º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

“There would be no street lights working to light up your way home through the blinding blizzard.” 

It’s Smith’s latest strike against any federal attempt to cut emissions from the national power grids. Among Smith’s moves are Alberta’s Sovereignty Act, which the province says allows them to ignore federal laws it deems unconstitutional, and an that rolled out in four provinces.

While Carney has not spoken specifically about the clean energy regulations (and did not respond to a request for comment) the Liberal platform does mention the need to build out the east-west electricity grid and “enhance connectivity to low-emissions electricity.” While questions remain about what that means, there is hope that Carney, who was raised in Alberta, is more open to traditional energy development, as evidenced by his promises to cut regulatory timelines and make Canada an “energy superpower.”

Smith said the province will challenge the constitutionality of the regulations in the Alberta Court of Appeal. The crux of the government’s argument is that electricity generation falls under provincial jurisdiction and the federal government is overstepping. (The federal government, for its part, has long argued that emissions reduction is squarely in their lane.) 

Alberta’s path to net zero is complicated by the fact the province is more reliant on natural gas — which produces emissions — for electricity generation than other provinces. According to the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), the non-profit that oversees the provincial grid, in 2022 came from natural gas. (In , for example, natural gas was used for about 10 per cent of the electricity that same year.) In addition, Alberta phased out its last in 2024, six years ahead of schedule, in a transition that was a major win for emissions reduction, but meant more reliance on natural gas.

A report from AESO also found that the federal regulations would post a “significant risk” to the reliability and affordability of Alberta’s grid. 

But as Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta, wrote on around the time Alberta was threatening to use the Sovereignty Act, “the provincial government does itself no favours with performative bluster and policies such as the recent renewables moratorium, which serve only to drive away investment and cast doubt on the sincerity of its clean energy commitments.” 

While Alberta had once been a hotbed of renewable development, the Smith government put a seven-month moratorium on new projects starting in 2023 while they considered the effects of solar and wind projects on agriculture, the environment and on the province’s “pristine viewscapes.” But according to the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank, that pause caused so much uncertainty that 53 projects were abandoned. At the time, a government minister told CBC that the analysis was ”.”

While the pause on new wind and solar projects has since been lifted, the projects now face new location rules that keep them away from agricultural land and a buffer zone around mountains and designated scenic areas. 

This latest tussle over power comes as Smith repeated her call for Carney to “reset” his relationship with the prairie province. On Thursday she again called for him to “immediately commence working with our government to reset the relationship between Ottawa and Alberta with meaningful action rather than hollow rhetoric.”

While this week’s election saw  the Liberals get its highest vote share in Alberta in decades — about 28 per cent — the province largely stuck to its conservative roots and will only send two Liberal MPs to Ottawa. And Smith is not the only leader mulling a renewed relationship with Carney.

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek released an this week in which she invited Carney to Calgary, “the city that fuels Canada’s economy.” In addition to imploring him to consider funding for municipalities and infrastructure, she also asked him to learn more about Alberta’s energy industry. “We are a strong nation with energy resources the world needs,” she wrote. “That’s the message we should be delivering nationally. I urge your government to spend more time in Alberta.”