Smith Rules Out Another Separation Vote After Albertans Choose Canada

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Tuesday night that Monday’s referendum gave her government a clear mandate to keep the province in Canada, and she promised not to hold another vote on separation for as long as she is premier.

By Wednesday afternoon, with 5,324 of 5,575 polls reported, 75.2 percent of voters had chosen for Alberta to remain a province of Canada. The other 24.8 percent voted for the provincial government to begin the legal process toward a binding referendum on leaving. That was 1,520,045 votes to 501,589, according to unofficial Elections Alberta results.

“Alberta will remain a province of Canada. Albertans will continue to be Canadians,” Smith said in a pre-recorded address that aired Tuesday night, as reported by CBC News. “I am well aware that not every grievance Alberta has with Ottawa has been resolved. There are still many political and constitutional battles ahead of us.”

Those battles, she said, “will be settled within the political and legal institutions of our nation rather than pursuing the option of separation.” Her government would still “use every legal and political tool at our disposal,” she said, and would be “unrelenting” when Ottawa interferes with the province’s rights.

A message to the quarter who voted to begin

Smith spent part of the speech on the hundreds of thousands of Albertans who voted the other way. “I recognize you as loyal Albertans,” she said. Many of them, she said, see Ottawa as having “threatened your freedoms and blocked your path to prosperity.” She told them: “You need to know that your voices have been heard.”

She also said she is convinced the federal government is no longer trying to phase out Alberta’s largest economic sectors, as she said it attempted under the previous prime minister. The province now considers seven of the “nine bad laws” she demanded Ottawa address to be scrapped or reformed, CBC reported.

The other nine questions

Smith asked voters for a mandate on nine questions about immigration and the constitution, and set the bar at 50 percent plus one. Yes led on seven of them by Wednesday afternoon. The widest margin was Question 5, on requiring proof of citizenship to vote in provincial elections, at 60.7 percent. No led on two: Question 6, on provinces choosing the judges for their own King’s Bench and Appeal courts, where Yes had 49.1 percent, and Question 8, on opting out of federal programs without losing the funding, where Yes had 47.9 percent.

“We will be pursuing the reforms approved by Albertans through this referendum in the coming months and years ahead,” Smith said. On Wednesday she said her government would look to Quebec’s 1991 immigration accord with Ottawa as a model, with legislation possible in the spring. She said early results appear to direct the province to take greater control over immigration and to charge temporary residents for the public services they use.

Some of those reforms face a long road. Abolishing the Senate, which led on Question 7, would need all 10 provinces, the House of Commons and the Senate itself. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that disputes over areas such as immigration could be settled without constitutional change, CBC reported.

Independence campaigners say the question stays open

Leaders of the independence side were not persuaded. “There needs to be a serious discussion within the party as to whether or not we want to continue to be led by a federalist,” Jeffrey Rath of the Alberta Prosperity Project told CBC. He told Global News he will push for a special general meeting of the United Conservative Party to remove Smith.

Smith answered in a video to party members Wednesday morning. “The United Conservative Party is not an independence party,” she said, according to CBC News. Members who “remain intent on dividing and turning our party into a vehicle for the independence movement,” she said, should “join a different party.” At a news conference later that day, she acknowledged “hurt feelings” among those who voted to begin the process. “You get to have your say, but you don’t always get to have your way.”

Kathy Flett, leader of Alberta Women for Independence, called the speech “nothing surprising” and said Smith’s pledge would not silence the conversation. “It might go on the backburner for a little bit. I’m not sure. We’ll see,” she said. “But it’s not done.”

On the other side, Monte Solberg of the Vote to Stay campaign called the remarks “refreshing.” Before the speech, Alberta New Democratic Party Leader Naheed Nenshi called the referendum “a political exercise to save Danielle Smith’s political skin.”

Elections Alberta is still counting, and official results are due October 29. The citizen petition that first called for a separation vote, and that a court halted in May, is still before the courts on appeal.