Will Danielle Smith steer Alberta away from separation, or will this train keep gathering steam?

When Premier Danielle Smith speaks, she's still placing the Canadian flags behind her in among the Alberta provincial flags.

As much as critics insist she's either a separatist herself or is opening the door wide to the Alberta secessionist movement by easing the rules to have a referendum next year, the premier herself maintains that she wants Alberta to stay within the country.

"Acknowledging something exists is not the same as fanning it," Smith told the Alberta podcast Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen on Thursday. "My job is to make sure it doesn't get higher. My job is to make sure it gets lower."

But if the premier is determined to sway pro-separatists and keep the Ottawa-wary in the Canadian camp, did she help that cause with this week's array of demands for Prime Minister Mark Carney to fulfil in the next six months? 

She's calling for easy access to extend new oil and gas pipelines to all three ocean coasts, a surge in new financial transfers and the erasure of many (if not most) of the Liberal government's climate policies

"There's simply no way the federal government will be able to [do that] — it doesn't have the power to do some of the things she's asking for," said Feo Snagovsky, a University of Alberta political scientist who researches western alienation.

"In that sense, almost from the outset, the federal government is doomed to fail."

Snagovsky wondered if by setting "maximalist demands," Smith might be able to declare victory by reaching middle points with Ottawa in negotiations toward what she's calling the "Alberta accord."

However, before the election she wasn't discussing compromise. After her first meeting with Carney in March, she set out similar demands and warned of an "unprecedented national unity crisis" if her demands weren't met.

One may wonder if we're already in or on the verge of national unity crisis mode, given the strong likelihood of an Alberta referendum to break up Canada that Smith said she'd schedule in 2026 if enough petitioners request it — a threshold her government has newly lowered.

The parallels to 2016's Brexit referendum seem clear to Snagovsky: U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron scheduled a vote on leaving the European Union that he publicly opposed and didn't believe would succeed. Until it did, and he resigned in disgrace.

Smith cannot assume the opposition against an Alberta exit holds, Snagovsky said.

"It's equally likely that lowering this threshold for the number of minimum votes [to get a referendum] might increase this kind of sentiment, because campaigns have a mobilizing effect," he said.

While Smith has firmly positioned herself and her party as federalist, it remains unclear from her statements this week whether she'd actively campaign on the "no" side of a referendum.