Alberta

Summary by AI:

• Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek expresses uncertainty about the future of the Green Line LRT project due to disagreements and the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
• The federal government has committed $1.5 billion to the project, but clarification is needed regarding their support for the revised provincial alignment.
• The revised alignment, proposed by the province in December, is 76% longer than the previous plan and features no tunneling through downtown Calgary.
• The city and province have different cost estimates for the project, with the city stating the revised alignment would cost $7.5 billion, $1.3 billion more than the provincial report suggests.
• A meeting between the city and province to discuss the new plan has not been held, and the city is requesting clarification on several matters before considering a vote on the provincial plan.

Between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, more than 300 COVID-19 outbreaks were declared at Alberta Health Services and Covenant Health acute care facilities throughout the province, according to data from AHS obtained through a freedom of information request.

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Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency physician in Calgary and co-founder of the Canadian COVID Society, said it is worrisome that patients are being harmed and that steps aren’t taken to adequately protect them.

“The reality is that people are dying from COVID in our hospitals, and we really are doing very little to prevent them getting ill and getting infected,” Vipond said. “And we wouldn’t do the same for any other infectious disease.”

“We have sporadic implementation of protection for patients. And if I was somebody’s daughter, and my dad went into hospital with a hip fracture and came out in a casket or had some kind of long-term disability from getting COVID in hospital when we know how to prevent it, I would be very mad at the system.”

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Vipond said in an ideal world there would be an independent third-party audit of the health system that would determine what is going wrong.

“But instead, what seems to have happened is that our politicians, and therefore society, have decided that COVID is no longer an issue for anyone, and that includes vulnerable patients in hospitals.”

Smith’s government dumps a load of denial and new risks just before Christmas.

The Alberta government gave its citizens an Australian sack of “modern” coal for Christmas, as well as a load of misinformation accompanied by a mountain of disingenuousness.

In an abrupt news conference held Friday, Energy Minister Brian Jean and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz declared the government was changing mining policy for Alberta because the world needed more metallurgical coal.

“It’s a big day,” said Jean, who has been lobbied relentlessly by the Coal Association of Canada and Australian billionaire and mining magnate Gina Rinehart to support coal mining in the Rockies.

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During the conference, neither Jean nor Schulz made any reference to what the public really wants. Repeated surveys have consistently shown that most Albertans don’t support coal mining of any kind in the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

In fact, most believe the government’s only priority should be the protection of critical watersheds.

Jean admitted Friday that coal development in the past has been “bad,” but that something called “responsible resource development” — a catchphrase for every speculative project in Alberta — would prevent selenium pollution, a multi-billion-dollar bane of metallurgical coal mining in neighbouring B.C. and many parts of Alberta. No viable technology has currently solved this environmental problem.

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Corb Lund, a popular musician who lives in southern Alberta, described the government press conference as “an Orwellian word salad meant to calm the public right before Xmas.”

“It is all greenwashing bullshit,” Donahue told The Tyee. “It is a way to push the UCP’s original 2020 plan to open the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mining, and now we’ll make a case for it again.” He called the announcement “a farce.”

A UCP government report said the province was entitled to $334 billion. Canada’s top actuary says not even half that.

Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt weighed in on Bluesky with the opinion that “the Smith government will quietly abandon the APP [Alberta pension plan] when there is a change in the federal government. The APP rears its head when there are Liberals in Ottawa, and buries its head when the Conservatives are in office.”

I am not so sure. The UCP brain trust has been singularly focused on the huge sums that could become available to prop up Alberta’s oil and gas sector if it got its paws on CPP assets, so don’t expect this divisive scheme to go away any time soon.

If the Alberta government built a nuclear reactor near your home, would you want to know the facts informing that decision? If Alberta gives millions, or billions, to private industry, would you want to know why? What risks and rewards did the government consider when choosing the ground beneath your home as an ideal place to store carbon dioxide?

Under new legislation, you might never have the tools to find out.

As the fall sitting of the legislature wrapped up, and the day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government announced Bill 34, which lays out new rules for freedom of information in the province. Once passed, the government will be able to censor factual information used to make decisions and restrict the power of the commissioner who can challenge its censorship.

The move, in some ways, would simply legalize the years-long practice of suppressing information in violation of the existing freedom of information act. But it would also make it easier to suppress more information, more often.

The changes would make it all but impossible to learn why the premier and her ministers make important public-interest decisions and would shield an undefined class of “political staff” from any oversight.

Only six animals may be left in the Wabasca herd of northern Alberta, where their range may soon be drilled — over the objections of Elders

Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi is about to make headlines again.

After languishing for the past six months in the role of Opposition leader without a legislative seat, Nenshi appears poised to run in a yet-to-be called byelection in Edmonton-Strathcona.

Yes, that’s the seat held by former NDP leader Rachel Notley who announced this morning she’d resign her seat Dec. 30.

No, as I write this Nenshi has not confirmed he will run to succeed Notley. But it’s just a matter of time.

Nenshi has coyly been suggesting for months he’d be interested in running in Edmonton-Strathcona, one of the safest NDP seats in Alberta. But he didn’t want to be seen trying to push out Notley who has been serving as his key senior advisor.

By running in Notley’s old seat, Nenshi would be filling a vacancy that was bound to come up sooner or later and he wouldn’t need to ask an MLA in Calgary or Edmonton to step down to trigger a byelection.

He’d also be countering the narrative that as a former Calgary mayor he is a stranger to Edmonton.

The UCP government is already welcoming it with open arms — and celebrating it as the biggest investment in Alberta’s history. “Excited to see this incredible project led by Kevin O’Leary coming to Wonder Valley, located in the Municipal District of Greenview,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on social media. “With Alberta’s low taxes, free market, abundant natural gas and skilled labour force, we’re positioned to be a world leader in AI data centres.”

First things first: this “incredible project” is, for now, just a website and a letter of intent signed between O’Leary Ventures and a small rural municipality. So far, it seems far more like an attempt to shake incentives and subsidies out of local governments and capitalize on the global investment community’s fascination with AI right now than anything real or tangible.

But at full capacity, it would require 7.5 gigawatts of power, which is almost 40 per cent of what the entire Alberta grid can currently provide — and that’s with increasingly frequent brownouts and some of the highest electricity prices in Canada.

Where, exactly, would all these additional electrons come from? Not wind and solar, which the provincial government has spent the last two years actively undermining with its new regulations — ones whose standards around land use and reclamation, curiously enough, don’t apply to oil and gas operations. Instead, they’d come mostly from additional gas-fired facilities, which just happens to suit the UCP government’s pro-fossil fuel agenda perfectly.

“Transgender people are 0.25% of the population, yet governments like the Smith government have a focus on transgender people like they’re a threat to civilization,” Brownsey told PressProgress. “Here she’s simply playing to a very right-wing religious base.”

Sweeping reforms are expected through Bill 22, The Health Statutes Amendment Act. The bill amounts to a restructuring of the Alberta health care system that will break Alberta Health Services up into four parts, each reporting to the health ministry. The new sectors are primary care, acute care, continuing care and mental health and addiction.

“I’m glad we have a Premier that thinks she knows better than the medical community,” Brownsey said. “It’s a bit disturbing that our government doesn’t run on rationality. Instead of what medical doctors say, who actually know what they’re doing, this government just wants to meddle. It’s absolutely bizarre.”

Fae Johnstone, Director of the advocacy group Queer Momentum says the new rules are an example of government overreach. “There’s a hypocrisy underneath this where on one hand Premier Smith says she wants to support the role of parents, then on the other hand she’s putting her government’s decision-making above the parent. The parents might have to leave the province,” Johnstone told PressProgress.

“They’re not targeting the care, but on the trans young folk’s ability to access that care. These interventions are provided in other circumstances and it’s fine, but it’s the fact that the patients happen to be trans that the government is taking an issue with.”

When Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government passed the Critical Infrastructure Defence Act in 2020, critics warned it would lead to more criminalization of protests in Alberta. Now the Alberta Federation of Labour says that’s happening as the government has introduced amendments that could bar health-care workers from picketing hospitals and other health centres.

“That’s significant, because at this moment there are more than 250,000 Alberta workers at the bargaining table. A large proportion of those are people who work in the health-care system.”

“We think that the UCP has introduced this legislation to make it harder for them to exercise that right,” McGowan said. “It’s clear to us that they want to stop nurses and other health-care workers from setting up effective picket lines, because we’ve received legal interpretations of Bill 31.”

The interpretations suggest that if the bill is passed, picketers could be arrested, McGowan said. But that could open the door to a legal challenge arguing the legislation violates Canadians’ constitutional right to protest, protected in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In a Tyee interview, Alberta’s premier discusses the ‘Turkish Tylenol’ fiasco and who’s got all that public money.

I am a researcher. I report any crimes I discover to police. All people are innocent until proven guilty. FLC is a forum on the darkweb. AOC is an acronym for ‘age of consent’. This group changes Facebook locations regularly.

BARRHEAD, Alta. — Residents of a northern Alberta town have voted in favour of a bylaw banning Pride flags and rainbow crosswalks from municipal property.

The town of Barrhead, located about 120 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, says 1,145 votes were cast in the plebiscite, with 653 in favour of the proposed bylaw and 492 opposed to it.

Edmonton Journal via The Canadian Press

Hunters can now kill cougars in a provincial park in Alberta. The move to allow a cougar hunt in Cypress Hills Provincial Park, along the border with Saskatchewan, is part of a trend in Alberta to open more land and more species to hunting, under the direction of Alberta Parks and Forestry Minister Todd Loewen — who is a hunter and whose family owns a hunting business.

“This is a change that encourages hunting of a species that is isolated, has declined, and is maybe just starting to recover, but there’s no evidence that we need a hunt or that this will in any way manage the population,” Ruiping Luo, a conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association, said in an interview.