Danielle Smith apparently hasn't learned from history

I hadn't really thought about it before, but there are some fascinating parallels between Alberta's almost-certain secession referendum later this year and Britain's Brexit vote in 2016.

In those halcyon and naïve days - pre-COVID, pre-Trump, pre-Ukraine war, pre-AI, etc, etc - British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron merely wanted to renegotiate Britain's relationship with the European Union (EU), mainly to placate a small but vocal majority of ultra-right wingers in his party. He thought that threatening to leave the EU would be a good bargaining tool, and thought, as most people did back then, that there was no way that Britons would be daft enough to actually vote to leave. It was certainly the last thing that Cameron himself wanted.

As we all now know, things didn't pan out quite as expected, largely due to an egregious misinformation campaign by the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. Britain voted narrowly to leave the EU, Johnson became Prime Minister for three wild and largely disastrous years, and Farage lay low for a while before reinventing himself, and is now odds-on favourite to become Britain's next disastrous Prime Minister. How quickly things can go pear-shaped!

Fast forward ten years, and the Canadian province of Alberta is threatening Albexit. Premier Danielle Smith says she is personally against it, and pretty much every serious economist and political analyst has warned that the consequences would be disastrous. All the polls suggest that support in Alberta for leaving Canada is low, around 20%, nothing like the level of support for secession in Quebec back in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

But Smith has for years been using the threat of separation as leverage to press the federal government for special treatment for Alberta, again largely to placate the hard right-wing hawks in her party. She has even made the process of starting a provincial referendum on the matter much easier than it used to be, hoping to squeeze still more concessions from Ottawa from the increased pressure. It now looks almost certain that a vote will in fact be held later this year.

Sound familiar? What could possibly go wrong?

Well, one thing that could go very wrong is Donald Trump, and Ms. Smith doesn't seem to have factored him into her calculations and machinations. America's most interventionist president has made no secret of his desire to annex Canada, and particularly to get his hands on Alberta's oil. It seems likely that the Trump administration would expend a lot of money and effort in any Alberta separation campaign. At the very least, Trump would probably declare any "stay" vote to be unfair and rigged, creating constitutional chaos and uncertainty.

Could this be Danielle Smith's Cameron moment? We (and Alberta) have to hope not. What is it they say? "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."