In a recent article Global News notes:
Incoming legislation that requires provincial approval of direct agreements with the federal government has universities in Alberta exploring potential impacts.
The Provincial Priorities Act, tabled Wednesday, prevents any direct agreements between the federal government and several provincial entities without approval from the Government of Alberta.
Those entities include municipalities, school boards, health authorities as well as post-secondary institutions.
However, the legislation goes further than the Quebec law it’s modelled after, which doesn’t include colleges and universities.
With all the normal and special challenges that charities face with fundraising and revenue generation, they don’t need another impediment. This could be quite costly for Alberta charities. We just released our Blumbergs’ Snapshot of the Alberta Charity Sector 2022, which indicates that Alberta charities received about $1.1 billion in Federal revenue in 2022. It was 1.2 billion in 2021. This is based on self-reported information from the T3010 data.
Any time a provincial government is involved in decision-making about funding for charities, it can add months or years to the process. Even if everyone agrees that something is good, like childcare, it adds a lot of time and politicking, etc. Just to review lengthy proposals, length funding agreements, etc can take a lot of time. How many provincial bureaucrats are going to be involved in reviewing hundreds of different projects?
Sometimes, funds are only known to be available weeks before the end of a fiscal year. This will put Alberta charities at a competitive disadvantage. Essentially, the Alberta government is shooting its own charities in the foot. What will charities do? Perhaps they will go to foreign governments who are presumably not covered? UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia may have funds to contribute? Perhaps they will have less funds, and the Alberta government will provide them with more funding?
It will be interesting to see how vigorously different umbrella organizations react to this unfortunate precedent. When perhaps a few hundred million dollars in tax savings was at stake from UHNW individuals related to the AMT, they forcefully organized a campaign. Let’s see what happens this time.
The problem when you have people in power who are generally opposed to government and who also might not be so smart, you get things like:
Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney says “The desire is not to impede academic freedom”. Then the minister says “We want to make sure that this funding does align with provincial priorities.” Huh? Academic freedom and “provincial priorities” are not going to always align. Then she added “I can’t think of a single grant stream that’s going to the post-secondaries that would be problematic.” Then why have such a stupid requirement? The minister has just imploded the rationale for having their legislation. Also, if UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia contribute funds, what is the likelihood it will be aligned with “provincial priorities”?
As a person living in Ontario who has to endure incompetence from our current government in Ontario, my heart goes out to the people of Alberta.