Alberta Premier Danielle Smith believes the Supreme Court’s recent rebuke of the Impact Assessment Act allows the province to bow out of federal climate change regulations.

While speaking to BNN Bloomberg Tuesday, Smith said the decision last week to overturn most of the law shows the federal government does not have control over Alberta industry and could thus ignore Canada’s planned emissions cap and its clean electricity regulations.

“We won’t follow it,” she said during the television interview. “I think the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear that we have the jurisdiction to be able to regulate our resources in our own way.”

Smith called federal emissions guidelines “unrealistic” and “unachievable,” and essentially amount to a cap on how much Alberta can produce.

“They’re not allowed to do that,” she said.

The federal government has committed to achieving a net-zero electrical grid by 2035 and a cap on oil and gas emissions is expected by 2024, with the goal of reducing emissions to 31 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Smith said her province is working to reduce its emissions at its own pace.

“We’re being responsible, we’re approaching the table in the spirit of cooperative federalism and I hope the federal government takes this judgement and decides to do the same,” she said.

“If they’re going to continue to put forward unilateral policy, I’m going to continue to fight back against it.” 

The Impact Assessment Act, which became law in 2019, gave the federal government the ability to investigate the environmental impacts of large infrastructure and energy projects. 

Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled most of the law unconstitutional, with five of the seven judges arguing the federal government does not have jurisdiction over projects held on provincial land.

“The Supreme Court makes it very clear that the constitution matters, that there are division of powers,” Smith said. “The court expects those to be respected. They don’t want one level of government using a workaround to regulate indirectly what they’re not allowed to do directly.”

The decision also ruled the federal government does have jurisdiction to assess projects involving federal land, more than one province, Indigenous issues, fisheries, greenhouse gasses and those held internationally.

In an interview with BNN Bloomberg last week, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson vowed to fix the law to comply with the Supreme Court decision.

“We of course accept what the court has said and we will go back and make amendments to the act and bring it into full compliance with what the court had directed us to do,” he said in a television interview.