Alberta Premier Danielle Smith appears to have kicked her campaign off in earnest ahead of May’s election, rolling out a $2.4-billion relief package for families struggling with living costs and rousing long-held grievances against Ottawa in Alberta’s oil patch in a speech this week in Calgary.

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Smith called the federal government the “biggest obstacle” to growth in the oil and gas industry at a receptive gathering of the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors (CAOEC) Wednesday. She pledged to be be a “fierce advocate” for the sector and to use every tool at the government’s disposal to fight federal overreach in areas of provincial jurisdiction.

“We will fight for you and we’ll go to the wall for you,” said Smith, who has begun laying out her vision for Canada’s energy industry a month after winning the United Conservative Party leadership race to replace former premier Jason Kenney.

“The biggest obstacle facing the growth of the sector is not the oil fields, it’s not the global markets, it is located in a building about 2,400 miles east of here on Parliament Hill — make no mistake, we have never faced the triple threat of hostility, ideology and incompetence that we’ve seen from the current federal government,” Smith said to applause from the more than 400 people gathered for CAOEC’s annual State of the Industry event on Nov. 23.

Recent poll numbers suggest Smith is lagging rival NDP leader Rachel Notley and Alberta’s premier appeared to be on a mission to reverse that trend this week, rolling out a $2.4-billion inflation relief package in a TV address to the province.

Smith is also set to introduce her contentious sovereignty act in the provincial legislature next week. The premier has said that the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act will assert the province’s ability to ignore federal laws it deems unconstitutional. The act has attracted significant criticism from constitutional academics, as well as Indigenous leaders in the province who say the act is in direct conflict with their Treaty agreements.

“Treaty is the highest law to govern the land now known as Canada, its resources, and our Peoples,” Alberta Treaty chiefs said in a statement last week. “We understand the proposed Act as a ploy to access resources and extract them at an unrestricted rate, leaving the land unprotected.”

Smith outlined a number of priorities for the energy sector during her speech Wednesday, including her government’s aim to position Alberta as a major global supplier of hydrogen and growing the province’s natural gas industry by pursuing opportunities in petrochemical manufacturing, LNG, hydrogen and plastics.

But Alberta’s premier also returned again and again in her speech to old grievances against Ottawa, including the federal carbon tax on fuel and Bill C-69, which critics say complicates the approval of energy projects.

Smith told the gathering of oil and gas drillers that she intends to travel to Germany on Jan. 14 as part of a trade mission aimed at building partnerships and agreements with European allies on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports and carbon-capture technologies.

“I know our federal government doesn’t think that there’s a business case for LNG export, but I’m assuming that there’s some folks in this room who think that that might be incorrect,” Smith said.

Smith’s remarks were warmly received. Much of the industry has enjoyed record-breaking cash flow over the past 18 months as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted already tight energy supplies and sent prices soaring. The sector’s appetite for capital expenditure, however, has been hampered by uncertainty over future demand and regulatory headwinds.

Still, in its 2023 forecast, CAOEC said it expects more drilling activity next year — even as the industry continues to push the federal government for a new tax credit it says it needs to help the energy sector decarbonize.

CAOEC has forecasted 6,409 wells to be drilled in Canada in 2023, an approximately 15 per cent increase from 2022, according to The Canadian Press.

“The last seven years has been very, very difficult and the industry is finally fun again,” said Jason Jaskela, president and chief operating officer of Headwater Exploration Inc. “We went through a seven-year cycle where renewables were going to replace natural resources, obviously we all know that isn’t true. Capital was hard to come by, pricing was depressed and we were all kind of right-sizing our businesses and really, the capital markets simply weren’t open.

“We’ve kind of transitioned out of that. We’re in an environment now where I think energy security is really, really important. Capital is finally coming back into the space as the industry produces more earnings.”

Smith said a few nice things about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. She said she is pleased that Ottawa signed off on the province’s system for pricing and regulating industrial greenhouse gas emissions — the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) program — as satisfying increasingly rigorous federal climate benchmarks over the next decade.

The premier also took a victory lap over the news that federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault had declined to endorse a failed bid at COP27 to get signatories to commit to a complete phaseout of fossil fuels over concerns such a move would invite further court challenges.

“When we assert our right to develop our natural resources, the federal government has to listen and they’re beginning to get the message,” Smith said.

• Email: mpotkins@postmedia.com | Twitter: mpotkins

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