There’s a substantial and growing body of economic research that separation would be a catastrophe for Alberta and Albertans, especially working people.

As economist Jim Stanford observed in his Aug. 31 report on the false promises made by Alberta’s separatists and the grave risks their scheme presents, “economists are unanimous that the costs of establishing a separate country would be enormous, and that Alberta will experience a brutal recession if it happens.”

“Separatist leaders promise Alberta would become a utopia: a freedom-loving, unencumbered, low-tax, prosperous energy superpower,” he wrote in his report, False Promises, Big Dangers. “The economic reality of separation would be much darker: a small, landlocked country struggling to build its own national institutions … in an environment of intense division, uncertainty, and outward flight of both people and capital.”

Indeed, another report by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, not exactly a hotbed of “Laurentian elites,” predicted that Alberta would suffer an exodus of businesses and jobs that would shrink the economy by $62 billion a year. And the right-wing Canada West Foundation weighed in with a report in which one author warned, “every Albertan should ask themselves one simple question: Can they be certain their employer, or their job, will still be here if Alberta chooses to separate?”

The work Dr. Stanford cites has been done by real experts in economics, people who actually know what they’re talking about – in other words, the kind of folks separatist leader Keith Wilson presumably had in mind when he told a CBC reporter that “Canadians, and many people in the world, are growing leery of the ‘experts say’ stuff …”

Mr. Wilson’s disdain for expertise is pretty clear from that remark and quite typical of the Alberta separatist movement, reflecting its origins in U.S. MAGA populism and the anti-vaccination Ottawa convoy siege in 2022.

Perhaps it is explained by frustration that real experts aren’t backing  the economic fairy tales even the most respectable advocates of Alberta separation would like us to believe.

On the culture-war front, Alberta’s separatists can’t help themselves. On immigration, reproductive rights, and human rights, they just keep telling on themselves. It’s obvious that the society they dream of building in Alberta would be a racist, misogynistic, Christian nationalist dystopia.

If you have any doubts about what motivates that crowd, consider the recent social media comment by Bruce McAllister – executive director of Premier Danielle Smith’s office, no less – praising the election on Monday of neo-Nazis in a German state. This explains a lot, observed Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt in a social media post, “for those wondering why Alberta is having a series of anti-immigrant referendum questions.”

As Dr. Stanford pointed out in his report, the separatist/United Conservative Party blame-Ottawa narrative is intended to leave the impression that “whatever is wrong in the province must be the fault of an intrusive, acquisitive federal government, perpetually interfering with the province’s affairs and stealing its resources, taxes and wealth.” He makes a compelling case that in reality most of the problems that plague working Albertans have been created right here in Wild Rose Country by successive Conservative governments, culminating in the now separatist-dominated UCP.

The economic fantasy the Alberta separatist movement perpetrates offers only hopium – the pipedream that we don’t have to wait for the sweet by-and-by to enjoy our pie in the sky. No, with a little help from Uncle Sam – or Uncle Don, anyway – and Alberta’s oil resources, we can all be as rich as Croesus if only we set out on our own.

That may be comforting to would-be separatists, the trouble is that none of what Dr. Stanford politely calls the “myths” of separation stand up to hard economic analysis.

“The real experience of separatist movements around the world confirms that separation would unleash unprecedented uncertainty,” the report states. “Workers in Alberta would pay a huge economic and human cost for separation.”

Dr. Stanford lists numerous ways separation would crush the economy and derail democracy in Alberta. Here is a Top 10 List, based on his observations, of the lies Alberta separatists tell:

Lie No. 1: We’ll all get rich. Forget about it. Former Alberta Finance Ministry official Lennie Kaplan estimates it would cost Albertans $300 billion to replace what the federal government does now. The true number is probably north of $400 billion. The costs of running them would be billions more each year. The new country’s debt would more than quadruple. Interest rates on the debt would soar. “Economists project a reduction in real GDP of as much as 10 per cent in the first year of independence – a loss in economic output of $60-billion or  more or up to $12,000 per Albertan per year of recession.”

Lie No. 2: Business investment would grow. “Business leaders in Alberta are unanimous … even the possibility of separation would badly undermine investment and growth.” This is consistent with the U.K.’s experience after Brexit, Dr. Stanford noted. “Less investment means less job creation, slower growth and reduced incomes.”

Lie No. 3: Alberta would sell more to the world. As noted in this space yesterday, Alberta’s problems can’t be blamed on difficulty exporting petroleum, despite the UCP/separatist myth-making to the contrary. Alberta’s international exports grew 16 per cent over the past five years, triple all of Canada. “As a separate country, Alberta would be small and landlocked. International experience shows this is not a recipe for trade success.”

Lie No. 4: We’ll still trade with Canada. There are no guarantees. “Separatists blithely assume that negotiations with the rest of Canada would retain free access to markets in other provinces. But this is wishful thinking. Even a 10-per-cent reduction in interprovincial exports from Alberta would be sufficient to cause a major recession here.”

Lie No. 5: We’ll be free to travel and work in Canada. Don’t bet on that. Despite propaganda to the contrary, that’s not what happened after Czechoslovakia’s peaceful “Velvet Divorce.” Slovaks called it the “Sandpaper Divorce,” because they got ground down. “No one knows if the rest of Canada would welcome Alberta with the same rights and freedoms they have today. Albertans would retain only the real right to live in their own separate, small country.” It’s said here Albertans can forget about this, especially if our new MAGA government starts forcing immigrants to leave en masse, sticking Canada with a refugee crisis.

Lie No. 6: We’ll stop subsidizing Canada. The problem with this one, as Dr. Stanford points out, is that we don’t actually subsidize the rest of Canada. “This argument is blatantly false, no matter how often separatists repeat it. The Alberta government pays no money to Quebec or any other province. To the contrary, the Alberta government receives substantial fiscal payments from the federal government – totalling about $14 billion this year. Those transfers would stop if the province separated, leaving a major hole in the new country’s budget.” In fact, the paper shows, most Albertans get more back from federal programs and services than they pay in federal taxes.

Lie No. 7: Taxes will be lower. Nope. Not happening. And because federal taxes are more progressive than Alberta taxes, working people would have to pay even more to make up the difference after separation. Given the beliefs of the separatist crowd, taxes would likely become even less progressive after separation. So, “not only would separation increase the total amount of taxes that must be collected, but that larger burden would be shared less fairly.” Services would, naturally, deteriorate. So get ready to pay more for less. And don’t expect a separatist government to increase resource royalty rates to cover the difference.

Lie No. 8: Living standards will rise. No again. Alberta now has the highest GDP in Canada. “Economists are unanimous that separation would reduce Alberta GDP and wealth, not increase it. Public services would be put under further pressure because of the enormous costs and debts associated with setting up new national institutions.” Given the ideology of the separatist movement and the likely financial crisis, say good-bye to public health care.

Lie No. 9: Our resources will be all ours. Not so fast. Ottawa and First Nations would still control legal rights to large swathes of land in Alberta. “Alberta would constitute a legal quagmire lasting for years, dramatically enhancing the uncertainty facing businesses and property developers.” Some separatists are bound to suggest violence to cut the Gordian knot, but that’s not exactly going to encourage a favourable investment climate, is it?

Lie No. 10: We can still use Canadian money. Reassuring, perhaps, to the separation curious, but basically hooey. And that also goes for using the U.S. dollar – backed by more than $40 trillion in debt. Alberta could continue to use the Canadian dollar, but don’t expect any cooperation from the Bank of Canada. Ditto with the U.S. dollar, which would put Alberta in the same company as Somalia, East Timor and Panama. “The challenge of creating a monetary system in an independent Alberta is perhaps the most daunting economic hurdle that advocates of separation must confront,” Dr. Stanford wrote. “the most likely result of separation would be monetary debasement, widespread defaults, and a breakdown in normal monetary circulation.” And brace yourself for currency controls if you wait too long to try to escape this mess.

Unfortunately, unlike a normal Top Ten list, none of these are funny.

Then there’s the biggest lie of all, although it’s not really an economic one. To wit, that by voting for separation in Ms. Smith’s referendum on Oct. 19, we’re just “sending a message to Ottawa.”

The idea we should vote to “Let Alberta Decide,” as Mr. Wilson’s group puts it, is a trick. It’s intended to divide the country and create the conditions in which separation is inevitable, even if it becomes universally obvious it’s a mistake, like the Slovaks’ Sandpaper Divorce, or the United Kingdom’s disastrous Brexit breakup with Europe.

“Just flirtation with the pipedream of separation undermines the economic, political, and social well-being of Albertans,” Dr. Stanford wrote. “And the longer this pipedream is kept alive, the more the damage will grow.”

If separation became reality, jobs and incomes would be at risk. Federal programs like Employment Insurance, the Canada Child Benefit and the Canada Pension Plan would disappear. Taxes would have to rise. Services would disappear. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be gone – to be replaced by what, the right to bear arms? So would the full rights of Canadian citizenship. Alberta students who wanted to study in Canada would have to pay full international tuition fees. The population of the new country would be bitterly divided.

Said Dr. Stanford: “The utopian promises of separation would in reality jeopardize most of what generations of workers in Alberta have worked for: a society which harvests this province’s unique abundance of human and natural resources, to build a society of opportunity, fairness, and inclusion.”

Conventional wisdom in Canadian political and media circles seems to be that Albertans are almost to a man and woman deeply discontented with their relationship with the rest of Canada.

Yet recent polling about the divisive and deceptively worded separation referendum foisted on Albertans by their province’s now separatist dominated United Conservative Party Government strongly suggests this is not the real story. 

Despite a massive foreign-funded disinformation and misinformation campaign and the willing collaboration of a significant sector of Canadian mass media, Albertans are still overwhelmingly in favour of remaining part of Canada. 

If they’re so unhappy, it’s reasonable to ask, why do they want to stay? 

Well, maybe they can smell the aroma of BS that’s blowing on the breeze nowadays – and not just from all the farmers’ fields around here. 

The separatist propaganda machine would like you to think it’s because the majority of Albertans are frightened sissies, cowed by the “woke agenda,” cowering in fear before a gloriously beckoning MAGA future. 

This, of course, is nonsense, and rather insulting. Just the same, concern about what the significant number of racist, neo-fascist, misogynist, and Christian nationalist individuals who have gravitated to the Alberta separatist movement would do if they ever got real power in an independent nation is entirely justified. 

It’s reasonable to wonder, though, about the true origin of the economic problems that separatists and the UCP government alike want us to think have all been perpetrated on Alberta by Ottawa’s notorious “Laurentian elites.”* 

What is the origin of Albertans’ legitimate economic worries, then? As Edmonton-raised economist Jim Stanford wrote in a recent paper on the separatists’ false promises, “the core source of Albertans’ mistreatment in recent years lies right here in Alberta.” 

“Successive conservative governments in Alberta have long practised ‘blame Ottawa’ politics,” wrote Dr. Stanford, who is now director of the Centre for Future Work and the Harold Innis Industry Professor in Economics at McMaster University. According to this narrative, he explained, “whatever is wrong in the province must be the fault of an intrusive, acquisitive federal government, perpetually interfering with the province’s affairs and stealing its resources, taxes and wealth.”

Alberta conservative governments operating under various trade names have raised this narrative of victimization to a form of art, and it’s reached new levels of hysteria under the leadership of Premier Danielle Smith. But while the hard times are real for many Albertans, Dr. Stanford argues, “the claim that Ottawa is fully and solely to blame for this hardship bears no relationship to economic reality.”

“By many key indicators, Alberta has performed uniquely poorly relative to other provinces, including economic growth, investment, wages, and living standards,” he said in the report commissioned by the Alberta Federation of Labour and published on Aug. 31. Indeed, this has been obvious since the UCP took power under Jason Kenney in 2019.

Citing published analysis by many economists, Dr. Stanford’s report debunks the claims of separatists that we’d all be richer, lower taxed and happier if only Alberta were free of Ottawa.

Remember, Dr. Stanford noted, that here in what was once the highest paid jurisdiction in Canada for working people, productivity per worker is still higher than in any other province, “yet wages now barely match the national average.” What happened? 

Thanks to the wage-suppression policies of the UCP, introduced by Mr. Kenney after his election in 2019 and continued to this day under Premier Danielle Smith, Alberta is the only province where real wages relative to inflation have fallen since that year, Dr. Stanford pointed out. In 2015, average Alberta wages were 16 per cent above the national average. That wage advantage has now all but disappeared. 

“The fact Alberta wages have lagged so far behind the rest of the country cannot be blamed on federal policies,” he wrote. 

Federal policy would have had similar impact in all provinces. Rather, “Alberta’s aggressive and perverse efforts to deliberately suppress wages (such as the eight-year freeze on the minimum wage, and harsh restrictions on union organizing and collective bargaining) are the culprit,” he argued. “The UCP Government continues to deliberately suppress wages through multiple channels.” 

Meanwhile, “production and export of petroleum have never been higher, and petroleum profits are setting new records,” Dr. Stanford wrote. “Yet petroleum employment declined by 40,000 in the last decade.” This, he noted, is “not because Ottawa was somehow handcuffing this industry, but because petroleum companies found ways to produce more oil and gas with fewer workers.”

Even during the much-disparaged Trudeau government, thanks to the federal expenditure on pipeline expansion Alberta’s exports grew at a much faster pace than the Canadian average. “The claim that Alberta is ‘blocked’ from exporting its petroleum and other products by Ottawa is exactly backwards,” Dr. Stanford said. “Whatever’s wrong in Alberta, it must be due to what’s happening within the province not due to a failure to export.”

The data shows that corporate investment, however, is down, despite all the favours done for big business and especially the oil industry by the UCP. “The petroleum industry is more concerned with paying record dividends and share buybacks than reinvesting in Alberta’s economy.” And thanks to Donald Trump’s war of choice in the Persian Gulf, profits were up more than 144 per cent in this year’s second quarter. In the same period, investment was down. 

At the same time, the UCP has done nothing to slow the elimination of jobs by the petroleum industry, including moving work from Alberta to foreign corporate offices. Since 2014, oil production has increased by almost 60 per cent while employment has fallen more than 25 per cent. “The industry is producing more, and generating more profits, but with fewer workers. That is the consequence of corporate cost-cutting, not Ottawa’s policies.”

And while nominal wages may be down thanks to the UCP, the impact of inflation has been worse, once again because of provincial policies – including higher increases in electricity, insurance and tuition costs than in any other province. Average real wages fell 3 per cent between 2019 and 2025, the only province in which they fell. 

“All of these policies reinforce the shift of wealth from workers to business, and reinforce workers’ hardship,” Dr. Stanford explained. “None of them have anything to do with the federal government.”

I will return very soon to Dr. Stanford’s analysis of what hard economic data say about the “false narratives and phony claims” – in many cases, outright lies – promoted by Alberta separatists inside and outside the UCP. DJC 

*That fatuous term, by the way, was coined by a Globe and Mail journalist, born and raised in Ontario and best known for his admiring take on Stephen Harper’s Conservative rule – in other words, the very definition of a Laurentian elite.

On Thursday, a mostly anonymous group of some 47 individuals identifying themselves as “the Alberta Transition Council” dropped a document they called “The Alberta Transition Plan, a Practical Analysis of Alberta’s Transition from Province to an Independent Country.”

Only two authors are named in the document, St. Albert lawyer Keith Wilson, a leader of the Let Alberta Decide third-party-advertiser group, and retired business executive Dennis Kalma, who based on his Internet presence is connected to the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project. 

As for the “council” comprised of the other 45, the document says they prefer to keep their role covert “in order to respect professional, employment and personal considerations.” Under the circumstances, it’s hard to blame them. 

For this “plan” is an utterly unserious document, either hopelessly naïve or deeply cynical. It is a fair comment to say that either the authors actually believe the charming nonsense peddled throughout its 214 pages, in which case they are fooling themselves, or they don’t, in which case they are trying to fool the rest of us. 

And for all the talk in its pages about analysis, research and findings, there is very little here but propaganda intended to create a reassuring sense of inevitability, thereby leaving Albertans with the impression that transitioning to citizens of the new state of Alberta will be a painless and quick process that would leave our lives and financial circumstances intact and inevitably result in a mutually beneficial new relationship with Canada.

It does, however, contain one interesting idea that perhaps could be explored further as a way out of the ridiculous situation Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party Government and her separatist allies have ensnared all of us who live here in the confusing, divisive and possibly rigged separation “referendum” they have scheduled for Oct. 19. 

To wit: Allowing citizens of Alberta’s First Nations the option of remaining in a permanent relationship with Canada, or even for their land, encircled by the landlocked new statelet of Alberta, to remain Canadian territory. 

“Canada could, for example, continue to own or administer certain reserve lands and services while the reserve remains inside Alberta,” the authors write, adopting a serious tone. “A different possibility would be to negotiate that particular reserve territory remains Canadian territory.” 

The key flaw with this, as the authors must surely know, is that their own separatist base would never abide such an arrangement. Indeed, it runs directly counter to the ridiculous draft “constitution” cobbled together by the bright lights of the APP, which would constitutionally entrench the present provincial borders of Alberta for all time as the boundaries of their imagined new republic. 

This part of the text continues: “That would create additional questions involving borders, roads, policing, taxes, utilities and access. Neither result would happen automatically.” To which one can reasonably respond: “No shit, Sherlock!” 

Still, if Alberta First Nations can remain Canadian on Canadian land inside Alberta, why not the rest of us? The remaining 75 per cent or more of us loyal Canadians who want no part of separation but would nevertheless prefer to remain in our Alberta homes, living as Canadian citizens on Canadian territory? 

All of Edmonton, for example, including its airport and Canadian Armed Forces base. Calgary, one is certain, would desire similar status. Well, this is unlikely to fly with the separatist base or the cabal of cynical schemers on Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s political staff, of course, but it is nevertheless a fine illustration of just how silly this document is despite its faux scholarly tone. 

“This plan assumes that a successful transition should seek a new cooperative relationship between Alberta and Canada, not the unnecessary disruption of existing relationships,” the authors write. “In many cases, services can continue without interruption, while responsibility for their regulation, funding or oversight transitions from Canada to Alberta.”

So, the authors would have us believe, no one need fear problems accessing their bank accounts, continuation of their mortgage, receipt of their pension payments, access to health care services or education for their kids. That lawsuit you launched in a Canadian court? It can continue in an Alberta court where it left off, the authors also promise, because some of those federal judges you don’t trust will become Alberta judges you do. And those jurists’ judgments, the authors argue, will still be honoured in the rest of Canada. 

Plus, federal Canadian services now offered by Ottawa will continue, quite possibly delivered by the same civil servants in the employ of the new state, the document startlingly suggests. “For those current federal employees working in Alberta who are asking if they can keep their jobs after Day 1 of independence, the short answer is yes.” One wonders how many federal employees would accept such a deal – and, if they were so foolish as to do so, how that would go over with the separatist base? 

The authors say elsewhere: “RCMP members can be offered to transition to become Alberta sheriffs.” What’s more, a “cooperative agreement could allow temporary (Canada Revenue Agency) collection or data services under defined terms while Canada builds full capacity.” The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation could continue to operate too, they say. And so on. 

And, hey, don’t worry about Canadians to the east and west being pissed about our frivolous decision to break up their country based on half-baked promises and U.S. and Russian Internet memes. “Geography makes an ongoing relationship both inevitable and important,” the “plan” avers. 

Anyway, if that fails to work, Alberta can always threaten British Columbia. “Although British Columbia has direct access to the Pacific, it is effectively continentally landlocked by the Rocky Mountains when moving goods eastward to the rest of Canada and inland North American markets.” Moreover, B.C. “has a strong interest in preserving reliable access to Alberta energy because there is no readily available near-term replacement for supply.”

Nowhere is the absurd naivety of this work of fiction more obvious than on the question of dividing up Canada’s debt, post separation. 

“The debt and assets analysis does not support using a simple per-capita or federal debt as Alberta’s final settlement formula,” the authors declare with boundless optimism. “Instead, the settlement should examine the broader financial relationship between Alberta and Canada, including federal assets and liabilities, records, historical investment, who benefited from debt-funded programs and infrastructure, contingent obligations, transition costs and Alberta’s historical fiscal contribution to the federation.”

After all, they argue, apparently forgetting that all Canadians pay the same tax rates, “Alberta taxpayers have contributed substantially more per capita to federal programs than Albertans have received through major federal transfers and spending programs.”

“Canada may propose that Alberta assume a share of federal debt based primarily on population,” the authors cheerfully continue. “However, such an approach would ignore Albertans’ historical contributions, which should be taken into account in any fair calculation methodology.” 

“Should be …” That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting in this document. But good luck getting voters in other provinces whose country you have just broken up to be in a mood to let their politicians agree to any such deal, even if their leaders were in a mood to do so. 

Elsewhere, under the general heading of health care, the authors seem to presume that transfer payments from Canada should continue.

What is the basis for this unwarranted optimism? Well, according to the authors, it worked for Peter Lougheed in the 1980s. “Difficult Canada-Alberta disputes have historically been resolved in negotiated arrangements,” they say. They seem to have forgotten, alas, that despite his differences with the first Trudeau government, Premier Lougheed was a patriotic Canadian and Alberta was a Canadian province. 

Look, there’s plenty more foolishness in this effort. I could write another 1,000 words on the disadvantages of a country with no currency of its own, the functionality of a diplomatic service that would only pay attention to North America, or the dangers of waiting until after a separation engineered by extremist right-wingers like the leaders of the APP to find out what your constitutional rights and protections in the new country would be. On that last point, the APP has already tipped its hand in its draft constitution, and it’s not pretty. 

Oh, and they’re in a hurry. All this is supposed to be basically wrapped up by the fall of 2027!

Do members of the secretive cabal who cooked up this “plan” imagine that after independence Albertans will still get to send a huge cohort of separatist MPs to Ottawa every four years or so to lecture Canadians on how to run their affairs? This is not stated explicitly in this document, but such an assumption seems to underly much of what is written there. 

In fact, what they propose would be a bitter and angry divorce. Worse, no matter what the vote is in Premier Smith’s bogus referendum, at least half the population of the new country, more likely two thirds, would side with the missing parent.

And the APP wants us all to be armed to the teeth!

No wonder the anonymous “council” thinks the new state would need an army and a spy agency – not to “coordinate with neighbouring states,” as the plan suggests, but to keep its own population down. 

“The report will speak for itself,” Mr. Wilson told a CBC reporter. Indeed, I think it does, regardless of whether he thinks “Canadians, and many people in the world, are growing leery of the ‘experts say’ stuff anyway.”

Never let it be said that the Alberta’s United Conservative Party government isn’t in favour of recycling stuff – at least as long as that can be used to create higher costs and more red tape to help strangle the development of renewable energy. 

Yesterday, the UCP opened a new front in its War on Renewable Energy by adding a $14-per-panel “recycling fee” to the cost of solar panels.

Naturally, the government framed the effort as an example of environmental responsibility, claiming piously in a news release that “Alberta’s government will not allow solar panels to pile up in landfills across the province.”

With the new fee set to come into effect quickly, on Oct. 1, the province will also ban solar panels from landfills and “ensure they are directed toward reuse and recycling when they reach the end of their useful lives.” 

If we could trust the UCP on environmental initiatives, this might be a convincing pitch, but the record of Premier Danielle Smith and her government on this front is not reassuring. 

The Business Renewables Centre-Canada condemned the “punitive tax” as “the latest in a string of arbitrary costs the province has placed on the renewable energy industry without the analysis to back it up.”

“While BRC supports the introduction of a recycling fee, we cannot support a punitive tax far exceeding any other jurisdiction,” said the organization’s director, Jorden Dye, in a news release yesterday.

“While governments worldwide are beginning to establish end-of-life recycling programs for clean energy infrastructure, Alberta’s proposed fee is 139 to 3500 per cent higher than any other jurisdiction in the world,” the release said. Well, of course it is! This is the UCP we’re talking about. 

BRC-Canada  – which was set up by the Calgary-based Pembina Institute to help businesses access renewable energy to reduce emissions, pretty much making it Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the UCP – called the imposition of the fee part of a familiar pattern. It cited its June 2025 study that found costs higher than in any other jurisdiction we reviewed, “imposed without benchmarking to justify them.”

According to the government, “by 2045, more than 95 per cent of the solar panels currently installed in Alberta are expected to reach the end of their lives, generating as much as 72,700 tonnes of material.”

But according to BRC-Canada, since none of the panels sold now are likely to require recycling for 25 to 35 years, “no near-term waste stream justifies the urgency, and the Alberta Recycling Management Authority has not published a breakdown explaining how the $14 figure was calculated.”

Never mind, the UCP had a colourful canned quote for Environment Minister Grant Hunter: “We will not wait until mountains of dead solar panels are piling up in our landfills before acting. We are putting the system in place now to recover valuable materials, attract private investment and build a new recycling industry here in Alberta.”

An image of a stack of dented solar panels was included to lend verisimilitude to the claim. 

“Responsible solar energy growth means considering environmental responsibility throughout its life cycle, said RJ Sigurdson, whose unintentionally ironic title is minister of affordability and utilities, in the same government news release. “We’re protecting taxpayers from future cleanup costs and keeping power affordable and sustainable for generations to come.”

In other words, I guess, the UCP is not only picking winners, it’s trying to ensure an industry that has the potential to cut into oil and gas profits is a loser. 

Well, this is the Trump path, which Premier Smith makes an obvious effort to follow closely even as she spars with critics of the U.S. president’s anti-Canadian trade policies. 

So yesterday’s announcement was obviously on brand considering the same government’s 2023 ban on renewable energy projects and subsequent imposition of expensive and complicated red tape on renewable energy projects that was estimated to have driven as much as $33 billion in renewable projects out of the province – although that figure is naturally disputed by the government. 

Just in case you were thinking solar panels might be a good way to insulate yourself and your family from the additional $460 a year in electricity costs you can expect to result from the government’s sweetheart deal with Meta Platforms Inc., they’re going to cost you a little more now. 

That Meta deal will let the California-based corporation hook into the provincial power grid for a couple of years to run its planned energy-sucking hyperscale AI data centre northeast of Edmonton before a natural-gas fired power-generation plant is brought on line, if it ever is.

That is widely forecast to drive up electricity costs for almost everyone in Alberta. 

As has been observed in this space before, nobody loves red tape as much as Premier Smith and the UCP, especially if it can be weaponized against the government’s enemies, real and imagined, and made to help its friends. 

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith marked the “Alberta Day” moment in time with a couple of significantly different official messages and an apocalyptic prophecy.

Yesterday morning at 10 o’clock, an email from the government showed up in journalists’ email accounts bearing Ms. Smith’s official Alberta Day message. This was obviously considered important enough to be reproduced in Canada’s other official language, an inclusive touch one wouldn’t normally have expected from a United Conservative Party Government. 

For the most part, it was the usual happy holiday pish-posh, except, of course, that Alberta Day is not a holiday. We’re celebrating our rich cultural heritage. We look confidently to the future. Yadda-yadda. The last line even echoed the national anthem, sort of: “Happy Alberta Day and may our province forever remain strong and free.”

The third paragraph, which turns out to be the most significant, began: “We recognize the Indigenous Peoples whose enduring connection to and stewardship of this land continues to shape Alberta.” This was positive, and even a hopeful sign for those of us who believe that we are all Treaty people here in Alberta, and ought to act accordingly. 

Fifty-five minutes later, an “UPDATED” email appeared. The first sentence of the third paragraph now read: “Generations of Albertans from many backgrounds have helped build our province through hard work, innovation and a shared belief in freedom.” 

The reference to Indigenous people had been excised.

The message adopted a more strident tone, continuing: “From the energy that powers our nation, to the food that feeds the world, to the entrepreneurs, workers and innovators who drive our economy forward, Alberta has always punched above its weight. We are a province of builders, dreamers and doers who refuse to settle for anything less than the best.”

“Let us continue building a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada, confident in who we are, proud of what we contribute and ready to seize the opportunities ahead,” this version concluded. 

Naturally, it didn’t take long for these changes to be noticed by the sharp-eyed denizens of social media, and questions were immediately raised about what the heck was going on. To his credit, CHED Radio host Courtney Theriault asked Ms. Smith’s spokesperson, Sam Blackett, what had just happened.

“Earlier today, an updated version of the Premier’s statement on Alberta Day was issued in error,” Mr. Blackett responded. “The initial statement that was issued at 10:00am stands and will be reflected on Alberta.ca/news. We apologize for this error and any confusion that it may have caused.”

So what exactly was the error here? That an embarrassing fight between factions in the UCP strategic brain trust had been revealed? Simple confusion in which a first draft became a final draft? Someone forgot who was supposed to be cancelled in the new Alberta? Speculation is rife, naturally, although chances are good we’ll never know for sure.

Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi of the Treaty 8 Sovereign Nations called the removal deeply troubling. “Our Nations are not a footnote to Alberta’s story,” he said in a news release. “Treaty Nations were here long before Alberta existed, and our place in this land cannot be erased when it becomes politically inconvenient.” His statement called the change “particularly concerning in the context of the Alberta government’s ongoing efforts to advance separation-related initiatives while challenging the constitutional status of Treaty rights and the duty to consult.” 

Meanwhile, Premier Smith also served up some oil patch eschatology, warning that the End Times are nigh if Canada pushes back against Trump’s tariffs. Postmedia political columnist Rick Bell was the semi-official conduit for what arguably was Ms. Smith’s real Alberta Day message yesterday.

Taking on the role of U.S. President Donald Trump’s unofficial Alberta spokesperson, Ms. Smith – who was “on fire,” according to Mr. Bell – said Canada has no options but to surrender.

This is an opinion that most Canadians don’t appear share, if you go by yesterday’s federal by-election results. But put an export tax on Canadian oil, she told her amanuensis, and the U.S. response would “wipe out the Ontario and Quebec economies.”

“I don’t want that to happen,” Mr. Bell quoted her saying. “I’m trying to keep Canada from doing something that dumb because I know what the effects would be.”

Ergo, she continued, Alberta will be keeping Kentucky bourbon and watery American beer on the liquor store shelves, thank you very much. 

Mr. Bell’s account concluded with the premier warning that the Americans would develop the Venezuelan tar patch out of spite and put Alberta out of business, plus blaming all our troubles on Justin Trudeau.

As for her apocalyptic claims about Mr. Trump’s Venezuela oil deal, which the U.S. president announced last Friday, here’s what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman had to say on Alberta Day: “Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil.”

Good morning, my fellow Albertans! Happy Alberta Day! (Such as it is.) 

No, you can’t sleep in. Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s lame celebration is a “recognized commemorative day.” So, no day off for you. And no overtime either. Better get crackin’! 

The legal holiday is next Monday. You know, Labour Day, a national holiday. 

Today marks Alberta’s achievement of official provincehood in 1905, the day the federal Parliament in Ottawa granted this part of the North West Territories official provincial status, although as the sovereign-Alberta crowd in all its various guises keeps sourly pointing out, it was not quite the full-meal deal for a spell. 

Of course, the population of Alberta was thought to only be about 250,000 in 1905, and Ottawa’s priority at the time was populating the West in an orderly fashion with grateful newcomers to immunize against U.S. encroachment. (Of course, this is Alberta, so historical circumstances are no reason to suppress our overflowing sense of grievance.) 

Seeing as Alberta Day embarrassingly fell on a Tuesday this year, our United Conservative Government told us it was OK to celebrate it on the weekend, which is perhaps why our local separatists decided to stage a demo on the steps of the Legislative Building in Edmonton on Saturday.

As a veteran of many a Saturday protest rally on the steps of the Legislature – surely the coldest spot in Edmonton eight months of every year – I could have told them that a weekend protest at that venue is no good, because none of the people you want to yell at are even in the in the vicinity, let alone on the premises, which are locked up tight. 

One might also have thought Premier Danielle Smith’s beloved Alberta separatists, with whom she seems to closely co-ordinate many of her schemes, wouldn’t have seen much value in a commemorative occasion that marks Alberta’s establishment as a province by a democratic vote of Parliament, in Ottawa, when no shots were fired. 

But sometimes needs must, and you have to make a sacrifice to get a crowd out. In the event, the crowd that showed up must have been a disappointment to the organizers, since photos of the event made it look as if only about 600 brave blue-clad souls showed up. Maybe 800 if we’re really being generous. 

Carefully curated photos were soon posted on social media to make the crowd look a little bigger – a venial sin that more than Alberta separatists have been known to commit. Alas for the rally organizers, that was spoiled by the ubiquity of smart phones with good cameras, not all of them in the hands of their supporters. 

On Sunday, Premier Smith delivered a short, anodyne Alberta Day speech to a small and presumably carefully curated crowd at an outdoor reception in Calgary’s Heritage Park, during which she managed not to say a single word about her strenuous efforts to ensure a separation referendum will remain on the province-wide ballot on Oct. 19.

Surely pretending to be a loyal Canadian and “the strongest campaigner on the Remain side” (as one of her loyalists put it on social media) while moving heaven and earth to accommodate her party’s separatist faction and toadying to U.S. President Donald Trump on the tariff file is galactic level codswallop. Still, the premier seems to be able to get away with it without much pushback. 

If any hecklers had appeared at Heritage Park on Sunday, presumably they would have been frog-marched out by black-clad Alberta Sheriffs just as they were at Saturday’s seppie rally in Edmonton.

When it comes to freedom of speech, apparently, Alberta is only one of the most free places in the entire world, as Ms. Smith put it in her Sunday remarks, when people are expressing points of view with which her government agrees. 

In fairness to the Sheriffs at the Legislature in Edmonton, there was more than one heckler in the crowd! (As the old joke goes: It’s a trick! There’s TWO of them!)

No doubt we’ll soon learn that the two counter-protesters were removed for their own safety, which, arguably, won’t reflect well on the separatist crowd.

Whatever. Premier Smith will presumably be celebrating Alberta Day today at a scheduled morning cabinet meeting and getting ready for her junket to Tennessee in the company of Nathan Cooper, the former Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA and Legislative Speaker who is now the province’s “Senior Representative to the United States” in Washington. 

As such, Mr. Cooper is an accredited Canadian diplomat, despite his name having never been removed from the Republican Party of Alberta’s online “Independence Scorecard” as a supporter of Alberta separation. In the past, the fringe political party has been willing to stop listing some MLAs as separation supporters when asked. 

According to news reports last week, Ms. Smith and Mr. Cooper will meet the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development, the head of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, and the CEO of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp.

Many Albertans were left wondering why the premier and her trade representative would bother meeting such insignificant officials. Political commentator Dave Cournoyer described this aspect of the visit as “somewhat comical.” 

He quoted an unnamed political strategist suggesting “that the meetings could either be a cover for a meeting with a more important U.S. official that was cancelled at the request of Canada’s trade negotiators or a cover for a meeting with a more important U.S. official that will happen.”

Alternatively, Mr. Cournoyer wondered if the low-level meetings were arranged at the last minute “to justify Smith’s vacation to Music City USA.” Perhaps she plans to claim her meal allowance. 

Personally, though, I wonder if some brainiac on the premier’s staff – or perhaps the premier herself – confused Nashville with Asheville, the North Carolina city where G20 finance ministers and central bankers met yesterday and are gathering again today. Tell me that’s not a possibility. I’m listening. 

About those Edmonton submarines …

Speaking of the Asheville G20 meeting, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott ‌Bessent told CNBC he plans to meet with Canadian trade officials soon, perhaps a sign his boss is once again preparing to TACO. 

Regardless, it’s interesting that Mr. Bessent took a shot at Canada based on an obscure Edmonton factoid. “We’re not at war with Canada,” he told the business news channel. “What are they going to do, take their two-cent submarines from the Edmonton Mall and sic them on us?”

West Edmonton Mall’s “submarine” attraction was closed in 2005 and carted away in 2012, as journalists couldn’t resist solemnly noting in their reports of Mr. Bessent’s remarks. To be fair, the four subs, which ran on tracks and never fully submerged, had a better service record than the four used Upholder-class subs the Canadian Navy bought from some slick used-submarine salesman in the U.K. back 1998. That $750-million deal was bad enough to qualify as piracy on the high seas!

Alert readers will also recall that back in January, Mr. Bessent put his oar in on the topic of Alberta separatism, telling a far-right U.S. TV station about “a rumour that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada” and opining “I think we should let them come down into the U.S.”

The secretary’s latest comment suggests he or one of his minions has been talking to someone pushing U.S. annexation who heartily dislikes Edmonton. This, I would suggest, is not some mere seppie camping in a two-star Washington hotel hoping to snare a meeting with a minor official, but someone with a significant position in the Smith Government. Several possibilities spring to mind.

NOTE: My apology to Mr. Cooper for referring to him once as Ms. Cooper in an earlier version of this story. This was just a simple old-fashioned typo with no implications intended. It should not be necessary to state this, but the state of North American political discourse, almost exclusively on the right, makes it necessary. DJC

Oddly, Alberta media seem to have had very little to say about the new analysis by the Pembina Institute that the $13-billion Artificial Intelligence data centre planned by Meta Platforms Inc. in Sturgeon County could add from $270 to $460 a year to Albertans’ electricity bills once the hyperscale installation has powered up. 

“At the heart of significant electricity market pressures, and the resulting bill increases, are Alberta’s ‘Bring Your Own Generation’ rules, which allow data centres to connect to the grid before their generation is brought online,” the Calgary-based organization said of its analysis in a news release Wednesday.

While the analysis by the institute confirms the provincial government’s claim that Albertans may see a 6-per-cent reduction in the transmission portion of their electricity bills because of Meta’s connection to the provincial grid, “the market impacts of the new Meta data centre will far outweigh the transmission savings.”

“As our analysis shows, when these new large-scale data centres connect to the grid, it puts pressure on the electricity market, increasing costs until new power plants come online,” said Pembina, which describes itself as a clean-energy think tank. 

The analysis shows the likely impact of the planned Meta centre northeast of Edmonton on the typical Alberta’s power bill from 2027 to 2031, Pembina said. 

“Albertans already pay some of the highest and most volatile electricity rates in the country,” said David Pickup, Pembina’s director of electricity. “If data centres are coming to Alberta, they should help make our electricity system stronger, cleaner and more affordable. Instead, Alberta’s current rules risk increasing consumer costs, while locking in new high-emission gas power.”

The latter point is a reference to Premier Danielle Smith’s policy of ensuring AI data centres are powered by natural gas from clapped out and otherwise uneconomic wells rather than renewable sources such as solar or wind power.

“Removing red tape for renewables can help to stabilize energy costs, enable local economic development, and reduce the emissions impact of this emerging industry,” Mr. Pickup added, although we all understand that’s not going to happen under the UCP. It’s funny, isn’t it, how solar arrays on agricultural land were a huge problem for the UCP but scores of massive data centres in the same kind of locations are not. 

Pembina’s conclusion is similar to what the Alberta Federation of Labour called free riding on the electricity grid in a July 16 news release that quoted a new study by the respectable but nevertheless right-wing C.D. Howe Institute and the AFL’s own research from two years ago on the impact of concentration in Alberta’s so-called deregulated electricity market, which has foisted the most expensive electricity rates in Canada on Albertans. 

“Albertans have already overpaid $24 billion because of deregulation and privatization of our power market,” the AFL President Gil McGowan said in that statement. “Now the government is adding a foreign tech giant to the front of the line, with no public say and no plan to deal with the inevitable fallout.”

“The solution is clear,” he added, “re-regulate generation and put the public back in charge of Alberta’s power.” Well, we also know that’s not going to happen under the UCP. 

Last year, Pembina said the average Alberta household spent approximately $1,700 on electricity. Of that, energy costs made up 40 per cent, distribution charges 23 per cent, transmission charges 18 per cent and administration fees 14 per cent, plus another 5 per cent in taxes.

“Albertans may be paying 15 per cent to 25 per cent more for their electricity in the next five years as a result of the data centre,” the Pembina release said. 

In addition, if more hyperscale AI data centres are built, as the UCP has made clear it intends, “similar price spikes are expected,” Pembina said in a data sheet it published on the topic. 

No one should be surprised that the Alberta Government’s “virtual town hall” on the data centres last night was a much tamer affair than the rowdy live events in Lacombe and Redwater on Aug. 19 and 20 at which, quelle horreur, Technology Minister Nate Glubish had to endure boos and catcalls from citizens. 

Doing it over the Internet puts the control back in the hands of the moderators, although it should probably make the UCP a little nervous that more than 12,500 people tuned in, according to Primary Care Minister Justin Wright, who was brought in to replace less diplomatic political staffer Vitor Marciano in the chair. 

What’s more, The Canadian Press reported, no one who was allowed to speak expressed any enthusiasm about the government’s AI data centre scheme.

Unlike the live meetings in real Alberta towns, Premier Smith sat in on this one, taking the opportunity in a response to one questioner to boost her Oct. 19 referenda pushing a MAGA-style immigration policies and Alberta intrusion into federal jurisdiction. 

Now seen from coast to coast as the weakest link in the national response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s ugly tariff war on Canada, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith took to a podium in Grande Prairie yesterday to do some reputational damage control. 

She trotted out a few pieties about how unfairly U.S. President Donald Trump is acting, plus a similar number of apocalyptic predictions about what will happen if we dare to push back, but at the end of a half hour of characteristic gaslighting it was evident that as long as she remains at the helm in Alberta, the province isn’t about to make any sacrifices to support the country. 

And, no, she told a reporter at her news conference, she won’t postpone or cancel the separation referendum she has been promoting to hold together her shaky United Conservative Party coalition, which is riddled with separatists, and thereby remain in power. So if that makes us look more like a tasty morsel to be gobbled up by Mr. Trump and his minions, tough luck, Canada. 

In Ms. Smith’s version of reality, Canada is helpless and the only thing we can do is beg state and federal U.S. politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, to put pressure on their addled president to do the right thing. 

Nevertheless, the premier called this “being smarter, more strategic, more agile and using our reputation and relationship with the American people to have these tariffs reversed.” (Good luck with that plan!)

“It means being more Canadian,” you know, “too friendly, kind and helpful to resist,” she advised smarmily. 

But use oil as a bargaining chip, or just the threat of it – as even former UCP premier Jason Kenney has advised, for crying out loud – forget about it! 

“This would bring the economies of Ontario and Quebec to a grinding halt,” she predicted, seemingly advising her former pal Mr. Trump’s minions about what they could do if Canada threatened to put an export tax on oil, say, to pay the cost of Canadian businesses hit by the latest U.S. tariffs. The cost of any such strategy, by the way, will soon be used by Conservatives like Ms. Smith to argue Canada can no longer afford to be Canadian. 

“Do we really want an outcome where the Toronto Pearson airport no longer has aviation fuel so that people can’t fly? Do we really want people to be in their homes working from home because there is no diesel or gasoline to get them to work? Do we really want an affordability crisis in Eastern Canada?” 

Oh, and don’t forget, she went on, if we do anything but roll over, the Americans will soon be pumping Venezuelan crude back up the pipeline to the Midwest’s heavy oil refineries and the mighty Athabasca Oil Sands will be abandoned forever. 

This seems like an odd prediction for someone who normally says the market for Alberta oil will never stop growing, but there you go. And never mind that it’ll take at least a decade to get the Venezuelan tar sands plants back on stream. But to be fair, she did renew her call for another pipeline to the West Coast – presumably to be paid for by all Canadians. 

Bizarrely but characteristically, the premier also rambled on for a spell about shipping Alberta crude by ocean tanker to the Irving refinery in St. John, N.B. How? From Prince Rupert via the Panama Canal, a part of the world she is said to be familiar with? It is a wonderment! 

Ms. Smith also vowed that her government would form a business advisory committee made up of some of the usual suspects, and open another “concierge” service for worried business owners, both of which will allow the government to look busy while not actually doing very much. 

Well, there’s something to be said for the idea that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” but usually that thought, whether it came out of the mouth of Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan, comes with a very heavy “but” right after it. Not in Ms. Smith’s Pollyanna view of the American political scene, though, apparently. 

For his part, Mr. Kenney told The Canadian Press on Tuesday, that while a full 50-per-cent tariff on Canadian oil in response to Mr. Trump’s bullying would probably not be a good idea, “you don’t deal with an aggressive attack on your economy by starting with listing all the things you will not do in reprisal by limiting your options, by weakening your position.”

This is obviously true, and Mr. Kenney may be willing to speak this particular truth because he still holds out some hope of someday becoming prime minister.

Mr. Kenney is also now taking on a more public role, including playing Oscar Madison in an Alberta political remake of The Odd Couple, which will also star former NDP premier Rachel Notley in the role of Felix Unger . 

That is to say, the two former premiers will co-chair a campaign by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce to persuade Albertans to vote on October 19 to remain in Canada. 

Her actions notwithstanding, Premier Smith claimed in her news conference to be on the same side. What could possibly go wrong? 

With a few exceptions, most Canadians seem to agree that while a tariff war with the United States is far from ideal, the only sensible way to respond to bad-faith bargaining by the Trump Administration in the United States is with dollar-for-dollar reciprocal tariffs, targeted to hit Americans where they’ll feel it. 

The rare exceptions mainly seem to include treason-adjacent Alberta separatists, including some who hold seats in Parliament and the Legislature, and Conservatives elected to provincial and federal office in Wild Rose Country who may not be MAGA-influenced Fifty-first Staters but lack the intestinal fortitude to speak up on behalf of their country. 

Plus, of course, there’s that one weirdo MP from Ontario who was apparently U.S. Vice-President JD Vance’s BFF in college. 

Other than those guys – and I say this as a lifelong New Democrat – no one speaks for Canadians at this fraught moment better than Ontario’s Conservative Premier, Doug Ford, who said of President Donald Trump, “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”

Mr. Trump, no stranger to having his own sizeable posterior kissed, responded by suggesting he would rename Lake Ontario, taking to his personal Pravda social media site to declare: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Thanks to the simpering toadies at Google, Mr. Trump has enjoyed some success with his effort last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Golfo de América, or words to that effect. One supposes, therefore, that this is an actual possibility. 

This raises an interesting question for Canadians: How do we respond, appropriately and proportionally, with a symbolic gesture that will get up President Trump’s sensitive nose without directly insulting the United States?

I have a solution. It’s time to rename the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington State The Canadian Channel. 

Full disclosure here, I grew up in a house where you could see the Juan de Fuca Strait from one window, that of a tiny bathroom on the second floor. 

The appropriate person to consult about the naming of geographical features and outdoor signage is always a 13-year-old boy. Since I was about 13, I have been vividly aware that Juan de Fuca is not an appropriate name for a large body of salt water, or for that matter anything, anywhere in the English-speaking world. 

For just one thing, almost nobody in these parts knows how to pronounce Juan, after the probably undeserving Greek navigator, Juan de Fuca (né Ioannis Fokas, which is even worse) who probably never even saw the passage, let alone sailed up it. 

Anyway, while a strait is generally thought of in maritime circles as being skinnier than a channel, both terms are vague about just how narrow the passage in question must be. So we sovereign Canadians can just name the Strait of Juan de Fuca the Canadian Channel if we bloody well want to. And if Mr. Trump proceeds with Lake America, we should.

As Mr. Trump did south of the longest previously undefended border in the world, we can order all Canadian departments and agencies to call it the Canadian Channel all the way from the open Pacific to the Salish Sea. What’s more, we can ask our European and Antipodean allies to do the same thing. And you can count on it, Dear Readers, that at this point they will do so with alacrity, even delight!

If Mr. Trump confuses this as for something to do with Canadian content rules for broadcasters, well, so much the better. 

When the dispute with the United States simmers down and, as the Scots put it, we’ve sent Mr. Trump homeward tae think again – with any luck, immediately after the U.S. mid-term elections in November – the name of the Canadian Channel should remain. 

It can be a reminder of our historical ties to the brave mariners who in the summer of 1588 rallied to their queen and drove away vastly larger ships of the Spanish Armada in the aptly named English Channel – the venerable and dignified name recognized to this day not only by the Spanish and the French, but even by the Russians! 

It will also be a lesson to future American presidents that, sooner or later, those who come to Canada to Fuca ’round, find out. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Now that voters everywhere in North America are turning against Artificial Intelligence data centres hard and fast, what’s Alberta’s United Conservative Party going to do?

They’ve spent two years planning to woo data centres to Alberta as if they were the greatest industrial development since the invention of the steam engine. They even quietly created a special “concierge service” to make it easy for as many as 40 massive AI data centres to set up their noisy, polluting shops in rural Alberta. 

Unsurprisingly, as journalist Andrew Nikiforuk described the burgeoning opposition to data centres recently in The Tyee, “rural Albertans, like working people everywhere, are asking why their communities should become sacrifice zones for multinational corporations hell-bent on constructing ugly windowless boxes to house computing power that will toss many out of work while sucking up capital, fossil fuel and water.”

So, now that the UCP is alienating significant parts of its own voting base, you have to wonder, will the party change course or double down? 

The history of Premier Danielle Smith’s government suggests they’ll stick to trying to gaslight us into believing AI data centres are just “digital refineries” that will magically turn natural gas from clapped out and otherwise uneconomic wells into big money. 

South of the U.S. border, the impact of the “data center backlash” on the crucial mid-term elections is becoming serious enough it was considered worthy of in a major front-page story in The New York Times Saturday. 

“The fight over data centers is suddenly at the epicenter of the midterm elections,” The Times reported. “Politicians are racing to tap into the backlash — or inoculate themselves — as political strategists in both parties described the issue as an unusually fast-moving force that is already reshaping races for the House, the Senate and governor’s mansions.”

The problem for American Republicans in particular – and maybe for the UCP too – is it’s becoming increasingly obvious AI data centres are a disaster for communities where they’re built and the argument for building them sucks.

In a nutshell, as is increasingly understood by American voters regardless of their political identities, that argument is that AI data centres may kill your job, ensure your kids never work, destroy the value of your property, keep you awake at night, make you sick, poison your land, suck up all the water, and make your energy bills go up, but … “There Is No Alternative!”

All of this will sound familiar to Albertans who are starting to pay attention to the UCP’s plans, as will the promises that water won’t be wasted because of closed-loop cooling technology and power prices won’t go up because data centres will have to generate their own electricity – claims that upon closer examination come with many caveats. 

Since the argument for AI data centres isn’t an appealing one, there needs to be a sales pitch that can get the locals to go along with such schemes long enough to make them impossible to block, and that was a topic at a community meeting in St. Albert Saturday about Meta Platforms Inc.’s planned hyperscale AI data centre in nearby Sturgeon County.

“There is a playbook that these guys follow,” retired Simon Fraser University finance professor Carol Edwards told about 100 people at the Edmonton area city’s curling club at the event organized by the local Give Voice group.

“Sneak in under cover of darkness,” said Ms. Edwards, who retired in Olds three years ago and played a prominent role in the successful fight against a massive data centre there that was kyboshed last week by the Alberta Utilities Commission. “Keep as much hidden as possible. Co-opt the politicians. Throw around enormous numbers … everything done in secret.”

Sound familiar? Others make similar observations. Financing details for the facilities are usually cloaked in corporate confidentiality and enforced with non-disclosure agreements on local governments, Saskatchewan-based researcher Simon Enoch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said at a presentation on AI data centres in Regina last June. In response, he said then, the projects “are often fast-tracked by local and regional governments, cutting corners to overcome opposition.”

As Edwards said Saturday: “They’re going to come in and lie to you. It’s standard in the data centre industry. Lies, lies, lies, more lies. … They think you’re hicks, yokels, and farmers, and they think they can roll right over you.”

“But as the U.S. has discovered, data center promises are worthless,” she continued. “Bear in mind that they will not have to deliver. Nobody will hold them responsible for the promises that they don’t deliver on. But they will demand that your politicians make them huge promises in return.”

Data centre developers like farming areas near small towns because prime agricultural land usually has water and small towns have the infrastructure they need already in place, Ms. Edwards explained.

Small towns in Alberta are soft targets because they’re desperate for taxes, jobs and development. Local politicians “are suckers for those words,” she warned, and data centre operators need local politicians “willing to look the other way.” 

“What they don’t need, and this is the big lie, they don’t need people,” Edwards said. “It is an absolute myth that data centres create jobs. … That’s one of the biggest complaints that we’re hearing with the U.S. communities. This is what they say: all the high-tech jobs they were promised never appeared. What they got out of the deal is two things: scut jobs and costs.”

As another speaker at Saturday’s get-together, Calgary-based geophysicist and podcaster Jenny Yeremiy, pointed out, AI data centre water use statistics are often deceptive because they leave out the water used in power generation. 

According to a U.S. study of AI data centre water use in 2023, she noted, “the data centers accounted for 66 billion litres, but then when they looked at the power source, the power that fed those data centers, that was 800 billion litres in that year!”

As for the promise AI data centres will be made to generate their own power, here in Alberta it’s already starting to be bent out of shape. 

“Without any public consultation, the Smith Government signed a deal that lets Meta, a foreign corporation, draw as much power as the entire city of Edmonton – for at least two years – before Meta’s own power plant is even running,” Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan said in July. “When the blackouts hit and the power bills spike, Albertans should remember who signed this deal without asking them first.” 

Here’s a small bet, though: by the time that happens, the guilty parties will have retired to Panama or somewhere even nicer.

Well, “town halls” organized in Lacombe and Redwater last week turned into town hell for Technology Minister Nate Glubish, who got stuck with the nasty job of being Premier Smith’s spokesperson for AI data centres. “Jeers, badgering and boos,” as a reporter put it, greeted Mr. Glubish at both events. 

The message to the government, at least in those two towns, seemed to be, ‘Never mind the pancakes – %$#& your fascist AI data centres!’

It doesn’t sound as if this issue is going to die quietly any time soon.