King Charles III’s speech on Tuesday from the throne in Ottawa was like a family reunion for Canadian politicians.
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was there, joking around with his old opponent Justin Trudeau, who, playing to type, wore an inappropriate pair of running shoes. Justin’s mother, Margaret Trudeau, who has known the king for 50 years, embraced the monarch.
But one important person wasn’t there: Danielle Smith, premier of Alberta. Smith, who made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in January and skipped the last gathering of Canadian premiers in Ottawa, has shown mixed feelings about the Canadian federation.
As the king’s plane was en route back to London, Smith called on Carney to respond to a series of demands meant to boost Alberta’s energy industry: build a new oil pipeline, loosen emissions and regulatory rules, scrap a tanker ban, and drop net-zero electricity requirements.
“Albertans need to see meaningful action within weeks — not months,” she threatened.
The unstated threat is Smith’s plan for a referendum that could theoretically allow Alberta to separate, after which it could, in theory, join the United States.
Smith, whose political ideology veers toward libertarianism, warned during the recent election that if easterners replaced Trudeau with Carney, it could produce an “unprecedented national unity crisis.” The day after Carney won, she presented a bill that will make it possible for Alberta to hold an independence referendum, likely next year.
The best local polling suggests that if a referendum were held today, it would fail, with only 28% of Albertans saying they’d vote to separate, compared to 67% who’d want to stay.
Numbers often change during a campaign, though, and uncertainty about the province’s future is already damaging the investment climate, so Carney faces pressure to bring Smith onside. Even his ally, Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford, says it’s time to show her some love.
Carney will have an opportunity to do just that when he flies to neighboring Saskatchewan to meet with Smith and the other premiers on Monday.
Carney pledged, via the king’s speech, to speed regulatory approvals so Canada can become the “world’s leading energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy.” And executives in the oil patch were cheered by a boosterish speech from his natural resources minister, Tim Hodgson. They hope that Carney and Hodgson will help them find ways to get their petroleum to foreign markets, rather than selling it at a discount to the United States.
But it is unlikely that he can deliver on Smith’s demands. British Columbians and Quebecers are both apt to resist new pipelines across their provinces, and if he removes the emissions cap, Carney risks losing support among voters worried about climate change.
Even if he does make some concessions to Alberta, chances are he won’t take the steam out of the separatist movement entirely. Smith needs to keep the separatists in her corner, rather than risk losing those voters to the province’s upstart Republican Party. That means a referendum is all but certain to go ahead.
Like former UK Prime Minister David Cameron before the Brexit referendum, Smith is trying to buy herself some time. And even Albertans who don’t want to secede still hope the threat will improve her negotiating position with Carney.
The wild card in the mix is Donald Trump, who is widely admired among the Albertan separatists and who regularly says Canada should agree to be annexed.
Could Alberta’s secessionist movement provide an opening for Trump to stir up trouble? He must know the province sits atop the world’s fourth-largest oil reserve. Does Trump look at Alberta the way Vladimir Putin once looked at the Donbas?
The stakes are high and the pressure is on Carney. He has been a successful banker, business executive, and campaigner. After his trip to Saskatchewan, Canadians might get a sense of whether he can master the difficult regional-power politics necessary to be a successful prime minister.