Doug Ford says Carney should extend an olive branch to the West. Liberal strategists agree
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney could soon be facing a national unity crisis after Alberta Premier Danielle Smith lowered the bar for a referendum on the province’s independence in 2026.
Liberal insiders with ties to Alberta say this is a threat that Carney shouldn’t take lightly. And Ontario Premier Doug Ford told reporters on Wednesday that he agrees.
“About two in 10 Albertans say routinely that they want to see the province separate from Canada,” says Dan Arnold, an ex-Alberta Liberal organizer who’s now an executive with Pollara Strategic Insights .
“These people are in the minority, to be clear, but they’re too numerous to be written off as a radical fringe.”
Arnold points to the grim numbers from Pollara’s latest Western Identity Report, released in February . The report found that 55 per cent of Albertans feel that their province is being treated unfairly by the federal government.
Albertans were also the least pessimistic group anywhere in Canada about their province’s prospects outside of confederation and the least opposed to joining the United States.
Arnold said the silver lining for Carney is that most Albertans have a gripe with Ottawa, not with Canada as a whole.
“Albertans still identify strongly as Canadians,” said Arnold. “Alberta separatism isn’t identity-based in the same way as Quebec separatism.”
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet riffed on the notion of Alberta’s lack of a distinct cultural identity when speaking with reporters on Wednesday, joking that he wasn’t sure that “oil and gas qualify to define a culture.”
Arnold also said that now is a good time for Carney to “sell Canada” to disaffected Albertans, with national pride rising in the face of tariffs and annexation threats from U.S. President Donald Trump.
He noted that next month’s G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., will give Carney a great opportunity to send a message of national unity to Albertans.
Carney reportedly gave Trump a hat and golf gear bearing the logo of the Kananaskis Country Golf Course as a gift during his visit to Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.
Ford said Wednesday that he’s personally told Carney to take a less confrontational approach to Alberta and the other western provinces than his Liberal predecessor Justin Trudeau.
“I said it’s time that your government starts showing some love to Saskatchewan and Alberta (because) the last prime minister showed no love,” Ford told reporters in Toronto.
Ford said that the two Prairie provinces, both major oil producers, had been “treated terribly” under Trudeau.
He added he was a “big believer” in pipelines and scrapping the Liberals’ Bill 69, which critics have called the “no-new-pipelines” law .
Calgary-based Liberal strategist Sabrina Grover said that Carney’s outreach to Alberta can start with the more than 600,000 Albertans who marked “Liberal” on their ballot in last week’s federal election.
“The Liberals had their best showing in Alberta in years, if you look at the number of votes they won,” said Grover.
“That tells me that Carney already has hundreds of thousands of Albertans behind him… and those are the kinds of people that you want to mobilize and bring on your team.”
Provincewide, the Liberals won 28 per cent of the popular vote, a double-digit improvement over the 15.5 per cent they won in the last federal election in 2021.
Grover said that Carney can build even more goodwill with Albertans by listening attentively to their concerns, especially surrounding natural resource development.
“You’ve had that with (Carney’s) scrapping of the carbon tax already… and I think there will be some give-and-take on things like the federal emissions cap and clean electricity regs,” said Grover.
Grover added that Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc could be a huge asset for Carney on the national unity file, assuming he stays in the portfolio when Parliament resumes.
“Dominic LeBlanc has decades of intergovernmental experience and will be a great voice to be engaging with Alberta and the other provinces,” said Grover.
LeBlanc’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the story.
Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, launched his campaign for the Liberal leadership near his childhood home in the city’s Laurier Heights neighbourhood .
He brought up his upbringing in the province when asked on Tuesday about the possibility of an Alberta referendum.
“Canada is stronger when we work together,” Carney told reporters in Washington.
“As an Albertan, I firmly believe that.”
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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