It is unsettling to witness the lengths to which Danielle Smith and Preston Manning will to go scare their fellow Canadians into supporting the Poilievre Conservatives and the fossil fuel industry. 

Alberta’s premier made headlines last month when she advised the Trump administration to ease up on its tariff and annexation threats because they were hurting Poilievre’s chances of beating the Liberals. Then, lest that doesn’t have the desired effect, MAGA’s favourite premier hedged her bets with an extraordinary statement following a meeting with Mark Carney.

“We had a very frank discussion in which I made it clear that Albertans will no longer tolerate the way we’ve been treated by the federal Liberals over the past 10 years,” Smith announced in a release. “I provided a specific list of demands the next Prime Minister, regardless of who that is, must address within the first six months of their term to avoid an unprecedented national unity crisis.”

In case you missed the demands, here’s the list:

  • Guaranteeing Alberta full access to unfettered oil and gas corridors to the north, east, and west;
  • Repealing Bill C-69 (aka “no new pipelines act”);
  • Lifting the tanker ban off the B.C. coast;
  • Eliminating the oil and gas emissions cap;
  • Scrapping Clean Electricity Regulations;
  • Ending the prohibition on single use plastics;
  • Abandoning the net-zero car mandate;
  • Returning oversight of industrial carbon tax to the provinces;
  • Halting the federal censorship of energy companies 

As can be seen, the list goes from the politically volatile – tankers off the northern B.C. coast, pipelines through pipeline-wary Quebec – to the eccentric – single use plastics and “censorship” of energy companies. 

(An “unprecedented” unity crisis indeed – one inspired partially by unmet demands to bring back plastic straws and stop calling out oil company BS. But the rumour that Smith also wants Canada’s national bird to be the black-capped chickadee covered in oil from an Alberta tailing pond is false, an invention of the satirical Beaverton).

Any doubt that the to-do list was for Carney’s benefit disappeared when Poilievre immediately acquiesced, calling Smith’s demands “reasonable.” Poilievre would be delighted to repeal C-69, end the tanker ban, eliminate the emissions cap and “axe” the industrial carbon tax. Those  items are in his platform and on the wish list of big petroleum, although it’s not clear where Poilievre stands on ramming a pipeline through Quebec or across Indigenous lands.

Hyping the crisis

Smith’s demands came with a six-month deadline, a feature that naturally gave rise to questions about what happens if a re-elected Liberal government says no to some, most, or all of the items on the list. How would Smith’s “unprecedented national unity crisis” unfold? Would a referendum on separation be in the cards?  Smith hemmed and hawed about that, but her latest plan contemplates appointment of  a “What’s Next” panel to consider, among other things, possible questions to be put to a referendum.

To help drive home the message that Canadians need to put national unity in their worry box along with national survival who should enter the fray but 82-year-old Preston Manning, the godfather of western alienation.

Under the headline “Mark Carney poses a threat to national unity,” the former leader of the Reform party wrote an op-ed in Friday’s Globe and Mail telling voters – especially those in Central and Atlantic Canada – that casting a ballot for the Liberals “is a vote for Western secession – a breakup of Canada as we know it.” His startling prediction that if Carney becomes the next prime minister, he “would then be identified in the history books, tragically and needlessly, as the last prime minister of a united Canada,” caused a stir on the campaign trail. 

Carney called it “dramatic and unhelpful.” Poilievre, a Reform party progeny, responded to a question about Manning with an ambiguous comment about the “need to unite the country” – to which could be added “by voting against Carney.”

But is sentiment in Alberta really as secessionist as Manning would have us believe? And does it, as he claims, extend to all of western Canada?  

Sifting through the numbers 

Citing a recent report from the Toronto-based, Liberal-leaning Pollara Strategic Insights, FOUND HERE, Manning tells us that “large numbers of Westerners simply will not stand for another four years of Liberal government, no matter who leads it” and that support for “Western secession” is “growing unabated.” 

The problem is that the report he cites provides little backing for his explosive assertions. As its title indicates – Quebec & National Unity – the Pollara report is primarily a retrospective look at Quebecers’ attitudes toward national unity and Canadians’ response to Quebec’s  status within Canada. Only a couple of pages of the report touch on how other Canadians feel about their province’s place in Canada.

Pollara does report that on the question of whether their province would be worse off or better off outside Canada, the gap between yes and no was only 11 percentage points for the Alberta sample versus a 35 percentage point average for all provinces – 53 percent yes worse off, 18 percent better off and 29 percent don’t know. 

Positive feelings for being part of Canada were highest in Atlantic Canada with a 54 percentage point worse-better gap, followed by Ontario at 46, Manitoba/Saskatchewan at 39, Quebec at 27 and British Columbia with a gap of 26 percentage point advantage between those who felt their province would be worse off outside Canada and those who believed it would be better off.

One problem with the numbers is the notional margin of error in the survey, conducted at the end of January. The findings were derived from an online survey of a randomly-selected sample of 1,504 adults. Online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error, but according to Pollara, as a guideline a probability sample for its survey has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 2.5 percent, 19 times out of 20. For Alberta, with only 150 interviews conducted, the guideline margin of error is plus or minus 8 percent. 

But for what they are worth, the Pollara data do not strongly support Preston Manning’s view that Alberta’s feelings – as represented by a mere 150 people – are shared by all of the western provinces. British Columbia is less positive about being in Canada than the average of all provinces, but with a 39 percentage point gap between worse and better, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are more positive than 35 point all-province average.    

But the major flaw in Manning’s argument is his claim that the Pollara report shows an increase in secessionist sentiment. That’s a flat out fib. The report does not even track whether there has been any change at the provincial level in respondents’ feelings about their province being part of Canada. So there is nothing with which to compare the present findings. Preston Manning may be sensing rising separatism among his oil industry pals, but the Pollara report does not establish that such perspectives exist beyond the doors of Calgary’s Petroleum Club.    

Although many Albertans, possibly a majority, feel the province is being treated unfairly by the federal government, Alberta’s pre-eminent pollster says that surveys regularly show that only one in five Albertans are open to the idea of separatism. And Janet Brown told the Globe and Mail that separatism doesn’t seem to be gaining support. “The movement is getting louder. I’m not necessarily sure it is getting any bigger.”

The increased volume emanating from Manning and Smith likely stems from the drastic turnaround in Conservative political fortunes. After salivating for years at the prospect of a Poilievre government advancing their vision of an oil-drilling, woke-bashing, tax-cutting Trump-lite dominion they have been stymied by Canadians’ response to Trump’s tariffs and threats of annexation. The reaction in Manning’s and Smith’s world can be explained in terms of the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross grief cycle. They seem to have gone past denial and are well into the second stage, anger, perhaps on the way to negotiation.

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