With Ottawa's green power rules, Danielle Smith's tone turns dark

Readers of a certain vintage — pensioners, say — will appreciate the lore that comes with "freeze in the dark," with regards to Alberta and energy.

Forty-some years ago, it came on a bumper sticker sold around Alberta, to convey the fury triggered by Ottawa's Natural Energy Program and how it inhibited the oil sector:

Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark! 

A 2023 variation on the old slogan arrived Thursday, in stark black and white on a podium next to Premier Danielle Smith, as she warned about the impact of stringent federal electricity rules: No one wants to freeze in the dark. 

It's a new message in her United Conservative government's war against Ottawa's net-zero rules — a campaign with stark warnings about blackouts in 2035 and demands people flood Ottawa offices with angry letters.

Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has sketched out a future where hydroelectricity, solar, wind power and a transnational network of intertie lines power nearly all Canada's ovens, TVs and electric vehicles — bolstered by federal heavy investment and minimal economic disruption anywhere.

Smith casts it all in literally darker terms, with flash-forwards to deeply cold, windless nights when there's no juice to heat entire swaths of Edmonton and Calgary.

The sign could as well say: Don't let the eastern bastards make us freeze in the dark!

The pitched and alarmed advertising appears not only on placards at Smith's news conference, but will also go on billboards around Canada, wrapped advertising on commuter trains, and even on a truck that rolled through downtown Ottawa on Thursday.

(Yes, that's a diesel-burning vehicle the Alberta government hired to meander up and down roads to send a message about climate change policy.)

These proclamations about blackouts 12 years from now are the culmination of months of Smith's pushback against the federal draft clean electricity regulations, which would restrict power generated by coal (which the province ends this year) and natural gas (its chief power source), in favour of emissions-free, renewable sources.

Smith has seen the rise of sources like wind and solar less as environmental opportunities than as threats to the grid's stability, halting their expansion with a half-year moratorium on new approvals. 

She's cast wind and solar expansions as too much, too fast, and treats Canada's 2035 net-zero grid goals as the same. Her lobbying efforts feature an insistence that Alberta cannot get there reasonably until 2050.

"The key words here are reliable and affordable," she told reporters. "Anything else will lead to ruin for Canadian families, businesses and the economy."