Danielle Smith eyes an Alberta middleman for federal-city deals

Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that Premier Danielle Smith's government would like to know by month's end:

The provincial government wants to know about all funding arrangements between a federal level it publicly distrusts and the municipal level it constitutionally controls.

Alberta Municipal Affairs describes its request for information from all cities, towns, villages and counties as an "overview" to understand the "scope and scale" of these deals, but this sort of scope appears to be the stuff of budgetary microscopes.

It's made municipal leaders around the province wonder why this inventory is being demanded, albeit with a certain level of suspicion as to the motives of the premier behind the Sovereignty Act and repeated protests about jurisdictional turf.

In the official provincial statement, Alberta wishes to "stand up for our constitutional jurisdiction" and ensure "equitable funding" for communities.

But there have been enough breadcrumbs dropped on the way here to interpret where the provincial government might be going with this, and it's an Alberta-shaped wedge between these two other levels of government.

Just as Smith and other UCPers have eyed Québec with some envy for having its own pension plan, tax collection agency and police force, the premier has also twigged to that province's vaguely titled An Act Respecting the Ministère du conseil executif.

This law prohibits any municipal body from entering into or negotiating an agreement with the federal government or its agencies without express authorization from the Québec government.

At a premiers' conference in November, Smith said Alberta would study adopting a law of its own.

"If defending our jurisdiction by passing legislation similar to Quebec assists us in being able to get fair treatment, then that's what we're going to do," she told reporters.

Why was Smith musing about this measure at this point? Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser had begun a cross-Canada announcement tour with the Housing Accelerator Fund, often dropping hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on cities whose councils had negotiated directly with Ottawa and bypassed the provincial level.

Because Québec had a law in place barring such agreements, Canada instead transferred that province $900 million to disperse to towns and cities on its own for housing construction.

Many premiers around the pan-provincial table had Québec envy, and Smith wasn't the only premier musing about mimicking that law. New Brunswick's Blaine Higgs was making similar noises.

Provinces' beefs with direct federal deals with cities weren't new in 2023; the frustrations have been long-standing in Alberta and elsewhere. Municipalities are indeed the constitutional purview of provinces, and past deals like the federal gas tax-sharing program have gone through provinces.