Happy Victoria Day!
Over the weekend leading up to our national celebration of Victorian rectitude, imperialism and class inequality, prominent Alberta separatist Jeffrey Rath took to the Internet appearing to advocate an internal United Conservative Party coup to remove Premier Danielle Smith.
Her sin, in Mr. Rath’s obvious estimation, is that she’s been working too closely with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney and playing both sides of Independence Avenue in her efforts to keep the party’s fraying coalition of outright separatists and traditional Canadian Conservatives in one piece.
His solution: The separatist cadres who now clearly control the UCP, but not quite yet either the government caucus or the provincial government, should dump her and replace her with a more ideologically acceptable leader and declare the party to be a separatist entity in the manner of the Parti Québécois.
Arguably, this could either be a sign of Ms. Smith’s increasing strength thanks to her latest deal with Mr. Carney, or of the separatists’ increasing strength as the holders of most of the internal power positions in the UCP party bureaucracy. Or, perhaps, a bit of both.
Ms. Smith’s strategy, as is well understood, has been to assert that only she can successfully keep the open separatists now embedded in the party, caucus and cabinet from scaring away electors accustomed to voting Conservative without thinking too deeply about what the party nowadays represents.
Likewise, as the vessel of Preston Manning’s strategy of blackmailing the federal government into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51st State, she is the only politician likely to be able to get away with perpetrating this political protection racket.
Talk of an internal party coup, though, should be taken seriously because Mr. Rath, who is legal counsel and for all practical purposes the self-appointed spokesperson for the Stay Free Alberta petition/Alberta Prosperity Project (SFA), is extremely influential within Alberta’s separatist faction. It is not clear if he has ambitions of his own in the new Alberta he hopes to create, but it is easy to assume that he must.
So when Mr. Rath was so blunt about what he thinks should happen next in a series of social media posts yesterday, we should pay attention. He speaks for many in the UCP.
“Premier Smith had no mandate from her membership to sign the Carbon Tax MOU with Mark Carney,” Mr. Rath posted at one point yesterday. “Danielle Smith no longer enjoys the confidence of the members of the UCP.” If that’s not a call for a coup, I don’t know what is.
“Enough is enough,” he said in another post. “We are a super majority of the party. Time to take it back from the Kenneyites.” (The “Kenneyites,” remember, basically purged the “Red Tories” from the UCP after former premier Jason Kenney engineered the double reverse hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party in the summer of 2017. This is an irony, since those Red Tories, had they still been around in any numbers, could have saved Mr. Kenney’s bacon in the fall of 2022.)
Here’s another, delivered Trump-style, in all caps: “DANIELLE SMITH HAS LOST HER MANDATE TO LEAD THE UCP!”
Mr. Rath’s message to the cadres in the UCP’s riding constituency associations: “MAKE SURE TO ATTEND YOUR LOCAL CA BOARD AGM AND ELECT A SLATE OF PRO-INDEPENDENCE BOARD MEMBERS. CONTACT YOUR LOCAL APP OR STAY FREE REGIONAL LEADERS FOR GUIDANCE.”
“We need to work to replace every non independence board in the province,” he said in part in another post.
All these messages were posted on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, a place a lot of moderate Albertans nowadays sensibly eschew, if only to keep their blood pressure down. Someone has to look in there, however, and I’m willing to take the risk so that the rest of you don’t have to.
If this was more than just an anticipatory outburst of exuberance in memory of the late grandmother of Europe’s titled classes it suggests Danielle Smith’s “United Conservative” coalition could actually be starting to fracture.
It’s worth noting that the separatists on social media are also infuriated by the possibility that when the pipe gets laid, it may not follow the route most of them prefer, that is, the one most likely to annoy the most British Columbians and First Nations along the way to Prince Rupert. (The British Columbia city of that name and the terminus of the Alberta separatists’ imagined Danzig Corridor to the sea, that is, not the first governor of the late Hudson’s Bay Co., just to be clear.)
Meanwhile, speaking of Independence Avenue, a metaphor lest you tried to look it up on Google Maps, Edmonton City Councillor Michael Janz yesterday announced he had applied on behalf of many of his constituents to rename the road in front of the Alberta Legislature “Forever Canadian Avenue.”
Mr. Janz – councillor for Ward papastew, located just across the North Saskatchewan River from the Legislature – said the renaming of two blocks of 99th Avenue between 107th Street and 109th Street “will celebrate the largest non-partisan citizen movement in Alberta’s history.”
“The Forever Canadian petition collected signatures from Albertans who want Alberta to proudly remain a Canadian province,” Mr. Janz explained in a statement. “This effort was prompted as a response to Premier Danielle Smith encouraging conversations about Alberta separation. The petition gathered 456,000 signatures and motivated more than 10,000 Albertans to volunteer in support of this work.”
Mr. Janz, who is a tireless progressive activist not unprepared to be a gadfly if that’s what it takes to accomplish something, was accompanied to an outdoor news conference yesterday by Forever Canadian petition proponent Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier of Alberta.
Mr. Janz will make application to the Edmonton Naming Committee, an independent body of volunteers appointed by the city. He pointed out that there is a precedent, when another city councillor successfully applied in 2018 to have a city road renamed Canadian Forces Trail.
If Mr. Janz succeeds with this one, it will drive the UCP and the SFA nuts.
