Alberta 2022 Speech from the Throne
Yesterday, the Honourable Salma Lakhani, Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, delivered the Government of Alberta’s Speech from the Throne. As is always the case, but to varying degrees, the ceremony was drenched in tradition and hoary protocol. The solemnity of the occasion made a statement about the strength of the old democratic institutions even as protestors railed outside the legislature reminding us that the public will always have their say.
More than any government in Canada the Government of Alberta is susceptible to being pushed off course by gusts of populism, or perhaps it is being pushed on course, depending on your perspective. This year’s throne speech reflected the government’s desire to be aligned with the restless base of the United Conservative Party, offering a blend of significant and even surprising changes in areas like private healthcare, economic diversification, and Alberta’s electricity system, and boutique initiatives of special interest to rural and socially conservative Albertans.
The speech boasted that Alberta was attracting record amounts of investment and then proposed initiatives to attract more, including a Clean Hydrogen Centre of Excellence, new legislation designed to encourage innovation in fintech products and services, and to establish a re-insurance provider in Alberta (Oil and gas and pipeline companies are increasingly challenged to find reinsurers who are willing to reinsure projects that produce or transport fossil fuels).
The government seeks to double the number of publicly funded, privately delivered surgeries in the province by expanding the Alberta Surgical Initiative. Red Deer and Edmonton will get more money for hospitals. Intensive care facilities will be expanded. Key healthcare workers will be trained and recruited.
Alberta’s electricity market is also marked for change. The government will eliminate the electricity balancing pool. It will encourage self-generation by making it easier to sell electricity into the grid which the government hopes will bring cryptocurrency firms and attract data centres. Consumers will receive rebates for spiking utility bills. Once again, the government highlighted the importance of highspeed broadband for rural, remote, and Indigenous communities. It will once again introduce legislation to cut red tape.
At least a dozen initiatives mentioned in the throne speech will appeal to the UCP base. They include several supports for choice in schooling, for palliative care, for military reservists, for those who have experienced miscarriages or stillbirths, the victims of crime, and tools to fight human trafficking, spousal abuse, female genital mutilation, hate crimes against religious institutions, and sexual predation by teachers.
The government will actively consider giving Alberta it’s own police force and it’s own Alberta pension plan. It will honour community volunteers. It will commemorate our greatest leaders, like Chief Poundmaker, and it will acknowledge perhaps our greatest failure, Indian Residential Schools, with a memorial on the legislature grounds.
Along with Thursday’s budget, the Speech from the Throne helps frame the discussion among UCP members as the premier prepares to meet his fate in a leadership vote on April 9th in Red Deer. All of this is overlaid on a seething body politic, tired of news conferences about infections and hospitalizations, tired of restrictions and mandates, anxious about the future, yearning for springtime and a return to something approaching the times before they had even heard of Dr. Deena Hinshaw and a new virus called Covid-19.