Changes will send chills through municipal councils and create a lot of grief for MLAs 

It has been very interesting to watch over the past week how Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government has unrolled its suite of changes to municipal governance and local election laws, and responded to the loud backlash from municipal leaders.

The UCP has spent a lot of political capital and government resources in its ongoing jurisdictional fights with the federal Liberal government in Ottawa, but Smith’s sovereignty agenda isn’t limited to challenging the powers of the federal government. Last month’s Bill 20, Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act and  Bill 18, Provincial Priorities Act are aimed at removing decision making powers from Alberta’s locally elected leaders and increasing the powers of the provincial government.

The drastic changes to the Local Authorities Election Act and the Municipal Government Act, introduced by Minister of Municipal Affairs Ric McIver, gives the provincial government sweeping powers to overturn municipal bylaws and increased powers to remove locally elected municipal mayors, councillors, and school board trustees.

Changes also include legalizing corporate and union donations to municipal candidates and introducing a formal structure for political parties in municipal elections in Calgary and Edmonton.

It’s hard to imagine how most of these changes would improve municipal government or municipal elections, or that there is even broad support for some of these changes (there isn’t).

Firing municipal leaders

The provincial government already has some ability to dismiss municipal councils and school boards, as McIver did in the City of Chestermere in 2023 and NDP minister Danielle Larivee did in 2016 in Thorhild County. This power is usually reserved for exceptional circumstances where there is alleged corruption or extremely dysfunctional governance, like now-Premier Smith experienced when she was removed along with the entire Calgary Board of Education in 1999.

Why these powers need to be expanded now remains unclear. 

Alberta already has municipal recall laws. The high threshold for overturning the results of a free and fair democratic election means that a lot of recall campaigns fail, but that’s not a bad thing. It should be very hard to overturn an election.

Cabinet can overturn municipal bylaws

One of the most puzzling changes proposed in McIver’s bill would give the provincial cabinet the ability to overturn municipal bylaws, an area that I am convinced most MLAs would agree they do not want to involve themselves if they really thought about it.

This would give the provincial cabinet the ability to overturn decisions made by local leaders who were elected with different mandates. Municipal leaders may be put in the awkward position of having to balance their promises to voters with the political whims of whoever occupies the Premier’s Office at any given time.

“Bylaws are made by local councils based on the day-to-day needs of the Albertans who live in our cities, towns, and rural areas,” said Sherwood Park NDP MLA and Municipal Affairs critic Kyle Kasawski. “The needs of Albertans are different across the province and that’s why locally elected governments are best equipped to represent the people in their jurisdiction.”

It also means that government MLAs can no longer convincingly deflect questions and complaints from constituents about zoning proposals, dog parks, snow removal, backyard chickens, and garbage pickup. These are not decisions the MLAs get to make but it will now be their decision about whether they get overturned.

I predict this will send a chilling effect through municipal councils and school boards and end up creating a lot of grief for MLAs.

Political parties will reshape municipal politics

Introducing political parties in municipal elections, presumably with a structure that will give them a financial advantage over independent candidates, has the potential to reshape politics in Calgary and Edmonton. McIver says parties will be allowed in the two big cities as a pilot project.

The UCP have hinted about bringing political parties to city hall for years. The influence of federal and provincial political parties already exists on the municipal level, as no election exists in a vacuum, but actual municipal political parties is something the cities haven’t seen in decades.

Edmonton’s 2021 municipal election saw one loosely aligned group of candidates endorsed by some local NDP MLAs and another endorsed by conservative mayoral candidate and past UCP nomination candidate Mike Nickel. Only two of the six city council candidates endorsed by NDP MLAs were elected (Michael Janz and Erin Rutherford) and all of Nickel’s slate were defeated (including incumbent Jon Dziadyk, who then ran for the UCP in Edmonton-Castle Downs in the 2023 election and is now employed as a ministerial chief of staff; Ali Haymour, who soon after ran for the UCP in Edmonton-North West; and Tricia Valthuzein, who now works as Director of Communications Planning in the Premier’s Office).

While we don’t know for sure how these municipal parties will be aligned or the influence that groups like Take Back Alberta will exert, it probably won’t serve the residents of Calgary or Edmonton well if the dominant municipal political parties operate as branch offices of the UCP and NDP.

Political parties have existed in municipal politics before, though, as dearly missed former University of Alberta political science professor Jim Lightbody once said, municipal politics parties usually emerge from “a series of issues that mobilize people – almost as a confederation of grievances with city hall.”

What the UCP is proposing won’t look like the loose alliance of candidates that ran under the pro-business Civic Government Association from the 1920s to the 1960s, or the labour-affiliated Edmonton Voters Association or the anti-river valley freeway Urban Reform Group Edmonton banner in the 1970s and 1980s.

We can probably expect these new municipal political parties will look and act similar to provincial and federal parties when it comes to candidate selection and caucus discipline. That kind of politics is not foreign to voters, but it’s also not something that Albertans are clamouring for in their city halls.

Only someone deeply involved in political parties at the provincial and federal level would look at municipal politics and decide that the solution to challenges faced by local government could be solved by inserting political parties into the mix.

Bringing back corporate donations

Money in politics is like water. It always finds the path of least resistance.

When the NDP government banned corporate and union donations to municipal political parties in 2018, it was the right choice. For many years there was a close correlation between the amount of corporate donations, largely from development companies, that a city council candidate received and their chances of winning.

Removing those donations to candidates didn’t fully remove corporate money from politics, as a lot of this money moved to third party political advertisers and political action groups. But a blanket return of private corporate donations in municipal elections won’t improve the problems facing municipal elections.

What now?

The troubling tone of these changes is that local government, especially in the big cities, don’t know what’s best of themselves. While McIver is a longtime Calgary politician, the UCP is largely dominated by MLAs from rural ridings and small- and medium-sized cities.

It feels very unlikely that Albertans would be seeing these kind of drastic increases to provincial control over the big cities if voters in Calgary and Edmonton had not backed Rachel Notley’s NDP in the 2023 election. The NDP won every seat in Edmonton and more than half the seats and votes in Calgary.

Not surprisingly, many of the municipal councillors elected to represent people in the two big cities also don’t particularly align well with Smith’s UCP on a lot of issues.

In response to the backlash from municipal leaders across Alberta, McIver now says he is open to amendments to Bill 20.

It’s clear that some of these changes are profoundly undemocratic, and for a government that talks about how focused it is on getting rid of red tape, it’s odd that they are now trying to take every roll and stitch of the stuff off the hands of every city and town across Alberta.

Dave Cournoyer writes and podcasts at daveberta.ca. Sign up for his excellent substack to stay informed on Alberta politics and elections