Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says Ottawa has until the end of fall to repeal anti-Alberta laws, warning that rising separatist sentiment in a recent byelection shows Albertans’ patience is “time-limited.”
During an exclusive interview with Juno News’ Keean Bexte, Smith said she’ll be watching Prime Minister Mark Carney when parliament resumes in the fall to see “what kind of accommodations, revisions and revocations” of anti-Alberta bills he will be making.
Although the Alberta United Conservative Party retained its Olds–Didsbury–Three Hills riding in the byelection with 61.12 per cent of the vote, the separatist Republican Party of Alberta secured 15.6 per cent of the vote. Smith says she’s not taking the victory for granted.
“We have always had independence parties on the ballot. I’ve seen them get as low as a couple of hundred votes. Sometimes, you know, three, four or five percent. This admittedly is the highest percentage that I’ve seen of a separatist candidate in my time watching politics,” Smith told Juno News. “People are unhappy, but they’re also willing to give my approach the benefit of the doubt; let’s give this new leader a chance.”
She said her government will “put the issues on the table” and attempt to negotiate with the federal government to combat Ottawa’s policies, which “have held Alberta back.” She said those negotiations are on a timer, though, as Albertans are giving Carney the benefit of the doubt.
“This is time-limited. I take that sentiment very seriously, and I’ve told the Prime Minister he should too because one of the things that they need to understand is that they’ve created it,” she said. “The sentiment exists because of how Ottawa has treated our province in particular and some of our industries in particular.”
She agreed that bills such as Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act and Bill C-69, the “no-new-pipelines law,” are some of the anti-Alberta legislation Ottawa needs to remove to return investment and allow production in Alberta during the fall sitting.
“I know that when you put the pedal to the metal, you can get laws drafted, so they now have a break, and (Carney) has until September before he comes back in,” she said. “It has to be that quick because it doesn’t make sense to say that you’re going to create a two-year to yes window and then dilly-dally for a year or two on fixing the underlying legislation.”
She said the introduction of workaround legislation to those anti-energy laws in the omnibus Bill C-5 is a “recognition” that those laws have created “such a chill on investment that it’s unworkable.”
Smith said she is already disappointed with the federal government, however, as Carney appears to have not even started pre-positioning to make any changes to anti-energy legislation.
She named the Liberals’ net-zero car mandate, which is set to begin in January and will mandate 20 per cent of car sales to be on net-zero vehicles, as one “idiotic” example coming out of Ottawa.
“The hydrogen net-zero vehicle industry doesn’t really exist yet. The electric net-zero vehicles are not produced in that kind of quantity, so that 20 per cent of all cars in Canada could be electric vehicles,” Smith added. “In Alberta alone, we buy 200,000 cars a year. We’d have to buy 40,000 electric vehicles starting in January, which are not produced in Canada, and not produced in the US.”
She said China is the only mass producer of net-zero vehicles, and there is a 100 per cent tariff on the product from that nation.
“It’s this kind of nonsensical pretzel logic that we would like to see some clarity out of the federal government on,” she said. “This would be a perfect opportunity for them to very quickly tell people that whatever they want to do aspirationally over time, they have to recognize that trying to implement it in January of 2026 is unachievable, and all it will do is it’ll hurt Doug Ford’s auto industry in Ontario.”