Steve MacLellan

You’d almost think ideas like Bill 207, the legislation to restrict reproductive rights usefully described on social media yesterday as the Abandoning Patients Act, and the scheme to replace the trustworthy Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta version more vulnerable to mismanagement and misappropriation, were prepared in advance on the assumption Andrew Scheer would be prime minister by now.

Bill 207, as has already been argued here, has the look and feel of legislation drafted in the Premier’s Office and handed to Peace River MLA Dan Williams, one of many anti-abortion hardliners in the UCP Caucus, to present as if it were his own private member’s bill.

But it was Mr. Kenney’s pension machinations, accompanied by noisy cheerleading from mainstream media and in particular Postmedia’s plethora of market-fundamentalist pundits, that really got me thinking about this.

It turns out this isn’t as easy to do as the right-wing commentariat would like you to believe. So while Albertans need to remain on guard against Mr. Kenney scheming to hijack their CPP, it’s too early to despair that their pension funds are about to disappear into thin air like 50 years of Alberta’s oil and gas royalties.