Premier plans post-election panel to gauge Albertans’ appetite for referendum

Alberta's premier says she is striking a postmortem election panel to give Albertans the chance to raise issues they might want to put to a referendum.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is striking a post-mortem election panel to give Albertans the chance to raise issues they might want put to a referendum.

Responding to a question Saturday on support for separation, Smith says she is looking to hear from all Albertans after the federal election, giving voters a chance to raise any issue, including leaving Canada.

“I am calling it the ‘What’s Next’ panel,” the premier said on her weekend radio show.

“We just want to go around the province, see how people are feeling and see if there are any other referendum issues they want us to put on the table.”

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If the idea sounds familiar, it comes six years after former premier Jason Kenney launched a nine-person ‘fair deal’ panel to try to get Alberta a better agreement within Canada.

The announcement of the panel comes as new polling puts Alberta at odds with nearly the rest of Canada politically as voters prepare to head to the polls in late April.

But Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, believes the two panels are different, with Smith’s seeming “to be a very specific attempt to gin up anti-Ottawa, anti-Liberal attitudes in the aftermath of an election that isn’t even over yet.”

Smith’s panel proposal comes within weeks of her threat of an “unprecedented national unity crisis” if the next prime minister doesn’t meet her nine demands within six months.

“Stoking national unity crises that don’t currently exist is certainly something new for the premier of Alberta, and should be worrisome not only for the next prime minister, but for all Canadians,” Wesley told CTV News Edmonton on Monday.

“This is something where we have a premier for the first time, before the election is even over, saying she’s not willing to work with the prime minister who doesn’t accede to all of her demands. Not even the government of Quebec has done that historically, and it’s a bit worrisome.”

Albertans’ sentiments will be articulated in the upcoming election. Results of a Nanos poll on the federal election released Monday puts the province at odds with most of the country, showing Conservatives with 53-per-cent support on the Prairies vs. 36 per cent in the rest of Canada.

With the Liberals’ Mark Carney leading across Canada as the preferred prime minister with 47 per cent, that support drops down to 29 per cent on the Prairies.

Barry Cooper, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, says Smith is “articulating the so-far unarticulated sentiments of most Albertans” and that “Easterners just don’t get it.”

“Particularly in the Prairie west, we’re fully aware that we have been treated very badly by Laurentian Canada since before we were even provinces,” Cooper told CTV News Edmonton.

“It’s not alienation, it’s just there’s only so much you can take, and then you get irritated.”