Can Smith Straddle Alberta’s Rural-Urban Divide?

Remember way back in 2022, when the newly elected UCP leader explained her strategy for winning the 2023 election?

All she needed was to hang onto the party’s base of support outside the big cities and win 10 to 15 Calgary and Edmonton area seats. And sure enough, she was able to deliver on that strategy, winning a dozen Calgary seats and a few outside Edmonton.

The dilemma, of course, is that the stark urban-rural divide can make governing a challenge. A predominantly rural caucus expects to see policy that aligns with what their constituents are calling for and MLAs want to be able to deliver concrete benefits to their communities.

And when I say “concrete,” I mean made of concrete: schools, hospitals and other infrastructure.

Because the United Conservative Party’s grassroots base is located mainly outside the big cities, Premier Danielle Smith has spent the past month on an extended tour of meetings with party members in an effort to ensure that she doesn’t follow in the footsteps of past conservative Alberta premiers who have won elections only to be removed by their party. From the various bits and pieces that have leaked out of those meetings, a couple of things are clear.

First, for a non-trivial segment of the UCP base, it’s still 2022. Their concerns are the alleged dangers of COVID vaccines, the need to compensate those who wouldn’t comply with vaccine mandates, the imperative to ensure that the Alberta government will never again impose a vaccine mandate and the injustice that leaders of the Coutts blockade have been convicted and imprisoned for their actions.

For many in this segment of the base, Alberta Health Services is responsible for their loss of freedom during the pandemic, and Jordan Peterson is a hero being persecuted by the Canadian state apparatus.

Second, rural communities are experiencing real and serious issues and are telling the premier about them. Their nearest emergency rooms close frequently for lack of staffing, they have to travel to the city for medical care. In some cases, they are watching a slow population exodus to the cities.

These two observations help to make sense of the patchwork of policy commitments (and musings) that we’ve heard from Smith during her tour. Some don’t come as a surprise: the idea of enshrining rights to bodily autonomy in the Alberta Human Rights Act, enacting legislation around trans issues and possibly changing legislation governing professional associations. All of these are intended to satisfy those most concerned with the post-pandemic culture war issues.

More surprising is the set of issues that seem to have been raised about rural concerns. It’s not surprising that rural Albertans have these concerns, but it’s interesting that they have been raised with sufficient volume to compete with the voices of the culture warriors. Over the past week, we’ve heard the premier musing about replacing AHS as the operator of rural hospitals and moving some of the Alberta public service out of the “socialist” cities and into smaller centres.

Of the ideas Smith has floated, the notion of moving some of the public service out of the big cities is the least problematic. Yes, there are enormous costs associated with this kind of relocation and it wouldn’t be popular with the employees being moved. (How’s the relocation of Athabasca University faculty and staff to Athabasca going, by the way?)

But there is a case to be made to try to use the location of government departments to smaller communities as a means of sparking economic development and making government more responsive to rural concerns.

The idea of replacing AHS as the operator of hospitals in smaller communities raises more concerns. The available alternatives are for-profit providers, who would presumably be focused more on profit than provision of comprehensive services, and Covenant Health, which offers a restricted range of services in compliance with Catholic Church doctrine.

Setting aside these concerns, we’re left with the question of whether this would actually address the very real issues of hospitals in smaller centres. Would alternative hospital operators be better equipped to recruit medical professionals to these smaller centres? Probably not.

The barriers to provision of health care in smaller centres are real. Faced with this, Smith has chosen to engage in some magical thinking: competition must be the answer. And so, Covenant Health is made out to be the hero ready to save rural dwellers from big, bad AHS.

As we move into the fall, we can expect to see the urban-rural divide join the post-pandemic culture wars as the animating forces in Alberta politics. The dismantling of AHS has become the spectacle intended to satisfy both groups in the weeks leading up to Danielle Smith’s performance review in November.

In the meantime, the concerns of urban dwellers — like overcrowded schools, housing shortages and big city infrastructure — will not be on the provincial government’s agenda.