On Tuesday afternoon, Premier Danielle Smith held a news conference at the Alberta Legislature to explain her position on separation.

After watching her spend 30 minutes answering questions from journalists I can say with certainty I’m as befuddled now as I was half an hour before. That might be because Smith seems just as baffled.

Here is the punchline to her news conference, quite literally the last comment she made after a deluge of questions about the mechanics, outcome, and consequences of a referendum to separate from Canada: “There is no referendum question, there is no petition campaign. We haven’t even put the structure in place for the Elections Act. So, I don’t have answers to those questions, because until we see an actual active question and an active petition campaign, it really is just hypothetical.”