Danielle Smith tries to blame 700,000 illusory Albertans for her separatism gambit

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Let’s say you live in a house with your family of four, and one day, three angry-looking characters bang on your front door and tell you they’re going to burn down your house. Everyone in your family is horrified and incensed, of course, and you yell at the trio of arsonists to get off your porch while your spouse calls the police.

Now, some math: In this scenario, do you have three people who want to burn down a house? Or do you have seven people demanding a robust debate about whether it should be burned to the ground?

Danielle Smith really, really wants to convince us all that what you have there is seven people who are absolutely clamouring to debate torching a house, and it would be wrong to shut down that conversation. That’s because she’s trying desperately to distract from the reality that her decision to strike a match over Alberta right at the start of wildfire season is for the benefit of precisely one person: Danielle Smith.

The Premier announced this week that she would add a referendum-on-a-referendum question about Alberta leaving Canada to the ballot in October. She acts like this is all very complicated and high-minded. She’s insisting on that because what’s really going on is simple and greasy.

A fringe separatist faction helped to make Ms. Smith the Leader of the United Conservative Party in 2022, and she’s spent the last couple of years smoothing the road for their cause, all while insisting from the other side of her mouth that she supports “a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.”

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A week and a half ago, a judge tossed a separatist petition that could have prompted a referendum on Alberta leaving Canada. This offered Ms. Smith an escape hatch by which she could have said the courts had tied her hands, sorry about that. But the separatists decided it’s time to call in the chit that helped her land in the Premier’s office, and their influence in the UCP is such that their public threats to her political career are anything but empty.

So on Thursday, she announced that Albertans will vote this fall on a sort of demonic, mewling turducken of a referendum question: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

Predictably, this attempt to have it both ways enraged everyone: Business types, municipal and provincial leaders, ordinary citizens and First Nations who all think it’s ferociously damaging to pry the lid off this cursed sarcophagus at all, along with separatists who found that weak-kneed version of the question to be an insulting cop-out.

Minutes after Ms. Smith’s primetime speech aired, Mitch Sylvestre, a key separatist leader, told The Globe he felt “duped” and that his movement would “react strongly.” Jeffrey Rath, the lawyer for the Alberta Prosperity Project that’s behind the separatist petition, was feeling so sure of himself earlier this week that he was doing his best impression of a mob boss in a 10-gallon hat.

“She needs to understand that if she abandons her base or betrays her base, there will likely be political consequences,” he told Global News.

The Prosperity Project’s pro-separatism petition gathered roughly 300,000 signatures before the judge quashed it for failing to consult with First Nations. A pro-unity petition that was specifically designed to block the separatist petition, meanwhile, gathered some 400,000 names.

And that is how Ms. Smith found her way to the idea that 700,000 Albertans are demanding a referendum that she deeply regrets, but will facilitate because of her principled commitment to democracy. The disingenuousness of this argument is really something to behold, even allowing for the Premier’s skill working in that medium.

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Separatism isn’t popular in Alberta – except for the one place it matters to Ms. Smith. In April, pollster Janet Brown clocked 27 per cent of the province in favour of separation, 67 per cent against and six per cent on the fence. But among UCP supporters, separatism runs much higher at 57 per cent support. That’s not a coincidence – separatist campaigners openly talk about flooding party membership and grassroots leadership to keep the Premier and her government properly focused on priorities.

But of course Ms. Smith will not acknowledge that this is all about her own naked political self-interest.

She mentioned those 700,000 earnest democracy-seekers just twice in her televised address on Thursday night; she seemed preternaturally confident then, almost serene, with no live audience or questions from journalists.

Then she gave a news conference on Friday afternoon and pointed to that noble 700,000 no less than a dozen times. She underlined that they represent 25 per cent of the voting-age population, and at another point, she somehow promoted them to “as many as a million or more.”

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After 18 hours of furious public reaction to her referendum gambit and with a line-up of reporters waiting to ask questions about the fate of her province, its economy and her leadership, the Premier looked like she’d adopted a dog and then discovered it was a wolf after it was already standing in her living room. She seemed to hope that if she could shove those hundreds of thousands of illusory Albertans in front of her, the wolf would go after them and leave her unharmed.

The own-goals yet to be unleashed by this grotesque pantomime of Ms. Smith’s are staggering. What investor or company in their right mind would park any new resources – including for that new pipeline – in a province on the verge of snipping itself out of Canada? Malign outside actors with any one of a million motivations to destabilize Canada will need nothing more than an internet connection and a little creativity to inject raw sewage into the public bloodstream. How much the campaign will cost in social cohesion, economic stability and national unity is grim to contemplate even in the five months between now and the October vote; who can guess what metastasizes beyond that?

Ms. Smith keeps justifying all of this by preaching the virtue of clarity: Albertans will make their voices heard, she insists, and then everyone can see what they’re dealing with. The same can be said for the Premier’s character and judgment: Now everyone can see what they’re dealing with.