Thanks to the success of former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition campaign, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith now finds herself on the proverbial horns of a very real dilemma.
Alberta Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure announced yesterday that sufficient signatures have been verified for the requirements of the Citizen Initiative Act to be met and Mr. Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition to be declared successful.
Elections Alberta said the total number of verified signatures after random statistical sampling with a 95-per cent confidence level was 404,293, and that 438,568 valid signatures were counted. That was well above the petition’s required 293,976 valid signatures, or 10 per cent of the voters in the 2023 provincial general election.
In the event, an estimated 13.6 per cent of all the electors in the province signed the petition – an outpouring of support for Canada that was a remarkable accomplishment by any measure.
Under the act, the premier’s United Conservative Party Government can either take the petition’s question – Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada? – to the Legislature for a vote that would probably end the separation debate. Or it can allow it to proceed to a province-wide referendum.
The first course would likely smoke out how many of the UCP’s MLAs and cabinet members are hard-core committed separatists. That would be bad for Ms. Smith and the party. The second course would create uncertainty, possibly drive away investment, and nevertheless result in a decisive loss for the separatists. That would also be bad for the premier and her party. It might drive the UCP separatists to set up their own MAGA-influenced far right party.
Without the government bending the rules or retroactively amending the province’s “direct democracy” laws, a yea vote in the Legislature would also block the wishes of the UCP’s large and influential separatist faction from having a secession referendum on their terms at least for five years – but practically speaking quite possibly forever.
So thanks to the remarkable success of the Forever Canadian campaign’s volunteers in every part of Alberta, Ms. Smith would appear to have found herself between a rock and a hard place.
According to Mr. Lukaszuk, who I talked to last night, “seldom are premiers faced with such really binary problems where the right and wrong are so clear: Do what’s right for the province. Don’t divide Albertans any further. Don’t cause us economic harm, and just deal with this in the Legislature. Or do what a small group of angry UCP party members demands of her and what’s expedient for her politically.”
“I chose the pathway that’s legislative, that gives her the opportunity to not call a referendum,” he said. “Separatists chose the pathway that forces her to have a referendum. I’m giving her an opportunity to do the right thing.”
“I certainly hope there is no referendum,” he added. “There doesn’t need to be one. Nearly half a million Albertans spoke loud and clear. But if there is one, I’m ready for it. I’m pivoting my campaign from petition-signature gathering campaign to a referendum campaign, and we’ll be prepared for it, just in case.” The campaign bus is in the shop right now getting a new transmission, he noted.
Mr. Lukaszuk thinks a significant number of Ralph Klein’s “severely normal Albertans” remain in the UCP camp. If Ms. Smith proceeds to a province-wide referendum, he argues, “they will walk away from her because they know the damage that this is going to cause.”
“Chambers of commerce across Alberta will be now coming out asking her not to have a referendum,” he predicted. “She is having positive talks with Prime Minister Carney. All that goodwill will be shredded immediately when she decides to go into a referendum.”
“I appreciate the dilemma of her position,” Mr. Lukaszuk concluded, “but, let’s be frank, it was Jason Kenney and her who put themselves into this position in the first place. First, they curated this sentiment of criticism within their own party. Then they created legislation for these referenda, and then they even made it easier for separatists to have these referenda. So they have no one else to blame but themselves.”
Regardless of what the UCP’s supporters are saying on social media, it’s hard to believe this is the high point for Ms. Smith it was supposed to be before she was publicly embarrassed by prominent members of the UCP’s separatist faction who booed her and attacked her pipeline deal with Mark Carney at the party’s annual general meeting last weekend.
Still, don’t count Ms. Smith out. She has a solid record of getting away with more than most politicians ever could. She will be looking for a way to dramatically change the channel. An early election on the pipeline deal might do the trick.
She gets away with it until she doesn’t. The problem is the harm she does on the way.
What happens next? Alberta stays in Canada, one way or another.
The whole separatist thing was something originally inspired by envy of how well it seemed to work for Quebec to get what it wanted. However, that was a very simplistic misunderstanding of the situation. It was more Quebec’s 78 seats and its keen ability to judiciously use them to support various parties that got it what it wanted. Alberta has about half the number of seats, which one party mostly takes for granted and the others know they are unlikely to win.
Perhaps fortunately there is now a PM who, having lived a portion of his life in Alberta, at least has some understanding of its political quirks. Yes, Smith’s UCP has become more extreme, but with that difficult AGM past her she will now have a bit more breathing room. While the party members have become quite unruly, MLAs who have grown accustomed to power and perks will likely be a bit more disciplined. So the best option for her now and everyone, except perhaps the extremists in her party, is a legislative vote to affirm the petition to put an end to this.
A referendum on separatism would be more drawn out and divisive, both for the UCP and Albertans. In the end the party would probably become even more split.
Unfortunately for the UCP, a snap election would not make their divisions on this issue go away eithet and there are too many other negative things accumulating for them to even be confident of winning.
Yes, Smith has sort of been painted into a corner here. For her there are no good options now, so she will likely choose the one that is the least bad for her.
Let’s see, an export-dependent landlocked territory with big patches of federal parks, military bases, and Indigenous reserves, criss-crossed by federally regulated railways, pipelines, and telecommunications, federally operated airports and air traffic control, thinks it can be independent. Really? Then there are small matters like currency, passports, judiciary, police, immigration, etc. The whole idea is fundamentally silly.
Joining the US, another fever dream of some on the right, is equally problematic.
Quebec has a much stronger case for independence — its distinct language, culture, and legal system, its seaports and hydro — but is still Canadian despite a half-century of agitation and angst. Separatism’s main accomplishment there has been to push away a lot of people, money, and industry, and the same thing is likely to happen here.
“Silly,” yes, but more importantly, moot: there is as yet no constitutional or statutory pathway for Alberta to legally secede from Canada.
If the legislatures in seven of ten provinces representing at least half the national population, plus the federal Parliament, ratify the SCoC’s recommendation to amend the Constitution so it says that all ten provincial legislatures plus the federal Parliament must ratify any province’s desire to secede—as measured by referendum that complies with the federal Clarity Act (basically asking, ‘secession, yes or no?’)—well, then, Alberta can just go right ahead and hold a referendum on secession.
Until such time, unless the constitutional amendment and exercise of those amended terms are achieved first, a referendum, even in complete compliance with the Clarity Act, and even if unanimously approving secession, is without any legal effect whatsoever.
However, there is no indication—now or forecast—that a majority of Alberta voters would elect to secede from Canada. In fact, quite the opposite.
Moot, yes, and therefore silly too.
We have to remember, Alberta is not Québec. Québec has been a distinct political entity for well over 400 years, dating back to New France. Its very existence became one of the sparks that led to the American Revolutionary War — the British government’s Québec Act of 1774 was cited by the American revolutionaries as one of the “Intolerable Acts” that led to the Revolution.
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/quebec-act
At the time of Confederation, Québec — then known as Canada East — was one of the four British North American colonies to join forces into a new country, along with Canada West (Ontario) Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Alberta did not yet exist, and much of the territory that we now call Alberta was part of what was then called Rupert’s Land and was a possession of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Québec separatism arose in the 1960s out of a feeling that Canada was too English, too small-‘c’ conservative, and overly dominated by corporations that saw the Francophone majority as second- class citizens. A prominent Québécois writer at the time even wrote a book that called Francophone Québecers “White [n-words] of America” (note: the word he used in French, “nègres” didn’t have the same racist connotations as its English counterpart).
Separatism first emerged in violence, as a terrorist group, le Front de libération du Québec began bombing symbols of federal government presence in Québec, like mailboxes. The FLQ, as it became known, was overtly Marxist in its ideology. Less violent separatist movements also emerged, such as the Rassemblement pour l’independence du Québec, or RIN.
The FLQ’s violence peaked in October 1970 with the kidnapping of a British Diplomat in Montréal, and the kidnapping and murder (by a different FLQ cell) of provincial Immigration and Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. The crisis and the resulting proclamation of the War Measures Act by the Pierre Trudeau government basically took the wind out of the sails of what remained of the FLQ, and Québec separatists pivoted to peaceful, democratic means to achieve their ends.
In 1976, the separatist Parti Québécois, led by journalist and former Liberal René Levèsque won a provincial election, and in 1980 his government held a referendum on “sovereignty-association”, a watered-down version of independence that would allegedly have maintained an economic association with the rest of Canada. That referendum ended with a 59.56% ‘No’ vote, rejecting “sovereignty-association”. But it also led to the 1981-82 patriation of the Constitution from the United Kingdom and the Charter of Rights. Unfortunately, though, the Québec government of the day — still the PQ — refused to accept the new version of the Constitution — and to this day no Québec government of any stripe has.
In the years since 1980, we have seen two failed attempts to accommodated the new Constitution to Québec’s aspirations, another referendum in 1995 that was much closer but still had a razor-thin majority for the ‘No’ side, the emergence of a federal political party based in Québec to advocate for sovereignty in Parliament — a situation I can’t imagine any other country countenancing — and the complete transformation of Québec’s economy into the powerhouse it is today, with dominance by local francophone corporations and entities like Air Transat, Bombardier, SNC-Lavalin and the Caisse de depôt et placement. There has also been a surge of cultural transformation since the 1980s, and also IMHO a touch of xenophobia related to immigration from places where the population doesn’t look as European as the province’s establishment.
Separation sentiment persists, and the PQ is now leading in the polls going into next year’s provincial election, but support for sovereignty remains relatively low in the province.
Meanwhile, out here in Oilbertastan, Alberta separatist sentiment evs and flows based on who is in government in Ottawa. When Conservatives rule in the nation’s capital, it virtually disappears; when Liberals govern, it comes back. It’s not coming from a fundamental, existential cultural disconnect with the rest of Canada the way Québec sovereigntist sentiment does. It’s simply an antidemocratic rejection of how Canadian voters have chosen their federal governments.
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/october-crisis
I believe this is a big thorn in the side of Danielle Smith. She can’t change the channel on this. A certain percentage of the UCP are separatists. She invited these people to the dance, and she must partake in that. Can’t be a wallflower. How will she handle this? It will be tough. The corruption she and the UCP are involved with, such as MH Care (Corrupt Care), and whatever else there is, will not leave her unscathed. Not possible. Danielle Smith can’t serve two masters. Neither can the UCP. Besides the massive corruption, this unpatriotic separatist malarkey that is part of the UCP, is going to sink them.
If being “severely normal” was the affliction that resulted in Klein’s regime, it is clearly a far more dangerous pathogen than SARS Cov 19. Will there be a vaccine soon, I wonder.
Murphy: Possibly. But we won’t be allowed to have it, or the jab will cost $2,000. DJC
Mr. Lukaszuk deserves the Order of Canada for this, but he’s dreaming if thinks Marlaina “will do the right thing”. She will only ever do what profits her cronies or serves her Big Oil masters.
The NDP needs to up their game if she is so desperate that she calls an early election.
As their chiefs most pointedly and publically asserted, it is the Aboriginal people who own over 90 % of the lands we call Alberta. We use it via Treaty (#6 I think.) The treaty is with Canada not Alberta. So these lands aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they suggested that if Premier Smith wants to join the USA she can certainly move there.
Just sayin ‘.
This just in: The Disjointed Conservative Party is not separatist:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-premier-danielle-smith-says-her-united-conservative-party-is-not-a-separatist-party-9.6999911
They just have a lot of work to do, convincing Canada to shut up and hand over, well, everything.
I wonder how long it will be till we hear some Trumpist MAGA wannabe tell us, “Alberta isn’t a separatist place. Canada is a separatist country!”
Typo footnote: I almost mistyped Conservative as “Conswervative.” Twice. Tempting, but maybe another time. If anyone else want to use it, please do!
Mike J Danysh: Saying the UCP aren’t separatist enablers would be like saying cabbage rolls aren’t something that Ukrainian Canadians eat. The UCP fully endorses this separation hogwash at every opportunity.
Anonymous– please don’t put us Holubchi eaters in or anywhere near the UCP, remember Marlaina claims to be Ukrainian….as in there’s a bad apple in the barrel, well there’s a bad head in the oak cask….commonly known as a ‘dornay banyak’….
I’m loving the fact that Smith “has been snookered”, or trapped, as is well outlined in this posting!
#ForeverCanadian has raised the bar for her and she cannot ignore that fact. The booing at her AGM was delightful music to my ears.
Let’s see if the Alberta NDP can be effective in holding Smith’s feet to the fire for a vote in the Legislature or at the very least making her life miserable. Based on past performance I won’t be holding my breath.
Jaundiced Eye: If Danielle Smith allowed more Legislature sessions to happen, things would be different. She scaled them back, because she is afraid of her foot in mouth disease to flare up again. A minor extension until December 11. The 2026 Legislature sessions will likely be shorter. In 2025, the Alberta Legislature had only 62 days of (non consecutive) sessions. That’s around 2 months. Pathetic.
Past experience shows she would prefer to leave an election until everyone is on holiday and assumes the opposition supporters won’t show up. There’s not enough time to call it for Christmas so the next choice for her would be spring break or Easter and that leaves ne’er do wells like separatists and NDP members more, perhaps too much, time to prepare. I’ll wager that Elections Alberta already has been frenetically organizing behind the scenes for something being called sooner. I suggest she’ll call it before the Legislature rises on the 15th of December and we’ll have an election in January when she hopes no one will come out to vote because the weather is too cold.
I want it to be an early election.
TMX was putting steel in the ground, and did squat for Rachel Notley in 2023. An paper pipeline in an MOU is even less than squat. Then you have everything else that Smith is tarred with. And Smith is sounding desperate.
Claiming the clown party is not seperatist made Smith look both stupid and desperate. Enough to go to the polls early? Probably. We’ll see after her possibly unconstitutional gun buy back disobedience law, and recall act changes.
Who knows, maybe she is about to do something so constitutionally egregious that the “fire extinguisher” (Lt. Governor Lakhani) goes all “reserve powers” on Ditzy Dani.
I can’t imagine a major project traversing Alberta from east to west, cooked up by B.C., and supported by Ottawa, not stoking UCP outrage and cries of federal overreach. Truly, we become what we hate.
No one deserves the Order of Canada tmore than Thomas. I hope the Prime Minister has his ear to the ground! Smith and her rag tag gang are on the ropes, and I can tell you from the UCP heartland here in Bonnyville/St.Paul, they are ill informed, not well educated, reactionary bunch (exactly the Trump sort), not the kind you want running a day care.
LOL
A day care? I would not allow these people to clean my bathroom.
I would support a BC Wine pipeline from Okanagan through to Newfoundland Labrador…
@McRocker
I second the motion.
All in agreement say, “aye”
It will certainly get more use than another oil pipeline and less dangerous to the ecology. If it spills, other than some drunk squirrels, it’s pretty harmless.
What is the voting record for winter elections in Alberta? Do winter elections favor the incumbents, or is that irrelevant in this set of unusual circumstances?
Another related issue I haven’t seen addressed is the Smith/Carney pipeline deal. Surely, any long-term deal is contingent on Alberta remaining part of Canada. If Alberta continues to threaten separation, or even if a referendum is in the works, then all bets are off regarding the tar pipeline.
Andy M ….BINGO!! I’m surprised no one else has looked at that angle….2 thumbs up!!
One way out for Premier Smith and her separatist MLA’s would be to schedule a vote in the legislature – and then walk out in protest without voting. They could spin their walkout as protecting Alberta rights – or something equally ludicrous. Another possibility is they hold a legislature vote on the question, but just enough UCP MLA’s abstain or come back late from lunch. (Hi CPC, we saw what you did!) Either way, the Forever Canadian vote passes and the separation referendum question is put on ice for another five years. Given the age and general health of some of the independence leaders, it might not be an issue in five years. The downside to this approach is that if separation is no longer taking up column inches, what stories will take its place? CorruptCare? Privatization of health services? Coal mines for short ugly billionaire Australians?
The Breakdown and the latest from the G&M…
“Alberta ends procurement talks with two companies tied to…
The 2 companies owned in part by Sam Mraiche were in negotiations to build private surgical facilities ….
So is Marlaina going to “porogue parliament ” now to get out of this mess, or is she going to give the Beaverton more material to play with…
“Danielle Smith uses the not withstanding clause to make herself Premier of BC….lol
My money is on an election call in the early new year. UCP and conservative voters can be counted on to ignore the destruction Smith has brought to education, health care, the economy, the budget, and democracy. Smith knows that. She will win a handy majority riding on the pipeline high and the UCP reign of terror will continue.
Below is quoted the questions and answers Dingy Smith gave during question period yesterday related to this petition. It appears she wants a referendum rather than a vote in the Legislature.
“Mr. Nenshi: At least she got a few claps and not boos for saying it this time. The Premier has been flirting with separatism nearly as long as she’s been having secret meetings with Sam Mraiche and Jitendra Prasad. Her entire political career has been focused on grievance
politics with Canada, and now the chickens have come home to roost. As much as she’d like to blame the federal government for this, it is she who has been pandering to separatists. Meanwhile 13.9 per cent of all Alberta electors in the largest petition in Alberta’s history signed to stay part of Canada. We just had it tabled. So what
is the Premier’s plan here? Will she take us to a referendum?
The Speaker: A point of order was noted at 1:58.
The hon. Premier.
Ms Smith: Well, thank you, Mr. Speaker. We congratulate the group on gathering so many signatures, which asks for a referendum on whether to remain in Canada. Of course, we’ve got a couple of options now that the petition has been verified and that it has been
tabled here in the Legislature, and caucus and cabinet are going to be meeting to discuss how we’re going to proceed on that.
Mr. Nenshi: The Forever Canadian petitioners have clearly indicated that they don’t want a referendum. All they want is a vote in the Legislature saying that Albertans are proud Canadians. Listen, we will certainly vote yes on that vote, so if at least four people on the other side are willing to stand up and say that
they’re proud Canadians, this goes away real quick. But it doesn’t solve the Premier’s political problem. She’s pandered to them, and now her base is crying for independence. Once again, does she want a job-destroying referendum on separation, or will she
work to avoid one?
2:00
The Speaker: The Premier.
Ms Smith: Well, thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s unfortunate that that’s not the way the referendum petition was worded. The referendum petition was worded to call for a referendum, and that’s part of the reason why we need to, now that it’s been tabled, meet as a caucus and a cabinet and decide what the next steps are. There’s
a very clear process that’s detailed in the legislation, and we’ll be taking that away, and we’ll be assessing it.”
Hey
Can anyone weigh-in on this?
“Without the government retroactively amending the province’s “direct democracy” laws,”
Who knows what Smith might try?
I do not think she’d be able to make a new law ‘retroactive’. Surely it would only apply to future cases? I’d think an injunction would shut down that ploy in a heartbeat.
Same for the lovely ‘recall’ campaigns that are blooming like prairie turd-blossoms.
Perhaps the law states that an election call renders any recalls null and void but what about a clear referendum question/petition like Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition.
Put a Canadian Flag sticker on your bumper……..Canada now….Canada 4ever……
Meanwhile, in Alberta, there are crickets on the investigation into AHS malfeasance, along with most of the other scandals which should be dogging Marlaina.
The reality is: big $$ buys big data (i.e. META) buys elections. Albertans are being manipulated in ways which will ensure little or nothing prevents M Smith from delivering more money to the rapidly-preparing-to-exit oil/gas industry.
And there will be no assets to sue into obvlivion and use for surviving climate change, let alone clean up.
When voters are copacetic mainstream parties vie for what is most popular to the most people. In Canada that’s the middle-of-the-road centre where what might be called normative psephology is practiced: surveying which of the general electorate’s top-of-mind issues align with a party’s platform, which is most often where partisan ideologies overlap around the centre of the communitarian spectrum; developing particular positions that distinguish one’s party from the others—not so much for individual voters to identify with but, rather, to stake some sort of discernible distinction on the familiar solid ground of political economics; nominating good candidates; recruiting volunteers; and raising money. On the other hand, so-called “movement politics” aims for radical social change.
Movement politics have been episodic in the modern world. The late 19th-century anti-Darwinist reaction was Protestant Christianity’s counter-reformation movement —inevitably smothered under the sheer weight of technological industrialization and nascent mass-consumerism. This unstoppable evolution was occasionally punctuated by, for example, the successful women’s suffrage movement or the Scopes “Monkey Trial” (which should have been a dead-cat bounce back in the 1920s—but then the cat came back, if it had ever gone astray in the first place).
Even the NDP, scion of an overtly socialist CCF movement which had long advocated some degree of radical change, espoused a status-quo of extending the fading post-War boom of the late 50s with the help of large public spending, strongly organized industrial labour, and a confident private investment environment through the 60s and 70s. Hard-won workers’ rights and wages, investor protection, and strong centrism ideally guaranteed every citizen opportunity to participate in any walk of life. These happy decades of sustained growth—call it ‘Trudeau 1.0’— ended with a severe global recession in ‘81-‘82 as banks predictably tightened money supply and sharply increased interests rates (remember 21% mortgages?) to address rampant inflation (≈11%!) resulting from well-paid workers’ rampant consumer demand, profligate capital expenditure, and massive public spending that coddled the first boomers from their teenage years to their working primes.
Neoconservatism was born of the 1981 Recession and although the rhetoric of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney seemed to back some sort of movement to change society, mainstream parties’ concerns were still essentially economic (heck, Maggie didn’t even believe that society existed at all). their relative political positions remaining schematically about the same even though promised “trickledown” failed to relieve workers from four decades of underpayment or compel gluttonous corporate conglomerates to share wealth they got when profitably relieved of taxes and regulations. Well, yeah, some kinda movement, I guess—uh—trickle-up?
To be sure there was big change as neoliberals availed electronic means to move money and effectively liberate themselves from, and put pressure on sovereign domestic taxes, environmental regulations, and customs duties. Eventually these globalizing neoliberals usurped moribund conservative parties, rendering them only nominally “conservative”. Yet this evolution went mostly unnoticed by the public, manifesting only in occasional stock market frauds and bank failures of record-setting proportions, and articulated only as “how the hell did THAT happen?” But it was business as usual, government bailouts effectively pardoning bad corporate behaviour, the only thing unusual being a Black President granting the pardons. His predecessor’s movement to Christianize US politics, starting each working day with morning prayers, eventually lost millions of Americans their homes (subprime mortgage fiasco), cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives (fabulated WMD) and utterly gutted parliamentary decorum. But thanks to—phew!—those pardons, we hardly missed a beat. That is, unmoved.
“Movement politics” has persisted cystically in the Greens who’ve struggled on the fringe to articulate their environmentalism in economic terms acceptable to the mainstream, and in the long-suffering Dippers who are turning into fringy social-justice-warriors now they’ve lost the sympathies of the majority of ordinary workers. At least temporarily.
Mainstream movement politics took a hiatus from 1939 to 2001. Globalizing neoliberals who usurped traditional conservative parties had been fostering a movement of their own since the Soviet Collapse in ‘92 but, naturally, a trickledown-duped society wasn’t invited to tag along. Misguided ‘movements’ like the Oklahoma City bombing in ‘95 and, of course, 9/11/2001 could not be further on the fringe. Yet they foreshadowed a much broader social movement in the USA hitherto working behind the political scene since the 70s, the glory days of US Televangelism, the ostensible “Moral Majority” movement which proselytized congregations to vote Republican. It was a force until, that is, too many TV preachers got busted praying to the church of unholy coitus. It remained for the prospect of a Black US President to inspire a reality TV star to demagogically harness abiding racism in the predominantly white, rural GOP fold, and for his successful 2016 presidential candidacy to elevate hitherto discrete, anti-democratic Christian Nationalism, onto the main stage to become an overt political movement.
That concerns us Canadians because some of this theocratic ethos has seeped across the border, especially in Alberta where it stokes the flames of secession. It is plainly not an economic movement —except insofar as it corruptly moves public money into the pockets of the favoured—stealing that’s hardly anymore by stealth. Naturally Canada, the US’s biggest bilateral trading partner, will have to weather however long this movement lasts, our only consolation being that it will damage America’s own economy so much more than ours that hopefully the pain won’t last too long.
tRumpublicanism is critically serious for Canada, not because we can’t endure three more years of the mentally declining Orange-Goo-Tan (can we say, “very low-IQ” compared to a real orangutang without getting slapped with more tariffs?), but because one of our provinces is using this window of MAGAtunity to threaten secession—or, as we suspect, confederation with the USA as the infamous “51st state.” Carney is duty-bound to prioritize Alberta’s concerns over, say, those of British Columbia or Coastal First Nations. The old Chinese saying that strong winds can’t blow all day probably informs Carney well about both kinds of MAGA.
Jason Kenney availed MAGA during tRump 1.0 to confess his submission to “movement conservatism”—which he hadn’t done since his failed anti-abortion campaign at the Catholic university he once attended in California (he quit before graduating after being refused the Pope’s endorsement). Returning to Alberta after his CPC was defeated in 2015 (the double-whammy to the NDP’s upset win in Alberta earlier that year), the K-Boy surely felt movement conservatism deep in his bowels. And after digesting two parties of the Alberta right, he got a close look at both ends of the UCP he created and led to its maiden victory in 2019 before he was dumped in 2022.
I hazard that Danielle Smith is also one of these “movement” types who wants radical change—that is, as many pipelines as her petro-masters want and a distinctive rearrangement of a sovereign Alberta’s relationship with the ROC(+Q) guaranteeing no federal jurisdiction over its bitumen resource else the Lone Star rise high above the southern horizon.
Whether or not the ploy is to get more pipelines by threatening secession, Carney has to take the threat seriously. We already know Smith is prepared to force radical change upon social and sexual mores, and against gender rights and other freedoms constitutionally chartered to protect Canadians from just this kind of radical government, notwithstanding the claws that are out against her by many, if not most Albertans. If this is movement politics, the boos Smith got at the UCP AGM suggest it is not wholly embraced by a significant proportion of conservatives.
Former ProgCon deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian Petition has indeed put the UCP in a quandary. Alberta is still a Canadian province so, if Smith thought four-dimensional chess was hard, try ten or eleven. It’s your move, Danielle.