There is a famous adage that says jazz music is about the notes you don’t play. It could also be said that elections are about the policies that no one talks about.
In Alberta’s 2023 election, this applies as much to Rachel Notley’s NDP as it does to Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP).
Both parties have based their platforms on the assumption that the oil industry will provide steady revenues to the government—an assumption that, as the clock ticks towards catastrophic climate change and an energy transition becomes inevitable, is increasingly deluded.
“We’re avoiding the hard choices by spending oil royalties,” Lisa Young, a University of Calgary political scientist, told The Breach. When oil prices start to collapse, “all of a sudden the things that were credible last week look a little bit less credible, because royalties will be lower and what’s built into the budget is assuming that you can spend royalty money.”
Avoiding the conversation about climate change isn’t the only thing Notley’s NDP has in common with the UCP during this campaign. In fact, Notley has openly said that she’s trying to court disaffected conservative voters.
As former conservative premier Allison Redford told CTV News, it’s no longer easy to distinguish an NDP policy from a conservative policy in Alberta.
Brian Mason, a former Edmonton bus driver who led the Alberta NDP from 2004 to 2014, and served as minister of transportation in Notley’s government, described the appeal to soft conservative voters as an electoral necessity, one which doesn’t detract from core social democratic principles.
“Practical and pragmatic decisions about the issues in the campaign trump any ideological considerations that may pop up. I want to emphasize that does not mean the NDP is abandoning those principles, or will not work in those directions,” he told The Breach.
With the NDP walking a tightrope between appealing to conservatives and appealing to progressives, voters are left to read between the lines. How many UCP policies would an NDP government reverse? And how many of its own former policies would a Notley government reinstate?
With the help of experts, The Breach breaks down what the NDP’s promises on labour, education, health care and the environment—and what the party has left unsaid—mean for voters.
The Breach sent a list of 20 detailed questions about the NDP’s positions on various issues to party spokesperson Malissa Dunphy and did not receive a response.
Corporate tax rate would remain lowered
The NDP has promised not to raise income taxes and to run a balanced budget while dedicating only a specific percentage of oil revenues to budgeting, with the rest going towards debt repayment.
The party has also committed to eliminating the small business tax. Left unsaid is how much of its oil royalties would be dedicated towards spending, and how an NDP government would balance the budget once oil revenues inevitably decline.
When the NDP was previously in power, the party increased the corporate tax rate from 10 per cent to 12 per cent.
One of former premier Jason Kenney’s first actions was to outline a plan to roll the corporate tax rate back to eight per cent—lower than it was before the NDP took power—which was achieved in 2021.
The New Democrats have committed to increasing the corporate tax rate to 11 per cent over three years, which it emphasized would still make Alberta’s rate the lowest in Canada. It would also be lower than it was before the UCP took power.
One easy giveaway to the labour movement
One area where we’re likely to expect significant reversals is on the UCP’s radical anti-labour agenda, given the NDP’s connection to the labour movement.
In 2020, Kenney brought forward the centre piece of his anti-labour agenda. The Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act has two major components. The first forces unions to establish a distinction between its “core” activities, such as contract negotiation and grievance settlement, and “non-core,” or what the UCP deems “political” activities, which members now have to explicitly opt in to paying, regardless of whether those activities were approved by the union’s active members.
A Parkland Institute study from Athabasca University labour studies professor Jason Foster found that as a result of this artificial distinction, charities were deprived of $2.5 million in union donations.
The second component of the legislation prohibits striking workers from blocking scabs from entering the workplace and forces unions to apply to the Alberta Labour Relations Board if it wants to picket a secondary site—an off-site location that is connected to the employer.
A year ago, Notley committed to scrapping the legislation in its entirety. Foster told The Breach the NDP is certain to follow through on this “in a heartbeat,” although he doesn’t suspect the party will be talking much about labour issues on the campaign trail.
“[Bill 32] is such a lightning rod,” he said. “It’s a fairly easy thing to be able to give to the labour movement.”
The reversal of other UCP labour reforms, such as allowing employers to deny workers who were injured on the job extended health coverage and even fire them, and eliminating mandatory Occupational Health and Safety committees at every worksite, will involve “much more challenging conversations” for an NDP government.
Questions remain on minimum wage
The UCP only partially reversed the NDP’s increase of the province’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, reducing it to $13 an hour for youth, which Kenney justified by saying, “$13 an hour is a heck of a lot more than $0 an hour.”
Last year, Notley committed to restoring a single minimum wage for all ages. But $15 an hour was worth a lot more in 2017, when it was fully implemented, than it is now. Foster predicted an NDP government would at some point index the wage to inflation.
“Before they do that, do they then also bump it up $1 or $2, and then index it? I think that’s the question mark,” Foster said.
Education funding boost won’t make up for UCP cuts
The NDP has committed to increasing K-12 education funding by $700 million over four years to hire 4,000 new teachers and educational assistants to reduce class sizes in public, Catholic and francophone schools.
Notley has also committed to restoring program unit funding (PUF), which helps prepare children with complex needs for their education as they enter the school system. Notley called this funding, which the UCP cut in 2020, “absolutely critical.”
Wing Kar Li, a spokesperson for public education advocacy group Support Our Students, noted that the $700 million—which works out to $175 million a year—isn’t a lot of money when one factors in the UCP’s cuts to public education over the past four years, many of which were done by stealth. But she applauded the NDP’s commitment to restoring PUF funds.
Alberta is also the only province which has charter schools—privately operated schools that receive equal funding as public schools. Unlike other fully-funded schools, though, charter schools don’t have publicly elected and accountable school boards.
Li said the NDP could prevent an acceleration of charter schools at little political cost, adding that she wonders why the party hasn’t publicly committed to doing so.
“The lack of boldness is quite obvious,” she told The Breach.
“Jason Kenney was very bold. Even in [the UCP’s] campaigning, we knew choice in education was coming. What is the antidote to that? There are lots of families and parents who have been really upset over how public education was dealt with, yet we find there’s really no party to turn to with bold visions to roll back those extreme measures.”
On the post-secondary side of the equation, Smith’s most recent budget capped tuition increases at two per cent starting in the 2024/25 school year, a significant decrease from the large tuition hikes the Kenney government permitted after lifting a tuition freeze.
The NDP says it will freeze tuition at 2022/23 levels—well above what it was during their previous term—and permit increases at the rate of inflation afterwards. The NDP hasn’t said how much of the UCP’s drastic cuts to post-secondary education it will reverse.
No promises on privatized health care services
The centrepiece of the NDP’s health care platform thus far has been a promise to spend $750 million to hire 4,000 new health care practitioners and establish 40 new family health clinics, which will consist of doctors, nurse practitioners, administrators, mental health therapists, pharmacists and dieticians.
The NDP has also promised the “largest national and international healthcare recruitment campaign Alberta has ever seen,” with a signing bonus upwards of $10,000 to incentivize health-care professionals to work in Alberta.
Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare, said this is a good start, but “we will never be able to simply recruit and train our way out of Alberta’s health care staffing crisis.”
He had the same qualm with the party’s family health clinics idea. “We’re never going to recruit and fill the gap unless we retain people we have right now, so that needs to be a top policy priority,” Gallaway said.
Since 2019, the UCP has contracted out various health care services to the private sector, from ophthalmology and lab services to food vendors and laundry at hospitals.
Smith has resurrected Kenney’s “public health guarantee,” which promises not to make Albertans pay out of pocket for health care, which she had previously mused about. But the UCP’s promise doesn’t rule out using public funds to subsidize private services.
Notley hasn’t publicly committed to reverse any of the UCP’s health care privatizations, although in its previous tenure in power, the NDP did halt the former government’s planned privatization of hospital laundry services and the privatization of lab services, both of which the UCP resurrected. The previous NDP government, however, didn’t make any efforts to reverse the privatization of long-term care.
The problem with making commitments to reverse privatization, Gallaway emphasized, is that the full details of the contracts, and what the cost would be to eliminate them, aren’t publicly available. According to Alberta Health Services, the arms-length body that delivers health care in the province, these private contracts’ durations range from seven years to a decade.
“It sounds like the UCP is doing the best they can to lock us into long-term contracts with for-profit providers. Until there’s a change in government, it would be hard for the NDP to comment on what they would do, because they don’t know what they’re currently locked into,” Gallaway noted.
Silence on the drug poisoning crisis
It’s fairly certain the NDP won’t introduce involuntary treatment for people who use drugs, as Smith plans to do if re-elected, a policy Notley called “doomed to failure, both from a treatment perspective and a legal one.”
When the NDP was last in power, it funded seven supervised consumption sites to address the growing drug poisoning crisis, which has only grown more severe since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Euan Thomson, a Calgary-based harm reduction advocate, told The Breach that while the NDP’s response to the drug poisoning crisis “took a while to get going,” it was a step in the right direction.
But these sites produced a vociferous backlash from surrounding business owners, which Kenney jumped on, closing the site in Lethbridge and one of four in Edmonton.
“Opposition to harm reduction has become a real focal point for deeply entrenched right-wing interests that want to see more policing and more maintenance of social structures,” Thomson noted.
The desire to woo soft conservative voters is one reason Thomson suspects the NDP hasn’t talked about ways to address the drug poisoning crisis thus far.
But he said this is a missed opportunity for the party to highlight the “fiscal responsibility inherent in harm reduction measures,” with fewer overdoses leading to reduced health care costs and better outcomes. “I feel like the NDP is … maybe just not trusting the public to understand some of these nuances,” he said.
No more pipelines?
One noticeable difference between the 2023 and 2019 election campaigns is that this time, neither major party is talking about the need to build more pipelines—a tacit admission that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which Notley tirelessly advocated for as premier, will likely be the last new pipeline ever built in Alberta.
That hasn’t stopped Notley from proudly proclaiming her government “went toe-to-toe with British Columbia’s NDP government to get the Trans Mountain pipeline built.”
The cost of the expansion, which the federal government bought in 2019 for $4.5 billion, has skyrocketed to $30.9 billion. When it’s up and running in the first quarter of 2024, it will nearly triple Alberta’s capacity to export planet-destroying tar sands crude.
Ian Hussey, a research manager with the Parkland Institute, told The Breach that while Trans Mountain will allow the fossil fuel industry to grow in the short-term, it’s undeniable that there will be a “meaningful decline” in demand for Alberta crude in the next decade, leading to an inevitable crash in prices.
“There are a lot of things that are going to change in Alberta’s energy industry, no matter who takes government,” Hussey added.
However, he emphasized, the NDP is far better equipped to weather this storm than the UCP because of its track record of engaging with the federal government’s climate initiatives when it was in government. Unsurprisingly, the former Alberta NDP leader shares this assessment.
“If we continue to put all our eggs in the fossil fuel basket, Alberta is going to look like a ghost town in 10 or 15 years,” Mason said. “The real approach here is to find a way to accommodate what’s coming and to restructure an energy industry so that Alberta remains an energy leader in the world.”
