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Alberta

Danielle Smith vows to protect Albertan farmland from Trudeau’s radical ‘net zero’ push

Published

1 year ago

6 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

‘You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, or on Nose Hill or in your neighbor’s backyard,’ the province’s premier declared.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said her province will continue to rely on reliable carbon-based fuel sources for power generation for decades to come after introducing sweeping new regulations restricting the development of so-called “renewable” energy generation from wind turbines and solar farms, saying these types of technologies are not the “silver bullet” the federal government claims they are for power generation.

“You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, or on Nose Hill or in your neighbor’s backyard,” Smith said to media on February 28 after announcing the new regulations on so-called “green” power generation.

“We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.”

Smith’s United Conservative Party government’s new “Renewed path forward for renewable energy” flies in the face of what mostly left-leaning proponents of “green power” claim is needed to rid the world of using “fossil fuels.”

Indeed, the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is trying to force net-zero regulations on all Canadian provinces, notably on electricity generation, as early as 2035. Alberta is adamantly opposed to this.

Natural gas and coal are abundant in Canada, notably in Alberta. In the new year, an extreme cold snap sent temperatures plummeting to nearly minus-50 degrees Celsius (58 degrees Fahrenheit) in much of western Canada. It was so cold that the province of Alberta’s power grid almost collapsed due to a failure of wind and solar power.

The UCP had put in place a pause on final approvals for large renewable energy projects, which was lifted on February 29. The UCP’s new guidelines stipulate that new wind or solar projects can only be allowed on Class 1 and Class 2 irrigable lands “unless the proponent can demonstrate the ability for both crops and/or livestock to coexist with the renewable generation project.”

Also, new buffer zones of a “minimum of 35 kilometres” will be established around “protected areas” and other “pristine viewscapes” that the province designates.

Alberta’s new rules of solar and wind power generation drew the ire of Trudeau’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter) last week that “Renewable energy companies expect to be treated fairly.”

“By placing overkill conditions on new renewable energy, it has the same effect as a moratorium by burying projects in red tape,” he wrote.

The Alberta government notes, despite what some in the federal government might claim, that it is home to about 90% of the renewable power projects in Canada, besides those from nuclear or hydro.

Alberta’s rules stipulate that any renewables that come online must be backed by “baseload” or natural gas/coal power generation, as wind and solar obviously are not reliable when it is dark or there is no wind.

“They are not the silver bullet for Alberta’s electricity needs and they are not the silver bullet of electricity affordability because each new development risks driving up the transmission costs and makes Alberta’s utility bills even more expensive,” Smith said.

In January, LifeSiteNews reported that Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, while speaking at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2024 meeting in Davos, Switzerland, said it is up to the government to “make” sure the “decarbonization” of Canada’s energy sector “happens.”

Her comments came just after Alberta’s power grid was saved from near collapse due to a cold snap that saw carbon-based energy saved the day after “renewables” failed.

The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has been pushed by the WEF – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – an organization in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet are involved.

Canada has the third largest oil and gas reserves in the world, with most of it in Alberta. However, since taking office in 2015, Trudeau has continued to push his radical environmental agenda similar to the agendas being pushed the WEF’s “Great Reset” and the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals.”

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Alberta

Is Canada’s Federation Fair?

Published on April 6, 2025

By

The Audit David Clinton

Contrasting the principle of equalization with the execution

Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light.

You’ll need to search long and hard to find a Canadian unwilling to help those less fortunate. And, so long as we identify as members of one nation¹, that feeling stretches from coast to coast.

So the basic principle of Canada’s equalization payments – where poorer provinces receive billions of dollars in special federal payments – is easy to understand. But as you can imagine, it’s not easy to apply the principle in a way that’s fair, and the current methodology has arguably lead to a very strange set of incentives.

According to Department of Finance Canada, eligibility for payments is determined based on your province’s fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is a measure of the taxes (income, business, property, and consumption) that a province could raise (based on national average rates) along with revenues from natural resources. The idea, I suppose, is that you’re creating a realistic proxy for a province’s higher personal earnings and consumption and, with greater natural resources revenues, a reduced need to increase income tax rates.

But the devil is in the details, and I think there are some questions worth asking:

  • Whichever way you measure fiscal capacity there’ll be both winners and losers, so who gets to decide?
  • Should a province that effectively funds more than its “share” get proportionately greater representation for national policy² – or at least not see its policy preferences consistently overruled by its beneficiary provinces?

The problem, of course, is that the decisions that defined equalization were – because of long-standing political conditions – dominated by the region that ended up receiving the most. Had the formula been the best one possible, there would have been little room to complain. But was it?

For example, attaching so much weight to natural resource revenues is just one of many possible approaches – and far from the most obvious. Consider how the profits from natural resources already mostly show up in higher income and corporate tax revenues (including income tax paid by provincial government workers employed by energy-related ministries)?

And who said that such calculations had to be population-based, which clearly benefits Quebec (nine million residents vs around $5 billion in resource income) over Newfoundland (545,000 people vs $1.6 billion) or Alberta (4.2 million people vs $19 billion). While Alberta’s average market income is 20 percent or so higher than Quebec’s, Quebec’s is quite a bit higher than Newfoundland’s. So why should Newfoundland receive only minimal equalization payments?

To illustrate all that, here’s the most recent payment breakdown when measured per-capita:
Equalization 2025-26 – Government of Canada

For clarification, the latest per-capita payments to poorer provinces ranged from $3,936 to PEI, $1,553 to Quebec, and $36 to Ontario. Only Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC received nothing.

And here’s how the total equalization payments (in millions of dollars) have played out over the past decade:

Is energy wealth the right differentiating factor because it’s there through simple dumb luck, morally compelling the fortunate provinces to share their fortune? That would be a really difficult argument to make. For one thing because Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light. Perhaps that stand is correct or perhaps it isn’t. But it’s a stand they probably couldn’t have afforded to take had the equalization calculation been different.

Of course, no formula could possibly please everyone, but punishing the losers with ongoing attacks on the very source of their contributions is guaranteed to inspire resentment. And that could lead to very dark places.

Note: I know this post sounds like it came from a grumpy Albertan. But I assure you that I’ve never even visited the province, instead spending most of my life in Ontario.

1

Which has admittedly been challenging since the former primer minister infamously described us as a post-national state without an identity.

2

This isn’t nearly as crazy as it sounds. After all, there are already formal mechanisms through which Indigenous communities get more than a one-person-one-vote voice.

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Alberta

Big win for Alberta and Canada: Statement from Premier Smith

Published on April 2, 2025

By

Premier Danielle Smith issued the following statement on the April 2, 2025 U.S. tariff announcement:

“Today was an important win for Canada and Alberta, as it appears the United States has decided to uphold the majority of the free trade agreement (CUSMA) between our two nations. It also appears this will continue to be the case until after the Canadian federal election has concluded and the newly elected Canadian government is able to renegotiate CUSMA with the U.S. administration.

“This is precisely what I have been advocating for from the U.S. administration for months.

“It means that the majority of goods sold into the United States from Canada will have no tariffs applied to them, including zero per cent tariffs on energy, minerals, agricultural products, uranium, seafood, potash and host of other Canadian goods.

“There is still work to be done, of course. Unfortunately, tariffs previously announced by the United States on Canadian automobiles, steel and aluminum have not been removed. The efforts of premiers and the federal government should therefore shift towards removing or significantly reducing these remaining tariffs as we go forward and ensuring affected workers across Canada are generously supported until the situation is resolved.

“I again call on all involved in our national advocacy efforts to focus on diplomacy and persuasion while avoiding unnecessary escalation. Clearly, this strategy has been the most effective to this point.

“As it appears the worst of this tariff dispute is behind us (though there is still work to be done), it is my sincere hope that we, as Canadians, can abandon the disastrous policies that have made Canada vulnerable to and overly dependent on the United States, fast-track national resource corridors, get out of the way of provincial resource development and turn our country into an independent economic juggernaut and energy superpower.”

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