UCP SPENDS SPRING LEGISLATIVE SESSION KEEPING BOZO ERUPTIONS TO A MINIMUM
If you’re thinking about dropping by the Alberta legislature Thursday, might I suggest you stand well clear of the exits.
If all goes according to plan, the spring sitting of the assembly will come to an end Thursday afternoon. Cue the stampede.
Alberta MLAs are happily about to start their summer holidays, not that they had a particularly gruelling spring sitting.
When it comes to legislation, the NDP government did much of the heavy lifting the past three years, introducing bills that among other things made sweeping changes to electoral financing rules, completely redesigned labour laws and tackled climate change through controversial methods including a carbon tax.
By comparison, this spring ’s legislature was so light you’d think the building was filled with hot air. Oh, right …
The most controversial and newsworthy piece of legislation was Bill 12, which had the most euphemistic of titles: Preserving Canada’s Economic Prosperity Act.
It should, of course, have been called the “Turning off the oil taps to British Columbia Act” but that would have looked mean-spirited, if not downright unconstitutional.
The act has been passed, but has not been enacted.
Premier Rachel Notley has said there’s no need to pull the trigger yet because now that Ottawa has bought the Trans Mountain pipeline project from Kinder Morgan, construction is supposed to begin really soon.
“We’ve got to keep our powder dry for when there’s actually a need for it,” Notley told reporters earlier this week, not specifying what that “need” would be.
United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney, though, is still demanding Notley turn off the taps.
“If the logic of Bill 12 existed two weeks ago, it still exists today,” Kenney said Monday. “I would be prepared to implement that given the continued obstructionism of the B.C. government.”
Yes, but it’s unclear what turning off the taps would accomplish at this point.
Then again, Kenney hasn’t left himself much wiggle room to say anything else on this issue. As official Opposition leader, he’s in a bit of a pickle, trying to criticize Ottawa’s pipeline purchase while also reluctantly supporting it.
That means his only strategy now is to repeatedly demand Notley invoke Bill 12.
If Notley can’t get Kenney to shut up about Bill 12, she can’t get him to say a peep about Bill 9, the only other interesting piece of legislation from the spring sitting. This was euphemistically entitled the Protecting Choice for Women Accessing Health Care Act.
It really should have had two titles because the bill had two targets.
The first was to set up protest-free “bubble zones” to stop antiabortion activists from harassing patients and health-care workers at abortion clinics.
The other target of Bill 9 was socially conservative MLAs in the UCP caucus, including Kenney himself.
The government was hoping the UCP caucus would explode in a series of bozo eruptions as anti-abortion MLAs strayed from debating abortion clinics to debating abortion.
Instead, the UCP MLAs flatly refused to debate the bill. Whenever it or an amendment was up for a vote, they walked out of the assembly. They did that 13 times as the bill progressed through the legislature in April and May. I guess you could say they were practising, for lack of a better term, bozo interruptus.
The only time a UCP MLA even acknowledged the bill was when it was introduced. Angela Pitt, the UCP’s deputy house leader, said the legislation was a cynical attempt by the NDP to draw the official Opposition “into a debate on an incredibly contentious social issue.”
She declared, “I will not take this bait.” And left.
Yes, you could argue (as I have done in the past) the UCP was simply avoiding a political trap.
But you could also argue the UCP MLAs looked like cowards and hypocrites, especially after UCP MLA Ric McIver talked philosophically on Tuesday about how “it’s the Opposition’s job to hold the government to account.”
But with only a year until the next election, the UCP apparently sees its job as being less about holding the government to account and more about keeping its MLAs in line.