Another day, another UCP announcement; another year of AlbertaPolitics.ca … its 18th, as a matter of fact! 

This blog marks the beginning of its 18^th year of publication today.

That, as I observed last year on this date, makes it something of an institution in Alberta political commentary. 

That post wasn’t a bad piece, if I may say so myself, and the questions I was entertaining about revenue and the most appropriate platform for political commentary in the form of old-fashioned newspaper columns that would be at home in the age of lead type and printer’s ink remain largely unchanged and largely unanswered. So here’s a link. 

On a positive note, if I got anything wrong in last year’s Dec. 27 post, it was my gloomy prediction about the ability of the social networking site known as Bluesky to deliver readers. A mass migration of Twitter users to Bluesky during the week after the U.S. election, and the kindness of strangers who added my account to a couple of lists of Canadian commentators worth following, resulted in a much larger number of followers in a much shorter period of time than I expected. 

Unlike Twitter, Bluesky does not seem to throttle progressive opinions – not yet, anyway – so the number of readers who now come to AlbertaPolitics.ca through that site is also higher than expected. For that reason, I do urge readers who enjoy this blog to follow me there – I can be found at (@djclimenhaga.bsky.social).

Of course, more than my number of Bluesky followers changed as a result of the U.S. presidential election. As Andrew Coyne of The Globe and Mail put it in what has to be the gloomiest column of all on this topic, “we are living in the time of Nero” and “all of this will wash over Canada in various ways.” (Spoiler alert: None of them good.)

Indeed, our little Nero in Alberta has been emboldened by Donald Trump’s victory and she will be off to Washington next month for the Big Nero’s inauguration, to which, the U.S.-owned National Pest has informed us in breathless and awe-inspired tones, “Premier Danielle Smith has scored tickets” … “thanks to Alberta’s trade office in Washington.” (So I guess that means we, fellow Alberta taxpayers, will be paying for them.) 

Perhaps as the premier says, she will have an opportunity to meet “energy groups, congresspeople, and various officials” and, as she surely plans, further undermine the Team Canada response to the new old U.S. president’s zero-sum approach to trade. That would be on-brand for Ms. Smith, whose loyalty to the neoliberal internationale apparently leaves no room for loyalty to Canada. 

Regardless of whom she manages to meet, we have already seen the inspiration of the first Trump “revolution” in how Alberta politics are practiced – from open red-baiting on social media, to the promotion of hatred for political opponents, lawfare against critics, and of course to the government’s glib official gaslighting.

From the perspective of any independent commentator, just keeping up with the stream of tendentious announcements from Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party Government, and hopefully providing some worthwhile analysis, becomes a problem.

Who has time to analyze and deconstruct individual announcements as the sheer volume of misleading, contradictory and deceptive official statements continues to flood the zone on an almost daily basis? What’s left of media could, but mostly doesn’t. The Opposition in the Legislature could. But so far mostly won’t. 

Example: the government assures us in a press release that Calgary’s Green Line LRT is “back on track.” Well, not really. Actually, the UCP appears to be trying to blackmail Calgary City Council into accepting an opaque, more expensive, shorter, and still incomplete version of project that will take years longer to build. Who benefits? 

Another presser says “Alberta’s government is putting the environment first with the Alberta Coal Industry Modernization Initiative.” It sure looks, though, as if this is just an effort to provide some green cover to the Grassy Mountain open pit coal mine in the Crowsnest Pass the UCP is determined to permit. After all, there’s an Australian billionaire that wants to build it. 

And then there are the policies almost no one wants but that it sure looks like we’re getting anyway: municipal political parties (already a done deal), the Canada Pension Plan takeover, the Alberta provincial police. 

How does a blogger keep up?

All we can do is try.