Is Danielle Smith Trying To Elect Mark Carney?

What Is Smith Doing?

Danielle Smith is back with a list of demands of the next government, promising an “unprecedented national unity crisis” if they’re not listened to. It’s offensive on multiple levels - the idea of a province explicitly threatening the rest of the country by saying we will do this only if we lose is horseshit - the Bloc, for all the shit I give it, believe Quebec is a distinct society that would be better off independent. There aren’t press conferences the week before every election campaign saying unless you do X and Y Quebec will push for a unity crisis, mostly because there isn’t anything Canada could do that would be acceptable to Quebec nationalists. Here, there’s no such conviction, it’s all just hostage taking.

It’s also a catastrophic misreading of public sentiment - if Alberta wants to leave, don’t let the door hit their ass on the way out. I don’t care. We own TMX and any future pipeline infrastructure they want to build east or west will need to go through Canada so we can extract our pound of flesh. We’ll be poorer for it, sure, but we can survive.

The difference with Alberta and Quebec is that Alberta is an economic power (though in terminal decline), and Quebec is actually legitimately special. Quebec is integral to the soul of Canada, to what us Canadian, to what shapes our identity and our humanity as Canadians. It was a product of Quebec’s intellectual class that pioneered the Charter and got it through recalcitrant Premiers. It was Quebec who pioneered social policy around child care that’s now the model for the Feds. It was Quebec that fought back against conscription twice, ensuring that mandatory military service isn’t even remotely under consideration.

But more than its contributions to our political life, Quebec is culturally distinct. Some of our greatest musicians have come from Quebec, from the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen to the soulful sounds of Oscar Peterson. Montreal is this country’s greatest city, a melting pot of languages, cultures, and humanity that is genuinely unfathomable in any other place. I will protect Quebec with everything I have. If Alberta wants to go, I don’t care.

The problem Danielle Smith has is that in doing this stunt, all she’s done is get the rest of the country - and the 44% of Albertans that voted against her, too - to look at Poilievre in a worse light. She is hostage taking at a time of national crisis, and as much as I respect my Albertan readers the rest of the country’s response will be to roll our eyes and vote for Carney more. It’s counterproductive because we just don’t care.

Alberta’s grand crisis is that it’s a petrostate masquerading as a Canadian province. There’s a reason all those claims about the “subsidies” Alberta pays the rest of the country - which are mostly just Federal Corporate taxes paid by Oil Sands companies - all go back to 2007. For the period up until 2014’s oil price crash, yes, we were running a lot on the oil boom. We were. The problem is, since then Alberta’s economy has stagnated. From 2014 to 2023, Alberta’s GDP grew 2.1% in chained dollars. Not 2.1% a year - 2.1% total. In the same period, Quebec’s economy grew 17%, and Ontario’s 18%. On a per capita basis, Alberta is down 10% over those 9 years.

Alberta wants to continue to swagger around like it's 2013, and it’s the only source of growth and employment in a country that's more broke than a college student after a Vegas bender, but it’s not true. The rest of the country is growing. Alberta tied itself to a commodity and votes against parties that will diversify and then gets mad that they’re still reliant on oil. It’s farce dressed up as something real. They’re posturing like they have leverage when they don’t - they need to squeeze ever more oil production out because otherwise there’s no way to make their math work at all.

What Smith is doing isn’t standing on some principle, as ill-advised as I think Quebec separation is, but trying to badly play poker with no cards. They aren’t this engine of growth anymore - they’re a stagnating mess desperate for someone to bail them out of their bad mistakes, trying to kick the can down the road one more time and pray that somehow that works. I’d say they’re trying to rob Peter to pay Paul, but they’ve robbed Peter, Paul, Phil, Patricia, and Percy already and they’re still refusing to admit defeat. In a universe where American oil production is likely going up not down in the medium term, there’s not even a great argument that oil prices will ever return to the prices that justify this obsession with more production.

We are at the point where Alberta knows all of this, at least on some level. They have to know it, and their desperation suggests they know it too. They’re pretending and pretending that one more pipeline will suddenly change their fortunes, blaming Federal government overreach and lack of interest on the fact that many energy products simply do not pencil out for the companies that would be financing it. They’re pretending that they’re still the province that could afford minimal taxation, with Danielle Smith continuously promising tax cuts in the near future before pushing those further and further out. They’re not living in reality, and this list of demands proves it.

You can make those demands when you have the cards. Alberta doesn’t have them. They have neither the economic power nor the cultural soft power and goodwill within Canada to make these kinds of threats and have anybody care. It is a masterclass of misreading the room. Danielle Smith has threatened an “unprecedented national unity crisis”, skipped another First Ministers Meeting, and pissed off a lot of people you’d need to get an East-West pipeline built, all of which will boost Mark Carney’s election chances.

It’s as comical as it is offensive.