Alberta Premier Danielle Smith generated a huge amount of virtual ink yesterday yakking about her planned amendments to Alberta’s Lougheed-era Bill of Rights, passed by the Legislature in 1972 and not thought about very much ever since for good reason.
In tune with the zeitgeist, Ms. Smith announced her planned changes in a three-and-a-half minute YouTube video in which she made big promises and failed completely to explain why they cannot be delivered.
In a few weeks, Ms. Smith vowed cheerfully, uplifting royalty-free piano music tinkling in the background, the changes will reinforce Albertans’ “rights” to own dangerous firearms they don’t need and refuse vaccinations they do. This, she said, will show that Alberta is a “beacon of freedom.” Or something, I suppose some might say.
“It is my firm conviction that no Albertan should ever be subjected or pressured into accepting a medical treatment without their full consent,” said the premier, who is also expected to soon introduce legislation that will force users of addictive drugs into “compassionate” treatment without their consent.
But, you know, as Oscar Wilde famously observed, “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
Well, one doesn’t need to be particularly imaginative to understand why Ms. Smith is doing this. She’s trying to inoculate herself against the condition that laid former United Conservative Party Premier Jason Kenney low and handed his job to her: the MAGA virus that infects the UCP’s base.
And, as vaccines go, this one will probably prove to be effective for a politician with a Damoclean sword forged by her own supporters dangling by a flimsy Take-Back-Alberta thread over her head.
“These amendments to the Bill of Rights are not just legal changes,” Ms. Smith boasted in her video, and in a sense she was right about that. As Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi noted in a short statement to media, “Danielle Smith’s comments today on YouTube about her proposed amendments to the Alberta Bill of Rights are nothing but desperate virtue signaling over issues that she thinks will help her leadership review.”
“Canadians’ fundamental human rights are protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and this, or any, Provincial bill does not override this,” Mr. Nenshi said.
This is not just hyperbole. It is technically true. The Alberta Bill of Rights – premier Peter Lougheed’s aspirational version and Ms. Smith’s performative codicil – is what legal scholars call merely an organic statute. That is to say, it is entirely symbolic and is unlikely to be able to be used to annul another Alberta law, let alone federal legislation.
No matter how fine its word are, Alberta’s Bill o’ Rights is just another piece of provincial legislation, passed by a simple majority by the Legislature, without any logical legal reason whatsoever for a court to give it precedence over another law.
Prime minister John Diefenbaker’s Canadian Bill of Rights, it should be noted, suffered from exactly the same fatal flaw. Courts can only strike down a law by appealing to a higher law. And you’d have to be high to think the Alberta Bill of Rights met that standard.
Count on the courts always to find some way to uphold a law challenged on the grounds of the meaningless Alberta bill – even Ms. Smith’s planned coercive drug treatment legislation. Thankfully, as Mr. Nenshi inferred, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms remains the supreme law of the land, including the Alberta part of it, so that will remain the best place to challenge unconstitutional laws.
So let me pause here to say thank God for prime minister Trudeau – Pierre Trudeau, that is – who more than anyone else was responsible for the adoption of the Charter, wherein the fundamental rights enjoyed by all Canadians are entrenched, or would be but for the “notwithstanding clause,” which weakens the document considerably.
However, je digresse. Notwithstanding the flaws of the Charter, as it were, Ms. Smith did not speak the truth when she said in her little musical video that “it serves much like a constitutional document, in that it ensures all provincial laws and policies must align with those listed rights and freedoms.”
This is a fantasy, simply false. It enshrines nothing, as Albertans who buy this bill of goods will undoubtedly soon discover.
Seemingly unannounced, political relic Lyle Oberg is out as AHS board chair
It was less than a year ago when Premier Smith summoned up Ralph Klein-era political relic Lyle Oberg to chair the Alberta Health Services Board.
“I am committed to steering Alberta Health Services towards providing high-quality acute care services across the province,” said Dr. Oberg, a physician, at the time.
That plan is now null and void, it would appear, AHS is being deconstructed a piece at a time, and Dr. Oberg is no longer chair of its board.
This seems neither to have been announced nor noticed by media.
However, in a news release Monday, the UCP did announce Dr. Oberg’s appointment as leader of something fancifully called “the Seamless Patient Experience Review.”
Despite its name, this is not a stage production, however. The review, the news release explained in solemn terms, will try to ensure that as AHS is deconstructed a piece at a time, patients won’t fall through the gaping cracks.
The latest news release doesn’t quote Dr. Oberg, but it does provide a canned quote to Angela Fong, the recently retired Chief Corporate Officer of the Alberta Investment Management Corp., better known as AIMCo.
And what does she have to do with this, you ask? Why, the press release identifies her as “board chair, Alberta Health Services.”
“I am honoured to be given the opportunity to lead the Alberta Health Services board as we work to transform the organization into an acute care delivery provider,” she said in her quote, which will no doubt be the first of many. Or not.
Yes, file this under M for meaningless. For instance Albertans already do have the right to lawfully own guns. By the way, some of those laws are Federal and are still laws whether the current Premier likes or respects them or not.
However, you have to wonder what is behind Smith’s recent very energetic run of initiatives to appeal to more extreme party members. My best guess, is that Smith who sort of disappeared for half a decade, but who has really been in Alberta politics for a long time now – almost two decades, knows her history of Alberta conservative leadership reviews well. Lets just say, frequently they do not go well for the leaders. So I feel she is concerned enough to be working to get a better result than say Stelmach or Redford. Because a comfortable but less than enthusiastic result is really not a good sign.
However, despite all her efforts I do wonder if she can get a Nenshi like level of approval. Because, even though the more extreme members are probably the most motivated to turn out, there will be others who will may have reservations about say all this talk about anti vax rights and the dismantling of our health care structures, which of course were mostly put in place by past conservative leaders.
Well, Queen Danielle is up to the weird shite, again.
I suppose putting on a clown face would have made this whole presentation perfect, but we can’t have everything.
These revisions are meant to serve one purpose and one purpose only: to keep TBA from driving her from office. David Parker seems to have his mojo back. But if these changes are supposed to satisfy is enormous ego, this is really a lot of much ado about nothing.
Refuse medical treatments already happens, unless you’re subject to the provinces weird drug treatment strategy.
Cannot be denied property, unless the province seeks to expropriate private lands. (With compensation, of course)
And the right to own firearms.
Gee. Did they stay up all night coming up with this?
Now, if Smith was a serious TBA person, she would have done the following …
Alberta is a Christian province. All are faiths are just there for no good reasons.
Freedom of Speech is so important that whatever you say is protected, even libelous for slanderous speech. Hate speech is legal. God word these words in your mouth, so yada yada yada.
Life of the pre-born is protected and life begins the moment the first button is undone.
And the right to firearms is an absolute, God-given one, and no one can stop any Albertan from owning a bazooka, a Sherman, tank, or a F-105 Thunderchief. (Best fighter jet name ever.)
I think maybe Parker has his mojito back rather than mojo.
Actually I met a guy in Alberta that imported a T-54 tank. The main gun has to be made non-operational, of course, but the real trick is you have to remove the flare dispensers as they are considered weapons when mounted. But you can import them separately and put them back on later.
(The Thud is too heavy to be a fighter, the F-8 Crusader was better and could land on a ship!)
Paul: In the new Alberta, it’s won’t be necessary to make the main gun on a tank non-operational. As for your parenthetical comment, if I recall correctly, all JM said was that Thunderchief was the best name ever for a fighter aircraft. (The Crusader looked weird, and it had an unacceptable name.) DJC
Ah, point taken.
Je fais une digression, ou, je m’écarte du sujet. If you really want to be fancy. But we knew what you meant.
Watch the sparks fly and the UCP get hit with more lawsuits that they will most certainly lose, if they push this ideological driven nonsense forward. It’s not going to end that well with them. Danielle Smith has no idea what she is doing. She has to try and stay afloat, because her leadership review is on the way. Lyle Oberg was responsible for sacking Danielle Smith as a public school trustee, and this is how she thanks him. It’s mind boggling how this happens.
Anonymous, Don’t forget who is paying for these lawsuits? I doubt these Reformers give a damn when it’s the people who are the losers. They have never ever cared about the well being of the people. A man told me recently of two of his friends who believed Smith’s lies about the COVID vaccines. They each had, had one and didn’t bother to get another one and are both dead from COVID. That’s how stupid they were.
Alan K. Spiller: On any given day, Postmedia newspapers are full of comments from people who give accolades to Danielle Smith and to the UCP, and they don’t care how bad they really are.
Wait a minute, does this mean AIMCO is going to “invest” the Canada Pension Plan savings of Albertans in hospitals? Never mind.
“The Seamless Patient Experience Review” reminds me of that show about travelling pants, or Jimi Hendrix or something. Speaking of travelling pants, did I tell you about the time I ordered a pair of pants that were on the truck for delivery, when somehow they got rerouted to NB, into a hurricane? That’s what Alberta feels like these days: onward to impending doom.
Abs: I think the UCP misnamed the The Seamless Patient Experience Review, just a little. The last bit should have been Working Group, AKA “the SPEW.”
My Gawd! Where do you get this stuff, David? It is beyond strange and more than a little hard to believe!
On another note; so pleased that you can bring up PET as a savior and provider of something good for the flat-earthers out here on the flats. It’s good for all of us, even Albaturdans, to get a dose of truth and an example of positive legislation.
Ranger: Well, it’s not made up! Usually, as in the case of Dr. Oberg’s disappearance from the AHS Board, it’s half-hidden in a UCP announcement about something else. DJC
SPER….an acronym to inspire confidence in all Albertans! And appointing a recent boffo at AIMCO (we put the “c” in capitalism) to lead the AHS…well, my head is spinning into a 6 Sigma ditch…and here I thought the concept of health didn’t have a price!
Too bad they couldn’t have added a word starting with ‘m’ to the name of that organization … it would have made the acronym far more entertaining.
Catholics running hospitals and reproductive health, and now, at least for free enterprisers, Sharia banking endorsed by the Premi? Never mind banks charging service fees is already normal, surely this acknowledgement of an Islamic banking practice is pure blasphemy in UCP land? Where does it stop? We already have UCP fossil-fuel Thought Police running the Universities and fundamentalist homophobic Christian fundamentalists doing drug policy. Why not throw in a Quebec style secularism law just to make the mix even more unstable? But hey, at least she acknowledged Trudeau the Younger’s TMX pipeline to the coast is “a game changer” even if she did not have a bumper sticker advising a desire to have sex with Trudeau. If these people were not so destructive, they would be amusing. Opera buffa indeed.
I would suggest – “Seamless Patient Experience Workgroup”
I see you beat me to it. Well done!
Oberg can be the Seamless Patient Experience Review Manager. I hear he’s pretty spunky….
Cool: You stole my idea lol
It causes me to wonder, yet again, when the UCP will collapse under the immense weight of its own contradictions, so we can be rid of such nonsense? And how long Albertans, suffering multiple crises ignored by a government uninterested in governing, can tolerate this nonsense?
DJC, not to downplay the magnanimity of your subject matter, but once I saw the image of Mr. Wilde in that coat, my train of thought left your article and went immediately to Prof. Tom Flanagan and his buffalo coat that he wore for a CBC interview (and supposedly ‘every day’ in the winter on the U of C campus). I assume that that is where the similarities between the two men ends, but I do appreciate you taking the time to forage for photos on the interweb to support your posts.
Dave: Maybe. Maybe not. Who are we to say? Who am I to criticize how someone identifies, or to comment on the cruelty or sustainability of theirs coat? DJC
If politicians in general dedicated as much time to teal issues as they spend on ideological no light at the end of the tunnel issues, we would definitely be a much better place to live in.
She is obviously trying to save her ass and thinks there are enough fools in the minority to save her when she adds in the Rural Alberta fools who don’t care that Ralph Klein helped the packing plants steal millions of dollars from their beef producers, rendered their farmland worthless with an oil well cleanup mess, is more than willing to let them destroy their water supply with coal pollution, and ignores the fact that the oil industry is destroying their communities by refusing to pay their taxes owed to them. Can you be any dumber than these gullible farm folk and what more do they have to do to them to get them to wake up and realize what fools they have been. You know they will never admit it. Their blind support for the word “Conservative” doesn’t make them look very smart does it?
Alan K. Spiller: They don’t care one bit, and they must love being walked all over by these phony Conservatives and Reformers.
Especially if you peel off the label and find “Reform” underneath!
Or peel off the “Reform” label to find “Social Credit”.
Strangely enough Donald Trump, father of the MAGA movement, has moved on to MIGA (make Israel great again), courtesy of big time Zionist Miriam Adelson who’s bankrolling his campaign to the tune of $100 million. More proof that whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
Trump spoke at AIPAC in 2016, he’s a Zionist just like the rest of the American political class.
Which is exactly like the Canadian political class with regard to the Jewish-supremacist colonial settler entity. On the subject of YouTube videos, few are more exhilarating than those featuring Yves Engler confronting the likes of Melanie Joly and Pascale St-Onge to discuss their unwavering support for genocide in the Levant.
Some alt-rights have difficulty with attention span.
There are some similarities between Diefenbaker’s 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights and Smith’s amended Alberta Bill of rights in 2024: they are both statutory and can be repealed or amended by any government of the day by a simple act of the legislature. In addition, both leaders’ pathways to power were both tortuous and torturous. Both were members of demoralized parties which eventually achieved one remarkable success before the shine started to come off. Diefenbaker’s federal Bill and Lougheed’s provincial Bill were restricted to their respective jurisdictions, and both were eventually superseded by the Canadian Charter of Rights (which is not restricted to any particular Canadian jurisdiction but rather covers the whole country) just as Smith’s revised Alberta Bill is today—for as long’s Alberta remains “Within a United Canada.” But that could be just an act, too.
To find any difference between the two, one should probably ask under what political or social circumstances either Bill was introduced, a difficult comparison between the fading post-war boom of the late 50s and the post-Covid bump of the early 2020s. Nevertheless, the two Bills’ respective ideals could hardly be more different. Diefenbaker was a patriotic Canadian lawyer whose Bill was designed to prevent arbitrary government. The contradictions (or hypocrisies) in Smith’s Bill are as arbitrary as guns for all and a get-out-of-epidemic-protocols-for-free card (except of course for those suffering from the deadly fentanyl epidemic). Finally, Diefenbaker and JFK despised each other whereas Danielle Smith would crawl over a mile of broken glass just to find out where Donald F tRump puts his spray-tan on.
“The Chief,” as my old man used to call Diefenbaker, certainly had his psephological worries after his ProgCons’ unprecedented landslide win in ‘58: not only was the economy starting to slump, there was also Rock-n-Roll. He can’t be blamed for trying to sweeten his government’s popularity with progressive cookies like the Bill of Rights and the white paper he commissioned which recommended adopting universal public healthcare like Premiere Tommy Douglas had done in the Chief’s home province of Saskatchewan—that’s normal politics working for the public good and humbly accepting any credit the party might get in return. Smith, in contrast, arrogantly clams to “enshrine” the arbitrary “rights” proffered in what sounds like a preamble to secession —and does it purely for internal party reasons.
Smith’s bill of rights is a pathetic joke. We can only hope the UCP’s payback won’t be quite as long and drawn-out as Diefenbaker’s PC demise. After the stunning win in ‘58, his government fumbled through a series of snap elections and minority governments, the last of which happened in 1963, just a year before the Beatles arrived in van of the British Invasion, when the Liberals returned to power after a relatively short—for them—hiatus of six years. And the Conservatives returned to the political wilderness whence they came.
At least Dief the Chief has legacy within a united Canada. Smith should get a statue discretely sequestered at a museum in the Old Confederate South: “Stateswoman of the Lost Cause.”
“Seamless Patient Experience Review”?
Back in the 60’s this was just a bad trip.
Sandy: For some reason this makes me think of the “light show” that followed the Guess Who to my high school gym in 1969: Ectoplasmic Reticulum. They put coloured oil in water in a glass tray set upon an overhead projector and shook it in time with the music while we all pretended we’d just dropped acid. Far-OUT! DJC
Come on, Dave, we know you used your mom’s bong! 😉
CX: My late mother, an actual member of the WCTU at one point in her life, would have been deeply offended by that remark. DJC
DJC: How groovy to see the Guess Who back in the day! I saw Burton last year in Calgary and he still puts on a great show.
One has to wonder if the MAGAts, and most Albertans in general, even knew that this obscure document existed 2 years ago, before the days that Premier Schmidt and her drooling UCP supporters elevated it to a status just slightly below the bible in overall importance. Just further proof of her dream to make Alberta the next American state.
“deadly MAGA virus..”. is that a variant of the deadly “woke mind virus” that has infected Mr. Musk? Judging by the number of adults changing into adolescent bullies, it appears we’re in an epidemic.
Does Danielle Smith feel that her position is threatened that much by UCP members and Take Back Alberta supporters in her upcoming UCP meeting that she needs to drop everything and focus on this rubbish instead of spending time on real issues impacting Albertans??
Like care or k-12 edu???
2017 election cannot come too soon for me. It is a double whammy for us. Our MLA is Eric Bouchard. Cannot wait to cast my vote for anyone else..
Brett: Yes, she does. DJC
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
To point out the obvious, doesn’t this mean that Danielle Smith’s plan to pass legislation permitting forced placement of people in treatment for addiction or mental health plus addiction would be impossible since forced medical treatment will be specifically prohibited by the proposed changes to the Alberta Bill of Rights?
Christina: Well, it would appear so, but it would not be so because, as noted in my piece, the legislation is performative and, at best or worst, serves only as a suggestion. There is no way a court would overturn any piece of legislation based on another statute passed by the same legislature. It is not a constitutional document, and enjoys no primacy over other laws. DJC
“It is my firm conviction that no Albertan should ever be subjected or pressured into accepting a medical treatment without their full consent,”
I take it that this applies to vaccinations against such diseases as smallpox and polio. So we can expect a Gilded Age epidemiological environment here in Alberta, to go along with the Gilded Age levels of corruption and inequality.
Typhoid Mary would be glad of the legal protection that Danielle Smith proposes.