Achi news desk-
The Alberta government has indicated its plans to introduce legislation that would prevent municipalities from dealing directly with the federal government without provincial consent.
Although details of the potential legislation are scarce, the leader of the UCP government house, Joseph Schow, indicated the government’s plans to introduce a bill sponsored by Premier Danielle Smith called the Provincial Priorities Act.
What that bill will mean is still unknown, but Senior Minister, Community and Social Services Minister Jason Nixon said on Friday that the province is “ready” to introduce a policy to prevent direct dealings between municipalities and the federal government.
“The days of the federal government being able to bypass us in our own jurisdiction and go directly to a mayor they may or may not have a previous relationship with end up in this state,” he told reporters. .
Nixon said the province is examining legislation similar to a law in Quebec called the Act respecting the Ministère du Conseil exécutif.
That law prevents municipalities and others from entering into or negotiating deals with the federal government or its agencies without obtaining approval from the Quebec provincial government.
“I think that shows you how far we’re willing to go to protect our jurisdiction,” Nixon said.
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Nixon’s comments follow a series of pre-federal budget funding announcements across Alberta last week, including $600 million to boost prefabricated housing solutions.
The province’s proposal received a swift response at Calgary City Hall on Tuesday as Mayor Jyoti Gondek accused the province of playing politics.
“If we have a provincial government that’s going to step in and stop us from receiving funding that we desperately need for housing, it’s simply going to slow things down and it’s going to make life worse for Calgarians, not better,” he told reporters.
“For a government that talks about cutting red tape and overreaching, this is rich.”
Funding directly from the federal government for projects and initiatives is not uncommon for cities and towns in Alberta.
Most recently, Calgary and Edmonton signed multi-million dollar funding agreements through the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund to increase housing stock in both cities.
Ward 8 councilor Courtney Walcott criticized the province’s sentiments, sharing concerns that the move is an attempt to “slow down funding,” and that the move will hurt “everyone involved.”
“I think that’s a way for them to control the distribution of funding so they can take credit for it, not for them to actually provide the best services to the public,” Walcott said.
However, not all city councilors were critical of the province’s potential to step in between the federal government and Alberta municipalities.
“What I’ve heard from the province is that they feel the federal government is actually playing favorites with mayors and councils that are friendly to them, and I don’t think that should be true,” said Ward 13 councilor Dan McLean.
But Gondek doesn’t feel the city is being treated fairly by the provincial or federal governments, with a growing funding gap the city estimates at $311 million annually due to offloading jurisdictional responsibilities to Calgary.
The mayor highlighted a number of investments in this year’s municipal budget around affordable housing, public safety and transport.
“To be honest, it’s not one of those things that is solely our government’s responsibility, yet we were the only one that invested enough to keep Calgarians safe, to keep them covered and to keep them safe active while traveling,” says Gondek. “That led to a property tax increase that nobody wanted.”
She added that the situation was “incredibly frustrating” for local governments across the state amid a political battle between two higher orders of government that she compared to “mother and father.”
“Tired of him. Cities deserve better,” Gondek said. “We deserve two orders of government that want to work with us and together. The time for politics was long overdue.”
The Ministry of Municipal Affairs did not respond to Global News’ request for comment on the matter.
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