Alberta's Premier Smith And The Canadian Dilemma

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been somewhat in the US news lately, since she announced lowering the bar on allowing citizen initiatives to be put on the ballot, which would inevitably bring the question of Alberta leaving Canada to a vote. This in turn was prompted by Mark Carney's win in last week's election. Yesterday, she addressed Albertans on how she plans to navigate the province's conflicts with Ottawa. The full text of her address is here.

I can't help but put this in the context of my post here Sunday on the message Justin Trudeau brought to Trump at Mar-a-Lago following Trump's victory in the 2024 US election, that if President Trump were to make the Canadian government face reciprocal tariffs, open the USMCA trade agreements to force reciprocity, and/or balance economic relations on non-tariff issues, then Canada would collapse on itself economically and cease to exist.

What Premier Smith proposes to do is renegotiate the relationship between Alberta and Ottawa on somewhat similar grounds in the wake of the growing popularity of the Alberta separation movement, something she herself stoked by making it easier to put separation on the ballot without herself endorsing it, or at least, not quite:

We are well aware that there is large and growing number of Albertans that have lost hope in Alberta having a free and prosperous future as a part of Canada. Many of these Albertans are organizing petitions to trigger a citizen-initiated referendum, as I mentioned earlier. The vast majority of these individuals are not fringe voices to be marginalized or vilified – they are loyal Albertans.

. . . As most Albertans know, I have repeatedly stated I do not support Alberta separating from Canada. I personally still have hope that there is a path forward for a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.

Nevertheless, her list of grievances against the national government contains what must certainly be conscious echoes of the US Declaration of Independence ("He has refused his Assent to Laws. . ."):

They have imposed net-zero mandates on our natural gas-based power grid causing investment in reliable generation from natural gas to flee, thereby endangering the future stability of our power grid, and risking future blackouts and spikes in electricity costs for Alberta families and businesses.

They have attacked our food producers with methane taxes, onerous regulations on fertilizer, electric vehicle mandates, and many other destructive policies that have hiked costs on our farmers and ranchers, and driven billions of dollars of investment in agriculture elsewhere.

They have interfered in provincial jurisdiction time and again. From taking over the regulation of plastics, to mandating how we operate child care, health care and dental care, to harassing law abiding firearms owners, to dozens of other examples of unconstitutional interference.

The remedy she proposes doesn't strike me as especially promising:

As a start, I will soon appoint a Special Negotiating Team to represent our province in negotiations with the federal government on the following reforms requested by our province. We hope this will result in a binding agreement that Albertans can have confidence in – call it an Alberta Accord if you will.

. . . While these negotiations with Ottawa are ongoing, our government will appoint, and I will chair, the ‘Alberta Next’ panel. This panel will be composed of some of our best and brightest judicial, academic and economic minds, to join with me in a series of in-person and online town halls to discuss Alberta’s future in Canada, and specifically, what next steps can we take as a province to better protect Alberta from any current or future hostile policies of the federal government.

. . . After the work of the panel is finished, it is likely we will place some of the more popular ideas discussed with the panel to a provincial referendum so all Albertans can vote on them sometime in 2026.

Well, Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, "jaw-jaw is better than war-war", but it sounds to me as though, if Alberta's grievances against Ottawa are as urgent as they seem to be, remedies other than jaw-jaw until sometime in 2026 (when there will maybe be some lind of potential vote on something or other) might be more appropriate. Trump's strategy with Carney strikes me as much more effective:

[Carney's] meeting with Trump is scheduled to take place Tuesday at the White House.

“I’m not sure what he wants to see me about, but I guess he wants to make a deal,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday when asked what he expected from the meeting.

. . . Carney, in his first comments Friday following the election, said it was “important to distinguish want from reality,” adding that the upcoming talks would be difficult.

I've got to assume that when Carney mentions "reality", he's referring to the message Trudeau gave Trump at Mar-a-Lago, that any sort of trade reciprocity or increase in defense budget would destroy Canada as a nation. I've got to assume that Carney's ready to give the same answer to any proposals for equitable treatment to Premier Smith's Special Negotiating Team. As Trump told Time last week,

[T]he deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don't have to pay it. They don't have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries.

I continue to think, first, that any problem Trump has with Canada will be resolved much sooner than any problem Alberta has with Ottawa, and second, any resolution to the overall Canadian dilemma will make Premier Smith's plans for Alberta irrelevant fairly quickly.