Parsing the symbols, signals and seriousness of Alberta's new Sovereignty Act move

To show how opposed her UCP government is to Ottawa's oil and gas emissions cap, Premier Danielle Smith said Alberta would use its provincial Sovereignty Act to bar energy companies from submitting emissions data to the federal government, and from letting federal employees onto their production sites.

These actions are "bold" in the government's own words. They'd also potentially run afoul of federal law requiring data sharing, and companies' own obligations to shareholders and investors.

But it's worth considering how many switches would have to flip a certain way to reach this fraught point of provincial-federal standoff over data and where federal inspectors could literally stand:

The draft oil and gas emissions cap — which the province and other critics say would force production cuts — would have to be enacted into law, either as soon as this spring or (given the typical pace of consultation periods and deliberations) next fall.

The Liberals would have to reverse a large and longstanding popularity deficit to win re-election next year to keep this climate policy in place, or a Poilievre Conservative government would have to reverse its own intentions to ditch the emissions cap if elected.

The cap would have to survive the provincial government's promised constitutional challenge; Smith has matter-of-factly declared it unconstitutional, while some experts question whether it would survive the courts.

Then, assuming all the other switches have been flipped correctly, we may have to wait, since the first emissions data disclosure isn't required until June 2027.

There's another condition:

5. That the Smith government is actually serious about these Sovereignty Act measures.

It would indeed be a highly serious action for the province to, under the pretence of ownership of all natural resources, declare that all producers' greenhouse gas emissions are "proprietary information and data that are owned exclusively by the Government of Alberta." (This is from the draft text of the Sovereignty Act motion headed for legislature debate next week.)

And that would have serious implications for the companies that find themselves caught in the legalistic jurisdictional crossfire. These governmental declarations about this provincial bout of data sovereignty were reportedly news to a major industry group that says it hadn't been consulted in advance.

While the draft motion text lays out these bold/serious actions, it tasks cabinet to "consider the following responses to the federal initiative." Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz confirmed to CBC News that the Sovereignty Act motion "sets forward seven things we would like to look at" (italics ours, in both passages).

What would follow, she explained, would be to "come up with the fine-tuned details with constitutional experts, and with companies and organizations." This would entail figuring out how to thwart federal rules on inspection and data disclosure, should it ever actually come to that point in 2027 and beyond.

There has always been this tension between the Smith team's ambition of a mighty Sovereignty Act to declare Alberta a no-go zone for disagreeable federal laws, and the reality that federal laws apply in the zone called Alberta.