Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has given Prime Minister Mark Carney until the weekend to pick a side on the future of Alberta oil and gas.Taking questions from a crowd of 2,000 UCP supporters at the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary Thursday night, Smith was asked when she would "draw a line" with Ottawa’s anti-energy legislation.“How long are you going to allow Ottawa to stall the questions?” asked a supporter. “Sunday,” replied Smith.“We’ll give him till Sunday. I’m only partly joking.”Smith gave credit where credit is due — Carney is not like his predecessor in dealing with Alberta, she said.“For most of my time in this job, the prime minister doesn’t show up. But with this new prime minister, he has met with us many times, and he’s been prime minister for only a few short months.""But he is coming to Alberta on Sunday to meet with business leaders in the energy sector, to get an idea of what Alberta wants.”Smith said she will then see Carney at a First Ministers’ meeting in Saskatoon on June 2, and will be looking for a “consensus about how we’re going to start building.”“I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long (to find out) whether this government is serious about changing its course," said Smith.“Just a couple more days.”Under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, Ottawa introduced multiple legislative barriers that critics say impeded Alberta’s ability to produce energy, including Bill C-69, which prevent new pipelines form being built, tanker ban Bill C-48, and a cap on oil and gas sector emissions — which Smith refers to as a production cap..Smith, during her speech, said her government is challenging Ottawa in court on multiple fronts, and maintained her position of achieving a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.She emphasized Alberta “wants to be free” from bureaucratic control from Ottawa.“We want to be free,” she repeated.However, she did speak candidly about the independence movement and said her government amended Alberta’s Citizen Initiative Act because she believes citizens should be able to have their say and guide the direction of the country.“I trust Albertans to make the right decision on independence,” she said..Towards the end of the evening, John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, asked the premier a question about free speech and regulatory bodies, giving the example of Dr. Jordan Peterson, who was penalized by the College of Psychologists of Ontario for posts he made on social media.Smith acknowledged Carpay’s work at the Justice Centre and said her government is working on what they have dubbed the “Peterson Law.”“It’s because of the work that you’ve done exposing this and other problems over the years that we knew we needed to act on it,” Smith told Carpay.She said one of the first orders of business is replacing “key positions” that have recently become vacant due to retirements, including the chief medical officer of health and a registrar for the College of Physicians and Surgeons. New appointees will “respect differences of opinion in the medical profession.”“Barring that, we have to put some legislative barriers in place for regulatory colleges that overstep what we've given them the mandate to do.”Established regulatory bodies are meant “not so that one medical professional can tattletale on another medical professional because they didn't like what they put on Twitter.”“That is not the reason why we have these colleges. They shouldn’t be weaponizing one professional against another. And so we've come to the conclusion we probably need to have — I think we're calling it ‘Peterson's Law’ around our table — and we're going to see if we can put some barriers around that.”
