Ric McIver, the Minister for Municipal Affairs, is the point man on Bill 18, the Provincial Priorities Act or as Danielle Smith like to call it, the ‘stay-out-of-my-backyard’ bill (images of cranky old men shaking their fists at kids cutting across their lawns spring to mind).
Bill 18 will force municipalities and provincially regulated entities (housing authorities, universities, health authorities) to get provincial government consent before they can enter into, amend, extend, or renew agreements with the federal government.
Why?
It’s not as if Trudeau’s most recent housing announcement is the first time the feds have signed funding deals with municipalities. Or awarded research grants to professors working at universities.
Never fear, Smith has her reasons, including the following:
Jurisdiction: Smith says the feds giving money directly to municipalities and other provincial entities is (yet another) example of the federal government’s overreach. These entities fall within the province’s sole jurisdiction, therefore the feds should not be doling out money to them.
However, instead of taking her nifty sovereignty act out for a spin or suing the feds on some hokey constitutional grounds, she’s going to pass Bill 18 to make it illegal for municipalities and other entities to accept federal funds without her consent.
In other words, the alleged federal overreach is fine, provided Smith can interpose herself between the feds and the municipalities so she can control who gets the money and what it’s used for.
Strings attached: Smith railed against the fed’s “unrelenting and ideological push” towards net-zero housing, net-zero electricity and safer drug supply programs, saying Alberta has its own policies to address these issues.
Really?
Smith’s Emissions Reduction and Energy Development Plan is a year old and her government has yet to provide details of how it will meet its 2050 net-zero target. She is still relying on yet-to-be-invented technologies and yet-to-be-passed regulations and yet-to-be-set interim targets to get us there.
And Smith’s program to address toxic drug deaths is a dismal failure.
Smith may criticize the fed’s “ideological push” all she wants, but until the UCP’s ideological push offers something better she doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Alberta should be treated like Quebec: The Alberta government may wish to be treated like Quebec, but the municipal governments and universities don’t care. They just want the money.
BTW: A study of five major multi-lateral federal/provincial agreements entered into since 2015 said that despite some provinces (we’re looking at you Alberta) whining about Quebec receiving “asymmetric” treatment, none of them triggered the clause in their agreements that would have allowed them to take the same deal as Quebec.
In any case Smith’s argument that Alberta should be treated like Quebec is irrelevant because it’s not an issue for the municipalities and other entities don’t care how Quebec’s municipalities and other entities are treated.
Duplicative programs cause waste: Smith says Bill 18 will prevent taxpayer dollars from being wasted on “duplicative programs like pharmacare and dental care.”
How?
Municipalities are not responsible for pharmacare and dental care. Requiring them to get the Smith government’s consent to access federal funding will have no impact on tax dollars slated for pharmacare and dental care.
This makes absolutely no sense.
Manipulation: Smith says she had to step in because the feds are manipulating municipalities into rewriting their by-laws in exchange for federal funds.
In other words, the duly elected municipal politicians cannot be trusted to do their jobs so Smith will do their jobs for them.
This Big Brother scenario became even more bizarre when in Question Period, McIver said Bill 18 is necessary because without it 220 municipalities out of 230 will get nothing from the feds.
He didn’t explain how he came to this conclusion (did 230 municipalities ask for federal funds only to be turned down?).
If McIver is so concerned about these 230 municipalities he can stop eroding their tax base by forcing oil companies to pay their property taxes and not forcing municipalities to pay for their own (unwanted) provincial police forces.
About that red tape
Critics have suggested that Bill 18 will create more red tape and slow down or kill municipalities access to federal funding.
McIver says this is nonsense. It only takes a “couple of minutes, or 10 minutes to review five or eight different agreements.”
[Pause here while every lawyer in the province has a good laugh].
McIver seems to believe the government will pop in at the end of the process, after the deal is fully negotiated and its terms have been recorded in binding agreements.
He’s forgetting what it take to get such agreement (or more likely a briefing sheet) onto his desk for a 2 minute review.
The agreement would come into the government, be sent to the appropriate departments (legal, environment, municipal affairs, energy, and anyone else who may have a policy which may be impacted by the deal).
It would be reviewed by all of the worker bees who will determine whether the deal undermines one or more of Smith’s policies. (It’s risky to second guess an ideological boss so the safe bet would be to reject the deal). On the off chance that everyone recommends approval, they’ll send their recommendation up the chain to their various deputy ministers and chiefs of staff and whoever else needs to agree with the recommendation, before their cabinet ministers skim the briefing document for 2 to 10 minutes and also agree with the recommendation.
Then the cabinet ministers will take the agreement to Smith to see if she’s onside or wants to kill it for ideological reasons that everyone else in the chain had failed to consider.
This will take months, not minutes, meanwhile all the other government entities in all the other provinces and territories will be scooping up every penny of free fed money because none of them (not even Ontario and Saskatchewan) intend to enact their own ‘not in my backyard’ laws.
And, in case we’ve forgotten, this process is brought to you by the bright lights who locked Alberta taxpayers into the Dynalife and Turkish pain meds deals.
But hey, it’s worth it if Smith can “own” Trudeau, right?
Susan on the Soapbox 