Claiming that “the West wants Ottawa out of its hair,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith yesterday named 14 members of her so-called Alberta Next Panel and recited a litany of grievances she has with the federal government, many of them allegations about how the feds are “punishing our energy sector and layering on policies to keep it in the ground.”
Also yesterday, news media reported the latest forecast by the influential S&P Global Commodity Insights, which indicates that oilsands production in northern Alberta will reach an all-time high this year with average annual production reaching 3.9 million barrels a day by 2030.
In other words, Globe & Mail columnist Andrew Coyne said of Ms. Smith’s announcement yesterday afternoon in what used to be known as a tweet, “the whole thing’s bullshit.”
“Alberta’s economy is not ‘under attack,’” Mr. Coyne’s tartly worded message continued, “the ‘status quo’ does not ‘threaten’ the province’s ‘way of life,’ there is no ‘constitutional right to prosper’ — though Alberta is prospering mightily, far more than any other province — and Alberta already is an equal partner in the federation. But hey, let’s have a referendum anyway, on … something.”
I am grateful to Mr. Coyne, who is not exactly a woke cultural Marxist, for concisely summing up Premier Smith’s commentary in appropriate terms.
As Alberta-born economist Jim Stanford reminded us last May in the Toronto Star, Ms. Smith’s never-ending fight with Ottawa is an obvious diversion from provincial policies that are driving down wages and driving up living costs here in Wild Rose Country. Albertans need to remember, he wrote, “it wasn’t Ottawa that laid them off, cut their pay, froze the minimum wage, drove up electricity and insurance costs, and put their health care at risk. It was the enemy within.”
Despite the premier’s transparent claims to the contrary, the obvious if unstated goal of the Alberta Next Panel – a supercharged version of former United Conservative Party Premier Jason Kenney’s equally ridiculous but less sinister 2019 “Fair Deal Panel” – is to push sovereignty-association, or outright separation.
Mr. Kenney’s panel only flirted coyly with separatism. Ms. Smith’s, which she will direct herself, appears intended to set the stage for Alberta separation if that’s what it takes to free the fossil fuel industry from environmental regulations, fair royalties, anything that stands in the way of a pipeline, and the polluter-pay principle in its declining decades.
The mechanism will be easy-to-manipulate referenda – which Ms. Smith described yesterday as her favourite form of democracy – on all those bad ideas that Albertans have made clear repeatedly they’re not interested in: Replacing the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta pension, replacing the RCMP with an Alberta police force, replacing the CRA with an expensive provincial tax agency, and demanding constitutional changes not within any province’s power to make unilaterally.
If Ottawa won’t truckle to this nonsense, the threat of separation or 51st statism can be rolled out in the guise of “Alberta sovereignty (in a united Canada).”
“The work will include identifying solutions advanced by Albertans on how to make Alberta stronger and more sovereign within a united Canada that respects and empowers the province to achieve its full potential,” the government’s press release stated cutely. “It will also include making recommendations to the government on potential referendum questions for Albertans to vote on in 2026.”
“We aren’t putting a separation question forward,” Ms. Smith insisted to a reporter at her news conference at Calgary’s Heritage Park, “we’re putting forward a question that would strengthen Alberta’s sovereignty within a united Canada.” (Remember, when Ms. Smith and the UCP talk about Alberta sovereignty, they mean that Alberta alone should have the right to exercise its sovereignty in federal jurisdiction and on other provinces’ territory. This kind of sovereignty, naturally, is not reciprocal.)
“There are two potential questions that are being put forward for citizen-initiated referenda,” she continued. “One from Thomas Lukaszuk, which has one perspective, and one from the Alberta Prosperity Project which has another. I’ve indicated if there are other referendum questions that get sufficient numbers of signatures from the people, 177,000, we would add those to the referendum.
“But at this point there isn’t an active petition campaign, there’s just a couple of questions that have been filed,” she shrugged. “And I don’t know if either one of those, or both, are going to get the number of signatures. But we’re gonna go ahead and put forward the questions that we hear from Albertans.”
“She should know that there can only be one petition, and the one that is filed first goes ahead,” Mr. Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier told me yesterday evening. “She should also know that the question that the APP is proposing is not constitutional and cannot go ahead as a referendum question.
“It is troubling that the premier who just amended the act has no clue what the act sets out in law,” he added.
It’s also troubling, one might observe, that there’s not enough money in Alberta to pay for COVID shots, but there’s always enough for another “panel” engineered to undermine the country and advance the cause of separation.
In addition to Ms. Smith, the 14 panel members named yesterday are:
- Environment Minsiter Rebecca Schulz
- Leduc-Beaumont UCP MLA Brandon Lunty
- Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock UCP MLA Glenn van Dijken
- Just-elected Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills UCP MLA Tara Sawyer
- Fraser Institute vice-chair Andrew Judson
- Retired appeal court judge Bruce McDonald
- University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe
- Business Council of Alberta President Adam Legge
- Private home-care company executive Sumita Anand
- Agricultural consultant Melody Garner-Skiba
- Whitecap Resources Inc. President Grant Fagerheim
- Didsbury physician Akin Osakuade
- Acupuncturist Benny Xu
- Questerre Energy President and Manning Foundation Chair Michael Binnion
Ms. Smith said one more member from an Indigenous community will be named to the panel soon.
Despite the presence of a retired judge and a prominent economist, no one is going to call this a balanced panel.
According to its snazzy website, the panel will hold managed “town halls” in 10 Alberta communities in July, August and September, and “online town halls” in October. Registration within a two-week window will be required to participate.
The website includes six online surveys that require participants to watch a short video first. One, on immigration, asks if Alberta should withhold social services from immigrants who don’t have “Alberta-approved immigration status.” What next? Alberta ICE raids?