There. Boom. After repeatedly warning she would, the premier has wielded the Sovereignty Act, designed to keep Ottawa from encroaching on the province’s right to produce its oil and gas resources, or in the case of the electricity sector, burning them to keep the lights on.
The Alberta premier who demands Ottawa stay in its legislative lane is playing the role of a court justice.
It’s typically a judge’s role to reach an opinion about whether a federal measure is or isn’t unconstitutional — and sure, a politician is free to rhetorically insist that is so before any court rules.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This leads to the other measure Smith unfurled as part of Monday’s expression of impatience with Ottawa’s power strategy, one that would surprise Albertans who thought they elected as premier an avowed libertarian, or who knew she had a Sumerian symbol for “liberty” tattooed on her arm.
Smith announced her UCP government will consider creating a new provincial agency that would be in the business of building new natural gas plants or buying existing ones from private companies, in the name of keeping Alberta electricity abundant and affordable.
(More controversially in these parts, Petro-Canada was created as an oil-producing federal Crown agency competing with private players in the 1970s, when the provincial government also started the Alberta Energy Company for similar purposes.)
In August, her government announced that the provincially owned Alberta Precision Labs will take over all staff, operations and facilities of DynaLife, after the private contractor hired under former premier Jason Kenney struggled to perform as promised.
With negotiations on these draft regulations still ongoing, and no timeline for their completion, it seemed a component of Smith’s timing was her trip later this week to the COP28 global climate conference in Dubai, where she and federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault would wind up saying vastly different things about how rapidly Canada could fully green its power sector.
And even as she throws down this Sovereignty Act gauntlet, Smith told reporters she won’t leave the negotiating table or federal-provincial working group to hammer out final rules for energy/climate measures such as this one.
The original article contains 1,152 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!