It’s been hard to keep track of how many legal challenges and active court proceedings the United Conservative government has tried to quash or pre-emptively block in the last six weeks, but let’s try to tally:
- The notwithstanding clause to thwart separate constitutional challenges by the Canadian Medical Association (1) and 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy groups (2) against Alberta’s ban on some transgender youth health care.
- Notwithstanding clause against those advocacy groups’ challenge against the school pronouns law (3).
- Notwithstanding clause against any potential challenges against the ban on transgender women in women’s sports (4).
- Notwithstanding clause against teachers’ potential challenge to the strike-ending and imposed contract (5).
- Bill 12’s provision to block public sector pensions from suing over the Alberta wealth management fund’s past trading losses (6). And then the measure in this week’s Bill 14 designed to discontinue the court hearing about the constitutionality of a citizen’s initiative petition for Alberta separation from Canada (7).
One could argue there’s an eighth case the UCP government’s legislation would nullify if passed — one filed by the United Conservative Party itself. That would be the governing party’s lawsuit against two of its former MLAs who had applied with Elections Alberta to rebrand the Alberta Party as the Progressive Conservative Party.
The UCP are desperate to hang onto the name conservative since they’ve given up on conservative values entirely and fallen to Christian Nationalism instead. But they are absolutely reliant on the portion of Albertans who consider themselves tribal conservatives, people who outsource their decision making to those whom they see as tribal authorities.