Inside the pressure campaign on Danielle Smith to make gun ownership (and more) an Alberta right

Premier Danielle Smith intends to strengthen the little-known Alberta Bill of Rights this fall to include protections for people who refuse to be vaccinated, but she's facing heavy pressure from United Conservative activists to go much farther in her overhaul, CBC News has learned.

A group from the premier's riding in Medicine Hat, which calls itself the Black Hat Gang, has met with senior government officials and proposed a massive new draft of Alberta's rights document. The "gang" wants it to enshrine an array of new rights, including confidentiality of health information and "informed consent" to medical care, as well as rights to keep and bear firearms, to use "sufficient force" to defend one's property, and "freedom from excessive taxation."

It's not clear how much influence Smith's constituents will have on the legislation that her government plans to introduce this fall, right before the UCP's annual convention. But the premier, facing a leadership review at that convention, has been heavily promoting her proposed Bill of Rights to her party's grassroots at multiple members-only gatherings.

What's more, party president Robert Smith told UCP members in a newsletter last month that the updated rights bill will have "95 per cent" of what party members supported at last year's party convention — ideas that Smith's constituency group had initially put forth at that gathering, and then proposed to the UCP government this year.

Some of the same proposals for new liberties and protections were also recommended last year by the public health emergencies review panel, helmed by former politician Preston Manning, a prominent critic of COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates.

Smith's reforms stand to give more teeth to a rights document that's been on the books since 1972, but has been vastly overshadowed in court decisions and the public conscience by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

While the Charter is a constitutional document and can be used to strike down laws and regulations, the Alberta Bill of Rights is only a statute (or law), and it's not as clear that judges can use one statute to trump others, says Eric Adams, a University of Alberta law professor.

However, both the Black Hat Gang and Manning's panel recommend the Smith government establish its Bill of Rights as part of the province's constitution, and therefore a supreme law that courts could use to affect other laws. 

Modelled after the British system, there is no written constitution of Alberta — or any other province, per se. It consists of a series of other federal and provincial laws that make up the province's supreme governing law. A province has the legal right to pass legislation adding elements to its unwritten constitution, as Alberta did in 1990 to confirm the self-governance of Métis in Alberta.

Smith hasn't yet tipped her hand too much about her Bill of Rights overhaul, except for one change she enticed UCP members with at a Calgary event last month.

"The amendments will make it illegal for the government to discriminate against any individual for refusing a medical treatment. And it needs to be said, including refusing to take a vaccine you don't want to take," she told the gathering, according to a recording reviewed by CBC News.

This echoes a campaign promise Smith made in 2022 to help secure the UCP leadership: that she'd add the right to be unvaccinated into the Alberta Human Rights Act, a separate document from the Bill of Rights. Smith ultimately abandoned that idea, and did not propose it or any vaccine-related reform in the provincial election last year.

But the proposal's resurrection in the Bill of Rights could wind up having impacts beyond the COVID-19 vaccine mandate that so riled the United Conservative base.

A longstanding provincial regulation requires all workers in health care and at daycare facilities be immunized against rubella (also known as German measles). Such a provincial rule could be subject to challenge under a new Bill of Rights protection.