Some good news for Premier Smith
TO THIS BUNCH, ALBERTA IS TERRA INCOGNITA. — REX MURPHY
Ihave some very good news for you, Danielle Smith: over here in Toronto, the centre of the universe, your recent legislation — the Alberta sovereignty within a united Canada act — is being rebuked, dismissed and ridiculed.
In the Toronto Star — that fountain of sensitivity and social justice — Toronto-based columnist Andrew Phillips suggested that you look like you’re “flailing around like a bad drunk in a bar,” and that your bill “isn’t a serious law.”
This is the language of raw insult, normally reserved for the darker sewers of anonymous Twitter postings. But what you must understand, Premier Smith, is that you are the Premier of Alberta, a province of rednecks, truck drivers and oil workers (all most unsavoury types) and as seen from the cloud-capping top of the CN Tower, Alberta is an outland of rustic hicks — and thereby the approved target of rude language and calculated insults.
Also, of course, Alberta is not Quebec. If that were the case, legislation securing your economy from the manic impulses of the global warming fanatics in the Liberal government would be seen as a courageous rebuttal of federal interference in the affairs of a “distinct society.”
I have other good news for you, Premier Smith: NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — he who rides two horses: Twitter Singh, who deplores the Trudeau Liberals; and actual Singh, enabler, protector and guarantor of whatever Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants — is also deeply disturbed by your legislation.
“It’s deeply concerning for me that Albertans have a premier who doesn’t understand the real risks that Canadians and Albertans are faced with,” he said.
Dear Lord. What a wonder this man is. Has he even once visited Fort Mcmurray, Alta.? Has he ever had a long meeting with workers in the oil industry? Does he know anything, at all, about the province he speaks of so condescendingly?
But Singh knows better than Danielle Smith. The explicit smugness and condescension of his remark is a special moment in the decline of Canadian political leadership. The leader of a national party, in obedient yoke and submission to the “natural governing party,” rebukes a premier for “not understanding” her own province.
Is there something in the Ottawa air that affects those who get sent there and makes them think they are better, smarter, kinder and wiser than the unfortunate non-entities that populate the hinterlands?
Speaking of which, I think the final stroke of luck that Smith has been granted comes from the deep inner sanctum of the Prime Minister’s Office and he for whom it exists to serve and defend, the prime minister himself.
Trudeau does not like the Alberta sovereignty act. He does not like it at all. This alone should be a great boost for you, Premier Smith. Moreover, exerting his great divinatory powers — perhaps there was a séance — Trudeau has offered this (eerie) revelation: “We know that the exceptional powers that the premier is choosing to give the Alberta government in bypassing the Alberta legislature is causing a lot of eyebrows to raise in Alberta.”
There are quite a number of people tuned in to the mood and thinking of Albertans, and for that matter the state of their collective eyebrows. Yet Trudeau and most of the federal cabinet are, emphatically, not among them. Politically speaking, to this bunch, Alberta (and Saskatchewan, for that matter) is terra incognita — an unknown land.
And on the subject of Smith’s groundbreaking legislative initiative, the prime minister went further, saying that while he was not “looking for a fight” (something usually said in the prelude to a fight), he was “not going to take anything off the table.”
Canadians know that table. And we know what’s on it. It’s where they rest their favourite cudgels. Such as the Emergencies Act. As its invocation is so fresh in his memory, there should be no doubt about what’s on that table that the prime minister will reach for, should — in his view — Alberta act truculent, Premier Smith not back down or if it rains on some weekend. (As we saw in the inquiry, the Emergencies Act has less of a threshold and more of an ice surface when the government wants to use it.)
So there’s Premier Smith’s three pieces of good luck: Ontario’s pundits are scornful of her legislation, and both Singh and his partner prime minister are desperately against it.
On one major point, she is — I write respectfully — totally wrong. More on this in my next column.