Let it be acknowledged that while Jason Kenney’s assessment of the danger posed by the United Conservative Party’s continued flirtation with separatism is spot on, it was he, Alberta’s first UCP premier, who sparked the fire his successor is now fanning.
In a conversation yesterday with journalists on the sidelines of the annual general meeting of Calgary-based ATCO Ltd., where the former premier sits on the board, Mr. Kenney warned that the government of Premier Danielle Smith is playing with fire by encouraging secession talk and enabling a separation referendum.
“This kind of stuff is kryptonite for investor confidence,” Mr. Kenney told the reporters.
“People who follow Alberta closely in investment circles are paying attention,” he said. “This is playing with fire. And if Albertans doubt that, look at a real historical example of what happened in Quebec’s economy as a result of merely the election of a PQ government. Quebec has paid the price for the uncertainty created by separation for going on 50 years now. I don’t want Alberta to be in the same situation.”
This is all fair, and it’s a good thing Mr. Kenney said it, and he was telling it to the right audience. But let’s not forget that it was the same former Calgary MP and federal Conservative cabinet minister who welcomed the most extreme anti-Canadian fringe of the conservative movement’s base in Alberta into the UCP when he began the work of uniting the Progressive Conservatives, still shaken by their 2015 loss to the NDP, and the more radical Wildrose Party.
As commentator Dave Cournoyer, a keen observer of the Alberta political scene, posted Monday on social media, “Separatist parties are nothing new in Alberta politics. There’s usually 2-3 occupying the fringes. The difference today is that these groups now operate inside the governing UCP …”
And while, as Mr. Cournoyer noted, it is Ms. Smith who has granted this risky situation her tacit approval and “is making it easier for them to trigger a referendum on separation,” it was Mr. Kenney who got the ball rolling.
After Mr. Kenney’s newly created UCP took power from the NDP in 2019, he announced he would set up a “Fair Deal Panel,” starting the process of normalizing separatist sentiment in Alberta.
When he struck the panel, among its nine members was Preston Manning, the superannuated Godfather of the Canadian Right, who has since taken to openly predicting Western separation if Canadians wouldn’t do as he told them and elect a government led by federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. As we all know now, the threat flopped and the Liberals, this time under Prime Minister Mark Carney, returned to power.
When the panel circulated an online questionnaire in 2020, among the questions it asked its self-selecting respondents was “how much would the following options help Alberta improve its place in the federation?” One suggested answer: “Alberta alone or with other Western Provinces separating from the rest of Canada.”
As one Internet wag wondered at the time, “What could go wrong?” Now we know.
As I wrote on March 1, 2020: “We know from the history of the postwar world that separatist movements are among the greatest threats to peace and security in modern nation states, whether those with some historical and cultural justification as in Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec, or those that exist only to serve the mischievous ambitions of local power elites.”
So we can say tonight, with a combination of sincerity and heavy sarcasm, “Thanks, Kenney!”
Yesterday, Mr. Kenney went on to say that he believes Albertans would overwhelmingly vote against secession.
He may have drawn this conclusion from the harsh reaction his panel got to some of his ideas – mostly ripped from the notorious Firewall Letter, the risible independantiste screed penned in 2001 by Stephen Harper, three of his market-fundamentalist college teachers, and a couple of hangers on.
As one citizen, speaking for many in the hall, told the panel in Fort Saskatchewan in January 2020, “Albertans do not want to leave the country, they don’t want their own pension plan, and they don’t want to lose the RCMP. We’re in the best country in the world and it shouldn’t be messed with!”
But even a small but significant “Yes” vote, Mr. Kenney cautioned this week, could drive investment in Alberta away.
But if he thinks this is going to discourage Ms. Smith from encouraging the separatist faction in her party, he and the rest of us are probably out of luck. If nothing else, it’s just too good a distraction from the many self-inflicted wounds now faced by the Smith Government.
Case in point: In the Legislature’s Question Period Tuesday, former infrastructure minister Peter Guthrie, now sitting as an Independent after being kicked out of the UCP Caucus last month, added to the long list of alleged improprieties faced by the government when he asked the premier what her husband was doing at a meeting about a proposed railway megaproject last year.
He said: “Has your husband ever been a registered lobbyist while you were premier, and if so, for what purpose?”
She said: “He has never, ever been registered as a lobbyist because he has never, ever lobbied any government, including ours, and I would ask for any innuendo and the slander to stop!”
Mr. Guthrie’s suggestion, clearly, was that David Moretta’s role at the meeting was as an unregistered lobbyist.
UCP House Leader Joseph Schow jumped in: “I find the nature of that question absolutely repugnant and disgusting!” He challenged Mr. Guthrie to say it again outside the house – suggesting, presumably, that Mr. Moretta might want to sue him for defamation.
Speaker Ric McIver, seeing his first day on the job take a turn, struggled to get the exchange under control.
This is entertaining stuff to watch, of course. But it goes to the fact, in Mr. Cournoyer’s words again, that the Smith Government now faces an “ethics crisis.” And a rather extensive one at that.
And how does Ms. Smith instinctively respond to allegations? Deny! Deflect! Distract! And how better to distract everyone than cranking up a separatist threat, real or imagined?