Happy New Year!

Well, here we are, living through the final day of 2025, and most readers of this blog would agree that this has not been the most fabulous year in living memory. 

That said, thanks to the Lords of Misrule* of the United Conservative Party and American social media, it’s been a pretty good year for a hitherto marginalized group of MAGA nuts, Christian nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and Alberta separatists who historically have occupied the most obscure fringes of Alberta politics.

One hopes that 2026 will see improvement in this regard, but as regular readers will understand, we have to look quite hard for reasons to be optimistic.

Better to end the year on a negative note, though, than to start the new one that way, so I want to note my two greatest disappointments in Alberta politics in 2025, if only in the hope we can do better soon. 

The first has been the weak and disengaged performance of the Largest Opposition Caucus in Alberta History (LOCAH). 

Those of you who bother to read the many comments under each of these columns will be aware there is a lively and respectful conversation among regular readers about how good or bad a job the NDP is doing. I have been admonished from time to time for being too critical of the party under the leadership of Naheed Nenshi, presumably out of concern that such talk might demoralize voters who despise the UCP more than they’re uninspired by the NDP. 

Well, so be it. The job of a commentator – even a self-appointed one – is to commentate, is it not? So commentate I will! 

From my perspective, NDP communications remain unfocussed, frequently uncritical, and even when vigorously attacking government missteps and harmful policies inclined to miss opportunities to put forward alternatives that would be popular with voters, presumably out of fear that these could then be countered by the UCP’s effective attack machine. 

For just one example, here in its entirely is the NDP’s official response Friday to the recent death of a 44-year-old man while waiting for eight hours at Covenant Health’s Grey Nuns Hospital in Edmonton after experiencing chest pains: 

“Sarah Hoffman, Alberta’s New Democrat Shadow Minister for Hospital and Surgical Health Facilities, and Jasvir Deol, MLA for Edmonton-Meadows, issued the following joint statement in response to the tragic death of an Edmonton resident after waiting hours in an emergency room:

“‘This is a terrible tragedy. We send our condolences to the family now grieving the loss of their loved one. This family needs justice, and we join others in demanding answers through a full and transparent review by the appropriate officials.

‘ERs across the province are overcrowded. The UCP’s health care cuts and chaos means this has become an unacceptable reality that Albertans have to put up with. More must be done to properly staff our hospitals, invest in our public health care, and ensure Albertans get the care they need — before another tragedy occurs.’”

This is all? This is sufficient? 

For crying out loud, the first people the Opposition targets are unnamed “appropriate officials” instead of the government for reorganizing health care into a state of utter chaos presumably to make it easier to privatize, and the solution they demand is a “transparent review.” This is exactly what the UCP will promise! (With no intention of actually delivering, it must be added.)

Well, at least the statement acknowledges in passing that the government bears some responsibility for the mess. There is no attempt to debunk the UCP claims they are investing in public health care by privatizing it, though. There is only a vague generality about a need for more funding.

If we’re going to demand that the UCP “ensure Albertans get the care they need,” you’d think there’d be a suggestion or two about how this could be achieved – and a mention of how health care, relatively speaking, operated without crisis under the NDP.

Under Mr. Nenshi, the Opposition devoted 95 words to this tragedy, if you don’t count the incomprehensibly wordy headline. I know Ms. Hoffman. She is fighter and was Alberta’s best health minister in a generation. I don’t believe for a minute she thought this was an appropriate approach. 

The NDP obviously needs to up its comms game, and up to now it’s been remarkably resistant to doing that. 

As for my second big disappointment of 2025, it has to do with the chicken-hearted way that decent, thoughtful and honest members of the UCP Caucus and Cabinet have mostly sat silent while Premier Smith has led the government into utter chaos, violated democratic norms, picked vulnerable groups of citizens to bully, played footsie with separatists and outright traitors, and repeatedly ignored the wishes of Albertans as in her dogged campaign to grab and grift Albertans’ Canada Pension Plan funds.

There are such people in the UCP, you know. We might disagree with the policies they have supported over the years, but Tories, as we used to say, were never all motivated by greed or malice. I’d name names, but why give their own party base targets to shoot at? 

Yet with the honourable exceptions of MLAs Peter Guthrie and Scott Sinclair – and it starts to sound as if Mr. Sinclair may be having second thoughts – nobody in the UCP Caucus or Cabinet has spoken up for Canada, for human rights, for common decency, for the verifiable benefits of public health care. 

Mr. Guthrie, a former minister, is now the leader of the rebranded Alberta Party in the Legislature. Mr. Sinclair sits as an Independent. Both were kicked out of the UCP for being too independent minded. 

Conservatives weren’t always cowards, cowed by the worst leaders in generations. Maybe some of the folks I’m thinking of believe they’ll have more influence if they remain on the inside. Frankly, I think we’re past that point now.

So, without principled Conservative voices of restraint, and without competent progressive voices of Opposition, where are we headed, Alberta? 

3 AlbertaPolitics.ca blog posts on this year’s list of the most popular stories in The Tyee

I guess the last day of the year is an appropriate moment to brag about our successes. Other Alberta political bloggers do, so I hope readers will indulge me if I boast a bit as well. 

Many of the commentaries published on this blog are picked up by The Tyee, a Vancouver-based online news publication that nowadays does a better job covering Alberta issues than many of our local news operations do. In addition to Yours Truly, The Tyee regularly prints stories by the likes of investigative journalist Charles Rusnell, author Andrew Nikiforuk, and respected political columnist Graham Thomson. I encourage readers to sign up for The Tyee’s free Alberta Edge weekly newsletter.

On Monday, The Tyee published a list of its best-read stories of 2025 – by British Columbians, and by all Tyee readers. I was delighted to see that three of my columns appeared on these lists, one of those on both.

*If that is an appropriate metaphor. It may not be, if one wants to be pedantic about it. But as turn of a phrase, it fits nicely with the zeitgeist. And if it’s good enough for a Nobel laureate with a wildly popular Substack, what the heck, it’s good enough for Alberta politics!