Danielle Smith will take the pipeline but won’t shelve the separatism talk
Will she just call a referendum anyway? Yes, probably.
Alberta politics can be a wild ride, so just in case you’re having a hard time keeping up:
a judge quashed Elections Alberta’s approval of the separatist citizen initiative petition and admonished the Chief Elections Officer’s failure to consult First Nations
Premier Danielle Smith called the judge’s ruling antidemocratic and declared her government would appeal the decision
separatist leaders threatened Smith’s leadership of the United Conservative Party if she didn’t ignore the court ruling and hold a separation referendum anyway.
Elections Alberta admitted that thousands of people might have accessed the leaked copy of the voters list that a separatist group uploaded to a public searchable database (and Elections Alberta says the leader of that group isn’t cooperating)
Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney stood together to announce that construction of a new oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast will start as early as September 1, 2027.
There’s a lot to unpack here - and that’s just from the last four days.
Will Smith just call a referendum anyway? Yes, probably.
There has been plenty of thoughtful analysis and commentary about Justice Shaina Leonard’s rulings and how it will impact constitutional law in Canada, so I will leave that to the legal scholars. I’m interested in how this will impact Alberta politics.
Premier Smith decried the judge’s ruling as anti-democratic and said the Alberta government would appeal the decision to block the separatist citizen initiative petition. This is not surprising as it is very clear that separatist activists who hold key positions in Smith’s party hold a tremendous amount of influence over her.
Stay Free Alberta petition leader and Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul UCP constituency president Mitch Sylvestre appeared to threaten Smith’s leadership by saying her failing to put the separation question on a referendum ballot would ‘cause problems’ for the Premier.
Despite around 70 per cent of Albertans saying they would vote to remain in Canada, Smith is feeling immense pressure from members of her party and some MLAs in her UCP Caucus to bypass the court ruling by using cabinet’s power to call a referendum. According to recent polls, more than half of UCP voters say they would vote for Alberta to leave Canada if a referendum were held.
Prominent UCP voices, like Premier’s Office senior staffer and social media spokesperson Bruce McAllister attacked Justice Leonard as a “Trudeau appointee” and separatist influencers online have described the class of 2002 University of Alberta law school graduate as “New Brunswick born,” as if being born in another part of Canada was a legitimate criticism.
This undoubtably plays into another referendum question the UCP decided to put to Albertans in October 2026 asking if the provincial government should select justices appointed to the King’s Bench and Appeal courts.
That and the separation question are included with eight other questions Smith’s UCP are putting the ballot this fall. The question about increasing provincial authority, limiting access to public services for immigrants, and abolishing the Senate were obviously designed to boost turnout for the independence campaign.
Despite the increasingly wide off-ramp that the massive leak of the voters list and the court ruling has provided Smith, I would put my money on the UCP cabinet deciding to hold the separation referendum anyway.
Won’t a new pipeline make the separatists happy?
Smith used the threat of national unity crisis to leverage the approval of a new pipeline to the Pacific Coast, and it looks like she just might get that. So this is a political win for Smith — especially because the September 1, 2027 target for the start of construction of a new pipeline lines up with the start of the next provincial general election campaign.
Expect “We got Alberta a pipeline!” to be splashed all over UCP re-election ads in 2027.
But don’t expect the promise of an oil pipeline to dampen the enthusiasm of Alberta’s separation activists. That was demonstrated clearly last November when Smith was booed by delegates at the UCP AGM when she touted the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding about pipelines and electrification.
For them, it was never about building a pipeline.
The current version of the Alberta separatist movement doesn’t have its roots in old timey grievances about NEP, the metric system, or the Crow Rate. The current crop of separation activists cut their political teeth opposing public health restrictions and vaccine requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You don’t have to scratch too far below the surface to find that some of the Alberta’s most prominent separatist leaders are enthusiastic supporters of American President Donald Trump and embrace the deep well of fringy conspiracy theories of Trump’s MAGA movement.
Smith has spent much of the last four years walking a politically dangerous line by trying to appeal to both straight out Alberta separatists and Albertans who don’t want to separate but still think the province is getting a bad deal from Ottawa.
This pipeline deal is aimed at the second group, but the unanswered question is whether Smith can put the separatists back in the box.
Separatist leaders like Sylvestre and Jeffrey Rath are calling on Smith to ignore the court ruling and use her cabinet’s powers to put the separation question on the October referendum ballot anyway. That pressure will be hard for Smith to resist, if she resists at all. Her actions over the past year have shown she is willing to bend over backward by amending laws and adding fuel to the fire to appease the separatist forces intrenched inside her Smith’s UCP.
Former UCP cabinet minister Tyler Shandro chimed in this week with a call for separatists to leave the UCP and openly run as separatists in the next election:
“Nothing in Justice Leonard’s decision prohibits separatists from running a separatist party with a separatist platform in the next general election. Democracy lives through long established processes for democratic participation.
Why won’t separatists run on a separatist platform in a general election?”
Shandro’s comment echoed calls by former premier Jason Kenney for separatists to leave the UCP and run for a separatist party, but that train has left the station.
The separatists have been entrenched inside the UCP for some time and have already submitted a policy for debate as the party’s November 2026 AGM to officially endorse Alberta’s separation from Canada.
The voters list is still leaked
Elections Alberta admitted this week that the personal information of 2.9 million Albertans included in the voters list that was uploaded to a public searchable database by the separatist Centurion Project may have actually been seen by thousands of people, not the hundreds they initially believed.
Smith has largely avoided talking much about the privacy breach, leaving Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi with a wide open field to bring it to the forefront at every opportunity. Nenshi held daily press conferences for a week calling on Smith to call a public inquiry and get to the bottom of the data breach.
But despite the largest data breach in Canadian history and who knows how many copies of the entire voters list floating around in separatist circles, the UCP government had not signaled any plans to postpone the already scheduled fall referendums.
Smith could end this by putting the Forever Canadian question to a vote
While the separation petition is stalled and the UCP ties itself in knots over its future, there is already a question from a verified citizen initiative petition that was signed by more than 456,000 Albertans last year that endorsed Alberta remaining in Canada.
The Forever Canadian question could have been put to a vote by MLAs in the Legislature, but Smith’s UCP sent it to an MLA committee where it will likely die a procedural death.
The petition was championed by former Progressive Conservative Thomas Lukaszuk, whose longstanding criticism of Smith and the UCP is likely a big reason the petition is being ignored by the government.
Former Edmonton mayor Don Iveson spoke up in favour of the Forever Canadian question:
“From the perspective of a signature collector and one of the 458K+ of us who signed the Forever Canadian petition, this means that we could settle this whole question now (including where each of our MLAs stands on the question of separation) with a simple vote at the legislature on the resolution proposed in the Hon. Thomas A. Lukaszuk’s petition.”
Avoiding a vote in the Legislature gives cover for UCP MLAs who support the separatists or are vulnerable to nomination challenges by separatist-endorsed UCP candidates ahead of the next provincial election.
How did we even get in this citizen initiative mess?
It has been wiped from the memories of most political commentators that it was former premier Kenney who gave Albertans the Citizen Initiative Act.
“More power in the hands of ordinary Albertans,” is how Kenney described the Citizen Initiative Act when his UCP government introduced the bill in 2021.
It is supremely ironic that Kenney is now one of the loudest voices against the citizen initiative petition that would force a referendum on Alberta separation from Canada that is being led by activists from his old UCP.
While Kenney can’t be blamed for the series of amendments made by Smith’s UCP that lowered the bar for the separatist petition, it was passed into law just as the populist forces that took over his party were organizing to push him out of the premier’s office. Many of those activists were key to Smith’s win in the ensuing leadership race and are key figures in the UCP’s separatist-wing.
Another big twist: Albertans are willing to give Carney a chance
Adding another layer of complexity to this wound up political situation, Prime Minister Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, remains surprisingly quite popular among Albertans. This doesn’t mean that Albertans will rush to vote Liberal in the next federal election, but it does signal that many people in the province are willing to give Carney a chance.
What about the other citizen initiative petitions?
The Forever Canadian and Stay Free Alberta petition campaigns have sucked up most of the political oxygen around citizen initiatives, but there are two others worth paying attention to.
A petition question late last year came close to putting provincial government funding of private schools on the ballot, but fell just short of the threshold. Alberta Funds Public Schools collected 124,937 of the 177,732 required, which means it was unsuccessful in triggering a referendum, but can’t be ignored as a successful organizing effort.
The Water Not Coal citizen initiative led by rancher and country music artist Corb Lund is currently collecting signatures to put a ban on coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Canadian Rockies on the ballot in October.
Lund started the petition effort because of his deep concerns about toxic runoff from coal mines contaminating drinking water and the threat the mines would pose to generational ranching, agriculture, and tourism in southern Alberta.
Lund is on the campaign trail (literally) this weekend as he rides in Longview, Calgary and Edmonton to bring attention to the petition drive to hold a referendum of ban coal mining in the Eastern Slopes.
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Because it’s about her not us. She’s a self serving sociopath
I suspect Dani made a deal with the devil - promised Parker, Rath, Modry and Sylvestre that she would deliver a separation referendum if they agreed ro keep the lunatics in that camp quiet - and not tip her out like Kenney for being too pro-Canada.
She has become a master pretzel with her contortions to stay in power.