The UCP Separatist Wing Takes Aim at Danielle Smith | The Tyee

The UCP Separatist Wing Takes Aim at Danielle Smith | The Tyee

The UCP Separatist Wing Takes Aim at Danielle Smith
The premier’s pipeline deal with Carney draws boos at the party’s AGM.

David Climenhaga TodayAlberta Politics

David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca. Follow him on X @djclimenhaga.Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.









Alberta Premier Danielle Smith urged AGM delegates not to ‘give up on our country just as the battle has turned in our favour and victory is in sight!’ Photo via Facebook.


The Frankenparty stitched together in 2017 by Jason Kenney from the Wildrose Party and the Progressive Conservatives has spawned a monster.

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Hardline Alberta separatists who were tolerated by Kenney and have for months been coddled by Premier Danielle Smith as a weapon against Justin Trudeau as of Saturday night control half, or nearly half, the United Conservative Party’s governing board. One vote was too close to call and was being recounted.

It’s been pretty clear to anyone paying attention that separatist trouble has been brewing in the UCP for a long time. But since the start of the party’s annual general meeting in Edmonton Friday night, it’s been obvious to almost everybody — despite the premier’s effort to keep the topic off the agenda.

That was when AGM delegates booed Danielle Smith, for heaven’s sake, for cutting a pipeline deal with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney. And it was not just a few grumbles from the crowd, if you go by the clip that’s been circulating on social media, but sustained, prolonged and loud jeering. Smith’s weird nervous laughter when the boos finally subsided was cringeworthy.


On Saturday, during her speech to the AGM, Smith got both catcalls and standing ovations, but about the best that can mean from the party’s perspective is that its activists are roughly divided between committed hard-core separatists and other varieties of conservatives that may include covert separatists, the separation curious, vaccine conspiracy theorists, cryptocurrency bugs and full-MAGA Trumpophiles who would still like to hang on to a Canadian passport just in case.

At one point in the speech, Smith said: “My friends, let’s not throw in the towel and give up on our country just as the battle has turned in our favour and victory is in sight!” Loud boos immediately erupted. She exclaimed: “It is!” Mixed cheers and boos followed half-heartedly.

So while they may love the “grand bargain” struck by Smith and Carney at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, that doesn’t mean they’re gonna love it at the Free Alberta Clubhouse in Gopher Butte.

And as the official favourite book of the UCP unequivocally states, “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

Or, to put that another way: Something’s gotta give.


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Kenney built the alliance with those people to engineer his double reverse hostile takeover of the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties, purging “Red Tories” as a first order of business. Smith has nurtured it ever since she took over as leader.

You’ve read about Take Back Alberta, the UCP faction that pushed out Kenney in May 2022 when he proved not to be extreme enough for their taste and replaced him with Smith. Well, the Alberta Prosperity Project crowd that wants a Petrorepublic of Alberta are essentially the same MAGA cadres, except the APP’s Jeffrey Rath is the new David Parker.



Has Separatism Gone Mainstream in Alberta?read more

But now that Smith has reached an entente cordiale with the federal Liberals to do what the oil industry wants — which, her COVID-skeptical views notwithstanding, has been her primary objective since her days as Wildrose leader — the monster she and Kenney created has become dangerous to her, just as it was to him.

And right when she’d hit upon a formula that just might work to overcome the popular anger that is bedevilling the UCP for corruption scandals, attempted pension hijacking, galloping health-care privatization, vaccine rationing and contempt for human rights with the use of the notwithstanding clause to prove it, the separatists have reared their heads again.

Well, you know what they say. “If you’re gonna lie down with dogs, you’re gonna get up with fleas.”

“That activist base is well organized and unafraid of toppling a party leader, as former premier Jason Kenney discovered in 2022,” observed political commentator Dave Cournoyer on his Substack Friday. “That is the big reason why they get more attention paid to them by Premier Danielle Smith than any other premier has paid to a party’s membership in recent memory.”

“The UCP governs with its enthusiastic activist base of supporters in mind and it has been clearly reflected in recent government policies restricting access to vaccinations, banning electronic voting tabulators, banning books in school libraries, banning transgender health services and blocking transgender athletes from competing in sports,” he explained.



The Ugly Underside of Alberta Separatismread more

Postmedia political columnist Don Braid appeared to be almost beside himself last night over where this was all going to end up. “Smith put her heart and possibly her future into the pro-Canada plan,” he fretted. “If it fails, God only knows what happens next in Alberta.”

Possibly the destruction of the country, one imagines he is thinking, or, even worse, the election of the NDP!

Braid called the premier’s unwillingness to confront the party’s separatists in her AGM speech wise. Well, that’s one interpretation.

It means the UCP will continue to flirt with separatism, and separatists, who have already proved they can remove the leader whenever they wish, will continue to use the UCP to achieve their goal.

If Smith won’t purge them, voters are going to have to — probably in the face of the most aggressive foreign interference in a democratic vote since the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016.