Premier Danielle Smith's Alberta Next panel will travel across the province consulting citizens on how to 'strengthen Alberta sovereignty within a united Canada.'
The Canadian Press
In 2019, then-premier Jason Kenney announced that a group led by the strident Westerner and former Reform Party leader, Preston Manning, would tour Alberta seeking feedback on ways the province could more fully assert its independence.
The so-called Fair Deal panel would examine ideas such as establishing an Alberta Pension Plan, a provincial police force, and even writing its own constitution. This was all necessary because “Laurentian elites” in Ottawa – Mr. Kenney’s favourite bogeyman – had abandoned Alberta, leading to a rise in separatist sentiment.
Of course, he made sure to mention at the time that he was against separation himself. He was just happy to pour gasoline on its aspiring embers, and to even light a match. He just wanted to use the threat of a separatist explosion to own those horrible Libs in the nation’s capital.
It wasn’t long after the panel was announced that a former Progressive Conservative MLA, Ian McClelland, stepped forward to proclaim the entire exercise a waste of time. Mr. McClelland had chaired a committee struck years earlier to examine many of the same complaints, and many of the same proposed remedies the Fair Deal panel was exploring.
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Mr. McClelland’s 2003 committee was inspired by the now infamous “firewall” letter co-penned two years earlier by Stephen Harper (before he would become prime minister) and a group of like-minded Alberta independence crusaders.
The letter called on then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein to protect the province from federal intrusions and overreach, and exert its sovereignty within Canada by building a “firewall” of measures, such as a provincial pension plan and an independent revenue agency. Ultimately, Mr. McClelland’s committee rejected most of the ideas being proposed on the basis they would create more problems than they would solve.
Looking at Mr. Kenney’s Fair Deal panel, Mr. McClelland predicted: “I’m 100-per-cent confident that they’re going to absorb a lot of steam being blown off and I don’t think they’re going to come up with one damn thing.”
And he was 100-per-cent correct.
The Fair Deal panel would end up releasing its report a year later, with most of its high-profile recommendations ignored or rejected. One of its big hopes, the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan, took a hit when it was revealed that the Alberta Investment Management Corp., the organization Mr. Kenney would have wanted to put in charge of a provincial pension plan, lost more than $2-billion in a dubious investment strategy linked to stock volatility.
Which brings us to today, with Mr. Kenney’s successor, Danielle Smith, announcing that a new panel – Alberta Next – will hit the road this summer to talk to people about many of the same ideas the Fair Deal panel explored six years ago – and that Mr. McClelland’s committee pondered and rejected 16 years before that.
As it so happened, on the same day Ms. Smith called the media together to talk about why her panel was necessary – the evil government in Ottawa that’s been trying to kill the oil-and-gas business in the province – it was announced that oil sands production is set to hit a record high this year, with volumes on pace to grow by five per cent in 2025 compared to 2024. Talk about awkward timing.
That aside, it’s remarkable how similar the rationale is for the establishment of Ms. Smith’s panel, when compared to the logic offered for the panel Mr. Kenney struck in 2019. It’s couched, as always, in lots of federal bashing and warnings about rising separatist sentiment in Alberta. And even though much of that separatist angst has been fuelled by the deeply divisive rhetoric of the Premier herself, she wants you to know, like Mr. Kenney before her, that she believes in a strong Canada and would hate to see anything bad happen to it.
Right.
The real story of the Alberta Next panel, however, is far more mundane than all the grand oratory surrounding it: it’s nothing more than a sop to those Albertans angry enough at Ottawa that they are considering extreme options – including voting for a separatist party.
While one of those, the Republican Party of Alberta, had a poor showing in Monday’s by-elections, they can’t be ignored, especially by Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party. All it would take is for the Republicans to get 8-to-10 per cent of the provincial vote in the next election, and the UCP would be in deep, deep electoral trouble.
So there’s a lot at stake. Enough, in fact, for Ms. Smith to recast an old, worn idea as a step toward some form of independence, when in reality, this is all in reaction to a threat to her place on the throne.