The folks who control the big bucks in Alberta must finally have realized what Danielle Smith’s separation referendum is about to do to their profit potential.
How else can we explain Premier Smith’s out-of-the-blue promise last week that her government would fully cost out separation by August and her observation at a news conference she was pretty sure the start-up costs would run into the “hundreds of billions of dollars”?
Who would be surprised to learn there have been more than a few strongly worded calls to the Premier’s Office from Albertans with enough clout to ensure someone picks up the phone when it displays their number?
In addition, as Alberta-based investigative journalist Charles Rusnell pointed out in The Tyee last week, it’s probably not a complete coincidence that Premier Smith’s “whiplash inducing” about face came after a former senior manager in Alberta’s Finance Ministry told journalists he’s been asking for records of any cost-benefit analyses of Alberta separation and getting no joy.
“They claim nothing has been prepared,” Lennie Kaplan said in a note to AlbertaPolitics.ca in late May. “I believe they (the UCP government) have not prepared anything because they don’t want to risk riling up the UCP base.”
But if you wanted someone who could make the UCP Government sit up and take notice, Mr. Kaplan is probably as good a candidate as any. After all, he served as executive director of former UCP premier Jason Kenney’s 2019 “Blue Ribbon Panel” on Alberta’s finances that was chaired by Janice MacKinnon. And he appears in the pages of the market-fundamentalist Fraser Institute’s website as author of several commentaries on Alberta fiscal policies, and contributed articles to Mr. Kenney’s now-defunct Energy War Room.
This blog may not serve as a fanzine for the work of the MacKinnon Panel or the Fraser Institute, but people in the UCP government take them seriously, and they are far more likely to pay attention to Mr. Kaplan’s “initial analysis” published yesterday that estimates the start-up cost of an Alberta Republic at $299.4 billion and the ongoing annual costs at $67.3 billion.
The separatist Alberta Prosperity Project – the group behind the original campaign for a separation referendum on this fall’s ballot and many warnings to the premier that her leadership is in danger if she does not toe their line – estimates the cost at a mere $38 billion.
As for the prognosis for uncertainty, that is not an upbeat one either, and growing worse with estimates like Mr. Kaplan’s.
Just the prospect of Ms. Smith’s Oct. 19 Frankenstein question – cobbled together from pro- and anti-separation groups’ referendum petitions to get around court rulings declaring the separation-friendly question that the premier has championed to be unconstitutional – is enough to give your average Alberta billionaire or Chamber of Commerce president the yips.
The unstraightforward question will say: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”
Thanks, Premier! Economic uncertainty is now guaranteed at least until Oct. 19. And uncertainty, as we’ve all had drilled into our heads for decades by business lobbyists and their political allies, is poison to investment. These days, even liberal economists seem to admit there may be something to this.
But if voters say yes on Oct. 19 to another, constitutional separation vote, the result will be more of the same for years, possibly decades.
First there’d be the wait for the binding referendum – a year later? two years? who knows? In the same time frame there’ll have to be another election, unless the UCP decides to do away with democracy – so what happens if another party wins?
Then, about those negotiations with Canada, how long are they supposed to take? Don’t forget that a legal separation would require approval of the Government of Canada, the House of Commons, and other provincial legislatures, as well as meaningful consultation with First Nations.
Plus, of course, chances are high some of the more intemperate nuts in the separatist movement who are already calling for a unilateral declaration of independence will start threatening violence, and what’s that going to do to the investment climate?
And then there’s the not insignificant matter of the what the United States thinks, keeping in mind the fact that no matter what you think of the man, Donald Trump isn’t going to be president forever, or necessarily even much longer.
By the time we Canadians get around to talking about this particular issue with them, the U.S. will most likely be considerably less in favour of a major disruption on its northern border than it seems right now, which is a way of saying that sooner or later the adults will be back in charge Stateside.
Whatever we would talk about with them is a whole other can of worms, and a time-consuming one. For now, let’s just say that Congress’s Reapportionment Act of 1929 guarantees that U.S. statehood for Alberta is never likely to happen.
I don’t suppose that Marlaina’s announcement of the $400 B price tag, had anything to do with the fact that it came out just after the YouTube video of Stephen Harper with Brian Lilley with a big $400 B separation cost banner…?
Probably not.
I feel Smith has finally realized she has taken her separatist confidence scheme as far as she can for now, so she is belatedly and half heartedly embracing Canada for the time being.
Yes, the separatists who seem to comprise the majority of and control her party must be furious at her perceived betrayal, but Smith is experienced at betraying her supporters, although not necessarily with a good outcome for her. Heck when she left the opposition for the government, it killed her political career for almost a decade.
I’m not sure Smith has really thought through well how to manage her latest whiplash inducing switch, which is probably partly why there are no studies about the costs of separatism by Alberta. It would be good to know if it would just eat up our Heritage Fund or if it would be 10 times that and it would also be good to know soon, like before the upcoming fall referendum.
In any event, just around when Alberta is deciding to go rogue, or not, the citizens of the US will be deciding to reign in their rogue leader, the one who keeps on talking about a 51st state. So trips to Mar a Lago either by our dear leader or her separatist colleagues are likely to be less enticing than in the past. I suspect US voters will want their leaders not just to stay out of foreign conflicts, but also meddle less in external matters and focus more on solving their own problems. Probably some of our provincial politicians could benefit from learning this as well.
The referendum question is so confusing. Danielle Smith and the UCP are causing way too many problems with Albertans, and it’s over for them.
The “question” is actually two questions tied together with an “or”. How will this be presented to voters and tabulated? In two separate sentences which could be answered with either a yes or a no? The frankenquestion is itself not clear and unless not made simpler and clarified, would be thrown out of court IMO should it be challenged.
No, the question has the same structure as the Quebec referendum questions and the Brexit questions. The options are still binary: remain or leave. You cannot simply ask if Alberta should become independent. That would get immediately shot down by the courts. That was the separatists’ big mistake. Of course they are dumb, but Smith is not.
The question as currently written cannot be answered with a yes or no, but the results would be treated as if they had been.
It is really amazing Dingy Smith has not thrown in the towel yet on separation. Given that the western premiers gave her an earful after the western premiers meeting, and Ontario’s Doug Ford and the premier on New Brunswick are against the separation thing, not to mention many prominent politicians from by gone days, she still stubbornly steams ahead. I note now she is trying become friends with Quebec, the only other province that has wrestled with separatism. Of course we now have the newest distraction, in the midst of so many others, to build high speed trains around the province. The graft with this premier just never ends. No doubt her husband a train enthusiast will be heavily involved and no doubt paid a ridiculous amount for his knowledge from public coffers.
Let us look at her indiscretions:
Play-off hockey tickets from the party involved in the Tylenol scandal.
Smith goes to meet Trump and O’Leary in Florida, suddenly we have a new data centre that does not need an environmental impact assessment, say for a kick back of a small portion.
New private surgical centres, again some sort of kick-back? Same person, builds multi-million dollar recovery centres via sole source contracts.
The newest train development, her husband getting a whole bunch of work?
All this while people are dying in emergency waiting rooms because they can’t get care.
The costs and risks are well known to the academic promoters (U of C School of Public Policy, for example) of using the threat of separation as an extortion tactic to obtain greater benefits for the oil and gas industry in Alberta. Once an oil and gas industry lobbyist, always an oil and gas industry lobbyist it seems.
The threat of separation is not about the fossil fuel industry according to the extortionists, but it is and always was only about fully and completely extracting all of the available fossil fuels:
https://www.tiktok.com/@team.daniellesmith/video/7511814635658415416
To be compared with the following:
https://energynow.ca/2023/07/trudeau-no-country-canada-would-find-173-billion-barrels-of-oil-in-the-ground-and-leave-them-there-circa-march-2017-watch-it-here/
And so it is that the kabuki theater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_posturing
and the entire political charade of finding the appropriate devil(s) (“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”) that can be used as publicly acceptable scapegoat(s) is both laughable and pathetically desperate, yet the gullible are always easily bamboozled and manipulated.
An experiment that involves cooking the planet with ancient captured and stored buried carbon one barrel at a time is the added global ‘benefit’.
But, but, but…a noodle seller had rocks thrown at her when she was signing people up for separation with Stay Free Alberta in Indonesia, or something.
Ma’am, there was nobody at those booths in Alberta. Not sure how many people signed up in Indonesia. Are you sure you didn’t throw rocks at yourself?
I’m not sure why Mark Zuckerberg pays people for this garbage but there you go.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/facebook-overseas-alberta-separtism-9.7223966
Noodle that, will you Danielle Smith! Put an end to this costly and harmful referendum that should never have been granted your authoritarian-libertarian time of day in the first place. End it now. Your desperate grab for complete control of Alberta and Albertans is a cesspool. Some of it will splash back on you, Dear Leader. You have illusions of power but you do not have enough power to stop Pandora’s Box. You are the face of this tragedy and you will bear the consequences. Surely a top-tier malignant narcissist would pretend to be the hero and save the day by ending this immediately by Royal decree or Order in Council or executive order, or what have you.
(Any way you look at it, this should be the end of “I have a mandate to destroy Alberta” Danielle Smith as dictator, er premier, and the UCP. In Alberta, though, anything could happen.)
typo alert
Donald Trump isn’t going to me president forever, or necessarily even much longer.
Thank you, Ron. It will me fixed. Indeed, it has meen. DJC
A new moniker:
‘a has meen’ 😉
Oh it’s gonna cost a LOT more than that measly estimate.
No ocean access without paying for it.
Border patrols on *four* sides.
No fed money for highways, federal infrastructure projects. Paying back the pipeline
Armed forces. Equipment.
Passports, banking system, transportation, national security system (no more CSIS/RCMP for them), regulation systems (good luck, you’re right next door to American screwworms, heartworms and gawd-knows what else running rampant), trade organizations, housing infrastructure, social security, every penny of healthcare, shall I go on?
With 5M population. Less than the GTA for a tax base.
Good luck. Yer gonna need it. Running away from home is expensive.
This is simply to counter the separatist fantasies. Smith is many things, but she is not a separatist. She has played the separatists perfectly, and she is on track to achieve her real goals, which are erecting a wall around the oil and gas industry so they unregulated and untaxed, and weaselling out of the Canada Health Act with the help of Scott Moe and Doug Ford and possibly others, to the delight of private insurers, local and American.
She has also trapped the opposition into insisting that she is a separatist, which she is not. They do this because separatism is hugely unpopular in Alberta and they are hoping to make voters believe she is a separatist and vote her out. This is a huge mistake. It won’t work because it’s not true. The opposition should instead point to the other nine referendum questions and explain what they imply. She is already halfway through implementing the Free Alberta Strategy, and if the UCP wins the next election Alberta will become Canada’s Texas, without the solar industry.
The “adults” are always in charge in the US. There is unwavering continuity in US imperialism. The battle between the Democrats and Republicans is pure kayfabe. In 1948, George Kennan said, “”We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population… Our real task… is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. …The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”” That’s our WW2 good guys, just as they embarked on their eight-decade murder and exploitation spree. The Canadian state and economic elite slipped seamlessly into the US imperial yoke from the clapped-out British version, and never looked back.
Murphy: Up to Trump, I would have agreed with you. Post Trump, not so much. Yes, he toes the imperial line – eventually. He’d doing far too much damage along the way, though, for this to have been fully planned. I’ve frankly been surprised there’s been no announcement that the poor man has passed quietly in his sleep and that, oh, by the way, some members of his administration have been arrested. DJC
Meanwhile, Skippy Poilievre’s let’s stay in Canada tour is nothing more than bashing both the past and present Federal Government.
As long as we are doing our pro forma statements, has anyone done the math on how much it will cost the taxpayers to hire the additional sixty thousand individuals to oversee the forty five million ballots? How hard would it be to put ten questions on one piece of paper?
I wonder how much privatized for profit schooling and for profit private insurance health care is included in Mr. Kaplan’s annual operating costs guestimate. It does appear to be a low ball number.
Apropos of nothing, since the plan is to eliminate all personal and corporate taxes, do the seppies not realize that the moment the oil comes out of the ground it belongs to CNRL, Suncor, and all of the other oil companies who may decide not pay tribute to Alberta.
Jaundiced eye— the seppies don’t realize alot of things imo; anymore than Pablum Pete when he starts using Marlaina’s lines of Alberta within a united Canada, and that the Liberals need to stop treating the seppies as our enemies.
As to the numbers, I’m quite confident: 100%, 400% 600% 200%, that the the final figures from the UCP will make perfect sense, even if they have to be done retroactively. Experience does have it’s benefits.
This is the part where the race to the bottom happens.
This is about being factual or honest; this is all about making the best the least painful package concerning the costs and the consequences of separation. At some point, I suspect that the costs of separation will be converted down to a bag of used hockey pucks.
As for Queen Danielle, she is suspect with everyone at the moment. She’s staging a referendum that no one wants because the Remain side knows this whole exercise is idiotic. Meanwhile, the Seppies want to jump straight into the FreeDUMB part with abandon. This is a new age of Nero, so truth doesn’t matter.
I think that Sylvestre guy is blowing smoke about getting rid of Danielle Smith. It’s all nudge-nudge, wink-wink between them. There’s no way they’re dumping her when she’s carried their agenda farther than they dared hope. Who can double-talk with such impunity more than her? No, they are wagging each others’ tails.
From the Alberta Votes page:
As set out in the Orders in Council, the ten referendum questions to be put to the electors are as follows.
O.C. 160/2026 sets out the following question and orders the results of the referendum on this question are not to be binding. Electors will mark an “x” next to the options of their choice on their ballots.
10. Should Alberta remain a province in Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?
Option 1: Alberta should remain a province in Canada.
Option 2: The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.
etc.
This one gets counted first, so they say.
60,000 workers to run the election
Lot of hoopla. Government going to present their numbers. Others have and will present theirs. Then make your judgement.
The politicians that get rich from being in power should be giving the money back. They work for the people and get a good income. ” If it is not good enough go find another job.” Ford making deals, and Daniel making deals just to get rich.
She should have been on it a long time ago. But now she’s on it, maybe after a spanking. But not too on it. Two months before the referendum questions are put to a vote unless something comes up and the costing must be postponed. Watching her try to appease two completely opposite sides is, well something. And a majority of Albertans still think she is the best choice. Where do I advertise all the bridges I have for sale?
You just can’t fix the stupid of this government. I hope this will be the straw that breaks the back for Albertans supporting her & her government.
Premier Ditzy is being, well, Ditzy. She has realized separation will cause great economic damage, so it is time to show the sums. This may well tank the conservative parties via a split vote. I have never credited Madame Premier with long term thinking. I can only hope.
We’ve heard different groups insist that if Albertans approve secession by way of referendum then the province will use the legal process in the Constitution to achieve separation from Canada—pretty presumptuous given there actually is no provision in the Constitution for any province to secede.
On its face it looks like an attempt to legitimize secession even though there is no legal or constitutional way for any province to secede. Let us be charitable and assume this position should be interpreted to mean Alberta will follow the SCoC’s decades-old ruling that the Constitution would need to be amended to allow a province to secede and, further, the amendment would say that all ten provincial legislatures and the federal parliament would have to ratify any province’s application to secede.the vast majority of nations do not have a legal mechanism for any part of their respective territories to secede.
It’s not illegal to have a referendum on secession, even one that doesn’t comply with the federal Clarity Act. Either way, a referendum approving secession would be putting the cart before the horse if presented before said constitutional amendment is achieved. And that’s presuming secession would be approved by referendum (no survey has ever shown that a majority of Albertans approve separation—it’s not even close) and the Constitution would be amended to allow secession.
So let us presume Alberta separatists can convince the Legislative Assembly to initiate the amendment process for which there already is a constitutional formula: a minimum of seven provincial legislatures which represent at least half the national population, plus the federal parliament, would have to ratify the amendment. Without this amendment (ratification of secession by all eleven sovereign parliaments in Canada) there is no legal or constitutional way for any province to secede. A referendum, whether approving secession or not, can only be a political ploy since it is otherwise legally moot. But that’s fair enough.
Naturally these criteria would require extremely complex and difficult negotiations to achieve, presumably taking years to complete. The last attempt to fiddle with the 1982 Constitution Act precipitated the dramatic downfall of the largest parliamentary majority any Canadian party ever won—Canadians availing two ways to disapprove of Prime Minister Mulroney’s attempt to woo Quebec with special rights, hoping it would finally sign on to the new Constitution: first by Referendum (Canadians’ clear disapproval incited Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s Quebec lieutenant, to hive off Quebec ProgCon MPs and form the separatist BQ party), then by general election (voters reduced the ProgCons to two seats and the party was eventually amalgamated by treachery with the Western Reform-a-CRAP-a-Con-Alliance party to form the CPC).
Obviously Canadians disapprove of any federate having special rights or powers the others don’t have. Yet the amending formula risks opening that can of worms because any province might want something in return for its ratification of the amendment, and if that quid pro quo includes special rights or powers for particular federates and not others—well, politicians already know that voters have a clear grasp of the federalist division of rights and powers, each federate being equal in this respect.
Thus it might appear that any amendment would be extremely difficult to achieve. However, with respect the SCoC recommended requirement for a province to secede, it is probably the one amendment that would stand a chance of meeting the onerous constitutional formula. Reason being that approving the SCoC’s criterion for secession (“11/11”) is ambivalent: it can be viewed as either preventing secession or allowing at least a legal pathway to it; because of complex and lengthy negotiations required, it would not threaten any immediate, drastic effect, and would not otherwise identify any particular position as enemy of the other. Since negotiations would plausibly take years to conclude, provincial governments might change, these negotiations would almost certainly become partisan political positions that would influence voters’ choices.
The basic nuts and bolts: what combination of provincial populations meet the minimum requirement to amend? From a Western Canadian point of view, the present populations would tend to exacerbate fabled “Western Alienation” because all four Western provinces (32.4%) combined with the three other provinces required— Nova Scotia (with 2.6% of Canada’s population), New Brunswick (2.1%), Newfoundland (1.3%), and PEI (0.4%) —only gets to 38.8%, or about 11.2% short of the half+1 threshold. There is no way to amend without including either Ontario’s and/or Quebec’s ratification.
Danielle Smith cannot possibly estimate what the cost of Alberta secession would be. Alberta would, for example, owe its share of reconciliatory compensation for the many injustices that resulted from the Crown’s bad-faith negotiation, and subsequent reneging of many treaties with indigenous nations. That alone is a bogglingly huge number which could not be contemplated other than all of Canada contributing over a long, long amortization period. As unlikely as it seems, it would be presumptuous to know whether or not citizens of a seceded province could keep their Canadian passports or pensions until these matters are sorted by negotiation. BC First Nations are particularly owed a lot because the province illegally refused to treat with them under the notion that its 1871 confederation effectively extinguished their sovereign claims—which was overturned by the SCoC in 1997. That’s 127 years of repression, deprivation, pain and suffering for which all of Canada is culpable.
Would resource extraction industries want to renegotiate their licensing contracts in a province attempting to secede? There are surely a million other devilish details that only years and years of negotiations of the most complex kind can deal with.
It remains that if separatists want Alberta to secede, they need to convince the government to initiate an amendment process to make secession at least legally possible —if not especially likely.
Any other route would be tantamount to breaking the law—and, because some separatists claim to have been in negotiations with the USA to solicit its help, tantamount to seditious treason such as any fifth-column which invites foreign interference with the territorial integrity of virtually every country in the world would face if discovered.
Remember: estimating what secession would cost might be largely speculative, but proceeding with estimates and referenda before the Constitution is amended is totally moot.
Scotty: The only potentially successful route to “independence” is a unilateral declaration followed by immediate recognition by the United States, backed by military force. That, in my opinion, has always been the only real plan of the APP group and their core followers, with the only real objective being assimilation by the United States. I’m not sure they even give that much of a hoot about 51st statehood, as long as they can own as many guns of as many kinds as they like. DJC
DJC: I don’t see how one could take the separatists’ apparent plan any other way.
The crazy Orange Baby’s blathering notwithstanding, I don’t see the USA committing an international crime when rationalized only by the minority opinion of one of another country’s federates (let’s assume 30% of Alberta voters support secession, whether independence or to confederate with the USA; and that there are —as of 2023’s provincial election—2.8 million eligible voters in Alberta; and that Canada’s population is —as of the first quarter of 2026—41.5 million; hence, 2,800,000 x 0.3 = 840, 000; 840,ooo ÷ 41,500,000 = 0.202) 20.2%, or in Canada’s case, slightly more than one-fifth of its population—that is, if every single eligible voter in Alberta voted.
I for one don’t believe the separatists have nearly 30% support (I’d put it at 10% if real, actual, no-turning-back-Brexit-like separation is the choice). So, what? Ten percent of Canadians? Or seven percent? The only democratic worth of such support would be merely for the sake of argument.
Meanwhile the US Constitution has rules about declaring war, as well as for confederating new territory. Five inhabited, non-confederated US Territories have a total population of 3.6 million. The last Territory to be confederated was Hawaii in 1959. The USA is not obliged to confederate any Territory, say, Puerto Rico, under its control—heck, it can’t even confederate its own Capitol of Washington, DC.
I’m flummoxed that nobody has whacked the separatists across the face with a cold, wet pickerel every time they wax about how separation is gonna go. How come nobody’s asked Smith, point blank, if she knows the secession project is not only legally moot, but illegal and guaranteed to provoke a state of war if attempted illegally with American help? Never mind the plausible prosecutions for the aforementioned seditious treason.
Are people afraid tRump will insert himself into the debate if those terms are raised? Canada, the world doesn’t need reminding, is not Greenland nor Venezuela nor Iran nor North Korea. But even if it were, the Orange-Goo-Tanned One has only achieved the illegal kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, but not the takeover of Venezuela; “Fire and Fury” became the title of a pretty good book about tRump, but his buddy Kim Jong Un has continued to violate with impunity the “peace” tRump claims to have brokered. Greenland? He backed offa that one pretty darn quick when other NATO allies deployed on the Danish territory. And Iran? He just wanted to see if NATO would come to his aid if he got into trouble—I guess he got his answer.
tRump Always Chickens Out. “TACO”
Or how’s about Poilievre Undermines tRump’s Idiotic Notions?
See? I can do separatist math too—turn 2% into 20%!!