Just days after the Alberta government announced it would allow political parties at the municipal level in Edmonton and Calgary, one has already been formed, announcing they will run candidates in the next election.
Transparent and Active Partnerships Edmonton, known as TAPYeg, declared its intentions after the provincial government tabled Bill 20 last week.
The proposed law by Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government would give cabinet broad authority to dismiss councillors, overturn local bylaws and allow political parties to run in municipal elections — for now in Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta’s two largest cities.
Those who oppose Bill 20 say it could lead to provincial interference and politicians following a party line instead of representing the views of the area of the city they’ve been elected to serve.
“I think those are all fair comments, but we accept parties as a really important part of democracy, provincially and federally,” said local businessman Jeffrey Hansen-Carlson, the president of TAPYeg. “The fact that it’s somehow not contributing to the exercise of democracy municipally, I just can’t reconcile those things.”
“I think this is a healthy democratic experiment.”
Originally from Vancouver, which along with Montreal has been one of the two Canadian cities to have municipal political parties for decades, Hansen-Carlson has experience seeing how they work at the local level and after moving to Edmonton 14 years ago, wondered why local parties weren’t a thing here.
Hansen-Carlson has a background in both politics and business and project development at companies like EllisDon. He has also spent time serving on the board of the Downtown Recovery Task Force and is the vice chair of Parkland County’s economic development committee.
Hansen-Carlson was the president and CEO of the shuttered Prairie Sky gondola project. About a year ago, he decided to bring together some like-minded friends and began building the political party.
The province’s move last week gave TAPYeg greater legitimacy.
“We had no idea that this bill was coming,” Hansen-Carlson said, adding while TAPYeg informed the municipal affairs ministry of its activities out of respect, it did not know the bill would come to fruition. “We were not involved in this. It was serendipitous.”
TAPYeg calls itself “the party for city builders” that doesn’t sit on one defined part of the political spectrum.
“We don’t want to define ourselves as the right or the left or the center. We have a big tent in the middle for people that are excited by their ideas and actually want to go out and do them.”
TAPYeg wants to get seven of its candidates elected to the 13 spots (12 councillors plus mayor) on Edmonton city council during the next municipal election in 2025.
Hansen-Carlson said the platform will evolve and grow as more people join the party, but right now it has four areas of focus: value for your tax investment, peace and order in communities, a reboot of the city’s relationship with the province, and a concept called “the Department of Ideas.”
“My favourite platform idea is the ‘Department of Ideas’ because one of the things about TAP is it’s such an idea-driven and action-orientated organization. We thought like, let’s formalize this, right? Let’s start a team in the city that’s sole purpose is to enable good ideas,” Hansen-Carlson said.
The party is building a platform for candidates to run on if Bill 20 is passed, which it all but will in the UCP-majority controlled Alberta legislature.
“I think people are hardwired to want to be a part of something,” Hansen-Carlson said. “That’s absent in political politics in this city and I think it’s one of the main reasons why we’re just so generally ineffective.”
Hansen-Carlson believes having more people united behind a common platform would make local government more efficient.
“I think the power, the influence, the structure and predictability that comes with a party — and people being able to be a part of it — is going to help the city move forward.”
Political analyst John Brennan said the idea of local political parties has been discussed for some time now in the province, despite it not being a popular idea: Alberta Municipalities surveyed its members and received a near-unanimous no, while the province itself also conducted a survey that found 70 per cent of Albertans don’t want political parties at the municipal level.
Brennan said the introduction of them in just Edmonton and Calgary is a political move.
“You know, there’s no secret that there’s been a lot of friction between Danielle Smith and the two big cities in Alberta,” he said, adding he believes the UCP wants to get more conservative-leaning candidates on city councils.
“That will give them an opportunity to take out the progressive left-of-center mayors in Edmonton and Calgary and perhaps change the makeup of the two city councils.”
While TAPYeg is the first out the gate, Brennan believes other parties from across the political spectrum will soon emerge.
“We’re probably going to see the formation of several political parties and they’re going to come up with a platform that all the people that organized these political parties can agree on.”
The idea isn’t completely new in Edmonton. In the 1970s and 1980s, Brennan said candidates with similar ideas ran municipally in Edmonton. Brennan expects any future parties would follow a similar model.
“They ran a slate of candidates across all the wards and said, ‘These are all the policy platforms that we all support and we all stand behind.’”
Brennan said municipal parties could change how a councillor represents its voters and won’t necessarily lead to more civility in politics.
“It’s definitely going to take away from a councillor’s focus on their ward and for good or ill, the focus will be more on a series of policies and a platform that all of these people can agree on, and so they’ll have more of a citywide focus on general issues.”
“But it may make things easier for some Edmontonians when they’re deciding who to support.”
Bill 20 came more than two weeks after Smith’s government introduced other legislation that would give it the power to veto any deal between the federal government and provincial entities, including municipalities and post-secondary schools.
The next municipal election will take place in 2025.
— With files from The Canadian Press
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