By Hayley Ferguson

Local political scientist weighs in on the number of UCP panels

Nov 12, 2019 | 5:45 PM

Medicine Hat, AB – Since being elected in April, Premier Jason Kenney has announced multiple panels.

Looking at topics such as supervised consumption sites, minimum wage, and provincial spending.

With the announcement of the latest “Fair Deal” panel examining ways to make Alberta more independent of Ottawa, Medicine Hat College political science instructor Jim Groom says that they could be a way of putting decisions on someone else.

“It seems like a significant number of panels and when you get a solid mandate from the electorate, you think you can just move ahead and move forward. But yeah he has a lot of panels going on and I’m not sure if they are all really necessary,” he said.

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Kenney’s United Conservative Party won 55 per cent of the vote, the strongest mandate in the province since 2001.

“He has a solid majority of course so it could appear that he is sort of overruling the other parties and any objection if he didn’t have the panels,” Groom continued. “But then when you personally select the people that are on the panels it’s going to be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that I would think really is a bit of a waste of taxpayers money to an extent.”

Groom is hopeful that the new Fair Deal panel will be productive, but he worries about the timeline.

“The issues that they are talking about with this current panel is pretty significant and I’m not sure that they will be able to come up with a really in-depth position by March because it does take a lot of research. Of course, they had panels back in 1995 under Ralph Klein. I hope they would at least start there and say well what did they find and let’s move forward from there.”

The panel will conduct public consultations throughout the winter and will present it’s report to government by March 31st.

Despite all of this, Groom doesn’t expect the number of panels to hurt Kenney.

“He’s received some sarcastic comments about the fact ‘oh another panel again instead of taking action.’ However he does, after they are completed their information and presentation, he acts on it pretty quickly. And he can always look back and say ‘we are doing what the panel told us to do.’”