In a rather busy span last month, the Alberta government confirmed that former prime minister Stephen Harper would be the chair of a completely remade board of Alberta’s investment megafund AIMCo, forecast a bigger-than-anticipated budget surplus, and announced the most substantial changes to the province’s auto insurance system in at least two decades.
That was all just one minister — Finance captain Nate Horner — and in a mere two-day stretch. Also in that late November week, Premier Danielle Smith presided over an experts’ summit for her cross-province passenger rail master plan, announced the latest new agency to replace a chunk of Alberta Health Services, and the legislature debated contentious changes to transgender policies and her beefed-up provincial Bill of Rights.
Boosters will call that firing on all cylinders. Critics will say she’s flooding the zone. Alberta New Democrats privately grumble that Smith’s been doing so much so fast that there’s not been much bandwidth for them to get an idea in edgewise.
“I never worry about being too ambitious,” the premier told CBC Calgary in a year-end interview.
Look over what she’s done since last year’s election, and you’ll notice she’s not merely announcing stuff. She’s setting in motion plans to transform major provincial institutions and the ways Alberta’s government operates.
“The world is moving too fast for us not to be an innovative government,” the premier said.
WATCH | Smith: ‘We have to be an innovative government’:
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith talks to CBC’s Jason Markusoff about the “ambitious” changes her government made in 2024, such as the restructuring of Alberta Health Services and changes to Alberta’s auto insurance and electricity systems.
Danielle Smith’s Alberta
So let’s consider all that she’s doing and undoing.
Dividing the health system into four agencies. Quadrupling the number of new school builds, and directing more resources and emphasis toward the charters and privates.
Carving out with the sheriffs a new provincial police force to bolster local police and the RCMP (or replace the latter, should the RCMP one day leave community policing). Implementing an addictions strategy with forced treatment and recovery campuses, and less harm reduction.
Overhauling both the electricity and insurance systems.
Charting a new course for the province’s $169-billion investment and public-sector workers’ pension fund. A reshaped relationship with municipalities, in which the province takes more control. Consistently pushing back against Ottawa, so the federal government has less control within Alberta.
Plotting new commuter rail lines all over Alberta, and putting itself in the middle of planning Calgary’s next LRT line.
Creating Canada’s most wide-ranging rules governing transgender youth in health, education and sport.
The UCP will soon unveil a road map to balloon the Heritage Fund to more than 10 times its current size. The premier has blue-skied about doubling Alberta’s fossil fuel production, and pushing its population skyward to 10 million by 2050 (though she’s since walked back that one).
It’s a lot for one government and one term — and Smith’s first full term still has two-and-a-half years left.
“We had a lot to fix,” she said.
With this pace, you’d be forgiven for thinking she was repealing and repairing after a different party’s long regime, rather than following up three years of her UCP under Jason Kenney’s premiership.
Neither Kenney nor NDP premier Rachel Notley before him went for major structural reform of Alberta health care, each preferring more incremental changes. But coming out of the pandemic — and her party base’s revulsion to public health restrictions — Smith saw a hulking, problematic beast needing to be taken apart.
In 2020, a panel recommended UCP adopt a no-fault driver insurance model, but Kenney’s team balked. Smith has taken the leap, worried that amid an affordability crunch, “all of a sudden we’ve got the worst insurance.”
That reformed system will take a couple years to take shape.
“We want to be able to have people see that we can start something, complete it and be able to go into the next election on our record,” Smith said. “So that’s why we had to start so many things so quickly.”
It’s early days yet for many of these changes. No-fault insurance and a redesigned electricity generation regime won’t be in place by 2027 (the election year); the reorganization of Alberta Health Services is incomplete; new pronouns and sex-ed policies in school don’t take effect until September; we’ve only seen personnel changes at AIMCo thus far.
With all these, there’s potential and there’s peril. When you dismantle and rebuild a system, and change things so fundamentally, there’s risk for road bumps, growing pains and outright mistakes or misjudgments.
Many voices in health have warned of patients slipping through the cracks of a system divided into function-specific agencies, and then again into seven new regional “corridors.”
The premier said that too often, governments hide behind agencies and wipe their hands of policymaking and execution. She wants more of a hand in matters.
“If we choose to be hands-off and things screw up, we’re going to get blamed,” Smith said. “If we choose to be hands-on and things screw up, well, we’re going to get blamed but at least we’ll try something new.”
The proverb is that fortune favours the bold. Her own remarks reveal she’s aware of the inherent risks of so much change.
And there are real-world consequences for Albertans, if patients get lost in paperwork, or children cannot access gender-affirming care they so desperately want, a city council gets overruled, or growth-minded investment decisions for AIMCo go awry. And each of those would be in areas Smith has directly intervened.
To go back to the fortune-favours-bold axiom, the current premier seems to believe her predecessor Kenney suffered from lack of boldness, though she didn’t say so directly.
“I think what happens is often conservative governments are too cautious,” Smith said in her interview. “And so when they get elected, they end up disappointing the people who voted for them because they don’t do the things that they said they were going to do.”
So much of what Smith has done, however, wasn’t part of her 2023 election platform — no mention of transgender policy, nor AIMCo, nor AHS dismantling, nor the strengthening of the province’s hand on municipal affairs.
Taxing decisions
A keystone election promise of UCP’s 2023 victory remains unfulfilled: an income tax cut.
Fiscal constraints prevented Horner from enacting it in this year’s budget, and he’s warned that lower oil prices could tilt the province to deficit next year.
WATCH | Smith: ‘We sure would love to run a balanced budget, but perhaps we can’t do it all’:
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith talks about the choice between having a balanced budget or giving Albertans a promised tax cut, as well as the impact of low oil prices on the province’s financial plan.
That might not be a deal-breaker for this conservative premier who wants to deliver on her promises.
Asked which she’d choose if only one were possible — tax cut or balanced budget — Smith said: “We’d have to gauge whether the public has an appetite for a deficit. We have heard people are hurting and they need an affordability measure.”
In other words, she’s convinced they want a tax cut, but isn’t sure about the red-ink tolerance in a province that’s long prided itself on surpluses. An Alberta Finance pre-budget survey asks that very question.
If you imagine this UCP leader would be willing to cut services or spending to accomplish her tax cut, you imagine wrong.
“I think cuts are very disruptive to the public service,” Smith said.
“In our system of government, these decisions were made a long time ago that health care, education, services to the vulnerable and infrastructure are the jobs of the provincial government. And so we’ve got to deliver on those.”
All the things she wants to do, like recovery centres and health administration and oversight of all federal deals with provincial entities and rapid tourism expansion — those require new expenditures, too.
Doing stuff in government doesn’t come cheap. And there’s so much she wants to do.
