Alberta has an Alberta problem

Last month, when Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a series of public consultations about her province’s place in Canada, she put her reason for doing so in well-worn terms.

“Alberta has an Ottawa problem,” she said in a video introducing the Alberta Next Panel, a body that will hold open hearings across the province this summer and fall, and then “identify and discuss specific policy questions that could be included in a 2026 provincial referendum.”

“Alberta has an Ottawa problem” is the same message that propelled the Leader of the United Conservative Party into the premier’s office in 2022.

Back then, one of her biggest beefs was the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. What remains is her not-completely-unjustified claim that the Trudeau Liberals throttled Alberta’s oil patch and prevented the province from reaching its economic potential.

It’s nothing new. What is striking is that she is doubling down on it when there is a Liberal prime minister in Ottawa who is open in principle to the construction of a new pipeline to carry Albertan crude to market – a sentiment that polling shows is shared by a majority of Canadians.

So does Alberta have an Ottawa problem? Well, yes – no province is complete without one.

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But Ms. Smith’s Alberta Next Panel is less about Ottawa than it is about assuaging a restive base that is talking openly about separation. Various polls show that two-thirds of Albertans oppose separation, but one poll found that 65 per cent of UCP voters support it. The separatist Republican Party came in third in a by-election last month in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills but took an ominous number of votes from the winning UCP candidate.

Last week, the head of a group pushing for Albertan independence released a pie-in-the-sky report claiming that the province “can literally become the most prosperous country in the world with the highest GDP per capita of any country in the world” within a year of leaving Canada.

Ms. Smith is trying to manage her party’s and her province’s separatist sentiment by saying that she thinks it deserves to be heard, even as she says she doesn’t support it.

She says in her video that the goal of the Alberta Next Panel is to create “an Alberta that is strong, free and sovereign within a united Canada.”

The public hearings will address legitimate and widely shared provincial gripes about immigration, the equalization system, the unelected and geographically imbalanced Senate, and more. Albertans will also get to chew over issues that could be settled internally, without Ottawa’s consent, such as creating a provincial police force or a provincial tax department, or leaving the Canada Pension Plan in favour of a provincial version. (The province would, however, need to negotiate the terms of a CPP exit.)

Ms. Smith’s government has meanwhile lowered the threshold for citizens to trigger a referendum on a subject of their choosing, a move that could result in a vote on separation in short order.

The danger the Premier faces is that she is attempting to bottle lightning. She wouldn’t be the first politician to try to contain a separation movement only to get burned.

It happened to former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. His aggressive effort in the early 1990s to counter growing separatist sentiment by demanding the constitution recognize Quebec as a distinct society was compared to holding a knife to the country’s throat. Its failure contributed to the return of the Parti Québécois to power in 1994, and to the near-death referendum experience in 1995.

Former British Conservative prime minister David Cameron made a comparable miscalculation when he campaigned in the 2015 election on holding a referendum on Brexit in order to quell calls for it within his party. We all know what came next.

Faced with a similar dilemma, Ms. Smith’s instincts have told her to launch a public consultation based on the charged premise that Ottawa mostly works against the interests of Alberta, and to open the door to a referendum on separation.

But she is doing this at the very moment Ottawa could be an ally in her stated effort to quell separatist sentiment.

Alberta’s problem is not in Ottawa – it’s in Alberta. If Ms. Smith aims to strengthen her province, she should extend her hand to the federal government, not clench it in a fist.