A prime minister from Alberta firmly closes the door on the Justin Trudeau era

No one can say they weren’t warned. In his Canada Day video, the prime minister flatly stated that his federal government needed to back off on Trudeau’s climate policy, even as he recalled teenage memories of Alberta’s grievances with Ottawa.

We now know he was laying the groundwork for the one-two punch of the pipeline deal for Alberta while simultaneously buying peace with British Columbia.

What also became clear is that Canadians really do find themselves with a prime minister from Alberta.

Yes, Carney represents an Ottawa-area riding and has spent much of his adult life in large urban centres far away from where he grew up. But in that video and in Thursday’s announcement, he left listeners with the deliberate impression that Alberta blood still courses through his veins.

Carney will be reprising that Alberta-Man persona again when he heads to the Calgary Stampede.

It was also clear on Thursday that the main proponent of this pipeline deal was not just Premier Danielle Smith or any private company, but the prime minister himself. Carney made this deal not because he was pressured into it, but because he was determined to make it happen.

“You asked for it. We promised it. Now we are delivering,” he said.

It’s obvious to say this, but this big Thursday announcement was unlikely to have come from a Trudeau government, or at least one with former environment minister Steven Guilbeault in it.

Guilbeault, whose exit began with last year’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta, wasted little time registering his dissent.

In a Facebook post, Guilbeault said that while he was relieved the pipeline was at least going to follow a southern route through British Columbia, he regretted that it was coming about at all.

He pointed out that the deal announced by Carney and Smith goes back on the promise in their memorandum of understanding last fall that it would be built by the private sector.

“Another project will be funded by taxpayers, even as oil companies are expected to earn $60 billion in profits this year,” Guilbeault wrote.

He said clean electricity regulations would be weakened, if not abolished.

“All of this is happening as we are seeing heatwaves hitting numerous corners of the globe and as northern Quebec is seeing four times the number of forest fires we would normally have at this time of the year.”

Trudeau wasn’t incapable of making deals with provinces — he appeared frequently, for instance, to be getting along famously with Premier Doug Ford. During the early days of the pandemic, he met virtually but often with first ministers.

But there’s been a noticeable shift now in how the provincial leaders, Ford included, seem now to want to talk publicly about Carney as a welcome change from Trudeau.

One of the strongest statements on that score came a few weeks ago when Nova Scotia’s Tim Houston sat down for an interview with CBC Radio’s “The Current.” Almost out of the blue, Houston served up the comparison.

“There’s been such a switch under Prime Minister Carney,” he said, describing Trudeau as “difficult to deal with.”

When host Matt Galloway pressed him on this assertion, Houston said, “He didn’t listen to us or didn’t care about what provinces had to say.

What the provinces seem to like about Carney is that he’s only a text message away. “He’s very accessible,” Houston said. “Like, I certainly couldn’t have just reached out directly to prime minister Trudeau, never.”

Carney’s hands-on approach to deal-making also surfaced when he was announcing his deal with British Columbia, and Premier David Eby noted more than once that the prime minister had been a tough negotiator.

Some of this is inevitable when regime change happens in Ottawa. Those with long memories will remember how Brian Mulroney assumed power in the 1980s vowing a new era of co-operative federalism, or how Jean Chrétien took over promising less fractiousness and drama among premiers than the kind seen in the later Mulroney years. Trudeau was seen, initially at least, as a pleasant change from Stephen Harper.

Here in Ottawa too, there’s been lots of talk in Liberal circles about how Carney, for good and bad, is a marked change from the last prime minister.

Conservatives repeatedly say they’re not buying it, and that Carney’s government is just the warmed over version of Liberalism under Trudeau.

That’s a harder argument to make after this past week, which will probably be remembered as the week that Carney really did say goodbye to the Trudeau years.