Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s petulant afternoon “readout” from Friday’s Calgary Stampede meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggests she didn’t get very far trying to bully the feds into abandoning their carbon emissions targets.
The readout – a faddish Washington term for a one-sided description of what happened in a closed meeting – prompted some rather threatening grumbling and some outright hysteria from a Postmedia political columnist Rick Bell: “Trudeau DOES NOT budge on where he’s headed with Alberta,” he wrote in the Ottawa Sun.
Holy crap! The apocalypse, probably!
Dial it back there, Big Guy! If she sticks with her present strategy for real – as opposed to random threatening readouts and declarations to impress the rubes – she’ll soon find that, constitutionally speaking, her government is all hat and no cattle, to stick with the Stampede metaphor.
Current agreements
As previously reported, Alberta and the feds have struck a “bilateral working group” that will “work on an aligned framework to incentivize investment in carbon capture, utilization and storage as well as other emissions-reducing technologies” – that’s bureaucratic babble for look busy and churn our anodyne platitudes, which is what Ms. Smith clearly hopes the committee will do. If she were serious about it reaching consensus with Ottawa, she’d call it a “task force.”
There will be rules for building “small modular reactors,” a dubious idea favoured by both the feds and the province. Other than the working group, that seemed to be about all the sides agreed upon.
Jurisdictional disputes
According to Ms. Smith’s readout, though, the meeting was “constructive.” Apparently not constructive, according to the premier, was the fact that “the federal government has yet to formally recognize Alberta’s exclusive jurisdiction to set its own emissions-reduction targets and milestones on the path to a carbon-neutral energy sector and electricity grid by 2050.”
That’s probably because the premier’s claim of jurisdictional exclusivity is constitutionally questionable at best, and likely to face stiff headwinds in the courts.
Smith threatened that “our province will have no choice but to use alternative policy options to protect our rights independent of federal interference” if Ottawa does not recognize their jurisdiction over their climate targets, seemingly referring to the Alberta Sovereignty Act.
One can only hope she does. That will settle once and for all that the Sovereignty Act is, to borrow from the Bard, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The federal emissions targets
Smith’s statement also said that the federal targets – a 42 per cent reduction in emissions in the energy sector by 2030, and a net-zero electricity grid by 2035 –“are unachievable, will drive billions of investment out of Alberta, massively increase electricity costs and result in the loss of tens of thousands of Alberta jobs.”
Well, that’s her story, and she’s obviously stickin’ to it, so detailed analysis needs to follow.
Smith also demanded “more time” for Alberta to clean up its electricity generation practices, a standard tactic of petroleum-industry-captured governments everywhere. In truth, had the NDP led by Rachel Notley won the election, the rhetoric would have been softer, but the ultimate strategy would likely have been much the same.
The readout carries on like this for a while. Readers are encouraged to read it themselves.
Calm down everyone! If Alberta Premier Danielle Smith follows through on her veiled Stampede week threat to use her Sovereignty Act, everyone will soon know that she’s all hat and no cattle.
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