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FIRST READING: Alberta is setting the template on how to defy Ottawa

Province has been pushing the limits of their power on issues generally considered the exclusive domain of the federal government

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FIRST READING: Alberta is setting the template on how to defy Ottawa Back to video

When taking stock of Canada’s decline over the last 10 years, some of the most conspicuous examples are in the realm of social policy.

A massive expansion of urban tent cities and open-air drug use. A crisis of “catch and release” justice. Racial favouritism in hiring and criminal sentencing. A health-care system that routinely offers death to patients in lieu of treatment.

Almost all of these new realities were accelerated or enabled by federal action. As such, a common supposition is that they can only be reversed at a federal level.

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But particularly in the last few months, the Government of Alberta has been pushing the limits of their power on issues generally considered the exclusive domain of the federal government. In many areas, Alberta’s already providing a template of how far a provincial government can go in defying Ottawa.

Alberta is unilaterally reining in MAID eligibility

Last month, the Alberta government tabled the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act. Assisted suicide will still be legal in Alberta, but with far tighter restrictions than the MAID regime mandated by Ottawa.

The restriction would return MAID to its initial federal standard of applying only for terminal illnesses. It would also ban nurses and doctors from unprompted suggestions of MAID to patients, something that is currently encouraged under federal treatment standards.

Quebec has already experimented with tweaking the rules around MAID, albeit in the opposite direction. In 2024, Quebec unilaterally expanded MAID eligibility to pre-approved patients who were unresponsive — despite the fact that federal law still considers this to be murder. Nevertheless, the CAQ government got around this by ordering prosecutors not to pursue murder charges against anyone euthanizing an unresponsive patient with pre-approval.

But Alberta’s action represents the first time that a provincial government has attempted to make it harder to access MAID, instead of easier.

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Alberta has singlehandedly rolled back child gender transitions

In 2024, Alberta first announced a series of amendments to restrict gender transitioning in children. Gender surgeries were banned for anyone under the age of 17, and hormone therapies to block puberty were prohibited for children aged 15 and younger.

This was followed up with legislation in 2025 to bar males from women’s and girls’ sports, regardless of whether they identified as female.

Both pieces of legislation represent Canada’s first major pushback against the doctrine of “self-identified” gender. Prior to the 2010s, any Canadian looking to transition their gender faced a process of doctor’s notes, waiting periods and surgery until the change was legally recognized.

But now, the standard in every province is that a Canadian can change their legal gender by simply declaring as much, and that it is the duty of policymakers to “affirm” the new identity.

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Ottawa isn’t entirely responsible for the new standard, but federal authority has certainly enabled it. As one of the most obvious examples, it was a 2017 order from then prime minister Justin Trudeau which mandated that incarcerated males could be transferred to women’s prisons if they declared themselves to be female.  

Particularly when it comes to medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth, Alberta has emerged as Canada’s only outlier. The official line from Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada and every major national health body is that gender is self-identified and gender dysphoric youth should be offered affirmation and medical treatment.

Racial quotas in public institutions are being reversed

In January, the University of Alberta became Canada’s first post-secondary institution to remove “equity” quotas from its hiring policy.

Starting in 2011, the University of Alberta had adopted a policy of explicitly prioritizing job applications from “persons historically under-represented at the University.” But they would be henceforth reverting to the prior policy of hiring based solely on merit.

This reversal was encouraged by the Alberta government, but not by much. As detailed by National Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak, the provincial government didn’t need to withdraw funding or introduce new legislation. All they had to do was indicate they were paying attention.

In September, Premier Danielle Smith sent a mandate letter to her justice minister, Mickey Amery, with instructions to “review and reform hiring practices in Alberta public institutions to ensure they are based only on merit, competence, and equality of all persons, rather than on DEI ideology.”

As Sarkonak notes, the university is still shot through with policies prioritizing non-white candidates for hiring and promotion. But the mere mention that the province was paying attention to equity quotas turned out to be enough for the University of Alberta to scrap its most overt hiring barriers.

Alberta was the first province to refuse compliance with new gun control mandates

This is the most notable example to date of Alberta defying federal policy, and having the tactic copied by other provinces.

Starting in 2020, the federal government banned thousands of previously legal firearms on the grounds that they were “assault-style.” In an instant, gun owners across the country were told that a firearm they had been legally using for hunting or target practice was now prohibited, and had to remain permanently locked up pending a federal program to “buy” it back.

Alberta was the first to declare that whatever the federal “buyback” program ended up looking like, they would be prohibiting “provincial entities” from assisting in any way. The Alberta government laid the groundwork for this with the appointment of a provincial firearms officer in 2021, and the passage of a Firearms Act in 2023, which was intended to prevent and head off federal “intrusions.”

The non-compliance approach was eventually followed by Saskatchewan, then the Yukon, Ontario, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and the Northwest Territories. Dozens of police agencies would also join the “do not enforce” chorus, including the New Brunswick Association of Chiefs of Police.

This is one of the signature reasons the buyback ended up being such a failure. At program’s end earlier this month, it had collected just 67,000 firearms from a goal of 136,000.

For the first time since 2019, Canada is now in the hands of a majority government. And it’s the first majority government in Canadian history that was built by actively poaching floor-crossers from the opposition benches.

Four Conservatives and one New Democrat have opted to become Liberals since November. And by securing three byelection wins on Monday night, the Liberals now have 174 of the 343 seats in the House of Commons.

Nothing like this has happened before. There have been 16 minority governments in Canadian history, overseen by a total of 11 prime ministers. But of all those, Prime Minister Mark Carney is the first one to systematically pack his benches with floor-crossers until his minority became a majority. Among his 10 predecessors, this was only previously achieved with a general election.

It doesn’t change Carney’s day-to-day powers all that much. Even as the head of a minority government, Carney already enjoyed broad executive powers to appoint Senators, judges and diplomats without any oversight.

But the new majority will shift federal politics in two key areas:

All else being equal, Carney no longer has to worry about the potential of an election before 2029. That basically gives him three years to do what he wants.

He’s cracking down on Parliamentary committees, given that he now has the power to pack committees with Liberal majorities and shut down debate. Carney said this rather explicitly, telling reporters, “We’ve had a variety of issues over the course of the Parliament where things have taken longer than they necessarily would, where debates have been more performative.”

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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