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.  

What Is The Untold Story Here?

This morning, in a move reminiscent of UK media, Canada's National Post published the following story as front page news:  Ontario school hid girl's transition, called CAS on parents questioning trans identity.

It's a semi-predictable article:  Child explores their gender identity, parents find out and panic ... yada yada yada ... It's riddled with tropes and inferences that speak to this being yet another hit job being used to prop up anti-transgender activists.  The bigger questions in my mind are "the parts of the story not being told" here.   

Let's dig in and explore just how fucked up this story really is, shall we? 

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.

An Attack On One Is An Attack On All

As we move from the summer doldrums to the fall political season in Alberta (and Canada in general), there are some things we need to talk about.  Specifically, we need to talk about the concept of rights - both as they exist in legislation and the spirit of that legislation in contrast with the legislative plans of certain politicians. 

When we talk about rights, we tend to think about legislation that enumerates those rights for us. In Canada, that is primarily the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (The Charter), although there is also an older Bill of Rights that is now subservient to the Charter, and a range of court rulings that build upon the framework of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Similarly, provincial legislatures have often implemented their own rights legislation frameworks, such as Alberta’s Human Rights Act.

The first point is that these acts all make provision for Individual rights.  That is to say, they set out the boundaries of what we can reasonably assume to be true both in practice and in legislation in terms of our interactions with the state, and to some degree our interactions with each other.  The Charter is an interesting document for several reasons - first, it doesn’t describe “absolute rights”, but instead its first clause stipulates that the rights may be circumscribed by “reasonable limits” as set out in legislation.  In terms of understanding the Charter, this is hugely important because it tells us that rights in Canada have limits and we can expect those limits to be set out in legislation.  Second, it also hints at the idea that our individual rights exist in a degree of tension with each other.  So, for example, while we have a right to “Freedom of Expression”, that right exists only to the degree that its exercise does not unreasonably impinge upon the rights of another individual. 

The Charter does not establish a clear hierarchy of rights.  That is to say, the order in which rights appear in the Charter does not inform us in any way whether any one right supersedes or can override a later right - they are all “equal”.  The only thing the Charter establishes in terms of “hierarchy of rights” is the notion of individual rights being more important than collective or group rights.  

Attacks On Rights

Recently, we have seen numerous proposals to legislatively attack the rights of minorities.  Specifically, transgender youth, and drug addicts here in Alberta.  In January 2024, Premier Smith proposed a sweeping group of policy and legislation that attacks transgender youth on numerous fronts. Further to that, the proposals being made for a “recovery focused” addictions treatment program which includes forced treatment. 

In both cases, you might look and argue that these are “reasonable limits” on rights.  After all, how can a youth or child “consent” to something as life changing as gender reassignment, right?  I have seen arguments that addicts cannot provide consent when they are in the throes of active addiction.  To the extent that such statements are true, one can see them as “reasonable limits”.  The issue is that the extent to which they are true is very limited.  

The fact that the Alberta Government is already talking about using the “Notwithstanding Clause” (S.33) to insulate its legislation from Charter scrutiny is a clue that they already know that it won’t stand up to a court challenge.  Invoking S.33 is essentially an admission that they know that these laws are invalid under The Charter, and they open those who are being targeted by them to discriminatory treatment not merely within the framework of the legislation, but in other aspects of their lives as well. 

What Happens If These Laws Stand?

This is where the slope becomes very slippery indeed.  If provinces (or the Federal Government) are allowed to slap S.33 on anything they please, they will effectively render The Charter moot. It suddenly becomes trivial to revoke or severely restrict rights simply by invoking S.33 to “protect” any piece of legislation that the legislature passes.  

If a legislature decides that it doesn’t like the idea of women being able to vote, they can simply pass a piece of legislation that revokes that right, or makes it much harder for women to meet the criteria to be eligible to vote.  Invoke S.33 to protect it, and presto! Your rights have just disappeared back to the 19th Century.  

It’s easy to set the precedent with small, poorly understood populations like transgender people or drug addicts.  Once the precedent has been set, it’s very easy to extend it to other topics.  Poilievre has already alluded to doing similar things in the realm of criminal justice at the Federal level.  

An attack on the rights of one group can very quickly expand into being the erasure of rights for all.  Just because you aren't affected doesn't mean that you won't be.