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UPDATE 2024/05/24 - This story (both text and audio) has been updated to reflect recent amendments to Bill 20, introduced on May 23.

MAYOR JYOTI GONDEK: We don’t understand why a provincial government that is so bent on sovereignty is interested in stripping away the rights and responsibilities and the roles of municipal governments.

PREMIER DANIELLE SMITH: People need to know if there is going to be an ideological council chosen. Like, you can’t pretend everything is all non-partisan.

RAKHI PANCHOLI (NDP MLA): Bill 20 is the UCP’s latest attempt to show Albertans that no issue is too small for big government intervention.

JEREMY KLASZUS (HOST): We’re less than a year and a half away from the next municipal election in Alberta. In October of 2025, Calgarians will elect city council members and school board trustees. But this one will be different than previous elections. Not just because of who will be running, but because of how these elections will unfold under the province’s new Bill 20.

IAN WHITE (CTV CALGARY): The Alberta government is proposing sweeping changes to municipal politics, including political parties at the local level. A new bill tabled this afternoon would also give the province powers to remove councillors and repeal city bylaws.

KLASZUS: The Alberta Municipalities association calls Bill 20 a “power grab.” The Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) condemns it as an “affront to democracy.” This is Premier Danielle Smith’s municipal affairs policy in 2024.

But a couple years ago, before she was Premier, she was articulating something very different.

DANIELLE SMITH: We should have our municipal levels of government be able to be sovereign in the decisions that they make that are within their municipal boundaries.

KLASZUS: This is Smith in May of 2022 on her locals.com account—a crowdfunding platform where she answered questions from supporters. These clips were recently surfaced by a Twitter account called @disorderedyyc. And in 2022, asked about different electoral systems and which is best, Smith held up Alberta’s municipal elections—where candidates run independently—as an ideal.

DANIELLE SMITH: Probably be Nunavut’s system, or the system that you see in a lot of rural municipalities in Alberta. And what is that system? You get elected as an independent based on your own steam. You get elected based on who you are, what you stand for. You’re not tied by some kind of partisan restriction.

KLASZUS: This is not a fringe idea. Smith was expressing what most Albertans think.

KLASZUS: But she’s taken a very different tack as Premier. Smith has a regular radio show on 630 CHED and 770 CHQR, where she used to be a talk show host. Here’s Wayne Nelson, the show’s host, reading off a text from a listener for Premier Smith in March.

WAYNE NELSON: Why are you proceeding in directions that independent and government polls and surveys reveal that Albertans don’t want? The majority of Albertans don’t want a provincial pension, provincial police, or political parties at the municipal level, yet you persist with enabling legislation. Your government’s behaviour is exactly what you accused the feds of being: stubbornly ideological and tone deaf.

KLASZUS: Here’s some of Premier Smith’s response.

SMITH: I think people need to know if there is going to be an ideological council chosen. Like, you can’t pretend everything is all nonpartisan. I remember the line from years ago—oh, well, there isn’t a right-wing way to plow the streets, or a left-wing way to plow the streets. Well, if it was just about plowing the streets, then you wouldn’t worry about it. But when it becomes about a whole variety of political issues, you need to know what the persuasion is of your council members.

KLASZUS: There’s a lot to get into here—but to understand what’s happening at the moment, let’s do a little Political Science 101. We’re going to hear University of Alberta law professor Eran Kaplinsky. I spoke with him for a recent Sprawlcast series on the provincial government’s role in a contentious Canmore development.

ERAN KAPLINSKY: One of the first political philosophers to examine local government, to write on local government, was Alexis de Tocqueville. And he viewed the town as the most perfectly natural unit of government.

KLASZUS: Hey, that sounds familiar!

SMITH IN 2022: When you look at the municipal level of government, it’s kind of the healthiest level of government in most cases.

KLASZUS: Anyway, let’s get back to de Tocqueville.

KAPLINSKY: He famously wrote that it is men who make monarchies and establishes republics, but the township seems to come directly from the hand of God. But at the same time, de Tocqueville also noted how fragile the autonomy of the town is, and how susceptible it is to encroachment from senior levels of government.

KLASZUS: De Toqueville was writing about American townships in the 1800s, and warned that “local freedom is a rare and fragile thing.”

KAPLINSKY: Regardless of how natural local government might be, Canadian municipalities were established originally as colonial outposts. So they were designed to ensure prosperity and order, not to provide self-government. And so, in the Canadian constitution, municipalities have no independent status. Rather, they’re creatures of the province, which means that all their powers are delegated to them by the provincial legislature.

KLASZUS: There are two pieces of provincial legislation that govern cities and municipal elections. These are the Municipal Government Act and the Local Authorities Elections Act. Bill 20 makes significant changes to both of them.

It’s not unusual for the provincial government to tinker with municipal election laws. That’s been happening for a long time, to different degrees, often under the pretence of strengthening local democracy.

If you go way back to Calgary’s earliest days, municipal elections used to happen every year. Then in the mid-1910s it was every two years. In the 1970s, the province extended the frequency of municipal elections to every three years. And in 2012, Alberta’s Progressive Conservative government made it every four years.

DOUG GRIFFITHS: You can be a more effective elected person when you have a four-year term where you actually get to work for a few years.

KLASZUS: That was Doug Griffiths, Alberta’s municipal affairs minister at the time. Naheed Nenshi was Calgary’s mayor when that change was made.

NAHEED NENSHI: It was surprisingly not a big deal because most other provinces had already gone to four years.

KLASZUS: But the province hasn’t just tinkered with the frequency of municipal elections. They’ve also changed how these elections are run and financed. And local politicians have sometimes chafed at these changes, viewing them as a threat to local independence.

In the 2000s, there were very few municipal campaign finance rules in place. When the province introduced donation limits for campaigns in 2010, capping donations at $5,000 per donor and requiring the disclosure of small donations, Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel was livid. He called it a slap in the face and was indignant that the province would impose itself on municipalities like that. Can you imagine!

Since then, various campaign finance rules have been introduced and removed and tweaked. One of the biggest changes happened in 2018, when Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP government banned union and corporate donations to municipal campaigns. They also limited how much each individual donor could give, capping it at $4,000 per donor total—across all campaigns.

DENISE WOOLLARD: We consulted with Albertans and we know they want to see local elections that are more fair and transparent.

KLASZUS: That was Denise Woollard, an NDP MLA at the time.

KLASZUS: But the NDP lost the election a year later, and Premier Jason Kenney’s newly-elected UCP government made another round of changes to the Local Authorities Elections Act, reversing some of the NDP’s tweaks. The UCP allowed donors to give up to $5,000 to as many candidates as they wanted, for example.

The 2021 municipal election was the first election after both the NDP and UCP had tweaked the Local Authorities Elections Act. The NDP’s move to ban union and corporate donations didn’t stop that money from flowing. Those dollars just went somewhere else.

NENSHI: When they banned corporate and union donations to individual campaigns, they actually allowed for unlimited corporate and union donations—some call them dark money—to these political action committees that in Alberta we call third party advertisers. Very U.S. system. There’s nothing wrong with third party advertisers being engaged in the community, but they have to be very well regulated. And there were very few rules for who could donate, or how much you could donate to one of these.

VIDEO: October 18 is our chance to shape Calgary's future.

KLASZUS: This is a 2021 video from a progressive third-party advertiser called Calgary’s Future.

VIDEO: If we want this city to thrive, we need to elect the right leaders. Leaders who will embrace the future, bring new ideas to the table and spur innovation. Leaders with the courage to stand up to the province and fight for what our city needs.

KLASZUS: The UCP had capped donations to third-party advertisers at $30,000. But before that, in 2019, CUPE alone gave over $1 million to Calgary's Future. In all, Calgary’s Future raised $1.7 million from city unions for the 2021 election. The group endorsed 13 council candidates and nine of them won, including Mayor Jyoti Gondek.

Calgary and Edmonton both elected centrist mayors in Amarjeet Sohi and Jyoti Gondek. And that wasn’t new. Before Sohi, Edmonton had Stephen Mandel and Don Iveson. And before Gondek, Calgary had Dave Bronconnier and Naheed Nenshi—who’s now running for the Alberta NDP leadership.

NENSHI: Where conservatives in Alberta have always been unsuccessful is in municipal campaigns. This has always frustrated the conservative governments in Edmonton because they think that municipal governments should be kind of their farm team. And so for many years, they have attempted to figure out ways to put their thumb on the scale in municipal elections, and they failed every time.

KLASZUS: This brings us to Bill 20, which would dramatically remake the relationship between the province and Alberta municipalities. It goes far beyond the usual tinkering with campaign finance rules—although there is some of that too. Here’s Municipal Affairs minister Ric McIver, who is a former Calgary city councillor.

MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS MINISTER RIC McIVER: We are updating the local authorities’ Election Act to allow donations from unions and private corporations, in removing the restriction on donating before the municipal election year.

KLASZUS: But that’s the relatively small stuff. More significantly, Bill 20, as introduced in April, proposed giving cabinet the power to remove municipal councillors and repeal municipal bylaws at will. The province already can already do this but there are limits on these powers and the process can be lengthy.

This did not go over well with municipalities. Here’s Tyler Gandam, the mayor of Wetaskawin and the president of the Alberta Municipalities association.

TYLER GANDAM: The bill has already created an atmosphere in which some of our members are fearing repercussions, if they disagree openly with the provincial government.

McIVER: I think the public will be most unforgiving of us if we make a decision to dismiss a duly elected councillor and don’t have a darn good reason for doing so. I think we’ll pay a big price for that. So that’s why again, first of all, I hope it never has to happen. But second of all, if it does then it’ll be incumbent upon cabinet to have a really good explanation for the public.

KLASZUS: After significant blowback, McIver walked that part of the bill back on May 23, introducing a few amendments to Bill 20. The amended bill wouldn’t have cabinet itself removing councillors. Instead, cabinet would have the power to put that question to a public vote. And this would only come into play for “councillors who are unwilling, unable, or refuse” to do their jobs, according to McIver's amendment. “Illegal or unethical behaviour” would also be a consideration.

But another big aspect of Bill 20 remains untouched: the introduction of political parties in Calgary and Edmonton, and only Calgary and Edmonton, for the 2025 election. McIver says municipal party politics already exists—he points to Calgary’s Future as an example of that.

McIVER: We are taking this step to enhance transparency for the voters of Calgary and Edmonton, to allow candidates to show their party affiliation if they so choose, and to give Calgary and Edmonton voters, I think, a better sense of who they are voting for. We’re going to see how this goes, and consider whether that benefit of transparency could be extended to voters of other municipalities in future elections. But that will be determined after we see how it works this time.

KLASZUS: Albertans have been surveyed on this question of municipal political parties more than once, and most don’t like the idea. The government’s own polling showed that 70% of Albertans don’t want it. McIver was asked about this when announcing Bill 20 in April and here’s what he said.

McIVER: At one time, we considered doing this for all municipalities, and out of 330 we’re down to two. Seventy percent of people don’t like it, 98% of municipalities won’t have it. I’d say we listened pretty hard.

KLASZUS: That’s one way to do the math. Another is that over half of Albertans live in Calgary and Edmonton.

KLASZUS: I asked Mayor Jyoti Gondek what’s going on between the city and province with Bill 20. This was on the same day when news broke that provincial funding for the low-income transit pass was being cut—a decision that the province backed down on a day later. And Bill 18 had also recently come down, which would block Alberta municipalities from making agreements with the federal government without the province approving it first.

MAYOR GONDEK: We don’t know what’s going on with the province. We don’t understand why they're exercising this kind of overreach. We don’t understand why a provincial government that is so bent on sovereignty is interested in stripping away the rights and responsibilities and the roles of municipal governments. I have no idea why they would implement measures that are broad, broad overreach in a worse way than anything that they’ve accused the federal government of.

KLASZUS: The former mayor has some ideas.

NENSHI: This is pure revenge against the two mayors for daring not to tow the party line, and revenge against the people of Calgary and Edmonton for not voting the way they wanted them to vote. That’s all this is—simple as that. And when they discover, as Minister McIver has discovered, that in fact every member of Alberta Municipalities and every member of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta are also opposed to this, he’s going to realize that his list of enemies is much longer than he thought it was.

KLASZUS: Meanwhile, the Alberta NDP has been hammering away on Bill 20 in the Legislature. Here’s NDP MLA Rakhi Pancholi.

RAKHI PANCHOLI: Two weeks ago the minister of municipal affairs was zealously preaching about transparency and accountability for local officials. Yet Bill 20, the because-I-said-so act, gives us a master class in what it means to centralize power behind closed cabinet doors and turn local governments into nothing more than puppet shows with the province firmly gripping the strings. Bill 20 is the UCP’s latest attempt to show Albertans that no issue is too small for big government intervention.

KLASZUS: It’s no surprise that the NDP opposes Bill 20. But it’s not just the usual suspects fighting it. The Calgary Chamber of Commerce says the bill “introduces instability in municipalities, running counter to businesses’ need for stability and regulatory certainty.” The Rural Municipalities of Alberta association has also loudly condemned what it calls overreach by the province—and is worried that political parties will be introduced provincewide after 2025.

Rural Municipalities of Alberta president Paul McLauchlin calls Bill 20 an affront to democracy in Alberta. It’s not a big-city mayor saying that. McLauchlin is a councillor in Ponoka County. Here’s what McLauchlin told 630 CHED in early May, recalling a recent conversation with McIver.

PAUL McLAUCHLIN: One of the comments I made to him was, you’ve just made rural municipal politicians mad at you. Do you know how hard it is to get rural municipal politicians mad at you? And you’ve managed to achieve that.

KLASZUS: To get a sense of the discontent in small-town Alberta, let’s listen in to High River’s town council. This was in April, before Bill 20 was announced. And keep in mind that High River is Premier Danielle Smith’s hometown. We’re going to hear Mayor Craig Snodgrass, Councillor Jamie Kinghorn and Councillor Michael Nychyk.

HIGH RIVER MAYOR CRAIG SNODGRASS: I think it’s very important that we keep our municipal governments as independent as we possibly can, and we don’t get mired in the political party quagmire that we see in both our provincial and federal governments.

COUNCILLOR JAMIE KINGHORN: Thank you, Mayor Snodgrass. I couldn’t agree with you more. This is absolutely one of the worst things that could happen to municipal politics. I remember riding with Premier Smith in my truck, and she said to me one day, you know, being in municipal politics gets you much closer to the residents of your community, and you don’t have a party to answer to. Well, those were her words and I’m saying, let’s live by those words.

COUNCILLOR MICHAEL NYCHYK: I’ve never felt, sitting here with the people I have over the years, that it was political in nature. It’s just not the right word to describe what we do. Yes, we’re elected; yes, we represent the people of the community, and that’s a democratic or maybe political process, but I don’t think that party affiliations have any place sitting inside this chamber or how we represent our people. Because admittedly I might be a right-wing thinker, but there’s lots of—if we’re going to talk that way—left-wing things that I’ve voted on in my years here. So it gives me that opportunity to, yeah, just make a vote in a direction that’s best for the community, not best for a party or for an ideology.

KLASZUS: So what’s underlying all of this? Here’s University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley.

JARED WESLEY: We don’t have an answer to that question. We’re left to speculate based on the pattern of legislating that we’ve seen from this government—that this is about taking vengeance on folks that disagree with them.

But putting my political science hat on, this is about chipping away at a core element of Canadian democracy, which is this notion of pluralism. And pluralism means simply, there’s a distribution of power and that many competing voices will come up with the best solutions to public policy. And the UCP’s approach to this is not simply to consolidate power, which most parties and leaders do, but rather to squelch dissent and remove the ability of critics to do their democratic duty—which is to call the government to account.

So in this case, it’s targeting their critics on councils in Edmonton and Calgary, and Bill 18 is targeting academics like myself, who use academic freedom to point out some of their misdeeds.

KLASZUS: Wesley says the UCP has become an authoritarian force in Alberta. And I asked him if it matters that Smith has said one thing and is doing another. Are we in a world where that has consequences?

WESLEY: This is where I’m optimistic because I think the UCP base will hold her accountable. They have a leadership review this fall, which is why the party is scrambling, and from the outside flailing, and throwing up policy ideas like cutting low-income transit—which they think is going to be red meat for their base. And finding that coming up with policy ideas on the fly as a means of trying to deflect attention from other things is just not palatable. It’s not popular among anybody across the political spectrum.

WESLEY: I was amazed that a piece that I wrote a few days ago that called the government out for acting in authoritarian ways—the response I got back from that piece was, first of all, far more in volume than I’ve ever received, and almost all of it was positive. And the comments I’m getting are from everyone, and from folks that were actually at the Coutts border blockade who were saying, absolutely, you’re right. The Smith government is not acting in a democratic fashion. All the way to the far left-hand side of the spectrum with folks that are usual suspects at anti-UCP rallies.

If those groups of folks are on the same side in saying 'enough is enough,' this government has a bigger problem than they started with. They’ve created a problem that they’re having a difficult time handling.

Jeremy Klaszus is editor-in-chief of The Sprawl.