With Bill 20, Danielle Smith sows fear and loathing (and confusion) in Alberta councils, big and small

It's hard to get 260 Alberta municipal governments to agree on much, which is why their blanket organiza‐ tion seldom has anything provocative to say.

What advocacy points can members as disparate as Cal‐ gary, Lethbridge, the town of Two Hills and the villages of Czar, Barons and Bawlf agree on? Safer fare, typically - sug‐ gestions that the province should consult more widely, or provide predictable fund‐ ing for infrastructure, and more of it.

This is why it's worth not‐ ing when the leader of Alber‐ ta Municipalities (ABmunis) doesn't mince words in reac‐ tion to the legislation that gives the provincial cabinet enhanced powers to unilater‐ ally remove councillors and repeal or change local by‐ laws.

"Bill 20 is an attempt by the provincial government to grab more power and wield more control over how peo‐ ple choose to live in their own communities," ABmunis president Tyler Gandam told reporters this week.

"I can't say this strongly enough: if passed, the pro‐ posed legislation will funda‐ mentally redraw the blue‐ print of our local democracy and alter how people's local needs are met and who rep‐ resents them."

There's been much com‐ mentary on how Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservatives have sparred with the councils of Edmonton and Calgary over matters like the single-use plastics bylaws and neigh‐ bourhood rezoning.

And after her recent bill on federal deal gatekeeping took aim at some of the ma‐ jor deals those cities struck on housing and electric buses, Bill 20 seemed to have them in its crosshairs too after all, only those two mu‐ nicipalities are getting the partisanized election system that municipal leaders had widely opposed.

Indeed, the sweeping leg‐ islation to overturn municipal decisions gets called "author‐ itarian" by Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi, and that it "strips the voting public's right" to choose their path by Mayor Jyoti Gondek of Cal‐ gary.

The UCP's manoeuvre on low-income transit passes, for just those cities, seemed to bolster that perception, even if Smith's team thought better of that budget cut af‐ ter a day.

But it's not just the cities that went majority NDP last election that feel threatened by Bill 20.

Down towns

The vocal dissent is also com‐ ing from those smaller com‐ munities that reliably vote conservative.

"Overruling municipal by‐ law authority calls into ques‐ tion the integrity of a munici‐ pal council," said Didsbury Mayor Rhonda Hunter.

"They need to quit med‐ dling in our business," said St. Paul Mayor Maureen Miller, who criticized the un‐ necessary new "super-pow‐ ers."

Grande Prairie Coun. Dy‐ lan Bressey protested: "This government doesn't appear to see municipal governmen‐ ts as a legitimate, fully elected, order of govern‐ ment, they're increasingly seeing us as a wing of the provincial government, which is not how I think local voters feel."

Responses range from perplexed to anxious to irked about Bill 20 among elected members in Okotoks, Red Deer and Red Deer County, Medicine Hat, Foothills Coun‐ ty, Diamond Valley, Cold Lake and Bonnyville.

There's also a chill factor this bill creates, said ABmu‐ nis' Gandam, the mayor of Wetaskiwin. He said that's why the umbrella group is being so vocal.

"The possibility of locally elected officials being re‐ moved at any time for any reason is deeply unsettling and likely to have a chilling effect on councillors who might otherwise speak out against the provincial govern‐ ment," he said.

Rural Municipalities of Al‐ berta, which represent the counties and municipal dis‐ tricts that form the true core of the UCP's power base, also spoke in harsh terms about the bill. That group said the proposals would "degrade municipal autonomy" and "attacks local democracy."

Mayors, reeves and coun‐ cillors are now accusing Smith of the same sort of turf-trampling jurisdictional intrusions that she's steadily accused the federal govern‐ ment of doing.

Of course, as she and Mu‐ nicipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver state, this is a differ‐ ent beast, constitutionally. There are clearly divided lines of provincial and federal jurisdiction in Canada's es‐ tablishing document, and it also declares that municipali‐ ties are the creation and do‐ main of the provinces.

Great power, great re‐ sponsibility

While this is true, there's more than a century of prac‐ tice at stake here that may‐ ors are defending. Municipal bodies are duly elected, and their authorities ought to be respected.

The province already does wield considerable authority over what local councils can and cannot tax, and they do have extraordinary powers to remove council members - see Chestermere - and even quash land-use planning or zoning decisions.

But premier after premier has largely resisted wielding those powers. This premier wants to upgrade them, and the worry is that like Chekhov's gun of drama lore, you don't introduce a weapon unless you intend to use it.

This week's surprise yank‐ ing - and then backtracking on provincial support for lowincome transit passes for Cal‐ gary and Edmonton adds an intriguing wrinkle to the turf debate. After all, when Cal‐ gary first proposed the deeply discounted passes, some councillors argued that poverty support measures were provincial jurisdiction, while supporters insisted the city must step in where the province was falling short.

While McIver said he would only use the bylawthwarting measure as a "last resort," his bill puts no para‐ meters or limitations on the cabinet power, not wanting to constrain it because he can't imagine the myriad ways or reasons the govern‐

ment may want to use it.

And he predicts any cab‐ inet would use fear of public backlash in an election as an internal limitation against overreach. "The greatest guardrail of all is the public pressure," he said.

Smith refused to set her own rhetorical parameters on where it would or would‐ n't be used. She wouldn't say this week if she'd have ap‐ plied this power to nix the big cities' plastic forks bylaws that she'd railed against this winter. But she did cite two municipal decisions the UCP has stepped in on - Edmon‐ ton's city mask mandate and, this month, Calgary's utility access fee.

"That gives you an exam‐ ple of the kind of thing that causes us concern at the mu‐ nicipal level," the premier said. "So we would use it very sparingly, but we want to make sure that municipalities are not creeping into provin‐ cial jurisdiction and that they're [not] enacting policies that are out of step with the kind of policies that we're try‐ ing to implement at the provincial level."

However, Calgary's Enmax fee structure wasn't new to

Premier Smith's time - they'd had it in place for decades, including back when Smith was a lobbyist pushing against it in 2006. So to other premiers, until this one came around, that was left as a lo‐ cal decision.

When she undid it, the law required her to use legis‐ lation, which at least gets publicly tabled and debated like every municipal bylaw in Alberta.

Cabinet of secrets

Local leaders especially wor‐ ry that Smith's Bill 20 allows closed-door cabinet meet‐ ings to quash councils' publi‐ cly deliberated policies, and that it's subject to the whims of how the premier of the day thinks it complements the governing party's policy.

McIver says that, now hav‐ ing put out the bill, he'll con‐ sult on its many provisions. But based on his stout de‐ fence of his government's ideas, he doesn't seem to have much interest in back‐ ing down on establishing po‐ litical parties for the big cities, or banning votecounting machines, or the other new cabinet powers to get rid of disagreeable elected members or their de‐ cisions.

After backlash in 2022, Smith permitted amendmen‐ ts to her keystone Sovereign‐ ty Act, to remove cabinet au‐ thority to privately alter provincial laws as ministers felt necessary. One wonders if the pushback from councils large and small might prompt similar changes in this powerful bill, or how far a move like that would go to blunt the screams about what the premier is doing to local democracy.