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If Alberta Premier Danielle Smith were smart, she’d treat yesterday’s Court of King’s Bench ruling quashing Elections Alberta’s approval of the Stay Free Alberta/Alberta Prosperity Project petition for a separation referendum as a political get-out-of-jail-free card.
After all, she could probably persuade her party’s separatist base the appeals were going to take forever, and in the meantime they’d need to re-elect her United Conservative Party so she could keep on pushing their cause. Then she could sign a pipeline deal with Prime Minister Mark Carney tomorrow and go for electoral gold.
That would probably work with enough voters and also hold together her uneasy coalition of pro-Canadian traditional conservatives and the angry separatists enthralled by the MAGA movement south of the Medicine Line who increasingly dominate her party.
But while Ms. Smith is wily, glib and determined, she’s not exactly smart. So the smart money says she’ll do nothing of the sort.
Instead, what do you want to bet she rolls the dice and again and attempts to use her unconstitutional Alberta Sovereignty Act to try to provoke the constitutional crisis the big brains behind her United Conservative Government’s implausibly deniable separation campaign have been working toward since the day she replaced Jason Kenney as premier?
Whatever happens next, Justice Shaina Leonard’s decision certainly landed with thud yesterday. Even The New York Times had a story up in moments.
The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and three nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy, signatories to Treaties 6, 7 and 8 signed in the late 19th Century, had gone to court to argue that using Alberta’s so-called citizen-initiative legislation to try to break up Canada violates treaty rights enshrined in the Canadian Constitution.
In a written judgment yesterday, Justice Leonard agreed. Ruling that Alberta had failed to meet its constitutional duty to consult with First Nations, she said that “as a matter of logic and common sense, there can be no doubt that Alberta’s secession from Canada will have an impact on Treaties 7 and 8.” (This is especially true since if you scratch an Alberta secessionist, you’ll find a 51st State annexationist.)
Justice Leonard also found Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure made an error in law when he approved Stay Free Alberta’s Citizen Initiative petition but failed to consider an earlier court ruling that Alberta separation would violate the treaty rights of Indigenous people.
It didn’t take long for Alberta separatists – who don’t seem to have much time for such quaint notions as the rule of law – to adopt a threatening tone.
Cory Morgan, a founder of the Alberta Independence Party who is now a columnist for a pro-separation online publication, stated Ms. Smith’s problem most succinctly: “Now it’s up to Premier Smith to schedule the referendum,” he warned in a social media post. “If she doesn’t, she will share the fate of Jason Kenney.”
Ms. Smith – who above all else is determined to hang onto power – well understands that this might be true. As University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young explained the premier’s predicament in a Substack post called On the Highway to Hell, “We’re stuck on a bus whose driver will only listen to the rowdies crowded in the front of the bus, shouting at her to go faster so we make it to our hellish destination: Referendumtown.”
Dr. Young asked, will the premier take the offered exit? And she answered: Nope. “She likes driving this bus. She’s pretty sure that the rowdies at the front of the bus would knife her if she pulled over. She’s probably right.”
What to do? The premier stalled yesterday, but only a little. “We think that today’s decision by the court will deny opportunity to well over 300,000 Albertans to have their petition verified by Elections Alberta,” she petulantly said, ignoring the fact she’s busy denying close to half a million Albertans who signed a petition last summer saying they wanted to stay in Canada.
“We think that this decision is incorrect in law and anti-democratic,” she continued, “and we will be appealing it as a result.” She will be joined by the organizers of the Stay Free Alberta petition, of course. “This is not a setback for us, it’s exactly what we were expecting,” petition proponent Mitch Sylvestre, the gun store owner from Bonnyville, told The New York Times.
The premier’s problem is that legal appeals take time, sometimes a lot of it, and the separatist crowd is in a hurry. They understand that their case isn’t going to get better if people have time to think about it. Their best hope is the massive foreign-funded disinformation campaign that is already under way and a referendum this fall before the separation curious start to do the arithmetic.
So expect the rhetoric to get pretty ugly in the next few hours as the demands for the premier to defy the courts and put the referendum on the ballot anyway persist and grow louder.
As far as the First Nations are concerned, “this decision should close the chapter on the suggestion of an independence referendum,” Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam told Postmedia. “The court has spoken, and so have the First Nations.”
Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi, sensing a moment that might work for his faltering New Democrats, thanked the First Nations “for fighting for our country with your time and money.”
“This referendum violates treaty rights, it would cost Albertans hundreds of millions of dollars, and is now tied to serious public safety concerns thanks to the largest data breach in Alberta’s history,” he said in a statement.
“The Premier says that she’s exploring other ideas,” Mr. Nenshi continued. “Here’s an idea, Premier: call off the referendum and put this to bed.”
“This petition is dead. This referendum is dead. For the premier to spend taxpayer time and money to resurrect it, would prove what we’ve always known: she’s a separatist.”
Mr. Nenshi concluded by saying that no one is above the law – not even this premier. Count on it, though, Ms. Smith, her advisors, and Alberta’s separatists will have other ideas about that.
