Maybe Danielle Smith doesn't want to use the Sovereignty Act, after all
In interview, Alberta premier backtracks on plan to invoke controversial law this spring
Premier Danielle Smith has said so many things about her Alberta Sovereignty Act, some of them apparent contradictions of each other.
One month ago, on the day she launched Alberta's most erratically controversial bill in recent memory, Smith said "I hope we never have to use this bill" — that she wanted it to jerk Ottawa to attention and make them butt out of provincial jurisdiction. That way, the Smith government wouldn't feel aggrieved enough to direct provincial bodies to refuse to enforce federal laws, or some other drastic and possibly unconstitutional measures.
Yet in that same media briefing, she said she'd instructed ministers to find examples of perceived federal overreach: "We expect to table a number of special motions under this act in the upcoming spring legislative session."
Both cannot be true, as much as she tries to play both the hawk and dove of western alienation. Premier Dove sat down for an interview with CBC Calgary this week. Smith made it sound like she likely won't wield this explosive ordinance before May's provincial election — which stands to rankle her hardcore base, but give some tentative comfort to her United Conservative Party's more moderate urban establishment, which is aware how much the broader public dislikes Smith's first law.
Sovereignty, shelved
As she ticked through various federal affronts she's linked to the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, Smith noted ways the threat has abated without opening up a can of ASWUCA.
The Bill C-69 environmental assessment act and single-use plastics ban? Alberta's legal challenges — which predate Smith's premiership — will suffice for now, she said.
New carbon emissions rules on fertilizer and fossil fuel development? She suggested Ottawa is backing down (or, perhaps, the western rhetoric was inflated).
Firearms restrictions? Alberta is doing Sovereignty Act-ish things, like taking provincial control of gun prosecutions and discouraging enforcement of the rules, but without invoking the new law.
"So there's a few things that I thought we might need to use it on, but with the passage of time, we found other alternatives," Smith told me.
"And that's I think what the people would want me to do. I think they want us to defend our constitutional jurisdiction. They want us to use every tool at our disposal. And at the moment, we've found other ways to defend our constitutional territory."
After saying a month ago she'll invoke the act repeatedly this spring to quell ongoing turf issues, Smith said: "I don't see anything at the moment that is imminent." She added, because there's always a but: "But, you know, that could always change."
Change in posturing around the Sovereignty Act has been a rare certainty in this act's bumpy ride through 2022. In October, it seemed a revelation that Alberta's new premier would respect court decisions as she staked claim to provincial sovereignty.
And it's only one week since Smith's office suggested using the Sovereignty Act to thwart the Liberals' mandate for electric vehicle sales by 2035. Unexplained was what blocks Alberta could throw up, given that vehicle standards are federal, and this province is bereft of any car or truck manufacturing.
Health spending accounts: not so fast
In her interview, Smith revealed another big plan will probably be on hold until after the province votes: health spending accounts. One of her few specific health-care promises during the campaign was an app-based program that gave every Albertan $300 to spend on the non-insured health care of their choosing: psychiatry, eye care, physiotherapy, naturopathy, etc.
"I'm not sure that that will be done before the next election, but I'm hopeful that we have at least some kind of beta test that we can do so people will see an innovative approach to health care," Smith said. It's too big a bite, the premier has learned, to create a new universal entitlement program linking 4.5 million Albertans and more than 1.3 billion redistributed tax dollars to thousands of health service vendors through a centrally run digital platform, all within a few months of taking office.
Federal health dollars, or not
While Smith has few out-of-province backers for her "sovereignty" fight, she marches alongside fellow premiers on another federal struggle — to extract more health-care transfers from Ottawa without meddlesome conditions attached to those dollars. Trudeau told CBC this month that "I will fully participate in the funding of it, as long as those real improvements are made," but Smith pledges to resist. "We're not contemplating making any kind of sacrifice of how we do our policies here," she said.
Will she take her refusal of federal rules so firmly that she refuses Ottawa's money? She won't say.
But, she suggested, Alberta's health system may not actually need more federal funds.
"I don't know. I'm of the view that we can't just look at money as the solution here," Smith said. "I think people expect us to deliver better health care within the budget that we have."
That rhetoric may be consistent with the reality of Alberta's massive surpluses and Smith fiscally conservative ideals, but it's at odds with the united front other premiers wish to put forth. There's art and stagecraft, of course, to federal-provincial wrangling; signalling you don't need extra dollars from the national government isn't the textbook way to prime a cash pump.
'Every time I've made a blunder'
But Smith prides herself on not being a textbook politician — especially if the textbook model was predecessor Jason Kenney, a centralizing leader for whom consultation and listening often seemed like boxes to tick. Asked about pressure from inside the Conservative tent to constrain her often unpredictable commentary, Smith said she'll be as careful and precise as she can, but thinks voters would "rather me be natural and a real person than become a robot."
While other leaders downplay their missteps, she chooses a different tack, perhaps owing to their frequency and prominence — from the 2014 floor-crossing that shattered both Wildrose opposition and the Tories she joined, to this year's string of clarification-prompting statements about the unvaccinated facing unparalleled discrimination, likening Alberta's treatment by Ottawa to that of First Nations, and some musings about Ukraine that resembled Russian propaganda.
"I do feel like I've got a lot of, heh, learning opportunities in my history," Smith said, laughing at her own characterization of mistakes. "And every time I've made a blunder, and I've made a lot, it seems to work out. I learn something from it and I grow from it."
She likens herself to former premier Ralph Klein and his readiness to apologize for errors and move on, but Klein never so directly identified the blunder-contrition-recovery pattern as his identity.
What also links her to Klein, Smith said, is a fondness to publicly float trial balloons, and alter policy plans as feedback arrives. Her leadership campaign promise to create new human rights protections for the unvaccinated was one such deflated balloon.
But if so many ideas can be popped or blown off in the wind, what are Albertans to take seriously?
"I think people have a pretty good BS detector," she replied.
As for the cattle excrement detector of a premier who's cozied to vaccine skepticism and other alternative health science on COVID, Smith said she "tends to be pretty trusting" of varied voices.
"When you get a lot of feedback from a lot of people, eventually a truth emerges," she said. "And so I think I tend to listen to a far broader range of scholars, experts and opinion than most people. And I think that that'll make me a better decision-maker as a result."
Soon, millions of Albertans (expert and non-expert) get to weigh in on her premiership and decision-making abilities. That's in five months, and who knows how many evolved approaches to the Sovereignty Act.
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