When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambition of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, and many other points, the questions came quick: Are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boondoggle or two?
Her answer wasn't typical fare from a conservative politician, let alone one with a libertarian symbol tattooed on her arm. Smith replied with a strong defence of government intervention.
"This is why people elect governments: To do the things that they can't do in the private sector, and that includes building massive new infrastructure that connects cities and requires this kind of major investment," Smith told reporters.
Never mind that Canada's founding passenger rail service was privately run, or that the construction consortium that pitched an Edmonton-Calgary high-speed line said they'd do it as a private-sector investment.
Smith has a vision to master-plan all future intercity lines, and mused this week about managing her provincial train network with a local version of Metrolinx, the provincial Crown agency created in 2006 by an Ontario Liberal government to run Toronto-region transit.
That would, of course, be on top of the Crown corporation Smith created this spring to research drug addiction recovery, or when Smith proposed potentially Crown-run natural gas plants as a "generator of last resort."
Add in her ambitions to potentially wrest more provincial management for pension and police from Ottawa, and plans for stricter control over the affairs of municipalities and post-secondary schools, and you might wonder what happened to the Danielle Smith who had long believed in shrinking the size of government.
