The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that less than three months ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney gave Alberta Premier Danielle Smith many of the concessions on energy and environmental policy that she wanted. The Globe's Adam Radwanski writes that now, Ms. Smith is setting the stage for the next confrontation. Almost all the plebiscites that she announced last week, five of them around immigration and four around constitutional matters such as how judges are appointed and the Senate, are federal. That is almost certainly a feature rather than a bug. Ms. Smith's brand and her political survival are contingent on perpetually positioning herself as a prosecutor of grievances with Ottawa. As of now, the two levels of government are still hammering out details of that agreement, and despite its concessions already, Ottawa is under some pressure to compromise further. That applies, most significantly, to the one big provincial concession that Mr. Carney got in return for all the federal climb-downs: a strengthening of Alberta's carbon pricing system for heavy industrial emitters. Tellingly, Ms. Smith's government proceeded with a planned weakening of industrial pricing shortly after the MOU had been reached.
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