Albertans, Jason Kenney wants us all to know, are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Therefore, says the premier, they will take careful aim and shoot themselves in the foot.

What else to make of Kenney’s speech over the weekend that revives the old idea of creating a so-called “firewall” around Alberta to insulate the province from the supposed hostility of the federal government and much of the rest of the country?

Kenney is setting up what he calls a “Fair Deal Panel” chaired by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning to look at ways Alberta could redefine its relationship with Canada.

And, apparently working from the idea that everything old is new again, the panel is being asked to take another look at a series of proposals that became known as the firewall when they were proposed back in 2001 by prominent Albertans, including Stephen Harper before he became prime minister.

Taken together, they would make Alberta much more autonomous, along the lines of the status that Quebec has now. In Confederation, in other words, but increasingly semi-detached.

What are these proposals? Setting up a provincial agency to collect its own taxes, for one (something Quebec does now). Withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan and creating a standalone Alberta Pension Plan (much as Quebec has).

Setting up a separate provincial police force (à la the provincial forces operated by both Quebec and Ontario). Opting out of federal shared-cost programs, like Ottawa’s proposed pharmacare plan. Playing a bigger role in international relations (Quebec again). Even writing a provincial constitution, whatever that means.

Who knows if the Manning panel will recommend such sweeping measures? Or if a future Alberta government would carry through with them?

But even raising, or re-raising, the spectre of building Fortress Alberta is dramatic. And there are two ways of looking at it, neither of which does credit to the Kenney government.

The first is that this is a purely partisan move, designed to signal extreme disapproval of the fact that the Trudeau Liberals managed to hold on to power in the Oct. 21 election. Especially since they ended up with zero representation from Alberta and Saskatchewan.

It’s clear that if Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives had won, Kenney would not be unholstering the old firewall pistol. And that’s what makes Alberta’s situation fundamentally different from Quebec’s.

Successive Quebec governments didn’t push for autonomy across a range of policy areas because they didn’t like this or that federal government. They, and their population, had a deep-seated feeling that they constituted a “distinct society” that needed more power to chart its own future, regardless of who held power in Ottawa at any particular moment.

That’s not the feeling in Alberta, even now. Kenney himself has rejected the notion of western separatism as “irrational,” which it is. How on earth would a landlocked independent Alberta find it easier to get pipeline access to the sea, for example? “None of that makes any sense to me,” says Kenney, and of course he’s quite right.

In the most generous interpretation, Kenney is trying to get ahead of the anger in his province. He doesn’t want to be outflanked by louder voices or let those pushing more extreme options get traction, and the Manning panel will be a chance for all sorts of grievances to be aired. That, however, still makes it a political ploy.

The second way of looking at the firewall revival is to take the ideas as serious policy proposals. And there they make even less sense.

None of them respond to the real problems facing Alberta, which have to do with the price of oil and the longterm prospect for the oilsands. None of them have anything to do with finding ways to finally build the pipeline that Alberta says is crucial to its future.

Instead, they would divert attention from those basic issues. They would send Albertans rushing off to set up a series of new bureaucracies to duplicate functions now being done quite efficiently by existing organizations.

It’s not just skeptical outsiders who are pointing this out. Albertans themselves can see through Kenney’s sudden enthusiasm for building a wall around the province.

Take, for example, the president of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, Sandip Lalli, who noted this week that the “firewall” measures would be costly to implement and impose new regulatory burdens on business. “That’s big government and how does big government reconcile with open for business?” she told the National Post. “This is definitely politics over policy right now.”

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Another Albertan who knows a lot about these issues is equally skeptical. Doug Griffiths, a former Conservative member of Alberta’s legislature, served on a previous committee to study the firewall proposals and concludes: “Pretty much all of it was non-starters.” The whole idea was driven by anger, he says, not sound thinking.

The bottom line is that all this is a giant distraction — from both the problems of the Kenney government and those of the province as a whole.

One way or the other, the premier is going to have to stop toying with discredited ideas and do the hard work of finding ways to work with the national government that Canadians elected on Oct. 21.

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