The Alberta separatist movement was never as big as Premier Danielle Smith wanted people to believe. After Elections Alberta concluded its count and verification, the petition that ultimately launched a referendum on holding an independence referendum gathered just 222,597 verified signatures. That’s far fewer than the 404,293 collected by the Forever Canada campaign, which demands that Alberta remain in the federation — and a small fraction of the number that separatist leaders boasted about getting. It’s also less than the threshold for holding a referendum had been before Smith put her thumb on the scale, and way less than the 20 per cent threshold for a constitutional question — like, you know, leaving Canada. As the Calgary Herald’s Rob Breakenridge noted, “had the premier not intervened to boost the separatist effort, it would have failed by a considerable margin.”

But, of course, Danielle Smith’s efforts to lower the threshold for the separatist campaigners — and extend the timeline over which they could gather signatures — was never about fairness or democracy or respecting the will of the people. It was a deliberate attempt to create political leverage by replicating what Quebec separatist Léon Dion described as the “knife to the throat” strategy. And boy, did it ever work. It has resulted in numerous policy concessions from the Carney government on everything from climate to pipeline approvals, even if Smith’s “wins” came at the cost of potentially breaking up the country. 

And yet, Smith is utterly unwilling to deploy that same strategy when it comes to Donald Trump’s threats to Canadian prosperity and sovereignty.........

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