Danielle Smith finds friendly, anti-Ottawa crowd at the Alberta Next town hall

There's a routine backdrop at most of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's news conferences: a row of provincial and Canadian flags, or at least one of each. Even when she's doing TV interviews from home on the weekend, the pair of flags are behind her — a red-and-white and a deep blue.

Her staff kept the Maple Leaf emblems at home for their road trip Tuesday to Red Deer, for the first Alberta Next panel on federal affairs.

Positioned behind Smith and her 15 fellow panellists were six flags, all ultramarine with the Alberta coat of arms.

This likely suited many in the crowd just fine. The roughly 450 attendees were heavily of the Alberta-first persuasion — not predominantly separatist, but certainly keen to withdraw the province from major Canadian institutions and Ottawa influence.

If that preference wasn't clear from speaker after speaker making those points, the premier got clarity on the meeting hall's bent. She requested a series of straw polls on an Alberta-only pension, police force and other proposals.

About three-quarters or more of the audience raised their hands in support on each question. The opponents were sparse in this central Alberta expo hall, next to where Red Deer's Westerner Days midway was set up to begin the next day.

Consider one attendee's hard line on equalization and transfers to less affluent provinces: "If my brother needs help, he can come with a business plan and ask for it. And Alberta should treat the other provinces the same."

That was the first speaker, but to say he set the tone would be inaccurate.

Smith's team chose to frame each topic by running the videos released last month on the Alberta Next website. They preceded the user surveys and suggested big economic benefits from quitting the Canadian Pension Plan and that to gain more of a handle on immigration, Alberta  "withhold provincial social programs to any non-citizen or non-permanent resident who does not have an Alberta-approved immigration status" — a move that even the video acknowledged could provoke legal challenges.

The six videos and a longer introductory recording in which Smith declares Alberta has an "Ottawa problem" altogether took up more than 30 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour event.

But that still left ample time for dozens of attendees to line up at the microphones and chime in with their agreement, arguments or questions for the panel.

There was even time for a self-identified communist to address the crowd — twice — and draw some of the crowd's loudest boos when he recommended nationalizing oil companies and installing workers as owners.

There were scattered boos, too, for pro-independence speakers, but far more cheers for demands for a separatist referendum, be it to actually leave or as political leverage for Alberta.

"If they do not know that we are serious and we can leave at any point in time, we will not ever get a pipeline to the Atlantic Ocean," someone from the Stettler area said. (Premier's staff urged journalists to stay at the media table and not wade into the crowd to speak with attendees, along with a restriction on news cameras and photography.)