Owing to the vagaries of the Georgian calendar, Labour Day won’t happen this year until Sept. 7. This may or may not be a disappointment to the Big Brains of Alberta’s United Conservative Party.
On the one hand, they’re stuck with Sept. 1 for former premier Jason Kenney’s lame celebration of Alberta’s achievement of official provincehood in 1905, the day that year the federal Parliament granted this part of the North West Territories official provincial status, albeit without some important bells and whistles.
Thanks to the fact that’s almost a week before the real September holiday – Labour Day, which unlike Alberta Day is an actual legal statutory day off – the UCP strategic brain trust won’t have much chance to erase our enjoyment of a day that celebrates labour, which in practical terms often means organized labour, with a day that celebrates a sovereign Alberta in a United Canada, or maybe a United States. Whatever.
Still, it’s possible that as a result of this year’s inconvenient timing some Albertans will actually notice Mr. Kenney’s “recognized commemorative day” this year.
Obviously, there was no way the first UCP premier’s loyal backers at Restaurants Canada would have let him get away with having two stat holidays in September, is there? Truth is, the self-declared voice of “foodservice” in Canada isn’t all that keen about stat holidays, period. But what can you do when the whole continent had already decided to make the first Monday in September an official day off?
On the other hand, at this point neither Premier Danielle Smith’s beloved Alberta separatists nor her supposedly equally beloved Alberta Forever Canadians are going to see much value in a commemorative occasion that marks Alberta’s establishment as a province by an act of Parliament. And anyway, Sept. 1 falls on a Tuesday, so they’re going to have to celebrate it on Aug. 30 this year if there’s going to be even a ghost of chance of attracting a crowd.
When the current UCP government put out a news release this week to encourage us to mark the occasion, I was reminded of Mr. Kenney’s unintentionally amusing effort to make Alberta Day into a kind of quasi-national holiday soon after he led the recently formed United Conservative Frankenparty to power in 2019.
You can tell how seriously the current iteration of the UCP is taking this by the fact that Ms. Smith wasn’t even quoted in the pro forma news release pumped out on Thursday describing the ho-hum events planned for Edmonton and Calgary and noting that there will unspecified goings on between Aug. 28 and Sept. 1 in 67 other communities.
Tanya Fir, minister of arts, culture and status of women (that is, stuff the UCP doesn’t think is all that important), got to do the honours with an anodyne canned quote about “the vital contributions our province makes to a united Canada.” (That oughtta keep the Forever Canada crowd off our backs, someone must’ve thought.)
Back in May 2019, it was another story when Mr. Kenney made a little video with Jason Nixon – then his environment minister, now Ms. Smith’s finance minister, ever and always casting a long shadow over the Alberta political scene – bumping cans of locally brewed beer on the front porch of Government House while touting a rule change allowing Albertans to get half snockered in public parks on the upcoming May Long.
“At this summer’s family picnic celebrating Canada Day, or maybe Alberta Day on September 1st, you’ll be able to toast the occasion with a glass of wine,” Mr. Kenney could be heard burbling in the video, leading The Toronto Star to speculate darkly that he might be contemplating changing the name of Labour Day to Alberta Day.
This wouldn’t have been entirely off brand, given Mr. Kenney’s 19th Century thoughts on labour rights, but it would have been pretty hard to change the name of a federal stat holiday to a local preference – leastways without an unconstitutional Sovereignty Act, the barrel full of brass Ms. Smith brings to the job, and a covetous eye then still cast on the Prime Minister’s Office. By contrast, all Ms. Smith has to do is set her watch to “Alberta Time.”
The next year, Mr. Kenney published another statement on the topic of Alberta Day, for some reason mentioning the way Albertans rose to the challenge of the “Spanish Flu pandemic” 100 years before.
“Yet, as Albertans have always done – from the protracted fight to wrestle ownership of our own natural resources from the federal government in 1930 to our responsible civic response to slowing the spread of COVID today – we will once again emerge stronger,” that 2020 statement said, perhaps a bit wistfully.
Well, Mr. Kenney must have sensed the way he was handling the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t pleasing anyone. In 2021, he would go on to disastrously loosen COVID restrictions and promise the coming summer would be Alberta’s “Best Summer Ever.” It wasn’t, a fact that did no favour to his approval ratings.
As for the protracted fight leading up to passage by Parliament of the Natural Resources Acts of 1930, Alberta separatists and separatist enablers like Mr. Kenney, with their perpetual sense of grievance, like to make a big deal about the fact Alberta and the other new provinces of the Prairie West had to wait 25 years to get full constitutional control of Crown Lands and natural resources.
This is true, and there were forceful advocates of full provincial rights sooner, but remember that the population of Alberta was thought to be only about 250,000 in 1905, and Ottawa’s priority was populating the West in an orderly fashion to immunize against U.S. encroachment.
In that light, waiting until the province had a population of about 700,000 to bestow full provincial rights, which Parliament proceeded to do, hardly seems like an act of cruel imperial hegemony, at least as far as European settlers of the Canadian Prairies were concerned. Negotiations got serious in 1925, and, one could argue, the matter was settled expeditiously and satisfactorily from Alberta’s perspective five years later.
Despite Mr. Kenney statement in 2020 that “our government has officially declared September 1st as Alberta Day,” it wasn’t actually proclaimed into law as a commemorative day of recognition until the summer of 2022, when he announced it yet again at the Calgary Stampede.
You still can’t take the day off or claim overtime if you go to work, though, so the former premier’s friends at Restaurants Canada can breathe easily for another year.
