Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has no business holding a referendum

 If there’s one thing that’s driving me a little nuts about the active petition to foist a separation referendum on Alberta, it’s this: the claim that the process is some kind of benign and beautiful expression of democracy. 

Because, frankly, no, that’s not really how our democratic system is supposed to work. Canada is not California — which uses tools like referendums promiscuously and disastrously to guide laws and policies. And even there, Californians can’t just propose a ballot initiative to leave the Union. 

By comparison, Canada does have a legal mechanism for secession — that lies within the boundaries of a Westminster parliamentary system. 

The Clarity Act calls not just for a referendum; it presumes that such a vote would be preceded by the election of an explicitly secessionist provincial government. 

Is that what’s happening here?

No, sirs, it is not. 

The United Conservative Party isn’t a secessionist party — just ask its founder Jason Kenney, who recently responded to rumours that some UCP MLAs had signed the separation referendum with the correct dose of horror. 

“If you’ve run on a platform, let’s say in the 2019 and the last Alberta election — twice under the UCP banner — you have been running as someone who believes in a united Canada,” Kenney said in an interview. 

“If that’s how you were elected, you have no business signing a petition to separate the country and I sure hope that’s not the case.”

The UCP is not a secessist party. When Danielle Smith ran for premier in 2023, she did so on a meat-and-potatoes conservative platform, with a little side helping of the Sovereignty Act — a constitutionally dubious promise to not enforce federal legislation the province doesn’t like. 

It was dumb, but the party was open about this plan, and people voted for it. Very well. 

But if I were to have said in 2023 that “a vote for Smith will lead to a separation referendum by the end of her first term” I would have been termed not just deranged, but outright crazy. 

Fast forward three years and we’re now facing the prospect of a fall vote, thanks to Smith’s decision to alter the Citizens Initiative Act to lower the threshold for the number of signatures on a petition required to “force” the government to hold a vote. I don’t recall her campaigning on that promise either. 

In short, what’s happening here isn’t a government acting on a legitimate democratic mandate. This is a democratic coup: the UCP has loosened the mechanisms required to force a dangerous and divisive unity question on a province that, at present, overwhelmingly does not support it. 

This is an abuse of procedure. One in which a mainstream political party that is explicitly for unity is participating in a game of bait and switch at the expense of the Canadians who voted for them. 

And from what I can tell, it’s a provincial government that has no real plan for what to do next — will Smith throw in her black hat with the federalists? If the vote succeeds, will she declare the UCP a secessionist party in order to represent the province in a negotiation with the federal government, or will an election need to be held? 

There’s a reason why the separatists aren’t going about this in the proper way. Separatism isn’t actually that popular in this province and never has been. Only one explicitly separatist MLA has ever been elected in Alberta. And in a byelection held last year in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills, the secessionist Republican Party came in third, well behind even the NDP. 

Does “Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills” sound like an NDP stronghold to anyone? 

The separatists know that they can’t win in an actual election. Their only path is to force a referendum despite the will of the vast majority of Albertans — including the majority of the UCP’s own voters — and pray that the project catches a Brexit-like wind that allows grievance and anger to overwhelm calmer heads and better sense. 

And Smith is absolutely pandering to this nihilistic desire. She’s risking the economic and psychological well-being of the province — the unity and sovereignty of the entire nation, potentially — on a gamble to keep her own fractious party together. 

I’m not even kidding, here. She’s said this explicitly. 

She’s gambling on the hope that the people of Alberta will see sense where she has not.