What Smith Gets Wrong about Alberta and Quebec Separatism

Premier Danielle Smith often cites Quebec when she talks about her plans to increase Alberta’s autonomy from Ottawa, especially when she is in full oratorical flight before a partisan crowd.

At her May 1 premier’s dinner in Red Deer she told 1,200 enthusiastic United Conservative Party or UCP supporters that Quebec had copied Alberta’s Fair Deal Panel.

“And one of the things that they want to do is to adopt a sovereignty act very similar to what Alberta has, which I thought was interesting,” she said.

The Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act is a provincial law that would allow the UCP to challenge or disregard federal laws or policies that it determined were harmful to the province or its citizens. Some law experts have said it is unconstitutional.

But while Smith often uses Quebec’s sovereigntist aspirations to rile her base and, apparently, to apply pressure to the Mark Carney Liberals, she is not keen to talk about whether her UCP government is collaborating, or even having discussions, with Quebec separatists.

Smith’s press secretary Lindsay Blackett did not acknowledge a query from The Tyee about whether the provincial Parti Québécois, which supports separatism, had reached out to the UCP government after Smith opened the door for Alberta separatists by making it easier to force a referendum on the issue.

The Tyee queried Blackett after it recently learned that Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon had sought a public platform in Alberta, potentially as an attempt to bolster his party’s own separatist agenda by promoting separatism in Alberta.

University of Alberta political scientist Frederic Boily said St-Pierre Plamondon asked the political science department if it could host an in-person talk by the Parti Québécois leader sometime in May or June, including, if possible, members of the public.

Nothing came of the request, and a Parti Québécois press secretary reneged on a promised response to questions about why St-Pierre Plamondon was seeking an audience in Alberta and whether the leader had sought a meeting with Smith.

St-Pierre Plamondon has commended Smith for defending Alberta’s interests. In early May, he said both parties want self-determination in response to what both he and Smith have characterized as “abuses of power” by the federal government. There have been mixed political responses in Quebec to Smith’s flirtation with separation.

“It is my impression that it is not good from the point of view of Danielle Smith to create a tie with the leader of the Parti Québécois because the PQ, and the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa, are opposed to a new pipeline from Alberta through Quebec,” Boily said.

The Tyee provided Boily with a transcript of Smith’s statements about Quebec at the May 1 Red Deer fundraiser. He said they are missing critical context.

Quebec’s governing party, the Coalition Avenir Québec — Coalition for the Future of Quebec, or CAQ — did create an advisory committee in June 2024, but it was not copying Alberta’s Fair Deal Panel, he said.

The committee, according to its mandate, was “to recommend ways to protect and promote the collective rights of the Québec nation; to ensure respect for our values and our common identity; to ensure respect for Québec’s skills and to increase its autonomy within the Canadian federation.”

In November 2024, the committee issued a report in which it proposed that Quebec adopt a constitution to increase the province’s autonomy — but within Canada. The committee did not have a mandate to consider Quebec independence.

In one of its recommendations, the committee said it had drawn some inspiration from similar legislation adopted by Alberta and Saskatchewan to create framework law for the defence and enhancement of its constitutional freedom.

“But that was just one recommendation out of 42 in the report,” Boily stressed.

“The CAQ’s autonomist views are not a copy of the UCP sovereignty act. The CAQ is autonomist and nationalist, but it is not independentist or separatist, notably since 2015,” he said.

It would make sense for St-Pierre Plamondon to seek a meeting with Smith since her chief of staff, Rob Anderson, is one of the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy. The Smith government is busily implementing that strategy, despite a lack of majority public support for some of its main initiatives.

The Tyee asked the other two co-authors of the Free Alberta Strategy if the Parti Québécois had reached out to them. Both Calgary lawyer Derek From and University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper said they had not been contacted.

In an interview from England, where he is conducting research, Cooper said he would be happy to talk to anyone from the PQ.

“But I would tell them the interests of Alberta and those of Quebec are diametrically opposed, and have been since Alberta became a Laurentian colony sometime after the transfer of Hudson’s Bay Company lands,” he said.

In 1991, Cooper and University of Calgary historian David Bercuson wrote a book called Deconfederation: Canada Without Quebec, in which they argued that “the demands of Quebec’s ethnic and cultural nationalism are simply incompatible with the continued existence of Canada as a Liberal democracy.”

Cooper’s hard-edged views toward Quebec have not been softened by the passage of time.

“These guys [Quebec separatists] were completely astonished that we thought that they should just go away, and I still think that is true,” Cooper said.

“I think Quebec has been the source of so much of our problems,” he said, dating back to the 1830s.

How much, if any, benefit did Cooper see in the UCP government collaborating with the Parti Québécois on sovereignty issues?

Cooper said there has always been a faction within Alberta’s conservative governments who think the two provinces should work together. He mentioned his good friend, former Conservative cabinet minister Ted Morton.

“He thinks you can trust the Quebec government to do things co-operatively with Alberta, and I don't think we can,” Cooper said, adding that “Quebec doesn’t look upon Alberta as friends.”

If they were friends, Cooper said, “there wouldn’t be all this bullshit about the pipelines not going across the sacred soil of Quebec. I mean, that is just ridiculous.

“It is in their benefit, certainly in our benefit, and if they really wanted to co-operate, that is what they would have done, but they don't.”

Boily, the University of Alberta political scientist, said Quebec’s opposition to a pipeline is not about sacred soil. He pointed out that Quebec Premier François Legault recently said a pipeline across northern Quebec may be possible given the threat to Canada’s economy posed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Legault and the CAQ gained power in October 2018, a year after TransCanada PipeLines (now TC Energy), citing “politics, the energy market and the economics of the energy industry,” withdrew its application for the Energy East pipeline. It would have carried 1.1 million barrels of Alberta oil to refineries in New Brunswick and Quebec.

But in 2021, the CAQ government stopped a pipeline that would have carried liquefied natural gas from Western Canada to Europe due to environmental risks and public opposition. Economists have said reviving that project may not be feasible.

Boily said Cooper and others on the right in Alberta mistakenly view Quebec politics as monolithic.

“In Alberta, we have two parties; it is bipartisan. In Quebec, we have many parties; it is multi-partisan,” he said.

“That makes potential co-operation with Alberta much more complicated.”

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