It’s been an ambitious year for the NDP government, which has been pushing through with a series of reforms, whether it’s minimum wage increases, a carbon tax, farming occupational health and safety regulations, higher corporate tax rates and more.
Sometimes, watching the speed of these reforms, set against the backdrop of a depressed Albertan economy, job losses and dwindling oil and gas activity is downright mind-boggling. Most recently, the government found itself jumping into a cauldron of boiling trouble, following the introduction of higher carbon levies on high-emitters that triggered power companies like Enmax to return its unprofitable power purchase agreements back to the balancing pool, and in turn, consumers, at what the government estimates may cost consumers as much as $2 billion over the next few years, when the PPAs will expire.
The NDP government then launched what Edmonton Journal columnist Graham Thompson called a “time-traveling” lawsuit against itself – but not itself, really, so much as the previous Conservative government. The NDP claimed the PCs are at fault for its current woes in pushing through with its Climate Leadership Plan, since the PCs agreeed to a clause that would allow utilities to return purchase power arrangements that a change in law would make unprofitable or “more unprofitable.”
The government repeatedly claimed it didn’t know about the details of the exit clause, even though several people, including Calgary-owned Enmax and former premier Jim Prentice, had warned them of it before. However, the government implied that perhaps its own bureaucracy hadn’t briefed them fully of the details.
If the government wants to implement its Climate Leadership Plan and transition from coal-fired plants to more renewable sources of energy, it needs to accept there will be a price to transition. And it certainly can’t kneecap the very people and companies that will be critical to the transition.
Blaming civil servants or the previous government is a tedious waste of time. Eventually, the NDP government has to stop throwing everybody else under the bus, take responsibility for its own blunders and slow down on pushing through all its social agenda in one term. Otherwise, one term is all this current government is liable to get.
