The authoritarian edge of Alberta conservatism

The question of how far-right politics are advancing in Canada has taken on new urgency following Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s record fourth invocation of the notwithstanding clause (NWC) in just five weeks. The clause, which is found in Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allows federal or provincial governments to temporarily override certain Charter rights. It was introduced in 1982 as part of a political compromise intended to protect provincial autonomy, but has since become a tool for governments seeking to shield controversial legislation from judicial review.

More than simply grappling with right-wing populism and reactionary politics, we must now contend with the increasingly authoritarian use of constitutional tools to shelter far-right political projects from critique and oversight by other branches of government.

While many institutional and liberal analyses have been published in daily papers and major news outlets regarding Smith’s repeated use of the NWC, they largely fail to grapple with the regressive and reactionary politics at the heart of her ideological project. It is not a coincidence—nor even provincially specific—that Smith has wielded the NWC against labour and LGBTQ+ people; outside Québec, these groups have been the clause’s primary targets.

In October, the Alberta government used the NWC, combined with back-to-work legislation, to break the Alberta teachers’ strike—a strike backed by a 90 percent rejection vote in response to the province’s and school boards’ failure to bargain in good faith. The Back to School Act imposed a four-year collective agreement that limited wage increases to three per cent annually and restricted new hiring in the public system, essentially mirroring the offer workers had already rejected. This was a deliberate attack on a specific union, but it also aligns with how the NWC has been used by other right-wing governments against the broader labour movement.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford used the NWC to impose a contract on striking CUPE education workers in fall 2022, only backing down when faced with a broad cross-sector labour alliance and widespread public resistance. Both Smith and Ford invoked rhetoric about defending students from unions and preventing runaway public spending, claiming a democratic responsibility to shield their austerity agendas from “interventionist” judges and legal tribunals. This fits neatly into the longer history of the NWC being weaponized against labour: in 1986, Saskatchewan became the first non-Québec government to invoke the clause, overriding the provincial Court of Appeal’s ruling that back-to-work legislation violated workers’ freedom of association. It was a pivotal moment in the neoliberal state’s anti-labour legal strategy.

Beyond her anti-labour and libertarian politics, Smith is a long-time participant in right-wing culture-war campaigns, from “parents’ rights” rhetoric to broader anti-woke reactionary politics. It was all but inevitable that she would seek to appease Alberta’s influential social conservative and far-right Christian movements. Yet she initially claimed she would not need to shield her anti-trans legislation using the NWC. As with most far-right governments, authoritarianism is always waiting in the wings, ready to be deployed whenever politically expedient.

The three bills she chose to subject to the NWC last month amend the Education Act, the Fairness in Sport Act, and the Health Professions Act. Together, they amount to a sweeping package of far-right virtue signalling and direct institutional attacks on the basic existence of trans people in Alberta.

The first bill requires children under 16 to obtain parental consent to change their names or pronouns at school, with mandatory parental notification for students over 16. It also empowers the provincial education ministry to effectively ban the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation, replaces sex education with an opt-in parental system, and requires government approval for any third-party instructional materials.

The second bill mirrors anti-trans legislation in the United States by banning transgender athletes from female amateur sports and introducing a formal complaints-reporting system in schools and sports organizations.

The third bill restricts gender-affirming care exclusively for trans people, banning access for anyone under 16 to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and top or bottom surgery.

These policies represent not only the general anti-trans fervour sweeping the North American right, but also the strategic use of the NWC to shield blatantly unconstitutional and discriminatory measures. They fit within a broader regional pattern: Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe invoked the clause in 2023 to pass a similar “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which—far from a simple debate over pronouns—effectively mandated outing trans children to their parents, exposing them to the risk of discrimination and abuse. Alberta’s additional denial of care could lead to heightened rates of self-harm and suicide among trans youth. Smith has attempted to justify these measures by likening gender-affirming care to overly permissive opioid prescribing, claiming the state must impose “guardrails.”

“Save the children” rhetoric has a long lineage, and it remains foundational to the reactionary, loosely organized parents’ rights movement, of which both Smith and Moe are prominent supporters. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has also embraced this movement, arguing in Andrew Lawton’s fawning biography that “parental rights come before governments’ rights” and that parents should have the final say over “the values… taught to children.” This agenda dovetails with anti-welfare-state politics and demands for school privatization, connecting to Alberta’s historical voucher movement and Smith’s record levels of charter school spending—approaching $10 billion—making Alberta home to the largest private and charter school network in Canada.

The voucher and parents’ rights movements are increasingly fused, as some right-populist strategists view them as two fronts in a broader struggle over limiting state authority: either by starving public funding or by redirecting it to parent-chosen institutions. The use of the NWC against so-called “gender ideology” is justified through a populist framing in which governments claim to defend “common sense” against “government ideology” or socially liberal activist judges.

These developments also align with Alberta’s longer history of deploying the NWC against LGBTQ+ people. After the Supreme Court’s 1998 ruling in Vriend v. Alberta, Christian right groups demanded that the province use the clause to override anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people in employment. Led by the Family Life Coalition and politicians such as Jason Kenney and Stockwell Day, their arguments echoed the same bigoted rhetoric resurfacing today. Premier Ralph Klein resisted invoking the clause for reasons of political self-preservation, but later passed legislation threatening to use it if the federal government ever redefined marriage to include anything other than a man and a woman (the Supreme Court ultimately declared the law unconstitutional).

To understand Smith’s ideology is to situate it within a long lineage of anti-central-planning and anti-welfare-state politics that have defined Alberta conservatism for more than 60 years.

The rise of right-populist rhetoric to justify authoritarian uses of the NWC is part of a broader ideological project—one that must be met with resistance. Ford’s misuse of the clause was defeated through mass mobilization, which succeeded in convincing the public that the NWC is an authoritarian tool granting undemocratic governments carte blanche to act unconstitutionally. As I argued in Canadian Dimension in 2022, legal wins are important, but they cannot substitute for sustained, collective resistance to regressive governments.

Historically, the NWC has been used almost exclusively to attack workers and LGBTQ+ people, all under the guise of limiting state intervention and spending. In reality, it enables a form of state interventionism rooted in far-right politics, masquerading as populism while serving only socially regressive interests. It is a means of contesting the judicialization of rights in a country where courts have often been more willing than political parties to defend minority rights.

To challenge these politics, we must draw from both the longer history of the NWC’s use and its contemporary application by a Smith government intent on reorienting the state toward deeper neoliberalism and reactionary social conservatism.

Ryan Kelpin has a Ph.D. in Political Science from York University where he is also a contract faculty member. In addition to his scholarly work on neoliberalism and right-wing populism in Ontario and Canada, he is a contributor to Jacobin, Canadian Dimension, and The Grind.