The Utah House of Representatives during the first day of the legislative session, in Salt Lake City on Jan. 28, 2019.Rick Bowmer/The Associated Press
One of the more controversial ideas to emerge in modern Canadian politics has found new champions in the United States, as legislators in Salt Lake City seek to pass into law a Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act.
The bill is directly rooted in the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act, whose 2022 passage under Alberta premier Danielle Smith caught the attention of senators in Utah last summer. Like Ms. Smith, they wanted a tool to pre-empt compliance with federal regulation they deemed unconstitutional.
“I’ll give the credit where the genesis came from: Alberta,” said Scott Sandall, the Republican state senator who drafted the bill. “We share some of the common concerns about federal overreach and in that way I think we partner, even across the border,” he said.
The bill was passed by the state Senate Friday and will now be examined by the state House of Representatives. Republicans enjoy supermajority control of the state legislature, and Mr. Sandall expects the bill to be ready for a signature by Utah Governor Spencer Cox, also a Republican, within two weeks.
The Utah legislation builds on centuries of state disputes with the U.S. federal government – although local scholars expect its effect, if it passes into law, to be largely symbolic.
But the appearance of such a bill in a U.S. legislature is also a measure of the influence that has been attained by Canadian conservatives. The truck convoys that crippled downtown Ottawa and shut down several border crossings in 2022 attracted considerable attention in the U.S. Next week, former Fox News broadcaster Tucker Carlson has planned appearances in Alberta alongside Ms. Smith, Conrad Black and Rex Murphy.
“We often talk about American political trends flowing into Canada. And we forget the fact that the flow also goes the other way,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
Alberta’s sovereignty act, which has not yet been tested in court, was deployed for the first time in November in opposition to federal regulations that call for net-zero electricity generation by 2035.
In Utah, news coverage of the Alberta bill came to the attention of Mr. Sandall and Stuart Adams, the Senate president. They decided “we need to try something like this in our state,” said Mr. Sandall. Albertans played no role in drafting the Utah bill, which Mr. Sandall believes is, for now, unique in the U.S. “We don’t know of any other state that has tried this option,” he said. “And I don’t know if any others will follow.”
Like in Alberta, the Utah bill has been put forward with federal environmental measures in mind. Mr. Sandall pointed to Environmental Protection Agency regulations on ozone that, he argued, Utah will struggle to attain, since much of the ozone in the state is not locally generated.
“This could be one of those things that rises to the standard to say, ‘EPA, you’ve got this wrong. You’ll be harming our state, shutting down certain industries,’ ” Mr. Sandall said.
The Utah bill would allow state legislators, if they can muster a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and Senate, to pass a concurrent resolution barring a government officer from enforcing “a federal directive within the state if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty.”
“This is a tool that when we think the federal government is a little out of balance, we can try to right that balance and put states’ rights ahead of the federal,” said Mr. Sandall.
But the bill, if passed, will confer limited powers, since a concurrent resolution cannot become law, said Jay DeSart, who chairs the department of history and political science at Utah Valley University.
“It ultimately amounts to an official expression of a sentiment. It doesn’t really have any teeth. All this will do is have the state officially say, ‘We don’t like this and so we’re going to drag our feet,’ ” said Prof. DeSart.
Critics in Utah have also raised concern over how the bill could affect Indigenous nations, which have a direct relationship with the federal government. “Our asking to be respected as a state and not respecting the tribal sovereignty is problematic,” Luz Escamilla, the Democratic leader in the Utah Senate, said Friday.
“It introduces significant ambiguity into relationships involving federal funds that our state receives,” she said in a statement to The Globe and Mail.
Tensions between states and the federal government are nearly as old as the U.S. itself – and, in fact, are a design feature, “intended to be a protection from overreach by either level of government,” said Damon Cann, who heads the political science department at Utah State University.
In the decades before the Civil War, several states sought to use a doctrine of “nullification,” under which they asserted for themselves the power to invalidate federal laws. Such efforts were blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has held that the power to determine the constitutionality of a law lies with federal courts rather than individual states.
“Many of the issues surrounding the situations where states can push back against the federal government were resolved 150-plus years ago,” said Prof. Cann.
But the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to rule on such issues. In 2022, it decided that the EPA cannot impose state-level carbon emissions caps under the Clean Air Act. In February, the court plans to hear oral arguments on a challenge to ozone regulations mounted by Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia.
“So we still and always will, I think, have some of this back and forth dialogue between states and the federal government on who gets to do what,” said Prof. Cann.
In Alberta, the premier’s office declined comment on the Utah bill, but said it welcomes legislative emulation.
“It’s great to see that the Alberta Sovereignty Within A United Canada Act is inspiring a greater discussion in jurisdictions across North America on the constitutional roles of federal and provincial/state governments,” Sam Blackett, a spokesperson for Ms. Smith, said in a statement.