Western Standard - August 22, 2023


Alberta can go its own way

Mentioned
Danielle Smith Nigel Hannaford Alberta
MPC Daily Market Update Aug 18, 2023 Cory Morgan Show. Austerity is inevitable

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

199.05

Word count

781

Sentence count

47

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on Alberta s challenge to the Trudeau government's proposed carbon tax, many are wondering what s next for Alberta and its premier, Danielle Smith, in their fight against the federal government's carbon tax.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Western Standards, Nigel Hannaford at a press conference the other day asked Premier Daniel
00:00:04.080 Smith what she will do to fend off the proposed federal incursion into Alberta's jurisdiction 0.70
00:00:10.240 with electrical generation. She finished her answer basically saying, we will go our own way.
00:00:16.060 That's her own words. Now, Smith isn't saying the government's going to pursue an independence
00:00:21.080 referendum in Alberta anytime soon, but she's well aware too that her statement left room
00:00:25.240 for people to take that as an unspoken threat. Alberta's Premier is an experienced and skilled
00:00:30.280 communicator. Her choice of words was no mistake. Now, in the near future, Alberta will go its own
00:00:36.740 way with the current plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, no matter what Ottawa thinks.
00:00:41.180 The goalposts, though, are 15 years apart, whereas, you know, Gilboa wants to reach that goal at 2035.
00:00:49.420 And there's little indication that Gilboa or Smith are willing to even entertain the notion of changing
00:00:53.820 their targets. So this battle is just beginning. Now, Gilboa is following the typical liberal playbook.
00:00:58.880 He's slapping down the West to win support in the East. The net zero electric generation targets are
00:01:04.300 going to be easily met in Ontario and Quebec, where they're rich in hydroelectric resources and they
00:01:08.660 have nuclear reactors. The 2035 net zero target for Alberta, though, is utterly impossible to reach
00:01:14.660 without crippling Alberta's economy and threatening domestic energy security. Right now, fossil fuel
00:01:20.580 supplies almost 80 percent of the province's energy needs. And that can't change that much in 12 short
00:01:25.680 years. The province has no major rivers to dam. And the way Canada works, it would take decades to get
00:01:30.880 a large scale nuclear power generation plant up and running if it was ever even approved. I mean,
00:01:36.460 despite years and billions in investment in solar and wind generation projects, they still only supply
00:01:41.380 a small percentage of the Alberta power grid. And they'll always need to be backed up with gas generators
00:01:46.100 for the days when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. It does happen. Smith can't bend
00:01:51.340 on that, and she won't bend. And Gilboa won't budge either. So what next? Well, this battle's surely
00:01:56.540 going to head to Canada's courts, and it'll move at the typical glacial pace. So it's going to be a war
00:02:01.500 fought in slow motion with plenty of heated rhetoric as the challenges creep through the system.
00:02:07.700 Eventually, the Supreme Court will rule on the dispute, and it will rule in favor of the liberal
00:02:12.400 government. I mean, the Constitution's little more than a set of suggestions when it comes to
00:02:16.520 protecting Alberta's constitutional authority and jurisdiction and energy generation. We established
00:02:21.780 that when the Supreme Court upheld the carbon tax. The court is stacked. And when it feels that it's
00:02:27.720 in the public good, particularly central Canada's public good, you know, when it feels it's better to
00:02:32.880 step on Alberta's rights in that case, it'll step on Alberta's rights every time. Now, Premier Smith is
00:02:37.460 saying she's willing to pull out all the stops to stop Ottawa's incursion upon the province.
00:02:41.820 Now, time will tell if she really means it, though, because once the battle is finished
00:02:45.840 in the courts and Alberta has lost, the federal government will then move on to the punitive
00:02:49.420 stage if we don't cooperate out here in the West. They'll cut transfer payments as they demand
00:02:54.640 capitulation, and the impact Albertans will be harsh. We'll be starved of the transfers of our
00:02:59.720 own money back to us. At this point, there's only going to be one thing that'll make Ottawa back off.
00:03:05.460 Alberta needs to begin the process of truly going its own way. No doublespeak, no veiled threats.
00:03:10.080 Alberta needs to work towards invoking a referendum on independence under the Clarity Act.
00:03:14.760 The only other option is a surrender to the Trudeau Liberals, and that would only open the door,
00:03:19.120 of course, to more incursions. We might as well just give up having a provincial government. 0.53
00:03:22.740 No, I don't expect Premier Smith to start threatening a move towards provincial independence,
00:03:26.720 at least not yet. Most Albertans would still prefer to see the standoff somehow settled within
00:03:31.500 Confederation, or at least for now. Once all the legal challenges have failed and all of the tools
00:03:36.940 have been taken out of the toolbox, used and broken, only one path is going to remain.
00:03:41.540 And that's the path to full independence. Now time will tell whether Premier Smith is going to be
00:03:46.140 willing to take that path. She is the most independence-minded, inclined Premier Alberta's
00:03:51.940 had to date, though. So we've got some interesting times ahead of us.