In the years before green ideology became ascendant in the federal government, and when Alberta was in its most active energy phase, there were many benefits to the Confederation. Not least, and being from Newfoundland, I like to point out how many people from my province—when it was reeling from the fishery collapse—found jobs and relief in Fort McMurray and allied projects in Alberta. One province helping another. I can’t think of a better model for a country built on mutual interdependence, which is why it’s styled a Confederation.
Those days are dead. Things turned. When oil prices fell, when the delusive panic of the global warming brigade took hold, when Alberta was internationally under fire from activists and actors, and most particularly when the Trudeau government—which subscribed to every article of the Davos-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change creed—came to power, everything changed.
Gerald Butts, a Sierra Club graduate, was the “mind” in the PMO; Mr. Trudeau fancied himself as a “world” leader in the “fight against global warming” (emptiest phrase in the lexicon); a whole department was dedicated to “climate change”; Canada was sending small armies to the deadly, dull, and useless COP (Conference of the Parties) annual mass seances; and Greta Thunberg was hailed as a “voice to be heard.” All these were the factors and context in which Alberta and its main industry were ignored or actively campaigned against, and fellow provinces made it policy to bar pipelines for Alberta’s product. “Quebec’s not into tarsands oil and Alberta pipelines,” was a popular line.
Now that half the world faces a cold winter, Europe is in deepest anxiety about its energy supply, and leverage in having gas and oil to export has given Vladimir Putin sway over half a continent and the ability to wage war, those policies are showing their grim harvest. But I’ll leave aside the geopolitics for now to have a glance at what might, for Canada at least, be the first welcome, possibly major change in the Canadian dynamic in at least a decade.
The election of Danielle Smith as premier—and I stress it is still very early days—is the first strong signal that the trashing of Alberta and its oil and gas might be at an end, or at least be forced to a stay.
One indirect signal of this is the mighty perturbation in the central Canadian media over Smith’s election. Shivers of dread run through the punderati, especially when her much-noted proposed Sovereignty Act is raised. One would think she had done something drastic like ban religious gear in public office or declared Alberta “officially” a unilingual province. Quelle horreur!
Actually, I’d recast the Sovereignty Act as the “Alberta Has Had Just About Enough Act.” It’s both easier to spell and carries the core message more clearly.
The essential dynamic of Confederation—the bond between provinces to the common benefit of all—has been reshaped and bent by the allegiance of the federal half of Canada’s government to an internationalist global agenda, to the detriment and particular economic and political harm to one of its provinces. Global warming policy paid for, put on the back of one province.
Not to be overlooked is that the difficulties brought about by that same allegiance—and the policies of “net zero” and “carbon taxes” that emerge from it—are now also turned on the farming industry and Saskatchewan in particular. And the revenues that could have been raised during the COVID shutdown and now through the rise of world energy prices and the crisis in Ukraine, have all been forsaken by the deliberate hostility and policy commitments against the maintenance and continued development of Alberta energy. Canada has been made weaker and less economically healthy because of those policies, with inflation accelerating dangerously and our national economy riddled with debt because of the sad and futile commitments to the global warming frenzy.
The regulatory and political blockade of Canadian industry due to the fixation on the globalist agenda of the great global warming NGO-environmental-WEF cartel has had one province in the main bear the cost. And for what? For what measurable purpose other than the glamour of climate conference attendance and gush reporting from some of the international press. Given Canada’s miniscule contribution to the supposed problem—I stress supposed—of global warming, what shutting down our industries will do to or for world temperatures in 2050 or 2100 is next to nil, and a fantasy to boot.
For that fantasy, Western provinces have been estranged, a necessary industry crippled, and the national economy put at risk.
So if Premier Smith’s election means a re-emergence of provincial rights, a hold on the over-extension of federal powers over natural resources, and an end to the unfair treatment of Alberta, I see it is a good thing.
The imbalance is now in the other direction.
And because Western provinces carry less weight, have less political force, are less represented by the national media, and seen by the mandarins of Ottawa as “second tier” provinces, the early indications from Smith that she is going to make an effort to find the countervailing balance for the present moment is a good thing. A necessary one. And if that makes her unpopular or even frightening to some central authorities, well that is a long-awaited good as well.
Alberta politicians and its own industry have been too reticent, too easily agreeable to the diktats of Ottawa, and not nearly vigorous enough in resisting the overwhelming campaigns of the radical environmentalists and the current Liberal addiction to “playing a role on the world stage.”
Smith and Moe are, for the West, at last returning fire. It’s about time.
