EDMONTON—Thomas Lukaszuk—the Polish refugee who came to Canada as a youth, ran successfully for the Alberta Legislature, rising to the position of deputy premier at a time when Progressive Conservatives ruled the province, and latterly took it upon himself to organize a petition calling for Alberta to remain in Canada that has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—says Prime Minister Mark Carney’s strategy to hold off the separatists is “strategically brilliant.”

Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith met in Ottawa on May 8 to move along their memorandum of understanding to lay out a pathway for an oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast. They met at a moment of high tension with a referendum on Alberta separation looming, court battles unfolding, private voter-data breached, and claims of foreign interference escalating.

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Carney’s strategy is to show Albertans that cooperative federalism works. Instead of making speeches as a Captain Canada rallying the five million Albertans on the benefits of staying in Confederation, the prime minister has teams of experts working out the technical details of a myriad of construction projects, chief of which is the possible new pipeline to British Columbia’s tidewater.

Lukaszuk praised Carney’s approach. “He is making it more difficult for Danielle [Smith] to be unreasonable,” he told me in an interview. ”He is showing that he is doing all he can to........

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