Admittedly, the revelation by The Narwhal yesterday that Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government is seriously pondering a scheme to create public corporations to build and operate pipelines to carry natural gas to a multitude of AI data centres across the province, and to force private companies to invest in the project, comes as a shocker.
And since the goal of the plan outlined in a leaked cabinet report drafted for Energy Minister Brian Jean’s department appears to be to pump up the price of natural gas to benefit fossil fuel multinational corporations and the government’s own coffers at the expense of the province’s citizens, that hardly seems like a worthy objective for a government.
But in half-hearted defence of the UCP, let it be said that there’s nothing wrong with governments using Crown corporations to run businesses of national or provincial importance at arm’s length from day-to-day political considerations.
Moreover, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with governments “picking winners and losers” among businesses vying for public support, as hard-core market fundamentalist critics like the UCP tend to put it when governments play a role in advancing projects of great importance. Indeed, the history of the great accomplishments of mankind in art, science, exploration and technology is a history of governments picking winners.
That said, as the decade-long history Alberta’s UCP governments illustrates, the party’s leadership, especially Premier Danielle Smith, is almost comically bad at picking winners, its relationship with the business sector is populated with bad actors and tainted with corruption, and its technological preference for fossil fuel uber alles is almost perversely foolish.
The UCP’s determination to make our beautiful province a dumping ground for water- and energy-sucking of AI data centres – which inspire fervent and justified opposition wherever they crop up on the planet – is the most striking example yet of this bizarre UCP instinct to do the worst thing it can for the province and its people.
If I may be so bold, given the nature of surveillance capitalism, it’s arguably even more offensive than blowing the tops of Rocky Mountains to build open-pit coal mines for Australian billionaires and polluting water all the way to Hudson Bay!
What’s more, it takes a remarkable level of brass for a government whose MLAs, political operatives, and social media trolls regularly engage in red baiting – calling anyone who publicly stands up for human rights, the environment, or wants a heat pump in their basement a “communist” – doing what real, actual communists are supposed to do.
You know, building huge state monopolies, having five-year plans the objectives of which must always be met, and stuff like that. Plus suppressing human rights, something the UCP’s MAGA inspirations south of the World’s Longest Undefended Border love to do, and the UCP would like to join if their Oct. 19 referenda questions are anything to go by. (Remember, Vote NO to the Nine.)
The Narwhal’s scoop, and a later report in The Globe and Mail, which indicated it also had a copy of the report, said the scheme would see two Crown corporations created, one to plan where the pipelines would go and another to “construct, own or backstop gas infrastructure.” Very Soviet, if you ask me.
Both stories indicated the document showed the government had tried and failed since 2024 to push TC Energy Corp. into building more pipelines, but the company’s “proposed solutions fell short.” (Which means, presumably, they didn’t make business sense.)
The Narwhal’s original report said the plan “would give the government the power to control some private investment decisions, including directing companies to build pipelines, and it could also make the government a direct competitor of companies such as TC Energy.” That story also said the document predicted “significant legal and cost impacts for the Government of Alberta” and cost “increases for utility ratepayers.”
If you’re wondering why the UCP would engage in such a scheme, you’re unlikely to get a useful answer from the government even when they get over their shock at The Narwhal’s Friday-morning scoop and get their talking points together.
Initially, various government departments didn’t return The Narwhal’s calls, said the Victoria-based online publication that specializes in environmental coverage.
Eventually, someone in Mr. Jean’s department sent both publications a note that stiffly insisted: “Governments routinely examine a wide range of policy, regulatory and legislative options when considering complex issues, and internal materials do not represent government decisions. … We are working with industry, including the natural gas infrastructure owners, to better understand these issues and identify practical solutions that support future growth and investment.”
Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi’s explanation at an obviously hastily called news conference on the topic yesterday afternoon is certainly accurate as far as it went.
“Many Albertans have been asking why is this government so gung ho on these data centers with all their challenges, with their environmental challenges, with their economic challenges, with the fact that they actually don’t create very many good jobs,” Mr. Nenshi said. “This report makes it clear that their strategy all along was to do whatever they could to increase natural gas prices to promote the government’s own bottom line due to their own fiscal mismanagement.”
“The report today says that everyone, all Alberta households and all Alberta businesses will see huge price increases to their natural gas,” Mr. Nenshi said. “That means your electricity bill will go up. That means your home heating bill will go up.”
“But it’s not just that. It is a tax on everything. It means everything you buy, including the already outrageous price of groceries, will go up when natural gas goes up, and there is no help coming from the UCP.”
This suggests that unlike the authors of the report and quite possibly the UCP politicians who received it, Mr. Nenshi has remembered that higher prices are more than a mere “perception.”
The following discussion provides additional information on the data center natural gas relationship, see and listen for instance at the 5:50 -7:20 timestamp and also the calculated PR deceit surrounding the idea of digital security and sovereignty at approximately the 11;30 timestamp.
https://breachmedia.ca/as-public-backlash-grows-against-ai-politicians-have-launched-a-new-pr-push/
What is reality in the otherworldly rabbit hole of Danielle in Wonderland? Surely natural gas, utility and grocery bills are not real. Surely they’re just concepts of bills, or perceptions. What’s in the tea, ayahuasca?
Today the premier went on her propaganda radio show to deny everything, with words that seemed to confirm everything, if you listen to them.
Someone who posts here regularly often talks about gullible seniors. Sure enough, they’re baked into the UCP’s plan. From The Narwhal:
The document notes Albertans may be “sensitive” to what it calls “any change in perceived affordability.”
The document also notes “potential disproportionate impacts on seniors and rural residents can be mitigated by monitoring affordability and exploring mitigation measures specific to households and small businesses….
The document suggests government messaging could sell the plan to Albertans to “help strengthen social licence.”
https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-ai-data-centre-takeover-cabinet-doc/
Oh my. I hear the Town Hall in Grande Prairie was another rip-roaring fun Friday evening, although I don’t have Mr. Glubish’s word for it.
Why so many panties in such a knot? What about all the benefits in kind?
At the Heartland Conference, Keith Bradley, Acting Chief Executive Officer of Invest Alberta, with tears of emotion, in a gosh-gee-whiz moment, coyly shared with us: “Meta trusted Alberta” on Thursday. (Well maybe they trust us on the other days too, but that wasn’t implied.) Because, as his former board chair taught him, business moves at the ‘speed of trust’. Matt Sexton, Community Engagement Manager at Meta (open collar, plaid shirt, engaging smile) then promised us- wait for it- flush toilets for Sturgeon County! World class amenities! (His words, honest to dog). No word yet on whether that’s just for the construction workers or whether residents will also benefit. And, as they did in Louisiana, they’ll be pouring money into the schools – STEM education, youth robotics, coding clubs… think of the children! https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/meta-social-media-harms-settlement-9.7320919
3000 jobs, then 300 jobs. Ah, but there’s the refresh cycle (nothing to do with the flush toilets) where you rip everything out, burn it down (again, not paraphrasing) and start again because that’s the way tech works, but- more jobs! Hyper-data centres are economic catastrophes, sorry my bad, catalysts “in perpetuity”.
Flush toilets required apparently for dignity because to get your 3000 workers you have to first ‘domesticate’ them (really, truly I am not making this stuff up) before you can retain them. That way, he says, you might even get the ladies out. Nothing says diversification like flush toilets. And if you want to be a Meta builder, THAT’S the BASELINE!
With all my heart, wish I was not inventing this stuff.
Is a certain Edmonton businessman with the initials SM involved in constructing these AI data centres? Like he’s allegedly involved in constructing private surgical centres and forced drug treatment centres?
On October 19, send Donald Trump a message. No to the nine and yes to Canada!
Highwood Hippie: I wouldn’t doubt that. There are multiple people getting kickbacks, while we see no benefits.
It is very unfortunate that Albertans can’t trust Elections Alberta.
OT: Still no answer from Keith Wilson to my fair question.
It was quite a long time ago, but lest we forget it was a past Alberta conservative government that owned an energy company, bought an airline and owned a bank in the 1970’s. The first and the second are no longer government owned, but interestingly we still have ATB which helps rural Albertans access banking. Around that time our Federal government also owned a railway, an airline and an energy company.
Crown corporations went out of style a decade or so after that, but I get the sense with the the focus on big infrastructure projects now they may be making a bit of a comeback soon. After all the Trans Mountain pipeline ended up being developed by the Federal government after a private company did not go forward with it.
So it is not surprising that even the Alberta government is now mulling how they can improve natural gas distribution for our supposedly poor long suffering natural gas companies. Unfortunately, while this may help them proceed with building data centres, it does not help most Albertans who will then have to pay more for natural gas used in heating and electricity.
Government control of enterprises can be helpful to achieve to achieve objectives of society, which private companies are not interesting in. However, when governments objectives are not beneficial for the public, it does not help.
I don’t trust the UCP with this at all, let alone anything else. Watch our already costly, deregulated power prices shoot up, a whole bunch of environmental impacts happen, while the rich friends of the UCP get even richer.
Ultimately, the end-goal is the depopulation of Alberta. Yes, all the claims of wanting 10M people living in the province is not only a pipe dream, it works against the entire UCP agenda. Ridding the cities of their surplus populations is a desirable goal, because don’t vote UCP anyway. As for the rural folk, who are most likely to be disadvantaged by UCP policies, they’re all idiots.
Oops! The contaminated water from Grassy Mountain will end up in the “Gulf of America” not in Hudson’s Bay. But the point is well taken.
Don: AlbertaPolitics.ca stands by the Hudson Bay: “There are numerous lakes and rivers at the site of Grassy Mountain that supply the Oldman River Basin. Waters from the Oldman flow into the Saskatchewan River Basin, and then all the way to Hudson Bay.” https://canadians.org/analysis/why-stopping-grassy-mountain-so-pivotal-moving-canada-beyond-coal/ Nevertheless, it is clear that the Hudson River should be renamed the Canada River. DJC
There is ever so much wrong with governments picking winners and losers among businesses. The phenomenon of data centres makes this clear. The entire industry is rooted in the US military industrial complex welfare program for surveillance capitalism in Silicon Valley. Progs/liberals/bourgeois folks loved the derpy nonsense of people like “the Woz” and Bill Gates, and the Muskrat until he revealed himself to be full-blown Nazi, although he’ll do in a pinch. Governments picked winners in the 2008-09 collapse and subsequent decade of bailouts, which was quite disgusting and cemented the post-capitalist corporate welfare model. Governments picking winners and losers from among private corporations is literally the foundational economic structure of fascism. “Soviet” is a more apt description of an economic relationship under violent and unrelenting assault by the agents of global capital and finance in concert with kooks like the Catholic Church and the various evangelical protestant freakshow denominations (the kind of people who support the Grifter-Yokel party). The Grifter-Yokel party of Derpberta is very much fascist and has nothing in common with anything remotely resembling communism, Soviet or otherwise. Because bourgeois folks can handle fascists and they can’t handle socialists. The US and French and UK and Dutch and Canadian and Australian and Israeli states never, ever support socialists but they back right-wing freaks all the time. It used to be excused as a function of the Cold War, never, ever true, but since the dismantling of the Soviet Union it has continued unabated. That’s why we have fascist governments in Italy and Japan and Argentina and a carousel of fascists in the rest of latin America. Isn’t it odd that in 1945 the US had jump all over French communists, with the CIA making a deal in 1948 to back the Socialists and using the Corsican Mafia to crush the Reds and break the Marseille dock strike and now the only opposition to “pragmatic centrism” in France is Nazis? It’s important to remember, on the subject of mining, that Canadian mining interests are among the most powerful on earth, and they do things like hire death squads and assassinate labour and environmental activists. Elbows up!
I was recently scrolling the wretched offerings of my current television provider, and came across this: https://rfdtvcanada.ca The program airing at the time featured copromorph Derek Fildebrandt, one more prominent lump of the excreta of Ontario so prominent in right-wing circles in Derpberta. Another program in the lineup featured Cory Morgan. Those damned Russians!
“This report makes it clear that their strategy all along was to do whatever they could to increase natural gas prices to promote the government’s own bottom line due to their own fiscal mismanagement.” (ANDP Naheed Nenshi). Perhaps, but that only captures part of the scheme. Renewables are explicitly excluded, which comes on top of the already existing moratorium on renewables, and the UCP’s pathetic attempts to discourage individuals from buying electric vehicles or installing residential solar generation. The objective is clearly to protect the natural gas companies from competition at any level. Given Danielle Smith’s history as a lobbyist for the oil and gas business I have no doubt that the former talk radio host and owner of a small-town diner stands to gain personally from her position of power, as does Brian Jean and others. None of the UCP’s priorities make any sense otherwise. This is good old-fashioned corruption in ideological clothing.