Danielle Smith doesn’t need a pipeline to Prince Rupert, she just needs Mark Carney to promise she can have one, with sketchy details to follow.
Then, just like that, Alberta’s premier could call an early election and get her United Conservative Party (UCP) re-elected based in her success pushing Canada’s new Liberal prime minister around with her sly threats of sovereignty association.
As an added bonus, that would give her a way to defuse the embarrassing grassroots recall campaign that’s been making some of her UCP MLAs so nervous.
Love that scenario or hate it, dear readers, you have to admit it’s a possibility.
Premier Smith and Prime Minister Carney will make their “grand bargain” official today. Chances are there will be smiles and handshakes all round, and not a lot of details in the memorandum of understanding they sign about how this is all supposed to work.
Lots of people won’t like it.
The UCP wing of the Alberta separatist movement will hate it. They’re already sore at the premier for ensuring none of them get to talk about a glorious Alberta republic at the party’s annual general meeting, which starts tomorrow at Edmonton’s EXPO Centre convention hall across the street from the crumbling Northlands Coliseum, home to the Oilers in the days they were champions.
Like the rest of us, the bad-tempered federal Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, hasn’t even seen it yet, but he’s already calling it “a meaningless so-called memorandum of understanding.”
Carney “will sign on to a public relations stunt while planning to hide behind the premier of B.C.,” Poilievre told Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell, who is now playing an unfamiliar role as a medium for a snarky attack on Smith.
British Columbia Premier David Eby is furious. He feels – accurately enough, by the sound of it – like he’s been sidelined. “Just the idea that Carney and Smith have been talking about a pipeline was enough to set Eby off,” wrote columnist Les Leyne yesterday in the Victoria Times Colonist.
“I underlined for the prime minister how unacceptable it was to me to have Saskatchewan and Alberta speaking about matters in B.C. without B.C. at the table,” Eby said. “This is not something that would happen in Quebec. I don’t know why the thought was that it would be OK for it to happen in B.C.”
Team Canada? Forget about it, Leyne suggested. The coming pipeline announcement is likely to fracture that noble idea once and for all.
Voters in coastal British Columbia will not be happy either. There are 20 Liberals from British Columbia in the House of Commons. If the Alberta deal goes ahead as predicted, there will be about five after the next federal election, retired Mount Royal University political scientist Keith Brownsey predicted yesterday.
So that’s probably good news at least for the federal New Democratic Party, which did so badly in the April 28 federal election that it elected only seven MPs and lost party status. So Mr. Carney may just have created the conditions for the revival of the federal NDP, Dr. Brownsey suggested. Voters may throw in some more Greens, too.
This may even prompt a B.C. separatist party to start organizing on the theory that leaving Canada is the only way to prevent a bitumen pipeline from being built to the North Coast. Presumably this is not what Mr. Carney had in mind when he talked about nation building.
It certainly explains why some of Mr. Carney’s B.C. Liberal MPs are said to be “seething” at their leader.
Yeah, yeah. I know there’s an Angus Reid poll that says British Columbians now love pipelines too. It depends where they live and it’s unlikely they live where the Liberals have seats. Eby has pollsters too, and it sure doesn’t sound as if they’re telling him the same thing.
Heaven only knows what the weirdly passive Alberta NDP will do, if anything. I wouldn’t put it past them to have nothing bad to say about the deal, or the lack of details. We’ll wait for their three-sentence press release tomorrow, I guess.
Voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan, meanwhile, are likely to continue to be allergic to voting Liberal, although a pipeline deal may briefly reduce local sales of black F Carney flags somewhat.
It’s hard to say what voters in Quebec will see in this, but they have to know that the pipe to Prince Rupert won’t be the UCP’s last territorial demand in Canada. Well, they may get a chance to vote on sovereignty again soon too.
The Asian market for diluted bitumen from Alberta, of course, remains highly suspect. If the pipeline gets built, this is why taxpayers are going to have to pay for it.
Hold onto your hats and fasten your seatbelts. These are going to be interesting times. The grand pipeline bargain is just the start.
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