ANALYSIS | Will Danielle Smith steer Alberta away from separation, or will this train keep gathering steam? | CBC News

When Premier Danielle Smith speaks, she’s still placing the Canadian flags behind her in among the Alberta provincial flags.

As much as critics insist she’s either a separatist herself or is opening the door wide to the Alberta secessionist movement by easing the rules to have a referendum next year, the premier herself maintains that she wants Alberta to stay within the country.

“Acknowledging something exists is not the same as fanning it,” Smith told the Alberta podcast Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen on Thursday. “My job is to make sure it doesn’t get higher. My job is to make sure it gets lower.”

But if the premier is determined to sway pro-separatists and keep the Ottawa-wary in the Canadian camp, did she help that cause with this week’s array of demands for Prime Minister Mark Carney to fulfil in the next six months? 

She’s calling for easy access to extend new oil and gas pipelines to all three ocean coasts, a surge in new financial transfers and the erasure of many (if not most) of the Liberal government’s climate policies

“There’s simply no way the federal government will be able to [do that] — it doesn’t have the power to do some of the things she’s asking for,” said Feo Snagovsky, a University of Alberta political scientist who researches western alienation.

“In that sense, almost from the outset, the federal government is doomed to fail.”

Snagovsky wondered if by setting “maximalist demands,” Smith might be able to declare victory by reaching middle points with Ottawa in negotiations toward what she’s calling the “Alberta accord.”

However, before the election she wasn’t discussing compromise. After her first meeting with Carney in March, she set out similar demands and warned of an “unprecedented national unity crisis” if her demands weren’t met.

One may wonder if we’re already in or on the verge of national unity crisis mode, given the strong likelihood of an Alberta referendum to break up Canada that Smith said she’d schedule in 2026 if enough petitioners request it — a threshold her government has newly lowered.

David Cameron may want a word

The parallels to 2016’s Brexit referendum seem clear to Snagovsky: U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron scheduled a vote on leaving the European Union that he publicly opposed and didn’t believe would succeed. Until it did, and he resigned in disgrace.

Smith cannot assume the opposition against an Alberta exit holds, Snagovsky said.

“It’s equally likely that lowering this threshold for the number of minimum votes [to get a referendum] might increase this kind of sentiment, because campaigns have a mobilizing effect,” he said.

While Smith has firmly positioned herself and her party as federalist, it remains unclear from her statements this week whether she’d actively campaign on the “no” side of a referendum.

Findings in a new Angus Reid poll suggest it could be in her political interests to leave the campaigning to others.

It showed that 36 per cent of Albertans would definitely vote or lean toward voting to leave Canada in a secession referendum, but that number leaps to 65 per cent among supporters of her United Conservatives.

“As separation rises in Alberta, the idea is bound to be even more popular within the UCP membership,” said Peter McCaffrey, who has been active with the UCP since its founding in 2017, and now leads a libertarian think tank.

He believes the party will have a “healthy debate” on sovereignty within its ranks. 

“The lesson Alberta conservatives learned from the Progressive Conservative/Wildrose split was that if you try to shut down debates on controversial ideas, the debates don’t go away, they just migrate into a new party,” McCaffrey said. (The Republican Party of Alberta has been vocal in the federal election’s aftermath and is wooing disaffected UCPers, but it’s unclear how much momentum they have.)

It’s entirely possible some UCP activists try to get the party to formally adopt separatist policies or principles — after all, in recent years Smith’s party grassroots have pushed her to adopt new rules for transgender youth, an expanded Human Rights Act and a ban on vote-counting machines, and she’s acted on them.

Separatism’s rise and an upcoming byelection in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills could also pose problems within Smith’s political base.

Insiders believe party members could nominate a separatist UCP candidate in that riding — or the premier could head off that threat and appoint a candidate, but that could stir dissent among her grassroots and give energy to a Republican Party candidate in that area.

And there’s a historical echo. In a 1982 byelection, the Olds-Didsbury riding rejected the governing Tories and voted in Gordon Kesler, with the Western Canada Concept, an openly separatist party.

Smith has planned a panel to tour the province and hear federal-provincial grievances and solutions, like former premier Jason Kenney did before her after the 2019 federal Liberal win.

Unlike the retired politician Kenney named to his Fair Deal Panel, Smith named herself to head this road-tripping summer panel. That could heighten the publicity and importance around it.

Smith went on a listening road show last year to UCP town halls, where she fielded sometimes unorthodox questions about vaccine safety and chemtrails.

But this year’s panel would be public, and not a party-only affair, leading to the possibility that Albertans both inside her camp and opposed to her show up and speak out on other provincial grievances.

Meanwhile, in Alberta

After all, while the separation issue consumes much oxygen — as nationally existential questions are wont to do — there’s much else going on worth scrutinizing in this province.

Lower oil prices will threaten the economy and widen Alberta’s budget deficit.

RCMP and auditor investigations into Alberta Health Services procurement and the firing of its CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos continue to hang over this government’s record — and its massive experiment in health system restructuring is unfolding in the meantime.

A measles outbreak has been raging since February, and only this week did the government announce a big vaccination awareness campaign.

There’s a growing risk of potential strikes by teachers provincewide and unionized provincial employees.

And the U.S. tariff threats and harm by those already imposed haven’t vanished, though that’s what premiers other than Smith are more likely to talk about.

Alberta’s leader told Postmedia this week that many disaffected Albertans see the threat coming from the east, like other Canadians perceive the threat from the south.

“As scared as these people are of what Donald Trump is going to do to their economy, that’s how scared Albertans are of what the Liberals are going to do to the Alberta economy,” Smith said.

And just as heightened anti-American feelings have risen broadly — including in Alberta — the separatist movement is aiming to transform the long-brewing anti-Ottawa sentiment into an anti-Canada sentiment.