Alberta Minute: Legislature Returns, Doctors Decline, and a Municipality Votes To Abolish Itself

Alberta Minute: Legislature Returns, Doctors Decline, and a Municipality Votes To Abolish Itself

Alberta Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Alberta politics.

 

Alberta Legislature by IQRemix on Flickr

 

This Week In Alberta:

  • The Legislature returns from their Easter break on Tuesday, with sittings scheduled for Tuesday afternoon and evening, Wednesday afternoon and evening, and Thursday afternoon. There are currently 8 government bills before the House, including the Recall Act and the Citizen Initiative Act. The Metis Settlement Amendment Act will be the first bill debated on Tuesday.

  • The Standing Committee on Public Accounts will meet on Tuesday morning from 8:00 am to 10:00 am. The Committee will hear from the Ministry of Justice and Solicitor General who will report on outstanding recommendations from the Auditor General, and provide their Ministry's Annual Report.

  • In COVID-related news, Alberta's largest immunization centre is set to open in downtown Calgary today, with the ability to scale up to 120 vaccination stations delivering 6,000 jabs per day. For the first week, it intends to deliver about 10,000 vaccinations.

 

Last Week In Alberta:

  • Doctors rejected the tentative deal between the Province and the Alberta Medical Association by a tight vote of 53% opposed to 47% in favour. Although the details of the tentative deal were technically confidential it was widely reported in the media that the deal included a hard funding cap, amongst other things. The government is now considering its options.

  • Fresh off the Supreme Court ruling that the carbon tax is constitutional (at least according to six Justices), the federal government increased the carbon tax by another $10 a tonne - talk about adding insult to injury! The increase is estimated to add about 2.3 cents to a litre of gasoline, as well as increase the price of natural gas and other goods. If anyone has any clever alternatives to reliably heat their homes, let us know!

  • The village of Hythe, located northwest of Beaverlodge on Highway 43, voted to dissolve itself following the conclusions of a sustainability report that showed that the Village was facing an infrastructure deficit that could see taxes hike by 150%. An overwhelming 95% of ballots cast in the plebiscite voted in favour of dissolving the Village, with the area now becoming part of the County of Grande Prairie No 1. [Editor's Note: If a 150% tax hike is the threshold to abolish a municipality, shouldn't Calgary and Edmonton be gone by now too?!]

 

 

 

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  • Alberta Institute
    published this page in News 2021-04-04 23:57:28 -0600