Paul Wells interviews Alberta Premier Danielle Smith

It’s beginning to look a lot like statehood: Danielle Smith and more on the pod

Here’s Justin Trudeau, urging Pierre Poilievre to declare whether he stands with Canada or with “Danielle Smith, Kevin O’Leary, and ultimately, Donald Trump.” The great thing about a wedge is it can always do more wedging. Meanwhile Danielle Smith is still the premier of Alberta and she’s my first guest this week.

At one point in our interview — which makes Smith the third consecutive Alberta premier to appear on this podcast, so don’t be shy, François Legault — Smith says she asked Trump at Mar-a-Lago whether he’d like to buy more Alberta oil. We’re coming off a truly weird couple of weeks when people were falling over themselves to call Smith a traitor or sellout for that kind of talk. Which is odd for several reasons, including this: as my guest from two weeks ago, former US ambassador David L. Cohen, pointed out, Alberta already sells immense amounts of oil into the American market. So it’s not some deranged fantasy to imagine it might sell more.

I never liked the “Team Canada” talk that swept through this country like a bad fashion trend after Trump tweeted his threat of 25% blanket tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports. I kind of don’t care who’s offside that sort of coerced and silly unanimity, or for what reasons: it will always be somebody, and the social capital you burn up in a futile attempt to enforce the party line will be a terrible, stupid waste. Kids, ask your parents about the Charlottetown Accord referendum. That it turned out this time to be the premier of the province with by far the most to lose from some counter-tariffs or, especially, from an oil export ban should not have been a big shocker. The party-line approach is also a strange response. There’s no Team America. Donald Trump will be challenged in court for everything he does for the rest of his time in office, often by state governors, and encouraging those natural divisions among our American friends makes more sense than forbidding natural divisions at home.

This may have something to do with why Louis St. Laurent, in his 1947 Gray Lecture, named national unity as the paramount value in Canadian foreign policy, ahead of liberty and the rule of law. “No policy can be regarded as wise which divides the people whose effort and resources must put it into effect,” he said, in one of the most enthusiastically ignored lessons in Canadian political history.

As it turns out, I think the air was already going out of the Team Canada balloon before Smith joined me on a Zoom call. Voices have been piping up, including economist Trevor Tombe on David Herle’s podcast, warning about substantial permanent economic cost in exchange for not much political gain.

I think I’ve made it pretty clear where I stand on all this. Smith makes herself pretty clear too.

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I added a second guest because I knew my time with Smith would be finite, and because we have so much to talk about these days. My second guest is Amy Greenberg, who’s one of the leading historians of the antebellum United States (1800-1860, the period leading up to the Civil War.)

She’s a former Guggenheim Fellow, an award-winning teacher, and the author of five books, many of which grapple with the notion of manifest destiny — the idea that the United States, as a historic vanguard of liberty, must keep growing until it filled a continent.

Manifest destiny is a founding American myth, a uniquely powerful intersection of messianism and acreage. You know who’d have a feeling for that sort of thing? A real estate man from Queen’s. But Greenberg, understandably, was reluctant to analyze anything Trump might be up to. She’s happy to stick to what she knows, but that’s fascinating enough: American expansionism as a project of zealots, but also of scoundrels eager for a distraction. The idea of annexing Texas, which became the Mexican-American War and thus the topic of Greenberg’s most prominent book, occurred to the hapless accidental President John Tyler while he was facing impeachment and after the Whigs’ congressional wing had kicked him out of the party. And as she points out in an earlier book with the intriguing title Manifest Manhood, the expansionist impulse is also an expression of a certain idea of robust and aggressive masculinity. Just remember, she’s not talking about Donald Trump.

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I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.

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