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The day after the federal election that saw Mark Carney installed as prime minister, Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, introduced sweeping changes to democracy in Alberta.
Among those changes was a relaxation of the rules around referendums, paving the way for a separation vote. All of it is driven by a perception that Alberta’s prosperity is under attack by a hostile force. According to the premier, that hostile force is not the U.S. and its tariffs or threats of annexation. It’s Ottawa.
Underlying it all? “Alberta’s prosperity” is shorthand for the oil and gas industry.
And the move to relax referendum rules is not a reaction to the current state of affairs — it’s the Smith government seizing a moment to institute a long-held and oil-rooted plan called the Free Alberta Strategy.
Smith swept into power with her long-time political ally Rob Anderson at her side as her chief of staff, and tucked neatly under his arm was a strategy to pull Alberta from confederation — partially if possible, entirely if need be.
“Alberta’s treatment within Canada has become intolerable,” Anderson and his co-authors wrote in the Free Alberta Strategy in 2021, adding the federal government had undertaken an “assault” on “Alberta’s largest and most critical industry,” meaning, of course, the oil and gas sector.
Throughout her short reign, Smith and Anderson have followed that plan closely, and appear to be capitalizing on both an international crisis and an election that didn’t go their way to pave the way for more extreme aspects of the plan.
Smith is not wrong that the oil and gas sector is of huge economic importance in Alberta — a one-dollar swing in the price of a barrel can mean $750 million more (or less) in the provincial budget. The sector is also not disappearing anytime soon.
But while blaming the industry’s fortunes squarely on Ottawa, and pushing the narrative of a shared enemy might be good for amping up vitriol, the strategy does little to help her lead the province through an era of intense uncertainty. It’s an era that will have a profound effect on Alberta’s future and on the future of its oil and gas industry.
The Free Alberta Strategy, written by Anderson, along with University of Calgary political science professor Barry Cooper and lawyer Derek From, calls for the province to institute several measures in response to what it calls “sustained federal attacks on Alberta” — attacks, it says, that are largely centred on the oil and gas industry, from the consumer carbon tax (which has since been eliminated) to federal environmental assessment legislation to a ban on oil tankers off the B.C. coast.
The first order of business to fight back, according to the strategy, is to enact the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which Smith did as her first order of business. The next steps the strategy outlines include the creation of an Alberta police force, and pulling the province out of the Canada Pension Plan. The strategy also says Alberta should opt out of all federal programs that it sees as interfering with provincial jurisdiction, including education, resource development, environmental regulation, property rights and health.
While attempts at creating a provincial pension plan have faltered, and the creation of a police force carries on piecemeal following clear public disinterest, the provincial government has leaned into the argument of economic carnage and the need to protect Alberta’s energy sector from Ottawa.
In the strategy, this would prohibit “attempts by federal agencies to regulate our province’s energy sector in any manner.” In practice, the Smith government has introduced amendments to its Critical Infrastructure Defence Act that would attempt to bar federal employees from facilities that track and compile emissions data — even private facilities that are not operated by the Alberta government.
The province is also challenging draft federal clean electricity legislation in court and making demands of the Liberal government all tied to opening more oil and gas exploration, which Alberta wants to double.
If those demands are not met, there could be a “national unity crisis,” Smith said prior to Carney’s election.
In a list of demands the Alberta government presented to Prime Minister Carney on May 5, only one wasn’t directly linked to oil and gas — a call to completely overhaul equalization payments, in which funds are redistributed across the country from wealthier regions. In Alberta, those payouts are inseparably linked to the fortunes wrought from the oil and gas sector.
Now, days after the federal vote, Smith is echoing the Free Alberta Strategy, saying Ottawa’s treatment of Alberta has “become unbearable” and separatists in the province are not a fringe minority, but loyal Albertans “who’ve just had enough of having their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile federal government.”
That’s almost word for word from the Free Alberta Strategy written four years ago.
Directing anger at Ottawa isn’t new in Alberta, it’s a time-honoured tradition as old as the province itself, when it entered confederation without the same ownership of its resources as other provinces (a slight that was later rectified).
Every government in the province has used the federal government as a foil to rally the troops and shore up political support. That’s usually a conservative government, but even the NDP stirred the federal pot during its four-year reign.
Talk of separation isn’t new either. It ebbs and flows depending on who’s in power in Ottawa and the federal policies they’re enacting.
Those outbursts usually burn brightly for a moment and then flame out, but there historically hasn’t been the same level of tacit support from the provincial government as there is today.
Smith rose to power after Jason Kenney, a staunch federalist who was shown the door by the party he helped found. Despite the merger of two right-wing parties to form the United Conservatives, the movement was strained between factions, including separatists and sovereigntists on its outer flank.
Smith owes her victory to some of those outer flanks. She is from those outer flanks, and so is her chief advisor, Anderson. It’s a flank that views the province’s oil and gas industry as under assault from “hostile and unreliable federal governments” — and one that’s willing to go to increasingly extreme measures to defend it.
Smith’s government has been focused almost entirely on expanding and promoting Alberta’s oil and gas sector in a way that exceeds past governments — a notable feat where the sector has long padded provincial budgets.
The United Conservative Party under Smith has not only pushed back against federal policies, but worked to reshape Alberta’s electricity grid to all but block renewables and encourage more natural gas consumption. It’s also considering elimination of its industrial carbon levy.
Where past separatist or western alienation movements have focused on political principles, including increased representation and senate reform alongside resource development, Smith’s focus is on making more money.
The main driver behind the Free Alberta Strategy, and the main rhetorical assault from the premier, isn’t about identity or about politics, it is centred on climate policies and the energy sector.
“The federal government has taken hostile actions … against our right to develop our resources,” Smith said the day after the election. She also demanded the federal government rescind “nine offensive pieces of legislation and policy that prevent us from being able to exercise our constitutional jurisdiction to develop our resources.”
Her list includes asking for the establishment of guaranteed economic corridors (think: pipelines), the repealing of federal environmental assessment legislation, the lifting of a tanker ban off the coast of B.C., the elimination of the proposed oil and gas emissions cap, scrapping federal clean electricity regulations, ending “treatment of plastics as toxic,” abandoning net-zero vehicle mandates, returning oversight of industrial carbon taxes fully to provinces and halting “the federal censorship of energy companies.”
Every one of those demands relates to the oil and gas industry.
Lisa Young, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, writes in a post about the separation issue that there appear to be two types of Alberta separatists these days, the true believers who imagine a free Alberta “as some kind of conservative utopia (like, well, Trump’s America)” and “instrumentalists” who want to use the threat to get concessions (think Quebec).
The Free Alberta Strategy adds a third group, those who would never separate. It labels them as “well-meaning and sincere,” but says they “have not learned from history.”
It’s clear Smith isn’t in the last group, but it’s not clear precisely where her true feelings lie. If her intent is to use threats to wrangle concessions for the oil sector, it comes at a dangerous time to play such games — or providential, depending on your view.
If Alberta were to vote to separate, some of the issues raised in the Free Alberta Strategy and the still minority separatist movement, would only be exacerbated.
“The world looks at us like we’ve lost our minds,” Smith said in her address to Albertans on May 5. “We have the most abundant and accessible natural resources of any country on Earth, and yet we landlock them, sell what we do produce to a single customer, to the south of us, while enabling polluting dictatorships to eat our lunch.”
The strategy, too, rails against landlocked resources and lays the blame at the federal government.
Secession would sever its official ties to neighbours the province would need to help industry get its products overseas or across borders. And it would face the once-unlikely, and now all-too-real, prospect of being consumed by that single customer Smith highlighted in her speech.
If Smith really is using the threats as a means to coerce changes to legislation her government does not like, she may awaken forces well beyond her control, which ends well outside her intentions.
And as University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley notes, the demands she has raised in her address aren’t based on national consensus, and will “face significant constitutional and political hurdles that, if not overcome, could end up inflaming frustrations among her base rather than resolving them.”
Providing a wedge as Canada faces a threat from the United States, and requires a united front in order to hold off the worst of the trade war, raises some serious questions about motivation.
In her address, Smith warned Albertans to stand unified against forces, inside and outside of the province, that would try to instill fear and distrust, before lashing out at those who would disagree with her views, and those of her government.
“They will seek to divide us into different camps for the purposes of marginalizing and vilifying one another based on differing opinions, effectively pitting neighbour against neighbour and Albertan against Albertan,” she said, without irony.
Smith’s government is making it clear that there is one vision of Alberta, and it is centred on a specific politics and a specific industry. Anything else is un-Albertan and won’t be tolerated. She will break up the country to ensure that’s so.
But perhaps it shouldn’t be her words that we listen to.
“Albertans,” she said in her address, “are more of an ‘actions speak louder than words, kind of people.’ ”
The actions of her government, and of her inner circle, speak volumes.
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