He needs to leave the municipalities alone on this one. 

Then we move to newly-minted “Municipal Affairs Minister” Dan Williams, who saw fit to come out with guns blazing over city hall implementing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.  Ah yes, the wonderful world of “merit hiring” - which is really a code phrase for there being a shocking number of fragile white men who are utterly terrified that someone who is not white might actually be their equal.  We’ll come back to this in a bit, because just when you think the week’s done, the UCP gets worse.

Yesterday, Education Minister Nicolaides decided it was a good time to roll out what amounts to a book ban in school libraries. In spite of the minister's claims to the contrary, this is really a ban on 2SLGBTQ material in school libraries.  Back in May, when the minister foreshadowed this action, it was pretty clear that this was based on a bunch of "Parents Groups" borrowing from a moral panic strategy that has already played out in the United States.  Of course, the proposed list of books comes from a number of US conservative aligned sources. 

None of this should surprise us - the Canadian Social Conservative movement is tightly enmeshed with its American counterpart, and at least in Alberta, they are practically drooling over the prospect of having a government so cowed by the fact that they ejected former Premier Jason Kenney a couple of years ago that they think they can push their extreme agenda even further.  It doesn't matter what Danielle Smith thinks or believes - she's shown that she kowtows to the loudest, most obnoxious voices in her party. 

Where is all this going?  Backwards for the most part.  Like her attack on transgender people started in January 2024, this is all about rolling back rights, access, and equity.  The UCP wants all them damned queers back in the closet.  The smaller the closet, the better, and they don't care who they trample in the process.  

But, it doesn't stop there.  There is a whole host of "SoCon" hobby horse issues - and it doesn't stop at abortion either - although LaGrange is obviously chuckling with glee as she tears our healthcare system apart at the seams - breaking it so badly that I suspect healthcare in Alberta will look increasingly like "if you aren't wealthy, you're screwed" - Alabama will look amazing.  

Going after trans youth was the "thin edge of the wedge" in the UCP's strategy.  Trans youth have the least voice politically, and even less resources to fight back with.  The government engaged in performative "consultation", but excluded voices of trans kids, their parents, and the people who actually provide treatment.  

Then they came along with a ban on trans women in sports.  Again, they listened to a small group of people who loudly proclaim that having trans women in sport is somehow "unfair", but ignored the voices of trans women, and any evidence that challenges the assumption that trans women have "automatic advantages" athletically because at some point their bodies may have produced testosterone.  The resulting policy is far reaching, and unreasonable to say the least. 

The recent "book ban" policy is clearly built on similar grounds.  When you look at it objectively, it's about erasing 2SLGBTQ voices from school libraries.  Did the government engage in meaningful consultation?  No.  They consulted with Action4Canada and a couple of other known anti-2SLGBTQ groups who helpfully provided them with book lists from similar campaigns in the US.  The "public consultation" was such an obvious "push poll" designed to provoke outrage it wasn't even worthy of being considered a fig leaf of consultation. 

Can you see the wedge being hammered in even further?  

If you think this government is going to stop at attacking trans people and library books in schools, I have news for you.  Williams' shot at "DEI" is a warning - they are coming after everything.   Think that you lost out in a job hiring process to a "diversity hire"?  Cool, they'll back you.  Do I expect them to go after the Alberta Human Rights Commission?  Absolutely - they are going to make it just about impossible to make a successful complaint if you aren't white, male, Christian, and wealthy.  

As for women's issues?  Well - get used to having to fight for everything from health care to voting, because that's on the agenda too. There is no shortage of religious hardliners who want to make it impossible for women to vote, and the fight over abortion is always about bodily autonomy. 

The point here is that Alberta is the beachhead in Canada for this extremist influence coming up from the US.  If we don't stand against it now, we're all screwed.  

The UCP Hates You

The Alberta “United Conservative Party” hates you - and it’s with a level of visceral loathing that is inexplicable.  Live in an urban centre?  Well, the cancellation of the Green Line is one of many examples of their loathing for anyone that isn’t “them”.  

Then the National Post published some of the policy proposals that the party is looking at for this fall’s convention.  To call it ‘hate-filled’ is perhaps the kindest thing I can say about it.  The levels of ignorance and hatred contained in the motions is stunning, but also telling. 

The UCP Owns The Green Line Project Fallout

The UCP now owns the entirety of the Green Line debacle.  Every last bit of its demise lands at their doorstep.  

Let me explain a bit here.  The current efforts to get this project underway date back to 2010 or so.  By 2017, the City of Calgary, Province of Alberta, and Government of Canada had all agreed on funding, and an alignment had been worked out.  

The City's own website on the project contains a huge history that goes back to 2011, and proposals around creating the line had been ongoing long before that.  This is reflected by the reality that 52St SE has clear space along its west side from 130 Ave south into Auburn bay.  Considering that MacKenzie Towne started development back in the 1990s, I think this particular project has a much longer history than 2010.  

While I agree with much of what David Climenhaga argues about the immediate fallout from the UCP government's decision, I also think his argument overlooks some very important history - history that needs to be talked about here.  

Political meddling in major infrastructure projects in Alberta isn't new.  The original plans for the LRT in Calgary would have had lines run to all the major quadrants of Calgary by the end of the 1980s.  Clearly that didn't happen, and goodness knows the original south leg alignment has more than a handful of decisions made by skinflint policy makers who panicked over costs instead of paying attention to long term functionality.  Almost always the meddling came from the Provincial Government - usually in the form of withholding funding.  

The 2019 budget tabled by a newly elected UCP government slashed funding to the cities, creating holes and delays for the project. Then, in 2020, McIver slammed the brakes on the Green Line project.  In 2021, the government leaving its foot on the financial brakes meant that construction couldn't start that year and in 2022, the city had restart the bidding process to hire a company to do the construction.  These aren't fast processes and the contracts are complex - plan on it taking the best part of a year (or more) for that to finish up.  

Fast forward to 2024, in spring, Smith takes a swipe at Calgary over possible cost overruns on the Green Line.  On the heels of that, city council goes back and refactors things to reduce cost risk.  The province green lights it, only to completely pull its funding a week or so ago.  

See the pattern here?  The city works diligently to put together a plan, only to have an increasingly interventionist UCP government pull the rug out from underneath it.  More importantly, while the city has been diligently trying to move the project along, it has been the province holding things up for reasons that are increasingly unclear and unreasonable. 

Not only does this underscore the fact that the UCP has no respect for the municipalities, but it is perfectly willing to overturn any decision a municipality makes to satisfy its own political agenda.  In this case, the "agenda" seems to be making people like Jim Gray happy, rather than focusing on Calgarians.  I know Mr. Gray will swear up and down that he has Calgarians' "best interests at heart", but frankly he only does to the extent that he can profit from those interests.  Add to that the sudden interest in building a rail link out to Banff - seemingly to benefit the owners of the Mt Norquay ski hill - one does have to become more than a little bit suspicious that the recent collapse of the Green Line project has much more to do with making certain UCP donors/supporters more wealthy than it does anything else. 

Meanwhile, the province's actions have opened the City of Calgary up to a great deal of both legal and financial liability.  Not only will it cost millions to wind up the current Green Line project, but it will also open the city to lawsuits from the various contractors who are finding their contracts cancelled abruptly based on the Province's actions.  

While the municipality carries the liability for those contracts directly (yet another way the UCP is setting out to further punish Calgary for daring to elect NDP MLAs last election), there is an argument to be made that the City can, and should, sue the province for its actions as being damaging to the fiscal and legal interests of the City.  In fact, recent legislation where the province explicitly gave itself the right to overrule municipal governments when it doesn't like what they are doing could be used in court to argue that the liability at least in part should be shifted to a provincial government that has decided that its authority supersedes that of everybody else. 

In the realm of "unintended consequences", the actions of the province here are going to make it much more costly for Canadian municipalities to negotiate any kind of contract.  It makes absolutely clear that unless the provincial government signs on the dotted line as well, that no contract with a municipal government is secure.  

On Above Ground Transit Corridors

So … the UCP wants the Green Line to be above ground as it passes through downtown.  The reasoning for this is ostensibly the “complexity” of dealing with water issues.  I call bullshit on this for a number of reasons.  

First, the original plan for the LRT was an underground line (yes, this goes back to the 1970s), and we ended up backing away from it “because of the costs”, and the result is the 7th Avenue “Transit Corridor” which has been a disaster from day one. 

Why do I call it a disaster?  For many of the same reasons that I consider the alignment of the original line with the railway lines running out of south Calgary.  First and foremost, it created a “people hostile” zone along 7th Avenue.  Some of the creepiest parts of downtown Calgary are along there because redevelopment along a transit corridor is hard - nobody wants to live there, and street level businesses get decimated because nobody actually wants to be along that chunk of real estate - lots of people “pass by”, but everybody is rushing to either get the next train / bus, or to get to some other part of downtown as quickly as possible. 

Then there is the ongoing problems of pedestrian and vehicle interactions with the train at crossings.  There is a regular stream of collisions with transit LRT vehicles along that corridor, and for all that officials keep reminding the public to be “careful around the trains”, it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference.  

It has long been my opinion that the “7th Avenue Transit Corridor” should have been slammed underground on day one.  It wasn’t because Calgary is notoriously cheap about major infrastructure projects.  

As for “the difficulties of managing water table issues”, the more you look at it, the less sense this makes.  Every major city that has underground public transit has to deal with this issue.  They all seem to be able to do it successfully.  Arguing that it’s “too hard” with a relatively minor river the size of the Bow river in the vicinity.  Compare the Bow to the major rivers in other cities with underground infrastructure and the answer is “no, it’s not that hard to deal with”.   The Thames in London is much larger and more complex and subway infrastructure was being build under it back in the 1800s.  

I find it laughable that the UCP is arguing against an underground alignment for the Green Line on the basis of “cost”.  An above ground, or even elevated alignment is just going to carve Calgary up even further, and make it significantly harder to move around and through the areas where the LRT tracks exist - effectively isolating parts of downtown and inner city Calgary from each other.  

This isn’t about cost - it never was.  This is about a UCP government hell-bent on punishing Calgary for the perceived slight of having dared to vote NDP last election.  They’re going to try and cast this as being about Nenshi and wanting a “caviar and champagne” solution for transit, and in the process they are going to fuck over decades of complex urban planning work which will end up costing Calgarians even more in the long run. 

… and don’t get me started on so-called “PPP” options.  Those are never a “win” for the public.  NEVER. 

The UCP Is Being Petty and Vengeful

The UCP government is now becoming vengeful - openly so.  In the 2023 Alberta Election, rural Alberta voted UCP, and urban Alberta didn't (at least not the kind of sweep that the UCP seems to think they are owed).  Now, it's not unusual for political parties to "reward" ridings that vote for them, but this is taking on a whole new tone that I think we need to discuss.  

How The UCP Is Lining Up To Steal Your Healthcare (and Rights)

Things are beginning to line up in terms of the UCP's plan and we can see now how they are going to attack health care and Albertans.  There's quite a sequence of things here, but the picture they paint when you draw it all out is quite interesting - and not in a good way interesting.

Reviewing The Cass Review Report

The subtitle for this should be "How Cass Weaponized Science".

Now that the Cass Review has published their final report, it is possible to look beyond the apparent issues in how the report was assembled, and examine the report, its recommendations, and see just how bad it really is. 

Let’s Go Back To The DSM III !

Apparently there is a belief held among certain members of the trans community that we should go back in time … back to the days of the DSM III in particular - at least for what is now referred to as Gender Dysphoria.  (If you wish to read the DSM III section on Transsexualism, it’s Diagnostic Code 302.50 - in the chapter on Sexual Disorders, I think).

I have opinions.  

First, let me post the thread that I just read before I go off and explain just how incredibly wrong these people have it. 

There are a few things to bring out here.  First is a gross misunderstanding of the role / purpose of the DSM and its development.  Then we need to get into a discussion of just what treatment for transsexuals looked like back then, because wow - it wasn’t pretty.  

About Alberta's Proposed Ban On Trans Athletes

Among the heartless and cruel things that Danielle Smith announced in her "policy package" about parental rights (anti-transgender policy, really), was an absolute ban on transgender women competing in sports in Alberta. The rationale being that somehow "transgender women have massive advantages in athletics", and somehow that having transgender women playing in women's leagues creates a "danger" to women. 

But, more seriously, does this make any sense from a policy perspective?

Let's Talk About Protecting Children

The ostensible reason for the UCP government's recently announced bundle of policies around transgender youth (actually, all trans people - but we'll come back to that) is to "protect children".  I'm going to speak to this from a professional and therapeutic perspective, because I have relevant training and experience in that regard. 

First, let's consider what it means to "protect" someone else's interests - to safeguard them.  The approach being taken by the UCP seems to be more about preventing the individual from making decisions for themselves, apparently on the basis that you "can't possibly understand the consequences unless you're an adult".  This clearly misrepresents the idea of safeguarding, and ultimately robs the individual of autonomy.  

The UCP's approach basically is based on the old nuclear family concept that the parents, siblings, and relatives magically "know what's best" for the child.  This is reflected in Smith's statements, as well as in the bizarre "mandatory notification" model being imposed on schools.  However, again, this model ignores the person most affected by these decisions - the child.  It's no longer given to them the opportunity to say "no, I'm not comfortable with notifying my parents right now".

And this is where the entire policy construct shows us its wrong-headedness.

Restructuring AHS - The Wrong Way

I was never particularly impressed with the AHS “Superboard” concept that was instituted in 2009 - it got some thing right (like centralizing procurement), but it also had the effect of gutting the ability for the system to respond to local needs.  It effectively turned major decisions into political fodder - suddenly matters like building new facilities became political footballs, with little or no regional input into matters like requirements.

After an initial period of utter chaos, which arguably lasted through 2012 or 2013, AHS started to find its feet and initiated programs like Primary Care Networks which went a long ways towards smoothing out access in the system, and in particular communication between family physicians and specialists.
Today, AHS is far from perfect, but it has done a lot to rebalance the system and introduce more local responsiveness to issues.  

What was rolled out by the Danielle Smith-led UCP government yesterday is a recipe for disaster.  We don’t have a lot of details yet, but the basic structure effectively creates a series of “silos” that will inevitably make communications between groups much, much worse. Vertical silos like what has been proposed are almost inevitably going to create walls between organizations that prevent meaningful knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Second, when I see this kind of structure trotted out in the corporate world, it almost always means that things are being lined up to be sold.  Once the walls go up, and mutual collaboration is severed, it’s relatively easy to sell off pieces and make huge profits on the sale.  Corporate “mergers” tend to go one of two ways:  The acquired entity is assimilated into the larger organization and its core functions become part of the larger whole; or, the acquired entity remains an all but separate business of its own that feeds a few % of its profits into the parent corporation - until such times as the parent company decides to skim a profit by selling it off. 

The UCP structure for health care in Alberta seems to be designed with an orientation towards the latter.  Create a bunch of isolated vertical silos that can then be dismantled.

Given the lack of detail, lack of risk management planning, and the complexity of trying to dismantle AHS into this new structure, the government’s self-assigned budget of some $120M is almost laughably small.  Having been a project manager myself, I look at that and go “you’re going to restructure a $45B organization that cheaply? - yeah keep kidding yourselves.”.  

When - or if - a more detailed plan is made available, I will look at it.  But, at the moment, I take one look at this, and my first thought is “this is a completely unrealistic plan that will be detrimental to the well-being of Albertans”.  I have little doubt that the real goal of this is to sell off as much as they can to US interests before the next election. After that, Albertans will find themselves stuck with the same affordability dilemma that so many in the US face:  Do I pay my rent or my healthcare premiums? 

The UCP Goes "Hold My Beer" To The CPC

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.