Is Danielle Smith About to Break Up Canada?

What on earth was Danielle Smith thinking?

The premier of oil-rich Alberta, Smith has long delighted in ticking off her enemies in Canada’s faraway capital of Ottawa. She’s a conservative populist known for slamming clean energy policies and an influx of immigrants, appearing alongside MAGA figures and declaring “an end to the era of wokeism.”

But this time, perhaps, she had gone too far. In May, Smith had announced a referendum would be held later this year on whether the province should actually seek to leave Canada.

Perhaps the strangest part: Smith doesn’t even support splitting.

Separatist sentiment has long existed in Alberta amid resentment toward the federal government and its more liberal policies, although always as a fringe idea. Sure, the notion of breaking off from Canada had periodically surfaced whenever tension with Ottawa soared, but it had never been taken seriously by a sitting premier. Now, that’s changed.

Still, Smith rejects any notion that she has now opened Pandora’s box, arguing any such box has long been open — and that there was no going back.

“You don’t quell a movement like that by suppressing it,” Smith told me.

But what was once a far-right pipedream has now inched closer to gaining legitimacy. The vote, to be held on Oct. 19, is not a referendum on separation itself; Albertans will instead decide whether the province should hold a future, binding referendum on beginning the legal process to secede. Still, Smith’s decision to hold a referendum raising separation at all has not only threatened the unity of Canada but sparked division within Alberta. The episode has also called into question Smith’s long-vaunted political antenna and fueled concern that she is unintentionally leading Canada toward its own Brexit debacle.

Smith is now walking perhaps the most precarious political tightrope of her career. She must convince the public that she remains committed to a united Canada, while also persuading a growing separatist movement that she is serious about giving voice to its concerns. Lean too far toward national unity, and she risks alienating some of the very voters who propelled her rise. Lean too far toward separatism, and she could be remembered as the premier who caused a national rupture. The balancing act has left her under attack from both sides — and raises the prospect that even if she staves off secession, the forces she has nurtured will ultimately eat her up.

For her part, Smith has lately made it abundantly clear that she is a believer in a united Canada and has been working closely with Prime Minister Mark Carney to launch investments that could convince Albertans that the federal government is willing to be a real partner for Alberta — and also showcase herself as a major deal maker.

“I’m working very hard to try to get a few major projects on the table, so that people can see that… we are respected by our fellow Canadians, and that the country can work,” she says. “We’ve got a few more months to continue making that case, but that’s the case that I’ll be making.”

Yet Smith still cultivates the sort of grievance politics that has made her so popular among her supporters, a coalition of rural conservatives who felt alienated by the establishment politicians in the capital. She’s also long been surrounded by people more skeptical of Canadian unity. Her chief of staff, Rob Anderson, co-authored the “Free Alberta Strategy,” a policy blueprint arguing Alberta should reclaim sweeping powers from Ottawa. It stopped short of endorsing total independence, but it has become one of the movement’s defining texts.

In our conversation, Smith talks confidently, saying she has the situation under control. But she doesn’t have to be reminded of a different instance where a referendum quickly spiraled out of hand: the UK’s blundering into Brexit.

“We’ve talked with senior staff who told her on numerous occasions that David Cameron thought he could manage a referendum to solve an internal party dispute, and look what happened,” says Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta who has long studied the province’s political culture. “Referendums are a different beast, and best-laid plans often go awry.”

The path to a vote on whether Albertans should secede from Canada has been a winding one. Earlier this year, the Alberta Prosperity Project, a grassroots separatist group, collected more than 300,000 signatures to force a vote on independence. But before the petition could move forward, an Alberta judge threw it out on constitutional grounds.

Smith denounced the decision as “anti-democratic” and then stunned the public by instead putting forward her own government-backed referendum question to be voted on in October.

That decision was particularly shocking to the more than 400,000 people who signed a competing Forever Canada petition, arguing against secession. But despite all the conspiracies and theories surrounding her decision to call the referendum — Is she an undercover separatist? Is she courting the far-right? — Smith states her rationale in a matter-of-fact way.

“When you’ve got a quarter of your adult voting population saying they want to have this debate, you should try to follow the law, and the law says that when citizens identify those issues, we should do our best to put it to the people,” she says. “So that was the reason why we did it.”

Western Canadians do have some justification for their anger toward Ottawa. The last decade of Liberal control of the federal government has left conservatives out in the cold on cultural issues and debates over immigration. (Although it’s worth noting that Carney spent his formative years in Alberta, and former Conservative Prime Stephen Harper was a longtime Calgary politician representing Alberta’s biggest city.) Meanwhile, Alberta’s economic importance has soared over the last 50 years, fueling the sense that the province is doing the economic heavy lifting for Canada: It accounts for more than 80 percent of Canada’s crude oil exports, is the third-largest provincial economy and has the highest GDP per capita of any Canadian province.

“You look at… the growing importance of Alberta in terms of the population, in terms of its importance to the economy, but its lack of recognition in our national institutions — there’s a lot of grievance about that,” says Darrell Bricker, chair of Ipsos Canada, the polling and market research firm.

History, however, shows that Smith is playing a dangerous game.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also thought he could relieve the pressure valve of populist grievances against the EU through a referendum — letting voters blow off just enough steam while staying in the bloc. But to his surprise, as the idea of leaving the EU entered mainstream debate, its popularity rose as well.

In May of 2015, support for Brexit stood at about 35 percent — roughly where support is now for Alberta’s secession — and by May of 2016, it had risen to 42.3 percent. On the day of the vote, in June 2016, 51.9 percent decided to permanently leave the EU. The UK political system has been in something of a shambles ever since.

Cameron has defended his decision to go to the polls on Brexit. “The lack of a referendum was poisoning British politics, and so I put that right,” he said 10 months after the vote. Even that defense, however — that referendums are the right way to address grievances that paralyze healthy democracies — is eerily similar to Smith’s own stance.

Smith rejects any comparisons to Brexit, full stop. “I’d say that they’re quite different,” she says.

She dives into the logistical, and perhaps obvious, differences of comparing a country’s exit from a multi-nation partnership to a province leaving its homeland. The stakes are far higher for Alberta, for instance: Britain already had a federal government and was simply choosing to leave a partnership with Europe. Alberta doesn’t have that same infrastructure ready and would likely have to spend significant money and resources to set one up — a fact Smith is keen on advertising to voters.

More importantly, though, she says that the EU did little to acknowledge the legitimate grievances being raised by many in the U.K. ahead of the referendum. That, too, is different, she says, because she believes Carney — a man who had a front-row seat to the Brexit meltdown as governor of the Bank of England and has warned Alberta of its “dangerous bluff” — is willing to work with the province.

“He, of course, having come from the U.K. recently and having seen what happened with Brexit, I think he took it seriously, as did I,” she says. “And I think that’s part of the reason we were able to find a couple of things to work on together.”

The two seem like an unlikely pair. He’s a technocrat popular with the Davos crowd and fluent in global finance; she’s a former radio show host who built her populist career taking on political elites.

But here they have a shared goal. It’s why the two have been showing up to events side-by-side to tout major federal commitments to the province — and promote a united Canada.

Since announcing the referendum, Smith has secured some of the very concessions she has long argued the province needed. Alberta and Ottawa signed a memorandum pledging to work together on “nation-building” projects and speed up approvals for major infrastructure. That has since translated into plans for a new West Coast oil pipeline — a longtime priority for Smith, who says Alberta needs more ways to get its oil to overseas markets.

The unity is on full public display for any skeptical Albertans. At a press conference on the pipeline last month, laughter rang through a warehouse in Calgary as the two walked toward the podium. “Canada and Alberta will be equal partners in this project,” Carney said, as Smith beamed throughout his speech. In the moment, the two leaders look like the closest of allies.

These projects are win-win for both sides. Smith gets to point to them as evidence that the pressure of the referendum produced tangible results — positioning herself as a skilled negotiator — while also justifying her decision to hold the vote. Meanwhile, Carney has a chance to strengthen Canada’s economy during a time of major disruption caused by U.S. tariffs and Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, all while nodding to Alberta’s long-held grievances.

Polling indicates that the strategy could work: Among those who leaned toward voting on Alberta leaving Canada, 65 percent said they’d more likely want to stay if the federal government committed to building a pipeline for western Canada’s oil, according to a poll from the Angus Reid Institute, a non-partisan research foundation. That’s consistent with their findings that the percentage of Albertans who would actually like to leave Canada (36 percent) is lower than the percent of people who say they want a referendum held on secession (48 percent).

“That speaks to the ‘We want to send a message,’ cohort,” says Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute.

Still, others who have toyed with separatism may not be convinced that these projects actually represent a new and improved Ottawa. It’s also not clear what lessons the broader Canadian public is learning from this saga.

“The question is whether or not the rest of the country takes a signal from the referendum that Alberta, and Western Canada in general, is not satisfied with the country operating as it is,” Bricker, of Ipsos, says. “Maybe we move a few institutions to Western Canada to make sure that the voices of the West find a way in.”

Without these changes? “This will be episode one,” he predicts.

Then there’s the question of Danielle Smith’s future. At 55, she has proven herself an adept politician, able to remold herself in moments of both crisis and opportunity. The referendum fight is testing her abilities.

Smith first entered provincial politics in 2009, easily winning a race to become leader of insurgent Wildrose Party, a new conservative party in Alberta challenging the Progressive Conservative government that had ruled the province for more than four decades. As head of the party, she helped transform it into the province’s official opposition. In 2014, however, she stunned supporters by joining the very government she had built her career opposing — only to then be denied the nomination for her legislative riding in the following year’s election.

It seemed as if her political career was over. She became a talk radio host and was a popular media personality for nearly a decade. And then she reemerged in politics, a conservative firebrand criticizing Covid restrictions and championing greater autonomy for Alberta. In 2022, she was elected leader of the governing United Conservative Party and has been Alberta’s premier ever since.

Her latest reinvention, as a negotiator-and-partner with Carney, seems to be working, at least for now. Her approval rating, which had gone down 7 points after she announced the referendum, has bounced back 7 points since the announcement of the pipeline deal, according to Angus Reid polling.

“At least in the short term, [the pipeline deal] has been the lever that she’s been able to pull to release a lot of that pressure that’s been on her,” says Kurl, of Angus Reid. Still, public perception of Smith remains mixed: 46 percent approve of her job performance while 48 percent disapprove.

And more bumps in the road are likely over the long term, as people warily watch the progress of the pipeline as well as the approaching referendum. Even as Smith tries to navigate the province’s divided constituency, the most vocal members of both sides, separatists and federalists alike, seem to have made up their minds about the premier.

Those who root for a united Canada speak of Smith with disapproval, and they haven’t shied away from showing it. At the high-profile Calgary Stampede last month, Smith was serving up pancakes at her annual breakfast within earshot of a handful of protesters who were calling her a traitor. One protester’s sign showed Smith’s face behind bars — just a hint of what they thought she deserved for allowing the referendum to happen.

Separatists who were once staunch allies of Smith aren’t happy with her either.

Some activists from the Alberta Prosperity Project, the group that collected signatures to trigger a referendum on Alberta’s independence, are particularly mad because of how the referendum question is structured. Since victory wouldn’t mean instant secession, the October vote is in some ways a referendum for a referendum. Smith, in their eyes, is simply dragging her feet.

“Danielle Smith looked every Albertan in the eye and lied to their faces,” Jeffrey Rath, co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project, wrote on X after the referendum question was announced. “She is the most dishonest and corrupt Alberta premier of my lifetime. Her entire caucus should be ashamed of themselves.”

Maintaining the support of her coalition, especially its core group of right-wing activists, may prove to be Smith’s greatest challenge — but the premier thinks her conservative credentials will be enough.

“What conservatives want is for their leaders to govern as conservatives,” she says. “I think that’s where my fan base comes from.”

She continues, coolly, without the alarm or urgency of a politician facing a divided constituency. “I’m not going to do anything different than what I haven’t already done for the last three and a half years,” she says.

Whether that assuages her conservative base, however, will depend on where public opinion goes, says Barry Cooper, a co-author of the “Free Alberta Strategy” and one of Smith’s former professors at the University of Calgary.

“She’s a politician. Politicians are interested in retaining office,” Cooper says. “At the moment, the public opinion tends to be more on the ‘remain’ side, but I think that will shift when more and more Albertans realize that Canada is going to do nothing. Then I think she’ll probably change her mind, and she’ll talk about how she’d been betrayed and misled, and so on, by Mark Carney.”

“She’s not really an ally of anyone,” he adds. “She’s an ally of herself.”

Source link