Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) leader, Danielle Smith, has been playing to her conservative populist base since her 2022 election. She campaigned for the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which authorizes provincial institutions to not enforce federal laws that “attack Alberta’s interests.” She introduced privatized healthcare, suspended funding for renewable energy projects, signed an agreement with the federal government to speed up pipeline approvals, and significantly increased funding for private schools.
Attacks on public education and LGBTQ+ rights
While Smith panders to her supporters using right populist language that targets the federal government, vaccinations, immigrants, and environmental activists, her main focus is fossil fuel extraction, and healthcare and education privatization. In 2024 the UCP introduced laws like Saskatchewan’s that restrict pronouns in schools, prohibit transgender children over 12 from competing in female sports, and restrict LGBTQ+ themed books in school libraries. Smith has held private meetings with the right-wing Parents Choice for Education that campaigns against “sexual identity and gender identity education.” The UCP frames its attacks on public education as giving parents choice in their children’s education. They deliver this “choice” through cuts to public education and funding charter and private schools.
The UCP couches its hunger for resource extraction as an appeal to “western nationalism.” The Alberta Sovereignty Act was a step in this direction, and the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on pipelines was a second. The MOU was meant to show that Alberta could negotiate with the federal government — like negotiating a trade deal with a foreign government. While Smith hoped that her separatist base would interpret this as Alberta extracting concessions from the federal government, the MOU was loudly booed at the UCP convention. Worse for Smith, the MOU has yet to coax any new pipeline investment. Smith has increased her appeals to separatism, and by significantly decreasing the number of signatures that would trigger a referendum, has made it easier for the Stay Free Alberta group to collect enough signatures for a referendum on Alberta’s independence. While it is unlikely that this will succeed, it will give legitimacy to the separatists, and further entrench them in Alberta politics.
These are not popular policies and have not increased Smith’s approval ratings. Still the UCP has a 10-point lead in the polls. Smith is striving to keep power by rushing through a “gerrymandering” re-distribution of electoral boundaries that would favour the UCP.
Left opposition lacking
UCP’s main organized opposition is the NDP and the labour movement. When the NDP won in 2015, for the first time in Alberta’s history, they cozied up to the oil and gas lobby backing the Trans Mountain Pipeline, against BC’s NDP government. Since then, they haven’t been within ten seats of the UCP. Recently NDP leader Naheed Nenshi reinforced his party’s commitment to fossil fuels, denouncing new federal NDP leader Avi Lewis’s environmental policies, saying “We believe in . . . Canadian energy and the good jobs it creates. We believe in more pipelines and in reducing emissions.” The Alberta NDP has no strategy to offer rural Albertans an alternative to a fossil-fuel-based economy.
The Alberta Federation of Labour responded to UCP’s use of the notwithstanding clause to impose a previously rejected contract onto striking Alberta teachers — forcing them to return to work — by threatening a general strike, but then backed down, saying it would work to get Alberta unions “general strike ready.” The threat of a general strike was enough to overturn similar legislation in Ontario in 2022. In the meantime, the NDP announced a campaign of recall petitions for UCP MLAs, all of which failed. It is the weakness of the left opposition that allows the UCP to continue its domination, despite deep frustration with its policies. Alberta is Canada’s most polarized province and there is potential for explosive resistance. Translating the frustration with Danielle Smith into political victory will require the working class to organize itself and the NDP to break with fossil fuels and offer a new economic foundation for Alberta.
