A companion to The Receipts
One rule for them. Another for everyone else.
A catalog of UCP rule changes and conduct where the standard applied to municipalities, independent officers, school boards, and ordinary Albertans is not the standard the government applies to itself. In each case, the asymmetry is on the legislative record, the public record, or both. The legislation is the receipt.
// On the editorial frame
Each entry on this page pairs what the government imposed on others with what it exempted itself from. The left column is not an allegation: it is the stated rule, the statute, or the public position. The right column is not an accusation: it is the documented exception the government wrote for itself. The asymmetry is the point, not the participants.
Items with placeholder source links require primary-document verification before sourcing is considered locked. The page will be updated as records are confirmed. If you have a primary document — a bill text, a tabled record, a FOIP release — the corrections inbox is in the footer.
Elections Alberta is an independent, non-partisan officer of the Legislative Assembly, mandated to administer elections and investigate violations of the Election Act without political interference. On April 29, 2025, Justice Minister Mickey Amery tabled Bill 54, the Election Statutes Amendment Act. Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure warned in writing that the bill's changes would force the abandonment of several active investigations and that none of the significant investigations conducted in the previous five years would have been completed under the new rules. The bill received Royal Assent May 15, 2025, and its enforcement changes came into force July 4, 2025.
// What applies to everyone else
When Elections Alberta investigates a breach of the Election Act — by a candidate, a third-party advertiser, or a registered party — the investigation proceeds under the rules that were in place when the alleged offence occurred. The agency has up to three years to impose sanctions. An investigation does not stop because the subject finds it inconvenient. The rules do not change because the findings are about the wrong people.
Complainants who bring matters to Elections Alberta are not required to hand over a substantially completed investigation before the agency will act. They are required to bring a complaint. The agency then investigates.
// What Bill 54 did
Bill 54 made two changes that gutted the agency's investigative authority:
- Limitation period cut from three years to one. Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure warned in writing: "None of the significant investigations undertaken by the elections commissioner in the last five years would have been completed if this reduced time period had been in place. Several current investigations will not be completed." Active investigations were killed retroactively by the shorter window.
- Investigation threshold raised to a criminal-law standard. The bill replaced the previous "grounds to warrant" threshold with "reasonable grounds to believe an offence has occurred" — requiring, in McClure's words, that "the Election Commissioner will need to be satisfied that a breach has occurred before they can speak to anyone." He concluded this would "eliminate the majority of compliance activities." No other Canadian jurisdiction imposes this standard on election enforcement.
The bill was introduced by Justice Minister Mickey Amery — the same minister documented on the Conduct page as a friend and relative of Sam Mraiche, whose companies held approximately $614 million in AHS contracts and whose procurement practices were under investigation at the time. No allegation is made that the bill was drafted to protect any specific investigation. The minister who introduced it, and the investigations it killed, are on the public record.
The Ethics Commissioner Act sets the rules governing what elected officials and cabinet members may accept as gifts, and what they must disclose publicly when they accept them. The disclosure obligation is the accountability mechanism. In 2023, the body the rules apply to voted to make those rules less stringent. No equivalent change was made to the disclosure or transparency obligations that apply to anyone else.
// What applies to everyone else
The Ethics Commissioner Act exists because the public has an interest in knowing when elected officials receive items of value from people who do business with the government. A contractor who wants a government contract is not permitted to make unlimited undisclosed gifts to the minister whose department awards that contract. That principle is not controversial. It is why the Act exists.
Citizens seeking government permits, contracts, or services are subject to a body of procurement and disclosure rules that were not amended in 2023.
// What they did for themselves
Bill 22 (2023) amended the Ethics Commissioner Act to raise the dollar threshold below which a gift does not trigger a disclosure obligation, and to narrow the categories of gifts that count against that threshold. The Legislature — the body the rules govern — voted to relax them for itself.
The amendment passed during the legislative period in which multiple cabinet ministers had publicly accepted luxury-box tickets to Edmonton Oilers playoff games from a businessman whose companies held approximately $614 million in AHS contracts according to the Mentzelopoulos lawsuit. The government's position was that accepting the tickets was appropriate. The Legislature proceeded to make the disclosure standard under which those tickets would have been assessed less stringent.
No allegation is made that the amendment was drafted to protect any specific recipient. The coincidence of timing is on the legislative record.
The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act gave citizens a statutory right to access government records and an independent officer to enforce that right. In June 2025, it was replaced. The replacement was tabled one month after the Information and Privacy Commissioner found that the government was already breaking the existing law. The new statute made several of those non-compliant practices legal.
// What the law required of government
Under FOIP, a citizen submitting an access-to-information request was entitled to a response. The government's ability to withhold records was bounded by statute. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner — an independent officer of the Legislative Assembly — published a report in May 2025 finding the government was already in breach:
- Disregarding requests as "overly broad" — without legal basis.
- Applying cabinet-record exemptions beyond their statutory scope.
- Treating political-staff communications as exempt when the statute did not permit it.
Each of those practices was found to be illegal under the existing law. The Commissioner's findings are on the public record.
// What the legislature did in response
Bill 23 — tabled and passed under government majority — replaced FOIP with the Access to Information Act, in force June 11, 2025. The new statute codified several of the practices the Commissioner had found illegal one month earlier:
- Requests may now be disregarded as "overly broad" — previously without legal basis, now a statutory authority.
- Cabinet-record exemptions were expanded to cover "background and factual information" not previously exempt.
- Political staff communications are now exempt as a matter of law.
The government's own conduct was found to be illegal by an independent statutory officer. The legislature's response was to change the law. The Commissioner's report is dated May 2025. Bill 23 came into force June 11, 2025.
Alberta municipalities built codes of conduct for their elected officials because accountability at the local level matters. Those codes had enforcement mechanisms — the ability to investigate, censure, and impose consequences on councillors and mayors who breached them. Bill 20 removed the statutory authority to enforce them. The government that dismantled local conduct enforcement left the equivalent mechanisms that apply to its own members untouched.
// What now applies to municipal elected officials
Municipalities may still adopt codes of conduct for mayors and councillors. What Bill 20 (2024) removed is the statutory authority to enforce them. Local governments retained the ability to put a code on paper. Their ability to act on breaches of that code was eliminated.
A code of conduct without enforcement is not a code of conduct. It is a statement of aspirations. Bill 20 preserved the form and removed the function.
// What continues to apply to provincial MLAs
No equivalent legislation has removed or reduced the conduct accountability mechanisms that apply to members of the Legislative Assembly. The Ethics Commissioner retains jurisdiction over provincial members. The process by which an MLA can be investigated for a breach of conduct standards was not amended when municipal enforcement was stripped.
The government that dismantled accountability at the municipal level left the accountability mechanisms covering itself intact. It was not an oversight — the two legislative systems were amended separately and the provincial one was left alone. The asymmetry is the legislation itself.
The UCP's defining political argument is that external bodies — the federal government, municipalities, school boards, regulatory agencies — should remain within their assigned jurisdictions. The Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act is the formal legislative expression of that argument. The pattern of conduct documented on this site is its practical contradiction. The jurisdictional argument is applied to others. It is not applied to the government that makes it.
// The rule for everyone else
The Smith government has publicly and repeatedly instructed the following to remain within their assigned jurisdictions and not encroach on Alberta's:
- The federal government — on energy, pipelines, carbon pricing, and fiscal equalization.
- Municipalities — on housing targets, land-use decisions, policing, and curriculum.
- School boards and teachers — on what is taught and how.
- Health professionals and regulatory bodies — on questions the government characterises as political rather than clinical.
The Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act — passed in 2022 — is the statutory expression of this position. The stated principle: jurisdictional lines exist, are meaningful, and should be respected by everyone.
// The practice, within their own jurisdiction
In its own jurisdiction, the same government:
- Fired the Alberta Health Services board — twice — and directed AHS to proceed with procurement contracts over its own internal warnings.
- Fired the entire AIMCo board of directors and four senior executives in a single day, with no public investigation, replacing the chair with a former Prime Minister.
- Directed the Alberta Electric System Operator to publicly support a renewables policy its own CEO was, in his words recorded in an internal email obtained under FOI, "not comfortable" with.
- Withheld an Alberta Utilities Commission technical report on renewable energy from the public until after the government's policy decision had been announced.
- Invoked the notwithstanding clause to strip 51,000 teachers of their right to strike, bar any constitutional challenge for five years, and impose a contract rank-and-file teachers had rejected by nearly 90 per cent.
- Directed municipalities on gender policy in school facilities through legislative and regulatory intervention.
The pattern: the jurisdictional argument is advanced when external bodies constrain the government's preferred outcomes. It is set aside when the government wishes to constrain the bodies below it. A principle applied selectively is not a principle. It is a tool.
// What this page is for
A double standard is not a hypocrisy. It is a policy choice.
Hypocrisy is a personal failing — saying one thing and doing another. A double standard codified in statute is something more deliberate. Ethics rules loosened by the people the rules govern. Access-to-information rights narrowed by the government those rights apply to. Conduct enforcement stripped at the municipal level and preserved at the provincial level. These are not failures of consistency. They are legislative choices, on the record.
The question is not whether any individual politician is a hypocrite. The question is whether the rules your government writes for itself are the same rules it writes for you. On the items on this page, they are not.
Items flagged with placeholder source links will be updated as primary documents are confirmed. This page is built on the same standard as the rest of the site: if the receipt does not exist, the item does not go up.