Danielle Smith’s Alberta Next Panel Report Lands with a Whimper

We paid $2 million for this?

The report of Danielle Smith’s Alberta Next panel dropped Friday afternoon and, boy, is it ever a pitiful little squib!

There’s no report, really, just a few recommendations. Weighing in at a skimpy 17 pages, the whole thing would be worth about a B- if you’d handed it in, say, to a University of Calgary economics professor and he happened to be in a particularly generous mood the night he marked it.

I’d be embarrassed if I’d just cost someone $2 million (or probably quite a bit more) for an effort as lazy and unconvincing as this.

Indeed, it must have embarrassed Smith and her United Conservative Party government too. Why else would they have released it into the wild on the afternoon of the last Friday before Christmas?

I mean, seriously, wasn’t this supposed to be the moment of Alberta’s arrival as a sovereign nation within a united Canada, maîtres chez nous?

Well, maybe the UCP brain trust realized that the whole premise of the scheme they announced last June — getting Albertans enthused about handing over their retirement savings to the UCP to Make Alberta an Energy Superpower Again and replacing the RCMP with the party’s own organs of state security — was never going to work and they might as well sweep the whole thing under the rug as quickly as possible.

“Merry Christmas, everyone! And a Happy New Year! Look over there — Santa, probably!”

Look, I get it, $2 million is chump change to the brainiacs who run the UCP. It wouldn’t even buy a fighter plane, let alone an aircraft carrier for the Republic of Alberta Navy. But it’s real money to most of us who had to chip in, whether we liked it or not, to pay for it. Surely they had an obligation to come up with something a little less embarrassing than this?

Well, a news release touting the report and papering over its obvious deficiencies adds another couple of pages to the effort, as do some colourful charts of the responses to the panel’s push-poll questions.

The purpose of the exercise was supposedly to find out what Albertans wanted to do, which the UCP obviously hoped would be the same things it really wanted to do, and then get them to lend the idea a bit of democratic legitimacy by voting for them in a couple of referendums.

As the government said in a news release back on June 24, when it announced the exercise, “the panel will consult across the province over the summer and early fall to ensure that those living, working, doing business and raising families are the ones to drive Alberta’s future forward.… It will also include making recommendations to the government on potential referendum questions for Albertans to vote on in 2026.”

Instead, after all that time packing Alberta Next town halls with their supporters and insulting people who didn’t want to talk about UCP hobbyhorses, they found out that Albertans are decidedly unenthusiastic about some of the things the government wants most — in particular, an Alberta Pension Plan and an Alberta Police Force.

That’s pretty clear from the little summaries of public support on the recommendations released Friday. For example, on the provincial police scheme: “In-person straw polls: clear majority support. Online/survey comments: clear majority oppose. Professional polling survey: 52 per cent oppose...”)

The summary for the APP was much the same, although the report does claim professional polling found there was 54-per-cent support for an Alberta pension. This is very hard to believe unless there was some jiggery pokery with respondent selection. Obviously, we need to know more about this poll.

Regardless, the UCP is clearly not going to give up on either of these ideas, so the report recommends holding a referendum on “proceeding to an Alberta Pension Plan” and exiting the Canada Pension and another on replacing the RCMP with the provincial police force the government is already in the process of setting up.

There will be no votes on these questions, though, until the population has been thoroughly propagandized. Or, as the report put it about the pension, “it would be appropriate in advance of any referendum for the government to present Albertans with a detailed Alberta Pension proposal…”

The panel also wants referendums on immigration, so Smith can realize her dream of an Alberta ICE (ACE?), and on “specific constitutional amendments.” For example, Senate reform! Well, good luck with that. That’s why the Constitution has an amending formula.

One suspects this recommendation was drafted in the expectation that Canada would soon have a MAGA-minded Conservative government in Ottawa along with the same in enough provinces to amend the constitution with greater ease.

Alas for the UCP, that’s off the table for the time being at least.

The panel’s first recommendation, on “responsible self-government,” seems to confuse the term with provincial autonomy or, perhaps, establishing Alberta as a super-province that rules all the others. “We believe that if the entire federation could be rebalanced to respect and empower provincial jurisdiction as laid out in our Constitution, Canada as a whole would be better governed and more unified,” the report said.

Notwithstanding the fact that’s not quite what the Constitution says, common sense suggests this conclusion is the opposite of what would actually happen. We have responsible government now — that is, the cabinet is responsible to the assembly, even if the assembly doesn’t act like it — and like all provinces we have sovereignty within our jurisdiction.

The panel also recommended there be no referendums on Alberta collecting its own income taxes, or on federal equalization programs, presumably on the grounds that will be easier to do later.

The panel devoted three of its pages to the results of the online push poll, and four to glowing biographies of the 16 panel members (including the premier as the Great Helmsman, Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz as her mini-me, two additional UCP MLAs, an acupuncturist, and, yes, a University of Calgary economist).

Or maybe the UCP has now simply moved beyond the entire Alberta Next concept. Completely absent from the report, probably significantly, was any mention whatsoever of the UCP push to facilitate a referendum on separation from Canada — and, presumably, eventual absorption by the United States.

I guess we’ll have to wait for the UCP’s Alberta Nexit panel to hear about why that one’s a great idea.