Premiers who play the Canadian card when it suits them

Opinion

It’s an odd world Alberta Premier Danielle Smith inhabits: one where her province keeps the benefits of its natural resources, while other provinces should simply surrender the bounty of nature that may have fallen by chance in their jurisdictions to Smith’s Alberta needs.

Smith has been arguing that it’s “unCanadian and unconstitutional” for British Columbia to rebuff plans for an Alberta-sponsored pipeline to go to the British Columbia coast.

(B.C. Premier David Eby has said giving the pipeline proposal a green light when it’s merely in the planning process would upset a fragile consensus for other projects that are much further along.)

In her battle to determine just what should happen in British Columbia, Smith has gotten some help from a resource-rich neighbour, Premier Scott Moe of Saskatchewan.

“There is no B.C. coast. It’s Canada’s coast. There are no B.C. ports. There are Canada’s ports,” Moe said. “I feel an equal owner in those ports as a Canadian.”

Excellent.

Then we could perhaps expect Moe would accept a corollary argument: there is no Saskatchewan oil and potash — it’s Canada’s oil and potash.

And maybe Moe would be happy to explain the concept to Smith as well — that natural resources, be they oil under the ground or the shipping benefits of a stretch of coastline, are for the good of all Canadians.

Don’t expect that to happen any time soon.

Because, right now, it looks like Moe and Smith are arguing, “What’s yours is ours, and what’s mine is mine.”

It’s particularly galling coming from Smith, who argues that we’re all in it together when the issue is Alberta’s access to tidewater ports, but when it comes to things like the Canada Pension Plan, Albertans are within their right to hive off the majority of the CPP’s funds for their own profit — and get a cash payout as well.

Oh, and need we even mention that Smith is playing the “we’re all Canadians in it together” card while also hanging an Albertan separation debate over the rest of the country’s head? (Just a thought — if Alberta were to separate, does Smith not believe that Canada would charge considerable rates for a foreign nation wanting to ship petroleum products across Canadian territory? Alberta oil already sells at a steep discount into the United States because of its limited shipping options.)

And we probably shouldn’t forget that Smith was issuing demands to Prime Minister Mark Carney to lift federal environmental regulations off the B.C. coast — and other federal rules — and describing his response in Alberta’s favour as a necessity: “This is a test of whether Canada works as a country.”

It is all too familiar, and frankly tiresome.

And Moe? This sudden belief in the rights of all Canadians in British Columbia comes from a premier who not too long ago brought in regulations to try to halt federal investigators from even taking water samples in Saskatchewan. He wanted to charge them with trespassing.

The truth is, Smith — likewise, Moe — play the Canadian card precisely when it suits their provinces and their own political ends.

Being Canadian isn’t just slipping on a maple leaf T-shirt when it suits your political purposes. If you do, you rightly risk being seen as a Canadian of convenience.

Canada is, in many ways, a country built on great compromise, with a historic separation of responsibilities between the federal government and its provincial counterparts. That compromise is something that should involve spending at least a little time walking in each others’ shoes, and a lot less time demanding more for yourself.

» Winnipeg Free Press