Over the weekend prominent Alberta separatist Jeffrey Rath took to the internet appearing to advocate an internal United Conservative Party (UCP) coup to remove Premier Danielle Smith. 

Her sin, in Rath’s obvious estimation, is that she’s been working too closely with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney and playing both sides of Independence Avenue in her efforts to keep the party’s fraying coalition of outright separatists and traditional Canadian Conservatives in one piece. 

His solution: The separatist cadres who now clearly control the UCP, but not quite yet either the government caucus or the provincial government, should dump her and replace her with a more ideologically acceptable leader and declare the party to be a separatist entity in the manner of the Parti Québécois.

Arguably, this could either be a sign of Smith’s increasing strength thanks to her latest deal with Carney, or of the separatists’ increasing strength as the holders of most of the internal power positions in the UCP party bureaucracy. Or, perhaps, a bit of both. 

Smith’s strategy, as is well understood, has been to assert that only she can successfully keep the open separatists now embedded in the party, caucus and cabinet from scaring away electors accustomed to voting Conservative without thinking too deeply about what the party nowadays represents.

Likewise, as the vessel of Preston Manning’s strategy of blackmailing the federal government into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51^st State, she is the only politician likely to be able to get away with perpetrating this political protection racket. 

Talk of an internal party coup, though, should be taken seriously because Rath, who is legal counsel and for all practical purposes the self-appointed spokesperson for the Stay Free Alberta petition/Alberta Prosperity Project (SFA), is extremely influential within Alberta’s separatist faction. It is not clear if he has ambitions of his own in the new Alberta he hopes to create, but it is easy to assume that he must. 

So when Rath was so blunt about what he thinks should happen next in a series of social media posts, we should pay attention. He speaks for many in the UCP. 

“Premier Smith had no mandate from her membership to sign the Carbon Tax MOU with Mark Carney,” Rath posted at one point. “Danielle Smith no longer enjoys the confidence of the members of the UCP.”

If that’s not a call for a coup, I don’t know what is. 

“Enough is enough,” he said in another post. “We are a super majority of the party. Time to take it back from the Kenneyites.” (The “Kenneyites,” remember, basically purged the “Red Tories” from the UCP after former premier Jason Kenney engineered the double reverse hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party in the summer of 2017. This is an irony, since those Red Tories, had they still been around in any numbers, could have saved Kenney’s bacon in the fall of 2022.)

Here’s another, delivered Trump-style, in all caps: “DANIELLE SMITH HAS LOST HER MANDATE TO LEAD THE UCP!”

Rath’s message to the cadres in the UCP’s riding constituency associations: “MAKE SURE TO ATTEND YOUR LOCAL CA BOARD AGM AND ELECT A SLATE OF PRO-INDEPENDENCE BOARD MEMBERS. CONTACT YOUR LOCAL APP OR STAY FREE REGIONAL LEADERS FOR GUIDANCE.”

“We need to work to replace every non independence board in the province,” he said in part in another post. 

All these messages were posted on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, a place a lot of moderate Albertans nowadays sensibly eschew, if only to keep their blood pressure down. Someone has to look in there, however, and I’m willing to take the risk so that the rest of you don’t have to.

If this was more than just an anticipatory outburst of exuberance in memory of the late grandmother of Europe’s titled classes it suggests Danielle Smith’s “United Conservative” coalition could actually be starting to fracture.

It’s worth noting that the separatists on social media are also infuriated by the possibility that when the pipe gets laid, it may not follow the route most of them prefer, that is, the one most likely to annoy the most British Columbians and First Nations along the way to Prince Rupert. (The British Columbia city of that name and the terminus of the Alberta separatists’ imagined Danzig Corridor to the sea, that is, not the first governor of the late Hudson’s Bay Co., just to be clear.)

Meanwhile, speaking of Independence Avenue, a metaphor lest you tried to look it up on Google Maps, Edmonton City Councillor Michael Janz announced he had applied on behalf of many of his constituents to rename the road in front of the Alberta Legislature “Forever Canadian Avenue.”

Janz – councillor for Ward papastew, located just across the North Saskatchewan River from the Legislature – said the renaming of two blocks of 99^th Ave. between 107^th St. and 109^th Street “will celebrate the largest non-partisan citizen movement in Alberta’s history.”

“The Forever Canadian petition collected signatures from Albertans who want Alberta to proudly remain a Canadian province,” Janz explained in a statement. “This effort was prompted as a response to Premier Danielle Smith encouraging conversations about Alberta separation. The petition gathered 456,000 signatures and motivated more than 10,000 Albertans to volunteer in support of this work.”

Janz, who is a tireless progressive activist not unprepared to be a gadfly if that’s what it takes to accomplish something, was accompanied to an outdoor news conference yesterday by Forever Canadian petition proponent Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier of Alberta. 

Janz will make application to the Edmonton Naming Committee, an independent body of volunteers appointed by the city. He pointed out that there is a precedent, when another city councillor successfully applied in 2018 to have a city road renamed Canadian Forces Trail. 

If Janz succeeds with this one, it will drive the UCP and the SFA nuts. 

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Watching Danielle Smith switch back and forth from striving to get her party’s large contingent of separatists to settle down to trying to keep severely normal Albertans who want no part of separation on side is enough to give you whiplash. 

It’s starting to feel like we’re watching a really fast game of tennis while sitting too close to the centre line of the court. 

And speaking of courts, Thursday the Alberta government sent its legal help off to the Edmonton courthouse to file an appeal of the May 13 decision by Court of King’s Bench Justice Shaina Leonard that tossed the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project/Stay Free Alberta referendum question on the grounds the province had failed in its duty to consult with First Nations about the impact of secession.

For all intents and purposes, Justice Leonard’s ruling siding with First Nations that challenged the referendum process put the SFA pro-separation question, which has been championed by Smith from the get-go, on ice not long after its organizers submitted petition sheets they claimed contained more than 300,000 signatures to Elections Alberta. 

So while Smith had just got finished infuriating her party’s aggressive separatist rump by admitting that turning Alberta into an independent country would cost “hundreds of billions of dollars” and promising to fully cost out that sum by August, she’s now going to throw a bone to the same faction by wasting more time and money appealing Justice Leonard’s decision. 

The Alberta appeal claims Justice Leonard made 14 errors in her ruling, The Canadian Press reported. I’m no lawyer, but this seems extremely unlikely. But, whatever, it might only require the appeal court to find one to send the whole thing off to the Supreme Court at enormous additional expense to the taxpayers of Alberta. 

The government, taking the side of the separatists again, argued Justice Leonard “misinterpreted provisions of a bill passed in December that allowed the separatist group behind the petition to reapply after its first application was hung up in court,” the CP reporter explained. 

Significantly, there was no official press release on this from the government, which presumably doesn’t want to put the impression it’s trying to create for the separatists in black and white on a sheet of paper where other voters might see it.

The government also argues that the whole thing should be considered moot anyway because next October’s referendum won’t be binding, even though it could lead directly to a binding separation vote. Or something. 

Readers are advised not to get too tied in knots by this. The smart money suggests that the UCP is happy to use taxpayers’ money to prolong this fight and generate some good PR for the party’s anti-Canadian base and, as an added benefit, stave off the danger and embarrassment of separatist constituency associations trying to remove Smith as party leader.

Given the mood of the seppies, as this crowd is coming to be known here in Wild Rose Country, this seems unlikely. But, as they say, any old port in a storm! 

Chief Allan Adam of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, one of the groups that challenged petition, asked CP’s reporter: “Hasn’t Danielle Smith been running around lately saying she’s Captain Canada? Now she wants to support the separatists again? It’s hard to tell whose best interests she has at heart. I’m not sure she knows herself.”

This is a good question. It sounds as if Chief Adam was being polite, though. Smith has her own best interests at heart and she’s painted herself into a corner with this foolish, dangerous and increasingly unpopular referendum. 

Alberta’s premier is known to be a skilled gas-lighter and has talked herself out of tight corners before, but the obvious contradictions and risks of her separation strategy may be contributing to her declining popularity. 

“Smith’s approval falls drops to an all-time low at 39 per cent after weeks of controversy over her government’s plan to hold an October referendum related to Alberta’s place in Canada,” the Angus Reid Institute said in its periodic popularity poll of nine of Canada’s 10 provincial premiers. (ARI always ignores P.E.I., which is darned poor form even if the place isn’t much more populous than Red Deer or Lethbridge.) 

To give Ms. Smith her due, at 39 per cent she’s still doing slightly better in the Reid survey than Nova Scotia Conservative Tim Houston (34 per cent), B.C. New Democrat David Eby (31 per cent), and Ontario Conservative Doug Ford (a pathetic 21 per cent). 

At the other end of the scale, remarkable numbers of Manitobans love Premier Wab Kinew, who by merit of being up a point at 61 per cent was the most popular premier in Canada with his own voters. He’s beloved by lots of Albertans too for his sharp remarks to Premier Smith last month about her separatist shenanigans.

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The United Conservative Party (UCP)’s effort to force a separation referendum onto a ballot this fall and blame it on the people who signed the pro-Canada Forever Canadian petition was unfolding according to plan in a Legislature committee meeting yesterday afternoon when Opposition House Leader Christina Gray raised a point of privilege.

Gray, who is not a member of the UCP-dominated Select Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee but could speak as the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Mill Woods, explained that she had just learned the UCP Caucus had published a news release saying the motion recommending a referendum question to cabinet had passed. 

It had not. Indeed, it had not even been voted on. 

This exposed the committee’s deliberations as a sham, committee chair Brandon Lunty as something less than the sharpest knife in the UCP drawer, and the UCP of being capable of messing up spectacularly even when it holds all the cards. 

The news release in question quoted Lunty spinning the circumstances hard as “following the law and respecting the expectations” of the nearly half a million Albertans who signed the Forever Canadian petition organized last year by former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk. According to Lunty’s version of the facts, they “signed Mr. Lukaszuk’s petition in good faith, understanding it would result in a referendum.” 

The reality, of course, is that most of them just wanted to tell Smith and her separatist allies to go to hell, and even Lunty had to understand that. 

Well, whatever. That was the moment the stuff hit the fan. Talk about a messy case of premature dissemination! The release was quickly pulled off the internet by the UCP, but screen shots were popping up within seconds. 

It was, Gray told the committee, an obvious breach of Parliamentary privilege. Lunty looked like a deer in the headlights as Ms. Gray dropped her bombshell. 

Just before that gobsmacking moment, Nate Glubish, Danielle Smith’s technology minister and the MLA for Strathcona-Sherwood Park, had moved that the committee use the Forever Canadian petition’s wording as the basis of the separation referendum the premier has been scheming for months to put before Albertans. 

Rest assured, this is not because the UCP loves Forever Canadian’s wording. It’s because courts have blocked the Stay Free Alberta petition’s wording as unconstitutional and stopped verification of that petition’s signatures by Elections Alberta because First Nations were not consulted about the implications of tearing Alberta out of Canada. 

Apparently the sneaky committee manoeuvre, opposed by the NDP and Lukaszuk, was the only way for a desperate separatist-dominated governing party to get the divisive separation question it wants on the ballot in October or risk completely alienating its powerful anti-Canadian faction. 

Implied but not stated in the debate between the three UCP members of the committee, who favoured the motion, and its two NDP members, who opposed it, was that wording can be altered later to something more favourable to breaking up the country. The opening of the UCP news release carried the same implication. 

The committee had given Lukaszuk five minutes – later extended to 10 – to make his case that his question shouldn’t be used to advance the government’s scheme. Glubish and Assisted Living Minister Jason Nixon argued aggressively and at length with Lukaszuk, obviously trying to make the preposterous case the referendum would be all his fault. 

Gray called for the matter to be referred to the Speaker of the House – Ric McIver, who is capable of independent thought and is expected to retire after the next election. Obviously the UCP didn’t want to take a chance on that. She also said Lunty – who by his own words and actions had revealed the whole thing was a set-up – should recuse himself.  

The committee recessed while the UCP members figured out what the hell to do. When the meeting resumed, the UCP members – Glubish, Nixon and Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA Tara Sawyer – quickly voted down a motion to send the matter to McIver. 

Lunty, naturally, remained in the chair. 

But when he tried to move the meeting back on track to approve getting Smith’s separation question onto the ballot, the clock ran out. A fiery Rakhi Pancholi, deputy NDP leader and committee member, and Calgary-Foothills MLA Court Ellingson said no to an extension, so for the moment the matter is unresolved. 

“Whatever the Premier chooses for the wording of a referendum, the UCP owns it,” Pancholi said in a statement after the meeting. “They can’t hide behind the separatists. They can’t hide behind Forever Canada. … She can say no to a referendum that she and the UCP so clearly want. Or she can go ahead with it, owning forever that she is Alberta’s first separatist premier.”

Lunty has called for the committee to meet again at 2 o’clock Thursday afternoon. Obviously, the motion will be rammed through then, just in time to save the 20 minutes of prime time TV the premier has booked for this evening to tell us all why a divisive separation referendum is a good thing for Alberta. No media questions will be permitted. 

Thursday morning, new members of Smith’s cabinet will be sworn in after announcements yesterday by two of the more level-headed ministers in her current cabinet – Finance Minister Nate Horner and Hospital and Surgical Services Minister Matt Jones – that they are quitting their portfolios and not running in the next election. 

Did they jump to escape the gong show Smith’s MAGA-adjacent rule has produced or were they pushed because they remain too loyal to Canada? Hard to say given the limited data available. 

Horner, a scion of the Horner political clan, indicated in his resignation letter that quitting was “the best fit for me and my family.” It’s hard to argue with that from his perspective. This morning, Nixon is expected to be handed the keys to the finance minister’s office, which he occupied briefly in 2022. 

Meanwhile, Smith’s manoeuvre is unlikely to do much to assuage the fury of Alberta separatists. The premier, said prominent separatist Jeffrey Rath on social media Tuesday night, “had better understand that if she puts a question forward on Independence that isn’t a constitutional question that complies with the Clarity Act that she will be betraying her base in favour of Carney as badly as when she screwed them over for Jim Prentice.”

“If she does this hundreds of thousands of Albertans will be forced to mobilize to remove her as the leader of the United Conservative Party,” he said. “We can easily do this prior to an election in 2028.”

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Nothing much has changed since the last time Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) trotted out its “patient-focused funding” scheme for hospitals. It’s still a bad policy that will force hospitals to game the system, increase bureaucracy, and hurt patients while delivering few benefits. 

Naturally, this is not what the UCP claimed Monday in an announcement that this bad idea will soon be rolled out in a dozen public hospitals in Alberta or in its April 7, 2025, announcement that the scheme was in the works. 

“Patient-focused funding is about making sure resources follow the patient and the care being delivered,” said the canned quote assigned in Monday’s press release to Hospital and Surgical Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, now one of Alberta’s quadrumvirate of health ministers. 

“Exploring innovative ways to allocate funding within our health care system will ensure that Albertans receive the care they need, when they need it most,” she enthused in last year’s version when she was still Alberta’s one and only health minister. 

Neither of these statements is likely to turn out to be true.

As for Premier Danielle Smith, her canned quote Monday was more interesting, pointing clearly to the neoliberal ideology she has espoused throughout her years in right-wing media and right-wing government. 

“The current global budgeting model has no incentives to increase volume, no accountability and no cost predictability for taxpayers,” she said. “By switching to an activity-based funding model, our health care system will have built-in incentives to increase volume with high quality, cost predictability for taxpayers and accountability for all providers.”

It is certainly true that with activity-based funding, as this U.S.-style funding model is more accurately known, Alberta’s health care system will have incentives to increase volume. Not necessarily the services that are needed, though. The rest, as we shall see, is pish-posh.

“Patient-focused funding,” it should be noted, is a tendentious euphemism intended to leave the impression it will make things better for patients, which it will not.

Now seeing as the government has repeated its announcement, I am going to repeat significant parts of my response to its 2025 version.

I asked then: “What will really happen when the United Conservative Party Government puts Ms. Smith’s new acute-care funding model into effect at Alberta hospitals?”

And Jonathon Ross, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Toledo in Ohio, answered in a 2013 article. 

“I would advise extreme caution and careful assessment of the implications for cost, quality, access, equity and efficiency before adopting this hospital funding model,” wrote Dr. Ross in a piece for the Canadian Healthcare Network.

Activity-based funding, he asserted, “has serious side effects.”

“One of the dangers is that ABF can be used to ‘game the system,’” Dr. Ross said. “When you pay hospitals according to diagnosis, the incentive is to increase or otherwise modify your diagnosis so your hospital will make more money. And that’s exactly what happened when the United States implemented ABF for U.S. Medicare patients.”

“Here in the States, we have a small army of nurses reviewing every case in hospital to remind us to use special words just the right way so we can get more money for each case,” he observed. “The incentive is to list all of the diagnoses you can possibly list for every patient, as some of these will increase the payment even if it does not change your management one bit.”

In addition, he warned, there will also be additional pressure to discharge patients too soon, as if there wasn’t already. “If the hospitals game the codes upward, then you need another army of regulators to catch them and code them back down,” he explained. “There is now a large hospital bureaucracy whose job it is to up-code the severity of illness of Medicare patients and another large Medicare bureaucracy trying to figure out how to stop the hospitals from gaming the system.”

Nothing had changed by last year since Dr. Ross wrote that article. In a January 2025 Substack, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman showed that this is one of the reasons the U.S. health care system costs Americans so much.

“Medicare is supposed to provide older Americans with the health care they need,” he said. “Yet instead of focusing solely on how best to achieve that goal, we have an arms race between insurance companies trying to game to system to charge more and deliver less and government officials trying to rein them in.” (Well, I guess we won’t have government regulators trying to rein them in in Alberta or, Heaven forbid, the Republic of same!)

In both news releases, last year and now, the government also perpetrated its ongoing fraud about how the U.S.-inspired “reforms” it’s importing are somehow European in origin. 

As Canadian health researcher and political economist Andrew Longhurst wrote this year in January, “the Alberta government decontextualizes international health systems.” While he was speaking of the government’s blatantly false claim that heavily regulated dual-physician practice as permitted in Germany and the Netherlands is the same as what is being proposed by the government in “red tape” averse Alberta, the same intentionally misleading claims can be found in the Smith Government’s media statements about activity-based funding. 

“Instead of bolstering our public health care system, and our publicly administered, publicly delivered surgical services, the Alberta government is undermining our hospitals by requiring them to compete for funding,” Alberta Friends of Medicare Director Chris Gallaway said yesterday. 

“Alberta has operating rooms sitting empty and unused every single day because this government would rather pursue convoluted schemes to subsidize private profits, even while their failed privatization strategy has already reduced public capacity,” he said. 

“Activity-based funding pushes hospitals towards quicker, less complex procedures at the expense of comprehensive care, proper follow-up and better health outcomes,” said Opposition Hospital and Surgical Facilities Critic Sarah Hoffman, a former Alberta health minister. 

Yesterday’s announcement said all hospitals where the program will be piloted are operated by Alberta Health Services and Covenant Health. Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital and Calgary’s Rockyview Hospital are on the list.

But the government’s goal, as Premier Smith has made clear, is to introduce private hospitals to the mix, furthering her drive to privatized, U.S.-style health care. When that happens, private hospitals will try to scoop up the easy cases and dump the complicated ones on the public system, then claim to be more efficient. 

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In Danielle Smith’s Alberta, if the facts don’t support your argument, you can make up new facts. 

Alberta’s premier demonstrated this capacity yesterday evening in her delusional 15-minute televised address to the province wherein she set out to explain the differences between the Canadian and United States constitutions in order to justify holding a referendum on Alberta separation. 

Claiming Canada was founded on the principle of strong provinces, Smith continued: “Canada is very different from the United States and many other Western democracies. For example, the U.S. centralizes the majority of power and decision-making in its federal government. In Canada, we chose a decentralized federation composed of very unique and diverse provinces left to govern themselves in almost all matters with the main exceptions of national defence and international affairs.”

This is the polar opposite of the facts. She either missed the lecture on the constitution during her years at the University of Calgary or someone was guilty of educational malpractice! 

The Fathers of Confederation created a federation in which the federal government had a clear preponderance of power. Even a quick read of the Constitution Act 1867* makes this obvious.

By contrast, the Founding Fathers of the United States did the opposite, creating a federation that vested more power in the governments of its states. The founders of Canada in took a different road in 1867 because they’d just had a ringside seat to the Civil War that wracked the neighbours from 1861 to 1865.

Smith continued, still mistakenly, “Over time, our federal government has sought to move towards a more centralized American-style system with Ottawa attempting to take over many provincial areas of jurisdiction using all manner of legislative, judicial and financial leverage.”

In fact, over time, while the United States has moved toward a more powerful central government, Canada has moved toward a less centralized model.

It’s important to note this nonsense because so many of the other consequential problems with Smith’s effort to push Alberta into a dangerous, divisive and economically harmful separation referendum campaign stem from her delusional view of the constitution. 

The fact she is ignorant of both the U.S. and Canadian constitutions would be amusing were she not a premier promoting a campaign for constitutional change in Canada with the provincial treasury for a slush fund and the assistance – solicited or otherwise – of foreign actors in possession of the stolen personal data of three million of us who do not have our interests at heart. 

This is extremely dangerous, and shockingly no one in her own party has tried to rein her in. Well, perhaps that’s what got Matt Jones and Nate Horner, two of her more sensible cabinet ministers, sent packing this week, leading to yesterday morning’s otherwise insignificant cabinet shuffle.

It was mildly amusing three years ago when Smith thought she had the powers of an American president to pardon convicted criminals. It is more troubling now as she uses the not inconsiderable powers of the province to assist a group of bad actors, foreign and domestic, in a campaign to break up our country. 

“The misinformation is so profound that there is no redemption for such ignorance,” retired Mount Royal University political science professor Keith Brownsey commented in a conversation about the address last night. 

Consider the wording the referendum question itself that she proposes to use, the courts having blocked the clear yes-or-no question that was cooked up by her allies in the so-called Alberta Prosperity Project for its Stay Free Alberta separation campaign. Voters, Smith said, will now be asked: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

This is wordy, ambiguous, and possibly intentionally confusing. How will the answer be composed? We were not told. It cannot be a simple yes or no. 

Why do this? According to Smith it’s “because this proposed referendum question does not directly trigger separation, but if successful would ask Alberta’s government to commence the legal process necessary to hold a binding referendum on the matter, the recent court ruling would not be applicable, and the referendum question I outlined, could proceed.” 

In other words, her daily protests to the contrary notwithstanding, including in last night’s address, she is a separatist!

Alas for Smith, this is unlikely to mollify the separatists who now dominate her party and have threatened to eject her as leader if she doesn’t use their question, which faces hurdles put in place by a series of court judgments. 

“Smith doesn’t understand that there is no such thing as a binding ‘referendum’ in a Westminster parliamentary system,” Dr. Brownsey observed. “You can’t tell Parliament or the Legislature in our case what to do.”

“I recommend that she read section 91 of the Constitution Act 1867,” he added. “As well, someone should remind Smith that Justin Trudeau is no longer prime minister!”

Well, yes, an awful lot of what Smith had to say last night was a tired recitation of the sort of talking points associated with the convoy protests that mutated into Maple MAGA that infested the United Conservative Party under Jason Kenney and eventually morphed into the Alberta separation campaign. 

There was a predictable attack on the decisions of various Alberta judges that have stymied the march of the Stay Free Alberta question to a ballot, which the premier boldly asserted were erroneous, fundamental misinterpretations of the law, and so on. 

Well, that could be. That’s why we have appeal courts. But I’d bet that a superior court judge in Alberta is more likely to interpret the law correctly than a premier who sounds as if she’s never read Canada’s constitution. 

There was an unhealthy dose of irrelevant Trudeau bashing. Smith also recycled old talking points attacking the “Trudeau-Singh government in Ottawa” and “the leave-it-in-the-ground NDP.” I guess we can expect to hear that again in the next provincial election campaign.

There was a lot of whining about the rights of “law-abiding gun owners” to own unrestricted weaponry, which makes sense when you remember the proponent of the Stay Free Alberta petition owns a gun store.

Earlier yesterday afternoon, the premier’s loyal minions on the UCP-dominated Select Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee finally managed to push through the motion that was derailed the day before to use the question from the Forever Canadian petition promoted by former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk. 

Soon thereafter the premier then said she doesn’t plan to, exactly. Still, if the separation referendum turns out to be as unpopular as I suspect it’ll be, I guess that will let the UCP try to pin the blame on Lukaszuk. 

It was mildly amusing to watch UCP and NDP members of the special committee fighting against positions that not long ago they held, but probably not all that relevant by the time Smith had read her speech. 

*Formerly known as the British North America Act.

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A public opinion survey published last Friday by the Ipsos polling firm suggests that support for separation from Canada is both limited and decreasing in Alberta, a trend that I’m betting will grow more evident as Albertans start paying attention to what Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Government have perpetrated by starting the ball rolling to a referendum on October 19.

The poll “shows there is a low and declining appetite for separation in Alberta,” the large polling firm said last Friday when it released the results. “The poll also shows that Albertans who want to stay in Canada are more certain of their choice than those who are considering a vote for separation.”

The Ipsos poll indicated “only 18 per cent of residents say they would vote for Alberta to separate from Canada if a future binding referendum is held on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada” – plus, “most (72 per cent) Albertans say they would vote for Alberta to stay in Canada.” Nine per cent indicated they were undecided, wouldn’t vote, or whatever. 

The Ipsos poll also indicated support for moving on to a binding referendum was lowest in Calgary, although not much higher in Edmonton. 

The same day, another national polling firm, Léger, reached similar conclusions based on slightly different questions. While it wasn’t the number every news story emphasized, according to Léger, “73 per cent of Albertans say Alberta should remain part of Canada, while 15 per cent say it should become an independent country.”

Both surveys were in the field in approximately the same time period – May 28 to June 1 for Ipsos and May 29 to June 1 for Léger. So, a couple of days before Premier Smith admitted that the cost of separating from Canada for whoever was left in Alberta would be at least $400 billion, not the ludicrously low $37 billion her former allies in the separatist movement have been promising. The former poll surveyed 1,500 Canadians, of whom 600 were in Alberta; the latter, 1,014 Albertans.

Time will tell whether this trend continues. Thanks to polling analyst Éric Grenier, it will be easier to see what the trendline is thanks to an Alberta referendum poll tracker he launched the same day on his Substack. 

Be careful, though, since he and other commentators may emphasize different numbers from each poll, leaving lots of opportunities for commentators to see what they wish in the murk of completing claims and the ongoing foreign-financed disinformation and misinformation campaign on social media. Nobody ever believes a poll with numbers they don’t like. 

No doubt as a result of surveys like these, some severely normal Albertans who have been worried about the UCP’s reckless insistence on a separation referendum may feel they can relax and stop worrying about a movement dominated by MAGA-influenced Christian nationalists and sour-grapes Conservatives who would break up our country because they’re apparently incapable of winning a federal election. 

On the common-sense principle that one should hope for the best and plan for the worst, this could turn out to be a mistake. 

Remember, there are many reasons to continue to worry despite the evidence that separation from Canada is the last thing a majority of Albertans want. Among them:

• The purloined Elections Alberta voters list now in the hands of hundreds, possibly thousands of U.S.-based, MAGA-affiliated and foreign-financed bad actors, who will not hesitate to use the data to influence the results of the referendum, not to mention to defraud Albertans of their savings for years to come.
• Elections Alberta’s hard-to-satisfy need to hire 60,000 elections workers to count the ballots on the UCP’s confusing and manipulative raft of 10 referendum questions, nine intended to blame immigrants for problems created by neoliberal economics and justify UCP intrusion into federal jurisdiction, plus the separation question. In addition to being extremely expensive – no one seems to know yet just how expensive – this creates another opportunity for the separatist fringe to try to interfere with voting. 
• Continued uncertainty about what motivates Premier Smith and the UCP in this campaign. As Ipsos put it in its commentary, “Both stay and separation voters think Danielle Smith wants the opposite of themselves.” Given the premier’s conduct, there is good reason for this confusion and distrust. 
• The likelihood there are separatist fifth columnists in high places in the federal Conservative party who may be inclined to get up to mischief. Certainly there are federal Conservative MPs who will be very careful not to reveal how they lean on this topic, notwithstanding CPC Leader Pierre Poilievre’s promise that they’ll all support “a strong Alberta within a united Canada,” a watered-down version of Ms. Smith’s oxymoronic “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.”
• The danger of “Alberta fatigue” in the rest of Canada. And who can blame them if they’re getting sick of this nonsense. A lot of us are too. 

Corb Lund delivers 200,000 signatures for ‘Water Not Coal’ petition 

Better make that 11 referendums. Leastways, reluctant environmental activist and popular country music performer Corb Lund yesterday delivered to Elections Alberta an estimated 200,000 signatures for his “Water Not Coal” referendum petition. “Albertans showed up for their water, their land, and their future,” Lund said in a news release. “Reaching this threshold proves what we’ve known all along — people care deeply about protecting our headwaters, our Rocky Mountains, and our way of life.”

The petition calls for legislation prohibiting new coal mining and exploration on the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It specifically mentions Northback Holdings’ proposed Grassy Mountain Mine and Valory Resources’ proposed Blackstone Mine. However, the news release added, “coal mining threatens the entire Eastern Slopes region and the critical headwaters that feed the Athabasca, Oldman, South Saskatchewan, North Saskatchewan Peace and Red Deer river systems – lifelines for communities, agriculture, and ecosystems across southern Alberta.”

Adriana LaGrange pulls plug on paramedic rebranding scheme

Alberta Hospitals Minister Adriana LaGrange Tuesday surprised everyone by pulling the plug on the effort by the government’s new Emergency Health Services Alberta agency to rebrand itself as ALTA Paramedic Health. 

In a social media post, the former minister of health who is now a quarter of the UCP’s quadrumvirate of health ministers, said “I’ve heard questions from Albertans and front-line workers about the recent Emergency Health Services rebranding, and I share their concerns.” (She certainly has been hearing concerns. Paramedics were infuriated by the scheme, particularly by a rumour they’d have to wear mint green uniforms.)

“On Monday, I directed EHS-Alberta to immediately halt the rebranding and return to the previous name and logo until further engagement can take place with Albertans and contracted providers,” she said. “This needs to be done at the right time and with the right input.” (Possible translation: We’ll wait till after the next election when we cook up a scheme to privatize ambulance services.)

LaGrange insisted in her post that “no operational funding was spent by EHS-Alberta on this project.” 

The rebranding was announced on May 15 by Acute Care Alberta, one of the welter of health care agencies created by the UCP in the breakup of Alberta Health Services. “The transformation of EHS-Alberta into ALTA Paramedic Health signals a renewed commitment to modernization, stronger accountability to Albertans, and delivering high-quality, timely emergency care,” LaGrange’s predecessor Matt Jones, who has since resigned from cabinet, said at the time.

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Thanks to her sneaky separatist manoeuvring, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith seems to have wedged herself between the proverbial rock and metaphorical hard place. 

If she doesn’t do what the Alberta separatists in her United Conservative Party (UCP) demand and call a referendum using the wording on their Citizen Initiative petition – “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?” – they may very well depose her in an internal party coup. 

If she does that, though, she will run up against the courts – which have ruled that question to be unconstitutional and quashed approval of the petition because First Nations were not consulted.  She may also soon face an energized pro-Canadian electorate that is finally starting to pay enough attention to send her packing if it gets the chance.

If she tries to find a “compromise” between those irreconcilable positions, one side, the other, or both could turn on her. 

Nevertheless, it looks as if starting today Premier Smith will try to wiggle out of the trap she has built and wedged herself into by pretending to be a loyal Canadian while doing everything she can to facilitate the schemes of the separatist crowd. 

The Legislature’s Select Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee has asked Thomas Lukaszuk, proponent of the Forever Canadian petition campaign, to come to its meeting this afternoon at 3 o’clock.

“It is possible the Committee will consider a motion during the May 20 meeting to invite you to present to the Committee,” said Chair Brandon Lunty, the UCP MLA for Leduc-Beaumont, in a letter to Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier of Alberta.

The letter continues: “In the event that the Committee chooses, during the meeting, to invite you to present, I would ask that, should you be available to attend, you please be prepared to make a presentation on the citizen initiative proposal of up to five minutes, after which committee members will have the opportunity to ask questions regarding the proposal and your presentation.”

Needless to say, this is both gormless and rude. Lukaszuk obviously picked up on the letter’s tone when he posted it to social media, commenting, “Looks like the UCP led committee dealing with the #ForeverCanadian petition has found whole FIVE MINUTES to discuss the future of Alberta and Canada.”

Nevertheless, he will be there. He told me last night: “I think Canada is worth five minutes. I will definitely go and make sure that this is the longest five minutes that those UCP MLAs have ever experienced!”

The obvious conclusion from this is that Lunty’s boss and her advisors have already decided to put separation on the ballot in October, and they’ll make it official this week, but they’d like to find a way to blame Lukaszuk for what is bound to be an unpopular decision. 

Up to now, the committee has been slow-walking the Forever Canadian petition – which was intended to require the members of Legislative Assembly to vote yes or no on the question, “Do you agree that Alberta should remain within Canada?” – observed Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt said on social media last night.

“It does not matter what @LukaszukAB or Forever Canada may have wanted,” Bratt said, responding to a post that suggested the UCP was trying to make Lukaszuk the scapegoat for the referendum they desperately want. “It is the determination of the MLA Committee that matters. And I am almost 100% that they will recommend a referendum and along party lines.”

Whether the UCP has decided to use Lukaszuk’s wording for their separatist referendum, as some have speculated, remains to be seen. But if they do, Lukaszuk observed, the premier will have to be the proponent, because he won’t. 

And if they use his question, he added, “that will cause them more problems than they can imagine.” 

“My question was designed to be asked in a legislature and to block their question,” he said. “My question does not meet the Clarity Act requirements and it cannot possibly start a constitutional process for separation.”

Which leaves us where, exactly? 

In the short term, if the UCP tries to use the Forever Canadian question, the hard-core separatists in the party bureaucracy will be furious – at the premier. If the government tries to move ahead with the Stay Free Alberta question, the vote will quickly bump up against the courts. What’s more, we can expect a large cohort of Alberta voters who have not really been paying attention up to now to be infuriated by this UCP threat against their country and the rights it guarantees them.

Still, one way or another, Smith might succeed in wiggling off the hook. History shows you can never count her out. 

Years ago, one of Smith’s smartest and closest political allies, who must remain nameless to protect the periodically helpful, told me that the former Wildrose Party leader often operated her mouth without engaging her brain. 

But whenever this got her in trouble, as it frequently did, she reckoned she could always talk her way out of the hot water she’d gotten herself into. “And she usually could,” they ruefully remembered. 

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According to the website of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, Calgary-Shaw MLA Rebecca Schulz gave up her seat on May 15.

That’s not a surprise, but it’s odd. 

It’s no surprise because when the former minister in cabinets formed by United Conservative Party (UCP) premiers Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith announced her resignation as Alberta’s environment minister last New Year’s Eve, she said she’d be leaving her seat in the Legislature in May. Her cabinet resignation took effect on January 2. 

“Timing is everything in life and in politics, and it is time for me to seek new opportunities in my career,” she wrote in her anodyne cabinet resignation letter, without providing any hints of why she chose that particular moment or what opportunities awaited her. Premier Smith praised her contribution to the government, as is customary in such situations. 

What’s more, on May 12, Schulz offered a swan song of sorts in an interview with CTV News, praising the premier, sending up hosannas to former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, and dutifully carping about former Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau and his environment minister Steven Guilbeault. 

What’s peculiar, though, is that her resignation from the Legislature seems to have gone all but unremarked by official Alberta without so much as a fare-thee-well. Indeed, the confirmation of her departure on the Assembly web page is implicit, not explicit – that is to say, it merely notes May 15 as her end-of-service date and her seven years, zero months, and 30 days as an MLA.

One would have thought that tradition and protocol would have required at least gentle pat on the back and the promise not to let the door smack her on the way out, if not a nice press release thanking her for her service. 

After all, she served in cabinet in three important ministries – environment, municipal affairs, and children’s services – and ran for the leadership of the UCP in 2022, casting herself as a kinder, gentler sort of Conservative leader, promising to deliver “compassion and common sense in addition to conservative values.”

It doesn’t seem likely given Shulz’s effulgent praise for the premier in her May 12 interview that there is any sort of significant disagreement between the two. So presumably this has something to do with the by-election required by law to replace her. 

But the UCP’s relative radio silence for more than two weeks on a topic bound to stir a lot of political interest is unusual, to say the least. Perhaps Ms. Smith has some ducks to get in a row. 

Somebody knows something, of course. On Wednesday, political commentator Dave Cournoyer reported that the UCP had posted a notice online stating today would be the deadline for nomination candidates, then pulled it down.

Also Wednesday, separatist supremo Mitch Sylvestre posted a video statement on social media Wednesday saying a by-election would take place in Calgary-Shaw on June 21 and urging his supporters in the riding to sign party memberships by today and to vote for his favourite separatist candidate. At least two other candidates have come out of the woodwork seeking the UCP nomination in the reliably conservative riding in Calgary’s deep south.

There is no official confirmation of the June 21 date. 

All this assumes that Smith won’t want to find a way to conn the ship of state to avoid having to call a by-election within six months as required by law, which wouldn’t be entirely out of character for our premier. 

Smith signs cabinet order ensuring separation referendum

Premier Smith, meanwhile, signed a cabinet order yesterday formalizing the wording of her controversially murky Oct. 19 separation referendum question.

Never mind the boldface statement that lingered yesterday on the Internet home page of the UCP government’s Alberta Referendum 2026 website that “A referendum is a direct vote where citizens are asked to vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on specific issues.”

This specific referendum question will be multiple choice.

Says the question: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

Voters will have two choices: “Alberta should remain a province of Canada,” and “The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.”

Note that the questions don’t say what form this separate Alberta might take if you’re thinking a cozy little republic is a deadbolt cinch instead of, say, an unincorporated U.S. territory like Puerto Rico.

The Order in Council also mentions that “the result of the referendum is not to be binding.” So if the UCP – which may or may not be a separatist party depending on whom you’re listening to at any given moment – doesn’t like the result, it can always ignore it. 

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There’s no need to make the explanation of the carbon pricing, carbon capture and bitumen pipeline deal announced Friday in Calgary by the federal and Alberta governments too complicated. It’s actually pretty simple. 

After all, notwithstanding their political differences, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith have more objectives in common right now than they don’t, so it couldn’t have been that hard for them to reach an agreement. 

Carney has served many years as an expert in and senior representative of international finance capital, of which the oil industry remains a key component in Canada. While neither an expert nor a deep thinker, Smith has been a lobbyist for the oil industry and an effective public proponent of its preferred policies throughout her career as a journalist and politician. 

Of course they weren’t going to have all that much trouble finding ways to grant the Canadian oilpatch its wish for a pipeline to the West Coast, preferably completely paid for by taxpayers, plus slow-walked carbon taxes and big subsidies for the carbon-capture boondoggle to build social license for the pipeline. 

They may have their differences, but they are flying in formation when it comes to the oil industry. 

They have immediate parallel political needs as well. Smith must thread the needle between appearing to be an Alberta separatist and appearing to be a patriotic Canadian unifier to hold her fraying but still united voting coalition together – and, not incidentally, to hang onto her job as premier since separatists now clearly dominate her party. 

Friday’s deal lets her do that – for the moment, anyway. And the moment is all Smith ever thinks about. To give her her due, it seems to work. 

Carney needs to keep his coalition together as well. Instead of MAGA separatists on the right who would really rather be part of the United States so they could own machineguns and call people hateful names, he needs to appease moderate green voters in British Columbia and Quebec and somehow hold the country together. 

Since the contradictions of using bitumen as the glue to keep their political coalitions together will become more obvious over time, they’re in a hurry to get the deal done and some pipe laid so the doubters on both sides of the political spectrum can be told there is no alternative. For this reason, we should take seriously their promise that work on the pipeline, whatever route it takes, will start next year.

The simplicity of this political equation seems to have confused the Canadian political and business commentariat, grown used to sustained attacks on Ottawa by conservative Alberta governments. Commentators’ theories and explanations, as a result, were all over the map Friday and yesterday  – sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results.

According to Carson Jerema in The National Post, it’s all a dirty trick by Carney to “ensnare Danielle Smith in pipeline blackmail.” Ottawa’s gift of “free rein to polluters” (as Environmental Defence put it in a news release) “will give anti-energy B.C. Premier David Eby an effective veto,” according to the Post. 

Meanwhile, over at the environmentally inclined National Observer, Max Fawcett agreed … sort of. Carney isn’t taking a wrecking ball to Canada’s climate policies, he’s saving the country by defusing Smith’s constant carping about Canada, Fawcett asserted. “He understands the value of appearing to say yes to certain forms of economic development while creating or accelerating the conditions that will make it a non-starter.”

Postmedia’s Rick Bell – who often acts as a sort of de facto minister of propaganda for Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) – was enthusiastic, with mild reservations. “Carney is the prime minister and Smith says there was no choice but to meet him in the middle,” he wrote, leaving his usual breathless hyperbole to his colleague Don Braid. “She figures this deal did just that and it is a win for Alberta and a far cry from those days of ‘anger, frustration and despair’ under Trudeau.”

Well, the last time Smith said something like that, about the memorandum of understanding with Ottawa that set the stage for Friday’s deal, she was jeered at her own party convention. 

And then there was Braid – Postmedia’s other high-profile Alberta political columnist – who went right over the top with a panegyric to Smith that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the pages of Pravda or the People’s Daily in the 1950s. 

“She has won every single battle with Ottawa over the past year,” said Braid, sending his hosannas heavenward. “In scope and importance, her victories against Ottawa outweigh former PC premier Peter Lougheed’s limited victory in the oil pricing crisis after 1980. … Smith may have set up this province for decades of economic gains.”

Well, if Carney is sneakily giving by a veto, British Columbia’s premier doesn’t seem to happy about it. And if Smith is saving Confederation, you have to wonder why she’s pushing ahead with her separatist referendum agenda. It seems to me that coastal British Columbians are as unhappy with this state of affairs as are Alberta separatists. And if anyone’s thinking about the constitutional requirement for consultation with First Nations, no one seems to be talking about it. 

You have to wonder if, despite Smith’s best efforts to keep the UCP united, something’s going to give as the separatists that now control the party push for it to officially declare itself to be a separatist party. Can political entropy in Alberta be far behind? 

And how comfortable will some members of Carney’s narrow majority in Parliament be in a government that appears to have completely tossed the environmental policies of the Trudeau era, unlamented though they may be here in Alberta. Steven Guilbeault, the former federal environment minister? B.C. MPs Will Greaves and Stephanie McLean? 

Is it possible that the biggest winner in this deal of the century could turn out to be … Avi Lewis?

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In addition to blaming everyone but herself for the national unity crisis she’s been trying for months to foment, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith used a news conference in Calgary Thursday to insist repeatedly that no one’s more loyal to Canada than she is and for sure she’ll be doing everything she can to get everyone to vote to remain in Canada when the referendum almost nobody else wants to happen is held next October.

That is to say, not an actual referendum on separation – which would be OK with the United Conservative Party’s separatist base, if no one else – but the confusing vote on whether or not to have a referendum on separation that Smith wants to hold to keep the issue alive in the face of court rulings that have blocked the Alberta Prosperity Project-approved wording she really wanted to see on the ballot. 

“I’m fiercely loyal to both Alberta and Canada,” the premier asserted in the first seconds of the newser, the motivation for which appeared simply to be to crossly roll out all the same talking points she made yesterday in her 15-minute prime-time televised message to us Albertans. 

Over the next 34 minutes according to my count, Smith repeated at least 13 times that she supported Alberta remaining in Canada and would be campaigning hard to ensure that happens. 

• “My position is to stay”
• “I believe Albertans should remain in Canada”
• “I would ask that all Albertans join me in voting to remain a province of Canada”
• “I will do everything I can to convince Albertans that the choice should be to remain”
• “Once again, I’ll be doing everything I can to convince my fellow Albertans that the choice should be to remain”
• “I’ll be doing town halls and meetings and telling people about why it is I think we should vote to remain”
• “If you want to remain in Canada, as I do, vote to remain”
• “I hope it goes the other way as well, that the remain side wins”
• “I’ll be very clear about the position of my caucus and my government and why does it think we should vote to remain”
• “I’ll be trying to do everything I can to convince our fellow citizens to vote to remain”
• “I’ll be campaigning hard to try to convince my fellow Albertans of my position, which is to remain”
• “I’ve said what side I’m on, that I want to convince my fellow Albertans to stay”
• “I will be focusing my efforts on remain”

Of course, I may have missed a few. A lot of words were spoken during that half hour, and my note-taking’s not what it used to be. 

In addition, at least two more times Smith insisted that she’s always been working to save Canada. “Everything I have done from the moment I got elected, with the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act, has been to work to find the issues that were causing division and resolve them,” she said at one point. “I have been actively campaigning to save our country and to resolve these issues from the moment I got elected,” she said at another. 

All of which begs the question, if this is true, why the hell is she doing everything she can to make it easy for a bunch of separatists with ties to a foreign country to break up the country? 

Look, not to be mean, but if she really sincerely believes what she’s saying, even if she only believes it when she’s saying it, then that’s a prima facie case right there for a 30-day psychiatric remand!

Or maybe she’s just gaslighting us and being obvious about it because she’s starting to realize that almost everybody in Alberta is infuriated by her antics right now. I’ll let you be the judge. 

True to form, as widely reported, Smith blamed everybody but herself for the present state of affairs. Justin Trudeau got special mention, of course, and his father probably deserved some too, although to be fair she didn’t think to mention old Pierre. 

Jagmeet Singh also populates the list of the usual Suspects, as seen by Danielle Smith. She whinged about uppity judges, of course, and the poor abused law-abiding gun owners of Wild Rose Country. 

The premier also singled out: 

• “The 14 cowards who signed a letter to the prime minister trying to derail our MoU,” a reference to the group of Liberal MPs who wrote Mark Carney before the memorandum of understanding was signed to complain about environmental rollbacks;
• “People like Avi Lewis, who continues to campaign to keep all of our fossil fuels in the ground;”
• And “leadership in British Columbia who continues to try to put barriers in the way of getting our product to market” …

… “That is the reason we having this crisis right now,” she averred. “… That’s what’s created the situation we find ourselves in today!”

Smith stuck to her talking point that 700,000 Albertans who signed petitions want to hold a vote on separation, notwithstanding the fact that most of the more than 400,000 verified signatories to the pro-Canada Forever Canadian petition wanted no such thing and as far as we know none of the 300,000 signatures on the separatist petition have been verified. She said nothing about the personal information of three million Albertans now in the hands of a Trump affiliated campaign company south of the world’s longest undefended border or what role the huge data breach may have played in getting signatures on the Stay Free Alberta petition.

If you were looking for actual news from this news conference, there wasn’t much, and it wasn’t particularly good.

Will the premier step down, one reporter asked, if the vote doesn’t go her way? Forget about it. “As I’ve said, I will accept the outcome of these referendum questions,” she said. If the separatists win, “then we will commence the legal processes to get to the point of a binding referendum on it.”

Asked another: Why not just call an election and settle the matter that way? “Well, because I had until October 2027 in my mandate.” She went on to suggest that the questions she wants answers to are so important that the government needs to get direction on them – which an election would provide, but never mind that. At least not until the UCP’s province-wide gerrymander is complete. 

And how big a vote would be enough to proceed to a full separation referendum? “Fifty per cent plus one. That’s what a majority looks like. Yes.”

Judged on her actions, not her words, Smith is a separatist. Ergo, this problem isn’t going away any time soon. Leastways, not until she summons up the courage to kick the separatists out of her party like almost all Conservative Alberta premiers have done from time to time. 

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