Memo to Alberta Premier from Eastern Canada....May 3, 2025

 If thousands of Canadian voters did not detect, or chose to ignore the hand, larynx, motivation and methods of the occupant of the Oval Office in the campaign of Pierre Poilievre, one can only hope that those same Canadian voters will not be unconscious and blind and deaf to the implications of the Alberta Prosperity Project’s solicitation and acquisition of thousands of signatures to enable a referendum on Alberta Separation from Canada.

Not only would a referendum favouring separation embolden the hand of the American wannabe emperor, but it would significantly erode many of the promised significant initiatives on offer from the new Canadian federal government, who, by the way, is not, in the words of Alberta Premier Smith, ‘If Ottawa has its way, Alberta would left freezing in the dark?”

There is political rhetoric, mostly exaggerated, hollow, devoid of empirical and rational evidence and argument respectively. And to some extent we have a spate of it during the course of the recent national campaign. And then there is this cancerous venom or bile, depending on your choice of metaphor from Smith. Those of us in the Eastern part of Canada have listened to western complaints of being ignored, belittled, taken-for-granted, and even feeling alienated from the major debates and decisions taken over the decades by Ottawa, whether those governments were Liberal or Conservative. There is, however, a significant and perhaps irredemiable and tectonic shift from the position of the  honourable and highly respected former premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, who is renowned for his statement, “I am a proud Albertan, but I am first a proud Canadian!” and this latest salvo from Smith.

Of course, those reading this, who support Ms Smith, will be repulsed by my omission of either a pronoun or a title of premier from her name…..and I do both deliberately. It may be the legal right and the political opportunity of the Alberta premier to engage in such reprehensible rhetoric.  It is neither the time nor the moment in history, nor the political ethos, nor the temper of the culture at a time when the national sovereignty is being rhetorically and politically and economically threatened by the American White House either to imitate or to emulate the chief antagonist of the Canadian nation.

And the Alberta Premier is both imitating and emulating that antagonist thereby fawning before him and sticking her political thumb in the eye of the newly elected Canadian Prime Minister. Identifying her province as having a significant affinity with Texas, can and will only embolden the American chief executive into thinking, and imagining that if he could ‘pick off’ Alberta, in his colonization project, he would have achieved more than he could ever have imagined. Her timing of legislation lowering the standard of numbers qualifying for referendum, for ordinary Albertans gather signatures for a petition, of course, she would argue, as has her mentor, Preston Manning, already done, is a perfect time to jump into the gap of political theatre prior to the full up-and-running operations of the federal government. National media is focused on the spectre of all of the potential head-winds facing the new Prime Minister. Grabbing headlines with Cecil B. DeMille-type epic headlines, while it may get a few ‘irate’ responses like this one, is neither the stuff of responsible leadership, nor does it attract those who expect and demand responsible leadership.

There are going to be a lot more jobs and livelihoods lost with the imposition of American-imposed illegal tariffs, and those losses are not going to be restricted to any one province or area of the federal state. Ontario already faces the move of a portion of Stellantis operations to the United States, as well as the loss, to this point, of some 740 jobs at the Oshawa General Motors plant, and some 400 from the GM CAMI Assembly Plant in Ingersoll. Who knows where the next wave of job losses will be announced, and in which province or territory they will occur.

Promising both to spread the revenue from Canadian tariffs to the displaced workers and also to work toward the goal of no single region bear the brunt of whatever implications the tariffs bring, taken together, serve as a beginning of a commitment to cushion the blow of the American political and economic behemoth, to some degree.

If the Alberta premier thinks, or believes, that, adopting a tempestuous and irascible and irate tone is a sign of the strength she believes she embodies as Premier and thereby she is strengthening her hand in negotiations with Ottawa, she has fallen into the same intimidating pose as her American hero…and the hollowness of her rhetoric, like his, is blatantly and venomously on display across the nation. Intimidation, as the American leader is learning from Mr. Carney, is never going to ‘trump’ mutual respect by adults in a formal, official and historic process of negotiations. Nor is intimidation an effective card to play if one wishes to be considered respectful, adult, mature and worthy of the time and respect to be seriously engaged.

In the school yard, the bully uses intimidation as his starting point, because, usually he is pre-adolescent, or perhaps early adolescent. And while the U.S. model of bully has had inordinate impact in intimidating his Republican colleagues in Congress, and among the Supreme Court Justices, the model of intimidation is clearly not going to have the desired impact or effect on Mr. Carney, either in Washington or in Edmonton or Ottawa.

Indigenous leaders, too, from across the province and country have condemned Smith’s new legislation for ‘stoking separatism and violating treaty commitments in the process. ‘Inviting individuals to vote on questions to take treaty land is absurd, and contrary to the nation-to-nation sacred convenants that we agreed toat the time of treaty making,’ said Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation Chief Sheldon Sunshine on Friday. (Jack Farrell, The Canadian Press, in the Glode and Mail, May 2, 2025)

The word ‘sovereignty’ is being bandied about as if it were the litmus test of a province’s or a nation’s identity….and clearly, by comparison, the threat to Canadian sovereignty from the White House has far more intensity, and far more immediacy and far more toxicity and danger than anything coming out of Ottawa relating either to Quebec or Alberta….and it does not take a rocket-scientist, or a Philadelphia lawyer to take note of that comparison.

In fact, the Alberta Premier does her case in advocating for Alberta’s respect and appropriate and legitimate place in federation by putting her provincial sovereignty adjacent to Canada’s. Even Quebec voters and the Bloc leadership, have turned their eyes southward recognizing the threat posed by America. By analogy, domestic violence is perpetrated primarily by men against women. Occasionally, however, the situation is reversed by gender, where a woman violently attacks a man. The voice of the victim, in that instance, is drowned out by the statistics and the public consciousness of the proportional dimension of the issue of domestic violence. It is not that ‘he’ in this case, should not be recognized and respected; it is just that the context, as usual, limits his ‘exposure’ and his ‘voice’ and his ‘respect’.

Context, however, is something that has seemingly been eviscerated, given the bullet-like, weaponizing of most issues into a black-and-white binary, in which public opinion seems to feel it has to take sides.

“A good first step’ is the way the Alberta Premier describes her first meeting with the new Prime Minister…and we can all hold out hope for more ‘positive’ exchanges in the near future. The overwhelming public sentiment, desire, even passion, for an adult to enter the room on the public square, however, over-shadows and hopefully erases the dominance of the zero-sum game which serves as the core strategy and tactic of the American government in its current iteration. Canada has elected a clear and unequivocal ‘adult’ (and a highly educated, sophisticated, nuanced, disciplined, and confident and open) adult at that. That is the greatest strength Mr. Carney takes with him into the Oval Office on Tuesday May 6, next week.

It is that model of the ‘adult’ in the room that Ms Smith might give thought to imitating and to emulating….it has the promise, like honey, of far more rewards than vinegar!