Danielle Smith, big government’s unlikely fan

When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambition of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, and many other points, the questions came quick: Are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boondoggle 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 government 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 connects cities and requires this kind of major investment,” Smith told reporters.

Never mind that Canada’s founding passenger rail service was privately run, or that the construction consortium that pitched an Edmonton-Calgary high-speed line said they’d do it as a private-sector investment.

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

That would, of course, be on top of the Crown corporation Smith created this spring to research drug addiction recovery, or when Smith proposed potentially Crown-run natural gas plants as a “generator of last resort.”

Add in her ambitions to potentially wrest more provincial management for pension and police from Ottawa, and plans for stricter control over the affairs of municipalities and post-secondary schools, and you might wonder what happened to the Danielle Smith who had long believed in shrinking the size of government.

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 campaign 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 government machine’s powers, but often expanding or maximizing them.

She’s maintained a larger cabinet than predecessors Jason Kenney or Rachel Notley.

The premier has also outspent 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 provincial spending in two years by more than the Notley government did in four years, between 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” payments, keep up health and education spending as the population balloons, build infrastructure 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 cutbacks to public services in either of the Smith UCP’s budgets, making the short-lived plan to cut subsidies for low-income transit passes all the more striking.

Her apparent penchant for establishing new Crown corporations actually continues a UCP trend. Her recovery research agency is the third new Crown created by this regime, along with Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corp. and Invest Alberta under former premier Jason Kenney. (Additionally, there’s the Canadian Energy Centre “war room,” a private yet provincially controlled corporation.)

History, meanwhile, will record that the NDP’s only Crown manoeuvre was to consolidate four independent research/tech agencies into the single Alberta Innovates, which downsized staff and budget.

Smith is doing the opposite 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-growing number of Alberta sheriffs who perform a widening array of tasks, a measure taken instead of rushing headlong into replacing the RCMP.

On her other big “Less Ottawa” plan, Smith continues to consider the idea of Alberta’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 financial services sector.

After all, if the premier wants Alberta to become a lot more like Quebec — control over pensions, police, tax collection and oversight over all entities’ federal deals — that might mean the provincial government winds up doing a lot more. In that province, there’s one public-sector employee for every 8.4 residents, according to Statistics Canadadata. That compares 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 operate than if private businesses 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 Ottawa out of areas within Alberta’s constitutional jurisdiction. But she’s lately expanded 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 governance and to have her government 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 bylaws and how election votes are counted.

Smith could say she’s channelling former premier Peter Lougheed with her penchant to expand government’s footprint with new agencies, given the many agencies and Crowns he established, including the provincial takeover of an airline. But she’s also embraced Ralph Klein, dismantler of many of the interventionist programs.

She has stayed true to one form of minimizing government’s role, and it’s the one that vaulted her to fame in the UCP leadership: Opposition to the province’s interventions into what businesses 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 participating in female leagues.

The NDP opposition calls her recent power-centralizing legislation an attempt to “control everything, everywhere, 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 everywhere.”

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 often saw her more eager to attack the governing Tories on ethical issues than specifically swiping at any government 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 anybody 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 premier.

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