RCMP union challenges bilingualism claim in province's Alberta Next survey
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The union representing RCMP officers is disputing that its members do not have the opportunity to advance to senior roles unless they speak French, as claimed in the preamble to a new Alberta government survey.
On Wednesday, Premier Danielle Smith launched the province's 15-member Alberta Next panel along with corresponding online engagement questionnaires.
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Calgary Herald
3 hours ago
- Calgary Herald
October election changes cost municipalities millions, longer return times
Article content The October 20 municipal election will bring new triple ballots, big bucks for hand-counting, and potentially days instead of minutes for election returns. Article content Spawned by the UCP government's Bill 20, electoral changes like the banning of tabulators will cost Edmonton taxpayers $4.8 million more in 2025. Article content Article content Voters around the province will face new registration procedures, three ballot papers per voter instead of one — and days, in some cases, instead of minutes to get election results. Article content Article content 'Better for democracy' Article content Article content In September, Premier Danielle Smith justified the mandate banning tabulating machines, saying that electronic vote tabulators have failed to produce fast results and public confidence. Article content Municipal affairs Minister Dan Williams said the move is about security. Article content 'Requiring all ballots to be counted by hand will ensure that all Albertans can trust the methods and results of their local elections, which is better for democracy,' Williams said in a written statement to Postmedia. Article content 'The time and cost to manually count ballots is outweighed by the increased confidence in election results,' he said. Article content Williams said the majority of municipalities across the province already hand count ballots for their elections, the federal government does, and the province will soon be hand counting ballots, too. Article content But Sherwood Park MLA Kyle Kasawski, the Official Opposition NDP shadow minister for municipal affairs, said vote tabulators have been cost savers for municipalities. 'They've allowed them to get more ballots counted faster and get the results out after municipal elections,' Kasawski said. Article content Article content 'What we've seen here with with the UCP is, I feel, like they're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist and is just trying to make a small fringe group of their party feel better when, writ large, there's been no concerns about the results of municipal elections.' Article content Article content 'This time, if you're voting for a mayoral candidate, you're voting for a councillor candidate, and you're eligible to vote for a trustee in a school board, each of those races is going to be on a separate piece of paper,' said Aileen Giesbrecht, the returning officer for Edmonton Elections.
CTV News
5 hours ago
- CTV News
Canada's liquefied natural gas touted — and doubted — as a green ‘transition' fuel
The LNG Canada industrial energy project is seen under construction in Kitimat, B.C., on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck CALGARY — Canada's first liquefied natural gas cargoes will soon arrive on Asian shores, a milestone touted — and doubted — as a boon for global emissions-cutting efforts. 'Cleaner energy around the world is what I think about when I think about LNG,' Shell Canada country chair Stastia West said in an onstage interview at the Global Energy Show in Calgary earlier this month. Shell and four Asian companies are partners in LNG Canada in Kitimat, B.C., the first facility to export Canadian gas across the Pacific in an ultra-chilled liquid state using specialized tankers. A handful of other projects are either under construction or in development on the B.C. coast. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told the energy show that Canadian oil and gas exports can be an 'antidote' to the current geopolitical chaos. 'And it comes with an added benefit: lower global emissions. By moving more natural gas, we can also help countries transition away from higher emitting fuels, such as coal.' Smith cited a recent Fraser Institute study that suggested if Canada were to double its natural gas production, export the additional supply to Asia and displace coal there, it would lead to an annual emissions cut of up to 630 million tonnes annually. 'That's almost 90 per cent of Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions each year,' Smith said. The authors of the Fraser Institute study, released in May, argued that Canada's ability to reduce emissions elsewhere should be factored into its climate policy. 'It is important to recognize that GHG emissions are global and are not confined by borders,' wrote Elmira Aliakbari and Julio Mejía. 'Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide by expanding its LNG exports.' Some experts see a murkier picture. Most credible estimates suggest that if liquefied natural gas were to indeed displace coal abroad, there would be some emissions reductions, said Kent Fellows, assistant professor of economics with the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy. But the magnitude is debatable. 'Will all of our natural gas exports be displacing coal? Absolutely not. Will a portion of them be displacing coal? Probably, and it's really hard to know exactly what that number is,' he said. Fellows said there's a good chance Canadian supplies would supplant other sources of gas from Russia, Eurasia and the Middle East, perhaps making it a wash emissions-wise. He said the Canadian gas could actually be worse from an emissions standpoint, depending on how the competing supply moves. LNG is more energy intensive than pipeline shipment because the gas needs to be liquefied and moved on a ship. In China, every type of energy is in demand. So instead of displacing coal, LNG would likely just be added to the mix, Fellows added. 'Anyone who's thinking about this as one or the other is thinking about it wrong,' Fellows said. A senior analyst with Investors for Paris Compliance, which aims to hold Canadian publicly traded companies to their net-zero promises, said he doubts a country like India would see the economic case for replacing domestically produced coal with imported Canadian gas. 'Even at the lowest price of gas, it's still multiple times the price,' said Michael Sambasivam. 'You'd need some massive system to provide subsidies to developing countries to be replacing their coal with a fuel that isn't even really proven to be much greener.' And even in that case, 'it's not as if they can just flip a switch and take it in,' he added. 'There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to take in LNG as well as to use it. You have to build import terminals. You have to refit your power terminals.' What LNG would be competing head-to-head with, Sambasivam said, is renewable energy. If there were any emissions reductions abroad as a result of the coal-to-gas switch, Sambasivam said he doesn't see why a Canadian company should get the credit. 'Both parties are going to want to claim the emissions savings and you can't claim those double savings,' he said. There's also a 'jarring' double-standard at play, he said, as industry players have long railed against environmental reviews that factor in emissions from the production and combustion of the oil and gas a pipeline carries, saying only the negligible emissions from running the infrastructure itself should be considered. Devyani Singh, an investigative researcher at who ran for the Greens in last year's B.C. election, said arguments that LNG is a green fuel are undermined by the climate impacts of producing, liquefying and shipping it. A major component of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Methane that leaks from tanks, pipelines and wells has been a major issue that industry, government and environmental groups have been working to tackle. 'Have we actually accounted for all the leakage along the whole pipeline? Have we accounted for the actual under-reporting of methane emissions happening in B.C. and Canada?' asked Singh. Even if LNG does have an edge over coal, thinking about it as a 'transition' or 'bridge' fuel at this juncture is a problem, she said. 'The time for transition fuels is over,' she said. 'Let's just be honest — we are in a climate crisis where the time for transition fuels was over a decade ago.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2025. Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press
CBC
16 hours ago
- CBC
Alberta premier intends to 'battle' injunction on transgender health-care law in court
After an Alberta judge granted a temporary injunction blocking a provincial law that would ban doctors from providing gender-affirming care to youth, Premier Danielle Smith said she intends to fight the decision in court. "The court had said that they think that there will be irreparable harm if the law goes ahead. I feel the reverse," Smith said on her weekend radio program, Your Province, Your Premier, on Saturday, a day after Justice Allison Kuntz of the Alberta Court of King's Bench handed down a written judgment on Bill 26. "We want to battle this out, and the way you do that is you go to the higher levels of court. If we were to impose the notwithstanding clause, everything would stop. We actually think that we've got a very solid case." Eric Adams, a professor at the University of Alberta's law faculty, said while he doesn't think the injunction is necessarily a clear sign that a constitutional case could be won, it does mean that lawyers will present strong and credible arguments against the legislation. "This isn't a final resolution of the constitutional issues — far from it," Adams said. "Those are ... possibly even still years away. But the question was: Can the law operate during that period where the legislation is being challenged? And this judge said that, on balance, she's electing to hold that law off until the court weighs in on its constitutionality." Bennett Jensen, legal director of 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy group Egale Canada and co-counsel in the case against the province, said getting the law temporarily put on hold has been a "tremendous relief." "I think we've been holding our breath until we got this decision," he said. Responding to the government's decision to challenge the injunction, Jensen said that "the province has been clear that it wants to act in the best interests of young people in the province.... Now we have a judicial decision finding on the basis of evidence that their law will cause irreparable harm to young people, so I think it merits a reconsideration." Notwithstanding clause a 'last resort' While the premier indicated the province will challenge the injunction through the court system at this time, she has previously said that using the notwithstanding clause is on the table as a "last resort." "It's certainly one of the tools in the toolkit that the province has been preparing the public for by signalling that they were prepared to use it," Adams said. "The government itself can't simply snap its fingers and have the notwithstanding clause appear. It's got to be put into the law itself." The provincial legislature is not scheduled to sit again until October, which means that the notwithstanding clause could not be included in the legislation until then, at the earliest, he said. The clause was first used in Alberta by then-premier Ralph Klein's Progressive Conservative government in 1998, then under Klein again in 2000. "The last time Alberta considered using the notwithstanding clause, the public reaction against [it] was fairly swift and they stepped back," Adams said. But the politics around the notwithstanding clause has changed a bit since then, he said, with it being used in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec. Adams said Friday's ruling indicates the province's fight for Bill 26 won't be an "easy walk through the park," as there are serious constitutional issues to be decided. "We'll see ... whether or not the government has to contemplate whether or not they want to take this out of the hands of judges entirely, because they might not like the direction this litigation is headed in." WATCH | Bill 26 faces legal challenge from Canadian Medical Association: Canadian Medical Association takes Alberta to court over Bill 26 1 month ago Duration 2:14 A law that prohibits doctors from using puberty blockers and hormone therapy on youth under the age of 16 is facing another legal challenge.
