Lisa Johnson and Jack Farrell writing for the Canadian Press broke a major story last Thursday, and it’s grim news.

The Smith government knows that three anti-trans laws they’re pushing—a law that will restrict access to gender-affirming care, a law that will ban trans girls from girls’ sports, and a law that will restrict when kids can choose to go by different names or pronouns—violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Bill of Rights. So Smith’s regime is  going to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause.

The clause is sometimes called the overriding power, because that’s what it does—it gives provincial and federal legislatures a loophole that lets them override the courts on matters of human rights.

It has often been invoked to try to ram through something foul.

A Progressive Conservative government in 1998 here tried to use it to get out of paying reparations to victims of government forced sterilization programs. A few years later, they tried to use it to block same-sex marriage.  In Ontario and Saskatchewan, it was used to break strikes with back-to-work legislation. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe deployed it recently in 2023 to push through an anti-trans “Parents’ Rights” law.

The conservative movement’s obsession with trans people continues to be a major driving force for the right on the prairies. And the UCP policies on pronouns and trans kids in sports are already coming into effect. An Edmonton Journal investigation this week found that participation in girls’ sports has dropped significantly this year as families grapple with—or refuse to comply with—the UCP gender checks.

But the government’s plan to override the Charter signals that they intend to keep pushing hard on this file, constitution and consequences be damned. And as the North American right-wing has begun to descend into insane conspiracy theories about “trantifa” terrorism in the wake of the murder of conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, it’s likely that the conservative culture war against trans rights is going to keep escalating.

Two organizations, Skipping Stone and Egale Canada, have already launched constitutional challenges of the UCP legislation.

Sundries

• Calls to action on TikTok and Instagram from what appears to be a loose group of high school student organizers are calling for a province-wide student walkout this morning. A large demonstration is expected to assemble outside the Legislature at 10:30.
  
  
• Sobeys began locking out over 250 workers in Balzac on Thursday. Teamsters Local Union 987, which represents these workers, is calling on Albertans to support locked-out Sobeys workers by avoiding Sobeys, Safeway, FreshCo, Voilà, M&M Meat Shops, and Petro-Canada.
  
  
• The Alberta government’s Mature Assets Strategy, which would see us pick up some of the bill for cleaning up oil wells dumped on the public by delinquent oil and gas companies, got a cold reception in Warburg over the weekend. The Mature Assets Strategy is a key project for Minister of Energy Brian Jean’s office and is being stick-handled by the storied and controversial conservative operative Vitor Marciano and David Yager, special advisor to the Premier.
  
  
• Marciano actually made it into the news twice last week, as a report from Brett McKay at the Investigative Journalism Foundation found that at the same time that Vitor has been Brian Jean’s chief of staff, he’s also been the director of the Alberta Resource Advocacy Foundation, a registered lobbyist that has heavily lobbied the same ministry he works in.
  
  
• The city of Edmonton has a new police chief—Warren Driechel, who you may remember as one of the members of the force’s anti-drug-trafficking task force who bought illegal steroids from another cop who was drug trafficking within the Edmonton Police Service.
  
  
• Yet another round of bargaining between the government and a public sector union has broken down—this time with the Association of Academic Staff at the University of Alberta, who say they’re now applying for a supervised strike vote.
  
  
• The murder of American conservative organizer Charlie Kirk has provoked an authoritarian crackdown in the United States and it’s spilling over into Canada, too. In response to harassment that appears to have been drummed up online by a couple of National Post writers—Jamie Sarkonak and Jon Kay—over comments about Kirk, the University of Alberta has put a professor on leave. If you’re not conservative yourself, this Kirk character may be unfamiliar to you. He was anything but a free speech champion. See this article from Ta-Nehisi Coates that breaks down just what Charlie Kirk was about.

• The Crown has withdrawn all charges against the Calgary police officers who shot and killed Anthony Heffernan in 2015 on the grounds that so much time has passed that the killers aren’t even police officers any more. ASIRT originally recommended charges against the officer who fired the shots, but the Crown declined to pursue.
  
  
• The Alberta government has crafted yet another handout to oil and gas owners: this time, they’re putting a loophole into the industrial carbon tax that experts warn will allow companies to double-count their carbon credits, not just dodging their own taxes but weakening the whole system.

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