Alberta
Canadians owe a debt to Premier Danielle Smith

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
In recent days, Premier Smith has endured criticism from many people about her recent announcements relating to treatments for what is often described as gender transition.
Instead, she deserves praise for decisions that are as important for how they were made as for the gender transition issues that concern her and her colleagues. Her actions on this matter demonstrate how public policy should be developed and explained.
The most important quality of the recent policy announcements by the Alberta government is that they are evidence based.
There is an emerging consensus outside Canada that the evidence supporting pharmacological and surgical procedures to change genders in minors is either very weak or nonexistent.
Sweden, Finland, the UK and Norway have restricted or forbidden the use of these treatments on minors, as have twenty-three American states. Ms. Smith referred to these in her press conference announcing the changes her government is making.
Leaders in other countries have done this after conducting detailed studies including one by the UK High Court of Justice and another by Dr. Hilary Cass, a former President of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health in the United Kingdom
Dr. Cass is an independent expert commissioned to provide advice to the National Health Service on gender treatments. She concluded that “evidence on the appropriate management of children with gender incongruence is inconclusive both nationally and internationally’’.
The second reason the decisions taken by Alberta are important is that they were taken despite ideology advocated by the Government of Canada and the unwillingness of federal officials including the Prime Minster to support their opposition to the Alberta policies with any evidence.
In his initial comments, the Prime Minister made no reference to any of the many studies that have been done describing the dangers of pharmacological and surgical procedures to change the gender of minor children.
He also displayed no understanding of the experiences of other countries on this matter. He did not refer to the Cass report and its seminal conclusions.
The comments by Federal Health Minister Mark Holland lacked any evidence the public could use. He also used offensive rhetoric.
Mr. Holland described the Alberta decisions as being behaviour that is “extremely dangerous to engage in …. which is, I think, playing politics about children’s lives.” He also referred to the “devastation that its going to bring”, referring to the Alberta changes.
Federal communications marked by a factual vacuum and excessive language are not going to help resolve serious differences of opinion on serious issues. They are also not condusive to good relations between the federal government and an important province.
The third and particularly significant reason the recent changes announced by the Alberta government are so important is that they will protect children.
Adolescence, a phase of child development that has been with us for thousands of years, is an important part of everyone’s life.
It is a vital part of what it means to be human. Delaying or blocking it is dangerous, something that many observers have noted but that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health do not recognize.
Federal leaders need to inform themselves, particularly about the negative impact of puberty blockers on bone and brain development and the lifelong medical attention many transitioners will need because of the pharmacological and surgical procedures used on them to change genders.
The Prime Minister and the Minister of Health should also learn about the increasingly large number of transitioners who regret their transition and later seek to reverse it. Their situation is particularly tragic because many of the negative consequences of changing genders in children cannot be reversed.
Federal leaders also support hiding from parents the decisions children make in schools about the pronouns they use to describe their genders. This is another practice that many feel is harmful and divisive.
The federal perspective on this is unreasonable.
Our species survived over the centuries because the first priority for most parents is their children and most take good care of them.
There is no basis for a lack of trust in them and in the relatively few cases where parents do not provide appropriate care, the child protection laws come into play.
It is particularly important that federal leaders recognize the grave problems that puberty blockers and related surgeries often pose for children who are gays or lesbians.
These children sometimes display some of the attributes of the opposite sex as they grow, and these are often misinterpreted as gender dysphoria. They then get treated for a problem they don’t have, with serious lifelong consequences.
Unfortunately, this happens in many Canadian pediatric hospitals.
There is nothing wrong with these children. They should be allowed to develop and grow in their own way and be who they are. That means no puberty blockers or surgeries to change them.
The fourth reason to respect the new directions on gender issues Ms. Smith and her colleagues have decided upon is the moderation displayed by the Alberta government in putting them forward and communicating with the public about them.
The language used has been understated. The changes are lawful in every respect including in relation to the Charter of Rights and Freedom and other legislation.
The evidence has been clearly presented in a way most citizens can readily understand and great care has been taken to deal with those who may have concerns thoughtfully, including allowing time for debate and discussion before the changes are made.
This is a good example of how governments should behave. Federal leaders should show some respect for the approaches taken by Ms. Smith and her colleagues as they dealt with a very complex issue.
The final reason for the importance of the Alberta approach is that it has avoided many of the problems associated with medical practice standards and regulation that are so evident in Canada and which have been a major cause of the difficulties our country faces on gender issues.
Provincial Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons and many regulators elsewhere regulate doctors based largely on prevailing practices by physicians rather than clinical outcomes.
This means that there have been many cases over the years, in Canada and elsewhere, where evidence to support medical procedures has been lacking. Current practices toward gender dysphoria in Canada and some US states are examples.
In these cases, if something is done often enough by enough doctors, that procedure becomes the standard and not clinical outcomes. This often leads to perverse outcomes that everyone ultimately regrets.
In the years to come, unless we change course soon and unless others follow the Alberta path, people will be wondering how the problems summarized in this article developed and why we damaged so many children by an approach defined more by ideology than factual reality.
David MacKinnon is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Alberta
Alberta extracting more value from oil and gas resources: ATB

From the Canadian Energy Centre
By Will Gibson
Investment in ‘value-added’ projects more than doubled to $4 billion in 2024
In the 1930s, economist Harold Innis coined the term “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to describe Canada’s reliance on harvesting natural resources and exporting them elsewhere to be refined into consumer products.
Almost a century later, ATB Financial chief economist Mark Parsons has highlighted a marked shift in that trend in Alberta’s energy industry, with more and more projects that upgrade raw hydrocarbons into finished products.
ATB estimates that investment in projects that generate so-called “value-added” products like refined petroleum, hydrogen, petrochemicals and biofuels more than doubled to reach $4 billion in 2024.
“Alberta is extracting more value from its natural resources,” Parsons said.
“It makes the provincial economy somewhat more resilient to boom and bust energy price cycles. It creates more construction and operating jobs in Alberta. It also provides a local market for Alberta’s energy and agriculture feedstock.”
The shift has occurred as Alberta’s economy adjusts to lower levels of investment in oil and gas extraction.
While overall “upstream” capital spending has been rising since 2022 — and oil production has never been higher — investment last year of about $35 billion is still dramatically less than the $63 billion spent in 2014.
Parsons pointed to Dow’s $11 billion Path2Zero project as the largest value-added project moving ahead in Alberta.
The project, which has support from the municipal, provincial and federal governments, will increase Dow’s production of polyethylene, the world’s most widely used plastic.
By capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions and generating hydrogen on-site, the complex will be the world’s first ethylene cracker with net zero emissions from operations.
Other major value-added examples include Air Products’ $1.6 billion net zero hydrogen complex, and the associated $720 million renewable diesel facility owned by Imperial Oil. Both projects are slated for startup this year.
Parsons sees the shift to higher value products as positive for the province and Canada moving forward.
“Downstream energy industries tend to have relatively high levels of labour productivity and wages,” he said.
“A big part of Canada’s productivity problem is lagging business investment. These downstream investments, which build off existing resource strengths, provide one pathway to improving the country’s productivity performance.”
Heather Exner-Pirot, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s director of energy, natural resources and environment, sees opportunities for Canada to attract additional investment in this area.
“We are able to benefit from the mistakes of other regions. In Germany, their business model for creating value-added products such as petrochemicals relies on cheap feedstock and power, and they’ve lost that due to a combination of geopolitics and policy decisions,” she said.
“Canada and Alberta, in particular, have the opportunity to attract investment because they have stable and reliable feedstock with decades, if not centuries, of supply shielded from geopolitics.”
Exner-Pirot is also bullish about the increased market for low-carbon products.
“With our advantages, Canada should be doing more to attract companies and manufacturers that will produce more value-added products,” she said.
Like oil and gas extraction, value-added investments can help companies develop new technologies that can themselves be exported, said Shannon Joseph, chair of Energy for a Secure Future, an Ottawa-based coalition of Canadian business and community leaders.
“This investment creates new jobs and spinoffs because these plants require services and inputs. Investments such as Dow’s Path2Zero have a lot of multipliers. Success begets success,” Joseph said.
“Investment in innovation creates a foundation for long-term diversification of the economy.”
Alberta
Alberta government must restrain spending in upcoming budget to avoid red ink

From the Fraser Institute
By Tegan Hill and Milagros Palacios
Whether due to U.S. tariffs or lower-than-expected oil prices, the Smith government has repeatedly warned Albertans that despite a $4.6 billion projected budget surplus in 2024/25, Alberta could soon be in the red. To help avoid this fate, the Smith government must restrain spending in its upcoming 2025 budget.
These are not simply numbers on a page; budget deficits have real consequences for Albertans. For one, deficits fuel debt accumulation. And just as Albertans must pay interest on their own mortgages or car loans, taxpayers must pay interest on government debt. Each dollar spent paying interest is a dollar diverted from programs such as health care and education, or potential tax relief. This fiscal year, provincial government debt interest costs will reach a projected $650 per Albertan.
And while many risk factors are out of the government’s direct control, the government can control its own spending.
In its 2023 budget, the Smith government committed to keep the rate of spending growth to below the rate of inflation and population growth. This was an important step forward after decades of successive governments substantially increasing spending during good times—when resource revenues (including oil and gas royalties) were relatively high (as they are today)—but failing to rein in spending when resource revenue inevitably declined.
But here’s the problem. Even if the Smith government sticks to this commitment, it may still fall into deficit. Why? Because this government has spent significantly more than it originally planned in its 2022 mid-year plan (the Smith government’s first fiscal update). In other words, the government’s “restraint” is starting from a significantly higher base level of spending. For example, this fiscal year it will spend $8.2 billion more than it originally planned in its 2022 mid-year plan. And inflation and population growth only account for $3.1 billion of this additional spending. In other words, $5.1 billion of this new spending is unrelated to offsetting higher prices or Alberta’s growing population.
Because of this higher spending and reliance on volatile resource revenue, red ink looms.
Indeed, while the Smith government projects budget surpluses over the next three fiscal years, fuelled by historically high resource revenue, if resource revenue was at its average of the last two decades, this year’s $4.6 billion projected budget surplus would turn into a $5.8 billion deficit. And projected budget surpluses in 2025/26 and 2026/27 would flip to budget deficits. To be clear, this is not a far-fetched scenario—resource revenue plummeted by nearly 70 per cent in 2015/16.
In contrast, if resource revenue fell to its average (again, based on the last two decades) but the Smith government held to its original 2022 spending plan, Alberta would still have a balanced budget in 2026/27.
Bottom line; had the Smith government not substantially increased spending over the last two years, Alberta’s spending levels today would align with more stable ongoing levels of revenue, which would put Alberta on more stable fiscal footing in the years to come.
Premier Smith has warned Albertans a budget deficit may be on the way. To mitigate the risk of red ink moving forward, the Smith government should show real spending restraint in its 2025 budget.
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