Letter: Sovereignty act highly problematic

By Letter to the Editor on December 14, 2022.

Dear editor,

In response to the UCP’s proposed Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act.

The UCP claims this Act will give their government the legal right to ignore federal laws they deem contrary to Alberta’s interests. It will not.

What they claim to be able to do cannot be legally done under our Constitution. Just as no individual can opt out of a law they disagree with, neither can a province. There is a legal remedy available to everyone, whether individual or province, who believes a federal law is not constitutionally within federal legislative power. That remedy is in our court system and in the massive body of constitutional law delineating laws as either federal or provincial.

Their Act will ignore that court system and the constitutional law. Their Act is fiction, fantasy detached from reality. Danielle Smith says her government is open to amendments to the Act and that it will be the legislature which ultimately directs the Alberta cabinet on the ignoring of any particular federal law, but none of that redeems the Act’s fundamental illegality. You can put many layers of lipstick on a pig but you will always have a pig.

What the UCP is really trying to do is the reverse of an actual, existing federal cabinet constitutional power called disallowance. Since 1867 the federal cabinet has the power to disallow and invalidate provincial laws. This power was given to the federal government under the British North America Act (since 1982 called the Constitution Act) to oversee constitutional compliance of provincial laws. It has been used by federal governments against various provincial laws 112 times since 1867. Provinces have no such power.

Also, under the Constitution if a provincial lieutenant-governor believes a provincial law is unconstitutional he or she can refer that questionable law to the federal cabinet for disallowance. Those are and have been the rules, from 38 years before Alberta existed.

If the UCP understands the law above, but proceeds with their Act anyway, they are willfully blind. If they don’t understand it, they are merely incompetent. You decide, because you get the government you deserve.

Gregory R. Côté

Irvine

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