Danielle Smith is playing with fire 

So much for that detente between Ottawa and Alberta. After suggesting that her first meeting with newly re-elected Prime Minister Mark Carney was positive, Danielle Smith decided to stick a fork in his eye with a statement that effectively invites a referendum on separatism in Alberta unless he cedes all federal climate and energy policymaking authority to her province and repeals every piece of climate-oriented legislation and regulation it implemented since 2015. 

It’s not just words from the premier, either. Smith’s government intends to change the rules around citizen-initiated referendums first implemented by Jason Kenney’s UCP government in 2021. Her bill would reduce the threshold for a referendum from 20 per cent of eligible voters in a previous general election to just 10 per cent, or approximately 177,000 people. It also increased the time period in which those signatures could be collected from 90 to 120 days. 

But just in case that wasn’t enough to get a referendum onto the ballot in 2026, Smith decided to help the cause by portraying Alberta’s separatist rabble as honourable stewards of a valid and noble cause. “The vast majority of these individuals are not fringe voices to be marginalized or vilified,” she said. “They are quite literally our friends and neighbours, who have had enough of having their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile federal government. They’re frustrated, and they have every reason to be.”

It was, in some respects, a remarkable performance. Yes, the province may have billions of barrels of oil in the ground, but no jurisdiction in Canada is better at mining grievances and anger than Alberta. Smith, meanwhile, is the most talented conductor of this symphony of bullshit we’ve ever seen. She gives them life, grants their ludicrous claims and grievances credibility, and harnesses their anger to her cause. Of course, as the premier of the province it’s her job to talk these people down, not rile them up. But to Smith, her most important job is clearly that of leader of the United Conservative Party, and she is determined not to suffer the same mutinous fate as her predecessor Jason Kenney no matter the cost to everyone else, including her own province. 

It might be tempting for Smith to think that a referendum will contain the separatist impulse in her province — and, more importantly, distract voters in Alberta from things like the AHS scandal that continues to metastasize inside her government. Smith saw that a post-election pro-independence rally in Edmonton could only attract a few hundred people, and she has access to polling data that shows how marginal the separatist movement in Alberta actually is right now. According to a recent Nanos poll, for example, more than three-quarters of Albertans identify either as Canadians or Canadians from Alberta. 

There’s also the fact that Smith’s other independence-adjacent initiatives have failed to gain traction with the public despite her government’s best efforts to aid and abet them. She recently acknowledged that despite millions of public dollars spent on advertising the supposed benefits of an Alberta Pension Plan — ones that were grossly overstated, as Canada’s chief actuary confirmed in December — there isn’t an appetite for it (yet). Indeed, as Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge noted, “much of the sovereignty-type agenda — Alberta pension plan, Alberta provincial police force, Alberta revenue agency, etc. — has been a tough sell, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s suddenly a broad willingness to dive into full-blown separation.”

Then again, British Prime Minister David Cameron thought the same thing when he called the referendum for Brexit in 2016. The Conservative prime minister did it to quell a pair of threats to his political power: growing unrest within his party among pro-leave MPs and the growing popularity of the upstart UK Independence Party. Instead, he opened a Pandora’s box of misinformation and rage-farming that ultimately pushed his country out of the European Union and into self-inflicted economic and cultural decline.

Ironically, Smith may have already achieved that for Alberta simply by fanning the separatist flames so shamelessly. Even if Albertans vote overwhelmingly against separating from Canada, as seems most likely, her behaviour has already irritated leaders in parts of the country where provincial consent and cooperation are essential to the new oil and gas export infrastructure she is endlessly campaigning for. “This is a time to unite the country, not people saying, ‘oh, I’m leaving the country,’” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Tuesday morning in a speech to a group promoting the skilled trades. It’s unlikely that her demand for a de-facto veto over federal climate and energy policy will play any better in Quebec and British Columbia, which are the real chokepoints for any new pipelines. 

 So why is Smith doing this? Because she desperately needs to distract Albertans from the failings of her own government. The healthcare system remains in crisis and chaos, the Trump tariffs have only begun to bite, and with OPEC poised to flood the global oil market Smith will have to contend with a deteriorating economic situation that could blow up Alberta’s budget. Ironically, the thing preventing Smith’s budget deficits from being even bigger is TMX, the pipeline that Canada’s supposedly hostile federal government bought and built, and which has already significantly narrowed the discount on Alberta oil. 

Mark Carney shouldn’t expect Smith to thank him for that any time soon. Smith desperately needs her province, and especially her party’s voters, to hate his Liberal government, facts and reality notwithstanding. If it ultimately comes at the cost of a united Canada, that’s a price she’s clearly willing to pay.