[LINK] "Wildrose renews idea of Alberta ‘firewall’ within Canada"

[rfmcdonald]

Alberta's right-wing Wildrose Party, set to displace the incumbent right-of-centre Progressive Conservative Party for not being right-wing enough, seems set to start using the powers allotted to the province of Alberta in the Canadian framework to the full. This, Postmedia News' Stuart Gradon notes, could have interesting repercussions throughout a Canada where Alberta is far and away the wealthiest province per capita and the Conservative government draws very substantially on Albertan seats and Albertan political traditions.

Echoing the famous “firewall” manifesto of a decade ago, Wildrose party leader Danielle Smith says Alberta would “assert itself” in Canada under her government and have the ear of a sympathetic prime minister in Ottawa.

Among these initiatives, the Wildrose’s policy book calls for the creation of an Alberta Pension Plan, which would see the province follow Quebec’s lead and withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan.

Rivals contend such talk would turn back the clock and see Alberta become more insular inside Confederation.

But Smith believes such proposals simply reflect the province’s size and growing economic clout.

“We are interested in looking at ensuring that Alberta has an opportunity to pursue its full range of options under provincial jurisdiction,” Smith told reporters this week.

“Our members are open to the idea of looking at an Alberta Pension Plan and we’re going to pursue that — the feasibility of it — to see if it would actually make sense.”

A Wildrose government would also do a feasibility study on a provincial police force, said Smith, although the province signed a new deal last year with the RCMP that runs through 2032.

Those two ideas were some of the contentious recommendations made in the so-called firewall letter of 2001, penned by a group of Alberta conservatives who called on then-premier Ralph Klein to exert the province’s full powers against an encroaching federal Liberal government.

Signatories included Stephen Harper, at the time the head of the National Citizens Coalition, Tom Flanagan (now the Wildrose campaign manager) and Ted Morton, the governing Progressive Conservatives’ current energy minister.

Today, Wildrose has also pledged to “aggressively address” the issue of transfers with Ottawa and the other provinces.

Smith said Alberta must never accept a repeat of the current equalization formula, which her party says is unfairly generous to provinces such as Quebec at Alberta’s expense.