Smith demands Ottawa abandon 'ideological' climate policies at right-wing summit

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith received a major round of applause from a Conservative-friendly crowd in Ottawa Thursday after decrying federal policies to curb pollution. 

“Enough with their meaningless virtue signalling, extreme climate policies that only serve to make Canadians poorer, threaten our energy security, kill jobs and investment across the country and make us vulnerable to unpredictable trade winds,” she said, calling emission reduction policies a “reckless ideological idea.” 

“This pattern of obstructionism has been devastating to our economy, and it has to stop once and for all.”

Smith, speaking at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference, described more fossil fuel production and export infrastructure — like new pipelines to the West Coast, the Arctic and East Coast — as being a key part of her plan to strengthen the province’s economy, despite leading energy forecasts predicting global demand for oil and gas is rapidly approaching due to the cost of renewables plummeting as countries decarbonize.

In a fireside chat with Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley, Smith acknowledged that the price of oil has recently collapsed, which means Alberta is staring down the barrel of a $5 billion deficit. 

Speaking to reporters after her address to the conference attendees, Smith said she intends to vote for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, but if Liberal Leader Mark Carney were to form government she wants to see him support Alberta’s fossil fuel economy or risk a national unity crisis. 

She touched on the list of policies she wants repealed, including the oil and gas emissions cap, a ban on West Coast tankers of a certain size, net-zero electricity regulations, net-zero vehicle mandates and net-zero building codes. She also said she wants changes made to environmental assessments to speed up the approval of major projects. 

“If they don't address those issues then we're going to have to see what the reaction of Albertans [is],” she said. “But I can tell you that having 10 years of having our economy beaten down by not being able to have those kinds of investments have soured Albertans on the idea of a Liberal government.”

Poilievre campaign suffering

Polling shows that navigating separatist threats is not a helpful situation for Poilievre. His support has plummeted in recent weeks, and according to the Angus Reid Institute, a majority in Alberta and Saskatchewan want to remain in the federation, regardless of which party forms government.

Martin Olszynski, an associate professor at the University of Calgary, told Canada’s National Observer that it’s become a hobby in Alberta to criticize Ottawa when Conservatives get to a point where they’re not seeing “the support they think they’re entitled to,” leading to a “pick up our ball and go home” approach. 

Western alienation has had surges of popularity in recent decades, including the Reform Party’s surge in the 1993 and 1997 elections before merging with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the contemporary Conservative Party of Canada, and the Wexit movement that found footing after the 2019 election. But Olszynski says that with Trump in power and threatening Canada, the stakes are much higher now because the national unity threats Smith is levelling could feed a pretense of popular support for annexation or separating from Canada. 

“You're dealing with much more loaded dice when you're having those conversations right now,” he said.

On Wednesday, Carney said if elected his government would aggressively develop energy projects in the national interest. A backgrounder accompanying the announcement does not mention oil, gas, LNG or pipelines explicitly, but does say Canada can reduce its reliance on the US by investing in both “conventional and clean energy.”

Smith told reporters she was not buying it.

“You can't ride two horses at once. You've got to decide: are you going to repeal policies that have killed investment in Alberta so that we can be that energy superpower, or are you not?” Smith said. 

“It's one thing to say you want to build oil and gas infrastructure, but you have to have the production, and you won't have the production if you don't have the right policies,” she said. “So I'll wait and see which horse the next prime minister is going to ride.”

Olszynski said the debate over conventional versus clean energy is essentially one between incumbent energy and disruptive new energy sources. But in his view, there are three options in this debate: double down on fossil fuels, as Smith and Poilievre advocate; accelerate the energy transition off of fossil fuels toward renewable; or the Carney approach: all of the above. 

He said Smith’s call to stop “riding two horses” reveals her priority to protect the fossil fuel industry, because it shows a failure to recognize the economic potential of renewables. There’s a “realpolitik” to it, he said. 

Even with an “all-of-the-above approach, what we’re talking about eventually is eating [the oil and gas industry’s] market share and diminishing the need for, and market for, fossil fuels,” he said.

Dr. Joe Vipond, a Calgary-based emergency doctor and past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), said Canadians shouldn’t want to be the “drill baby drill” country during a climate crisis. 

Carney may be trying to pick up votes in Alberta by pitching the country as a superpower in both clean and conventional energy, but “the conventional energy superpower horse has left the barn.”

“The world is rapidly decarbonizing and if we want to be in the growth industry we need to be in the renewable industry, that's where the world is going,” he said. “Doubling down on an older industry may sound [good] in my hometown of Calgary, but is it going to play across the nation? I think people understand it's time to change.”