Danielle Smith is against forest fires, but she’ll leave this lighter right here
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith absolutely, unequivocally does not want to see a cockfight. She’s merely provoking these specially bred roosters and will soon release them together in a pen. Whatever happens, happens.
She has been adamant in her opposition to forest fires. “They’re dangerous,” she says, as she gingerly places a pack of matches on a pile of dry leaves. “Now, no one touch these.”
Ms. Smith hates to see drama at social events, but she will clandestinely ask the bartender to make everyone’s drink a double. And she categorically, unreservedly does not support Alberta separating from Canada and becoming a sovereign state; her government has simply tabled legislation that will make it significantly easier for residents of her province to do so.
“Now, no one touch this” she says, as she gingerly places Bill 54 down in the Alberta legislature. “It’s dangerous.”
This is how the Premier gets to stoke separatist sentiments without wearing the label herself; how she attempts to act as both a voice for angry secessionists and an advocate for a united Canada at the same time. Ms. Smith has said repeatedly that she “do[es] not support Alberta separating from Canada.” And yet she keeps legitimizing its discussion, creating a platform for its serious consideration, and facilitating the conditions for a referendum vote.
Late last month, Ms. Smith‘s United Conservative Party (UCP) tabled Bill 54, the Election Statutes Amendment Act, which, among other things, lowers the number of signatures needed for a citizen initiative to be put to a province-wide referendum. The current threshold is 20 per cent of all registered voters, and 20 per cent in two-thirds of all provincial ridings. The threshold has now been lowered to 10 per cent of registered voters who voted in the last election – about 176,000 signatures, down from 600,000 – and riding-level thresholds will be eliminated. Ms. Smith also announced previously that she would be assembling an “Alberta Next” panel to consider potential referendum questions.
“To be clear,” Ms. Smith said in a 20-minute address to the province one week after the federal election, “our government will not be putting a vote on separation from Canada on the referendum ballot. However, if there is a successful citizen-led referendum petition [...] our government will respect the democratic process and include that question on the 2026 provincial referendum ballot.” She later added that she still has “hope that there is a path forward for a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.”
Alberta’s Premier has thus taken up the most yellow-bellied position possible: she’s against separatism, but with a wink; she’s entertaining separatism, but with plausible deniability. She’s poking these caged roosters with a stick, but she’s too pusillanimous to actually own what she’s doing.
And what Ms. Smith is doing, in effect, is what she’s been doing as long as she’s been Premier: trying to keep the more extreme factions of the former Wildrose Party in the fold of the UCP. It’s what she did by unveiling changes to the province’s policies on trans youth last year seemingly out of nowhere, and it’s what former Premier Jason Kenney did by putting the issue of equalization payments to a referendum, knowing fully well it was an impotent, symbolic exercise: it’s all in service of keeping the United Conservative Party united. In this case, however, Ms. Smith‘s flirting with separatism also happens to be an exercise in legitimizing the absurd, impractical and destructive.
Indeed, there are many ways a federalist Premier can acknowledge and address her constituents’ credible grievances with Ottawa without effectively threatening the nuclear option. But Ms. Smith knows that more than a third of Albertans, according to one Angus Reid poll, are at minimum interested in hearing about that nuclear option. And so, she provides.
One would expect that a Premier who genuinely does not want to see her province separate from Canada would use her platform to convey the extent to which separation would harm Alberta; that a landlocked country of five million people would have a much harder time convincing Canada to invest in energy infrastructure than it already does as party to it.
Ms. Smith has not said what her government intends to do if and when the issue makes it to a referendum. Will the UCP campaign to remain in Canada? Will Ms. Smith herself speak to the plethora of legal and logistical challenges of separation, including access to foreign markets, the establishment of new currency and monetary policy, national defence and so on? Talk of separation already threatens to undermine business confidence and investment in Alberta. Why is Ms. Smith stoking that uncertainty, rather than tempering it?
The answer, of course, is in that yellow-belly – the one that wants to exist in both the “leave” and “remain” camps in order to stay onside of everyone. But there’s an ember threatening to ignite Alberta’s forest, and we all know who left that pack of matches.
Gifted article: theglobeandmail.com |
