Prediction: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will call an early election before she allows a referendum to proceed to a vote with the wording promoted by former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition.
To do otherwise would derail the scheme by the premier and her closest advisors to blackmail Canada into conferring near-national status on Alberta by threatening an easy-to-manipulate Brexit-style separation referendum followed by quick recognition by the premier’s MAGA allies in the Trump regime currently in power in the United States.
But Lukaszuk, exuding confidence and predicting “we will prevail,” said Friday that the Forever Canadian petition he submitted to Elections Alberta in June in response to separatist machinations by Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) has now obtained almost 80 per cent of the signatures it requires.
The petition now has about 230,000 signatures, he told reporters at an outdoor news conference in an Edmonton park. Under former UCP premier Jason Kenney’s “citizen initiative” legislation, which was designed to give the impression of direct democracy while making it actually quite difficult to achieve, the campaign’s approximately 5,000 volunteers now have until October 28 to gather the remaining 64,000 witnessed signatures the law requires to get a referendum question on the ballot.
The petition calls for the referendum question to be: “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”
Meanwhile, the Smith Government has been working hand in glove with the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project to ensure that a question on a referendum ballot next year asks, “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta shall become a Sovereign Country and cease to be a province in Canada?”
Unlike Lukaszuk’s question, in addition to intentionally casting Canada in negative terms, that would move the province directly into a separation process in the event the referendum passed. This may seem unlikely given current polling, but the Brexit vote in June 2016, for example, illustrates the potential for manipulation by misinformation and disinformation to create catastrophic results.
Lukaszuk’s question, submitted first under the old Kenney-era rules that require signatures from 10 per cent of the number of Albertans eligible to vote in the 2023 general election, has been approved by Elections Alberta.
The APP question faces a court challenge on its constitutionality, as it would drive the province immediately into a separation process with huge constitutional impacts. But the Smith Government lowered the bar for it in legislation passed this year, reducing the number of signatures it requires to 177,000 and adding an extra month to collect them.
But even if the APP question is approved by the court, since the Forever Canadian petition was submitted by Lukaszuk first, under current Alberta laws no other question on the same topic can be asked in a referendum for five years – as long as the Forever Canadian volunteers can deliver the goods in the next 24 days.
At his news conference, Lukaszuk told reporters: “We are on the home stretch. But this is a race, and you just don’t stop running when you think you’re doing well. You just continue running, and we haven’t hit the finish mark yet.” The aim is to collect 300,000 signatures to ensure there are enough in the event some are ruled ineligible by Elections Alberta.
From now on, Lukaszuk told me, “most of our volunteers will be attending large gatherings such as teachers’ rallies at the Legislature, municipal election polling stations, and other large events across the province.” In addition, he said, “we will do all farmers markets until the end, as they are a good source of signatures.”
Last week, lawyers representing the Forever Canadian campaign persuaded a court to toss an Elections Alberta rule requiring each petitioner to sign an affidavit. “That was an obstacle put in front of us that was not supported in law,” Lukaszuk said. “We are anticipating that there will be others, but things are going well and we will prevail.”
An interesting clip from a 2021 meeting of the so-called Canada Strong & Free Network, earlier known as the Manning Centre, shows former Reform Party leader Preston Manning schooling Smith on how to blackmail Canada into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51st state.
Cheekily wearing an Order of Canada pin in his lapel, the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right talks about how “fear of the United States can be a factor in federal provincial relations.”
He asks rhetorically, “What if Alberta did actually secede? There will be an offer from the United States for Alberta to become the 51st state. And why will that offer be made? It will be made because the United States would like to get a hold of the second or third largest source of petroleum in the world. That is why it will be made.
“Now when that finally sinks in to Ottawa,” Manning pauses … “‘You want that to happen?’ Do they want that to happen? Or do they have to say, ‘Maybe we have to do something, to keep that energy sector and its development in Canada,’ and to accede to some of these other demands.”
Manning concluded his pedagogy with a little shrug, asking: “Is there some way that fear of the United States can be used as a lever to get some of the things that the West needs to have addressed?”
It’s hard to say if this was the inspiration for Smith’s “Alberta Next” campaign and the long list of laws she now suggests must be changed to keep Alberta in Canada, but Manning’s counsel is obviously valued by the UCP strategic brain trust and her strategy certainly sounds the same.
Of course, this little discourse took place before the United States tipped into a profound democratic crisis with hard-to-predict outcomes, but the sort of history we see being made south of the 49th Parallel may present opportunities as well as challenges for people who put ideology ahead of their country.
Indeed, I expect this kind of talk has been quite common even in pre-MAGA Canadian right-wing circles for a long time – only behind closed doors.
Of course, there are many other reasons the UCP may consider an early election next year as well – among them, getting ahead of the government’s ongoing public-sector labour relations crisis, increasing health care chaos, embarrassing oil company layoffs, and continuing procurement scandals.
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