Criticism of Ottawa, the federal government, and the federal Liberals is nothing new in Canada. Nor is the refusal of one province to go along with everyone else on a specific policy, even if it is deemed to be in the national interest. But since the Quiet Revolution of the mid-sixties, the recalcitrant province in question has almost always been Quebec. In fact, this has been such a predictable scenario that phrases such as “What does Quebec want?” and “The Rest of Canada” became well entrenched in our political discourse.
But that was then and this is now. For most of the last decade the label of “odd-province-out” has applied far more to Alberta than Quebec. This was true when Stephen Harper’s former minister, Jason Kenny, took over the reins as premier with the United Conservative Party, but it has now accelerated dramatically in wild and wacky ways under his successor, Danielle Smith.
Smith has made Kenny’s equalization referendum look like a minor lover’s quarrel compared with some of her vitriolic no-holds-barred rhetoric and contrarian views over the past few years. Her dislike of all things Ottawa has led to proposals to replace the RCMP with a provincial police force, the Canada Health Act with a made-in-Alberta plan and the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta-based one that she also believes should receive some 50% of the funds in the current national plan as a startup. On the environmental front, she has not only launched several legal challenges against proposed and existing federal legislation, but more recently has essentially dismantled any and all alternative energy programs created by her predecessors and opened the door to more intensive development of the oilsands.
And what can one sensibly say about Smith’s signature Alberta Sovereignty Act, (which allegedly “is designed to “protect” Alberta from federal laws and policies that the Alberta legislature deems to be unconstitutional or harmful to Albertans or the province’s economic prosperity, in areas such as natural resources, gun control, COVID-19 public health, education, and agriculture” [i]), apart from the fact that it has been widely panned and considered by many legal scholars to be unconstitutional? Even former premier Kenney described it as a “full-frontal attack on the rule of law”, as well as a step towards separation and a “banana republic.”[ii]
While venerable former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed may have framed the federal government as his adversary in provincial election campaigns, he did not make a career out of attacking federal government policies – or individual politicians — at every opportunity. Nor did he stray beyond the bounds of civil discourse and democratic convention. Not so Ms. Smith.
She has described the federal government’s climate change and environmental protection policies as “Ottawa’s unhinged vendetta” against her province,[iii] and in a recent, highly controversial interview with American rightwing commentator and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson, she actually suggested he “put federal environment minister Stephen Guilbeault in his crosshairs.”[iv] She has accused the prime minister of “demonizing” her province and declared she will “not stand idly by while Justin Trudeau sacrifices our prosperity, our constitution and our quality of life for his extreme agenda.”[v] And she has blamed the entire tariff crisis on Trudeau personally. “If there is a failure, the failure lands entirely at the feet of Justin Trudeau who damaged the relationship with the incoming president by his antics in the first round of negotiations,” she declared.[vi] Since even former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney praised Trudeau’s handling of negotiations during that earlier crisis as a tour de force, Smith’s interpretation of history is unique to say the least.
And now, of course, we are treated to the spectacle of Quebec’s premier Francois Legault happily playing his part in the prime minister’s Team Canada response to Donald Trump’s tariff blackmail, while Danielle Smith refuses to sign on to the team at all and instead goes to Mar-a-Lago to plead on bended knee for special treatment. [vii]
Even Doug Ford, the normally sympathetic fellow right-wing populist premier of Ontario, was mightily upset by Ms Smith’s go-it-alone posture. Stopping just short of calling her a traitor, he declared “I have a little different theory: protect your jurisdiction, ok, but country comes first. Canada’s the priority…Trump is going full tilt at Canadians. We need to be united. United we stand, divided we fall.”[viii]
What to make of this seeming about face? Alberta has clearly replaced Quebec as the problem child of Canadian politics and the obvious question is why? Quebec’s motives were obvious. Quebecers had legitimate concerns about preservation of their language and culture and Quebec’s original agreement to participate in the federal project was based on various guarantees to preserve those characteristics. Successive premiers were vigilant in their defence of those guarantees against perceived threats, even if their methods and solutions were not always ones the rest of the country could relate to or buy into. But Alberta had no such cultural distinctiveness. Instead, much of the explanation for Alberta’s current role as spoiler is to be found in accidents of history, and the fact that federal systems, over time, can actually create distinct cultures in subnational units where none existed before. [ix]
Recall that Alberta was not even an obvious choice of province in the beginning. Quebec was already a well-defined political unit before confederation, like Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. But western Canada was a great expanse of unknown, referred to as the Northwest Territories. After British Columbia was added as a province in 1871 it was obvious that something would need to be done since the remaining western/northern territory was simply too large. The solution, in 1905, was to carve out two new provinces, (Alberta and Saskatchewan), south of 60, with arbitrary geographically-determined borders (Just look at Saskatchewan on a map.)[x] As a result Alberta had no real identity of its own.
Instead of common culture or history, the most significant factor in the evolution of a distinct Alberta perspective on Canadian federalism was, of course, the discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947. Needless to say, when assigning jurisdiction to the two levels of government in 1867 the Fathers of Confederation did not anticipate that oil would become an important commodity. And it was another twist of fate which saw that commodity occurring within the borders of only one province.[xi] The end result was predictable. From concerns over pipelines and transportation policy to rejection of the ill-fated National Energy Program, and more recent outrage over emission caps, Alberta’s major conflicts with the federal government have been focused on the oil and gas industry ever since.
However, this alone cannot explain the recent rise in both the tenor and tone of Alberta’s criticism, or the widening subject matter of that criticism. From this original concern with preserving the industry underpinning Alberta’s economy, the current premier and her immediate predecessor have raised the bar on intergovernmental conflict to cover a wide range of unrelated issues. Moreover the primary driver of this increased conflict is not economic but ideological. The rise of right-wing populism in Alberta has led to increased political polarization and a lack of civility in political discourse, a phenomenon common to other liberal democracies where such populist tendencies have taken hold.
But the dominant political culture in Canada remains essentially liberal. As a result, Alberta’s premier and government now find themselves offside with widely supported national healthcare programs, (including dental care and pharmacare) and most notably with the province’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.[xii] Similar conflicts have emerged over childcare, drug addiction and gun control policies. The Smith government has even created issues and then addressed them through aggressive legislation – such as their recent bills on parental permission on pronoun use, transgender identities and sex education – which has resulted in widespread condemnation across the country.
This is particularly significant since Quebec has rarely been at philosophical odds with national governments, and especially with the Liberal ones that have dominated Canadian politics for so long. Indeed, once the separatist/nationalist issue is put aside, the province has long been seen as having a centre-left political culture. Both the PQ and the Bloc have most often found themselves on the same side as the Liberals and NDP on the majority of issues. Recall that it was Quebec that took the lead on the idea of a national pension plan and, more recently, a national childcare plan and pharmacare plan. It was Quebec that fought the Harper government tooth and nail over its efforts to dismantle the national gun registry and to introduce a variety of “tough on crime” measures. Certainly Stephen Harper discovered this political reality to his dismay in 2004 and 2008, and eventually was forced to devise a strategy for achieving a majority without Quebec in 2011. And it is Quebec that took the lead in establishing a cap-and-trade environmental program with the Ontario Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne and the state of California. Even more directly, it is Quebec that has categorically rejected Alberta’s dream of an eastern pipeline.
So in one sense Alberta has indeed become Quebec. It is now the principal disruptor of federal-provincial relations and the province most likely to request special treatment. At the same time, Alberta’s reasons for becoming federalism’s problem child are quite different from those of Quebec. Rather than cultural or societal concerns, Alberta’s differences of opinion are driven by economic concerns and a right-wing ideological agenda.
The consequences for national unity of this about-face in Canadian federalism are evident everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more so than in recent public opinion polling. In the face of the Trump tariff threats, an Angus Reid poll conducted the first week of February found that fully two thirds of Quebecers considered their province’s relationship with the federal government to be “good or very good”, and nearly 60% were “very proud” to be Canadian. Contrast that with Albertans. Only 29% felt their province’s relationship with the federal government was good, which is hardly a surprise given their premier’s constant attacks. Meanwhile at 61%, the number of Albertans proud or very proud to be Canadian was lower than every other province except Quebec.
However the more significant revelation can be found in an Abacus poll conducted in late January about Donald Trump’s tariff threats. As Abacus CEO David Coletto noted, at 91%, Canadians’ awareness of the threat was at the highest level he has seen in many years, equaled only by their awareness of the COVID pandemic. So ignorance can be ruled out in various responses to questions posed by the poll. Interestingly, Quebecers registered the highest level of agreement (71%) with the statement that they are “absolutely opposed” to any type of merger with the United States, and only 14% were open to the idea of exploring options, two percentage points below the national average of 16%. This contrasts with only 64% of Albertans who were absolutely opposed, and a shocking 21% who were open to exploring options. In addition the ideological rift appears in these findings as well, with 77% of Liberals absolutely opposed, but only 58% of Conservative supporters sharing that view. [xiii]
Nor is there any reason to suppose this situation will change in the near future. Another recent poll indicated that Smith’s approval rating currently stands at 51%, the highest it has been since 2023. Initial hopes that former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, the newly elected leader of the provincial NDP, might change the dynamics of party politics in the province do not appear to be panning out. (Given the electoral map of Alberta, the UCP can continue to win a majority by taking all of the rural seats and only some of those in Calgary. By contrast the NDP must not only maintain their Edmonton stronghold but take almost all of the seats in Calgary to compensate for the UCP’s stranglehold on rural ridings.)
What does this mean for interprovincial relations?
With the issue of climate change likely to remain high on the international agenda, the prospect of even greater federal-provincial conflict centred on Alberta’s concerns about federal environmental policy looms large. One recent comprehensive study found that “although 72 per cent of Canadians say they are “worried” (45 per cent) or “very worried” (27 per cent) about climate change, those topline findings mask large differences across regions from a high of 84 per cent in Quebec to just 55 per cent in Alberta.”[xiv]
There are other large gaps masked by the overall national numbers, most notably the huge gulf between the 83% of federal Liberals who believe “climate change is a crisis and we need to act quickly” and the mere 34% of federal Conservatives who share that view.
Given that climate change is the epitome of the so-called “wicked problem”[xv], made even more complex in Canada due to the jurisdictional ambiguity in the constitution, any future federal government committed to action will undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance to any proactive measures that are perceived by Alberta governments to negatively impact the oil and gas industry.
Perhaps the only scenario in which this situation does not develop into a full blown constitutional crisis along the lines of earlier Quebec-centric dramas would require the election of a Poilievre Conservative government committed to doing nothing on that file. But this development would potentially produce any number of new federal-provincial and interprovincial battles as progressive provincial governments, and even municipalities, attempted to pick up the slack. Moreover, with current federal measures having successfully reduced emissions in all areas but the oil and gas sector, (where they have continued to rise significantly), it is difficult to envisage a successful strategy without the inclusion of that sector.
A far more difficult but potentially productive approach would require a future federal government to provide more concrete support for Alberta’s key industrial sector as the province shifts to a green economy. To date, however, the specific tools and mechanisms to achieve this objective remain elusive. Moreover this does not address the problem of the far right populist culture that has caused conflicts on a wider range of issues. In the end, the role of Alberta as the problem child of confederation in the 21st century may prove more challenging than the one played by Quebec in the 20th.
[i] https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1931794/albertans-tire-of-fights-with-ottawa-as-danielle-smith-ups-the-anti
[ii] Op cit
[iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm0UOsa01pw
[iv] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC7ze4YXLGM
[v] https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/bell-angry-premier-danielle-smith-sovereignty-act-block-justin-trudeau
[vi] https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/danielle-smith-scorches-trudeau-villain-trump-tariff-drama
[vii] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/01/13/analysis/danielle-smiths-visit-trumps-imperial-court-boom-or-bust-canadas-looming-trade
[viii] https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/01/16/Danielle-Smith-Sabotage-Team-Canada/
[ix] For a detailed discussion of this well-known phenomenon, see W. Riker. Federalism: Origin, Operation and Significance. (New York: Little and Brown, 1964)
[x] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=what+is+the+logic+of+alberta+borders
[xi] More recently oil has been discovered and processed in southwestern Saskatchewan, with noticeable impact on the political culture of that province as well.
[xii] For more details see “Daniel Smith Clearly Does not Understand Science”, Feb. 6, 2025
https://brookejeffrey.ca/danielle-smith-clearly-does- not-understand-science/
[xiii].Nor is Canada unique in this development. Both Australia and the United States have also seen subnational units ( Western Australia and Texas) raise major objections to various policies related to the energy industry
[xiv] https://reclimate.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2024-public-opinion-summary.pdf
[xv] https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/wicked-problem/about/What-is-a-wicked-problem
