Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has spoken out against the carbon tax for the umpteenth time.
Smith said the Alberta government is proud Albertans pay the lowest overall taxes in Canada and is working towards bringing in more income tax relief in 2025 to continue to help families keep more money in their pockets.
Canada is lurching toward a trade war with the United States unlike any it has endured before. While President-elect Donald Trump threatens tariffs as high as 25% on Canadian goods, Prime Minister Trudeau appears determined to inflame the situation by implying American bigotry is the reason Kamala Harris lost the presidential election. Trudeau has treated the situation seriously enough to travel to meet Trump in person on short notice, but the meeting doesn’t appear to have been productive.
She is focused.
“Albertans will go bananas.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith does not mince words speaking with Postmedia this day.
There are those suggesting Alberta start sabre-rattling and threatening U.S. President-elect Donald Trump with either completely cutting off Alberta oil to the Americans or taxing the oil heading south.
In a Thursday announcement, the government confirmed that the new Interdiction Patrol Team would consist of 51 officers, ten support staff, four patrol dogs, ten surveillance drones, and four narcotics analyzers.
On top of the 298 kilometres that will be monitored for drug smuggling, gun trafficking, and illegal immigration, a two-kilometre “red zone” will be created. The Interdiction Patrol Team will also monitor major provincial highways and inter-provincial travel routes to and from the border.
A pair of LGBTQ2S+ advocate organizations say they’ve followed through with their plan to challenge Alberta’s three transgender bills in court, starting with one that bars doctors from providing gender-affirming treatment such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy for those under 16.
The Alberta government has confirmed new rules for wind and solar energy projects it says are needed to protect the environment, food security and the province’s scenery.
The new regulations stem from Premier Danielle Smith’s February announcement that Alberta was going to take an “agriculture first” approach towards renewable energy development moving forward following the government-imposed seven-month moratorium on project approvals in 2023.
A recent study released by the Fraser Institute found that Alberta ranked 12th for economic freedom among Canada’s ten provinces, America’s 50 states, Mexico’s 32 states, and the US territory of Puerto Rico. Alberta tied with Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and South Dakota.
The big showdown finally starts Tuesday, with a fierce counterattack on the federal oil and gas emissions cap from Premier Danielle Smith.
The premier will announce details of a Sovereignty Act motion at a news conference.
Government sources say the motion will “make it virtually impossible for Ottawa to impose the cap in Alberta.”
Over the weekend, a couple of messages came down from Canada. First, it was Premier Doug Ford of Ontario and then Premiere Danielle Smith of Alberta.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith received 91.5 per cent support for her leadership from members of her United Conservative Party who voted in Red Deer, Alta., on Saturday.
The result solidifies Smith’s leadership of Alberta’s governing party and confirms party members agree with the direction she has taken the province in since she took over the party two years ago.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s weekend appointment of two Liberal Party donors as Alberta senators was denounced by the Government of Alberta.
It marks the 35th anniversary of Alberta holding Canada’s first Senate election, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. Premier Danielle Smith said Trudeau’s administration “blatantly disregarded” Alberta’s interests.
Along with pulling out of the Canada Pension Plan, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, has in the past floated the idea of replacing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a provincial police force.
Like every province except Ontario and Quebec, which have provincial forces, Alberta has contracted out rural policing to the Mounties for over 90 years, and several of its cities also outsource policing to the federal force.
And like every province that relies on the Mounties, grumbling about the cost and quality of the service the R.C.M.P. provides ebbs and flows in Alberta.
Premier Danielle Smith intends to strengthen the little-known Alberta Bill of Rights this fall to include protections for people who refuse to be vaccinated, but she’s facing heavy pressure from United Conservative activists to go much farther in her overhaul, CBC News has learned.
A group from the premier’s riding in Medicine Hat, which calls itself the Black Hat Gang, has met with senior government officials and proposed a massive new draft of Alberta’s rights document. The “gang” wants it to enshrine an array of new rights, including confidentiality of health information and “informed consent” to medical care, as well as rights to keep and bear firearms, to use “sufficient force” to defend one’s property, and “freedom from excessive taxation.”
Federal funding promises can shape how much, or how fast, provinces advance their own agenda items, and Alberta wants Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to know that his to-do list will have to wait.
Premier Danielle Smith announced that the province would take steps, through a bill introduced this month, to reinforce the work that she contends is most important to Albertans and to her United Conservative Party government. This latest attempt to square off with the federal government in Ottawa continues to deepen her party’s view that Mr. Trudeau, a Liberal, has thrust his ideological agenda onto Albertans.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has long indicated her government would use hammer, tongs and scalpel to reshape the face of Alberta politics.
It’s a strategy can be summed up in four words that actually appear now and again in official government documents: “More Alberta, Less Ottawa.”
