As Albertans will testify after experiencing the Tory dynasty and the last couple of UCP premiers, conservatives are not all built the same.
Jason Kenney took Alberta in directions past Progressive Conservative leaders never dared to, while Danielle Smith rose to leadership by repudiating Kenney’s COVID management — and he did his share of rebuking her Sovereignty Act idea.
The current Alberta premier, a former talk-show host and lobbyist, similarly never seemed to have much in common with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a business owner from a sort of political dynasty family. But both have often worn the “populist” tag; Ford and Smith gave direct payments to residents to ease the affordability crunch.
Until this week, there was generally chumminess and accord between the pair of conservative premiers from Canada’s oil province and from its manufacturing heartland. They’d even been the twin Canadian regulars on Fox Business and Fox News, both pitching to the U.S. conservative networks the ills of tariffs and the benefits of Canadian trade.
Then came this week, and their sharply different approaches and positions around the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and Canada’s own potential retaliations. That may owe partly to his and her own personalities and backgrounds, but it’s also rooted in their own backyards.
Smith defiantly kept her own signature off the joint statement the prime minister and all other premiers inked about the response to the U.S. president-elect’s proposed import tax of up to 25 per cent on all Canadian goods. She was the lone premier to do so, arguing she couldn’t tolerate Canada continuing to entertain or threaten using export taxes or other sanctions on oil as a pressure point in a trade war.
“We will take whatever actions are needed to protect the livelihoods of Albertans from such destructive federal policies,” Smith said.
By pinning it on the federal Liberals, Smith slips by the fact that, with their statements and comments, these policies are now endorsed (at least in theory or principle) by all her counterparts.
Ford had helped co-ordinate the position statement to which Justin Trudeau and 12 provincial and territorial leaders of various political stripes had agreed.
At the end of Wednesday’s meeting of those leaders, Ford said he understood Smith’s impulse to defend her province’s energy industry.
He added pointedly: “I have a different theory, that [you] protect your jurisdiction but country comes first.”
The Ontario premier has talked much about retaliation in the weeks since Trump first launched his tariff threats, saying in December his province’s hydro agency could cut off the U.S.’s electricity supply.
“You can’t let someone hit you over the head with a sledgehammer without hitting them back twice as hard, in my opinion,” Ford had said before the premiers’ one-day summit. And, to the idea of taking oil export taxes off the table, gave the cagey gambler’s remark: “If you have some aces, you hold on to your aces.”
Smith, by contrast, wants Alberta’s ace industry sheltered.
She has consistently denounced the idea of throttling her region’s energy exports to make Americans wince in a trade war. Nor does she even want to talk about what retaliations to use or threaten, saying in a briefing with reporters on Monday she doesn’t “think it’s helpful to negotiate that in public.”
This week’s most indelible iconography from these leaders couldn’t be more different, either. She was pictured at Mar-a-Lago meeting Trump himself, alongside Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman who has proposed fusing the two countries together with a common currency, regulations and more.
Ford? He sported a baseball cap stating “Canada is not for sale.”
Outside of Alberta, there’s been condemnation to the distance Smith has created from the Team Canada approach. “Nothing should be taken off the table before negotiations even start,” international affairs expert and former Trudeau advisor Roland Paris said on social media.
“Trump has found his weak link in Canada. He didn’t need to look far. She delivered herself to him.”
But within her province, there’s more understanding of her pleas for the province’s sector to be shielded from both Trump’s measures and Canada’s response.
All leaders are employing a negotiate-first, retaliate-second position, said Gary Mar, CEO of the Calgary-based Canada West Foundation.
“But the form of that retaliation will differ. Yeah. Depending on what part of the country you’re from, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody,” said Mar, an Alberta representative in Washington during the George W. Bush administration.
Mar reasons that threatening to constrain or tax oil shipments would greatly hurt the energy sector and create gluts because so much of Canada’s oil goes south, and that Washington could blunt the price blow of any oil taxes by opening up the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve.
Premier Doug Ford wore the hat while speaking to reporters ahead of a premiers’ meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss Canada’s response to the threat of U.S. tariffs. It was designed by an Ottawa-based company in response to U.S. president Donald Trump’s recent musings about Canada becoming the 51st state.
What Smith and Ford are variously warning and threatening may also have much to do with their own provincial economies. When the Ontario premier muses about throttling power exports, he’s talking about sacrificing a significant but not defining source of government revenue and jobs in his province — for the sake of guarding against tariffs on automobile manufacturing, Ontario’s most lucrative sector.
But if Alberta’s energy sector became a bargaining chip, this would sacrifice the province’s lifeblood industry — and for the sake of what? To fend off threats to less important sectors in Alberta and the crown-jewel sectors of other parts of the country.
Mar also sees merit in the former businessman Ford’s tactics, which he says are right from Trump’s own playbook — literally, his Art of the Deal.
“You always try and put the person you’re negotiating with on their back foot,” Mar said. “[Trump] weaponizes uncertainty, and he’s done it time and time again.”
But trying to span the duelling approaches, Mar adds: “I understand the need to say everything’s on the table, but we’re going to have to be careful to understand what the impacts are going to be.”
Smith is also from a long line of Alberta leaders who routinely battle with Ottawa, which is less of a tradition in the province where Ottawa is located. Neither jurisdiction has much history warring with the United States, Canada’s historic ally and dominant export customer.
After weekend meetings with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith urged the federal and other provincial governments to prepare for tariffs, but advised against using Canadian energy as a bargaining threat.
The differing identities in Western Canada and Central Canada may be at play too. An Environics Institute study last year found that there are far more Albertans who primarily identify with their province — and Smith has made “Alberta first” a rallying cry for that base — compared to Ontario, where people are the least likely in Canada to primarily cling to their provincial belonging.
While Ford and Smith are arguably the most powerful conservatives in government in Canada, they’re likely to get overtaken by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre if he wins an upcoming election.
It’s near impossible to predict where U.S.-Canada relations will be after an expected spring federal election. But given Smith’s tensions with Ford and other premiers, the Alberta leader’s rocky relationship with her Confederation partners may not end if Poilievre replaces Trudeau.
The federal Conservative leader has recently had praise for Smith — calling her a “fantastic leader” on Jordan Peterson’s podcast — and appears to have a testier relationship with Ford. But Poilievre has not come down on either side of this question about keeping a retaliatory export tax on oil as an option, or on Smith’s opt-out of the Team Canada approach.
It’s unclear if he’ll stay mum on Smith’s strategy in the meantime. He repeatedly dodged the question during a media conference on Thursday by instead blaming the federal Liberals for dividing Canadians, and not building more pipelines and gas-export terminals for non-U.S. shipments.
He said that rather than a unified response, there are “10 different foreign affairs ministers, running things separately.”
Ford may not see it that way. He would see nine of Canada’s provincial leaders standing together, and Smith on her own.
During a news conference following a visit at a steel manufacturing company in Windsor, Ont., Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took aim at Alberta Premier Danielle Smith being the only provincial leader not to support implementing retaliatory tariffs should the U.S. impose them on Canada. Trudeau’s comments come a day after the first ministers’ meeting in Ottawa.
