With the Danielle Smith UCP government about to enter the second year of its four-year mandate, Alberta is facing significant and ongoing challenges on several fronts.
Specifically, the health-care and the education systems are under considerable strain as 2023 comes to close, with long emergency room wait times and crowded classrooms more the norm than the exception.
As well, the cost of living crisis continues largely unabated in communities large and small, including in this region.
In rural Alberta, the current challenges are front-and-centre for many families, individuals and businesses, placing financial and other pressures on everyone.
Whether the Smith government will be able to meet these challenges in 2024 that it has failed, at least in part, to meet in 2023 remains to be seen.
What is known is that right now the government’s focus appears to be anything but laser-focused on the key problems facing Albertans.
For example, Premier Smith has been spending a great deal of time and effort in recent months fighting federal government environment protection plans and programs.
Just last week, Smith announced that Alberta will be intervening in Ottawa’s appeal of the federal court’s recent ruling on plastics.
“It is past time for Ottawa to listen,” said Smith. “We have told them they are overreaching their jurisdiction, the private sector has told them so, and so have both the Supreme Court and the federal court.”
Also last week, Smith announced that the province will “do everything within its legal jurisdiction” to fight the federal government’s electric vehicle mandate plans.
And, of course, Premier Smith and her cabinet colleagues are continuing with their taxpayer-funded efforts to maybe pull the province out of the Canadian Pension Plan.
Everyone expects Alberta’s government to defend the province’s rights and jurisdiction, including as it relates to the federal government and its programs and plans.
However, maybe in 2024 the Smith UCP could spend a little more time and effort meeting the day-to-day, at-home challenges facing everyday Albertans?
Dan Singleton is an editor with the Albertan.
