Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) is having another tantrum about federal environmental regulatory overreach, mostly imagined, by the former Trudeau Government.
Yesterday’s meltdown came in the form of an announcement about a bill to implement changes to former UCP premier Jason Kenney’s untested but probably unconstitutional Critical Infrastructure Defence Act that are obviously intended to make the legislation unconstitutional for sure.
Among Premier Danielle Smith’s big plans: making it explicitly illegal for federal officials to try to gather environmental data in Alberta without the Alberta Government having to prove to a court the feds are in fact operating outside their jurisdiction.
It doesn’t require a master’s degree in constitutional law to see what’s wrong with this scofflaw approach, whether or not the MAGA wannabes and 51st staters of the UCP are bold enough to actually try to toss a federal inspector in jail for doing her job.
They also want to set up a two-kilometre-deep cordon sanitaire along the U.S. border to protect the helpless Americans from us, I guess. (“Let this be a message to all potential traffickers, especially those who traffic deadly fentanyl, that Alberta’s southern border is secure,” Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis huffed comedically in yesterday’s press release, possibly momentarily forgetting that what little fentanyl crosses the border is generally moving north.)
Now, this may all seem odd since Justin Trudeau, having retired from the fray last Friday, is in no position to interfere in provincial jurisdiction even if he were in a mood to do so.
However, Premier Smith and many of her closest advisors certainly aren’t going to let a little thing like facts stand in the way, especially on the cusp of a visit to Wild Rose Country by Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trudeau’s Liberal successor and an Alberta homeboy just like his federal Conservative Opponent Pierre Poilievre.
Therein lies the problem from the UCP perspective. As is now well understood, Mr. Carney is enjoying something of a bump in the polls that’s unnerving Alberta Conservatives, who along with most of the rest of us have assumed for months that a majority federal government led by the dislikeable Poilievre, was a certainty.
Then along comes this modestly conservative sounding Liberal central banker, exuding a serious Canada’s Dad vibe, and all of a sudden the federal Conservative farm team in Alberta succumbs to daddy issues!
After all, if the Liberals end up with another term in power, and the prime minister is from Alberta – whether or not Carney announces today that he’ll seek a seat in Alberta, as several commentators have suggested he might – it will blow a major hole in the UCP’s never-ending grievance story about poor, neglected, misunderstood, ignored Alberta.
While the UCP has telegraphed this sovereignist nonsense before – for example, at a news conference last November – the timing of this announcement suggests the UCP brain trust hopes Carney will say something unreasonable in response when he meets Ms. Smith.
Everything we know about the man suggests this is unlikely, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Indeed, as his very first act, Carney demonstrated his willingness to take a more conservative tack on the environment than Trudeau, immediately casting the maligned consumer carbon tax into the trash heap of history.
However, in half-hearted defence of the Alberta government, it did promise last fall to entrench this nonsense in law, and there is a session of the Alberta Legislature ongoing, so the highly performative and certainly unconstitutional Critical Infrastructure Defence Amendment Act, 2025, would have had to be introduced anyway. It will henceforth be known for a few weeks as Bill 45.
The legislation is enabled by the so-called Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, which has nothing to do with a united Canada and is also likely to be ruled unconstitutional if it is ever used in a way meaningful enough for someone to bother challenging it in court.
The news conference offered an opportunity for Smith, flanked by Ellis and Justice Minister Mickey Amery, to gaslight furiously about Ottawa and the Liberals. She complained, falsely, about “a federal liberal government which has tried to crush our economy for the last 10 years” and suggested U.S. President Donald Trump wants the Liberals to win, as he confusingly and possibly confusedly indicated Tuesday, because he wants to keep Canada weak.
Well, there’s nothing like a toadying collaborationist to keep the country strong, she seemed to suggest.
None of this is going to do Poilievre and his federal Conservatives, who so far have been unable to figure out how to pivot from their longstanding adoration of Trump and abuse of Trudeau, a lick of good.
But readers are advised not to get their knickers in a twist about Smith’s endless sovereignty posturing. To politely borrow a partial sentiment from the Bard of Avon, she’s “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
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