© Al Charest / Postmedia NewsDanielle Smith celebrates after winning the leadership of the United Conservative Party, and thereby the Alberta premiership, on Oct. 6, 2022.
The election of Danielle Smith to the leadership of Alberta's Conservatives, and thereby the premiership, appears distressing to some. I'm not thinking of those who ran against her, for whom some shadow of distress would be natural, but rather of the worried voices far afield from Alberta with no attachment to the leadership contest at all.
Her rise has ignited alarms on the Toronto/Ottawa panel shows, the Capitoline geese of our times, that any brazen assertion of Albertan autonomy may impair the Confederation. It should be noted that no similar quacking attended the invasion of Alberta's rights by the "climate-change" government determined to suffocate the province's main industry, and in fact sided with all its enemies from environmentalist organizations to the IPCC.
Ottawa strong-arm good. Alberta pushback, "threat to Confederation."
Kill pipelines, good. Fight for access to international markets during a time of crisis, bad.
Premier Smith made it a trademark of her campaign to adopt a strong protective stance towards her province's rights, and its chief industry. What a wild notion for a provincial politician.
It is in the nature of a confederate state that powers are shared, which very obligingly means that the provinces have powers all their own, and the federal government has a basket of them as well.
Now I could argue that in a "post-national" state with "no core values" — as Canada famously was described by one of our Constitution's keenest students — that it is the provinces that hold majority sway. For if there is no centre, no core, then obviously the outliers are the only possible source of strength.
To elaborate: In a period of vague national identity (post-national), having abandoned any central or defining principles (no core values), it is natural that the constituent parts of the Confederation (the provinces), which strongly maintain their "local" identities, will exert a stronger push, a more vigorous agenda in pursuing their place in the nation.
And, not incidentally, provide the nation with its otherwise missing character.
All the provinces of this country have a strong and individual character. It takes but a little travel and an occasional stopover in any province other than your own to register this, and it is a good thing.
Canada, if I may hail a biblical tale, is a coat of many colours, and we are better for it. Wander to the Territories, go to Quebec or Newfoundland, visit P.E.I., heck take a couple of weeks in Alberta, and you will immediately "feel" the particularity of each, that pulse of local pride, and a sense of the individual history of any given province or territory.
You "know" when you're in Manitoba that you're not in Nova Scotia, and it is to the delight and honour of both that you do. For that matter, even within provinces there are singularities of region, town and city.
There is in this country what I am pleased to call the Peter Lougheed phenomenon.
© Cave Buston/CP
This man was a full and intelligent patriot. I am in danger of digressing — any reference to Peter Lougheed carries that allure — but I am just pointing out that a strong sense of provincial rights is never, per se, a denial of the wider loyalty. It may and does reinforce it.
In fact, it is one of the supporting energies. Lougheed fought valiantly against the National Energy Program of the '80s because he thought it an invasion of provincial rights. He thought it an overreach by the national government and he combated Pierre Elliott Trudeau at many a constitutional conference on just this point.
But never did he see the contest as a rebuke of Confederation. He saw it as an attempt to put a corrective on Ottawa overreach. He saw the insensitivity of a central government to one of its provincial partners as the actual threat to Confederation.
To come back to the present day.
Whenever a central administration staffed and mentored by issue-activists, from the prime minister on down, utterly bound to an extra-national ideology promulgated by a dubious mix of billionaires and UN bureaucrats, craving the approval of internationalist campaigners, makes it national policy to neuter the prosperity of one province — then surely that province is not only right but duty bound to say "No."
Is this not the story of the Alberta oil and gas industry? How over the years this government has looked complacently upon the attacks from all fronts on Fort McMurray, promised "no pipelines," played the risible game of "social licence," chimed in on the demonization of fossil fuels, and introduced the insane so-called "carbon tax." Has this not been, in Orwell's term, "objectively" an attack on Alberta's rights?
So now Danielle Smith says "Whoa!" She says the great edicts from the federal government — all deep in the cloud of their global warming crusade — will be met with argument, resistance and real test.
She is saying to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault that (a) Your very personal, doctrinaire obsessions should not be the foundation of a national policy in a Confederation, and (b) I will do all that I can as Alberta's premier to pre-empt them.
Pleasingly I would note that Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is more or less reading the same novel.
The only thing I can find wrong about Smith's approach is how long it took to be undertaken. Her stance is not a "threat" to Confederation.
It may be the only plausible way to offer it renewal.
Comment: Danielle Smith has commented on other wrongs committed against Canadians. She bodes well.