MONTREAL—Over his years on Parliament Hill, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney built a solid reputation as a wily political operator gifted with a fine grasp on policy.

When it comes to hands-on knowledge of the workings of the federal government, he stands head and shoulders above his fellow premiers but also his current federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

Kenney has also spent more time on the ground in the various regions of the country — including Quebec — than any of his provincial counterparts.

And yet since last month’s federal election few of these attributes have been in evidence.

Instead of tapping into his experience to articulate made-in-Alberta solutions to the challenges the province faces in a climate-conscious global environment, Kenney has been intent on finding inspiration for a way forward in an outdated and demonstrably flawed Quebec strategy playbook.

Take the commission the premier recently asked former Reform party founder Preston Manning to lead in the search for leverage to secure what Kenney calls a fairer deal for Alberta.

Based on the premier’s prescriptions, the group will be spending much of its time looking into policies that date back decades and that, in each and every case, would involve adding new layers to the province’s civil service.

One of the most talked about is a pension plan separate from the one Ottawa runs nationally.

Quebec has operated its own system since the Canada Pension Plan was introduced in 1966.

At the time of the inception of the CPP every province had the option of going it alone. The main rationale behind Quebec’s choice of a separate route was to give its government the ability to use the pension fund to play a leadership role in the shaping of the province’s economic fabric.

That may be a goal worth pursuing in Alberta, but it does come with the need to set up a bureaucracy to administer a system that ultimately — for reasons of labour mobility — would offer relatively identical benefits to those on offer under the CPP.

Ditto in the case of having the province run its own police force — something, for the record, that Quebec was doing decades before the RCMP as we know it was created in 1920 — or taking over the collection of all income tax from the federal government.

The reason Quebec is currently pursuing the latter option has more to do with saving money and freeing the province’s taxpayers from the long-standing burden of filing two income tax reports every April, than provincial autonomy.

A few years ago, a commission costed the duplication at almost half a billion dollars a year and recommended Quebec join the other provinces in having Ottawa collect the taxes on its behalf.

That turned out to be a federalist bridge too far even for the then-Liberal Quebec government, hence the demand that the federal government hand over its collection responsibilities to the province instead.

It is hard to see how any of the above options adds up to more leverage for Alberta rather than to a series of solutions in search of a problem. If anything, by focusing on federal-provincial arrangements at a time when the climate-change issue is playing out globally the province risks missing the forest for the trees.

And then there is Kenney’s overreaching rhetoric on the unfairness of the equalization system. Listening to the premier, one would not know that it was he and not Justin Trudeau who had a front-row seat at Stephen Harper’s cabinet table at the time the current formula was arrived at.

Kenney recently engaged in a war of words with Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet over pipelines versus equalization benefits. Rarely has the premier of a large province had so much time to spare on sparring with a third-party leader in the House of Commons.

The worst thing that could happen to Blanchet’s reinvigorated Bloc would be to be ignored in a House dominated by federalists.

He may lead the third strongest contingent in Parliament but inasmuch as it is eminently possible for the Liberals to find common ground on most issues with one or another of the opposition parties. Blanchet does not hold the balance of power.

But that means he is freer to speak his mind and to advance his goal of putting sovereignty back on track.

With every volley, Kenney is strengthening both Blanchet’s case for his party’s existence and the Bloc’s hand in Quebec.

He is also contributing to pointless noise between Quebec and Alberta at a time when wisdom would dictate the opposite approach.

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A word in closing on the so-called knife-on-the-throat approach to making demands on the federation under the threat of separation.

This seems like a good time to remind Prairie copycats that neither the Quebec federalists seeking constitutional change nor their sovereigntist rivals achieved their respective goals.

If the Quebec experience teaches anything, it is that the knife is more likely to get rusty than to draw constitutional blood.

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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