NOT SINCE BIBLE BILL ABERHARDT HAS ALBERTA BEEN SO CLOSE TO FASCISM

Alberta sovereignty act: Municipalities, local police could get provincial directives

By Emily Mertz Global News
Posted November 29, 2022

On Tuesday, the first day of the fall sitting at the Alberta legislature, the United Conservative government introduced its proposed Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act.


The province says that if passed, the act could be used “to stand up to federal government overreach and interference in areas of provincial jurisdiction, including… private property, natural resources, agriculture, firearms, regulation of the economy and delivery of health, education and other social programs.”

Opposition NDP MLAs voted against first reading of Bill 1 and released a statement saying the legislation would create “investment uncertainty, jeopardize federal funding agreements and risk Alberta’s economic future.”

READ MORE: Premier Danielle Smith asks ministers to take ‘united front’ when dealing with feds

“I hope we never have to use this bill,” Premier Danielle Smith told reporters Tuesday afternoon.

“We need the power to reset the relationship with Ottawa,” she added, saying: “I believe it’s already working.

“It begins the conversation with Ottawa so that they do not continue to pass aggressive policy targeted specifically at our industry and specifically at our development of our natural resources.

“That is not the way the country is supposed to work. And so we’re helping to educate them and the rest of the country about that.”

Standing up to Ottawa stressed in Alberta throne speech

The proposed act gives cabinet authority to “direct provincial entities to not enforce specific federal laws or policies with provincial resources.” Anyone subject to the act must comply with it, but the act does not outline enforcement measures.

It defines provincial entities as:a provincial public agency
a provincial Crown-controlled organization
an entity that carries out a power, duty or function under a provincial enactment
an entity that receives a grant or other public funds from the provincial government that is contingent on the provision of a public service
a regional health authority
a public post-secondary institution
a school board as defined
a municipality
a municipal or regional police service

We’ve been ignored’: Smith defends proposed Alberta sovereignty act

BULLSHIT

The act lays out the legislative framework through which Alberta can “formally defend its provincial jurisdiction, while fully respecting Indigenous and treaty rights, Canada’s Constitution and the courts,” the province’s news release said.

It also stresses that the bill cannot infringe on First Nations rights, a concern Alberta treaty chiefs have raised.


2:25Alberta Premier Danielle Smith introduces controversial sovereignty act

In response to the tabling of the bill, Treaty 6 and Treaty 8 chiefs released statements reiterating their opposition to it. Treaty 6 chiefs said the act “could conceivably apply to any federal law or requirement, whether in respect to public health, the environment, or treaties — international agreements that take legal precedence over provincial and federal law.

“The lack of prior consultation with Indigenous peoples about this proposed act indicates that reconciliation is not a priority for this premier or this government.”

READ MORE: Alberta plans to resist federal efforts to seize prohibited weapons: Justice minister

The process starts with a member of executive council (premier or any minister) introducing a motion in the legislative assembly for a proposed use of the act. The motion would identify a federal action, policy or law “as being, in the opinion of the legislative assembly, unconstitutional, contrary to the Charter or otherwise harmful to Albertans, along with the nature of that harm.”

The act does not define what “harmful” means. It also does not explain how something could be determined to be “unconstitutional” in the absence of a court ruling.

The motion would also propose measures or actions for cabinet to consider in response.

Then, the legislative assembly would debate the resolution. If the majority of MLAs vote in favour of the motion, it would pass. If the resolution passes, cabinet has the power to carry out the measures in the resolution, including:directing a minister to exercise power vested in that minister by legislation or regulation

giving specific directives to provincial entities
temporarily amending enactments in accordance with the resolution
any other action cabinet is legally able to take

The act would give cabinet the power to change legislation by order in council. That means, laws could be changed or amended without legislative debate.

Under the act, that power would last for a maximum of four years after the resolution is passed.

Proposed sovereignty act provides legal framework to defend Alberta’s rights, freedoms: justice minister

Justice Minister Tyler Shandro was asked specifically about this power at a news conference later Tuesday.

A reporter explained his interpretation of the bill as: “once the motion is debated in legislature and the majority of MLAs vote on it, and then it goes to cabinet and there are directives within that motion, then the cabinet ministers have the ability to unilaterally, if they so choose, change legislation.”

Shandro replied: “That is correct.”

The NDP said the act would “grant cabinet new powers to unilaterally bypass the democratic will of the legislature when making laws,” calling it “alarming.”

“Danielle Smith was elected by one per cent of the Alberta voters and now she wants to give herself dictatorial powers,” said Alberta NDP deputy leader Sarah Hoffman. “Danielle Smith and the UCP are focused on creating more chaos, costs and conflict with her sovereignty act.”

Bill 1 first step in pushing Ottawa ‘back into its own lane’: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith

The province said the act would not compel any private citizen or business to violate federal law.

The United Conservative government also stressed the act does not “involve anything related to separation from Canada.”

Premier Danielle Smith has already asked ministers to prepare resolutions for the spring legislative session that would “push back on several federal laws and policies,” including Bill C-69, fertilizer cuts and emissions reductions, firearms rules, and the delivery of health care, education and other social programs “with strings-attached funding.”

“Albertans are proud Canadians and we love our nation dearly,” Smith said in a news release. “The Canadian Constitution is clear that the federal and provincial governments are equals, each with our own areas of exclusive jurisdiction.

“The Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act will be used as a constitutional shield to protect Albertans from federal overreach that is costing Alberta’s economy billions of dollars each year in lost investment and is costing Alberta families untold jobs and opportunities.”

Sovereignty act, affordability to define Fall legislative session in Alberta

Another goal of the act is to “shift the burden to the federal government to legally challenge Alberta’s refusal to enforce unconstitutional or harmful federal laws or policies instead of Alberta having to initiate legal challenges and waiting years for a decision,” the province said.

The bill would come into force upon royal assent — after it passes third reading and is signed by the Lieutenant Governor — which could happen during this legislative session.

READ MORE: Smith’s sovereignty act to ‘respect Supreme Court decisions’: advisor

The sovereignty act was the cornerstone of Smith’s successful campaign to win the leadership of the United Conservative Party last month to take over from Jason Kenney as premier.

The bill has been criticized by Kenney and even some of Smith’s leadership rivals — four of whom now sit in her cabinet — as a recipe for legal uncertainty, investment flight and the first step toward separation.

Alberta introduces sovereignty act bill granting cabinet broad powers to fight Ottawa

The bill was tabled after Lt.-Gov. Salma Lakhani read aloud in the chamber the speech from the throne, launching a new legislative session.

In the speech outlining government plans and priorities, Lakhani said the four-week fall sitting would focus on helping Albertans with inflation, health care and battling the federal government.

“Ottawa is not our ruler. Ottawa is our partner and it needs to begin acting like it,” Lakhani told the assembled legislature members and dignitaries.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith sworn in as an MLA on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022 in Edmonton, Alta. Credit: Legislative Assembly of Alberta

Earlier Tuesday, Smith was sworn in as the new member for Brooks-Medicine Hat after winning a byelection for the seat earlier this month.

It was her first time back on the floor of the legislature chamber since the spring of 2015.

At that time, Smith was with the Progressive Conservatives, having led a mass floor-crossing of her Wildrose Party months earlier. She failed to win a nomination for the PCs in 2015 and returned to journalism as a radio talk-show host for six years.

READ MORE: Jason Kenney quits Alberta politics with critical letter on state of democracy

Kenney — who was a backbench UCP legislature member since stepping down as leader — announced his immediate resignation as MLA for Calgary-Lougheed Tuesday afternoon. He was not in the chamber for the throne speech or the introduction of the bill.

READ MORE: Federal Liberal cabinet minister concerned with Alberta premier’s proposed sovereignty act

Edmonton Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault said earlier Tuesday he wanted to read the act, which had not yet been tabled, but that he’s deeply concerned with what he called “Alberta’s attack on Canadian unity.”

“Any act that’s going to say: ‘We’re going to cherry pick which federal laws apply in Alberta’ is some sort of opt-out clause that doesn’t exist in our federation.

“I grew up in the Lougheed era when I saw Premier Lougheed take swipes at the federal government over legitimate grievances that the province had. And the prime minister of the day worked it out with the premier of the day but inside the context of strong federation and a stronger Canada.

“My appeal to the premier and to her ministers is: let’s work together,” Boissonnault said.


Trudeau ‘looking forward’ to working with Alberta’s Danielle Smith on range of issues

Ontario Liberal MP Mark Holland said earlier Tuesday that the relationships between the federal government and the provinces are critically important.

“We’re facing the most challenging time in human history probably since World War II. I think whether or not you’re looking at your provincial government, your federal government or your municipal government, I think there’s an expectation that we’re going to work together, that we’re going to find common ground, and we’re not going to play games that divide us.

“I know our government … is focused on having a constructive relationship with Alberta,” he said, before reading the act in full.

“At this point in time, we need to dial back our partisan interests or how we might exploit divisions between us. Instead, this is a time when it’s demanding us to come forward with solutions as productively as possible.”

— With files from Dean Bennett, The Canadian Press

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SOCRED 

UAlberta Faculty of Law Margaret Crang (Class of 1932), the first woman law graduate to serve on City Council in Edmonton

 OFFICIAL CITY OF EDMONTON BIO

https://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/PDF/Crang_Margaret_-_Updated_Bio.pdf

ANOTHER IMPORTANT RADICAL CITY COUNCILLOR AND MY FAVORITE, MARGRET CRANG SHE WAS THE SECOND WOMAN ON CITY COUNCIL AND THE YOUNGEST 

I DISCOVERED HER WHEN I WAS DOING MY BIOGRAPHIES OF LABOUR  REPRESENTATIVES ON CITY COUNCIL. LABOUR OMNI VINCINT

UAlberta Faculty of Law's List of Firsts: Margaret Crang (Class of 1932), the first woman law graduate to serve on City Council in Edmonton

Article by Paula Simons (Edmonton Journal)

Katherine Thompson - 16 July 2013

Margaret Crang, as a young woman, in front of her family home in Garneau. The picture is from the collection of her nephew Robert Allin of Banff.

Margaret Crang, city's youngest elected official finally gets her name on a little piece of Edmonton (by Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal)

EDMONTON - "As a young girl in my teens, I found myself rather addicted to spasms of conviction. Like all adolescent youth, I was given to the projection of desperate ideals of personal and social perfection. The fact is that I really believed that I had a mission to save the world, and what is worse, I knew exactly how the thing was to be done. I was out to mould the world in conformity with the heart's desire."

Margaret Crang,  "Where My Convictions Have Led Me"

Lawyer, journalist, teacher, politician, social activist. The youngest person ever to serve on Edmonton city council. A beautiful woman who turned down three marriage proposals, and who was rumoured, by some of her younger relatives, to have been Dr. Norman Bethune's lover. An eccentric aunt who grew marijuana on her windowsill, hoarded books and magazines, and spent her days in a ratty housecoat.

Margaret Crang, who died in 1992 at the age of 82, dedicated her life to causes she believed in, from women's rights to labour rights to anti-fascism. Whether in the courtrooms of Edmonton or the battlefields of Civil War Spain, she never hesitated to fight for her principles - even when her idealism was her political undoing.

She was one of the most intriguing, exasperating, and ultimately tragic public figures Edmonton has ever produced. Yet Edmonton has no memorial of her extraordinary life and adventures.

That could soon change. Last month, the city's naming committee approved a plan to name a road for Crang in the new southwest subdivision of Cavanagh. They also propose to name a park in the new district, south of Ellerslie Road and west of Calgary Trail, in her honour.

Finally getting her due

City’s youngest elected official will finally have her name on a little piece of Edmonton

• Edmonton Journal
• 15 Jun 2013
• Paula Simons

Simons: An extraordinary Edmontonian will finally be honoured by the city.

“As a young girl in my teens, I found myself rather addicted to spasms of conviction. Like all adolescent youth, I was given to the projection of desperate ideals of personal and social perfection. The fact is that I really believed that I had a mission to save the world, and what is worse, I knew exactly how the thing was to be done. I was out to mould the world in conformity with the heart’s desire.” — Margaret Crang, “Where My Convictions Have Led Me”

Lawyer, journalist, teacher, politician, social activist. The youngest person ever to serve on Edmonton city council. A beautiful woman who turned down three marriage proposals, and who was rumoured, by some of her younger relatives, to have been Dr. Norman Bethune’s lover. An eccentric aunt who grew marijuana on her windowsill, hoarded books and magazines, and spent her days in a ratty housecoat.

Margaret Crang, who died in 1992 at the age of 82, dedicated her life to causes she believed in, from women’s rights to labour rights to anti-fascism. Whether in the courtrooms of Edmonton or the battlefields of Civil War Spain, she never hesitated to fight for her principles — even when her idealism was her political undoing.

She was one of the most intriguing, exasperating, and ultimately tragic public figures Edmonton has ever produced. Yet Edmonton has no memorial of her extraordinary life and adventures.

That could soon change. Last month, the city’s naming committee approved a plan to name a road for Crang in the new southwest subdivision of Cavanagh. They also propose to name a park in the new district, south of Ellerslie Road and west of Calgary Trail, in her honour.

“Her story just seemed really fascinating,” says Jeff Nachtigall, who chairs the committee. “She was a very unique individual who had a major influence here.”

Crang first entered public life in 1933, when she ran for Edmonton city council.

It was a typically bold decision.

Although several prominent women had run for and won seats in the Alberta legislature, only one had ever been on Edmonton city council before; Izena Ross, elected in 1921, served a one-year term.

Crang was just 23, an accomplished track star, swimmer and competitive diver. She’d already earned a bachelor of arts and a teaching degree, and she was a fresh graduate of the University of Alberta law school, so fresh she’d not yet been called to the bar.

She’d grown up Garneau, in a political family, one of the six children of Dr. Frank Crang and his wife Margaret Bowen.

Dr. Crang, a former bricklayer who went back to school to train as a physician, encouraged his daughter’s interest in social justice.

please turn here and h “While accompanying my father on his rounds, I saw the distress among the poor people,” she later told the Toronto Star.

The politics of equal opportunity for all, she said, “were our family topics of conversation, morning, noon and night.”

Father and daughter ran in the 1933 election on the same Labor slate, she for city council, and he for school board.

Crang’s election handouts featured a photograph of a young lady in her graduation gown. Despite her three university degrees, she scarcely looks old enough to be out of high school.

“With thousands of women and children vitally interested in the action of the city council, it is essential to have a woman on the Council,” read the flyer. “Miss Crang is peculiarly well fitted to fill this position.”

On Nov. 8, 1933, in the depths of the Depression, Crang was elected, still the youngest person ever to have served on Edmonton city council.

The Edmonton Journal was well-pleased with her victory.

“Extremely quiet in personality, Miss Crang articulates her ideas with amazing clarity and swiftness and a remarkable singleness of purpose concerning her ideas which augers well for balanced action,” said the paper.

Dan Knott, elected mayor that same night, was asked by the Journal whether he would “treat his girl alderman nicely.”

That he promised to do — although he bemoaned the fact that councillors would have to stop smoking during their meetings.

No one was more shocked by her unexpected victory than Crang herself.

“I can scarcely believe it,” she told the paper. “It makes me feel very serious. I will try to do my utmost to stand up for the principles for which I think I was elected.”

That she did. Over the next decades, Crang dedicated herself to fighting for her principles — even when her idealism was to her political disadvantage.

She ran successfully for reelection in 1935, and served on council until 1937.

She ran three times — always unsuccessfully — for the Alberta legislature. She advocated fiercely for the rights of Chinese and Sikh immigrants, fought to raise the “relief” rates, fought to maintain Edmonton’s streetcar system, and championed the rights of women, including advocating more liberal divorce laws. She took legal cases pro bono for clients would couldn’t pay.

She wrote passionate newspaper articles and delivered thundering radio addresses and public lectures on the dangers of fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

And she criss-crossed the province, making speeches to high school classes, union meetings, service clubs and political rallies.

“I campaigned all over Alberta in the provincial elections in August for the Labor Party,” she wrote to a cousin in Saskatchewan in late 1935. “No sooner was I through with this work than the Federal Election was upon us. I spoke and worked hard for the CCF candidates in and around Edmonton. This was no sooner through than I began a strenuous Civic campaign for re-election to the aldermanic board. Many times I was about to write to you at my office, when the phone would ring or a visitor arrive to talk CCF or a legal client would be waiting for me.”

In September 1936, while still an alderman, she travelled to Spain to witness first-hand the impact of the Civil War between the loyalist Republicans and Francisco Franco’s fascist rebels. Four months after the war began, and a year before the famous Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion was formed, “Margarita” Crang travelled to Barcelona, Madrid and Toledo, dodging sniper bullets and enrolling as a member of the Battalion of Young Guards, writing a series of articles for the Edmonton Journal when she returned about the atrocities she had witnessed.

She outraged many across Canada when she boasted of firing a gun “in the general direction” of the rebel forces. The Vancouver Sun called her “beastly” and “unwomanly.” The Montreal Gazette dubbed her a Communist. The Toronto Star pointed out that Crang had originally gone to Europe as a peace activist, a delegate to a conference in Brussels on war prevention.

“What justification could there be for a peace delegate’s participation in a civil war?” the Star asked.

Though Crang always insisted she hadn’t shot at any actual people, the resulting controversy may have contributed to her loss at the polls when she ran again for council the following year. Then again, it was a bad election for Labor candidates: no incumbents won their seats, and even Crang’s father, a 25-year trustee, lost his own re-election campaign.

While family legend suggests that Crang and Norman Bethune began their rumoured relationship in Spain, that can’t be true. Bethune, the radical leftist doctor, didn’t arrive in Spain as a volunteer with the International Brigade until November 1936, by which time Crang was already back in Canada, writing and speaking about the Loyalist cause. But the two did finally meet when Bethune came on a western Canadian fundraising trip in July 1937, six months before he left to join the Communist cause in China. They travelled together to Medicine Hat and Swift Current, on a joint speaking tour. Bethune was divorced and it was certainly a dramatic breach of 1930s etiquette for a single lady and gentleman to travel together. But whether the two shared anything more than a podium is unclear.

Despite the communist label, Crang’s actual political allegiances weren’t always easy to pin down. While she was prescient when she used her speeches and articles to warn Canadians about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the links between Spanish fascism and that in Germany and Italy, some of her other political ideas were much murkier. She decried anti-Semitism — yet didn’t hesitate to blame Canada’s economic woes on a cabal of evil bankers. She flirted with communism, was an active member of the CCF, then later became enamoured of William “Bible Bill” Aberhart and his Social Credit monetary policies.

When she ran for a seat in the legislature, that lack of rigid ideology came back to haunt her. She attempted to run as a compromise candidate, appealing to both CCF and Social Credit voters. Instead, she ended up splitting the left-wing vote, and disillusioning labour supporters

She advocated fiercely for the rights of Chinese and Sikh immigrants, fought to raise the “relief ” rates, fought to maintain Edmonton’s streetcar system, and championed the rights of women, including advocating more liberal divorce laws.

who were baffled by her new Socred leanings.

Frustrated politically, she left Edmonton and worked as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette. Privately, she was fighting a very different battle. In her 1930s, she was diagnosed with a severe case of Cushing’s syndrome, which affected her pituitary and adrenal glands. The condition sapped her energy, and led to depression. According to Crang’s nephew, Edgar Allin, a retired doctor, it also caused severe osteoarthritis, hunching her spine. From a height of five-foot-seven, she shrunk to less than five feet.

“She went from being quite an attractive woman to a much modified, less attractive individual,” he says.

The condition became so severe, Crang’s family feared for her life. They finally took her to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where George Thorn, the world’s leading authority on diseases of the adrenal gland, was physician-in-chief. There, Crang bravely became a pioneer of a different sort. Allin says his aunt became the first person to survive a bilateral adrenalectomy — the removal of both glands. The surgery saved her life, but she never truly regained her health or energy — or as she later complained, her libido.

For a time, she lived with her older sister, Florence, and her family back in Garneau.

“She was hard to live with and rather messy,” her niece Shirley Moen recalls. “She lived in her housecoat. We’d be having guests over and she’d come downstairs to join us in her ratty old dressing gown, even though my mother had given her nice dressing gowns.”

But Edgar Allin, Moen’s brother, has fonder memories of their aunt and the stories she told about her love affairs and her Spanish adventures.

“Margaret had a rather bad temper and I don’t think she was very fond of children. But I had some very interesting conversations with her when I was a teenager. She was very uninhibited in what she would talk about.”

Crang spent her later years in Vancouver, where she remained passionately interested in politics, especially the politics of China. And she never quite lost her ability to shock. In about 1973, Moen remembers taking her own children to Vancouver to visit their greataunt. Crang offered Moen’s 14-year-old son a beer. When the startled teen declined, the mischievous Crang offered him some pot, from the marijuana plants she was growing on her kitchen windowsill.

But despite such flashes of puckish humour, the beautiful athletic woman, the unstoppable firebrand, was gone forever.

“Once, she told me, she went for a walk in Vancouver. She looked over on her right and saw this odd, gnome-like little person walking beside her. Then she realized it was her reflection,” says Allin.

Yet the real reflection of Crang’s life is the society she helped to shape. Today, there are four strong women on Edmonton city council. The premier and the leader of opposition are women. Female law students outnumber their male classmates. And many of the radical policies Crang championed — welfare, universal health care, equal rights for Asian immigrants — have become core Canadian values. Some of her political enthusiasms, to be sure, have not withstood the test of history. Yet without Crang, and her generation of social revolutionaries, we would not have the country we have today.

Still, her family is surprised and pleased to learn the city is proposing to name a park for their remarkable aunt and cousin.

“I think she would have been delighted. And so am I,” says nephew Edgar Allin.

It will be some time before Margaret Crang Park comes to be. Its location still needs to be approved by city council, the subdivision still has to be built. In the meantime, Nachtigall, chair of the city’s naming committee, is delighted to see Crang’s story being told.

“We in Edmonton need to know our characters. It’s good when people dig into things and find out these stories. It’s good to dig into our past. These stories are little treasures, that help us to understand more about our history.”

Certainly, with a new civic election season upon us, it’s a perfect time to remember the importance of city councillors with convictions, who fight with passion to make this a better city. psimons@edmontonjournal. com Twitter.com/Paulatics Paula Simons is on Facebook. To join the conversation, go to www. facebook.com/ EJPaulaSimons or visit her blog at edmontonjournal. com/Paulatics edmontonjournal. com To see more archival photos and to read the original text of Margaret Crang’s fiery 1934 radio address, courtesy the Provincial Archives of Alberta, go to edmontonjournal.com/insight

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March 08, 2016

Edmonton City Councillor with an Edge: Margaret Crang

Happy International Women’s Day!

To celebrate the United Nations’ recognition of women and their achievements, today’s post discusses a remarkable Edmontonian and University of Alberta (“U of A”) Faculty of Law alumnus, Margaret Tryphene Francis Crang. We are grateful for the opportunity we recently had to speak with Ms. Crang’s niece, Phyllis Crang, and her great-niece, who helped inspire this biographical post. Her great-niece, Catherine A. Crang, also graduated with a law degree from the U of A and is a partner at a prominent Calgary law firm.

 

Margaret Crang earned three degrees by the age of twenty-three at the U of A: a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Law, and a School of Education diploma.[1] She was a keen athlete, excelling in track and swimming. Her photo is included in the Faculty of Law’s graduating class of 1932. In that ninth graduating class, she and Ms. H.K. Craig were the only women in their class of eleven, and only six women had graduated before them. Ms. Crang was well respected by her peers and sat on the student executive committee along with well-known members of the Edmonton legal community, Wilbur Fee Bowker and William Ogden Parlee.

In 1933 Ms. Crang became Canada's first female city councillor.[2] She remains the youngest person to ever serve on Edmonton City Council.[3] Her tenure on council lasted only four years, despite topping the polls in the 1935 civic election.[4] By 1937, the conservative Alberta politics ousted many politicians with more leftist ideals, and even her father lost his twenty-five-year seat on the school board to a more conservative candidate.[5] Some argue that her idealism, and particularly one controversial event in Spain as outlined below, prevented her from being re-elected in 1937.[6]

Ms. Crang was called “council’s chief defender of the unemployed and their organizations”.[7] She was raised by liberal parents, including her physician father who, as a member of the Canadian Labor [sic] Party, advocated for the unemployed, the ill, the young, and the poor during Alberta’s poor economic conditions in the 1920s.[8] Ms. Crang’s idealism was deeply rooted as a product of her upbringing; she is quoted as having said:

As a young girl in my teens, I found myself rather addicted to spasms of conviction. Like all adolescent youth, I was given to the projection of desperate ideals of personal and social perfection. The fact is that I really believed that I had a mission to save the world, and what is worse, I knew exactly how the thing was to be done. I was out to mould the world in conformity with the heart’s desire.[9]

As a socialist, a pacifist, and a staunch anti-fascist, Ms. Crang attended the United Peace Conference in Brussels in 1936 along with nine other delegates from Canada.[10] She was the national representative of the Edmonton Branch of the League against War and Fascism and a member of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (a political coalition of progressive, socialist, and labour groups).[11] That same year, the Spanish Civil War had recently broken out. While in Europe, Ms. Crang seized the opportunity to sneak into “war-ravaged” Spain through a tunnel on the French border.[12] Luckily, Ms. Crang had this opportunity less than a year before the Canadian government criminalized involvement in the Spanish Civil War.[13] Ms. Crang and nine other delegates connected with some milicianas, the republican Spanish women who battled fascists, who took them on a tour of Madrid and a battle front. Feeling a sense of connection with her female comrades and an overwhelming sense of justice for the Spanish government forces, she picked up a rifle and fired two shots in the direction of the fascist guards.[14]

Newspapers across Canada, including the Edmonton Journal, reported on her anti-pacifist, “unwomanly” act when she returned home.[15] Despite there being no legislation to criminalize her act, the conservative attitude in Canada during this time destroyed her socialist political career. After her city council term ended in 1937, she was unable to secure re-election and three efforts to break into provincial politics were also unsuccessful. Instead, she practiced as a lawyer on the west coast of Canada in support of the rights of refugees and immigrants and enjoyed a career as a journalist in Montréal for the Montréal Gazette. She eventually relocated to Vancouver to be closer to her parents, and passed away in 1991.[16] To recognize her contribution to the Edmonton community, the City of Edmonton has named a park in the southwest after Ms. Crang.

Ms. Crang’s remarkable story is timely - in the spirit of celebrating International Women’s Day, we honour pioneer women in law and politics who both benefitted from the rights to vote and hold office, and who contributed to the women’s equality movement in Canada.

 

[1] City of Edmonton Archives, “City Government”, Chapter 18 - Biographies of Council Members (online):

<http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/Chapter_18_-_Biographies.pdf> [City].

[2] Katherine Thompson, UAlberta Faculty of Law's List of Firsts: Margaret Crang (Class of 1932), the first woman law graduate to serve on City Council in Edmonton, University of Alberta Faculty of Law News (online): <https://lawschool.ualberta.ca/news/main-news/2013/july/margaretcrang-firstwomanlawgraduatetoserveonedmontoncitycouncil> [Thomspon].

[3] City, supra note 1.

[4] Larry Hannant, “‘My God, are they sending women?’: Three Canadian Women in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939”, Journal of the CHA 2004, New Series, Vol 15 (online): <http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/012072ar> [Hannant].

[5] Ibid.

[6] City, supra note 1.

[7] Edmonton Public Library, City Councilor [sic] Margarent Crang, City of Edmonton Archives, EA-267-534 (online): <http://www2.epl.ca/edmontonacitycalledhome/EPLEdmontonCityCalledPhotosSingle.cfm?id=1648> [Library].

[8] Brief Biography of Margaret Crang, Old Alberta, 12 June 2013 (online): <http://oldalberta.blogspot.ca/2013/06/brief-biography-of-margaret-crang.html> [Brief]. 

[9] Thompson, supra note 2.

[10] City, supra note 1; Hannant, supra note 4.

[11] Hannant, ibid.

[12] City, supra note 1; Hannant, ibid.

[13] Dougal McDonald, “How Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act Criminalized the Anti-Fascist Volunteers”, 75th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War (online): <http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmlw2011/W410045.HTM> [McDonald].

[14] City, supra note 1; Hannant, supra note 4.

[15] Hannant, ibid.

[16] Brief, supra note 8.

Margaret Crang

Profession: 

Lawyer, member of Edmonton City Council, 1933-1937, on a Labour ticket

Hometown(s): 

Edmonton, Alberta

Education: 

University of Alberta, law school

Political affiliation: 

Canadian Labour Party; Cooperative Commonwealth Federation

Affiliations to union and social groups: 

Active with unemployed groups; League Against War and Fascism; Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, including speaking at and organizing for Bethune's speaking tour

Approximate date arrived in Spain: 

1936-08-00

1938-00-00

Unit: 

Geneva World Youth Congress: Youth Delegate

Final status: 

Survived

Other: 

Crang visited the front lines in Madrid and fired two shots at the fascist lines, which may have damaged her political career in Alberta

Sources: 

Petrou; Ancestry; Hannant, "My God, Are They Sending Women Now?"

PROTEST AND PROGRESS

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay, Margaret Crang... three Edmontonians who stood up and fought for the working people of their city through the dark days of the World Wars, the fragile prosperity of the 1920s, the grinding poverty of the Dirty Thirties and Cold War repression.

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay and Margaret Crang did not win all their battles but they made a difference in the history of the city, the province and the country.

PROTEST AND PROGRESS Quantity Selection - Provincial Archives Of Alberta

THE ALBERTA NDP THE PARTY OF OIL WORKERS

THE COINCIDENTAL BIRTH OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS 

AND THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA

Rachel Notley warned New Democrats that adopting the LEAP manifesto which demands the end of oil extraction from the Tar Sands as well as conventional and shale gas plays, and NO pipelines, would put the Eastern arm of the party in direct conflict with a party that is proudly Albertan and directly involved in the oil industry history in the province even more so than the long ruling party the PC’s.

It was the development of oil and energy in Alberta that created new wealth and a new industrial province after WWII. The discovery of oil not only brought the oil industry but also the oil and energy workers union, a small American union that had an arm in Alberta, the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers OCAW. In Alberta it was beginning its organizing of workers in the field and in the new gas and chemical plants being built between Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan.

This was the post war boom, the party in power was Social Credit, and while  there was no NDP there was an active labour political movement housed in the AFL and Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, members belonged to the Communist Party, the CCF and some still belonged to the OBU and IWW.

Edmonton had a history of electing labour council members as Mayor, Aldermen (women), school board trustees and Hospital Board members. Elmer Roper  longtime labour activist, CCF activist and candidate, owner of ABC Printing and publisher of Alberta Labour News would be elected Mayor of Edmonton after the creation of the NDP by the merger of the CCF with the newly created post war Canadian Labour Congress.

The sixties saw the growth of the labour movement in Canada and in Alberta, including the creation of an active movement of organizing public sector workers, provincially, municipally and federally. The Federal Workers Union originating in Calgary would merge with the Ontario based National Workers Union to create what we know as the Canadian Union of Public  Employees, the Civil Service Union of Alberta would become a union known as the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

But throughout the oil boom of the fifties and sixties the union most associated with the provincial NDP was the Oil Chemical and Atomic Energy Workers Union under the leadership of Neil Reimer and his assistant Reg Baskin

That’s right the party was brought to life in Alberta by Oil Workers in the provinces new Energy market. Its first party leader was Neil Reimer, who would meet a charismatic young politician a contemporary of Peter Lougheed and Joe Clark at the University of Alberta, Grant Notley who would go on to become party Leader and its first elected MLA.

Notley himself did not represent Edmonton but his home region, the oil rich north of Alberta, the Grand Prairie, and Peace River riding.

As it had since 1936 the Social Credit party of Alberta held power in the province as a one party state, under the permanent leadership of Premier Ernest Manning, Preston’s daddy.  The New Democratic Party of Alberta focused its energy not only on consolidating union power in the party as well as the voices of the left and progressives but in challenging that Social Credit domination of Alberta Politics.

This was also the time of the Cold War and the Anti Communist Witch Hunts, a time being anti war, anti nuclear war, pro labour, was considered suspect. Where union members who were left wing were exposed to police spying, where padlock laws in Quebec had been used to raid imprison and steal property belonging to those accused of opposing the Duplesis regime or who were suspect of being Reds.

Duplessis ‘s party in Quebec aligned with that provinces Federal Social Credit Party which was aligned with Alberta’s Party as well. In both provinces the left faced one party dictatorship which reminded many despite their democratic trappings of the forces they had been fighting against in WWII.

As in Alberta it would be the post war labour movement in Quebec under Louis Lebarge that would mobilize politically as well as economically against the Old Regime, his right hand was a young activist lawyer named Pierre Eliot Trudeau. And like Alberta they were building a provincial and national party; the Liberals.

This then is the historical basis for the differences between the left in Quebec and the rest of Canada and why it took so long to breech these two solitudes, as was done in 2012 under Jack Layton and the federal NDP.

Premier Rachel Notley, the daughter of Grant Notley, the first NDP MLA ever elected to the Legislature, the first opposition member elected against the Social Credit party of Ernest Manning  had this rich history as her prologue at this week’s national NDP Convention in Edmonton where the party adopted the LEAP manifesto which challenges the very energy economy that makes Alberta a modern industrial state.

This province created the NDP under the leadership of  Neil Reimer, an oil worker and oil union organizer.  Neil was the first leader of the Party, and Reg Baskin was his right hand in their union and the party.

Neil also created the modern Canadian Energy Workers union,  Neil and Reg first represented oil workers in the new industry in the province with the OCAW  oil chemical and atomic workers of Canada, which had one other base of expansion; Louisiana.  He and Reg made it the Canadian Energy Workers Union, which became CEP merging with the Canadian Paper workers unions in BC, and now has consolidated with CAW to create UNIFOR.

Neil’s daughter was Jan Reimer two term Mayor of Edmonton during the 1990’s and while party labels are not used in Edmonton municipal elections everyone knew that we had an NDP mayor.

Meatpackers, a union that disappeared in the eighties with amalgamation of the meat packing industry into a smaller and smaller oligopoly, was a militant base of union workers and activists including communists and socialists, that was a large base for the party, as was Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488.

These were the post war unions that were the party’s base in Edmonton and across the province. Federally the postal workers were a strong backbone for the Federal Party, though there were two separate unions at that time, letter carriers and inside workers, the latter being more left wing and militant with OBU IWW communist, socialist and Trotskyist activist workers.

It was the discovery of tar sands oil that led to the growth of the province, the union and the NDP. It was also this discovery and its needed development during the Arab Oil Crisis of 1971 that led to the end of the Social Credit government, its movement, but not its essence. In its place came the newest members of the Alberta Legislature elected in 1967 for the first time, the Lougheed Progressive Conservatives. They would be joined by Grant Notley and the NDP in opposition in 1968, when Grant won a by-election in Spirit River.

The “Progressive” element in the Lougheed PC’s represented the post war Liberal base among the non Anglo ethnic communities in Edmonton and Calgary, such as the recent post war immigration of Ukrainians, Italians, Portuguese, Greek, European, Asian, and Displaced Peoples. The Liberals had no political existence in Alberta since they were wiped out by the United Farmers/ Labour Party coalition in 1921.

Even Lougheed’s conservatism was not the neo conservative Austrian school embraced by the republican lite Preston Manning cons of today, it was classical liberal capitalism, that progressive aspect of capitalism that sought to ameliorate through regulation what short comings capitalism itself may suffer from despite its idealism of being the ‘ideal’ system.

The history of the Alberta NDP is the history of the Oil Workers and the Oil Industry in Alberta, even more than it is for the current batch of Conservatives provincial or federal.  The NDP in Alberta grew up with the oil industry with its workers and their union. For the Alberta NDP to reject both the LEAP manifesto and those call for the end of pipelines is natural and should have been expected by those who know the party history in the province.

For those who fail to understand this historic base of the party in Alberta fail to understand the social democratic politics of the oil industry, the NDP has long supported a form of nationalization under public ownership and increased workers control through unionization.

This occurred in the case of Suncor which was the earliest of the oil sands operators, before the Syncrude conglomerate was created.  In the early seventies after the Lougheed government promoted the oil sands, Suncor began mining operations.  Neil Reimer’s new Canadian Energy and Paperworkers union, CEP, got its birth in a long and bitter historic strike at the Suncor operations.

CEP went on to organize refineries in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan.

It tried but failed to organize Syncrude due to its conglomerate ownership and its concerted anti union efforts over the decade of the seventies into the eighties. Today unionized Suncor has bought out Syncrude so this situation opens it up to unionization decades later.

The seventies and eighties saw massive growth in the province including growth in both private and public union membership.

This also saw the success of the NDP and the left in Edmonton. While Grant Notley was a lone NDP member in Alberta Legislature, Edmonton saw a left wing U of A Prof David Leadbeater elected alderman.  Notley was joined in the house by Ray Martin, from Edmonton.

The NDP elected Ross Harvey its first federal MP from Alberta in the eighties from the old packing plant and union district of Edmonton Beverly. This was at the height of the Arab Oil Crisis of early eighties, which the Conservatives in Calgary blamed on the NDP Liberal National Energy Plan, NEP, which included the creation of the Canadian Publicly Owned Oil and Gas Company PetroCanada.

PetroCanada was a success and saved Calgary and the Lougheed Government during this oil crisis, it was able to buy up, nationalize, American oil companies like Gulf Mobile, Texaco, Chevron,  as well as smaller Canadian and American oil companies that were going broke or bailing out of Calgary heading back to Dallas and Huston.

And CEP was there to unionize it. Today PetroCanada is no more the Liberals privatized during the Austerity crisis of the Nineties, and Paul Martins Liberal Government sold off the last of our shares prior to the 2006 election.

Ironically it is Suncor that bought them and then bought up PetroCan and absorbed it., just as it has done with its competitor Syncrude.

It would be during the late eighties and early nineties that under Ray Martin the NDP would gain a record number of seats, going from 2 to 23 and status of official opposition. But by the time of the middle of nineties and the Austerity panic of debt and deficit hysteria and the birth of the neo conservative movement that two city Mayors, Ralph Klein of Calgary and Lawrence Decore of Edmonton would battle it out for Premier of the Province, Klein for the PC’s and Decore for the Liberals. Both ran on Austerity budgets, one promised massive cuts the other brutal cuts. It was a close election the losers were the NDP who were wiped out as a third party.

In Edmonton we had a new NDP mayor to replace Decore, Neil’s daughter Jan Reimer, joined by another leftist alderman the bus driver Brian Mason. The NDP centred itself in Edmonton at this time and got elected the enormously popular  team of Pam Barrett and Raj Pannu.

The CEP was critical in supporting the NDP at this time, including having its past president Reg Basking become leader of the Party.

After the shocking early death of party leader Pam Barrett, former alderman Brian Mason ran in her riding, Highlands, which also covers the Federal riding of Beverly that Ross Harvey once represented and won her seat in the house. Raj Pannu became the first Indo Canadian leader of an NDP party in Canada.  After he stepped down Brian Mason became the leader of the party.

The party went from four seats to two to four until Brian stepped down and the party elected Grant Notley’s daughter, Rachel Notley, who had sat in the house with Brian through all those ups and downs in electoral success.

The party base is the labour movement and left across the province and no less important unions such as CEP, IBEW, Carpenters and UA488 all involved in the oil sands and the petrochemical industry in Alberta.

So why are the various wags and pundits surprised when the Alberta NDP does not LEAP off the edge of a cliff named STOP PIPELINES, STOP DIRTY OIL.

In the finest of social democratic traditions, the Alberta NDP will do no such thing nor should it be expected to. It will ameliorate the worst of the environmental damages that the fossil fuel industry has and can be expected to cause. They will create a green plan, and expand the carbon fuel tax the PC’s brought in.

 It will do what the conservatives would not do, and that is eliminating Alberta’s Socred PC dirty energy economic backbone: coal. And that is the real dirty energy in Alberta, coal fired utility plants. These plants are evenly divided between private ownership, with state support from the ruling Socreds and PC’s, TransAlta Utilities, and publicly owned municipal utilities EPCOR and ENMAX. TransAlta is the original P3 funded by taxpayers under the Socred and spun off to become a private company where government cabinet members retire to the board of.

Even Lougheed was tied to the coal industry representing his old employer Mannix Inc, as a board member of Luscar Coal, which during the nineties created a major controversy with its efforts to mine outside of Jasper National Park.

Contrary to Greenpeace and other environmentalists who claim oil sands are the dirtiest energy the real dirty energy on the Palliser Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan is coal.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel that needs to be kept in the ground. There is no such thing as clean coal!

There is however clean petrochemical fuels, that is the nature of refining, creating finer and finer grades of hydrocarbons; ethenes, benzenes, oil and gas for plastic production, diesel etc.

That is the reason for both the Joffre and Scotford massive refining projects and the plan for the heartland refining project, which would allow the province to crack and refine bitumen into secondary and tertiary hydrocarbons.

That is what the future of the energy is in Alberta, stopping the use of coal, refining hydrocarbons and shipping them south, east, and west.

Why would the NDP limit the provinces ability to ship what it processes.

As I have pointed out the pipeline west will probably go through the Peace River Athabasca highway route to Prince Rupert, which coincides with BC Site C dam development and its LNG  pipeline development, giving pipeline companies an alternative to going to Kitimat via the BC Sacred Bear Rainforest.

Energy East will be built and the NDP will promote as it did in the eighties, the idea that Alberta energy for a fair price should go east. What occurred instead was it was shipped to refineris in Ontario and Quebec at discounted prices where it was refined and sold to the US while oil was imported from the Middle East.

This was the original idea of the NEP that the NDP and Liberals promoted to Lougheed, and he agreed to! And like the NDP this was his vision for Alberta oil before he died.

While the LEAP manifesto is suitably left wing green etc, even shudder, anti capitalist ( read anti corporations) it is not something either the labour movement or NDP in Alberta will agree to do much more about than debate. Debate will be welcome, dictat not so much.

LEAP like most environmentalism today fails to take into consideration that even if workers had control of publicly owned energy companies, we would still be producing hydrocarbons, and will be even after the glorious Socialist Revolution.

The dirtiest energy causing climate change is not oil sands in Alberta or Venezuela it is coal and wood burning worldwide.  That is the challenge we face to shut down coal, and wood burning, not to accept the myth of Clean Coal, and to make sure we ameliorate environmental damage caused through hydrocarbon production.

You want to keep something in the ground its coal, and the biggest fight back in Alberta today is the utility lobbies who oppose the Alberta NDP Government ending of coal fired utilities.

In Alberta the NDP is the party of oil and oil workers. Never forget it. The old Social Credit of Preston Manning’s daddy’s day and the PC’s of Lougheed Klein were both parties of coal.