The United Conservative Party (UCP)’s effort to force a separation referendum onto a ballot this fall and blame it on the people who signed the pro-Canada Forever Canadian petition was unfolding according to plan in a Legislature committee meeting yesterday afternoon when Opposition House Leader Christina Gray raised a point of privilege.
Gray, who is not a member of the UCP-dominated Select Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee but could speak as the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Mill Woods, explained that she had just learned the UCP Caucus had published a news release saying the motion recommending a referendum question to cabinet had passed.
It had not. Indeed, it had not even been voted on.
This exposed the committee’s deliberations as a sham, committee chair Brandon Lunty as something less than the sharpest knife in the UCP drawer, and the UCP of being capable of messing up spectacularly even when it holds all the cards.
The news release in question quoted Lunty spinning the circumstances hard as “following the law and respecting the expectations” of the nearly half a million Albertans who signed the Forever Canadian petition organized last year by former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk. According to Lunty’s version of the facts, they “signed Mr. Lukaszuk’s petition in good faith, understanding it would result in a referendum.”
The reality, of course, is that most of them just wanted to tell Smith and her separatist allies to go to hell, and even Lunty had to understand that.
Well, whatever. That was the moment the stuff hit the fan. Talk about a messy case of premature dissemination! The release was quickly pulled off the internet by the UCP, but screen shots were popping up within seconds.
It was, Gray told the committee, an obvious breach of Parliamentary privilege. Lunty looked like a deer in the headlights as Ms. Gray dropped her bombshell.
Just before that gobsmacking moment, Nate Glubish, Danielle Smith’s technology minister and the MLA for Strathcona-Sherwood Park, had moved that the committee use the Forever Canadian petition’s wording as the basis of the separation referendum the premier has been scheming for months to put before Albertans.
Rest assured, this is not because the UCP loves Forever Canadian’s wording. It’s because courts have blocked the Stay Free Alberta petition’s wording as unconstitutional and stopped verification of that petition’s signatures by Elections Alberta because First Nations were not consulted about the implications of tearing Alberta out of Canada.
Apparently the sneaky committee manoeuvre, opposed by the NDP and Lukaszuk, was the only way for a desperate separatist-dominated governing party to get the divisive separation question it wants on the ballot in October or risk completely alienating its powerful anti-Canadian faction.
Implied but not stated in the debate between the three UCP members of the committee, who favoured the motion, and its two NDP members, who opposed it, was that wording can be altered later to something more favourable to breaking up the country. The opening of the UCP news release carried the same implication.
The committee had given Lukaszuk five minutes – later extended to 10 – to make his case that his question shouldn’t be used to advance the government’s scheme. Glubish and Assisted Living Minister Jason Nixon argued aggressively and at length with Lukaszuk, obviously trying to make the preposterous case the referendum would be all his fault.
Gray called for the matter to be referred to the Speaker of the House – Ric McIver, who is capable of independent thought and is expected to retire after the next election. Obviously the UCP didn’t want to take a chance on that. She also said Lunty – who by his own words and actions had revealed the whole thing was a set-up – should recuse himself.
The committee recessed while the UCP members figured out what the hell to do. When the meeting resumed, the UCP members – Glubish, Nixon and Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA Tara Sawyer – quickly voted down a motion to send the matter to McIver.
Lunty, naturally, remained in the chair.
But when he tried to move the meeting back on track to approve getting Smith’s separation question onto the ballot, the clock ran out. A fiery Rakhi Pancholi, deputy NDP leader and committee member, and Calgary-Foothills MLA Court Ellingson said no to an extension, so for the moment the matter is unresolved.
“Whatever the Premier chooses for the wording of a referendum, the UCP owns it,” Pancholi said in a statement after the meeting. “They can’t hide behind the separatists. They can’t hide behind Forever Canada. … She can say no to a referendum that she and the UCP so clearly want. Or she can go ahead with it, owning forever that she is Alberta’s first separatist premier.”
Lunty has called for the committee to meet again at 2 o’clock Thursday afternoon. Obviously, the motion will be rammed through then, just in time to save the 20 minutes of prime time TV the premier has booked for this evening to tell us all why a divisive separation referendum is a good thing for Alberta. No media questions will be permitted.
Thursday morning, new members of Smith’s cabinet will be sworn in after announcements yesterday by two of the more level-headed ministers in her current cabinet – Finance Minister Nate Horner and Hospital and Surgical Services Minister Matt Jones – that they are quitting their portfolios and not running in the next election.
Did they jump to escape the gong show Smith’s MAGA-adjacent rule has produced or were they pushed because they remain too loyal to Canada? Hard to say given the limited data available.
Horner, a scion of the Horner political clan, indicated in his resignation letter that quitting was “the best fit for me and my family.” It’s hard to argue with that from his perspective. This morning, Nixon is expected to be handed the keys to the finance minister’s office, which he occupied briefly in 2022.
Meanwhile, Smith’s manoeuvre is unlikely to do much to assuage the fury of Alberta separatists. The premier, said prominent separatist Jeffrey Rath on social media Tuesday night, “had better understand that if she puts a question forward on Independence that isn’t a constitutional question that complies with the Clarity Act that she will be betraying her base in favour of Carney as badly as when she screwed them over for Jim Prentice.”
