When Prime Minister Mark Carney called Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s relentless campaign to ensure there’s some form of separation referendum on a provincial ballot next fall “a dangerous bluff” and “not helpful” yesterday, City News in Ottawa sent a reporter to find a Conservative MP who would complain about it.
To many of us, Mr. Carney’s mild-mannered and carefully worded remarks to a group of reporters at an outdoor announcement about affordable housing might have sounded like the understatement of the year. After all, as Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, he occupied a ringside seat to the Brexit disaster, the damaging impacts of which are still being felt in the United Kingdom.
“The Brexit analogy comes up over and over again – and for good reason,” Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Not only was it poorly thought out, but David Cameron put it to a ballot and then campaigned against it – which is exactly what Danielle Smith said she would do.”
But it never takes much to crank up the Conservative rage machine in this country, and it looks as if it wasn’t much trouble for City’s national reporter, Xiaoli Li, to rustle up an appropriately angry Conservative MP from Calgary.
“He has no right to wag his finger,” huffed the MP in question, Michelle Rempel Garner, on the news clip broadcast by City News across the country. “There’s one person who can unite the country right now, and one job it is, and it’s Mark Carney’s.”
“But he can’t just wag his finger,” she continued, unbothered by the fact that neither literally nor figuratively was Mr. Carney wagging his finger when he noted how easy it is for referenda of this nature to be manipulated by bad actors foreign and domestic and for there to be disastrous consequences as a result.
It is, in other words, an obvious risk that could impact many of us, and one that Ms. Smith is obviously willing to take.
According to Ms. Rempel Garner, finding a solution to the blackmail scheme ginned up by Ms. Smith and her separatist allies in the United Conservative Party and seemingly inspired by Preston Manning’s 51st State scheme, which he outlined to Ms. Smith in 2021, rests entirely on Mr. Carney’s shoulders.
Well, I’m sure we can all agree that ex officio the prime minister is bound to play an important role in solving this problem, but a little responsible behaviour by Conservative politicians, federal and provincial, in Alberta in particular, might be helpful as well.
Ms. Rempel Garner then got down to the nature of the of the solution, as she sees it, which naturally involves increasing exports of fossil fuel products – a development to which, by the sound of it, Mr. Carney has no objections whatsoever, notwithstanding the need for a prime minister to at least consider the thoughts of Canadians outside Alberta. “He has to project real action,” she said, “tell Albertans when a shovel is gonna go in the ground for pipelines.”
“As an Albertan, what I can tell you, sitting in the House of Commons, which has made my blood boil for a decade, is watching the flippancy with which they thought they could just pit region against region and think that everything was gonna be OK, right?”
This, of course, is utter nonsense, although of a sort often taken to be unvarnished truth in Alberta because it is repeated so often. Mr. Carney was certainly not being flippant. Nor was his predecessor Mr. Trudeau – who to this day gets no credit from Alberta MPs for spending $34.2 billion to build Alberta a new pipeline to the West Coast along the route of an old one. That is a feat that no other PM of any stripe has managed since 1953, when the PM was Louis St. Laurent, also a Liberal.
The City clip concludes with Ms. Rempel Garner, in high dudgeon, saying: “And then pointing the finger at my province this morning after doing that? That is not what we need in leadership right now!”*
“My province,” indeed. Is this not the same Ms. Rempel Garner who was not so long ago a permanent resident of Oklahoma, and from all the evidence on the Internet, may still be?
A reader of this blog asked me a couple of nights ago who I thought would be the first Alberta elected official to step up and say they’re not voting for Canadian unity. Some rural reeve? Some town councillor? An MLA? An MP?
Maybe it could be Ms. Rempel Garner, the Honourable Member for Calgary-Nose Hill, who once pondered running to lead the UCP when Mr. Kenney was skidded out the door? Scratch an Alberta separatist with any influence, and you’ll find a 51st State annexationist. So why not an elected official who feels at home in Oklahoma?
Well, probably not. Federal Conservative Leader and Alberta MP Pierre Poilievre has pledged that all 33 of his Alberta MPs will campaign for Alberta to remain in Canada. “It is the job of the prime minister of Canada to unite the country, and as prime minister in waiting, I will begin that work myself,” he really said. Mind you, Ms. Smith says that she too will campaign for Alberta to remain Canadian, which is odd since she continues to do everything she can to achieve the opposite result.
Just for fun, let’s finish up with Jason Kenney, the first UCP premier, pushed out by Danielle Smith and her separatist allies, and now a bitter opponent of Ms. Smith’s separatist schemes. On the night the Brexit referendum results came in from the U.K., he infamously tweeted: “Congratulations to the British people on choosing hope over fear by embracing a confident, sovereign future, open to the world!”
I wonder if he still sees Brexit the same way, or if he’s reconsidered?
*An exact transcript of Ms. Rempel Garner’s final comment in the City News clip would read: “That is not what we need in leadership right wing, right now!”* God and Ms. Rempel Garner only know the origin of that slip.
