All those good people who write earnestly and often that The Sovereignty Act advanced by Danielle Smith is unconstitutional are dead right..Of course it is. That's the whole point of it. It's not a law. It's a political document, an attention-getter, the kind of stick-in-the-ear you use when all else has failed. And Albertans have tried all else. Premiers Jim Prentice, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney... All have banged on Ottawa's door. To none of them has it been opened. It's time to try something else..Let's face it, if Alberta were not already part of Canada, who would sign up on today's terms of Confederation?.The sheer inequitable distribution of cost and benefit alone has been staggering. U of C political-science professor and one-time provincial cabinet minister Ted Morton pointed out recently Alberta has — since the mid-sixties — sent about $630 billion more to Ottawa in taxes and revenues than it received back in transfer payments. (That is, in Old Age Security and Canada Social Transfer payments and in 2018, briefly, an equalization payment.) Almost two-thirds of a trillion dollars! Crudely estimated, that's about $3,700 per year for every single Albertan, or more than $14,000 per year for a family of four..How could that be? Well, Alberta's place in Canada is a case study in what happens when a province that's resource-rich and vote-poor, butts up against another place that's resource poor, reckons it needs the money and is vote-rich. It speaks well of Albertans' pro-Confederation consensus thus far, that this situation has been grudgingly tolerated for 60 years. We don't like it. But until recently, given the lack of riots in the streets, it seemed we could live with it..It would probably still be tolerated, but for the predatory actions of the Liberal government since it came to power in 2015. This has changed everything..'Predatory,' is the polite word, by the way. 'War on Alberta' would be another way to describe it. And how often have Liberals spoken contemptuously of Alberta over the years? Here are three, from a deeply abundant canon of contempt and derision:.In the context of the 1980 election campaign, Liberal activist Keith Davey in 1980 said: "Screw the West. We'll take the rest.".Jean Chretien, speaking in Edmonton in August 2001, let us know that Alberta success was not appreciated: "[W]hat is going on in Alberta is causing a lot of problems to the government of British Columbia, the government of Saskatchewan. We will have to start to work collectively to make sure there's no dislocation in the nation because of the fortunate position of this part of Western Canada at this moment." .Speaking in French to a Quebec audience, Mr. Trudeau said in 2010 that, “Canada isn’t doing well right now because it’s Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn’t work.”.There are plenty more. Obviously, a lot of Liberals have never liked Alberta and some of their prime ministers have given that eloquent expression. Remember Jean Chretien musing he didn't care much for doing business out West and more trivially, Prime Minister Trudeau forgetting Alberta in the Canada 150 callout on Parliament Hill?.But we could shrug it off because what made Alberta strong and what made it possible as one of Canada's smaller provinces to bear the national equalization burden almost alone — for years, Alberta was one of only two 'have' provinces, the other being Canada's largest, Ontario — was its highly efficient energy industry. How efficient? Economist Jack Mintz comments it's seldom appreciated inside or outside Alberta that oil and gas extraction creates more real value-added per working hour than any other sector in Canada.."Unconventional oil and gas, which now accounts for the lion’s share of Alberta’s oil and gas production, produced $1,302 of real GDP per working hour in 2019, while conventional extraction generated $590 per hour.".Dr. Mintz made the comments in response to the prime minister's virtue-signalling statement at last year's UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, that Canada's oil and gas sector would be required to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And he predicted that if this was insisted upon, it wouldn't just be Alberta paying the price but all of Canada. But, Alberta first..One more tightening, then, of the garrote Mr. Trudeau's government placed around Alberta's neck almost as soon as the Liberals took power in 2015. You know, the No-Pipelines act, the No-Tankers act, the cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline, the crucifixion of Energy East on a regulatory cross, carbon taxes and more carbon taxes and always more restrictions, requirements and targets for the beleaguered oil-and-gas industry to meet..We should not be surprised. The prime minister is on record that for the sake of the environment of the world, he intends to phase out the oilsands of this province..We should however, be outraged. It's one thing to skim the cream and half the milk from Alberta's pail while still leaving Alberta with the highest standard of living outside downtown Toronto..The planned, graduated destruction of a single province's wealth is quite another matter. To put it bluntly it seems that for Mr. Trudeau to claim success, Albertans must become poor. Many of us already know what that feels like; the carnage in the oil-and-gas sector as head offices of major enterprises quit the province has been well documented. Likewise the tens of thousands of energy workers laid off in 2016-17 as Liberal policies began to bite, and the tens of billions in cancelled investments as energy majors saw the writing on the wall..Albertan governments tried to push back. Remember how first Premier Jim Prentice and later Rachel Notley as premier tried to obtain 'social licence?' That is, we tie one hand behind our back to meet their climate change objective in exchange for permission to continue oilsands production, and export it via pipelines? No dice. As above, no pipelines, no tankers. Premier Kenney took a more belligerent approach. He asked for and received a mandate from Albertans to make Ottawa talk about equalization..That went nowhere..So, how do you get Ottawa's attention? Maybe with a big fat political crisis..A Sovereignty Act would sound like a piece of legislation should — majestic prose, section upon section, clause upon clause, tumbling down the parchment to a glorious declaration. And as the critics say, it is highly unlikely it could ever come into force. The Legislature could pass it, but it is highly unlikely the Queen — that is, the Lieutenant Governor acting upon the instructions of the Governor General acting upon the instructions of Prime Minister Trudeau — would ever sign it into law..So yes, all the constitutional scholars are correct. As legislation, it's stillborn..However it's written though, it would be a political document, pure and simple, intended to embarrass Ottawa and to force change — that is, a better deal in Confederation for Alberta..Understood that way, it makes a ton of sense. And that is a matter of politics, because constitutional overtures have been made and have failed..Let's see... pass it, let the Government of Canada signal by its insouciance that it doesn't want to play, proceed as if it were signed, establish an Alberta police force, maybe start collecting our own taxes. Do things our own way. If nobody's paying attention then (and only if nobody is paying attention) invoke the Clarity Act..Whether that would get Alberta any more respect in the Laurentians, who knows?.But maybe that would lead to a good faith discussion about restoring some equity to equalization..As Dr. Mintz says, without Alberta, the rest of the country would be broke.
