During her leadership campaign last year, Smith ran on a number of policies to increase Provincial autonomy, right out of the “Free Alberta Strategy”, including a Provincial police force, a Provincial tax collection agency, and withdrawing from CPP to replace it with a Provincial version.

These ideas were generally not popular.

The costs of a Provincial police service would be dramatically higher than continuing to use the RCMP. While Alberta currently pays about $500M for the RCMP’s policing in rural communities, under a Provincial alternative the costs would rise to about $735M, even aside from an initial $366M in startup costs.

Similarly, establishing a Provincial tax collection agency is costly and complicated: There would be no savings, as the CRA would still have to continue collecting Federal taxes, but Albertans would be on the hook for paying for a new immense bureaucratic infrastructure, not to mention that their own tax filings would become more complicated – having to file different returns with the different tax agencies. The only potential benefit to having its own agency would be that Alberta would be freed up to depart from Federal definitions of taxable income, but that does not appear to be part of the plan.

And the pension plan? CPP is an effective investment organization, which is well-insulated from political interference (in part because of Provincial participation, which structurally limits what the Federal government can do to it) and it typically performs well. There’s no reason to think we’d be able to say the same of a Provincial pension plan: AIMCo’s history gives plenty of reasons to doubt whether it, or a similar Provincial entity, would be as strong a vehicle as CPP; it would be impossible for the Province to create the same kinds of institutional safeguards against political interference that exists under the CPP Federal/Provincial agreement even if the Province wanted to; and there’s every reasonable expectation that an Alberta pension program would be used – at least by the current government – to pick winners and prop up specific industries to the detriment of others, not the least of which is that Smith herself has told us that she’s concerned about the prospect of CPP investing in renewables and divesting in oil and gas.

So, recognizing that these issues aren’t election winners, and that the NDP were ready to go to the mat fighting an election over CPP, Smith shelved these ideas at the beginning of the election campaign.

But now that the election’s over…they’re BACK.

At least, the pension and tax collection plans are back, forming part of the latest mandate letter for the Finance Minister. We haven’t yet seen the mandate letters for Justice, Public Safety, or Municipal Affairs, to know whether they’ll reflect continued movement toward an Alberta police service.

Rob Breakenridge calls these proposals – and particularly the Alberta revenue agency plan – “costly and reckless“, pointing out that it would cost half a billion dollars per year and create “pointless hassle” for Albertans, for no apparent reason except to thumb Alberta’s nose at Ottawa.

However, Breakenridge also highlights the darker side of these proposals – that it was initially tied to the ‘Sovereignty Act’, enabling a “bizarre scheme to confiscate or hold hostage the federal tax contributions of provincial civil servants.”

Breakenridge has made this point before, during Smith’s leadership run: The ties are undeniable between Smith’s campaign (and now her office) and the “Free Alberta Strategy Group” that initially publicized an “Alberta Sovereignty Act” strategy in 2021: Smith’s leadership campaign chair, and the chief of staff of her office as Premier, is none other than Rob Anderson, known on Twitter as “freealbertarob”, who is one of the co-authors of the Free Alberta Strategy.

If you look directly at the Free Alberta Strategy, even ostensibly constitutional measures like an Alberta Revenue Agency or Provincial police service take on ominous notes, such as what Breakenridge describes as “a massive scheme forcibly enlisting thousands of public servants into widespread tax evasion”; UCP leadership telling us expressly that the Alberta Police would take political direction as to what Federal laws get enforced, or not; and Smith telling us that Federal environmental officers will be prevented from doing their jobs.