“I heard you didn’t like us anymore,”
Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley quipped
after Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s address to the Canada Strong and Free Network (CSFN) Conference in Ottawa on Thursday afternoon. Lilley was Smith’s interlocutor in one of those “fireside chats” that are so popular at such conferences. He was reacting to Smith’s very patriotic “Team Canada” speech.
Smith sure didn’t sound like the traitor or quisling certain west-coast and central Canadian pundits have been describing her as.
“It should go without saying, but let me say it: Canada is worth fighting for,” averred Smith, who has recently been mocked and pilloried for
mooting a sovereignty referendum
should things go further wrong in Ottawa — roughly infinity per cent more than Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has been mocked or pilloried
.
“We need to get serious about the hard work of nation-building if we want to compete and win in the next generation (but) there are immediate actions we have to take to ensure that Canada is a strong, prosperous and independent nation,” said Smith.
She said that includes, for example, getting the various oils, gasses and minerals buried beneath us — British Columbia’s natural gas, Alberta’s oil, Ontario’s “ring of fire,”
and Quebec’s natural gas as well
— to market.
Smith has been called a turncoat and a quisling
and probably worse in recent weeks for refusing to play along with the phony-baloney united front some other premiers, led by Ontario’s Doug Ford, have pretended to assemble in the face of Washington’s orange menace. And in theory CSFM — the self-styled annual meeting of Canada’s conservative movement — is somewhere Smith could safely have flown the flag for a very Alberta-centric vision of Canada.
Conservatives generally appreciate Canada’s natural resources and the prosperity they offer us — and of course, so do most Canadians.
A Nanos poll released last week
found opposition to “funding the construction of a new oil pipeline from Alberta to eastern Canada” topped out in supposedly bright-green Quebec at just 25 per cent. Nationwide, Nanos reckoned 77 per cent of Canadians were in favour of such a pipeline.
That’s
all
Canadians, not just conservatives.
Getting natural resources to market is not a position of which Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should or needs to be afraid. Smith’s Alberta-elbows-up approach probably hasn’t helped him much, though, since most Canadians get their news filtered through a a media ecosystem that abhors the very concept of petrochemicals.
So it was interesting to see Smith very deliberately leaning into a national vision, rather than the provincial one she has been accused (not entirely without reason) of espousing.
“How do we meet the moment?” Smith asked, rhetorically, referring to Trump’s tariffs and Canada as a whole. “The answer is simple: We build and we build fast, and we build big, and we build
now
. As Canadians, the answers to the challenges lie right beneath our feet.”
We need to get red tape out of the way of progress, she argued. “There is a desire to get this work done like never before.”
Indeed. This is, perhaps, something Poilievre himself might want to lean into even more than he already has been.
Personally, I support revenue-neutral consumer carbon taxes as the most transparent, efficient and honest way to fight carbon emissions. But the simple, observable fact is that most Canadians don’t really care about carbon emissions. If they did, campaigning Liberal candidates wouldn’t be out there bragging about getting rid of the carbon tax they insisted until 15 minutes ago was essential for the planet’s survival. Or if they were doing that, Mark Carney wouldn’t be in a position to win an until-recently unfathomable majority government.
Canada didn’t get a carbon tax, or a natural resources-skeptical government, because a critical mass of Canadians loved carbon taxes and were skeptical of natural resources. They got them because a critical mass of Canadians were done with Stephen Harper, or besotted with Justin Trudeau, or both. And carbon taxes came with the package deal.
What unprecedented numbers of Canadians
are
concerned about is their economic futures, and about their children’s economic futures. There’s no good reason for Canada to divide on these issues.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
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