Team Canada mates no more: how tariff threat put Ford and Smith on divergent tracks

As Albertans will testify after experiencing the Tory dynasty and the last couple of UCP premiers, conservatives are not all built the same.

Jason Kenney took Alberta in directions past Progressive Conservative leaders never dared to, while Danielle Smith rose to leadership by repudiating Kenney's COVID management — and he did his share of rebuking her Sovereignty Act idea.

The current Alberta premier, a former talk-show host and lobbyist, similarly never seemed to have much in common with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a business owner from a sort of political dynasty family. But both have often worn the "populist" tag; Ford and Smith gave direct payments to residents to ease the affordability crunch.

Until this week, there was generally chumminess and accord between the pair of conservative premiers from Canada's oil province and from its manufacturing heartland. They'd even been the twin Canadian regulars on Fox Business and Fox News, both pitching to the U.S. conservative networks the ills of tariffs and the benefits of Canadian trade.

Then came this week, and their sharply different approaches and positions around the threat of Donald Trump's tariffs and Canada's own potential retaliations. That may owe partly to his and her own personalities and backgrounds, but it's also rooted in their own backyards.

Smith defiantly kept her own signature off the joint statement the prime minister and all other premiers inked about the response to the U.S. president-elect's proposed import tax of up to 25 per cent on all Canadian goods. She was the lone premier to do so, arguing she couldn't tolerate Canada continuing to entertain or threaten using export taxes or other sanctions on oil as a pressure point in a trade war.

"We will take whatever actions are needed to protect the livelihoods of Albertans from such destructive federal policies," Smith said.

By pinning it on the federal Liberals, Smith slips by the fact that, with their statements and comments, these policies are now endorsed (at least in theory or principle) by all her counterparts.

Ford had helped co-ordinate the position statement to which Justin Trudeau and 12 provincial and territorial leaders of various political stripes had agreed. 

At the end of Wednesday's meeting of those leaders, Ford said he understood Smith's impulse to defend her province's energy industry.

He added pointedly: "I have a different theory, that [you] protect your jurisdiction but country comes first."

The Ontario premier has talked much about retaliation in the weeks since Trump first launched his tariff threats, saying in December his province's hydro agency could cut off the U.S.'s electricity supply.

"You can't let someone hit you over the head with a sledgehammer without hitting them back twice as hard, in my opinion," Ford had said before the premiers' one-day summit. And, to the idea of taking oil export taxes off the table, gave the cagey gambler's remark: "If you have some aces, you hold on to your aces."

Smith, by contrast, wants Alberta's ace industry sheltered.