Alberta faces potential short-term gain, long-term pain after Trudeau quits as prime minister

Justin Trudeau's resignation as Canada's prime minister and leader of the Liberal party should benefit the province in the short term, but long-term, the importance of free trade should be central to any Albertan or Canadian effort to sway U.S. opinion with the spectre of potentially crushing tariffs looming, pundits say.

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Corey Hogan, one-third of the Strategist podcast and a former head of government communications for premiers Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney who once worked for the federal Liberals, said Monday people in Alberta should expect the upcoming party race to replace Trudeau should work to their advantage because candidates who "want your support to get your support ... offer you things."

Gov. Gen. Mary Simon prorogued Parliament until March 24 Monday morning at Trudeau's request, pausing the federal legislature for two months, clearing the current slate of legislation and delaying opportunities for non-confidence votes that could trigger an election.

Trudeau, who is staying on as prime minister and Liberal leader until his replacement is chosen, asked the president of the Liberal Party of Canada on Sunday night to begin a leadership race.

"You're going to have Liberal leaders coming through," Hogan told CTV News Edmonton on Monday.

"You're going to hear a lot of great speeches about how important the West is to a modern Liberal party, and some of those will come with gifts, goodies. Maybe it's a new transit line, maybe it's a highway, maybe it's a moving of an office."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau turns to leave a news conference on Jan. 6, 2025, after announcing his resignation as Liberal leader outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)He said federal Liberal members in Alberta will hold significant sway in helping decide the next leader in the party vote as each federal riding has the same number of points to use in the process.

"One of the things that means is that if you're in downtown Toronto, where there's maybe 10,000 members of the Liberal party, each of those members matters for 1/100th of a point, but if you're in, say, rural Alberta, where maybe there's only 100 members to begin with, each of those members is worth a full point," Hogan said

"What you find in a leadership contest is people will often disproportionately put effort into areas where the party is the weakest because that's where they get the greatest return, so Alberta is about to become front and centre in Liberal politics over the next couple of months."

Hogan said Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will probably see opportunities as well as candidates for Liberal leader campaign in the province, but the biggest one she's been using for years – Trudeau as go-to scapegoat – will diminish over time.

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"The ghost of Justin Trudeau is going to be with us for a while," he said. "I mean, the ghost of Pierre Trudeau is still with us, and that was decades ago, so I suspect they'll still continue to use him as a political pinata over the next bit, but there's no doubt that the provincial government was probably better served by having the active threat, so to speak, of Justin Trudeau rather than the boogeyman that was Justin Trudeau."

Smith said Monday during a media conference announcing a pipeline capacity-expansion agreement with Enbridge she was disappointed a federal election wasn't called Monday by Trudeau to allow "whoever is in the chair (to have) a four-year mandate, so when we go to negotiate with the United States, there's some certainty about who the players are going to be at the table."

"I think that would have been the better outcome, and it would have allowed for the prime minister to go to the public and see whether or not they support his agenda of the last number of years," she said.

"I think the polling results suggest that's not the case."

Questions about Trudeau's future had been mounting since support for his party began to fall in 2023. The Conservatives have led the Liberals by more than 20 points for more than a year.

Moshe Lander, an economist out of Montreal's Concordia University who lives in Alberta, said Monday with Parliament not returning until March – and "with nobody really in charge of the country" for two months – Canadians can expect that'll be enough time for blanket 25-per-cent tariffs threatened by incoming U.S. President Donald Trump, who is slated to begin his term Jan. 20, "to do enough economic damage to tip Canada into recession."

He said he hopes Smith, who has been active on American media over the past few weeks and who says she wants to be in the U.S. every month, will go "to Montana and North Dakota just as much as she's going to Texas and Oklahoma" to promote "good economics" more than "good politics."

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He said Canada needs to take "a very open and public stance about the importance of trade" but that a voice for it "is missing."

"(Smith) does have a background in economics, even though sometimes she forgets it," Lander told CTV News Edmonton on Monday.

"Free trade is good, and somebody needs to be promoting 'free trade is good' to American citizens, not to Americans in Washington. They know free trade is good. They're not basing their decisions on what's good or bad economics.

"They're basing their decisions on what's good or bad politics, and she should understand that as much as anybody, that what they're doing here is good politics, not good economics, and so trying to sell them on the benefits of carving out oil and gas, that's not going to resonate."

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks to reporters before a New Year's Eve party as Melania Trump looks on Dec. 31, 2024, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)He said Alberta and Canada need to explain to Americans the benefits of cheap oil and gas.

"We are providing you with low-cost energy that you otherwise wouldn't get, and you need to put pressure on your political representatives that they need to convince (Trump) to back away from what might be good politics by showing him that maybe it's not good politics," Lander said.

"That's the only way that he's going to back away from this."

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Smith said a task Alberta has before it is to convince the incoming Trump administration that receiving affordable oil-and-gas products for use domestically is important to the U.S. desire for world energy dominance, "which is what they seem to want to do."

"They need a partner to be able to help ensure that they've got a product for their own people, so that prices can stay low. From my read on what I'm seeing with the Trump administration, they want both," Smith said.

"They want to be able to continue to export their own production, continue to build their own production, but then also be able to provide stable prices for consumers. That's the role that we can play."

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Chelan Skulski, CTV News Calgary and The Canadian Press