Thanks to her sneaky separatist manoeuvring, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith seems to have wedged herself between the proverbial rock and metaphorical hard place. 

If she doesn’t do what the Alberta separatists in her United Conservative Party (UCP) demand and call a referendum using the wording on their Citizen Initiative petition – “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?” – they may very well depose her in an internal party coup. 

If she does that, though, she will run up against the courts – which have ruled that question to be unconstitutional and quashed approval of the petition because First Nations were not consulted.  She may also soon face an energized pro-Canadian electorate that is finally starting to pay enough attention to send her packing if it gets the chance.

If she tries to find a “compromise” between those irreconcilable positions, one side, the other, or both could turn on her. 

Nevertheless, it looks as if starting today Premier Smith will try to wiggle out of the trap she has built and wedged herself into by pretending to be a loyal Canadian while doing everything she can to facilitate the schemes of the separatist crowd. 

The Legislature’s Select Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee has asked Thomas Lukaszuk, proponent of the Forever Canadian petition campaign, to come to its meeting this afternoon at 3 o’clock.

“It is possible the Committee will consider a motion during the May 20 meeting to invite you to present to the Committee,” said Chair Brandon Lunty, the UCP MLA for Leduc-Beaumont, in a letter to Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier of Alberta.

The letter continues: “In the event that the Committee chooses, during the meeting, to invite you to present, I would ask that, should you be available to attend, you please be prepared to make a presentation on the citizen initiative proposal of up to five minutes, after which committee members will have the opportunity to ask questions regarding the proposal and your presentation.”

Needless to say, this is both gormless and rude. Lukaszuk obviously picked up on the letter’s tone when he posted it to social media, commenting, “Looks like the UCP led committee dealing with the #ForeverCanadian petition has found whole FIVE MINUTES to discuss the future of Alberta and Canada.”

Nevertheless, he will be there. He told me last night: “I think Canada is worth five minutes. I will definitely go and make sure that this is the longest five minutes that those UCP MLAs have ever experienced!”

The obvious conclusion from this is that Lunty’s boss and her advisors have already decided to put separation on the ballot in October, and they’ll make it official this week, but they’d like to find a way to blame Lukaszuk for what is bound to be an unpopular decision. 

Up to now, the committee has been slow-walking the Forever Canadian petition – which was intended to require the members of Legislative Assembly to vote yes or no on the question, “Do you agree that Alberta should remain within Canada?” – observed Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt said on social media last night.

“It does not matter what @LukaszukAB or Forever Canada may have wanted,” Bratt said, responding to a post that suggested the UCP was trying to make Lukaszuk the scapegoat for the referendum they desperately want. “It is the determination of the MLA Committee that matters. And I am almost 100% that they will recommend a referendum and along party lines.”

Whether the UCP has decided to use Lukaszuk’s wording for their separatist referendum, as some have speculated, remains to be seen. But if they do, Lukaszuk observed, the premier will have to be the proponent, because he won’t. 

And if they use his question, he added, “that will cause them more problems than they can imagine.” 

“My question was designed to be asked in a legislature and to block their question,” he said. “My question does not meet the Clarity Act requirements and it cannot possibly start a constitutional process for separation.”

Which leaves us where, exactly? 

In the short term, if the UCP tries to use the Forever Canadian question, the hard-core separatists in the party bureaucracy will be furious – at the premier. If the government tries to move ahead with the Stay Free Alberta question, the vote will quickly bump up against the courts. What’s more, we can expect a large cohort of Alberta voters who have not really been paying attention up to now to be infuriated by this UCP threat against their country and the rights it guarantees them.

Still, one way or another, Smith might succeed in wiggling off the hook. History shows you can never count her out. 

Years ago, one of Smith’s smartest and closest political allies, who must remain nameless to protect the periodically helpful, told me that the former Wildrose Party leader often operated her mouth without engaging her brain. 

But whenever this got her in trouble, as it frequently did, she reckoned she could always talk her way out of the hot water she’d gotten herself into. “And she usually could,” they ruefully remembered. 

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Over the weekend prominent Alberta separatist Jeffrey Rath took to the internet appearing to advocate an internal United Conservative Party (UCP) coup to remove Premier Danielle Smith. 

Her sin, in Rath’s obvious estimation, is that she’s been working too closely with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney and playing both sides of Independence Avenue in her efforts to keep the party’s fraying coalition of outright separatists and traditional Canadian Conservatives in one piece. 

His solution: The separatist cadres who now clearly control the UCP, but not quite yet either the government caucus or the provincial government, should dump her and replace her with a more ideologically acceptable leader and declare the party to be a separatist entity in the manner of the Parti Québécois.

Arguably, this could either be a sign of Smith’s increasing strength thanks to her latest deal with Carney, or of the separatists’ increasing strength as the holders of most of the internal power positions in the UCP party bureaucracy. Or, perhaps, a bit of both. 

Smith’s strategy, as is well understood, has been to assert that only she can successfully keep the open separatists now embedded in the party, caucus and cabinet from scaring away electors accustomed to voting Conservative without thinking too deeply about what the party nowadays represents.

Likewise, as the vessel of Preston Manning’s strategy of blackmailing the federal government into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51^st State, she is the only politician likely to be able to get away with perpetrating this political protection racket. 

Talk of an internal party coup, though, should be taken seriously because Rath, who is legal counsel and for all practical purposes the self-appointed spokesperson for the Stay Free Alberta petition/Alberta Prosperity Project (SFA), is extremely influential within Alberta’s separatist faction. It is not clear if he has ambitions of his own in the new Alberta he hopes to create, but it is easy to assume that he must. 

So when Rath was so blunt about what he thinks should happen next in a series of social media posts, we should pay attention. He speaks for many in the UCP. 

“Premier Smith had no mandate from her membership to sign the Carbon Tax MOU with Mark Carney,” Rath posted at one point. “Danielle Smith no longer enjoys the confidence of the members of the UCP.”

If that’s not a call for a coup, I don’t know what is. 

“Enough is enough,” he said in another post. “We are a super majority of the party. Time to take it back from the Kenneyites.” (The “Kenneyites,” remember, basically purged the “Red Tories” from the UCP after former premier Jason Kenney engineered the double reverse hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party in the summer of 2017. This is an irony, since those Red Tories, had they still been around in any numbers, could have saved Kenney’s bacon in the fall of 2022.)

Here’s another, delivered Trump-style, in all caps: “DANIELLE SMITH HAS LOST HER MANDATE TO LEAD THE UCP!”

Rath’s message to the cadres in the UCP’s riding constituency associations: “MAKE SURE TO ATTEND YOUR LOCAL CA BOARD AGM AND ELECT A SLATE OF PRO-INDEPENDENCE BOARD MEMBERS. CONTACT YOUR LOCAL APP OR STAY FREE REGIONAL LEADERS FOR GUIDANCE.”

“We need to work to replace every non independence board in the province,” he said in part in another post. 

All these messages were posted on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, a place a lot of moderate Albertans nowadays sensibly eschew, if only to keep their blood pressure down. Someone has to look in there, however, and I’m willing to take the risk so that the rest of you don’t have to.

If this was more than just an anticipatory outburst of exuberance in memory of the late grandmother of Europe’s titled classes it suggests Danielle Smith’s “United Conservative” coalition could actually be starting to fracture.

It’s worth noting that the separatists on social media are also infuriated by the possibility that when the pipe gets laid, it may not follow the route most of them prefer, that is, the one most likely to annoy the most British Columbians and First Nations along the way to Prince Rupert. (The British Columbia city of that name and the terminus of the Alberta separatists’ imagined Danzig Corridor to the sea, that is, not the first governor of the late Hudson’s Bay Co., just to be clear.)

Meanwhile, speaking of Independence Avenue, a metaphor lest you tried to look it up on Google Maps, Edmonton City Councillor Michael Janz announced he had applied on behalf of many of his constituents to rename the road in front of the Alberta Legislature “Forever Canadian Avenue.”

Janz – councillor for Ward papastew, located just across the North Saskatchewan River from the Legislature – said the renaming of two blocks of 99^th Ave. between 107^th St. and 109^th Street “will celebrate the largest non-partisan citizen movement in Alberta’s history.”

“The Forever Canadian petition collected signatures from Albertans who want Alberta to proudly remain a Canadian province,” Janz explained in a statement. “This effort was prompted as a response to Premier Danielle Smith encouraging conversations about Alberta separation. The petition gathered 456,000 signatures and motivated more than 10,000 Albertans to volunteer in support of this work.”

Janz, who is a tireless progressive activist not unprepared to be a gadfly if that’s what it takes to accomplish something, was accompanied to an outdoor news conference yesterday by Forever Canadian petition proponent Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier of Alberta. 

Janz will make application to the Edmonton Naming Committee, an independent body of volunteers appointed by the city. He pointed out that there is a precedent, when another city councillor successfully applied in 2018 to have a city road renamed Canadian Forces Trail. 

If Janz succeeds with this one, it will drive the UCP and the SFA nuts. 

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There’s no need to make the explanation of the carbon pricing, carbon capture and bitumen pipeline deal announced Friday in Calgary by the federal and Alberta governments too complicated. It’s actually pretty simple. 

After all, notwithstanding their political differences, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith have more objectives in common right now than they don’t, so it couldn’t have been that hard for them to reach an agreement. 

Carney has served many years as an expert in and senior representative of international finance capital, of which the oil industry remains a key component in Canada. While neither an expert nor a deep thinker, Smith has been a lobbyist for the oil industry and an effective public proponent of its preferred policies throughout her career as a journalist and politician. 

Of course they weren’t going to have all that much trouble finding ways to grant the Canadian oilpatch its wish for a pipeline to the West Coast, preferably completely paid for by taxpayers, plus slow-walked carbon taxes and big subsidies for the carbon-capture boondoggle to build social license for the pipeline. 

They may have their differences, but they are flying in formation when it comes to the oil industry. 

They have immediate parallel political needs as well. Smith must thread the needle between appearing to be an Alberta separatist and appearing to be a patriotic Canadian unifier to hold her fraying but still united voting coalition together – and, not incidentally, to hang onto her job as premier since separatists now clearly dominate her party. 

Friday’s deal lets her do that – for the moment, anyway. And the moment is all Smith ever thinks about. To give her her due, it seems to work. 

Carney needs to keep his coalition together as well. Instead of MAGA separatists on the right who would really rather be part of the United States so they could own machineguns and call people hateful names, he needs to appease moderate green voters in British Columbia and Quebec and somehow hold the country together. 

Since the contradictions of using bitumen as the glue to keep their political coalitions together will become more obvious over time, they’re in a hurry to get the deal done and some pipe laid so the doubters on both sides of the political spectrum can be told there is no alternative. For this reason, we should take seriously their promise that work on the pipeline, whatever route it takes, will start next year.

The simplicity of this political equation seems to have confused the Canadian political and business commentariat, grown used to sustained attacks on Ottawa by conservative Alberta governments. Commentators’ theories and explanations, as a result, were all over the map Friday and yesterday  – sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results.

According to Carson Jerema in The National Post, it’s all a dirty trick by Carney to “ensnare Danielle Smith in pipeline blackmail.” Ottawa’s gift of “free rein to polluters” (as Environmental Defence put it in a news release) “will give anti-energy B.C. Premier David Eby an effective veto,” according to the Post. 

Meanwhile, over at the environmentally inclined National Observer, Max Fawcett agreed … sort of. Carney isn’t taking a wrecking ball to Canada’s climate policies, he’s saving the country by defusing Smith’s constant carping about Canada, Fawcett asserted. “He understands the value of appearing to say yes to certain forms of economic development while creating or accelerating the conditions that will make it a non-starter.”

Postmedia’s Rick Bell – who often acts as a sort of de facto minister of propaganda for Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) – was enthusiastic, with mild reservations. “Carney is the prime minister and Smith says there was no choice but to meet him in the middle,” he wrote, leaving his usual breathless hyperbole to his colleague Don Braid. “She figures this deal did just that and it is a win for Alberta and a far cry from those days of ‘anger, frustration and despair’ under Trudeau.”

Well, the last time Smith said something like that, about the memorandum of understanding with Ottawa that set the stage for Friday’s deal, she was jeered at her own party convention. 

And then there was Braid – Postmedia’s other high-profile Alberta political columnist – who went right over the top with a panegyric to Smith that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the pages of Pravda or the People’s Daily in the 1950s. 

“She has won every single battle with Ottawa over the past year,” said Braid, sending his hosannas heavenward. “In scope and importance, her victories against Ottawa outweigh former PC premier Peter Lougheed’s limited victory in the oil pricing crisis after 1980. … Smith may have set up this province for decades of economic gains.”

Well, if Carney is sneakily giving by a veto, British Columbia’s premier doesn’t seem to happy about it. And if Smith is saving Confederation, you have to wonder why she’s pushing ahead with her separatist referendum agenda. It seems to me that coastal British Columbians are as unhappy with this state of affairs as are Alberta separatists. And if anyone’s thinking about the constitutional requirement for consultation with First Nations, no one seems to be talking about it. 

You have to wonder if, despite Smith’s best efforts to keep the UCP united, something’s going to give as the separatists that now control the party push for it to officially declare itself to be a separatist party. Can political entropy in Alberta be far behind? 

And how comfortable will some members of Carney’s narrow majority in Parliament be in a government that appears to have completely tossed the environmental policies of the Trudeau era, unlamented though they may be here in Alberta. Steven Guilbeault, the former federal environment minister? B.C. MPs Will Greaves and Stephanie McLean? 

Is it possible that the biggest winner in this deal of the century could turn out to be … Avi Lewis?

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