Danielle Smith's nine questions

It never hurts to ask, I hope

Danielle Smith addresses Albertans, Thursday night

Alberta premier Danielle Smith has become such a polarizing figure that I should probably put my cards on table. I’ve enjoyed my occasional conversations with her even if I don’t always find her arguments persuasive. As the fairly-elected premier of a Canadian province, she doesn’t strike me as a particularly subversive figure. I was happy to interview her in early 2025 about the appropriate response to Donald Trump’s tariffs, at a time when much of the country’s intelligentsia had convicted her of abandoning a “Team Canada” consensus that struck me as forced and unsustainable.

I find much of Smith’s new plan to put nine referendum questions to Albertans baffling, but I find I’m still able to state my objections calmly. Readers looking for spicier stuff are invited to read Emmett Macfarlane, the veteran political scientist who says she “launched a xenophobic assault on immigration” on her way to proposing “a constitutional agenda that would reduce Canada to a rump of pathetic, disaggregated fiefdoms.”

Mostly I think the referendum questions ask Albertans for permission to do things the government is already free to do. I find Smith’s asserted basis for the referendums — that Alberta is facing an unusual and sustained avalanche of immigrants — unpersuasive. I’m pretty sure the real reason for the questions is that Smith hopes Alberta separatists will be so distracted by nine questions on assorted stuff that they’ll forget their plan to ask a specific question on seceding from Canada. I doubt it’ll work.

Let’s get to it.