Alberta Premier Danielle Smith called a news conference to tell the impertinent journalists who showed up why, as a strong believer in Canadian Confederation, she intends to do whatever she can to ensure her province’s loony separatists get to have a secession referendum as soon as possible.
A link is provided, Dear Readers, but if you value your sanity, I can’t really recommend that you spend even half an hour watching Smith refuse to answer the reporters’ perfectly sensible questions about that bizarre contradiction on the grounds that we haven’t yet seen the question that a fissiparous claque of secessionists tied to her United Conservative Party (UCP) are planning to gin up.
Indeed, there was very little new at the videotaped presser that wasn’t in Premier Smith’s mid-afternoon address to the masses on Monday.
There was one tidbit that could legitimately be described as news – to wit, Smith’s reason for holding her speech at 3 p.m. on a Monday. It turns out the speech wasn’t for the good people of Alberta at all! It was for the folks in Ontario, Quebec and maybe the Maritimes – plus those other Eastern Bastards in British Columbia who are occupying our Alberta coastline. They need to know just how pissed off we Albertans are at them for voting Liberal when they were supposed to vote Conservative! The utter cheek!
mith indicated she was there to tell them about it at an hour when they’d be paying attention.
Look, if you watch this, even if it’s just to find that bit, you’re soon going to start screaming, “All aboard the crazy train!” at your computer screen. Be my guest if you insist. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Meanwhile, Tuesday’s news conference can’t have been a particularly happy day for Smith and her strategic brain trust.
Mark Carney, Canada’s gentlemanly new prime minister, did great when he sat down with Donald Trump to try to salvage Canada’s trade relationship with the United States. He made His Mightiness smile and coo. President Donald Trump even called him a “terrific guy” in public.
This is not, you can trust me, what Smith had hoped to see happen. And it’s not, I’d venture to speculate, what would have happened if the premier’s man Pierre Poilievre had been in the hot seat at the White House with VP JD Vance giving him his now proven death glare.
It’s probably too early to start calling Carney the Trump Whisperer, but you’ve got to admit the PM’s meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his consiglieres went better than you expected.
Remember, it’s a mistake to dismiss Carney as a mere banker, as if he were the manager of a local branch of the Bank of Commerce who had just turned down your request for a mortgage. As the governor of two Commonwealth central banks, he is more akin to a member of the very highest strata of the professional civil service, wise to the quirks of politicians and big businessmen alike, and skilled at soothing their fragile egos. Think, Yes Minister!
So, of course, President Trump liked him!
This means that while Carney may not be the ideal politician to run for mayor of Mushaboom or Spuzzum, he may well be the man for the moment.
This is not good news for Conservative partisans. Smith, who despite her constant gaslighting and inconsistency is no fool, knows this and cannot find it reassuring. If her past performance is any guide, this means she will now likely double down on her divisive separatist mischief.
How will Carney counter that? I expect that one way or another, the prime minister will assign Corey Hogan, just elected Liberal MP for the Calgary Confederation riding and former head of the Alberta Government’s sprawling communications operation and comms vice-president of the University of Calgary, to the role of foil to the premier’s anti-Canadian distemper.
Hogan’s clever slogan during the election campaign was “Confederation is Worth Fighting For.” Those words continue to have resonance.
I’m sure Smith likewise wasn’t pleased when Ontario Premier Doug Ford, also a Conservative, reminded her that “we have to stay united … this is about Canada, this isn’t about Ontario or Alberta.” Smith waspishly suggested he stay in his lane. “I don’t tell him how he should run his province, and I would hope that he doesn’t tell me how I should run mine,” she sniffed during her presser.
Long gone are the days when Ford and Alberta’s previous Conservative premier joked about how they finished each other’s sentences. More idle speculation here, but if this Ford-Smith feud gets much worse, perhaps Ford will send some of his obviously competent Progressive Conservative campaign strategists out to Alberta to help NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi.
That would be strange, but if Smith stays the course, not doing so might even be stranger.
Also yesterday, Alberta’s First Nations chiefs let it be known that they have very little patience with Smith’s separatist manipulations. The chiefs of Treaty Nos. 6, 7 and 8 held an emergency meeting in Edmonton and the Chiefs of the Confederacy of Treaty No. 6 cancelled an annual protocol meeting with the premier scheduled for Tuesday.
The desire for reconciliation among Albertans and Canadians remains strong, despite what you night read on the parts of Twitter/X inhabited by UCP supporters. This will not help the premier’s mission either.
In addition, Alberta’s apparently annual wildfire mass evacuation season began early not far north of Edmonton, another issues-management problem for the climate-change deniers of the UCP.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
