B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix purports to see right through Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her pipeline deal-making with Ottawa.
To him, the memorandum of understanding to be inked today by Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney is really all about her base.
“Timing is a priority for Alberta because, apparently, there is a political convention this weekend,” Dix told reporters this week. “And apparently Alberta needs to unite the right.”
It’s ever been the case that Smith wants to keep her United Conservative Party membership happy, and the run-up to the group’s annual general meeting has become prime time for such red-meat measures.
Convention week last year was when the UCP government tabled restrictive bills affecting transgender youth, and beefed up the Alberta Bill of Rights.
So is a federal-provincial accord on energy her way of teeing up the partisans for AGM 2025?
Dix may perceive it that way. If Smith does too, she’ll face members who don’t think the much-hyped MOU is much of a crowd-pleaser.
“Definitely not. Another pipeline doesn’t change Alberta’s problems,” said Tim Hoven, a west-central Alberta rancher.
It’s not that Hoven and others in the UCP’s activist core aren’t pro-pipeline. Of course they are.
It’s just that they’re past the point of wanting handshake pacts between Alberta and Ottawa. They want the two to sever ties.
“All of the active people in the grassroots movement that I know of are 110 per cent behind independence,” Hoven said.
While polls have shown Albertans vastly opposed to separation, a majority of UCP supporters favour the idea. The United Conservatives who travel and participate in AGMs skew more toward the hardline edge of the party’s voter coalition, so the pro-independence fervor may be much hotter on the convention floor.
Current party president Rob Smith has publicly estimated that the UCP base is two-thirds to 75 per cent separatist.
Mitch Sylvestre is a leader of that large faction. He’s not only CEO of the separatist group Alberta Prosperity Project, but he’s also the UCP constituency president in Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul, the rural northeast riding that perennially sends more members to the convention than any other district.
He believes the premier’s reaction to the Carney deal will indeed be the convention’s highlight. Sylvestre views it as meaningless, and hopes Smith will, too.
“It’s basically a useless piece of paper as far as I’m concerned,” the separatist leader told CBC News in an interview. It doesn’t guarantee a pipeline gets built, or federal climate regulations get lifted, he reasoned.
“Nobody’s going to be fooled by a memorandum of understanding. That is not a victory. That’s not even a talking point.”
Separatism-inclined United Conservatives resent that there were ever federal limits to Alberta’s oil-developing and oil-shipping ambitions, and their list of demands from Ottawa have grown more expansive.
They want things like a major overhaul to equalization payments, Alberta’s own pension plan and police force and Senate reform.
Those are the same issues Smith got her base exercised about with her Alberta Next hearings — one of her responses to the Liberals’ repeat victory last election, alongside a renewed push for a West Coast pipeline.
With that latter initiative bearing some fruit, eyes will be on Smith to announce how she’ll act on the feedback from Alberta Next panels — namely, which of those anti-Ottawa measures Alberta will vote on in referendums the premier has suggested be held next spring.
She’s spoken about tamping down Albertans’ anti-Ottawa sentiments with progress on pipelines. But that fire may be burning too hot within her base.
The referendum many of them want is one for a straight divorce from Canada. UCP brass had actually considered hosting a debate on independence at the AGM, featuring Sylvestre as one of the speakers.
They narrowly decided against it, concerned that embracing separatist ideas may turn off others inside and outside the party, Rob Smith said earlier this month during a presidential candidates’ online debate.
“The board decided there isn’t an upside to it because you’re not going to convince any of that other third of the people,” Smith told debate moderator Chris Scott, a former head of the APP. He said he’d prefer the party staying neutral on independence until a province-wide referendum settles the issue.
Darrell Komick is Rob Smith’s lone presidential rival in this week’s board election. Komick has criticized the board for shying away from the contentious issue. As the Calgary-Lougheed UCP riding president, he’s organized town halls that promoted separatism and vaccine skepticism.
Sylvestre is recommending members vote for Komick and other “grassroots” UCP members who are more open to separatism.
Hoven said the current president may be a good committee chair, but the party needs someone more aggressive.
“If Darrell wins, I think it’s a fairly big sign that the members who were there want a more independence-minded agenda moving forward,” Hoven said.
Komick, too, doesn’t put much stock in the Smith-Carney MOU on climate and energy.
“Do I think it’s going to take the heat off Ottawa? Absolutely not,” he told CBC News.
It’s a reminder of the political distance that’s grown between the UCP convention floor and a chamber of commerce or the broader electorate.
Smith may spend Thursday celebrating a pipeline breakthrough with Ottawa, but she’ll then wade into a gathering on Friday and Saturday with a bunch of Albertans that don’t want to do much of anything with Ottawa, let alone celebrate.
