Oh, great, just what Canada needs: a totally made-up sovereignty crisis.
Who should we thank this time? The Bloc Quebecois again? No; this latest challenge to Canada’s Constitution is courtesy of Alberta premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party.
OK, so what’s up with Alberta? Well, until recently, the province was a paradise for Canadian conservatives. The Liberals may have dominated federal politics for the past century, but in Alberta they haven’t won a single election since World War One.
Nonetheless, really right-wing Albertans wanted more. They felt that Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives were far too progressive – and not nearly conservative enough.
So Alberta’s ruling party frequently faced challengers from further to the right – until finally, in 2015, the Wildrose Party so successfully split the conservative vote that something miraculous happened: Alberta elected the left-wing New Democratic Party.
Suddenly Alberta wasn’t conservative heaven anymore… it was socialist hell. Not really, of course: NDP premier Rachel Notley increased the minimum wage, invested in education and heath care, and raised the corporate tax rate. And the sky did not fall.
But she certainly put the fear of God into former Conservative federal minister Jason Kenney, who won the race to lead Alberta’s beleaguered Progressive Conservatives in 2017 after promising to take down the NDP by joining forces with the righter-wing Wildrose Party.
His plan worked: Kenney’s newly founded United Conservatives beat Notley’s New Democrats in Alberta’s 2019 election. But then COVID hit – and Kenney failed so spectacularly as premier that his party called for a leadership review, and he stepped down before finishing his first term.
Enter Danielle Smith. She’d led the Wildrose Party from 2009 to 2014, but she was a talk radio host and columnist for the Calgary Herald when she won the United Conservative leadership race in 2022 on her promise to pass the “Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act.”
And that more or less brings us back to this week, when premier Smith invoked her signature act for the first time.
Why? Well, according to her, Canada’s forthcoming Clean Energy Regulations will cause brownouts, blackouts, and obscene electricity bills in Alberta… and Trudeau’s Liberals don’t care because they’re environmental ideologues.
But that’s total bullshit: Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations are still being drafted; the federal government is still consulting with Alberta; nothing has been set in stone – not even the deadline for establishing a net-zero carbon-emitting power grid by 2035; and the current draft already includes a provision allowing for new natural-gas plants to be exempted from the regulations for 20 years.
Plus the goal of establishing a net-zero power grid isn’t some woke Liberal idea. It’s something all G7 nations agree is of existential importance. But every member country also acknowledges that the objective is aspirational – as opposed to realistic – because there are places that cannot achieve net-zero for very practical geographic, technological and financial reasons.
The federal government already readily recognizes that Alberta is one such place. While Canada’s electricity grid is already around 80% carbon-free, that ratio varies from province to province. For example, 99% of PEI’s power is generated by wind (because it’s a windy island); and 80% of Quebec’s power is generated by hydro (because it’s a land of rivers); but nearly 90% of Alberta’s power is still generated by burning fossil fuel (because it’s the home of the oilsands).
Nonetheless, Alberta premier Smith’s threat-slash-promise to defy federal law was accompanied by her promise-slash-threat to establish a government-owned energy company to build and run new natural gas plants until 2035 – and then buy and run old natural gas plants from the private sector in defiance of the federal government indefinitely.
This would be head-scratchingly off-brand. As Liberal minister Randy Boissonnault told reporters in a scrum on Parliament Hill: “We’re talking about a conservative premier that wants to nationalize the energy industry in Alberta … to pick a fight with the feds over regs that don’t even yet exist.… I can’t even write this stuff. It’s crazy.”
It’s also obviously unconstitutional (provinces can’t pick and choose laws to enforce a la carte) as well as completely unnecessary: Federal laws that violate provincial jurisdiction are already illegal (by definition) and provinces can already challenge such laws (via the legal system).
It seems like Smith understands as much. Yes, she vowed to take Trudeau’s Liberals to court if the federal government doesn’t back down on the 2035 deadline; and yes, she continues to confidently proclaim that the Supreme Court of Canada would see things her way.
But the Alberta premier has also described her own invocation of her own legislation as “largely symbolic.” And she has repeatedly committed to getting Alberta’s energy grid to net-zero by 2050… a mere 15 years later than the deadline proposed by the supposedly ideological Liberals.
I realize it wasn’t incidental that Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives dropped the word “Progressive” from their name when they merged with the Wildrose Party. But there’s difference between opposing progressivism (however you define it) and simply stalling progress.
Even Danielle Smith understands that the days are numbered for Alberta’s oilsands. She’s just trying to burn up as much of it as she can before that day finally comes.