Danielle Smith watches her back

Guest writer Ken Boessenkool on the party factions Alberta's premier has to manage

As a complex political year heats up in Alberta and Quebec, I plan to cover events in both provinces regularly, both in person and with help from other writers. I asked Ken Boessenkool, a veteran Conservative political strategist, for his take on Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s plan to put nine referendum questions — and maybe more — to Albertans this autumn. Boessenkool delivers a handy reminder that one thing the premier is protecting is her own political survival. — pw

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Alberta appears to be in the throes of a major separatist threat. There’s the potential separatist referendum this fall. Separatist leaders are getting hearings with senior Trump officials. Some of those officials have weighed in favourably on the separatist project. And Premier Danielle Smith’s defence of Canada through it all is squib-like in its dampness.

At the same time, recent polling shows Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney is quite popular in Alberta, with the federal Liberals showing rising support levels. The Memorandum of Understanding between Carney and Smith that would see Carney win big on climate in exchange for Smith winning big on energy infrastructure is clearly part of all of this.

So Alberta is on the cusp of a dangerous separation referendum at the same time as there are significant breakthroughs in relations between Ottawa and Alberta?

In a word, yes.

It’s possible to make sense of this, but it requires rewinding the tape a bit.

Ever since Ralph Klein quit, following tepid support from party members in a 2006 leadership review, small groups of aligned party members, often in close concert with caucus, have exercised outsized control over the premier of Alberta. With this result: No Conservative premier since Klein has been permitted even to lead the party in more than one election.

Ed Stelmach recruited some Ukrainian Albertans to win the Progressive Conservative leadership in 2006. He handily won the subsequent election. The caucus, with broad party support, pushed him out in 2011 before he could contest a second election.

Alison Redford recruited some teachers to win the Progressive Conservative leadership in 2011. She handily won the subsequent election. The caucus, with broad party support, pushed her out in 2014 before she could contest a second election.

Jason Kenney recruited some federal Conservatives to win the Progressive Conservative leadership in early 2017. He then merged that party with the Wildrose Alliance and won the leadership of the combined party later that same year. He handily won the subsequent election. In 2022, some anti-lockdown/anti-vax folks joined the party to successfully depose Kenney before he could contest a second election.

Danielle Smith has been a central player in all of this drama. She drew two critical lessons: first, party members are much more important than Alberta voters when it comes to holding your job; second, the party can be controlled by small groups of aligned Albertans.

She applied those lessons to win the leadership (and become premier) in 2022. She combined the support of two groups. First, the groups that organized to dump Kenney became “Take Back Alberta” under the very adept organizational skills of long-time conservative organizer David Parker. Second, a dollop of nascent separatists signed up for the “Free Alberta Strategy” that Smith’s current chief political adviser, Rob Anderson, co-wrote. That strategy proposed an “Alberta Sovereignty Act” as one of several potential precursors to a referendum taking Alberta out of Canada.

Both groups had thousands of supporters across Alberta. So it was a bit of a surprise when six ballots were necessary for Smith to secure the leadership in 2022. It was a sign of her strong but narrow appeal. (Full disclosure: I ran one of the failed leadership campaigns in that contest.)

Smith handily won the subsequent 2023 election. She then went about running government to make sure those who were in control of her keeping her job had no reason to turn against her. Those people weren’t the broad spectrum of Alberta voters, they were “Take Back” and “Free” Albertans. If Smith was to stay on as premier and contest another election, it was more important to keep an eye on her party support than on her popular support.

Keeping popular support has been relatively straightforward to date: stay focused on the economy and rely on perhaps the weakest opposition any Alberta premier has been fortunate to have. NDP leader Naheed Nenshi spent most of his life dissing the very idea of partisanship and political parties. His “purple” brand as a successful mayor of Calgary was famously a combination of Liberal red and Conservative blue. It turns out that someone who disdains party politics is really bad at leading a partisan party. Who knew?

Keeping party support has been an entirely different matter. You can tell when the Smith government is acting to keep virulent party activists onside. These initiatives tend to be run by a small cabal out of the Premier’s Office and to be much more haphazard and symbolic, often shambolic. Thankfully for Smith, Take Back and Free Albertans appear to care more about style than substance.

An early example was the Sovereignty Act. Early drafts were so rough that they had to be pulled and redrafted numerous times. This was an operation directed almost entirely by political staff—no serious civil service would sign off on such slop. In the end, the law was a pale shadow of Smith’s leadership promises, but that didn’t stop the Free Albertans from celebrating an essentially meaningless piece of legislation.

Another example is Smith’s forays into transgender policy, book banning, and the frequent and pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause. All curious turns for a self-proclaimed libertarian. But Take Back Albertans are largely evangelical Albertans radicalized when the Kenney government shuttered churches for a few months during the pandemic. They have moved on to issues imported from Trumpian evangelicals in the U.S. Smith knows she has to hand them regular victories, though here too reversals and flip-flops are common.

Today, Take Back and Free Albertans control the United Conservative Party of Alberta— and Danielle Smith’s ability to contest the next election.

Both groups have rallied around Alberta separation. Take Back Albertans see separation as a path to a religious state embracing a panacea of policies imported from the Trumpian evangelical right (evangelical is used here as a label, not a theology). Free Albertans have wanted separation all along.

To accede to these demands, Smith made it easier for these groups to force a referendum on separation by lowering the signature thresholds and extending the time to collect those signatures. And, by all accounts, Take Back and Free Albertans are close to getting enough signatures in the time required (they need around 170,000 verified signatures by early May).

One suspects that Smith and her cabal were hoping that easier thresholds would placate these groups for a spell. One also suspects that the more sensible voices in her caucus and retinue are quite worried about the implications of holding a referendum on separation.

To date, most of the actions to placate party members don’t interfere much with Smith’s broader government agenda. The Sovereignty Act was symbolic slop. Appeasing radicalized evangelicals has some real and painful downsides, is irritating or just plain dumb (book banning), but it doesn’t stop a pipeline from being built or health care from being turned upside down.

But an actual referendum? That would have serious implications for the reputation of the province. It is a serious distraction from important economic work that should be done. It almost certainly will fail, but that’s what was said of a host of other democratic misadventures globally. Trump somehow became president. Twice.

Which makes her latest gambit—a series of referendum questions on a host of non-separation issues—rather interesting. They are the first real collision between what party members want and what the broader electorate cares about. I won’t rehash Wells’s analysis of the various questions, as I largely agree. Instead, I will focus on how Smith might be trying to manage that collision.

First, she may be hoping these new questions satiate the separatists enough to put their separatist project to the side. I don’t think the separatists will be satiated. The premier opened the door to a separatist referendum, and I expect the separatists will want to walk through it. If Smith closed that door, I wager they’d take her out.

Second, she may grant the referendum on separation but hope these additional referendum questions make it less likely that disaffected Albertans—the fairly large group that feels alienated from Canada—will back separation. It may be easier for them to support Smith’s other questions than a straight-up question on separation. Result? The separation question is defeated by a larger margin. In other words, Smith is satiating the desire of many Albertans to get a better deal without putting the knife quite so close to the throat by voting yes to separation. Again, the danger here is that the separatists see through her ploy.

Neither scenario plays out well for Smith’s standing with party members.

The irony is that Smith is well positioned to handily win the next election. If the federal government and Alberta can get through the April deadlines setting out the environmental foundation for the MOU and the July deadlines setting out the energy infrastructure foundations, Smith could take these major victories to the polls. And I suspect she would win—handily.

The real question is whether separatist party members will let her hold her job long enough to contest what would be her second election. No Conservative premier has done that in two decades in Alberta.

I’d take even odds that she’ll be the first.

Ken Boessenkool is a partner at Meredith Boessenkool & Phillips, and a former advisor to Stephen Harper, Ralph Klein, Jim Dinning, Christy Clark and others. In 2001 his signature appeared, with Stephen Harper’s and others, on the Alberta Agenda, the so-called “Firewall Letter” that laid out an agenda for increasing Alberta’s provincial autonomy within Canada.