The previous post featured my letter urging UCP members of Alberta’s Committee on Private Members’ Bills to recommend that Rachel Notley’s Eastern Slopes Protection Bill proceed to full legislative debate. The committee met to decide this issue on April 13. Its deliberations can be watched here or read in transcript version here.

The odds seemed stacked against the bill. Private members bills from the opposition benches rarely get a positive recommendation from this committee, and none had thus far during the UCP regime. The expected political posturing from both sides for most of the meeting led me to think Notley’s bill would meet the same fate.

That seemed to be what the NDP members thought, too, because they eventually tried to delay the decision by introducing a motion to hear additional evidence from stakeholders at a later date. Predictably, this motion was defeated on strict party lines.

Rachel Notley’s twitter account live-tweeted the NDP’s disappointment:

Now UCP members are shutting down the NDP’s proposal to have stakeholders make presentations to this all party committee about the future of coal mining in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. #ableg UCP MLAs argue they’ve already heard enough from Albertans on this.

— Rachel Notley (@RachelNotley) April 13, 2021

And then a surprising denouement. Immediately after defeating the motion to hear stakeholders (at about 11:04:30 AM of the video or page PB-361 of the transcript), UCP member Joseph Schow (Cardson-Siksika) proposed that the bill should proceed to further legislative debate.

This caught me off guard and seemed to startle the NDP members as well.

When asked to provide precise wording for his motion, Schow deferred to the Chair, who he thought “might have a draft motion.” The Chair, Mike Ellis (Calgary West), did indeed have the needed wording and quickly provided it.

When the Chair asked for “any further discussion,” there wasn’t any. None. The NDP members weren’t about to rock this boat, of course, but the UCP members were equally schtum. The Chair immediately called the vote, and all ten members of the committee agreed to recommend that the bill proceed.

That would not have happened without instruction and approval by UCP higher-ups.

This didn’t necessarily mean that the UCP had decided to support Notley’s bill, however. Indeed, the NDP suspected the government would let the bill die on the order paper before the assembly could debate it. For more on this, see the next post in this series.