When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambition of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, and many other points, the questions came quick: Are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boondoggle or two?
Her answer wasn't typical fare from a conservative politician, let alone one with a libertarian symbol tattooed on her arm. Smith replied with a strong defence of government intervention.
"This is why people elect governments: To do the things that they can't do in the private sector, and that includes building massive new infrastructure that connects cities and requires this kind of major investment," Smith told reporters.
Never mind that Canada's founding passenger rail service was privately run, or that the construction consortium that pitched an Edmonton-Calgary high-speed line said they'd do it as a private-sector investment.
Smith has a vision to master-plan all future intercity lines, and mused this week about managing her provincial train network with a local version of Metrolinx, the provincial Crown agency created in 2006 by an Ontario Liberal government to run Toronto-region transit.
That would, of course, be on top of the Crown corporation Smith created this spring to research drug addiction recovery, or when Smith proposed potentially Crown-run natural gas plants as a "generator of last resort."
Add in her ambitions to potentially wrest more provincial management for pension and police from Ottawa, and plans for stricter control over the affairs of municipalities and post-secondary schools, and you might wonder what happened to the Danielle Smith who had long believed in shrinking the size of government.
I'm not going to call Smith a "small government" hypocrite for this (though with LGBTQ+ issues I will), a comprehensive rail transport plan is long overdue and will be good for Alberta.
So good job Premiere Smith here.
Yeah we're not going to see any track foundation for 5-10 years and no in service trains for 10-20. But having the government backbone set up will make it easier to attract private investment too, and it's all about free market competition so a competing private Calgary-Edmonton highspeed express line vs. a local government commuter line is fine.
My only worry is that the NDP is going to inherit this project, make some improvements which then Conservatives are going to make a whole lotta noise about it. If they return to power again, end up shrinking or cancelling something that was originally the UCP's idea but Conservatives will conveniently forget and call it cutting NDP bloat or something.
This has to be the 39th iteration of Alberta's rail transport plan. It's just a shift and deflect away from her authoritarian changes in other areas last week (mainly her plan to introduce political interference into the municipalities) .
Anytime a conservative government gets caught doing hood-rat shit in Alberta, it feels like step 1 of the playbook is, "Hey look everyone, a Monorail!!"
I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime don't give her credit for shit she didn't come up with, or never plans to actually follow through with.
In any case it's going to take a heck of a long time. From a cursory search I couldn't find a Kenney government example of what you described.
Sometimes Premieres just like to take credit for stuff already in planning stages like Doug Ford for example. It's petty but I'll take having a transit plan executed over it being scrapped because they don't like anything the Liberals thought of.