Danielle Smith wants ideology 'balance' at universities. Alberta academics wonder what she's tilting at

From the exam-marking trenches to the ivory tower executive suites, Premier Danielle Smith has injected nervousness throughout Alberta's post-secondary sector.

It initially seemed her Bill 18, the Provincial Priorities Act, was intended to make her government play check‐ stop or gatekeeper whenever the federal government and mayors made deals without provincial involvement.

Then it became apparent that Smith's government would apply the same scruti‐ ny to the higher-learning sec‐ tor, and the premier's re‐ marks made it clear she had federal research grants and notions of ideological "bal‐ ance" in her targets.

"When the government of Alberta states that it wants to align research funding with provincial priorities, it risks colouring research coming from Alberta post-secondary institutions as propaganda," wrote Gordon Swaters, a Uni‐ versity of Alberta mathemat‐ ics professor and academic staff association president.

"Students are caught in the UCP's forever war with Ottawa," stated James Steele, head of the University of Cal‐ gary Graduate Students' As‐ sociation.

Bill Flanagan chimed in on his University of Alberta pres‐ ident's blog Wednesday: "I will continue to do all I can to advocate for a regulatory framework that does not impede our ability to secure federal funding and operates in a manner consistent with the university's core commit‐ ment to academic freedom."

An academic world, won‐ dering jointly: what's Smith going to do?

It doesn't appear even she knows, not yet revealing any clear direction.

Campus improv night

Several signs, in fact, suggest that the UCP government did not initially conceive of the post-secondary realm to be a major player in this Bill 18 drama - at least, not until journalists began asking last week how those provincially controlled entities could get tangled up in the bill's over‐ sight.

Consider the following:

Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney didn't participate in the April 10 news confer‐ ence; only Smith and Municipal Affairs Minis‐ ter Ric McIver did. The premier didn't mention post-secondary once in announcing the pro‐ gram; it only came up when a reporter asked about it, and Smith mentioned a curiosity about social-science re‐ search. When Smith be‐ gan speaking in more detail in interviews on April 12, she extensively referred to a Nova Scotia business profes‐ sor's criticisms of the system, which appeared in an Edmonton Journal column that very day.

If this policy approach in‐ volved more forethought, one imagines there would be a body of evidence or anec‐ dotes beyond that morning's newspaper. Smith did cite one political scientist's survey that indicated far more leftidentifying Canadian profes‐ sors than right-wing ones which was mentioned in that same Journal column.

This week, she tabled that article in the legislature.

A few days later, in her 38minute debate speech on the bill she extensively quoted from that piece, but also brought in a second anecdo‐ tal point - another article.

This one came from the National Post in 2021, a McGill University chemistry professor's protests that he was denied a science re‐ search grant because the "woke" granting agency ex‐ pected him to factor diversity and equity into his assistant hiring. Unmentioned by Smith - that agency's peer re‐ view committee gave the same scientist, Patanjali Kambhampati, a $144,565 grant last year.

For those keeping score at home, that's two articles about out-of-province profs forming almost the entire public justification for Smith's coming policy on universities.

Now, journalists love to imagine they have massive influence in high offices, and probably inflate their self-im‐ portance too often (or maybe this is just me). But it's likely that most journalists, and more importantly most citi‐ zens, don't expect or intend for articles or columns to form not just the backbone but the entire skeleton of po‐ litical decision-making.

But even if Smith cobbled together her justification from news clippings after she tabled Bill 18, there is at least a sense of where her griev‐ ances lie. And if it's not clear what route she'll take with this legislation, she's sig‐ nalled what the desired desti‐ nation is.

She's made it clear she believes more conservativetilted research would bring more like-minded academics and then students. "If we did truly have balance in univer‐ sities, then we would see that we would have just as many conservative commentators as we do liberal commenta‐ tors," she told the CBC's Power and Politics.

Smith offered this week two potential paths she could pursue. One is using this provincial oversight bill to track all federal research grants to determine what share goes where - even though the granting agencies already publish everything online, as many academics have recently noted to the UCP.

"The other way is that we could also establish our own research programs to make sure that we're providing that kind of balance," Smith ad‐ ded.

The UCP government, in this notion, would create a new body to support ideolog‐ ically focused research that Smith doesn't feel gets its fair shake from the non-partisan, peer-review committees that dole out agency grants, at ar‐ m's length from the Liberal government or the govern‐ ments of various stripes that have overseen these agen‐ cies for more than a century.

Believe this to be farfetched and heavy-handed, for a partisan government to set up their own shop to con‐ duct public-interest research?

It's already happened in the UCP government era twice.

Former premier Jason Kenney gave his "energy war room" twin mandates to ad‐ vocate for and research oil and gas, to do work he felt was lacking elsewhere; Smith has maintained this program.

In early April, Smith an‐ nounced a new Crown corpo‐ ration for research and ex‐ pertise on addiction recovery - to bolster, hone and spread elsewhere the type of drugcrisis response her govern‐ ment has already invested heavily in.

The constitution squarely places post-secondary edu‐ cation into provincial jurisdic‐ tion, but the federal level has long led the way on support‐ ing research projects.

The province topping up federal research funding could be a good thing, said Richard Sigurdson, past arts dean at the University of Cal‐ gary. Emphasis on could.

"It would only be great if the provincial government was to provide funds at an arm's length, non-partisan fashion," he wrote in an email while on academic ad‐ ministrative leave in Berlin. "There cannot be any inter‐ ference with institutional au‐ tonomy or academic free‐ dom."

If the government takes this approach and estab‐ lishes its own research body in the style of the Fraser In‐ stitute - a conservative thinktank where Smith herself used to work - expect heaps of controversy. But it could be less messy than actually using Bill 18's gatekeeper function to interfere with fed‐ eral agency grants, some‐ thing that the Quebec gov‐ ernment doesn't do, despite long having the provincial gobetween powers that Alberta now intends to mimic.

'Firing a shot'

Alex Usher, a longtime analyst with the consultancy

Higher Education Strategy Associates, doesn't expect the Smith government to in‐ tervene with agency research grants.

But he still expects a fight that universities won't like.

"While the UCP govern‐ ment may not be targeting tri-council grants specifically, they are firing a shot at the province's universities, warn‐ ing them that they will be ex‐ pected to show 'ideological balance,'" Usher wrote on his website.

"God knows what this will mean in practice, but my take would be that it will be lowlevel skirmishing and attemp‐ ts at micro-management for the rest of the UCP's term of office, combined with at‐ tempts to [wage] culture war [over] odd-sounding research projects in what the right likes to call 'grievance studies.'"

The premier's recent rhetoric doesn't make it clear she knows what it will mean in practice, either. The Bill 18 debate seems to have be‐ come the jumping-off point, perhaps due to a combina‐ tion of fluke and expansively written legislation.

Now the premier has been thinking about it, and finding articles to read. So an entire sector will be left to wait, wonder and worry.