What UCP cabinet minister mandate letters say about the government's agenda

Kind of like Aunt Martha’s fruitcake. It keeps coming back at you year after year.

AI generated images of the “Alberta Legislature Building on the moon.” (source: DALL-E mini)

Over the summer months, while most Albertans were focusing on navigating wildfire smoke and intense heat, the provincial government released a steady stream of mandate letters from Premier Danielle Smith to her cabinet ministers. The mandate letters are meant to provide direction from the Premier to the Ministers on where the departments they are responsible for fit in the government’s agenda.

Publicly releasing ministerial mandate letters provides a certain level of transparency on the surface but the stream of press releases, as conservative thinker Ken Boessenkool mused last year, “turns an important governing process into a communications and stakeholder exercise.”

As far as I can find, the Alberta government only started publicly releasing ministerial mandate letters in the mid-2000s during the premiership of Ed Stelmach. But, even then, the letters still generated the equivalent of political eye rolling from critics in the opposition benches.

Rick Miller was the Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Rutherford from 2004 to 2008.

Former Liberal MLA Rick Miller, one of the most honourable people I had the privilege of working with with at the Legislature, described ministerial mandate letters as “kind of like Aunt Martha’s fruitcake. It keeps coming back at you year after year.”

Because it’s so normal in Alberta, I was a little shocked to read this week that making these letters public isn’t the norm in some other provinces. Premier Doug Ford’s government fought tooth and nail to keep its ministerial mandate letters from being publicly released.

But, aside from mostly being a communications and stakeholder relations exercise in Alberta, the ministerial mandate letters do give us a glimpse of insight into the direction the government plans to take on certain issues.

Minister of Finance mandate letter

Smith said during the spring election campaign that a re-elected United Conservative Party government’s first piece of legislation would be an amendment to the Alberta Taxpayer Protection Act. So it’s no surprise that her letter to Finance Minister Nate Horner tasked him “to ensure no future government can increase personal or business income tax rates without approval from Albertans in a referendum.”