‘Berta
Danielle Smith continues her two-faced two-step
“Go fund yourselves” indeed.
Alberta’s Premier will say she’s standing up for the process (of Alberta’s ability to threaten separation to “send a message to Ottawa”). She’ll say she’s fighting for the rights of Albertans to be heard. She’ll also claim she has no idea what the plan is if we vote “yes” to separation or “no” to remaining Forever Canadian.
She is, if not an adept liar, at least a reasonably consistent one; as we discovered by her eventual admission that she did in fact know there were concerns that her Edmonton buddy was scamming AHS out of tens of millions of dollars or more. Therefore, it’s not inconceivable that she’s lying about this, too. It’s entirely possible that, much like the 2023 election, she has a plan that she refuses to share with Albertans because she was told Albertans don’t want the pay-as-you-go future Danielle Smith wants to gift to her donors.
She’s become the poster matron for “ask forgiveness, not permission.”
Unfortunately, she’s also proven she either doesn’t have any interest, or worse, the ability, to consider the consequences of her actions.
When she lost the 2012 election as leader of the Wildrose, it didn’t hurt anyone else. When she lost the Progressive Conservative nomination after she crossed the floor two years later, it didn’t hurt anyone else. When she messes with the future of our province, it’s legitimately everyone but her who will have to deal with the consequences.
Sadly, the scribblers and like-minded rage badgers are on her side right now and ignoring her double-speak. No one is riling up Joe Alberta by pointing out her government’s inconsistencies, the promises that turned out to be anything but, or their supporter’s handing out our personal information for profit. And the fringe separatists have yet to prove whether they actually have any power in the UCP or simply a governing party who supports their goal of getting more of what Quebec has without doing the work Quebec does.
It was, after all, the governing party who changed the laws for them. It was the governing party who supported the changes. Maybe the separatist clowns have nothing more than the support of every single UCP MLA.
The “small ball” game conservatives are playing rely on their ability to focus entirely on the local while pretending nothing is going on outside of our provincial, or national, borders. On a basic psychological level, I get it— make people feel like they’re in control of situations (like voting for a party) they have no control over (like the U.S. Administration’s determination to bring Canada down to their level). It’s a dangerous one in the current political climate, where the worst-case scenario should be viewed as more plausible than I would like to admit.
However, it’s the easiest explanation for why Ms. Smith is now going to open up the public purse to appeal Justice Leonard’s decision to quash the separatist’s petition as unconstitutional. A decision which, if upheld, could have far-reaching consequences outside of Alberta.
The irony of pandering to a delusional segment of Alberta’s population managing to screw over the far more serious and prepared separatist faction in Quebec— with their help even— is somehow less enjoyable in 2026 when irony is so relentlessly shoved in our faces every single day.
Area man promoting leaving Canada discovers he can just, you know, leave Canada
It might be that separatist Take Back Alberta/Centurion Project founder saw the writing on the wall. With his Elections Alberta fines being sent to collections, and the fact that he might be facing up to $100,000 more in fines for illegally accessing and sharing the Alberta list of electors, or it may be the fact that the RCMP is investigating it as well, David Parker has apparently discovered that if he doesn’t want to be here anymore, he can leave.
Mr. Parker, the conservative Christian nationalist who handed out the private information of 2.9 million Albertans to anyone he thought might provide him influence, has either fled the country, gone on vacation, or wants people to think he has. (If you’re a Strategists patron, Senator Paula Simons joined the stage for some Q&A at the Edmonton Live event on May 9 to discuss the consequences of Albertans being doxxed by right wing loons and it is well worth a listen.)
Meanwhile, researchers from the Canadian Digital Media Research Network released their findings about the inundation of influencers from outside Canada feeding the same grievance politics as the separatist movement. The scribblers and separatist-friendly United Conservatives would only scream foreign interference if the “slopaganda” was supporting a united Canada. Probably.
Not that we don’t have enough homegrown swill.
MO(u) pipelines of promises
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith had another photo op after promising record fast approval for a pipeline no private investor has even hinted at wanting.
Conservative politicians will say it’s because no one trusts the federal government to make good on a fair regulatory environment, and NDP politicians will complain about climate accountability, and Liberal politicians are saying they’re creating the investment climate.
Or maybe, it’s just the politicization of something that was never about politics.
Back when Danielle Smith published her list of demands to Prime Minister Carney on social media, I wondered if there was even any point to trying to keep up appearances on the fossil fuel file.
I do mean “keep up appearances” because I refuse to remain captive to the Alberta media bubble.
The short version is that investment in green (new) projects has been down everywhere. No, that doesn’t mean no new projects were built anywhere at all, it means investment is down around the globe, even if we’re told it’s the fault of the NDP and Liberals.
I’ll contend instead that the theatrics in this case were not just on behalf of conservative politicians but an impressive play by the Liberals under Justin Trudeau to build credit on the climate file. They took advantage of an industry saying it wasn’t going to expand due to oil prices and came up with stricter approval processes that didn’t affect them anyway.
During Trump’s first term, he was all “drill baby drill”. He also approached congress to approve paying oil and gas not to drill because record production was hit with a COVID-induced lack of demand which created a global oil glut (again) and sent prices falling even further than 2014 levels.
The longer version comes from my misfortune of seeing a clip of Calgary-Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel-Garner on a CTV spot last week talking about how the oil sands stopped thinking bigger (because of government). “Why should Alberta be happy with steadily increasing record production when it could have been double or triple that,” she asked. That’s just fantasyland logic and I’ve quite had my fill, thank you very much.
Shockingly, decreased production wasn’t because of government. The decisions to pull back new investment for oil sands development were made under a CPC government in Ottawa and a PC government in Alberta in 2014. Those decisions were based on a forecast of decreased oil prices that economists couldn’t see the end of. The recession was taking a “U” shape, instead of the standard “V”, and no one wanted to warn Albertans that was coming. I’m sure it’s a natural response when they’re entirely used to blaming someone else: if it suddenly looks like accountability is coming for them, just don’t tell anyone what is happening.
In early 2015, Premier Jim Prentice had the gall to initially deny a recession was coming for Alberta’s oil and gas industry— and their employees, sometimes referred to as “voters” or “citizens”. You know, the people the government supposedly works for. Layoffs had already begun in 2014 but the bulk of them were almost 10 months away.
A number of projects were nearing completion in 2015 and the executive classes made the decision to continue them but shelved new projects. That meant there was no new project to go to afterwards, and no one told them that was a long-term decision.
I only found out how much the government knew when I interviewed Emma May, who Jim Prentice had approached to become an advisor to the Premier’s Office on Calgary’s flood mitigation. Her account was confirmed by someone else I spoke with who was in the boardrooms in downtown Calgary at the time. Oil and gas companies knew there would be no new projects starting up, the PCs knew there would be no new projects starting up. The feds knew as well but Stephen Harper didn’t acknowledge it until the first leader’s debate that summer.
Tom Mulcair: “You’re trying to deny the fact that for the past five months those same statistics from the Canadian government have shown that for five months in a row the Canadian economy has shrunk. We are one month away from a technical recession, but according to a lot of observers, we’re already in a recession.
Stephen Harper: “I’m not denying that, but what I’m saying is that that contraction is almost exclusively in the energy sector.”
I was very angry upon learning all of this and I hold this specific transgression close because in 2016 I took on a new position career coaching and my clients were almost exclusively former oil and gas workers who were blindsided by the severity of the industry’s contraction. I was very angry that no one warned them, and I was angry that Jason Kenney’s UCP was campaigning on a return to oil and gas expansion and jobs, jobs, jobs— once they were back in power.
In 2018, I asked a UCP MLA if he actually believed that oil and gas jobs were coming back if they formed government. To his credit, he paused and thought about it for a moment before his politician-instincts kicked in and he rattled off the talking points that of course everything would be fantastic.
It wasn’t fantastic for oil and gas jobs, but there was a Trudeau in government to point a finger at, so it wasn’t a problem for the UCP. The Prime Minister made good on his promise to get TMX approved and the expansion was completed at public expense— with a price tag that was almost four times what Kinder Morgan had projected. That little nugget led me to believe KM knew full well it was going to be a monster and they wanted out anyway.
Embittered by the fact that NDP— under a Trudeau government no less— got a pipeline built, Jason Kenney threw a $1.3 billion into reviving the Keystone expansion which ended, unfilled, at the border in 2021 due to 12 years of fierce opposition in the U.S. as well as regulatory hurdles south of the border. In a “partial revival” of KXL, a new deal was brokered between South Bow in Calgary (TC Energy spinoff that just owns the pipeline we paid for) and U.S. based Bridger. The new route is bypassing Native American reservations, which was a key issue for approvals in the original plan. Even in the land of the free, if you can imagine that.
Despite the approval obviously having nothing to do with her government, the Premier has credited her and her minister’s frequent attendance at panels, conferences, and prayer breakfasts. I mean, she called it “advocacy” but they weren’t meeting with environmental groups or Native Americans, so, I’ll just file that one under “crap Danielle Smith says”.
The feds have generally been a convenient target. They took the brunt of the blame for Energy East’s cancellation (and not the fact that the business case was built around repurposing an old line without having to build additional capacity for end users in Ontario and Quebec), and with the new “Keystone Light” approval, there may no longer be a business case for TMXX… as above, there has been minimal expansion in the oil sands— just like there has been minimal expansion everywhere else in the world.
There was probably a better case for it before the Trump Administration’s epic blunder in Iran, which is widely considered to be a final push for EU and Asian markets to hurry along with their energy transition than a reminder of how great it is to be an oil producing nation.
And that means the biggest proponent for TMXX is likely to remain the same proponent it always was: Danielle Smith, the person entrusted with holding the public’s purse.
And Jesus; obviously.
Also…
UCP-led committee wanted to withhold Chief Justice’s response to a request to participate in their sham boundary re-commission, so Christina Gray read it into the meeting minutes.
Final thoughts:
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Glad to see I'm not the only one wondering where the $100B in oilsands production investment will come from in order to provide 1 million bpd for her new $40B pipeline that no one is willing to build!
That we can't see that the oil & gas horse has left the barn and the long-term energy economy is very much electric centric is frustrating!
Thanks
I was working for the Conference Board of Canada in 2014 and we put out a short report in December stating that that year would be a high water mark for spending in the oil sands ($54 billion) and we were heading for a low price cycle for the coming years. Premier Prentice called us “outliers” and “Laurentian Elites”. And yet ……..