Blind faith in Sovereignty Act is scary

I got a lot of pushback last week for comparing Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to a bad drunk in a bar.

So I’d like to apologize — to drunks in bars.

The drunks I’ve known are mostly pretty harmless. They usually just pass out after a bit of aimless ranting.

Smith is worse. Her “Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act” threatens to undermine the rule of law, both nationally and (in the form it was introduced last week) inside Alberta itself. It could even hurt attempts to attract investment to the province.

On that point, don’t take my word — or that of any other supposedly “elite,” “leftist,” “Laurentian” types who are allegedly furious that Alberta is daring to assert itself (as a certain Twitter chorus would have it).

No, that criticism comes from such lefty circles as the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The chamber, for one, warned that Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Etcetera Act would introduce “a very significant element of risk and uncertainty” for business.

On the point about undermining democracy in Alberta, by giving the provincial cabinet the power to amend certain laws without seeking approval from the legislature, Smith was adamant that no such thing was possible. Suggestions that it was, she told the legislature, amounted to a “shameful display of fear-mongering and fabrication.”

That was on Thursday. By Saturday morning the premier had changed her tune. Apparently she’d had another look at the law and agreed it should be rewritten to remove language that would allow the cabinet to unilaterally change laws — the very possibility she had been dismissing as fabrication. There was “confusion,” she said.

“You never get things 100 per cent right all the time.”

So it turns out Smith’s government was not only wrong, it didn’t actually understand the legislation it introduced.

At the first breath of criticism, it collapsed and promised to remove some of the most damaging parts of the act.

Tempting as it is, though, I don’t particularly want to rag on Smith once again.

I’m more interested in the torrent of criticism that came my way and presumably in the direction of anyone else from east of Thunder Bay who dared to question Sovereignty Etcetera.

The basic point seemed to be: the very fact that effete Easterners like you find it objectionable proves the act is necessary. A prominent columnist in the National Post took up the struggle in a piece whose headline was: “When Trudeau, Singh and the Toronto media are all against Danielle Smith, you know she must be doing something right.”

That columnist had nothing of substance to say about the sovereignty act itself, including the part that Smith disavowed before the ink on his piece had a chance to dry. No, it was enough that Torstar and other villains opposed the act for such thinkers to rush to its defence. No actual critical thinking was brought to bear on the substance of the legislation.

This kind of logic is more and more common. It’s reminiscent of the dynamic among U.S. Republicans who stuck with Donald Trump simply because he was a master of “owning the libs,” i.e. enraging the liberals they hate most.

The very fact that talking heads on CNN and MSNBC exploded at Trump’s absurdities was taken at ipso facto proof that he was on the right track. No need to examine the absurdities themselves. It got to the point that “owning the libs” seemed to be the Republicans’ “core belief,” according to Politico.

Among the many problems with this sort of thinking is that it stops people from looking critically at what they’re being asked to support.

Principled conservatives ought to support or oppose the sovereignty act on its own merits, not just on whether it makes heads explode in Ottawa and Toronto.

If they don’t, they’ll be rushing down a rabbit hole, just like those Republicans who followed Trump on a drunken plunge into intellectual oblivion.