The triumph of selective blindness

Not even smoke, let alone fire despite commentariat kerfuffles

The political commentariat in Canada have had their undies bunched for the past couple of years over political crises that have turned out to be a lot less of a crisis than they made it out to be.

The most recent one is the proposal by the Alberta government that will give the provincial government the power to remove municipal councillors from office in some cases, direct a municipality to repeal or amend a by-law, postpone a municipal election, allow municipalities to include a criminal record check as a requirement to be a candidate, and to allow candidates to form political parties in some municipalities.

Political scientist Emmett Macfarlane tweeted that this was “another reminder that contemporary conservatives actually hate democracy.” He didn’t explain how, likely because it is hard to explain how these things are not only innocuous but are commonplace in other provinces. If anything Alberta’s existing municipal law was incredibly lax in not giving the provincial government some ability to intervene if problems turned up at the municipal level.

To understand what can happen, one need only look at Newfoundland and Labrador where places like the aptly named Witless Bay have turned into cesspits of mismanagement or Stephenville where conflicts of interest and dubious relationships between councillors and developments abound. Politically, the provincial government won’t touch Stephenville but it has taken some action in Witless Bay. In other municipalities, the provincial government has stepped in because there’s little or no interest in serving on council and incorporated municipalities are in danger of collapsing in some cases.

*This* non-crisis is less interesting than ones that supposedly involve the constitution and really this Alberta one is just a way to pivot to those more interesting examples of “sovereignty” laws and Quebec’s Bill 96 and Bill 4. Macfarlane’s weighed in on those as well, most noticeably in a paper on Bill 96 that came with the ominous title Provincial Constitutions, the Amending Formula, and Unilateral Amendments to the Constitution of Canada: An Analysis of Quebec’s Bill 96.

What follows is not a specific rebuttal of or commentary on Macfarlane’s views specifically but a general set of observations about the issues using Macfarlane in the front end here as a way into the deeper discussion about what the sovereignty bills and the Quebec laws are all about.