Alberta election fact check: Fact vs fiction at the leaders’ debate | 24CA News
Thursday night time’s debate forward of the provincial election featured a pair of veteran politicians taking verbal jabs at one another.
UCP Leader Danielle Smith and Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley addressed points like affordability, well being care, the economic system, schooling and belief in management.
And whereas each leaders appeared to land stable factors and counterpoints of their arguments, there have been plenty of questionable speaking factors utilized by each.
Let’s take a look at among the claims.
Editor’s word: Quite a few claims have been made in regards to the administration of the province’s health-care system, claims which will likely be added to this story at a later date.
‘The power bill crisis’
Notley mentioned beneath the present UCP authorities, “most Albertans’ utility bills look more like a mortgage payment.”
CMHC knowledge from Q1 2023 exhibits the typical mortgage fee for Edmonton was $1,509 and Calgary was $1,615.
Some Albertans have come ahead to the media with utility payments of as a lot as $2,700.
Smith claimed her opponent “created the power bill crisis.”
“By phasing out coal early, they added $2 billion to the cost of your power bill,” Smith mentioned, calling it an “ideological change.”
“That will cost $52 billion and increase your power bill another 40 per cent,” Smith mentioned repeatedly via the one-hour debate.
Those numbers come from a latest UCP declare that decarbonizing Alberta’s energy grid would value $87 billion, a complete report authors mentioned was “not a fair representation” of the price of the federal coverage to achieve internet zero electrical energy era by 2035.
The $52-billion determine got here from an Alberta Energy Systems Operator report that discovered the capital investments wanted for the grid to achieve internet zero ranged from $44 to $52 billion. And in line with University of Calgary assistant professor Sara Hastings-Simon, these estimates of prices of key applied sciences like photo voltaic and wind “are really much higher than what we’re seeing today across North America.”
The vitality and local weather professional mentioned the concept the elevated capital prices can be handed immediately alongside to clients is fake.
“We don’t have a regulated system like much of the rest of Canada where you would expect those costs to go directly on to the users of electricity. Instead, generators of electricity basically make bids in an auction-like system in order to produce electricity,” Hastings-Simon mentioned.
Neither of the studies addressed prices for inaction or prices for society-wide adaptation to a warmer local weather.
Notley claimed there’s a profitable alternative for Alberta to put money into renewable vitality.
“There is roughly $16 trillion of international investment floating around out there looking to invest in renewable energy,” she mentioned.
That declare matches numbers from Goldman Sachs. In June 2020, the monetary evaluation agency mentioned the transition to renewables from fossil fuels would create a $16-trillion funding alternative via 2030, in line with a Market Insider report.
That similar month, 30 worldwide business giants price $16 trillion created the Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance, committing trillions to sustainable growth objectives.
Friend or foe of vitality growth?
Notley’s report on infrastructure growth for the vitality sectors got here beneath fireplace through the debate.
The UCP chief mentioned her opponent “didn’t stand up” in opposition to the cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline challenge, the Energy East pipeline challenge, or in opposition to Bills C-48 and C-69, payments the UCP known as the “tanker ban bill” and “no more pipelines law.”
Notley testified earlier than Senate in opposition to Bill C-48 through the 2019 election marketing campaign, urging the Red Chamber to toss the invoice “in the garbage.”
Similarly, Notley addressed senators about Bill C-69, calling for main amendments.
“I will give (the Liberal government) credit for stepping in to buy Trans Mountain, but I also think there is a high level of investor uncertainty that exists right now in the way in which it’s written,” she mentioned on Feb. 28, 2019. “We cannot allow that uncertainty to continue. You can’t build trust by saying, ‘Trust us.’ You build trust by providing clarity.”
The federal authorities determined to shelve the stalled Northern Gateway pipeline in November 2016, however gave the inexperienced gentle to the Enbridge Line 3 and Trans Mountain expansions, with the caveat that “Kinder Morgan respects the stringent conditions put forward by the National Energy Board.”
At the time, Notley took an optimistic and conciliatory tone, noting that Trans Mountain and Line 3 have been “critically important to Alberta’s economic future” and the TMX approval allowed Alberta to “get our product to China” and “enhance our economic independence not only in Alberta but all of Canada.”
On Thursday, the NDP chief mentioned she “made sure we got a pipeline to tidewater, the first one in 50 years. I did that standing up against a B.C government (and) federal government.”
The Trans Mountain pipeline began operations in 1953, from Edmonton to the B.C. coast.
In 2016, the B.C. authorities said it didn’t help an enlargement of Trans Mountain. Notley travelled to B.C., to advertise the pipeline in late 2016 and the next 12 months, then-premier Christy Clark introduced her authorities’s help.
In May 2018, the federal authorities introduced its intent to buy the pipeline from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion, with the intent to not change into the everlasting homeowners. Months later, Notley would announce Alberta’s withdrawal from the federal local weather plan “until the federal government gets its act together.”
Notley mentioned Alberta signing onto the plan was at all times contingent on the Trans Mountain pipeline challenge going ahead.
Emissions and manufacturing caps
Smith claimed a shift away from “petroleum products” is the Notley view of the world.”
“As long as we keep our energy industry strong, we’re going to keep Alberta’s economy strong,” the UCP chief mentioned. “Ms. Notley won’t do that.”
Notley instantly disagreed with that characterization.
“I want to create jobs producing energy. I want to create jobs upgrading our energy. And I want to create jobs,” the NDP chief mentioned. “Reducing emissions and reducing emissions is absolutely the focus. It’s not about reducing our production, it is about emissions.”
Bringing up the federal authorities’s proposed emissions reductions of 42 per cent by 2030, Smith mentioned, is a “de facto production cap.”
Earlier within the debate, Smith lauded the “exciting things that are happening with carbon capture and utilization and storage and all the green technology.”
The provincial authorities already has an emissions cap on the oilsands: 100 megatonnes per 12 months. The province mentioned the oilsands at present emit roughly 70 Mt per 12 months.
The Pathways Alliance, a group of six oilsands operators, has work underway to decarbonize however not cut back its vitality manufacturing.
The federal emissions discount objective — believed needed to forestall international warming from reaching catastrophic ranges — makes no point out of decreasing manufacturing, simply decreasing the carbon depth of that manufacturing.
Taxes and jobs
On plenty of events, Smith mentioned the NDP’s insurance policies once they have been in authorities beginning in 2015 resulted in “183,000 jobs… lost in the first couple of years.”
University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe mentioned that determine is an “inappropriate use of data.”
“That claim is looking at the lowest points in the previous government’s term in terms of full time employment unadjusted for seasonality,” Tombe informed Global News. “That’s just an inappropriate use of data to compare different months across years that are not seasonally adjusted because then you’d be capturing just the regular ups and downs of the labour force that have nothing to do with policy at all.
“Second, just focusing on full-time employment, it doesn’t align with the claim being made, which is about job losses. So we should be looking at total employment and we should be looking at seasonally adjusted employment.”
Tombe mentioned the most important drop in jobs beneath the NDP authorities was round 77,000 jobs, however famous that there was a internet achieve in jobs on the finish of the NDP time period.
The U of C economist mentioned the rationale for the job loss wasn’t anyone authorities’s insurance policies.
“It was really due to the recession that we went through that started prior to the NDP taking office and was due to low oil prices — like a really large and long lasting reduction in world oil prices,” he mentioned.
“Governments have far less of an effect on the economy than they like to claim. They claim credit when things are good and their opponents blame them when things are bad. But the reality is they can only nudge things at the margin.”
‘Just transition’ blame
Smith additionally claimed, “Where do you think Justin Trudeau got the idea for ‘just transition’ and for an emissions cap and for a carbon tax? He got it from Ms. Notley when she was premier.”
The concepts for all three of these ideas have been mentioned internationally for years earlier than Trudeau campaigned on these concepts in 2019.
At COP 21 in Paris in 2015, unions and advocates urged the events to incorporate language round a “just transition” as a part of the Paris Climate Agreement. Canada was a signatory to that settlement.
A “just transition” is a framework developed to incorporate plenty of measures to make sure employees’ rights and livelihoods when economies transfer from a resource-extraction-based economic system to extra sustainable manufacturing.
It “involves maximizing the social and economic opportunities of climate action, while minimizing and carefully managing any challenges,” the International Labour Organization writes.
The time period has since been latched on to by conspiracy theorists as some form of mass management scheme.
A carbon tax — a tax on air pollution — was first proposed by David Gordon Wilson in 1973, and in 1980 economist Milton Friedman expressed help for ecotaxes in his guide Free to Choose.
Emissions caps may be tracked again to microeconomic simulations research carried out by the U.S. National Air Pollution Control Administration within the late ’60s beneath a “cap and trade” strategy to air pollution. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 put in place a framework for international locations’ agreed-upon limits of greenhouse fuel emissions.
“Inflation crisis”
Smith mentioned one of many first issues the UCP authorities did, beneath former premier Jason Kenney, was to handle the “inflation crisis created… by the Liberal-NDP coalition in Ottawa, spending too much money, driving up the cost of everything.”
While Canada’s inflation has not too long ago seen charges not seen in 40 years. Bank of Canada numbers present inflation on this nation reached detrimental values in 2020 earlier than surpassing eight per cent final 12 months. But Canada was not alone in coping with elevated prices of residing.
Data from the International Monetary Fund exhibits inflation worldwide noticed will increase from 2020 to a latest peak in 2022, and a downward development since.
Many economists level to the fluctuating push and pull of provide and demand that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. The “just in time” provide chain noticed many disruptions as completely different components of the chain have been shut down at completely different occasions and to completely different capacities, inflicting a bullwhip impact.
Regarding federal “spending,” Smith doubtless was speaking in regards to the federal monetary aid supplied at a time when well being authorities advisable the shuttering of huge swaths of the economic system to forestall COVID-19 from rampantly spreading between folks in the middle of financial exercise.
The Office of the Auditor General of Canada concluded that emergency spending supplied fast monetary aid to people and employers, stopping a rise in poverty, serving to the economic system “bounce back from the effects of the pandemic.”
But the auditor normal additionally discovered the federal companies “did not manage the selected COVID‑19 programs efficiently given the significant amount paid to ineligible recipients, the limited adjustments as programs were extended, and the slow progress on post-payment verifications.”
It must be famous that the COVID-19 pandemic was a once-in-a-century well being emergency.
— with recordsdata from Phil Heidenreich and Caley Gibson, Global News, and The Canadian Press.
