By Daniel Béland

April 8, 2025

During a speech in Victoria on Sunday, Mark Carney quipped: “We’re sending Doug Ford onto FOX News to show them that we’re not messing around up here,” which made Liberal supporters in the room laugh. Then, he added: “And we’re going to send Danielle next. Well, maybe we won’t. We won’t send Danielle. That’s a bad idea. Strike that.”

The next day, when asked about Carney’s joke about him, Doug Ford responded: “I just talked to him, he just messaged me. He was joking around, but it’s a good thing because we have to get out there and just message.” While Ford, who has not campaigned for Poilievre, took the joke lightly, reinforcing a sense of complicity between him and the prime minister, Danielle Smith, who strongly supports the federal Conservative leader, reacted bluntly to Carney’s mocking comment about her: “I don’t shut up. I make sure that Albertans know exactly how I feel about issues. And I’m going to continue advocating on behalf of my province, whether he likes it or not.”

Carney’s Sunday jokes and the respective reactions of Ford and Smith might seem incidental, but they point to the very contrasted yet equally prominent roles these two conservative premiers are playing in the current federal campaign and, more generally, in the ongoing trade war between Canada and the United States.

First, Ford, whose party was recently reelected after a snap election on trade, has framed himself as a key member of Team Canada, pushing back against the Trump administration’s tariff policies, both at home and on US cable television. While the Ontario premier does emphasize the economic interests of his province, notably regarding the steel and auto sectors, since the beginning of the trade war launched by Donald Trump, he has projected the image of a team player who fights equally for both Ontario and Canada. As for the federal campaign, Ford has maintained a positive public relationship with the new Liberal prime minister, illustrated by the fact that Ford responded positively to Carney’s Sunday joke about him.

Second, while Smith has publicly criticized the Trump tariffs, her behavior and statements about Canada-US relations have been more controversial and openly partisan than Ford’s. A case in point is her March Breitbart interview, during which she suggested that the Trump administration should put potential tariffs against Canada on hold during the federal campaign, as she feared “that the longer this dispute goes on, politicians posture, and it seems to be benefiting the Liberals right now.” She then continued: “So I would hope that we could put things on pause, is what I’ve told administration officials. Let’s just put things on pause so that we can get through an election. Let’s have the best person at the table make the argument for how they would deal with it — and I think that’s Pierre Poilievre.”

What these comments suggest is that Smith has adopted a hyper-partisan approach to both the trade war and the federal campaign. Simultaneously, she has strongly criticized the (Liberal) federal government’s energy and environmental policies in the name of an aggressive pro-Alberta push to protect her province’s autonomy and economic interests, an in-your-face approach that stands in strong contrast with Ford’s much more consensual and pan-Canadian tone.

In the end, the contrasted approaches of Ford and Smith to the federal campaign and the trade war with the United States point to regional differences; Alberta, like Quebec, is an autonomist province while Ontario tends to identify more readily with Canada as whole.

This is why, when she recently sought the support of another large province in her push-back against the federal (Liberal) government, Smith wrote to François Legault rather than to Ford. Although this may sound ironic considering how much conservatives in Alberta have criticized Quebec over its opposition to pipeline projects and its reliance on equalization payments, they also see la belle province as providing a template for the promotion of provincial autonomy. This is something reflected in the June 2020 report of the Alberta Fair Deal Panel, which mentioned Quebec way more than any other province.

In her letter, sent on March 21 but only made public 10 days later, Smith commented positively on the highly autonomist final report of the Comité consultatif sur les enjeux constitutionnels du Québec au sein de la fédération canadienne and stated that she saw an opportunity for her and Legault “to chart a path toward a new era in Canadian federalism.” This letter points to the fact that Smith, who, unlike Ford, clearly supports Poilievre’s Conservatives in the current federal campaign, is already laying the tactical groundwork to future fights against the Carney government in case the Liberals win on April 28.

Smith’s pugnacious attitude can be explained by two main factors. First, despite the departure of Justin Trudeau, anti-Liberal sentiments remain strong in her province, especially among the Alberta populists who form a key part of the United Conservative Party’s base. Like former Reform Party Leader Preston Manning, they present Carney and the Liberals as threats to national unity who could pave the road to the independence of Alberta if the Conservatives lose on election day.

Second, Smith knows very well what happened to her predecessor Jason Kenney, who resigned nearly three years agoafter part of his caucus and the party’s base revolted against him in the aftermath of the pandemic and the public health measures enacted in response to it. Smith is a shrewd politician. To avoid the same fate as Kenney, she must keep her populist base happy by continuously attacking the federal Liberal government, in a context in which partisanship and regional alienation have meshed in Alberta to a point that what Ford is doing in Ontario (i.e., staying apparently neutral during a highly divisive federal campaign) would be very hard to imagine in Wild Rose Country.

In the end, the contrasted approaches of Ford and Smith to the federal campaign and the trade war with the United States point to regional differences; Alberta, like Quebec, is an autonomist province while Ontario tends to identify more readily with Canada as whole. Those differences are also reflected in the heterogeneity of the conservative movement across the country, which is symbolized by strong contrast between the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario and the United Conservatives in Alberta.

This is why, if the Liberals win on April 28, the Carney government will likely find it much easier to deal with Ford than with Smith, who knows that fighting the federal Liberals is necessary to keep her base happy, especially as she fights for her political survival amid the Alberta Health Services scandal, which could motivate her to take on the federal government even more frontally as a diversion. In Alberta, as elsewhere in Canada, partisanship shapes intergovernmental relations, something that the next government, regardless of the party in charge, should keep in mind once campaign is over.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.