Danielle Smith’s New Attack on Ottawa and the Law

Was Premier Danielle Smith’s Sovereignty Act moment Tuesday formal notice that she intends to unilaterally declare Alberta independence soon, evidence she thinks she’s found a magic constitutional formula to overturn federal laws she doesn’t like or just another day of using provincial resources to campaign against the Trudeau government?

Perhaps it’s a bit of all three. Who can tell?

Regardless, you have to give Smith and Alberta’s United Conservative Party credit. No one can flood the zone like they flood the zone, and the stuff they’re flooding it with just never stops spewing.

With her claim Tuesday that she plans to use the UCP’s unconstitutional Sovereignty Act to try to make it illegal for Alberta fossil fuel companies to obey federal laws or admit federal officials to their premises, the better to hide the amount of carbon they’re pumping into the planet’s atmosphere, the volume and velocity of the spew surpassed almost anything we’ve seen to date.

While local Alberta media tried to make it sound as much as possible as if Smith’s fast-paced gaslighting about how the planned federal emissions cap is really a production cap actually makes sense, Tuesday was one of those days when it was the most frustrated responses that truly made the most sense.

My favourite, I have to admit, was Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne’s exasperated tweet: “Oh Christ this craziness again.” (One really shouldn’t take the name of the Lord in vain, but, sometimes, what else is there to say?)

“So we’ve got a lawless lunatic to our south imposing tariffs inside a free-trade zone, and a lawless lunatic in Alberta pretending to veto federal laws inside a federation. I assume Quebec will be along in a few minutes to make the circus the full three rings,” Coyne wrote.

This sounds about right to me. Of course, for saying that, Coyne was labelled a Laurentian elite, a grave insult out here in Wild Rose Country where the Cordilleran elite holds sway.

University of Calgary law professor Martin Z. Olszynski also made a useful contribution to this conversation.

“Is Danielle Smith a singularly gifted provincial premier who unlocked a hitherto unknown constitutional super-trick for getting around federal laws that she doesn’t like (a problem as old as Confederation)?”

Something that I can tell you about Olszynski is that he is a calm and thoughtful observer of the constant swirl of constitutional piffle and bafflegab that Smith and her advisors emit, so we can have faith that he had it right when he answered his own question succinctly with “no and no.”

If we wait a few days, I expect, his reasonable conclusion will be spelled out in more detail in the University of Calgary’s always informative law blog.

The UCP position seems to be that since the Canadian Constitution gives provinces jurisdiction over natural resources, therefore the Alberta government can order fossil fuel companies in the province not to obey the laws passed by Parliament.

One doesn’t need to be a constitutional expert like Olszynski to suspect that this is not going to go anywhere if it ever gets to court.

That said, it’s quite reasonable to assume that Smith and the two cabinet stooges who flanked her on the podium Tuesday — wisely silent Energy Minister Brian Jean, a lawyer, and not-so-wisely verbose Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz — have no intention whatsoever of actually testing this performative nonsense in a court of law, except perhaps as a stalling tactic. (Judging from the government’s royalty-free photos, Justice Minister Mickey Amery, also a lawyer, seems to have been in the room too, presumably silently wishing he was somewhere else.)

This is not so much about an attempt to “make it virtually impossible for Ottawa to impose the cap in Alberta,” as Postmedia columnist Don Braid quoted someone saying when he reported Monday that the UCP was about to break out the Sovereignty Act again, but to make it virtually impossible for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals to get re-elected.

That’s already hard to imagine given the level of unpopularity to which Trudeau personally and his party seem to have sunk, but you never know.

As Braid wrote in another column Tuesday, Smith’s biggest fear has to be that her hero, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, has just handed Trudeau his comeback chance with that 25-per-cent tariff threat. Never mind that once he’s president again Trump still won’t have the authority to arbitrarily impose a tariff higher than 15 per cent, even with his fake national security claims about refugees and fentanyl from Canada.

Of course, that would depend on Trudeau expeditiously cutting a deal with Trump. Since Trump, as Coyne accurately assessed him, is basically a lawless lunatic, that’s probably too much even for the prime minister to hope for.