Federal parties contend with the Danielle Smith effect

In 2019, Danielle Smith was a Calgary broadcaster with a talent for reflecting Albertans’ anger back at her audience. At the time, four years into Justin Trudeau’s first term, collapsed oil prices were crippling the provincial economy, pipelines had been cancelled and Albertans were angry about Liberal legislation affecting the energy sector. “Election day is shaping up to be the most disunifying event in Canada in recent history, but it doesn’t have to be,” Smith wrote in her regular Calgary Herald column, just days before the 2019 federal election. “It could also be the moment where Alberta finally decides to stop acting like a national doormat and take charge of its future.” More than five years later, Smith is now premier, and Albertans — and other Canadians — are musing openly about just what election 2025 could do to national unity. “I want Canada to work … I also want Canada to work for Alberta, and it hasn’t for the last 10 years because of terrible policies by the Liberals,” Smith said recently. The man Smith replaced, Jason Kenney, says that in 2019, when he was premier, the reasons for the anger were easy to find — Bill C-69, C-49, the cancellations of the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipeline. Now, Kenney says, it’s more basic: Albertans are simply baffled that the Liberals under Mark Carney could possibly be re-elected. “There’s a general sense in Alberta that the Liberal party is hostile to our core industries, and a frustration that despite the manifest incompetence of the government on virtually every issue over the past decade — which would be a view held by like three-quarters of Albertans — that it’s a government that might get re-elected,” Kenney said. As premier, Smith is rattling Confederation with talk of alienation, national unity crises and provincial rights. This, coupled with her diplomatic efforts south of the border and engaging with Trump-friendly audiences, have made her a lightning rod for a certain sort of Canadian — especially at a time when patriotic sentiment is soaring, and very much a ballot issue. Those Canadians — generally those from outside Alberta and Saskatchewan, although she has her local critics, too — see her diplomacy and her national-unity musings as a kind of treason, even if Smith would argue she’s trying to improve Canada, not destroy it. “I really hope that we can get Canada on Team Alberta because Team Alberta has always been on Team Canada,” she said recently. There are three key things that are driving her critics mad, and rippling through the federal campaign. The first: her visit to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump in January, her appearance alongside U.S. podcaster Ben Shapiro in Florida in late March, and comments made to a Breitbart podcast saying Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was more “in sync” with the Trump administration than his opponent. The second: her decision to remain offside with the other Canadian premiers’ united response to U.S. tariff threats. And, third, her insertion of nine demands onto the national electoral agenda, lest there be an “unprecedented national unity crisis.” “The idea of a national unity crisis is probably more real than a lot of people in Ottawa would like to think, and at the same time, not as real as the biggest pushers of Alberta separation would like to think,” says Brad Tennant, a long-time conservative activist in Alberta, who’s also with Wellington Advocacy. It’s enough to have caught the attention of The New York Times, which this week described Smith as being on the vanguard of the Canadian right. And, in contrast to the bullish response from the federal Liberals to U.S. intransigence, Smith is taking a different tack. “I’m happy to be good cop,” she told the Times. Smith, as she did in her days as an incendiary columnist and radio host, is channelling and perhaps fuelling Albertans’ anger, and directing it outwards. It’s an altogether different environment than it was in 2019, when a bunch of big-rig truckers set off for Canada’s capital in the first iteration of the convoy to Ottawa. — Each year in Ottawa, the biggest names in Canadian conservatism gather for an annual conference hosted by the Strong and Free Network. It’s a place where conservative fellow travellers can meet and network and otherwise further the evolution of Canada’s conservative movement. Smith told the conference that Albertans are “soured” on a Liberal government, blaming the policies of former prime minister Justin Trudeau for a “beaten down” economy. Whether or not there will be a national unity crisis precipitated by Alberta depends on how the next government — Liberal or Conservative — acts, she said. “It depends on what the reaction is. If they don’t address those issues, then we’re going to have to see what the reaction of Albertans are,” Smith said. In that, Smith was referring to the nine demands she made to Carney the day they met in late March. They include scrapping the Liberals’ clean-electricity regulations, reforming the regulatory regime established by Bill C-69, ending the ban on single-use plastics, and others. If Smith was vague on what the reaction of Albertans would be, others have been less shy about stating it outright. A group of devoted separatists, including two former Conservative members of Parliament, are organizing a delegation to Washington, D.C., hoping to meet with American officials on the possibility of Alberta becoming the 51st state. They want a secession referendum by December 2025. (Alberta has legislation that allows citizens to bring forward province-wide referenda.) Preston Manning, the father of the Reform party, wrote in the Globe and Mail in early April that a vote for Mark Carney would be a vote for the end of Canada, as the prairie provinces stampeded towards secession. The perception outside of Alberta, and even to an extent inside Alberta, is that this is an outright threat: Give us what we want, or we’re out. Matt Solberg, a partner with New West Public Affairs, who worked on Smith’s transition team in 2023, says he doesn’t see those comments that way. “This is a bit of a reality check,” Solberg said. “I think she’s saying ‘if we want to make everyone’s life easier, let’s acknowledge these priorities.’” — On Saturday mornings, Smith goes back to her roots. She appears on Your Province. Your Premier on the Corus radio network. A couple weeks ago, a caller phoned in, asking if the premier was a “closet” western separatist. “It’s hard not to notice your contempt for Team Canada,” the caller said. “I disagree,” Smith said. “I was just down in the U.S. with my Team Canada jersey on.” At this point, what Smith has promised is a “what’s next” panel. When Kenney became premier, he initiated the Fair Deal Panel, which toured the province and revisited a number of issues that could see Alberta wrest some power from the federal government. While it’s unclear what Smith’s version of the panel would look into, she says it would listen to Albertans and see what they want to discuss. “We just want to go around the province, see how people are feeling and see if there are any other referendum issues that they want us to put on the table,” said Smith. The Corus host, Wayne Nelson, noted that Smith has, over the past few months, furthered perceptions of disunity in the Canadian response to U.S. tariffs and the renewed talk of Alberta independence. “It’s nonsense. The one issue I disagreed with is we cannot have an export tax or export restrictions on oil and gas, that is the one issue that I have disagreed with and I think I am standing up for Albertans in that regard,” Smith said. In mid-January, Smith declined to sign a joint statement of Canada’s premiers, because it included the potential use of an export tax on oil and gas as a negotiating lever with the United States. Alberta separatism is, and always has been, a fairly niche sentiment. The Angus Reid Institute found in a recent poll that only 24 per cent of Albertans believe their province is respected by the rest of the country; 30 per cent say they’d like to see Alberta separate. A large figure, certainly, but nowhere near a majority. But there’s a distinct partisan divide here. What separatists do exist, the Albertans who are the most incensed at Ottawa, the most angry about the structure of Confederation, tend to be conservative voters. In 2023, Environics pollsters found 83 per cent of UCP voters said Alberta wasn’t given enough respect, compared to 37 per cent of NDP supporters. Smith’s chief of staff, Rob Anderson, is the author of the 2021 Free Alberta Strategy. In a province where conservatives have been far more successful at deposing conservative premiers than opposition parties have, it pays to keep an eye on party sentiment. It was angry conservatives — not angry NDPers — who ushered Kenney out the door. For Smith, keeping that base happy is crucial to her political survival. And, ironically, as much as she probably wants a Poilievre government in Ottawa, a conservative in Alberta’s going to have much better electoral luck with a Liberal in the prime minister’s office. “She’s more than a one-note band, but her biggest note is fighting with Liberal Ottawa and if that gets taken away, she has more political challenges than if it doesn’t get taken away,” says Ken Boessenkool, a long-time Alberta political strategist. — On the very first day of the federal election, Pierre Poilievre launched his campaign with Parliament Hill as his backdrop. In what was surely not the start that he would’ve wanted, Poilievre was forced to answer questions about Smith. She had told Breitbart News the Trump administration would find Poilievre more “in sync” with their goals than the Liberal alternative. She also hinted that the tariff talk was pushing Canadians towards the Liberals, undoing what, just weeks before, had looked like a surefire Conservative victory. Poilievre largely elided the issue: “My response is that the president has said that he thinks it would be easier to deal with a Liberal, and with good reason, the Liberals have weakened our country,” he said. Erika Barootes, a senator-elect, podcaster and past president of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, said that interview caused some problems at the start of the campaign. “But I think that they’ve — the premier’s office — have corrected their tactic of how to engage or speak during a federal election, and I think that that’s democratically and diplomatically the right shift that they made,” Barootes said in an interview. Boessenkool was one of those who, nearly 25 years ago, authored the Firewall Letter to then-premier Klein, arguing that Alberta could increase its power within confederation. But he’s become a staunch Smith critic — particularly around questions of Alberta separation and talk of national unity crises. “Look, every time she talks this way, it drives every progressive voter to say, ‘What’s my best pathway to defeat my local Conservative MP?’” says Boessenkool. Of course, not everyone sees it that way. It’s not clear any of this is registering for voters — particularly in areas of the country beyond the Prairies where both the Liberals and Conservatives are vying for seats. “I don’t really buy the premise that it’s actually something Canadians care about,” says Solberg. The polling shows Canadians are concerned about issues wholly divorced from Alberta’s anger over a fourth Liberal term. Canadians tell pollsters they care about affordability, housing and Trump. If election 2019 was “disunifying” — before the COVID-19 pandemic, before Kenney lost his job, before then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer lost his job, before his successor Erin O’Toole lost his job — election 2025 must be orders of magnitude more important, at least for Smith. She may not be able to predict how Albertans will react, but the pundit premier will continue to channel that sentiment. And everyone else in Canada will wonder what she means by it.

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