Shaun Newman Podcast - #648 - John Burrows

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

John is a councilor of Woodlands County in central Alberta and a director for district 3 of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta. We discuss Bill 20 and his thoughts on the municipalities working with the provincial government. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener. Ticket for Dr. James Lindsay “Parental Rights Tour”: https://brushfire.com/anv

This is Brett 14. This is Doug Casey. This is Tom Romago. This is Alex Kraner. This is Viva Fry. You're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. How's everybody doing today?

Yeah, hump day. Wednesday. Yeah, it's a good day. Well, anybody got any confidence in our government? No, didn't think so. So maybe now is the perfect time to diversify some of your heart and savings. I don't know what. It's so sad.

It's funny, isn't it? Like, I mean, it's almost called. comical. Anyway, yeah, yeah. Anyways, maybe it's a

perfect time to diversify some of your hard-earned savings in a physical money that can't be printed. Yes, I'm talking

gold and silver. Silver Gold Bolt, of course, are my favorite precious metals dealer here in Alberta. They can ship

all the way across, all of Canada, all the United States. You just got to go to the right place. Silvergoldbill. dot CA here in Canada, silvergoldbullbull.com

in the United States. They got a spot in Vegas. I got a spot here in Calgary. They ship from there. And they got a special offering just for you. Sean Newman podcast listener.

That is the Royal Canadian Mint, Silver Maple Leaf. Just text or email Graham down on the show notes, and you can find out more information. Rec tech power products. For over 20 years, they've been committed to excellence in the power sports industry. They've got a bunch of different things going on here coming up in the months to come.

On Father's Day, June 16th, they got Demo Day. They're going to be able to Bright Sand Lake here in the area. small beach pavilion 10 a.m. The 2 p.m. They got Cidu and the Cidu switch. You can demo it on Father's Day. That'd be a pretty cool little thing to take the old man to. 14th here is going to be in June is the anniversary party.

25 years that are going to be on location. So on the west side of Lloyd, they got an off-road demos and a giveaway of a paddle board, a C-D paddle board. So on location with the barbecue, that'll be a fun, 25 years. Where did the time go, ain't? Where did the time go? Of course, party in the pasture. St. Walberg, they're going to be there for May 31st and the first second.

They got a train show in the arena happening. And then the Stark Vargs. They're the only place in all of Saskatchewan selling them. I think I got that right. And when you see it, it's the electric dirt bike, and you should just go take a look at them. I don't know what more to say than, like, you know, Ryan gets all. excited talking about him because he's, you know, he's a guy in that world. I look at them and I'm going to go like, this thing is something.

It's something. You can turn it on right in the showroom, fire it up, see what it's all about. All right, Rectectpowerproducts.com. That's where you can find out more OroCorp, stop in on the west side of Lloyd Minster and see what they're all about. Caleb Taves, Renegade Acres. They got the community spotlight. And I got a lot of time for Mr. Caleb doing the community spotlight.

week, an injection of truth town hall June 17th in Calgary hosting world-class experts to present the medical and scientific case for stopping COVID-MRNA injections in children. Dr. Eric Payne, Dr. Chris Schumacher, Dr. Byron Bridle, Jack Jessica Rose, Dr. William Maccas, Dr. Mark Trozy. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting, interesting evening. I'm hosting that night, which should be, you know, from this side of things, it should be interesting. as well. You can get tickets at an injection of truth.ca. You know, they've had

their event bright pulled them and now they've had some politicians kind of feel like maybe the political climate isn't there. So maybe we should try and support this. If you can't make it, it's a Monday night in Calgary. You can still buy a live stream version of it so that way you can

have a viewing party wherever you're at. And I think that's probably a, well, this seems like it's going to be something that we should all be supporting. The deer and steer butchery. It's 4H season. They're open for bookings and slaughters for

4HBs. They can't forget. It's barbecue season. Smoking time, which means perfect time to fill freezers as well as they're smoking and grill cuts. And if you haven't stopped in and met the new butcharest, that's Amber. She's mother or two, born and raised in small town Wadena, Saskatchewan.

And now she's in little old Lloydminster. Give them a call. 7-8 870, 8700 to get your meat booked in today. Erickson Agro Incorporated at Irma, Alberta. That's Kent and Tosha Erickson, family farm, raising four kids, growing food for our community, and this great country. You know, been into the sun is playing United Baseball,

which has been, you know, I'm not going to lie, it's been a ton of fun, ton of fun. But you start to realize, like, there's certain communities that got just a ball, culture to them. And when did you know it? Irma's another one of them. So there you go. The Erickson's out in Irma. It seems like they got quite the little sporting community there.

Shall we get on to that tail of the tape? Probably should. Here we go. He's a counselor for Woodlands County in central Alberta. Also a director for District 3 of the rural municipalities of Alberta. I'm talking about John Burroughs. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by John Burroughs.

So, sir, thanks for making the drive all the way to Lloyd Minster. Absolutely. I appreciate the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. Now, I don't know a whole heck a lot about you. So I'm going to really assume my audience doesn't know a heck a lot about you either. So why don't we just start with, you know, a little bit about who John is and then we'll get into it.

Okay. Well, I guess I'll start off in... in where I started. I started in the trades. I was originally in aircraft maintenance engineer and became a heavy duty mechanic. I'd lived in multiple provinces. I'd lived in northwestern Ontario.

I was born and raised in Manitoba. Did a couple of years up in northern. Sorry to hear that. Bees. Oh wait, it gets better. I went up to northern BC as well. And yeah. And I would always look around the country

and think, you know, where do I want to be? I don't feel like I quite fit here. I don't like the way some of these things are working. And I finally found myself attracted to the way things were going in Alberta, which Alberta was kind of the last bastion of free enterprise, low government regulation, low taxes. And I don't think there was a ton of government interference and they tended to stay in their lane. So I moved to Alberta in 2008.

I actually did five years up in McMurray. And then in 2003, I moved to Woodlands County, and I've been there ever since. And what was it about Woodlands County? Like just, I'm trying to picture it in my brain. And it's probably why it like what attracts you to Lloyd Minster kind of thing. But what was it about, you know, you've been all over the place, Woodlands County. What is it about Woodlands? Well, I originally went there for a job.

I was looking after a fleet of fixed-wing aircraft as an aircraft maintenance engineer. And then things changed a little bit, and I just kind of stayed there. I enjoyed the area. I liked the recreation that was there. I liked the lifestyle. I had lived in cities. Don't really like them. So I decided to stay.

And so I changed my trade over to heavy-duty mechanic. and worked in that for a while and then started a business. And I was quite successful as a mobile heavy duty mechanic business. And then in 2017, there was a municipal election. And I got tapped by a few of my friends. They said, you know, you should really run on this. And so I started a campaign and door knocked and went through the neighborhood and I managed to win by two votes.

By two votes? Yeah, two votes. The second election was a much better outcome, but I was, I was, I was off-seeding a fairly prominent. When they say your vote doesn't matter when it's, when it's a town, not a town trip, sorry, I'm thinking RM counselor, but that's what it is, right? Yes. So in an RM, two votes, what was the, do you know what the official tally was on each side? Oh, it was fairly low. The overall engagement in municipal politics is low.

Is low. Yes. So, yeah, it was in the hundreds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was like 102 to 100. Yeah, I think it was 208 to 206, something like that. That's wild. Yeah, it was close.

You know, on this show, you know, I've talked to a lot of blue collar guys. It's, you know, one of the things I enjoy doing the most because they just have such a unique and wonderful way of looking at the world. and most of the time they don't get talked to because they work in the blue collar industry and most people don't give them the time of day because they think they need to have a PhD behind their and yet you have a PhD in a different sort. When you got into politics or started running for it,

what are your thoughts on it so far? I mean, you've been now, now it's seven years. Yep, seven years. So originally I saw some things that were going on in my municipality that I didn't like and they were really centralized around this one issue. And what I, as I got talking to different people, and I even said at the time, you know, running on that one issue is not enough to be a counselor.

It's not a good enough reason to go into that area. So I wasn't going to do it. And then I started having more and more conversations and I started to form this picture. And I said, well, this problem, I think is systemic. the municipality and if we can fix the systemic part of it then that other problem will get fixed by itself so that's basically how i i came to do it but i wanted to make sure that i wasn't one of those one issue uh counselors that like you you do run into that from time to time what was the one systemic issue that you were trying to address oh it was just some things that we had going on about

development at the airport at the time and did you get it fixed um yeah we're getting close. Seven years in and it's still, if that isn't a micro, like a screenshot of politics in general, we're getting close seven years later. Yeah. It's, and that's part of the issue, you know, you get into it and you start realizing how difficult it is to, to move, move the needle. I'm not, I'm not special.

I mean, I was, I even served as Reeve for four years in the municipality. You're still, even as Reeve. you're one vote out of seven. So you've got to bring people along and see if you can make your case. And you learn to be a little more persuasive and you learn better communication and you learn how to make stronger, I guess, cases. I won't say arguments, but let's say cases for what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you can start building your case.

So what brings you in the studio is I'd had, well, it started with a mashup, You probably weren't privy to that I assume you weren't. But we brought up the Bill 20. It kind of hit the news cycle. And on a show we do on Fridays, we brought up, started talking about it, which led to Shane Getson talking about it in the house. And then I reached out because I'd had his constituents show me the video. And I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to bring Shane in to talk about it.

and then that podcast, I get a text from a listener and bring on you. Let's talk about it. I don't know where you want to go. I don't know what you want to say, but hey, here's the floor. And with a guy coming from the municipality's background, this is pretty much the other side of the coin. I could be wrong on that, but you've had the government now say their thoughts on it.

This isn't a big deal. Like we're just cleaning up a few things. We're putting in a couple checks and balances. And we have the relationship of parents. child now you're the the other side of that coin I think and I'll let you know what are your thoughts yeah so I guess I got to speak as a 50-something year old child but I I I immediately chafed on a personal level at that at that comparison of the parent child idea and I think that and let me back up a

little bit here too because I didn't mention my role in the RMA. So when you get into the rural municipalities of Alberta, I was elected as a director there, and I represent 13 municipalities in central Alberta. And it's easy in municipalities to kind of, you get over-focused on what's going on in your municipality. You're thinking that this is the only municipality that this is happening to.

Then you get into an organization and start to really communicate with other municipalities, and you start to find out that a lot of problems are running throughout the province and a lot of them are having the same problem. And in Alberta there's 87? There is, I can't remember the, the urban count, but the rural count is I think nine, no, it's 64. 64.

Yeah, I think, okay, all right, all right. Just for my own brain on numbers. So when you meet on the, I'm forgetting, what it's even called. Is it the AMA? Rural municipalities of RMA. Yeah. Like I'm like, AMA is stuck in my head, folks. I'm having a brain. Anyways, when you meet on that, how many, how many people are represented there? Um, sorry, how do you mean how many people? Uh, how many people are in those meetings? Well, at the director level, we have, yeah, we have, uh, five directors. So five directors and a president and a vice president. Thank you. And so there's seven people meeting for,

once again the province which is you know as you point out 64 rural plus the cities i'm just painting a picture in my own brain i'm doing a horrific job of it this morning welcome to a monday morning uh by the time this is released a wednesday morning regardless uh thanks for coming along for my my brain fog this morning okay apologies no and then uh anyways and then and then listening to that podcast and then we we see the the bill 21 bill 20 and bill 18 that that came out recently. And I, the idea that, uh, that the province is moving in a direction that's going to take away local control, it's going to centralize the authority.

And that seems to be a theme through all three of these bills. Um, when I heard the, the, the comment to the, the parent-child relationship, I was, I was making some comparisons on one of the things that I've been noticing for, for lack of a better term, no pun intended, the rural municipalities and municipal politics in general used to be the farm team for provincial politics. You generally start off in municipalities and then work your way up. I think there's only three MLAs right now that have worked in municipalities that are sitting. So the idea of the whole parent-child relationship is, if you have been a, let's use the analogy since it was, brought up. If you have been a child, you know what it's like to be a child, you know what it's

like to have your parents act a certain way, you have some empathy for it, and you inevitably grow up and say, well, I'm not going to do that when I have kids. I think in this case, we've got a provincial government that doesn't understand what it is we do in municipalities. I don't think they have a feel for it because they never did it. And I think they're, I think they're, I think they just don't see the importance of what it is that we do. That's the crux of it in the, in the parent-child end. I can see how a guy who has your, your background, all your acumen of your skill set, plus seven years now in municipal politics, and then parent-child relationship, I can see how

that's, you know, in theory, a provincial government should be leaning on the municipalities to help build a framework that would be, I don't know, lack of a better term, healthy. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's what we're really looking for is a, you know, a partnership rather than a parent-child type of relationship. We understand the way the legislation's created. And if you come back to the, excuse me, to the legislation, you'll, The way it's written, we are creatures of the province and we understand that. We're not, uh, we're not null to that fact. We get it. But the reality is that we're being undermined. Uh, we're the, the level of government that's closest to the people.

And we see three pieces of legislation that has components in all of them that undermine that local authority. So what is it when you look at the three bills, what is it specifically that sticks out to us like these are, these are issues? issues? Well, let's start with some of the more simple ones, the Bill 21, which is the Emergency Statues Act. That one basically seeks to, if you declare a sole, then a state of local emergency, then the province can come in and take over the action and start directing local assets. We're looking to try and form a partnership on these kind of local

emergencies, not necessarily have the province come in and do everything. Now, I was affected in my municipality, I was affected at the time by the wildfires last year. And the communication from the local level council, again, we're the level of government that's closest to the people. So we end up being for the most part the most trusted. We have relationships with our residents and in the case of emergencies, you need to communicate with people, not just you need to evacuate, you need to do this, you need to do that. You have to communicate in such a way that they understand why it is they're doing these things. And I think that's a respectful way to go about the communications, and I think it's something that can only be done at the local level.

So this has to be a partnership. and I, so I'm not sure how this legislation exactly is going to fix things. And the other issue is that we actually have a resolution. So at our convention with rural municipalities of Alberta, the various municipalities can go ahead and make a resolution and direct the board to act in a certain topic. And one of them is to actually build a stronger partnership in wildfires that are outside the,

forest protected areas. So that's the, that's the area where the municipalities are going to be fighting the fires. And this is the discussion that we were having with the province and, you know, we're asking for a partnership and we end up getting that. So. You know from, and you probably have heard this a lot, I assume. The thing is it get talked around the, I don't know, proverbial water cooler when it

comes to forest fires in particular, wildfires in particular, is a lot of people. is a lot of people being very, very frustrated. It doesn't matter if it's provincially or down to their local government as how they're not allowed to help. You know, I've heard about it in BC. It was probably the first place. And I want to say last year it was Northern Alberta. You can, I don't know if I'm getting the spots.

I know I interviewed a lady out of BC specifically. That's the one that comes to mind. But, you know, like the thing is, is people want to help. And, you know, coming from a blue-collar background, you realize real fast that, There's a ton of people out there who know a ton about how to protect their land and, and, you know, get in front of bad situations and lend a hand and have the equipment and have the skill set necessary.

And one of their problems with any form of government is when it comes to emergencies, the people are just told to run away and hide and not to, you know, lend a hand and get the problem solved. Yeah, and we're, we've actually struck a wildfire committee. So we're looking at that right now as to how can individuals help and that topic has definitely come up. And I think I and I and this is the problem. You're going to have to look at it from both sides. If you have somebody that's, you know, running off on a cat doing something, there is a possibility they'll run over a crew.

There's a possibility that they'll make things worse. There's a possibility that. So there's there's all of these possibilities. There has to be some kind of command. and control structure around that type of help. And there's got to be a little bit of training on communication and where you go and how you build some of these fire breaks. So, but again, you're right. We do have a tremendous access to a pile of heavy equipment in, in Alberta.

So there is lots of help to be had. The other big thing is when it comes to wildfire and protecting your property, One of the biggest things that you can do prior to a wildfire breaking out is actually do some fire smarting around your property. Have a look at the combustibles that are next to your home. You know, move the wood piles, the brush that's grown up. There's a whole guideline around Fria for fire smarting your properties. Yeah, I 100% agree. I was almost thinking, you know, what you have in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

I can't speak to the rest of the country because I don't know how I just know growing up around farms in the rural is you almost have like a standing army sitting there if you want to enlist their help because most people be like, what do you need? Yeah, right? They don't want to see people suffer and everybody in the rural communities has come from a background of, you know, or a history, a lineage of like you look out for your neighbor and you know when they're in need, you go help and and all they're looking for is that tap on the shoulder and unlist them. And that way, once again, I could be speaking at a turn here, but I go, that way you don't need to have 10 pieces of equipment that cost the taxpayers X amount of dollars. It's like you have your reserves, if you would, you have your equipment that you need, but then you also have all these, like all the heavy machinery under the sun and people willing to

go put themselves in that, in the way of danger to help protect the community as a whole. I don't know. I understand it's way more complicated than that, John, but yeah, I don't know. I stare at it too as a symptom and I go, we overcomplicate certain things. You know, that's what politics does. Yeah, and I don't want to suggest any solutions on that,

but it's definitely something that we're looking. Exploring. We're exploring. And again, there has to be some command and control structure around it and some level of training with it, but it's definitely something that we're looking at. Bill 20 was the one that stuck out to me when I first read the, you know, the overview of it.

And then Shane had pointed out, well, that's always been in there, you know, the ability for the government to come in and remove, you know, counsel, mayors. You know, I interviewed Chestermears, and I bring it up again and again because I just, you know, I can't sit here and say that they're completely unjustified and going in there. but I look at it and I hear from people from that area and and it seems like there's a lot more questions than then this just is resolved by the government coming in. So for me, Bill 20, when I read it, I went, well, this is going to centralize more power. And if we learned anything through COVID,

which certainly I have, I don't want central. I would rather decentralize things. I'd rather have, you know, empower, you know, if Calgary wants to go the way it's going, if Emmington wants to go the way it's going, well, eventually it has to get, bad enough where the people decide to engage with their local politicians and get it better. And I wish that on, I think, you know, maybe I'm wrong.

I wish that upon all of Alberta or all of Canada that in order to get people engaged, they have to feel like they have the voice in in getting things pushed through and how things are done. So when I read Bill 20, I was like, oh, I don't know if I like this at all. Shane says it's always been there. What do you think? Well, well, in a way, it has been there. some portions of it have been there, but the idea that you want to make this process easy,

I think is what municipalities are worried about. This is not supposed to be an easy process. They have put recall legislation in place. There's a mechanism at the local level to get rid of a counselor or a Reve or a mare that's acting out of hand. So that mechanism is there. And honestly, the best recall legislation that we have is an election every four years. If you think doing this job is easy, it's really not.

And there are people in my community that probably don't like the things that I do. And I hope I get a chance to talk about it later. But I had to do one of the most unpopular things that you can possibly do in a municipality, and that's cut services, raise taxes, and cut spending. So we did all three of those things, and it's as a result of an unpaid oil and gas tax issue that's ongoing that the government hasn't addressed. They've addressed portions of it, but it's still continuing on. Well, I mean, when you call, when we talk about recall legislation, I'm all for it. And I'm all for the four-year thing.

But you get something like Mayor Gondack, where they had, what was it, 16? thousand-ish signatures and you realize, you know, when you start understanding the 40% of the eligible voting population, you're like, so we got recall legislation and that's a good thing. But overall, it's just another, in my opinion, government did what the people wanted in the best possible way for government. It's so unattainable. We got recall legislation. We got recall legislation, well, that's great. You know, it's, once again, I don't mean to pull you into my way of thinking, but like, you look at MRI jabs, okay, the vaccine.

It's not mandatory. You got choice, you know, but it's still there and still being pushed by H.S. You know, like, what are we doing? At this point, there's enough stuff out there. Like, what are we doing? Oh, we're playing politics. So the recall legislation, while I'm all for it, and I'm all for the four-year thing with voting, I agree.

but the people, you know, if we're going to decentralize and have the ability for people to feel like they have control of it. It needs to be difficult enough that it's not like on a whim you can have it. But it needs to be attainable. And the recall legislation we have right now is really, really, really difficult. Yeah, that's fair. It is a high bar. But it's supposed to be a high bar. So the issue that that's really in the legislation,

is the fact that the provincial government can come in and strike bylaws. They can remove counselors. And again, these types of things are supposed to be difficult. Remember when I started the, the, uh, the conversation, uh, I mentioned that I was working on a problem that I ran on back in 17 that got me involved in this. And we're still working through it. Things in government do not move terribly quickly. And that's good and bad.

Um, if they move in the wrong direction quickly, then you're going to have a lot of problems. If they move in the right direction quickly, then everybody's for it. But that, that little bit of checks and balances that are in there so that the, the speed doesn't move too too quickly, I think it, it still needs to be there. Now, I'm curious, you know, and, and feel free to disagree with me, uh, John. while I agree with you, to me, it feels like government can move really fast when they want to. And the rest of the time, they move really slow, painfully slow. Because, like, you know, I just go back to COVID.

And I know we beat this with a, we beat this horse dead. But like, anything in there, everything was moving real fast. So when they have public safety, it seems like everything can move real fast. When it's something that's mundane, like recall legislation or, you know, what do you have, you, Bill 20, right? It seems like it's pretty mundane. It seems like it moves real slow. So while I'm all for it, I do think government can move real fast when they want to. And it's trying to find out what carrot will do that, you know, because like one of the things with the bills, all these bills,

is part of it is in response to Trudeau going directly to the municipalities instead of going to the, Alberta government, isn't it? Aren't they trying to do things that force the government's hand to come talk to the province instead of going to the municipalities or the towns that be? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's I think that's part of the plan. The reality is that you can you can very easily affect policy at any level with the incentive of grants and access to funding and things like that. So if you at a federal level decide that you want to move in a certain direction and you're going to introduce a program, so something around funding, and they move directly into the municipalities, then they at the federal level can influence local decision making. And I think that's what the province is worried about. So I completely understand where they're coming from in that way. It's part of this local autonomy that we need to start having conversations around this. If you're going to believe in municipal elected government, then, you know, you've got to,

you've got to treat them like it. And maybe put things in that protect it. Yeah. And, you know, it would be, it would be nice if we had a conversation with the province at the municipal level where, you know, they say, that, hey, we'd like to move in these directions, we'd like to enhance these things. You know, we never really had that kind of a, at least in my experience, I never had that kind of a conversation with the province,

that, you know, we'd encourage you to move in these directions, or this is the direction that the province wants to move in, and we'd encourage municipalities to come along with us, or, or, and we, we don't often find that instead, and, and again, what you're getting now is this kind of parent-child relationship, and you'll do as you're told and, you know, just sit down. This is where I'm like, you know, I'm not new to politics now because I've been talking about it now for a couple of years and I've gotten to have lots of great conversations,

but you'll have to forgive me and fill in some blanks here because I just want to make sure that I'm not missing an organization or something. So you have these, these, you have the Alberta politicians, the MLAs, the Premier, uh, bringing in new legislation for municipalities. You're a director of the RMA, which represents the municipalities. Yes. So you're one of seven, correct? One of five.

At the RMA, I'm one of five. At the local council level, I'm one of seven. Okay. Okay. So when they're putting these bills together, did they have one of you in there, at least to consult with, to be like, hey, this is what we're going to do, or is that not how that relationship works at all? That's not how that relationship works. Why? Because aren't you a representative of the larger body of municipalities?

Yeah, well, I'd have to leave that to the province to have that discussion, but it's not how it works. Not that you can answer why, but why? I don't know. I don't know why. It's just not the way it works. Typically, we do get to have some conversations with them. There is some more consultation, but in the cases of some of this legislation, we're finding it pretty light on the consultation end, if there was any at all.

And certainly the amendments that have come out on the bills, they're really adding more words, as one of our directors, sorry, as our president put it, they're adding more words, but they're not changing the meaning of it. there's no other RMA

it's not like there's like seven different councils that represent municipalities no there's two there's two organizations in the province one of them AB munis represents the urban municipalities so that's towns cities and villages and then there's

the rural municipalities of Alberta and we represent the rural do your two organizations talk absolutely yeah we often actually interact. You know, there's a board that I sit on with the president of AB Munis.

So there's, yeah, we, we interact quite a bit. So best case scenario, once again, I'm like Monday morning quarterbacking this, as if I'm going to get listened to anyways, would be that the Alberta government listens to this and goes, oh yeah, we should have totally talked to these people, pick up a phone call, or pick up a phone, make two phone calls and get people sitting down at the the table on the specific, on the specific legislation, sorry, to get their input, because that would just make sense, wouldn't it? Well, I would think so, yeah.

And, excuse me, to, to that point on picking up the phone, I know our president has had conversations with the minister, Minister McIver. I can't speak to those because I wasn't on the line that was between the two of them. But based on the amendments that are coming out, it doesn't seem that the directions changed. It's the same legislation that it started out as. And again, the biggest things that we're worried about is some of the definitions that are tricky. Removing a public, or sorry, removing a counselor in the public interest. And that is such a broad terminology in the public.

interest. The AER, Alberta Energy Regulator, is mandated to look after resources, oil and gas, and they're responsible for issuing licenses, and they have a, you know, for the betterment of Albertans for the good of all Alberta clause in there. So that would be the public good as well. But as a, in reality, we've got $251 million in unpaid. oil and gas taxes across the province right now. And we've got some that are continuing to operate that still are not paying their municipal taxes. And if you want to, I can go into a large story about how that, that affected my municipality

because we were one of the earliest and one of the worst hurt. So I was elected in 17. I got into part way through the 19 year. and we found out that we were 9 million behind in payments from an oil company. That oil company ended up going bankrupt. And that was, that was Trident. Okay. Yeah, that was Trident.

And they were, I think their total liability was 900 million or something like that across the province. So it was, and you got to keep in mind when these companies, blow out like that, they're not just leaving the municipalities stranded for uncollected taxes. They're leaving the small oil and gas service companies that, again, it's the reason that I moved here for is because this is a very small business friendly province. So now you've got, and I just spoke to him the other day, so a local business that we had, he was owed 900,000 by the company when they bankrupted. So he's got to eat a million dollars worth of bills. And he's already sent the trucks out. He's hired the guys. He's paid the wages. He's, he's got all the

expenses to deal with, and he's got no cost recovery on it. And the longer that you let these companies start to operate, keep operating, the more that they start to pull healthy companies down with them. Right now, when we look in our tax rule, we can tell who's healthy and who's not by whether or not they're paying their bills in the municipality. Because if they're not paying their taxes, they're usually not paying their subcontractors either. And if we're moving into a realm where you can continue to operate companies without paying your municipal taxes, there's a there's a reason that we have those, and part of it is the fact that we need to maintain the roads and the infrastructure that allow access to a lot of those.

A lot of them are private roads, but there's a large portion of municipal infrastructure that provides access as well. So this is why we need that revenue. We need to keep going with this. And again, 251 million in unpaid taxes, this resulted in, for my municipal, we had to go on to an economic recovery cycle that we're just in the fifth year of now. We're entering the last final year. And I have had to vote for a tax increase of revenue generation 3% annually for the last five years.

And we've had to do that. The worst part is a $3 million line item in uncollected taxes that exist in the budget. And in the first two years, we failed to collect $3 million annually. So the... And that comes once again from an oil company's not paying their taxes? That was mostly oil and gas. It was 95% oil and gas, yep. And part of the thing that's difficult to understand is that you've got an asset that the

liabilities on oil and gas, the environmental liabilities on oil and gas. So people would say, well, why don't you just go in there and seize the property, like you would in a private. If you don't pay your taxes after three years on a private residence, the Municipal Government Act says that we can actually enact a process to go in, seize the property, sell it, and recover the taxes. They do that at the urban level, they do that at the rural level. If we were to do that, we now find ourselves in a huge environmental liability

because you start to be liable for all the cleanup and all the environmental issues that go with those sites. So the risk to the municipality is higher in seizing the asset than it is to let it keep operating. That's part of the problem. Now, there was a court decision, the Redwater decision, and they're not even attaching the tax liabilities to the bankruptcies anymore because they consider a municipality not a secured creditor. So without anything to go by, when a bankruptcy occurs, we're out the money. and it ends up going on the backs of residents and local businesses.

And there's another component that nobody talks about enough in this one, and that's local landowners have surface rights leases. So they'll actually be a well site on private lands, and the oil company will strike a lease with that particular landowner. A lot of those are not being paid right now, along with the municipal taxes. So you have now the Surface Rights Board that you can make a complaint to, and the taxpayer is funding millions of taxpayer dollars into that program to pay landowners for what oil and gas companies aren't paying them.

And this is an issue that we've been, that it started on the horizon in about 2016 badly, and it's gotten, it was probably at the height around 2019, 2020 and then it's continuing on a little bit. There are oil and gas companies that are continuing to operate that are not paying their taxes. So what do you guys do about that? Well, again, the- Or what can you do about it, maybe is the better question.

The licenses are issued at the provincial level through the AER. And I don't know about you, but if I've got a business that relies on operating motor vehicles or anything along the, those lines. If I don't pay my insurance, I don't pay my registration, I don't pay my, any of these things, you don't get a license to operate. You can't operate the vehicle without, without the, uh, without the appropriate things lined up. And I, I don't understand why they can't attach the taxes to that. Once again, that's an Alberta government thing that it has to go through there, correct? Yeah, that's, that's the provincial level. So, and that's, again, that was an unseen component when I was when I was running in 17 I wasn't aware of it but I'm very

very aware of it now so and it's something we've been talking with the province about to try and help us out and they have made changes so at least they can't you know in our municipalities case for example we we had a company that wasn't paying its its taxes then another company was going to come in and buy these assets from this company, and that's a license transfer that has to be approved by the AER. So the AER sent notice to the municipality saying that this license transfer was going to take place. And we said, hey, great, you know that company that hasn't paid taxes in the last three years? Well, the company that's buying the asset hasn't paid taxes in the last two years. So you're telling me that they can come up with the money to buy the oil and gas assets,

but they can't come up with the money to pay the taxes. So that, but the AER didn't have that in their considerations at the time, so they approved the transfer. Again, Sean, if it's, if it's a common sense thing that you're looking for, you weren't going to find it in that, in that story. Are any, like, you're probably not, you probably can't say, but regardless, when it comes to not paying their taxes, is there any companies where you're like,

it's really surprising who isn't paying it or all the big boys are just fine on their taxes? It's smaller oil field companies, although I might add in when you said it was Trident, who didn't pay theirs and they had $900 million. I mean, that's no small company. No, that is no small company. And part of the problem is when, and I guess,

and this is the thing being at the local level is you see this. So this poor company that I was telling you about that was owed a million dollars. They now managed to survive this. And, you know, this guy hadn't paid himself in three years, the owner of this company. So he manages to survive this and he keeps the whole company going. And his reward for this is I have to up his taxes at the municipal level.

Yeah, I can see how that's beyond frustrating. And further to that, and this is the, I think the really salient point is when Trident bankrupted, I don't think anyone noticed in the community. But if you lose some of these small local service providers like this company that I was talking about that had to eat the 900,000, those are the guys that support community lunchbox programs, those are the guys that put the hockey jerseys on the backs of the kids, those are the guys that are active in the community because they're part of it. And these are the ones that we need to be protecting. Correct. Those are the, not protecting.

I shouldn't say protecting. Those are the guys whose interest we need to be looking out for. Yeah. Protecting a guy from losing 900 grand from a company not paying their bills, right? You say protecting and you correct it right away, but I don't think you're wrong in your assessment of it. It's these companies that support the community. They are part of the community, right? And what you're pointing out is they get screwed over.

and then on top of that, they get footed to pay the bill. Or, you know, and they're not paying the full bill, but their taxes go up, which is paying the bill. Because once companies default on, their obligations,

who's left to take care of it? The public. And, you know, an extent to that is a commercial business. Yep, absolutely. I actually went through, I was just looking for my numbers here. I went through something that was,

we sent out our tax assessments and nobody likes it when you send out a tax assessment, but you may not know this. When you get an assessment, there is a municipal portion of the assessment and then there is a provincial component that's on there. So one of the things that we're starting to see grow is the provincial component, and that takes away some of the tax room from the municipalities as well. So right now, and I'm going to look at this because I want to make sure our mill rate in from if I compare 2023 to 2024.

And I think the important thing for you to notice is that we're still in the middle of an economic recovery where we were increasing revenue generation, which which is a component of our mill rate. But our mill rate actually went down by 1%. And the government of Alberta's mill rate went up by 4.8% on the education requisition. So the parts that come from the province are the education requisition and the seniors allocation.

So in 2024, and I went through this fellow's assessment, in 2023, 21.8% of his assessment went to the not assessment, sorry, of this total tax roll went to the province. In this year, 23% of it is going to the province. I'm going to have you explain this one more time to a simpleton on this side. I just want to make sure that I'm hearing what you're saying, correct. What you're saying is over time the government's portion of taxes is becoming larger and it's therefore forcing municipalities to either become smaller or to raise taxes.

Well, we're, as I'm getting, that right or not you're you're you're generally right the reality is that we're in a we're in a revenue crunch and we have been for a little while now municipalities in the province are we're all in a in a revenue crunch the the problem is that what you're seeing is a continued downloading of some of these costs onto the municipalities with no mechanism of recovery so the the the Alberta government seems to be very generous with a portion of, with an incentive to oil and gas, for example,

at the expense of municipalities. So I'll give you an example. There used to be a thing called the equipment well drilling tax. And the equipment well drilling tax was designed to, if you're drilling a new well in this area, then there's going to be a tax associated with it. And the idea behind that is that you will be incurring major

usage of some of that local infrastructure. There's going to be some damage associated with it, and the roads have got to be up kept. So there's some upkeep that goes with it, and it's more of a usage type of idea. That was the idea of the oil and gas well tax, the equipment drilling tax, sorry. The government of Alberta has eliminated that now,

and I have municipalities that I represent. One of them has a 60, million dollar municipal bridge that those companies use. And without and there's lots of activity in that area, but without that specific and so the government availability. So the ability for us to generate revenue is starting to shrink and all of that is starting to fall on residents and local businesses. And then we're also seeing some of the requisitions increase.

Even the police funding model has now filtered down to municipalities like ours. I've got 4,700 residents in Woodlands County, and you're looking at half a million dollars for the police requisition, police funding model. Fill me in, police funding model. What do you mean? So back in the prior to the change, municipalities under 5,000 didn't pay for police. They've changed that. and in our case we were actually always paying for police because we had a partnership agreement

with the urban that was kind of next to us that had an RCMP contract so we were always paying that 500,000 anyways but the police funding model is going to be part of the new provincial police force coming forward and there's got to be a way to pay for policing so now municipalities under 5,000 are starting to pay for this police funding model. Well, I shouldn't say the majority of them were already paying for it somehow or another, but now the police funding model is setting up in such a way that it's just a funding model that you've got to deal with. So you're looking at these continual downloading of costs into the municipalities

and a shrinking way of generating revenue to deal with those increasing costs. Which means taxes are going to go up. And that means that it transfers on to residents and businesses that are in the municipality. If you go back to them removing the tax on drilling, the thought process, I assume, would be, you know, if we make it more lucrative for companies coming in drill, they drill, they, you know, they hit oil, they build leases. Now they have to pay tax because they've got these wells to operate. And so you go, you remove one tax and hopes that you. you draw revenue generating industry, essentially. Yep.

And then they stop paying their taxes on revenue generating, and now you're out twofold. So you're not actually getting the tax, and you're not getting the tax to go drill it, so they're getting not freebies, because they still owe it, but there's no consequences, I guess, for not following it through on what they're supposed to do, right?

I don't know that there's any numbers on anyone that's benefited from that, and to unpaid taxes. I don't think that we've necessarily crunched those numbers. But from a philosophical standpoint, I guess, yeah, you're right. Well, remove the financial barriers if they're, you know, I don't know how much tax they're paying to go drill a new well. But if you make it more lucrative for industry to come in, the hope would be that they hit oil, they, you know, they build industry.

And now you're RM. They become a local employer. and on and on it goes. But when they don't pay their, you know, they're, when they go under, you're showing how it just, it filters through your entire community now. And what happens is the taxpayer once again is left on the hook to pay the bills. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And part of the, part of the thing is that in enacting legislation like that, it's great.

And again, I'm a free enterprise, low tax type of guy. But what you have to be aware of is that the tax break that you gave them or the incentive that you gave them, whose pocket did you take that out of? The reality is anytime you offer an incentive or you do some kind of a break, somebody's got to pay for that. And it's at the moment, it's always the municipalities that are paying for that. So it's not on the provincial side of the revenue. They've never relieved the royalties for a certain portion. They've always done it.

Royalties all go to the province? Yep. And they've never done anything like that. They've always cut it on the municipal side. So how many, like in your mind, you've probably stued on this now for seven years or maybe, maybe less, you know, I don't know what time frame it takes of becoming a local politician to when you start to stew on some of the bigger matters. But you look at, you know, you look at the provincial government, you know, like Shane

Gadsden was just literally in here. not saying he's the guy that you have to talk to by any stretch of the imagination. But I just look at it and I go, well, how do we get, I don't know. My brain always goes like super simple. It's like, well, let's just get a groupie in and let's just start talking about it, you know, and get the public in on the conversation and all of a sudden good things might come. They might not. Maybe it just ends in a punching match.

I have no idea. But I look at it and I go like, okay, so you've had lots of time to stew on this. It's like, so what do you need from the government or what do you need for like, you know, from legislation? Are you saying just like, listen, all these bills need to be reworked from the very beginning. You need to come talk to us and let's have a grown-up conversation. It's not a parent-child. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, how about we just adult, adult?

And we just sit down and go, like, this is what would work. We need to have a few things. We want the province to be able to fend off the federal government when they're doing stupid things and they're doing lots of stupid things. But also, you know, within our own province, we need to have this balance and let's, it's no different than on the real small, level, what I'm saying about local farmers and heavy machine operators, when there's an emergency, they want to help. They don't want to sit on the sidelines. They don't want to go race off to some other community.

There's some do, but there's lots that want to help. Let's make it so that they can have that ability. And we're kind of saying that from a municipality, provincial government level as well. How is it that we can get to where we're talking to one another? And I'm sure you've had lots of time to think on this. Yeah, we've definitely had time to think on it. It would be nice to get a little better communication, just so that they understand what it is that we're going through.

And it's, I don't want to pick on, it was a minister that's actually not there anymore, but at the time when we were asking for these taxes to be collected, they said, you know, the provincial government is not the municipalities tax collector. And that seemed like a really strange thing to say when, you know, what, 25, roughly, 25% of the, of the assessment that, or the taxes collected at the municipal level go to the province.

So we're their collector, but they can't help us on the oil and gas side. It just, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. I don't know what to say to. I get deeper into these conversations and I'm like, we have a very functional system, but very broken system all at the same time, right? Like, to me, just get in the room, start talking to one another, and probably the solutions happen real fast. I could be wrong on that.

But that isn't the way politics works. That isn't the way the government works, and love it or hate it. That's the system we've inherited it from our ancestors. Yeah, and again, I think it's important you understand that I don't bring these things up to beat up on the government or personally attack or anything like that. What I'm trying to do is...

Well, I don't think you've personally attacked anyone. No, no. The only thing you've brought up is the parent-child relationship comment. That's one, okay. Yeah. And then after that, I don't think there's any attacks. If anybody's attacking, it's me. Because I just, I got a thing, I got a bone to pick with pretty much every politician out

there over the last since I've been paying attention to it. And you're just bringing in, once again, you know, from municipalities to operate healthly, it's kind of a relationship with the provincial government. And right now they're not listening. Or maybe they've never listened. Who knows? Yeah, it's, I, again, I don't know. And the amendments kind of show that they're not listening.

And that's really what you're seeing now is, if you look in the last little while, some of the releases and conversations that have been coming out of AB, MUNY's and RMA, you're starting to see some more conversation about this. in the media. And when you start, when you start doing consultation in the media, that's not the way to go about it. So this isn't going to be. No, it won't.

And that's why I say, I don't want to be perceived to be attacking anybody. What I'm trying to do is, is really for the rural municipalities to be able to give some perspective to the provincial government. I think that when they look at what's going on in Edmonton and Calgary, they see some things that they don't like and they're addressing some of those issues. And I think rural municipalities are being swept up in that mess. And we don't belong there. We didn't do it.

We don't need to be painted with that brush. And also the rural voice is starting to disappear on the landscape. The reality is that as we move on, the province's population is becoming more and more urbanized. So we start to matter less and less. And the thing that I always tell people, like I've had conversations with lots of the large urbans and they say, well, you know, you should be really happy with us because we provide you with all these services. You know, where would you go for a swimming pool and where would you go for this and where would you go for all these services? And I said, yeah, but you got to realize that everything flows from the outside in. So rural Alberta is where your food comes from, is where your energy comes from,

it's where your raw materials come from, your lumber. You wouldn't be able to build a house without cutting down a tree in rural Alberta. You wouldn't be able to build a road without using the gravel out of rural Alberta. You wouldn't be able to turn the lights on in your house without the power generation that occurs in rural Alberta. So again, this is, we're part of the economy. economy where generally were the raw material provider and things flow inward. But it would be nice if people understood that a little bit better in the province as well.

Yeah. I think that's a very naive comment, not yours, the comment on, on, you know, basically you should be happy with us. Because, you know, it's no different than as more and more of the population, and we've talked about this a lot. I think it's in Canada. you know, and then there's the argument, well, what's actually an urban center, right? Like, because Lloyd Minster's obviously different than even a red deer,

and red deer is certainly different than a Calgary, and on and on that, that goes. But it's, you know, 83. Some percent. If you go back to the dirty 30s, you had a majority rural population. It was just, I think it was closer to 60 percent. Don't quote me on that, but, you know, definitely that 50-50, you know, there wasn't this huge majority in the cities where, I mean, we don't have, you know, You just look around. Everybody lives in the cities and is very dependent these days on what the city provides.

But it's a very naive comment to make that you don't need what goes on outside because everything comes from the outside. You know, and certainly being tied to a farm growing up on a farm, you understand that real, real quick. It's a symbiotic relationship. It's, again, we're all about trying to build partnerships. And again, I think the biggest thing is that perspective. And when I come back to the parent-child relationship with the lack of municipal experience at the provincial MLA level, I don't think that they have the perspective that we do. And that's our job is to provide that perspective.

And it's difficult to do that. Do you think, me and my brothers have talked about this lots. Do you think if you want to be a politician, right, on whatever level, whether it's federal or provincial, uh, do you think there should, you know, kind of like a tradesman almost, right?

Like you want to get your journeyman. Maybe you should go work the job before you just get your journeyman and have the, you know, the, yep, I got it. I'm really smart. And I'm picking on politicians again,

I know. But like, obviously there's some people in those industries that have lots of background and lots of different things. But do you think sitting from a, uh, uh, uh,

RM perspective that, uh, people should have to serve, you know, I don't know, is it two years? Is it four years in a, whether it's an RM or,

or a city perspective to get a, perspective from the common person and, you know, from a lower level of government where, you know, you've got to earn your stripes, so to speak. Yeah,

I, I don't know whether that would be practical or not. Why not? Well, I shouldn't say practical. Uh, Um, the idea of a representative democracy is you get to pick your, you get to pick your representative. And laying those kind of requirements on them might narrow the field to a point where you're not necessarily.

Getting Donald Trump as president. I wouldn't say that, but, um, but my. Yeah, you, you, you, you might want to, you might want to be careful going down that road. my, again, my comments are more around perspective. And I should say, too, that there is a, you know, a good thing in Bill 20 and the fact that it now makes the requirement of training of municipal counselors mandatory. It used to say that you had to offer it. It didn't say they had to take it.

I've taken it several times because it's offered every time. But it is a, it's, it's a 101 type of course. It's a basic course. And there are opportunities for more and more training that are going on with local elected officials. And to that end, we have the elected officials education program, which there's a whole bunch of processes that you can go through planning. And I've made it my mission to take as many of those as I could. And if you get them all, you get a certificate. So I got the certificate because I've, I mean, I've changed trades, what, three times?

now basically in my life and I understand that the training is important and the education's important you've got to understand what what your job is and I think a lot of municipal well a lot of politicians in general think that they're gonna get in there and start pulling the levers of power and and affect this huge change and that's not quite how it works there are levers you need to understand how they work and once you understand how to work them, then you can get somewhere. But it takes time.

And it's not an easy road. And you've got to start balancing everything. And when you put, you know, our economic recovery plan, we, we had several options thrown in front of us. We could do it over three years. We could do it over five years. We could do it over 10 years. And these are the implications of doing it.

This is how hard it's going to be on taxpayers to deal with these kinds of of increases. So we did the best we could over the five-year period is what we ended up choosing. But we didn't go into that lightly. People on the ground may not see that deliberation going on, but it is happening. So it's it's again, and when we got into the situation that we were in, we weren't going to come out of it overnight. You just can't generate that kind of revenue. So we're in a good place now. But, um, I definitely use that as a cautionary tale. You know, I like that you pointed out, and I should do a better job of this, I think,

that it's not that you dislike everything in all the bills. You just want some consultation and some of it, because part of it you don't like, but there are good things mixed in with a few of the bad that you're like, these are concerning, correct? Well, that's how everybody passes legislation. I think there's always a few things that are in there that, that people aren't going to like. But yeah, there's lots of good stuff in there, lots.

So the idea of criminal record checks on elected officials, that's a great idea. I don't have any problem with that. And none of the elected officials that I spoke to do. You know, we're an hour in, and I had it in my pocket. But one of the things for coming in is people who make the tour here, you know, for people who don't understand, John drove four hours to come to do it in person, I really appreciate. And one of the ways that we say thank you is silver gold bull here out of Alberta.

Gives one ounce coins to all the guests that come in. I'm not sure if you're a silver guy or not, but that's, there you go. There's a silver mayblee for you. Oh, that's fantastic. Thanks very much, Sean. I really appreciated being here and having an opportunity to, I think, give that rural perspective. It's a little bit different. And again, I just, I'm hopeful for the future.

I still think Alberta is the best province in all of Canada. I am going to continue to make my home here. I, like I said, I love this place. I want it to be that, that jewel that it was in Canada. And it's still, like I said, it's still the best province to live in in Canada. I've gone back to some of those provinces that I was living in. I can tell you they're not doing that well. But we can do better.

I think you just hit the nail on the head. We can do better. You know, I'll bring us back to COVID one more time, you know, because Shane had said, you know, basically we're the freest place in all COVID. I no longer, well, I don't know if I ever subscribe to that thought. We still sucked. Like, come on, we had a Vax pass by the end. We had lockdowns.

We had on and on and on it went. And so when you say we're still the best province, although true, we're sliding just like everybody else. And we can do better. We should be way ahead of where we are. And I know from a provincial government, Shane's probably not going, come on, listen to all the good things.

And if you go back and listen to them, rattle off some of the good stuff that the Alberta government has been able to pull off since coming back from an NDP, government and balance in the books and a whole bunch of different things. He's not wrong, but we can be so far ahead of that. I think we've got to raise the bar on our expectations of government. And by getting more and more people involved in the conversation

and hopefully the population, listening to the conversation and pushing on their elected representatives to, you know, I don't know, talk to one another and do things that are going to be, you know, a win for the province and hopefully a win for the elected officials at the municipal level, I think isn't much to ask for actually. And I think we can do better. Yeah, I would definitely agree with you on that. And I think, and maybe this is, you know, I talked about perspective, maybe this is part of my ability to, to gain some perspective on this because I did live in different provinces and I did different things. So I, I saw the way. some of those things worked.

What we need is made in Alberta solutions because we have different problems than a lot of different than other. You know, look at our challenges around energy generation. We, we don't have access to much, if any, hydro. So you're going to have to make heat to turn a turbine out of something. What's it going to be? It could be natural gas, but now we have the carbon initiatives that are on top of that. We got rid of coal.

There is a ton of problems that are facing Alberta. But they can't, this broad brush that the federal governments applied isn't going to work in every province in Alberta. It always seems to be the one that it doesn't work at all in. And so I'm hopeful that we can work with the province on providing some of these solutions and move forward with consultation. And again, we're still the best province in Canada. But we can do better. But we can do better.

Thanks, John, for coming in and doing this. Thanks. I really appreciate it. It's been enjoyable.