Danielle Smith, big government's unlikely fan

When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambi‐ tion of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmon‐ ton, and many other points, the questions came quick: Are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boon‐ doggle or two?

Her answer wasn't typical fare from a conservative politician, let alone one with a libertarian symbol tattooed on her arm. Smith replied with a strong defence of gov‐ ernment intervention.

"This is why people elect governments: To do the things that they can't do in the private sector, and that includes building massive new infrastructure that con‐ nects cities and requires this kind of major investment," Smith told reporters.

Never mind that Canada's founding passenger rail ser‐ vice was privately run, or that the construction consortium that pitched an EdmontonCalgary high-speed line said they'd do it as a private-sec‐ tor investment.

Smith has a vision to mas‐ ter-plan all future intercity lines, and mused this week about managing her provinci‐ al train network with a local version of Metrolinx, the provincial Crown agency cre‐ ated in 2006 by an Ontario Liberal government to run Toronto-region transit.

That would, of course, be on top of the Crown corpora‐ tion Smith created this spring to research drug addiction recovery, or when Smith pro‐ posed potentially Crown-run natural gas plants as a "gen‐ erator of last resort."

Add in her ambitions to potentially wrest more provincial management for pension and police from Ot‐ tawa, and plans for stricter control over the affairs of municipalities and post-sec‐ ondary schools, and you might wonder what hap‐ pened to the Danielle Smith who had long believed in shrinking the size of govern‐ ment.

Back when she was smaller

We're a long way from the 1990s, when Smith cut her teeth as an intern with the Fraser Institute free-market think tank, or her 2000s newspaper columnist days when she praised "smaller government" as a "central tenet of conservatism," or her 2012 Wildrose Party cam‐ paign when she branded herself a "small government conservative."

Now, she's in government and has taken over its levers. She's shown ample interest in not only wielding the gov‐ ernment machine's powers, but often expanding or maxi‐ mizing them.

She's maintained a larger cabinet than predecessors Ja‐ son Kenney or Rachel Notley.

The premier has also out‐ spent them, considerably.

This year's budget, the second under Smith, features $71.2 billion in spending - a 20 per cent increase over the $59.4-billion budget tabled under Kenney before he left in 2022. Smith hiked provinci‐ al spending in two years by more than the Notley govern‐ ment did in four years, be‐ tween her final $56.2-billion budget in 2018 and the last one by the PCs.

But it's the UCP and Smith that tend to get more credit for spending within their means - in part because oil revenue has made the province's means so much greater.

That has let Smith offer direct "affordability" paymen‐ ts, keep up health and educa‐ tion spending as the popula‐ tion balloons, build infra‐ structure around the next Calgary Flames arena, and boost grants to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to their highest levels yet.

In fact, there have been no prominent funding cut‐ backs to public services in ei‐ ther of the Smith UCP's bud‐ gets, making the short-lived plan to cut subsidies for lowincome transit passes all the more striking.

Her apparent penchant for establishing new Crown corporations actually contin‐ ues a UCP trend. Her recov‐ ery research agency is the third new Crown created by this regime, along with Alber‐ ta Indigenous Opportunities Corp. and Invest Alberta un‐ der former premier Jason Kenney. (Additionally, there's the Canadian Energy Centre "war room," a private yet provincially controlled corpo‐ ration.)

By comparison, the NDP government created two Crowns, in a way. There was Energy Efficiency Alberta, a green solutions agency killed by Kenney, and the consoli‐ dation of four independent research/tech agencies into the single Alberta Innovates, which downsized staff and budget.

Smith is doing the op‐ posite of this by balkanizing Alberta Health Services into four standalone agencies that her health minister will oversee.

Atop this, Smith will also be creating a new police agency to host an ever-grow‐ ing number of Alberta sherif‐ fs who perform a widening array of tasks, a measure taken instead of rushing headlong into replacing the RCMP.

On her other big "Less Ot‐ tawa" plan, Smith continues to consider the idea of Alber‐ ta's own pension plan, which analysts told her would cost up to $2.2 billion to set up, plus more to run it. It would create 1,500 to 2,000 new public-sector jobs, leading pension engagement panel leader Jim Dinning to say it could boost the province's fi‐ nancial services sector.

After all, if the premier wants Alberta to become a lot more like Quebec - con‐ trol over pensions, police, tax collection and oversight over all entities' federal deals that might mean the provin‐ cial government winds up doing a lot more. In that province, there's one publicsector employee for every 8.4 residents, according to Statis‐ tics Canadadata. That com‐ pares to one for every 10.3 in Alberta.

Provincial agencies to run trains and electricity systems would further narrow that gap. It would give a premier and her cabinet more sway over how those services op‐ erate than if private busi‐ nesses were in charge.

The head that wears the Crown

Some of the expansive vision Smith has developed for the provincial government stems from the desire to clear Ot‐ tawa out of areas within Al‐ berta's constitutional jurisdic‐ tion. But she's lately ex‐ panded that constitutionalist thinking to wanting a tighter handle on what's going on at post-secondary schools and city halls, with her recent bills to overhaul municipal gover‐ nance and to have her gov‐ ernment vet all federal deals with provincial entities.

She's suggested that the provincial government wants more of a hand in university research projects and equity policies, as well as local by‐ laws and how election votes are counted.

Smith could say she's channelling former premier Peter Lougheed with her penchant to expand govern‐ ment's footprint with new agencies, given the many agencies and Crowns he es‐ tablished, including the provincial takeover of an air‐ line. But she's also embraced Ralph Klein, dismantler of many of the interventionist programs.

She has stayed true to one form of minimizing gov‐ ernment's role, and it's the one that vaulted her to fame in the UCP leadership: Oppo‐ sition to the province's inter‐ ventions into what busi‐ nesses and residents could do during the COVID public health emergency.

Though critics will wonder why that laissez-faire spirit doesn't apply in 2SLGBTQ+ policy, where the UCP has pledged to push Alberta sports agencies to crack down on trans women partic‐ ipating in female leagues.

The NDP opposition calls her recent power-centralizing legislation an attempt to "control everything, every‐ where, all at once."

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, there's

disappointment from Drew Barnes, the three-term MLA for Wildrose and the UCP says that she's "sprinkling money and favours every‐ where."

Barnes was first elected along with Smith in 2012, when she was proposing a more fiscally hawkish and limited government.

But once in caucus, he of‐ ten saw her more eager to attack the governing Tories on ethical issues than specifi‐ cally swiping at any govern‐ ment programs.

"She was always coming up with these ideas of more government, instead of less," Barnes told CBC News in an interview this week.

"Many of her ideas amounted to, 'Well, I can just run this smarter than any‐ body else.'"

Perhaps it's the belief that she's smarter than anybody else that's driving her to do so much in her time as pre‐ mier.

But that's also setting up a lot for government to do, in perpetuity.