Thanks to Danielle Smith, Alberta may trump Trump as the big ballot box question

If the federal ballot question was about who would be best to handle Trump, it may well now be about Trump plus Albertan secession.

We’ve all had our fill of bad news of late, and I’m reticent to add to your list of worries — but I do believe that Ontario voters need to pay attention to what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been saying of late. The fact that neither she, nor Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, attended last Friday’s First Ministers meeting is important — even if it was lost in the excitement around the pending election call.

The Charlottetown Accord process was extremely painful. Only to be topped by the 1995 Quebec referendum, which was bound to follow that missed opportunity. I see a scenario where the current federal election is this generation’s version of Charlottetown. Premier Smith has warned us of what’s to come.

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Mere hours after finalizing his plan to run an election campaign focused on protecting Canada from U.S. President Donald Trump’s various threats, Prime Minister Mark Carney learned the first lesson of the PMO: you never know what your day will hold.

Those best-laid plans might have suddenly been turned upside down, courtesy of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. In the wake of her first meeting with the new PM, and conscious of polls showing Carney’s party to be competitive again, Smith said, “Albertans will no longer tolerate the way we’ve been treated by the federal Liberals over the past 10 years.”

Gauntlet dropped.

In the fall of 2023, Smith began to talk about following Quebec’s lead from 1966 and taking control of Alberta’s share of the Canada Pension Plan. That idea stalled, but it telegraphed her mindset about a proactive and more economically independent Alberta.

Hours after 14 CEOs from Canada’s largest pipeline and energy companies called on Ottawa to use existing emergency powers to clear a path for building new infrastructure, Smith arrayed a “specific list of demands” that she’d like met prior to Thanksgiving “to avoid an unprecedented national unity crisis.” If the prime minister intends to make good on his plans for Canada to become a “superpower in both clean and conventional energy,” much of the Alberta premier’s list should match up perfectly with the Liberal election platform.

Smith wants the feds to allow new east-west pipelines, lift the tanker ban covering the northern British Columbia coast (and thereby make a new western pipeline truly viable) and eliminate the oil and gas emissions cap. In making these demands, Smith has done Canadian voters a favour: there’s grave danger ahead if we find out, post-election, that Carney’s version of the Liberal Party is indistinguishable from Trudeau’s when it comes to throttling conventional energy production.

This is the most “dangerous” time for national unity since the 1980 Quebec referendum, according to my former colleague Norman Spector, once Canada’s secretary to the cabinet for federal-provincial relations. He sees a scenario in which Carney fails to satisfy Smith’s demands and Alberta looks to “sovereignty-association” with America. Spector is as experienced as anyone when it comes to fed-prov dynamics, having survived tours of duty that included repatriation of the Constitution in 1982, Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations, the failed Meech Lake Accord in 1987 and the early innings of the 1992 Charlottetown Accord.

Hit the link to read the rest of the piece.

MRM

(this post is an Opinion Piece)