Say what you will about Canada’s premiers, but don’t accuse them of being reliably boring defenders of the status quo.
Often, they sound less like governing political leaders than they do like critics of the institutions they represent.
This is most obvious in Western Canada, but the trend is spreading eastward.
Unfortunately, this is not helpful. Instead of thinking hard about policy solutions to complex problems, governments are reflexively adopting simple fixes that rarely work.
In New Brunswick, and in Newfoundland and Labrador, for instance, cabinet ministers have sounded the alarm about the costs of travel nurse programs – costs incurred under their own programs, and under their own watch.
If the costs are justified in light of staff shortages in health care, neither province is saying so. Instead, they’ve hidden behind a happy expedience – In both provinces, auditors-general are reviewing the programs.
In Nova Scotia, the government overturned the joint decision of the two municipal governments in Antigonish County to amalgamate. Doing so was within the province’s jurisdiction, but hardly respectful of duly elected municipal government leaders.
In Western Canada, meanwhile, it seems OK to ride roughshod over the jurisdiction of other governments.
Indeed, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s Sovereignty Act allows the provincial government to reject any federal laws it doesn’t like. And respect for the law, and for federal jurisdiction, be damned.
Smith first deployed the act last November to combat the federal government requirement to create a national net-zero electricity grid by 2035, a policy within the Trudeau government’s jurisdictional purview.
In neighbouring Saskatchewan, Premier Scott Moe said in December his government would not collect the federal carbon tax, even if by his own admission it would be breaking the law to do so. (Now that the federal tax authorities are closing in, Moe contends his defiance in the face of the carbon tax may be legal after all.)
Our loyal readers will know we neither support unrealistic timelines for greening the planet, nor endorse the existing federal carbon tax, which unduly punishes rural areas.
But we’re all for responsible government. This means working to change laws that don’t make sense, rather than breaking them. And it means fixing policies that don’t work, rather than criticizing them.
Here in the CrowsNest, we know that chaos follows if ship captains question how the fleet got trapped in a hurricane, instead of correcting course in the first place.