This was the last thing United Conservative Party leader Danielle Smith wanted to see happen, and on her birthday of all days! After losing the March 2027 Alberta general election to Naheed Nenshi’s freshly rebranded Alberta Democratic Party (formerly the New Democratic Party, which wisely tweaked its tired old name and severed ties with the federal NDP about a year after the 2025 federal election, won by Prime Minister Freeland’s Liberal Party of Canada), today the UCP’s 42 MLAs were relegated to the official opposition benches in the Alberta Legislative Assembly while Mr. Nenshi was sworn in as our province’s 20th Premier.
What went wrong for the UCP, which was flying high in the polls back in April of 2024, a little under three years prior to the 2027 election? Those educated in political science (well, one in particular who also has a law degree and wrote this must-read Guest Column in the Calgary Herald) can trace the beginning of the end to the spring of 2024, when a report by actuarial firm Oliver Wyman and commissioned by then-Finance Minister Nate Horner (at an estimated cost to Alberta taxpayers in the half million dollar range) was released, recommending that the UCP government remove Albertans’ motor vehicle accident (MVA) tort law rights and replace our longstanding traditional freedoms with an unpopular no-fault scheme (with an illusory tort “option”), somewhat similar to auto insurance systems in New Jersey (where premiums are amongst the highest in the USA), New South Wales (highest premiums in Australia) and our neighbouring province of Saskatchewan.
Against the sage advice of experienced legal counsel and the astute experts at FAIR Alberta, MVA tort law in our province was obliterated and replaced with what the UCP described as its “revolutionary, made-in-Alberta hybrid no-fault system”, foolishly enacted effective April 1, 2025. Unsurprisingly to the majority of Albertans who possess a triple digit IQ, the government’s FAFO move was an unmitigated disaster both for good Alberta motorists and for innocent injured victims of bad drivers. After a short-lived and underwhelming reduction in rates, auto insurance premiums shot up to pre-deform levels in 2026 before skyrocketing to unprecedented heights by the beginning of 2027, leading to the predictable primary platform plank in the Nenshi Democrats’ election campaign: banish the private auto insurance industry from our province in favour of a new Alberta Government Insurance Corporation.
After being gouged by private auto insurance companies on the premiums side of the ledger and grossly undercompensated on the benefits side, Mr. Nenshi’s campaign promise to usher in public auto insurance was sufficiently popular with Albertans that the plan is expected to be introduced as the new government’s Bill 1 in the coming legislative session. Not only do UCP politicians wish they hadn’t been played for April fools by insurance lobbyists and blatantly biased finance department bureaucrats after that fatally flawed Oliver Wyman report was released, avaricious automobile insurers have learned (albeit too late) an important lesson: be careful what you wish for!
“Danielle, wake up, you’re having a nightmare!” Oh, thank goodness; it’s actually the first of April, 2024, and all of the foregoing was only a bad dream. Obviously, our UCP leader would never REALLY turf tort law in favour of some sort of no-fault nonsense, which clearly would be a politically suicidal blunder. Happy birthday, Premier Smith!
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