Is This Really Why Danielle Smith Wants a Separation Referendum?

According to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who describes herself as a Canadian patriot, she’s enabling a separation referendum out here in Wild Rose Country only to keep a separatist party from becoming as successful as the Bloc Québécois.

“We do not want a permanent feature of Alberta politics to be parties that send representatives to Ottawa whose sole purpose is to break up the country,” Smith said last week in the legislature in response to a question by Opposition leader Christina Gray.

The Canadian Press interpreted this and similar statements the premier made to mean Smith was prepared to roll the dice on a separation referendum “in part to avert the emergence of a political rival.”

As Albertans have come to know, Smith has a casual relationship with the truth, so it’s not always easy to be certain what she has in mind when she blurts out stuff like this. In this case, though, it seems more likely she was trying to frame her party’s legislative effort to make a separation referendum easier for a “citizen” group to get on a ballot as a way to prevent a separation movement from growing in Alberta.

While it seems improbable, it’s not impossible that’s what she really thinks. Readers with long memories will recall that former British prime minister David Cameron cooked up the disastrous 2016 Brexit referendum because he was certain it would fail and thereby weaken far-right Euro-skeptic politicians who were nipping at his Conservative Party’s heels.

Smith has been enamoured of Cameron’s dumb ideas before, championing his Darwinian “Big Society” scheme to dismantle the welfare state and dump the cost of social services for the weakest members of society on local councils and volunteers when she was the brand new Wildrose Alliance leader in 2011.

“What Prime Minister Cameron is challenging Britons to consider, and what we in the Wildrose are challenging Albertans to consider, is perhaps there is a better way to care for the most vulnerable in our society,” she said at the time.

So as unlikely as her separation-referendum explanation may seem, we can’t rule out completely the possibility Smith is telling the truth this time.

The mysteriously well-funded Republican Party of Alberta, buoyed by irresponsible polls that provide no information to respondents about the economic implications of separation, scoffed at Smith’s statement. “The Republican Party of Alberta already exists,” it pointed out accurately enough in a statement attributed to no spokesperson that was posted on social media.

This is true enough as far as it goes, but its boast that the former Buffalo Party is “just getting started” raises other questions. The Republican Party of Alberta, or someone, certainly seems to have plenty of resources for dubious push polls, advertising and paid door-to-door canvassers.

Surely it isn’t rude to wonder where the money’s coming from? As anyone who has observed geopolitics in recent decades understands, the astroturfy Alberta independence “movement” has all the hallmarks of the “colour revolutions” that roiled many countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, not to mention the malicious use of social media that marked the Brexit campaign.

Nor can it be ignored that Smith’s chief of staff, her former Wildrose Party house leader and current fellow traveller Rob Anderson, is the co-author of the notorious “Free Alberta Strategy,” or that a certain amount of sympathy for separation or 51st-state talk is tolerated within the United Conservative Party caucus and cabinet.

Moreover, for some reason “Alberta separatism” seems lately to have captured the imagination of the Fox disinformation network in the United States.

“We want Alberta, because they’re the powerhouse,” opined Fox bloviator Jesse Watters a week ago, suggesting that a U.S. state of Alberta “would just kind of look like a big Florida that would shoot up north.”

“It would give us access to the Arctic,” he enthused, demonstrating his extensive knowledge of geography.

Amid the brouhaha lately about claims of interference in Canadian elections by the governments of China and India, there seems for some reason to be surprisingly little interest in examining the potential for similar activities by bad actors closer to home.

What is the good of having Five Eyes, one wonders, if they can’t keep at least one out for threats to Canadian sovereignty and unity originating right in our own neighbourhood?