The Main — June 22: Fights Over The Plebs
In a province pre-occupied with fighting back, should municipalities allow their elections to be influenced from on high or fight back, too?
Jeff Davison does not think Calgary should engage in politics when it comes to plebiscites. “The constant political grandstanding has got to stop,” Davison, who’s now running for mayor in Calgary, says in a quick chat with Rage. “We tend to nag one another and it’s just not productive.”
Davison made his stance known in Calgary this week as it prepares to debate adding another plebiscite question to the ballot in October. Davison is right about plebiscites not being productive. But he’s potentially wrong, too. Indeed, where you come down on this likely depends on how you figure we got to duelling plebiscites in the first place and what message you’re hoping to send about it all.
Back in 2019, in what it must be said was a different Alberta, the then newly-elected United Conservative Party government felt it had won a mandate to fight back against pretty much everybody. Today, nearly two years into this government’s mandate, and more than a year into a pandemic, several of its fightback, score-settling methods are backfiring. The so-called War Room, for example, is often just a sort of own-goal content farm.
By October of this year, the fightback method that this newsletter came together to write about — which will see the municipal election used as a fightback front thanks to a referendum question about the federal equalization formula that has no bearing on Ottawa or municipalities — will reach its nadir. As many, including Davison say, there’s little the fair deal question will produce. It’s all political theatre.
The question, though, is whether Calgary should engage in political theatre as its own form of fightback or sit quietly as the province uses the municipal elections for its own ends?
For his part, Davison says it’s pointless to play tit-for-tat with the province, and that doing so is just further battling that, ultimately, slows projects down. There are many that have surely been slowed, including the Green Line, he says. And both provincially and municipally, the way the questions for the referendum or proposed Calgary plebiscite are worded, he says, “are a waste of time.”
What’s needed is all levels of government sitting down and agreeing to fairer deals, Davison says. What would that look like? Davison says it would mean the feds and province engaging Calgary to figure out a next-generation energy industry, and flowing some of the billions in investment in green technology into the city. “No oil and gas company wants to be an oil and gas company for the next five years,” he says. “They want to be energy companies for the next 200 years.”
In isolation this is true. But when put into context, is it? The province and its biggest cities did sit down and discuss a fairer deal. We called these deals the big-city charters, and they saw at least a half step taken toward what modern cities need — predictable revenues and the ability to keep up with growth. These the UCP all but destroyed as one of its first policy decisions.
So, while Davison is right that the plebiscites are meaningless, there’s also a question here. Is it more beneficial in such a time to not play the games being played? Or is better to judo flip the meddling back on the government doing it in the first place?
This newsletter sees the fight Davison hopes Calgary stays out of as asymmetrical. Municipalities, as creatures of the province, follow the province’s lead and have little choice to do so in most cases. The reason we’re debating plebiscites and referendums in the municipal election season — at all — is that the UCP put a meaningless question about fiscal fairness onto the municipal ballot in order to whip up its base.
Davison thinks a politicized, fight-back plebiscite from Calgary will backfire. “I think there’s other ways to send the message to the province than simply putting an arbitrary question on a referendum or plebiscite,” he says.
Davison is right that the plebiscites are meaningless. But they are messages, too. The best way to send a message to the province is through an election. Of course, the next provincial election is in 2023. Until then, the municipal elections that the province was keen to be push referendums into take place this October.