Her Worship is none too amused.And now Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek is turning to social media and other mainstream outlets to express her displeasure with the UCP government’s plans to limit the number and type of funding agreements municipalities and other organizations can enter into with the federal government.In an uncharacteristic Twitter (“X”) blitz, Gondek accused Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of acting like children by waging an “ideology battle” that will “stifle Calgarians’ ability to have their hard-earned tax dollars flow back into their communities.”.“Now that cities actually have the ear of the feds and they've created funding streams that will allow us to build more homes, to fix broken roadways, and make sure that your drinking water is safe, the provincial government, the very same one that wants to cut red tape and operate at the speed of business, that provincial government now wants to slam the breaks and slow things down to the speed of a bloated bureaucracy," she said at a press conference on Wednesday.“Like I said yesterday, mom and dad are fighting and the kids are stuck in the middle and I'm getting very tired of it. Both of them need to figure out how to put their ideological differences aside and work together.".It comes after the Prime Minister parachuted into Calgary last week with $600 million in new funding to build modular homes — ostensibly to address the housing crisis in next week’s federal budget.That’s on top of a $1.5 billion rental fund, another $15 billion to build new apartments, $1.47 billion in loans and contributions to non-profit community housing providers — and even $2.4 billion for AI to figure out how to spend it all.In all, the Liberals have pledged $35 billion in new spending and loans, and the budget won’t even be announced until Tuesday..“We know the federal government, on certain issues, has a diametrically opposed view to what it is we want to do.”Premier Danielle Smith.But Smith says she has a problem with the “ideological strings” attached to that money, in the form of so-called ‘green building codes’, mass zoning changes and other conditions she says effectively bypass her government and trample on jurisdiction.In response, she’s introduced Bill 18, the Alberta Priorities Act to prevent federal interference with her government’s stated ‘priorities’. .If passed, the new law would require that any agreement between the federal government and any Alberta town, school board, university or other provincial entity be vetted by the provincial government first.At a Wednesday press conference, Smith said the law is modelled after Quebec’s Act Respecting the Ministère du conseil executif and asserts that any new, amended, or renewed agreement between Ottawa and a provincial entity that comes without provincial approval will be deemed nul and void.“We’re not going to allow the federal government to come in and work directly with the provincial entity that we give a regulated mandate to and circumvent the things we want to do,” she said.“We know the federal government, on certain issues, has a diametrically opposed view to what it is we want to do.”
