Despite UCP scheme to fuel AI data centres, there’s nothing wrong with Crown corporations

Admittedly, the revelation by The Narwhal that Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) is seriously pondering a scheme to create public corporations to build and operate pipelines to carry natural gas to a multitude of AI data centres across the province, and to force private companies to invest in the project, comes as a shocker. 

And since the goal of the plan outlined in a leaked cabinet report drafted for Energy Minister Brian Jean’s department appears to be to pump up the price of natural gas to benefit fossil fuel multinational corporations and the government’s own coffers at the expense of the province’s citizens, that hardly seems like a worthy objective for a government. 

But in half-hearted defence of the UCP, let it be said that there’s nothing wrong with governments using Crown corporations to run businesses of national or provincial importance at arm’s length from day-to-day political considerations.

Moreover, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with governments “picking winners and losers” among businesses vying for public support, as hard-core market fundamentalist critics like the UCP tend to put it when governments play a role in advancing projects of great importance. Indeed, the history of the great accomplishments of mankind in art, science, exploration and technology is a history of governments picking winners. 

That said, as the decade-long history Alberta’s UCP governments illustrates, the party’s leadership, especially Premier Danielle Smith, is almost comically bad at picking winners, its relationship with the business sector is populated with bad actors and tainted with corruption, and its technological preference for fossil fuel uber alles is almost perversely foolish.

The UCP’s determination to make our beautiful province a dumping ground for water- and energy-sucking of AI data centres – which inspire fervent and justified opposition wherever they crop up on the planet – is the most striking example yet of this bizarre UCP instinct to do the worst thing it can for the province and its people. 

If I may be so bold, given the nature of surveillance capitalism, it’s arguably even more offensive than blowing the tops of Rocky Mountains to build open-pit coal mines for Australian billionaires and polluting water all the way to Hudson Bay! 

What’s more, it takes a remarkable level of brass for a government whose MLAs, political operatives, and social media trolls regularly engage in red baiting – calling anyone who publicly stands up for human rights, the environment, or wants a heat pump in their basement a “communist” – doing what real, actual communists are supposed to do. 

You know, building huge state monopolies, having five-year plans the objectives of which must always be met, and stuff like that. Plus suppressing human rights, something the UCP’s MAGA inspirations south of the World’s Longest Undefended Border love to do, and the UCP would like to join if their October 19 referenda questions are anything to go by. (Remember, Vote NO to the Nine.)

The Narwhal’s scoop, and a later report in The Globe and Mail, which indicated it also had a copy of the report, said the scheme would see two Crown corporations created, one to plan where the pipelines would go and another to “construct, own or backstop gas infrastructure.” Very Soviet, if you ask me. 

Both stories indicated the document showed the government had tried and failed since 2024 to push TC Energy Corp. into building more pipelines, but the company’s “proposed solutions fell short.” (Which means, presumably, they didn’t make business sense.)

The Narwhal’s original report said the plan “would give the government the power to control some private investment decisions, including directing companies to build pipelines, and it could also make the government a direct competitor of companies such as TC Energy.” That story also said the document predicted “significant legal and cost impacts for the Government of Alberta” and cost “increases for utility ratepayers.”

If you’re wondering why the UCP would engage in such a scheme, you’re unlikely to get a useful answer from the government even when they get over their shock at The Narwhal’s Friday-morning scoop and get their talking points together. 

Initially, various government departments didn’t return The Narwhal’s calls, said the Victoria-based online publication that specializes in environmental coverage. 

Eventually, someone in Jean’s department sent both publications a note that stiffly insisted: “Governments routinely examine a wide range of policy, regulatory and legislative options when considering complex issues, and internal materials do not represent government decisions. … We are working with industry, including the natural gas infrastructure owners, to better understand these issues and identify practical solutions that support future growth and investment.”

Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi’s explanation at an obviously hastily called news conference on the topic yesterday afternoon is certainly accurate as far as it went. 

“Many Albertans have been asking why is this government so gung ho on these data centers with all their challenges, with their environmental challenges, with their economic challenges, with the fact that they actually don’t create very many good jobs,” Mr. Nenshi said. “This report makes it clear that their strategy all along was to do whatever they could to increase natural gas prices to promote the government’s own bottom line due to their own fiscal mismanagement.”

“The report today says that everyone, all Alberta households and all Alberta businesses will see huge price increases to their natural gas,” Nenshi said. “That means your electricity bill will go up. That means your home heating bill will go up.”

“But it’s not just that. It is a tax on everything. It means everything you buy, including the already outrageous price of groceries, will go up when natural gas goes up, and there is no help coming from the UCP.”

This suggests that unlike the authors of the report and quite possibly the UCP politicians who received it, Nenshi has remembered that higher prices are more than a mere “perception.”

The post Despite UCP scheme to fuel AI data centres, there’s nothing wrong with Crown corporations appeared first on rabble.ca.

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