A lot of people are getting very upset about this. Personally, I think the bill itself is not really what’s objectionable here and most of what people are working themselves into a lather about.

What is Bill 18? It’s meant to be a mirror of a piece of legislation in Quebec known as M-30 (English version here). What M-30 does is that it effectively forbids all sub-provincial public entities from receiving money from the Government of Canada without checking first with the provincial government. Basically, it tells the federal government that if it wants to do things that affect institutions/jurisdictions which belong to the province, then it has to go through the province. No end-runs around provincial jurisdiction. There is literally nothing wrong with this. Indeed, arguably, it is the way federalism is supposed to work.

Now, some have read the legislation and wondered how this would apply to the post-secondary sector. Some have rushed to the conclusion that every single application for research infrastructure and every application by an employee of a university to the research granting councils would be a separate contract under the law and therefore each would have to be reviewed by the provincial government. Cue fears of a conservative government going all Ron DeSantis on pieces of research it did not like, etc. etc.

In the words of the immortal Terry Mosher (Aislin): everybody take a Valium. This outcome isn’t impossible, but it’s probably the least likely outcome here. Certainly, this is sure as heck not what happens in Quebec. When it comes to dealing with the feds on things like infrastructure, basically the province decides which projects it thinks are a priority (based on institutional submissions) and submits them collectively on behalf of all the provinces’ post-secondary institutes. Not only is this how Quebec deals with the Canadian Foundation for Innovation; it is also how the province deals with things like the Knowledge Infrastructure Program and—in areas outside PSE—a lot of initiatives in the municipal and housing domains as well.

What about the granting councils? Well, M-30 has what amounts to a “pre-clearance” clause: institutions can apply to be pre-cleared to apply to a recurring program: the government vets the program, and once that is done, institutions can do business with it all they want. And so it goes with the tri-councils. The Quebec government formally has the right under the legislation to stand between the universities and the councils, but it opts not to and the law lays out a simple way for the government to do so. Clause 2(7) of Alberta B-18 would seem to function in exactly the same way, and so at the least, the possibility of a similar solution exists here.

So what’s the problem, exactly? Well, just because Bill 18 could be used as sensibly as M-30 doesn’t mean it will be. And here the detractors will point to the comments the Premier made in her interview with David Cochrane on Power and Politics last Friday, to wit:

“[the federal government] uses its power through researchers to only fund certain types of opinions, certain types of researchers, and I don’t think that’s fair.”

Smith said the government wants to review federal research funding coming into the province’s post-secondary institutions to ensure that “all people from all political perspectives are able to engage in a robust debate and have a robust research agenda.”

Ok, but we have to be careful here. Read very carefully what the Premier is saying and what she isn’t.

The most fruit-cakey thing in here she seems to be making some kind of equivalence between “research” and “opinions”, which I find…disturbing. Apart from that, she is saying that “the federal government” (it’s not entirely clear she’s talking about the granting councils here) only funds certain kinds of research, which—let’s face it—has been a pretty standard right-wing talking point since at least the 1980s. She is also saying that she thinks Alberta universities—nothing to do with the granting councils here—need to ensure some kind of ideological balance. That’s a position which is scary if we’re talking about, say, vaccine research, but isn’t entirely without merit in the humanities and social science.

Now look at what she doesn’t say: that she has intention of getting between Alberta universities and their federal grant dollars. She never even gets close to saying that. Alberta can’t make the feds fund “balanced” research (whatever that means); at most, what she seems to be doing here is laying the framework for the province to start funding research that would “balance out” all that crazy stuff coming from Ottawa—or at least get to get the institutions to find ways to create such balance.

So, here’s my take. The bill itself is in keeping with the general “Fortress Alberta” that the UCP has evinced since Jason Kenney took power. Nothing new here, and nothing Quebec hasn’t already done. The fact that it provokes political opponents into paroxysms of apoplexy is a bonus. Indeed, the more people give in to wild accusations about what the province intends to do, the better it is for the UCP even if in the end they do absolutely nothing with respect to tri-council funding (which, to belabor the point, is no more or less than what they have said they would do). They can just sit and smirk at all the over-reaction and roll their eyes at left-wing overreaction. And to some extent, they’d have a point.

Except that this probably isn’t just an exercise in trolling. While the UCP government may not be targeting tri-council grants specifically, they are firing a shot at the province’s universities, warning them that they will be expected to show “ideological balance.” God knows what this will mean in practice, but my take would be that it will be low-level skirmishing an attempts at micro-management for the rest of the UCP’s term of office, combined with attempts to make culture war off odd-sounding research projects in what the right likes to call “grievance studies.” Little echoes of Ron DeSantis and Viktor Orban, in other words.

In other words, it’s almost certain that there is a fight coming to universities’ doors in Alberta. But I have my doubts that it’s going to come through this specific piece of legislation.

Special Programming Note: The federal budget will be released today at 4 PM. As usual, the HESA Towers team will have our full coverage out to everyone around midnight tomorrow – if you don’t see your usual 7AM EDT release, scroll up to look for something a bit earlier. And if you can’t wait that long for the fiscal skinny, tune in to our YouTube channel where I’ll be giving brief highlights and analysis at 4:45, 6:00, and 8:00 PM. See you then!