Danielle Smith and the Alberta separatists gather in the UCP tent

There was a period, in the old Progressive Conservative dynasty days, when there wasn’t much daylight between a chamber of commerce crowd in Alberta and the party convention crowd. Maybe a number more windbreaker-clad ranchers at the latter, but both audiences would come to root for the same thing: a thriving, economy-boosting petroleum sector. 

In 2025, they’re two strikingly different audiences — the Calgary business luncheon that stood up and cheered twice for Prime Minister Mark Carney when he discussed his pro-pipeline memorandum of understanding with Alberta one day, and the United Conservative gathering that booed Alberta Premier Smith on the same topic the next day.

The friction is the raucous sound of two trends colliding.

The UCP premier has never been so pro-Ottawa, and her party has never been so decidedly anti-Ottawa.

“I hope people today feel a lot more confident that Canada works than they did a couple of days ago,” Smith told her convention Friday. Boos rang out from the Edmonton Expo Centre seats — the kind that partisans normally direct at mention of the other guys, not their own leader and the notion that this country can work.

The UCP base’s separatist fervor proved a challenge for Smith this weekend, one she at times struggled to handle.

This party has repeatedly conveyed big demands and expectations to the politicians it elects, but members have never flared their temper at the leader like this.

What got big applause, by comparison? Jeff Rath striding to a convention microphone — the barrel-chested pro-separatist lawyer sporting his Alberta Prosperity Project logo on his ballcap.

He branded the “so-called memorandum” as one that lets Carney hike Alberta’s industrial carbon tax by 600 per cent. (More boos.)

“How many of all of us favour a free and independent Alberta?” he implored United Conservatives. “Raise your hand! Stand up!” The vast majority in the room did, with sustained howls and cheers.

Then, not long after the first round of boos Smith received, she got them again for replying to Rath’s remarks that she advocates the halfway-there idea of “an independent Alberta within a united Canada.”

On Saturday, during her keynote in a slightly fuller hall, she risked losing the room again with a prepared speech that recommended keeping her province within Canada — typically, something that’s only an audacious thing for certain Quebec party leaders to say to their base.

“Let us 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,” Smith said. Some boos rang out again, but more applause counteracted them this time. 

The same mixed reaction greeted the premier when she stressed that Canadians are getting behind Alberta’s pro-oil position: “Now is not the time to give up the fight!” Smith said, an exclamation mark in the advance speech draft given to media to signal what’s supposed to be an applause line.