Asian Tribune Your Multilingual Newspaper covering World and local news News
Thursday night’s debate ahead of the provincial election featured a pair of veteran politicians taking verbal jabs at each other.
UCP Leader Danielle Smith and Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley addressed issues like affordability, health care, the economy, education and trust in leadership.
And while both leaders appeared to land solid points and counterpoints in their arguments, there were a number of questionable talking points used by both.
Let’s look at some of the claims.
Editor’s note: A number of claims were made about the management of the province’s health-care system, claims which will be added to this story at a later date.
‘The power bill crisis’
Notley said under the current UCP government, “most Albertans’ utility bills look more like a mortgage payment.”
CMHC data from Q1 2023 shows the average mortgage payment for Edmonton was $1,509 and Calgary was $1,615.
Some Albertans have come forward to the media with utility bills of as much as $2,700.
Smith claimed her opponent “created the power bill crisis.”
“By phasing out coal early, they added $2 billion to the cost of your power bill,” Smith said, calling it an “ideological change.”
“That will cost $52 billion and increase your power bill another 40 per cent,” Smith said repeatedly through the one-hour debate.
Those numbers come from a recent UCP claim that decarbonizing Alberta’s power grid would cost $87 billion, a total report authors said was “not a fair representation” of the cost of the federal policy to reach net zero electricity generation by 2035.
The $52-billion figure came from an Alberta Energy Systems Operator report that found the capital investments needed for the grid to reach net zero ranged from $44 to $52 billion. And according to University of Calgary assistant professor Sara Hastings-Simon, those estimates of costs of key technologies like solar and wind “are really much higher than what we’re seeing today across North America.”
The energy and climate expert said the idea that the increased capital costs would be passed directly along to customers is false.
“We don’t have a regulated system like much of the rest of Canada where you would expect those costs to go directly on to the users of electricity. Instead, generators of electricity basically make bids in an auction-like system in order to produce electricity,” Hastings-Simon said.
Neither of the reports addressed costs for inaction or costs for society-wide adaptation to a hotter climate.
Notley claimed there is a lucrative opportunity for Alberta to invest in renewable energy.
“There is roughly $16 trillion of international investment floating around out there looking to invest in renewable energy,” she said.
That claim matches numbers from Goldman Sachs. In June 2020, the financial analysis firm said the transition to renewables from fossil fuels would create a $16-trillion investment opportunity through 2030, according to a Market Insider report.
That same month, 30 international business giants worth $16 trillion created the Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance, committing trillions to sustainable development goals.
Friend or foe of energy development?
Notley’s record on infrastructure development for the energy sectors came under fire during the debate.
The UCP leader said her opponent “didn’t stand up” against the cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline project, the Energy East pipeline project, or against Bills C-48 and C-69, bills the UCP called the “tanker ban bill” and “no more pipelines law.”
Notley testified before Senate against Bill C-48 during the 2019 election campaign, urging the Red Chamber to toss the bill “in the garbage.”
Similarly, Notley addressed senators about Bill C-69, calling for major amendments.
“I will give (the Liberal government) credit for stepping in to buy Trans Mountain, but I also think there is a high level of investor uncertainty that exists right now in the way in which it’s written,” she said on Feb. 28, 2019. “We cannot allow that uncertainty to continue. You can’t build trust by saying, ‘Trust us.’ You build trust by providing clarity.”
The federal government decided to shelve the stalled Northern Gateway pipeline in November 2016, but gave the green light to the Enbridge Line 3 and Trans Mountain expansions, with the caveat that “Kinder Morgan respects the stringent conditions put forward by the National Energy Board.”
At the time, Notley took an optimistic and conciliatory tone, noting that Trans Mountain and Line 3 were “critically important to Alberta’s economic future” and the TMX approval allowed Alberta to “get our product to China” and “enhance our economic independence not only in Alberta but all of Canada.”
On Thursday, the NDP leader said she “made sure we got a pipeline to tidewater, the first one in 50 years. I did that standing up against a B.C government (and) federal government.”
The Trans Mountain pipeline started operations in 1953, from Edmonton to the B.C. coast.
In 2016, the B.C. government stated it did not support an expansion of Trans Mountain. Notley travelled to B.C., to promote the pipeline in late 2016 and the following year, then-premier Christy Clark announced her government’s support.
In May 2018, the federal government announced its intent to purchase the pipeline from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion, with the intent to not become the permanent owners. Months later, Notley would announce Alberta’s withdrawal from the federal climate plan “until the federal government gets its act together.”
Notley said Alberta signing onto the plan was always contingent on the Trans Mountain pipeline project going forward.
Emissions and production caps
Smith claimed a shift away from “petroleum products” is the Notley view of the world.”
“As long as we keep our energy industry strong, we’re going to keep Alberta’s economy strong,” the UCP leader said. “Ms. Notley won’t do that.”
Notley immediately disagreed with that characterization.
“I want to create jobs producing energy. I want to create jobs upgrading our energy. And I want to create jobs,” the NDP leader said. “Reducing emissions and reducing emissions is absolutely the focus. It’s not about reducing our production, it is about emissions.”
Bringing up the federal government’s proposed emissions reductions of 42 per cent by 2030, Smith said, is a “de facto production cap.”
Earlier in the debate, Smith lauded the “exciting things that are happening with carbon capture and utilization and storage and all the green technology.”
The provincial government already has an emissions cap on the oilsands: 100 megatonnes per year. The province said the oilsands currently emit roughly 70 Mt per year.
The Pathways Alliance, a collection of six oilsands operators, has work underway to decarbonize but not reduce its energy production.
The federal emissions reduction goal — believed necessary to prevent global warming from reaching catastrophic levels — makes no mention of reducing production, just reducing the carbon intensity of that production.
Taxes and jobs
On a number of occasions, Smith said the NDP’s policies when they were in government starting in 2015 resulted in “183,000 jobs… lost in the first couple of years.”
University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe said that figure is an “inappropriate use of data.”
“That claim is looking at the lowest points in the previous government’s term in terms of full time employment unadjusted for seasonality,” Tombe told Global News. “That’s just an inappropriate use of data to compare different months across years that are not seasonally adjusted because then you’d be capturing just the regular ups and downs of the labour force that have nothing to do with policy at all.
“Second, just focusing on full-time employment, it doesn’t align with the claim being made, which is about job losses. So we should be looking at total employment and we should be looking at seasonally adjusted employment.”
Tombe said the biggest drop in jobs under the NDP government was around 77,000 jobs, but noted that there was a net gain in jobs at the end of the NDP term.
The U of C economist said the reason for the job loss wasn’t any one government’s policies.
“It was really due to the recession that we went through that started prior to the NDP taking office and was due to low oil prices — like a really large and long lasting reduction in world oil prices,” he said.
“Governments have far less of an effect on the economy than they like to claim. They claim credit when things are good and their opponents blame them when things are bad. But the reality is they can only nudge things at the margin.”
‘Just transition’ blame
Smith also claimed, “Where do you think Justin Trudeau got the idea for ‘just transition’ and for an emissions cap and for a carbon tax? He got it from Ms. Notley when she was premier.”
The ideas for all three of those concepts have been discussed internationally for years before Trudeau campaigned on those ideas in 2019.
At COP 21 in Paris in 2015, unions and advocates urged the parties to include language around a “just transition” as part of the Paris Climate Agreement. Canada was a signatory to that agreement.
A “just transition” is a framework developed to include a number of measures to ensure workers’ rights and livelihoods when economies move from a resource-extraction-based economy to more sustainable production.
It “involves maximizing the social and economic opportunities of climate action, while minimizing and carefully managing any challenges,” the International Labour Organization writes.
The term has since been latched on to by conspiracy theorists as some sort of mass control scheme.
A carbon tax — a tax on pollution — was first proposed by David Gordon Wilson in 1973, and in 1980 economist Milton Friedman expressed support for ecotaxes in his book Free to Choose.
Emissions caps can be tracked back to microeconomic simulations studies conducted by the U.S. National Air Pollution Control Administration in the late ’60s under a “cap and trade” approach to pollution. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 put in place a framework for countries’ agreed-upon limits of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Inflation crisis”
Smith said one of the first things the UCP government did, under former premier Jason Kenney, was to address the “inflation crisis created… by the Liberal-NDP coalition in Ottawa, spending too much money, driving up the cost of everything.”
While Canada’s inflation has recently seen rates not seen in 40 years. Bank of Canada numbers show inflation in this country reached negative values in 2020 before surpassing eight per cent last year. But Canada was not alone in dealing with increased costs of living.
Data from the International Monetary Fund shows inflation worldwide saw increases from 2020 to a recent peak in 2022, and a downward trend since.
Many economists point to the fluctuating push and pull of supply and demand that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. The “just in time” supply chain saw many disruptions as different parts of the chain were shut down at different times and to different capacities, causing a bullwhip effect.
Regarding federal “spending,” Smith likely was talking about the federal financial relief offered at a time when health authorities recommended the shuttering of large swaths of the economy to prevent COVID-19 from rampantly spreading between people in the course of economic activity.
The Office of the Auditor General of Canada concluded that emergency spending offered quick financial relief to individuals and employers, preventing an increase in poverty, helping the economy “bounce back from the effects of the pandemic.”
But the auditor general also found the federal agencies “did not manage the selected COVID‑19 programs efficiently given the significant amount paid to ineligible recipients, the limited adjustments as programs were extended, and the slow progress on post-payment verifications.”
It should be noted that the COVID-19 pandemic was a once-in-a-century health emergency.
— with files from Phil Heidenreich and Caley Gibson, Global News, and The Canadian Press.