Alberta Premier Smith wants to 'reset' federal-provincial relationship while eyeing sovereignty act

Fresh off leading Alberta's United Conservative Party to a majority victory on Monday night, Premier Danielle Smith says she wants to 'reset' her relationship with the federal government, while readying to invoke the province's sovereignty act over emissions targets, if needed.

Fresh off leading Alberta's United Conservative Party to a majority victory on Monday night, Premier Danielle Smith says she wants to "reset" her relationship with the federal government, while readying to invoke the province's sovereignty act over emissions targets, if needed.

"I think that we can work collaboratively, and that's what I've asked the prime minister. I said I'd love to reset our relationship," Smith said in an interview on CTV News Channel's Power Play with Vassy Kapelos in Calgary. "I'd love to be able to work together on things that we can agree on, because I don't think the country benefits by seeing Alberta shut its economy down. And I think that the country benefits when we do well."

In her election-night speech, Smith took aim at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's energy policies as "harmful" and called on the federal government to "show it is willing to partner in good faith" to find ways to reduce emissions.

Congratulating Smith, Trudeau said he plans to "continue to work on growing the economy, on fighting climate change and on supporting Albertans into the future."

Asked Tuesday to respond to federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson suggesting to reporters that a re-elected UCP government wouldn't impede on federal climate change initiatives, Smith said that is true as Alberta is on-side with the "aspiration" of being carbon-neutral by 2050, but it's how the country gets there that she has concerns with.

"If you try to compress that [target] into too short a timeframe, when the technology isn't available, and there's not enough time to do it, it results in production caps. And when they've put forward ideas of a 30 per cent reduction in emissions in fertilizer… when they started talking about 'just transitioning' oil and natural gas workers completely out of out of existence, and when they brought through a proposal for a net-zero power grid by 2035… Those are things that we have to fight back against," Smith said.

While Wilkinson said the two jurisdictions don’t have to agree on everything, and indicated openness to trying to find areas for ways to find consensus, he thinks Albertans, like other Canadians, "believe in climate change and the importance of addressing it."