SASK. ON OUTSIDE: FINGAS,
Well, that resistance fell apart in a hurry.
Less than a month after a federal election in which Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government was reduced to a minority, the gang of rightwing premiers supposedly united in opposition to him has scattered.
New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs has announced that he’s pulling out of legal challenges to the federal carbon tax, and will instead develop a plan to comply with Canada’s climate change policy. Manitoba’s Brian Pallister has criticized any attempt to stoke separatist sentiment as a means to pursue partisan ends. And even Ontario’s Doug Ford has struck a somewhat more conciliatory tone toward Trudeau.
With Alberta and Saskatchewan then the last two provinces refusing to recognize the will of voters across Canada, many have been tempted to treat the Prairie region as a single, monolithic holdout. But that point of view neglects how Alberta’s position has evolved — leaving Scott Moe alone with nothing to show for his stubbornness.
While Jason Kenney has fanned the flames of separatism, he has also started pushing options to detach Alberta from federal influence within Canada’s constitutional structure. Last week, Kenney instructed a group of political allies, including Preston Manning, to barnstorm around the province to sell the possibility of cutting ties with the federal government in areas ranging from pensions to policing to revenue collection. He’s demanding “tax points” as an alternative to federal funding for social programs. And he’s also put a separate Alberta constitution on the table.
Other commentators have pointed out the glaring flaws in Kenney’s proposals from Alberta’s standpoint. Most of them were already
We’d be ... worse off if Alberta decided to impose provincial governance systems.
studied — and rejected as entirely unfeasible — when Ralph Klein was similarly looking for ways to translate anger with the federal government into provincial power. And virtually all involve incurring massive expenses and risks, to no end other than projecting Alberta’s hostility toward Ottawa.
Which leads to the significance for Saskatchewan: Kenney’s retreat into provincialism leaves even Moe on the outside looking in.
Nothing about Kenney’s panel involves any participation by, nor consideration for, anybody beyond Alberta’s borders. And as ill-advised as Kenney’s plans are for his own province, they’re even worse from the perspective of a neighbour trying to claim Alberta as an ally.
Whatever Kenney’s base wants to pursue, there’s no reason to think that Saskatchewan’s citizens share any interest in abandoning the Canada Pension Plan or the RCMP merely to spite the federal government. We’d be nothing but worse off if Alberta decided to impose provincial governance systems that made it more difficult for businesses and people to work in both provinces. And the theoretical rationale for shifting from federal funding to a transfer of tax points doesn’t apply to Saskatchewan: Unlike Alberta, we’d end up worse off in raw dollar terms if that exchange came to pass.
We might expect that two premiers so close in ideology and geography would pay some attention to each other’s plans and interests. But Kenney’s complete lack of consideration for his province’s most devoted lapdog has been matched by Moe’s refusal to answer an isolationist scheme, which would do far more harm to Saskatchewan than anything the Trudeau Liberals have proposed.
As a result, the best-case scenario for Saskatchewan is for Kenney to be wasting time and money on an ineffective distraction tactic. But any responsible government would be looking for ways to reduce both the likelihood of Kenney following through on his destructive plans, and the impact on us if he does. And the fact that Moe has been left entirely on his own confirms just how little he’s done to actually advance Saskatchewan’s interests.
Fingas is a Regina lawyer, blogger and freelance political commentator who has written about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective since 2005.