While National Newswatch does not keep an archive of external articles for longer than 6 months, we do keep all articles written by contributors who post directly to our site. Here you will find all of the contributed and linked external articles from Jason Markusoff.
On tariff impact, political response and more, Alberta became an outlier. Several factors have triggered concern in some corners of the country about the role the United States may play in Alberta’s upcoming referendum on separation. They range from a Trump cabinet secretary’s remarks, to administration meetings with separatists, to the spectre of U.S.-based foreign influence campaigns. But what if...
Other cabinet members lining up behind Smith's pledge to vote to stay. But Devin Dreeshen avoids answering. Alberta’s transportation minister declined on Friday to say whether he’d vote for or against his province remaining in Canada, becoming the first cabinet minister to publicly avoid taking what Premier Danielle Smith says is the anti-separation stance of her cabinet, caucus and party...
Stay Free Alberta's Mitch Sylvestre says UCP base angry at premier's pro-Canada stance. The leader of Alberta’s main separatist group is organizing to force either a leadership review of Premier Danielle Smith, or for her United Conservative Party to demand a different referendum question than the one she’s put forth, he told CBC News on Tuesday. Mitch Sylvestre, CEO of...
Premier Danielle Smith appeared to be working many strategies at once with her complicated 37-word, referendum-to-hold-a-referendum question on Alberta’s future in Canada. One doesn’t put forth a vote with dueling options to remain a Canadian province or start a process to lead to a future binding independence vote, unless one is trying to juggle many tactical balls and clubs and...
For the last torrid year in Alberta politics, so much seemed to be building toward a separation referendum this fall. Premier Danielle Smith eased the rules repeatedly for a pro-separatist petition to succeed. Right before a court first ruled against petitioners in December because of constitutional issues, her government rewrote a law to make that moot. She scheduled a series...
Moscow's influence scheme is covert, while Trump-aligned meddling is overt and public. A year ago, weeks after the Carney Liberals won the last federal election, the website albertaseparatist.com sprang up, accompanied by similarly named TikTok and YouTube accounts. Article headlines included “The case for sovereignty over statehood” and “Ottawa’s piggy bank wakes up” — but these sites don’t appear to...
Alberta separatists aren’t just enthused by the fact they have apparently surpassed the necessary 177,000 signatures to force their referendum onto ballots — they’re also celebrating when they reached the target. Stay Free Alberta claimed that accomplishment a week before a judge in Edmonton hears a First Nation’s injunction bid against the citizen’s initiative on April 7, arguing that the...
Conservative leader expected to address separatism in speech tonight. The Conservative Party convention boasts roughly 2,650 delegates, which doesn’t make this the largest right-leaning political gathering this week in Calgary — or even the biggest on the Calgary Stampede park grounds. That title would belong to Stay Free Alberta’s separatist rally and petition signing event that drew more than three...
Alberta separatist leaders expect to start canvassing in January to get their independence referendum question on the ballot, thanks to the provincial government’s latest legislation to make it easier for them to succeed. Were it not for the United Conservatives’ speedy passage of Bill 14 this week, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s citizens initiative would have been in peril, thanks to...
At weekend UCP convention, activists might not settle for federal accord when what they want is separation. B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix purports to see right through Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her pipeline deal-making with Ottawa. To him, the memorandum of understanding to be inked today by Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney is really all about her base...
New party ad stresses Albertans' struggles on affordability, health — light on details of how to fix them. Nearly a year and a half after Naheed Nenshi began serving as Alberta NDP leader, and about two years out from the next scheduled election, his party has determined it’s time to reintroduce him to Albertans this week. The newly released video...
Premier earning reputation for hearing a plea, being persuaded, acting. Chad Anderson had travelled 90 minutes from his farm near Cremona, Alta., to bend the premier's ear, but it was starting to look futile. He'd come to a town hall with Danielle Smith and Agriculture Minister RJ Sigurdson in Okotoks, an apparent rehearsal of sorts for the Alberta Next panels...
Independent members seek signatures to re-register PC party that led Alberta for decades. Two Independent MLAs expelled from the UCP are bidding to resurrect the old party brand of Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein. Peter Guthrie and Scott Sinclair are petitioning to re-register the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta — the party that governed Alberta from 1971 to 2015, before...
Before taking their latest chance to weigh in on the wisdom of exiting the Canada Pension Plan, Albertans must first watch a five-minute video, most of which tries to persuade them how great an idea it is. The promise of lower premiums and higher benefits hasn't sold well in the past. We recently learned that only 10 per cent of...
Liberal leader rated very or somewhat impressive by 4 in 10 CPC voters. Alberta's politics are not without their complexity. Here's one striking new example. While this is a province where many people are newly interested in separating from Canada because the Liberals won — again — and nearly all ridings went Conservative — again — Albertans appear as likely...
It's apparent that a fourth Liberal victory has triggered a surge in anti-Ottawa sentiment in Alberta, but have things changed so much that a populace long opposed to pulling the province out of the Canada Pension Plan now supports it? One reading of fresh polling commissioned by the Premier Danielle Smith's government argues as much.
Alberta Prosperity Project says it will push the premier to hold referendum in 2025. An Alberta separatist group released on Monday a referendum question on independence from Canada that it will petition to get in front of provincial voters — but only once it has garnered support from 600,000 Albertans. That's more than triple the number of signatures the Alberta...
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...
One hundred and seventy-seven thousand people. That's roughly 3.5 per cent of Alberta's population. It's also the amount of signatures that will be needed to force a separation referendum designed to take those five million people and their land out of Canada.
Canadians have elected a prime minister who promised to pursue energy corridors across Canada, to slash project approval timelines and boosted an oilsands carbon capture project during the English leaders' debate. But this wasn't the Conservative prime minister that most Albertans were hoping for. They didn't reject the Liberals with the same ferocity and lopsided results they'd delivered to Justin...
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took his message of change Friday to Calgary, where his supporters will hope there's minimal change as Liberals push for multiple victories in the predominantly Conservative city. Speaking to what organizers said was more than 3,000 people, he stressed the importance of ensuring all their friends and relatives vote in Monday's election.
A veteran political organizer in Calgary asked Lindsay Luhnau if she'd consider running for the Liberals last fall. It was an easy "no thanks" for Luhnau, director of a local investment co-operative — Justin Trudeau's party was polling miles behind the Conservatives, and the leader's name was mud nationwide, let alone in blue Alberta's biggest city.
Prominent campaigners will push for provincial independence, inside and outside of UCP tent. You don't need to be a Preston-Manning-like soothsayer to imagine western separatist sentiment ticks upward if the Liberals win re-election. You just need to remember 2019 and the Wexit movement. Justin Trudeau's Liberals narrowly won a second term that fall, and disgruntled Albertans and Saskatchewanians self-branded a...
At the height of the debate about oil pipelines last decade, relations became so strained between the Alberta NDP and the federal wing that ex-premier Rachel Notley wouldn't even say she was definitely voting for Jagmeet Singh's party in 2019. Tensions appear to have thawed. Notley, now in private life, has publicly endorsed the Edmonton Centre NDP candidate in the...
Activists organized, sold memberships for nomination races that never happened in Calgary McKnight, Skyview. Several federal Conservative activists in northeast Calgary are criticizing their party after they'd organized and sold memberships for a year or longer in hopes of running in the election, only to watch the party appoint other candidates at the last minute in two key ridings. There...
CBC News has obtained video of Alberta premier's onstage discussion with podcaster Ben Shapiro. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's response to a U.S. podcaster's quips about Canada as the 51st state last week was to tell him and a conservative group's Florida donor gala that they'd regret having tens of millions of progressive Canadians voting for the U.S. president, according to...
Premier saying Conservative leader 'in sync' with Trump rattles both federal and provincial politics. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith came into the federal election campaign hoping her words would leave an imprint.
Peter Guthrie calls for Adriana LaGrange to be moved to 'another unrelated ministry' amid AHS probes. A UCP cabinet minister is urging the premier to remove Health Minister Adriana LaGrange from her post while investigations continue into serious allegations a fired Alberta Health Services CEO has made about major health contracts, CBC News has learned.
The former CEO of Alberta Health Services has filed a $1.7-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit against AHS and the province, claiming she was fired because she'd launched an investigation and forensic audit into various contracts and was reassessing deals she had concluded were overpriced with private surgical companies she said had links to government officials.
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.
Premier Danielle Smith is open to letting MLA Jennifer Johnson back into the UCP caucus, but not until after the legislature passes new transgender policies this fall. Johnson was elected last year as a United Conservative member for the Lacombe-Ponoka riding, but the UCP excluded her and made her sit as an Independent because of derogatory remarks she had made...
Premier Danielle Smith intends to strengthen the little-known Alberta Bill of Rights this fall to include protections for people who refuse to be vaccinated, but she's facing heavy pressure from United Conservative activists to go much farther in her overhaul, CBC News has learned. A group from the premier's riding in Medicine Hat, which calls itself the Black Hat Gang...
A couple of Tuesdays ago, Premier Danielle Smith's evening began with her facing heat for not rushing to ban COVID vaccines for children. Then it moved on to Smith having to answer about why she wasn't pushing harder to remove Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan. Before the night's end, she also fielded questions on whether she'd legalize property owners...
There's a wash of emotions that surely hit the firefighters having to retreat from the wall of flame, and the Jasper residents learning by social media and rumour that their homes and businesses were lost, and Alberta's premier tearing up while waxing rhapsodically about what was lost and what will be recovered.
It was never really the war room that former Alberta premier Jason Kenney dreamed of. And even if it had turned out that way, it's not clear it would have worked any better than the pro-oil entity his UCP government actually wound up creating. Either way, the Canadian Energy Centre never seemed to reach its promised potential. And this week...
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure. And as the party reignites its bid to return to government this summer...
The three most important issues to Albertans are health care, the cost of living and housing affordability — and fewer than one-third of Albertans think the provincial government is handling any of those files well, according to the latest batch of Janet Brown's polling for CBC News. You might think these findings of public opinion ought to set off multiple...
You don't have to go far back — 2012, or four elections ago — to find a time when the Alberta NDP hardly registered in Calgary. Sure, they ran candidates, but none of them seriously door-knocked or campaigned. They averaged less than five per cent of the votes in Alberta's largest city in 2012.
When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambition of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmonton and many other points, the questions came quick: are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boondoggle or two?
In among all the pokey words Premier Danielle Smith flung at the prime minister (and his environment minister) after meeting with Justin Trudeau, one gentler term nudged its way into her rhetoric. Gratitude. That's right. From a premier from this western province to a PM with that surname.
Premier pitches massive Heritage Fund as she shelves tax cut, tightens spending. There's paying attention, and then there's paying for attention. The latter has become quite an Albertan habit. Premier Danielle Smith has picked up the habit that Ralph Klein started in the early 1990s and delivered her second paid-time premier's televised addresses Wednesday — though all the other premiers...
New Democrat MP Charlie Angus's message this week that the oil and gas sector needs to have its "big tobacco moment" and no longer be advertised positively will play well among the Canadians who largely view fossil fuels as climate-ravaging toxins that must be shunned as quickly as possible. The federal NDP member's message and new private member's bill will...
Former Alberta justice minister Kathleen Ganley kicked off her bid Monday to lead the NDP, stressing her Calgary roots. By this time next week, Edmonton caucus mates Rakhi Pancholi, Sarah Hoffman and David Shepherd will likely have joined her in the race to replace the departing Rachel Notley. That lineup of leadership candidates has been reported publicly for some time...
Premier Danielle Smith swore for months that she didn't want to politicize issues around the rights and aspirations of transgender, gender-fluid or questioning youth, and has now declared Canada's most restrictive and wide-ranging set of policies governing the rights and aspirations of those same minors. She didn't want to politicize it, and yet there Smith was on Thursday, by herself...
U.S. commentator presses Alberta premier on convoy-related legal cases. Back at work in Alberta after two weeks of vacation, Premier Danielle Smith chose as her first public appearance in 2024 a conversation on stage with Tucker Carlson, the U.S. commentator whose views and remarks became too much for his Fox News bosses to tolerate. On Tuesday night, they enjoyed a...
Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that Premier Danielle Smith's government would like to know by month's end:
In white text on black boards, messages that were both visually and rhetorically stark flanked Premier Danielle Smith last fall as she launched a big advertising campaign against Ottawa's clean electricity regulations. "No one wants blackouts in –30°C." "No one wants to freeze in the dark." Both statements are universal truths, no doubt.
For a sense of how colossal the Alberta NDP's debt is to Rachel Notley, consider this. Their three best election results were in the three under her leadership, the party winning a combined 116 seats in those races. Across the 12 elections before that, the NDP won 51. That's fewer than the number of MLAs elected under Notley's banner in...
Since at least her days as premier, NDP Leader Rachel Notley has worn the same wristwatch. No luxury wrist bling — it's a digital number, though not as smart as an Apple Watch either. Notley instead relies on the simplicity of a Garmin Forerunner 35 with a silicon wristband. Big digital time display, and it can sync with her phone's...
A decade ago this coming spring, Alison Redford resigned as Alberta premier, largely under the crushing weight of revelations of her profligate flight habits. At the time, some commentary wondered why government-funded flying proved fatal to Redford but never seemed to dent former premier Ralph Klein, whose use of provincial aircraft prompted critics to dub the fleet Air Ralph. Was...
It might not have mattered for the Alberta government's reaction that what the Trudeau government promised as a 42-per-cent cap on oil and gas emissions will actually only require that industry to curb emissions by 20 to 23 per cent by 2030. It might also not have been significant that there's ample flexibility and allowances that technology might not be...
The Danielle Smith government intends to put its Sovereignty Act into action next week to shield Alberta power companies from the proposed federal clean electricity regulations, CBC News has learned. The province will use the controversial law to introduce a resolution in the legislature that declares Ottawa's plan to slash grid emissions an unconstitutional federal measure, and spell out ways...
Preston Manning's report on the government's COVID response concluded that emergency management agencies should lead over the health department, demanded economic impact assessments for any health protections and criticized the courts' deference to "demonstrably justifiable" limits on freedoms. You might think we're referring to the panel report Manning was commissioned to lead for Alberta's government. You'd be partly right.
Alberta's premier leads a party whose most active members almost unanimously want the province to refuse to house trans women in women's prisons, and require schools to tell parents if their children want to secretly change their pronouns, as New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have controversially done. United Conservative Party members also voted unanimously at their convention to eradicate diversity and...
David Parker's bespectacled eyes widened as the leader of Take Back Alberta told fellow political activists what will go down at the United Conservative Party's annual convention this weekend. It's different from what most traditional politicos will say is happening at Calgary's BMO Centre — a political schmoozefest where members get to clap thundersticks for leader Danielle Smith, get tipsy...
When Danielle Smith says Albertans would save $1,425 a year in an Alberta Pension Plan and other Canadians would pay "only" $175 more, the Alberta premier is trying to excite one group of people and calm the jitters of another. But if these are the numbers Smith is using, then she's adding an extra layer of bumps and uncertainty to...
It's not clear if Pierre Poilievre had already devised a position on Alberta's proposed quitting of the Canada Pension Plan, but the Conservative leader issued one barely a day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proclaimed his own stance. The Liberals' unusually forceful opposition to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's pension ambition has doubled as a political wedge against Poilievre. Alongside trying...
Jim Dinning, engagement panel chair: Thank you, Duane from Camrose. We appreciate all your comments on the potential Alberta Pension Plan. Isn't this telephone town hall format a swell idea? Sarah, please put through the next call. Operator: Our next commenter is Justin, and he's on the line from Ottawa. OK, so it didn't quite happen this way, but may...
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can usually only count on polite applause when he's talking to an Alberta business crowd. But when executives hosted him this week at an Ottawa reception, he found one line worked surprisingly well — praise for the national pension program that Premier Danielle Smith wishes to exit. In a list of federal programs assisting Alberta (health...