Danielle Smith is putting out a fire with gasoline

Here we go again. Faced with another surge in separatist sentiment in Alberta, the UCP government has decided to strike a panel in an attempt to let off some of the political steam it has spent the last two years deliberately creating. As with former premier Jason Kenney’s 2019 “Fair Deal” panel, Danielle Smith’s “Alberta Next” will tour the province in an attempt to give their supporters an opportunity to vent about the federal government and its supposed hostility towards Alberta. In the process, it will whip up the very frustrations it claims to want to address. 

In reality, Smith’s panel is an elaborate (and expensive) exercise in manufacturing consent, one that will cost Alberta time and political oxygen that would be better spent addressing its real challenges. It’s an obvious attempt to distract Albertans from her government’s growing list of failures, ones that range from a messy attempt to reorganize the healthcare system (and open the door to more private sector involvement) to a shameful surrender to Australian coal-mining magnates. Oh, and there’s the ongoing ethical scandal that began with her government’s ill-fated purchase of Turkish tylenol, one that seems to keep metastasizing with each passing month. 

The premier’s 15-member panel, which is headlined by Environment Minister Rebecca Schultz, three UCP MLAs and a predictable assortment of oil and gas executives and business leaders, will assess ways in which Alberta can “better protect ourselves from Ottawa’s attacks.” It’s worth reiterating that said “attacks” have resulted in record-high production from the oil sands, the first LNG facility in Canadian history, and the expansion of TMX, which will deliver billions of dollars in additional revenues for both oil companies and the Alberta government. If the premier is unclear about that last point, she can ask Trevor Tombe, the University of Calgary economist who ran those numbers — and sits on her shiny new panel. 

But facts like this are clearly going to have very little purchase over the findings of her panel, Tombe’s presence notwithstanding. Let’s use its public survey on immigration as an example here, and set aside its unmistakably xenophobic undertones for the moment. It begins with a three-minute video — one people can’t click through — that’s littered with partisan talking points about “Justin Trudeau’s Liberals” and even a few outright falsehoods. It talks about the need to “counter Ottawa’s open-border policies” and suggests “Ottawa has ignored the request of Alberta and other provinces to cut refugee claimants and student visas.” But Ottawa already did that last year, and it’s already resulted in the slowest population growth on record — and maybe in Canadian history. 

Smith’s government isn’t interested in actually gauging people’s genuine opinions here. Its panel has been tasked with massaging and managing them, and the public survey portion — forced preamble and all — is little more than a publicly-funded push poll. The inevitable result will be a report that blames Ottawa for Alberta’s frustrations and then makes a set of recommendations that either won’t address them or can’t actually be implemented — which, in turn, sows the seeds for even more frustration.

This is not an accident. Danielle Smith knows she can’t single-handedly amend the constitution, and that other provinces not named Saskatchewan and Quebec aren’t going to indulge her fantasies. She knows that eliminating equalization would do nothing to actually change the flow of dollars between Ottawa and Alberta. She knows that collecting income taxes in Alberta would simply add expense and bureaucracy to a province that claims to hate both. And she knows the idea of an Alberta pension plan is a dead letter, as the government’s own survey — one whose results it refused to release until compelled by the privacy and information commissioner and persistent hounding by Postmedia’s Matthew Black — confirmed in glorious detail. None of these dogs are going to hunt. Most of them won’t even get up off the carpet for a sniff. 

But Smith also knows that she’d much rather spend — or waste — time talking about these things rather than her own government’s various failings. By keeping the focus on Ottawa and its supposed “attacks” on Alberta, she is able to distract both the opposition NDP and her own party’s constituency of increasingly rabid separatists. While the upstart Republican Party of Alberta may have only won 17.6 per cent of the vote in this week’s byelection in Olds-Disbury-Three Hills, those votes appear to have come almost exclusively at the expense of the UCP. “We are still here and fighting, and we aren’t going away any time soon,” Republican Party of Alberta candidate (and leader) Cam Davies said. “This is just the beginning.”

If Smith actually wanted to end the separatist threat in her province, she would stop feeding her supporters the endless diet of Ottawa-based grievances to which they’ve grown accustomed. Then again, maybe they’d just find someone else to feed their appetite for victimhood, just as they did when they turfed the last UCP leader. And so, they’ll get another do-nothing panel that stokes their anger and spends their money without solving their problems. At some point, they might just figure out who their real problem is.