Jen Gerson: Danielle Smith is destroying my kitchen

This gamesmanship costs us money. Cash that Trevor Tombe will be able to track on spreadsheets of stalled growth or capital outflows.

This is not actually Jen’s kitchen. Jen’s kitchen is not this nice.

By: Jen Gerson

I want to talk for a minute about my kitchen.

My family moved into a house in suburban Calgary a few years ago and, although it's an older barn that needed a little polish around the edges, I wake up every day grateful to be here. Literally, every day. In a country beset by exorbitant housing costs, living in a comparatively affordable place like Calgary, on a calm street, where my kids can run around, in a home large enough to accommodate bedrooms and offices — these are blessings. So, yeah, I'm settled in. And I'm grateful.

But like all older houses, nothing is perfect. One of the items of nagging imperfection sits in my otherwise warm and bright kitchen.

Our white, MDF cabinets are starting to disintegrate. It's not terrible, just yet; but the plywood behind the veneer is bubbling up and breaking through the edges, and once that glue starts to go, you know you're on borrowed time with these things.

I like my kitchen otherwise, and the cabinet boxes are still in good shape so there's no need for a full renovation. If you're a fellow homeowner, you know that the cheapest way to go about fixing these things is to opt for a cabinet refacing — simply switching out the cabinet faces.

I say "cheaper" here, but even refacing isn't cheap. I'm still looking at thousands of dollars — more than I could comfortably afford on a journalist’s salary alone. Fortunately, I don't live alone, so we're looking at options — debt, pulling cash out of savings — all the ordinary things that middle-aged couples living in suburban homes consider at this time of life.

It's not going to kill us or anything, but home improvement is an investment, and not one that we take lightly.

And there's one factor we now have to add to the decision. As I watch the passage of time slowly unravel the mid-tier shaker cabinet under my kitchen sink, debating between white and walnut, and trying to persuade my Scots husband to spend money, I am dealing with another problem: "What if we have to move?"

We were content to die in this home, but if Alberta goes forward with an independence referendum — as our premier is now suggesting could happen in 2026 — and on the small chance that this vote is successful, well, we have no desire to live in a landlocked Hermit Kingdom of five million people, separated from our family by a border, and potentially unable to live or work anywhere else on the continent. This isn't a better future for ourselves or our kids.

We have even less interest in becoming American, especially at a time when that country appears to be Orbánizing.

So what do we do with our kitchen cabinets? Do we spring for the good quality facing that we'd be happy to live with for the next 15-20 years? Do we slap some Home Depot-grade versions onto them? Or do we sand the puffed up MDF and slap some cabinet paint on the damage with an understanding that the house's future owner will probably want to rip them out anyway?

Does this matter in the greater scheme of things?

Well, no.

But, also, yes, because this in-depth conversation about cabinets is going to be replicated across thousands of kitchens and thousands of offices and thousands of boardrooms over the course of the next year. Any family or company that is looking to move to Alberta, anyone looking to invest here, or expand their operations, is going to have to ask some version of this question.

"What if we have to move?" "Can we move?" and if yes: "Well, should we invest now, or hold off until we have a better sense of what's going to happen with this vote drama?"

I think this gets to the heart of what irks me so deeply about separatist movements — and I lump Quebec's corrosive addiction to parties like the Bloc in with Alberta's attempts to ape it. These politics are built on stoking grievances about real issues, and never solving them. They're about getting a plurality of constituents constantly amped up and angry in order to win elections for people who blame the federal government for the province's failings.

And they bother me because they presume that there are simple solutions to complicated problems. That a referendum, or a vote, or a new political allegiance is going to solve all of a polity's complaints — without introducing new ones.

That's not how life works though, is it?

There are never simple solutions to hard problems, there are just choices and trade-offs.

Take Danielle Smith's announcement that the province will hold a referendum if separatists garner enough names on a petition to trigger a vote through a Citizens Initiative motion. Even if we take the most charitable interpretation of her words, and the kindest inference from her plans to introduce legislation to make it easier for a Citizens Initiative to succeed; even if we assume that she's doing this not because she wants to become the first El Presidente of the Republic of Alberta, but rather because she believes that this is the best way to leverage the federal government to get a pipeline built or an emissions cap lifted, the leverage she's acquired here isn't free.

We — us Albertans — we pay for that leverage. I don't mean that in an ephemeral or even moral sense, I mean this gamesmanship costs us money. Cash that Trevor Tombe will be able to track on spreadsheets of stalled growth or capital outflows. This is true even if a Citizens Initiative goes nowhere. It's true even if a referendum dies on first contact with the will of the voter.

The business uncertainty that all of this introduces means deferred or delayed investment; it means lost opportunity. It means painting over the cabinets instead of replacing them, but at an industrial scale.

And our premier doesn't seem to care. She's quite happy to expound on the glories of direct democracy in theory, as if she were presenting a PowerPoint argument to a not-particularly inspiring University of Calgary political science class.

Smith is justifying herself with an appeal for those Albertans riled up to declare a border — riled up, I'll note, in part because she's tacitly encouraged them to be so.

“The vast majority of these individuals are not fringe voices to be marginalized or vilified. They are loyal Albertans. They are quite literally our friends and neighbours who’ve just had enough of their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile federal government.

“They’re frustrated and they have every right to be.”

And what about the vast majority of loyal Canadians who live here and have no interest in suffering the consequences of even a failed referendum: do these friends and neighbours, people who are having their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile provincial government, not also have a right to be frustrated?

This isn’t a question of empathy. It’s a matter of which loyal Albertans Smith is choosing to listen to, and which ones she’s preferring to ignore.

Look, I have friends who run the gamut from hard separatist to soft sovereigntist and I don't hold any ill will toward a single one of them. I think they're wrong but I don't lack the emotional capacity to understand where they're coming from.

But that doesn't mean that their beliefs aren't minority positions — statistically, objectively, they are measurably borderline — at least for the moment. Smith isn't reluctantly reacting to a genuine groundswell of support for an independent Alberta; she's pandering to, and stoking the anger of, the approximately 25 per cent of the electorate that's extremely pissed off about Mark Carney's win after a decade of terrible Liberal rule.

Statements like this from Smith are a deflection from her own culpability, her compulsion to follow her base rather than to lead sincerely angry people toward constructive outcomes. She's conflating ideas that are fringe with people who are not and can never be so, thus presenting herself as a champion of the self-anointed persecuted, while actively normalizing minority policy positions.

It’s one thing to listen to frustrated Albertans. That’s perfectly sound. It’s another thing entirely to propose legislation that eases the path for a minority to hijack our political discourse, conveniently giving the premier cover on other issues like health-care privatization scandals and tanking oil futures.

Smith is using Rorschach political rhetoric to all but champion a referendum that will impose real consequences on our lives. This isn't a uni debate club at the quad. It’s not a book club gabfest on Plato’s Republic. It's my house. It's my kids' school networks that Smith is gambling with now.

And for what? So the oilsands can emit 150MT of carbon emissions annually rather than 100MT? So that we can force the federal government to run a pipeline to Kitimat? Are we risking this incredible gamble to pressure the federal government to re-jig the equalization formula to take the wealth generated from Quebec’s hydroelectric power into account when considering how federal funds ought to be allocated annually?

Personally, I think the federal government shouldn't be imposing an emissions cap on the provinces. I think we do need more east-west pipelines, and I don’t think the current equalization formula is particularly fair — but am I willing to risk my home and my citizenship on a wish list of accords compiled by junior oil and gas executives?

Umm. No. Sit down, Bob.

Our province is more than just an oil and gas plant, and I would love a government that didn't run the province — wasn't literally willing to risk the entire population’s security — for the benefit of one sector at the expense of all the others. Right now, Alberta is the richest province per capita by far, and oil and gas plays a huge role in rising wages across the board. But the vast majority of Albertans don't work in this sector; and adopting the tactical politics of Quebec, one of the poorer provinces in Confederation, won’t make us wealthier. In case anyone hasn’t yet pointed this out, the fastest way to make equalization “fair” would be for Albertans to earn less income than Quebecers. If we, too, were a have-not province, then we could also enjoy becoming overly dependent on the federal government for cash transfers to fund our services.

Is that…better?

For what it's worth, I think that Alberta has been disrespected by the rest of Canada; other provincial and federal leaders have been perfectly willing to use the oil-and-gas sector as a political wedge with their own voters while happily cashing the cheques that this province's success has cut for the wealth of the Confederation. This has had the effect of turning provinces and constituencies against one another, of incentivizing them to put their narrow self interest ahead of the less-satisfying compromises inherent to national cooperation. All of this has been made worse under the last 10 years of Liberal government, to such an extent that I am not sure that the "Confederation" can stand united if we continue in this direction.

My position on these issues hasn’t changed, but I'm also going to own up to some of my emotions, because they've shifted in recent months. I am anxious about what is happening right now, and it’s altering the way I look at politics.

I’ve grown tired to the point of despondency by the politics of grievance. It's a calculated and manipulative game played on all sides of the political spectrum; an attempt to gin up apocalyptic emotional responses to comparatively minor disagreements. This is a tactic that has only one end — to secure power at the expense of civic unity.

And in an era of genuine existential trouble, our leaders — all of them — have to stop trying to win this way.

I've gone from being highly sympathetic to Alberta’s challenges in Confederation, to recognizing that every play now being considered by her leaders presents significant downside risks. Now the door to a referendum is open, nobody, nobody at all, can control who or what will march through. This is a poorly managed controlled burn in a forest infected by a decade of deadfall. Maybe it will work. Maybe we'll be lucky. But it's risky as all hell, and it threatens to destroy the forest and sterilize the earth beneath it. (This is just a metaphor, and on a not-minor point of dispute, lest anyone accuse me of being apocalyptic.)

Meanwhile, watching what's happening south of the border unfold, I've gone from being open to considering, say, an economic union with the U.S., to an emotion akin to: "absolutely fucking not. Build the wall and hunker down until that political fever breaks."

I can’t rationalize these emotions. Good or bad, my feelings are what they are. My intellectual opinions haven't shifted so much as my emotions on these matters have hardened as the impacts of these trends are starting to be felt, literally, in my own kitchen.

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As an aside, every time I write about why Alberta separatism is a bad idea, The Line loses paying subscribers. That’s the problem of subscription journalism in action; people are willing to pay for analysis right up until you start pointing out things that they don’t want to hear — which creates an incentive to give the readers only what they want.

Fortunately, I’m dumb with money and stubborn, so that doesn’t deter me. But if you were on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber before, consider jumping off the fence now. If you want to help us create a capitalistic incentive for being mulish, now’s your chance. I also have a kitchen to update.

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