... she's a Canadian-style fringe conservative
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TOP STORY
To hear The New York Times describe Monday night’s Alberta election, it was a victory of “American-style far-right politics.” Re-elected premier Danielle Smith, meanwhile, is a standard-bearer of the “hard right.”
While Alberta has certainly re-elected the most conservative government in the country (and likely in modern Alberta history), it’s a uniquely Canadian right-wing government. One that shares vanishingly few of the hallmarks typical to hardline American conservatism.
The United Conservative Party government of Danielle Smith does not really care about abortion. It’s extremely pro-immigrant. Smith has a solid personal record on supporting gay causes — something that even the opposition NDP has acknowledged. And the UCP has no stated quarrel with the status quo of tight Canadian gun laws — all its moves in that realm have been to counter new crackdowns from the federal government of Justin Trudeau.
And above all — like any Alberta government since the province’s discovery of oil in 1947 — the UCP loves spending money.
The party’s pre-election budget still ran a modest surplus, but the avalanche of revenue from an ongoing oil boom is mostly getting poured into social spending.
One of the party’s signature campaign pledges, in fact, was an unprecedentedly expensive plan to ratchet down Alberta’s overdose crisis via a massive expansion of the province’s drug treatment beds.
Where Smith gets decidedly fringe is largely in the realm of COVID policy.
Strenuously against vaccine mandates, this campaign opened with the NDP circulating a video of Smith comparing vaccinated Albertans to the unquestioning German masses who brought Adolf Hitler to power.
“We have 75 per cent of the public who say not only ‘hit me but hit me harder and keep me away from those dirty unvaxxed,’” she says in the Nov. 2021 video, in which she also adds that she no longer wears a Remembrance Day poppy due to her objection to COVID mandates.
Smith has proved decidedly sympathetic to a prolonged 2022 blockade of the Coutts, Alta., border crossing that turned out to be one of the more troubling manifestations of the nationwide Freedom Convoy anti-mandate demonstrations.
Although the blockade disbanded peacefully, police later discovered a conspiracy within the protest camp to stockpile in anticipation of a shootout with Mounties. Notably, no such threats of violence ever emerged at the much more high-profile Freedom Convoy blockades in downtown Ottawa.
But as recently as May 3, Smith was saying that the Coutts blockade was a “win” because it got rid of vaccine mandates.
Early in her tenure, she also regularly spoke with Artur Pawlowski, who was charged in relation to the blockade. In a recording of one call, Smith promised to do what she could to help Pawlowski, even musing about using her “pardon powers” — seemingly unaware that she was referencing a power held by U.S. governors and not Canadian premiers.
Smith has even dabbled with a few World Economic Forum conspiracies. The WEF regularly convenes glitzy conferences of the world’s elite in Davos, Switzerland, where it champions such causes as “the Great Reset” — a proposal to remake the post-COVID world economy along leftist parameters such as green energy and “stakeholder capitalism.”
As such, the body often appears in online conspiracy theories as a kind of 21st century illuminati.
In October, when Smith learned of a relatively quotidian health data agreement between the WEF and an Alberta health agency, she announced she would suspend the deal in order to free Alberta from WEF influence.
“I find it distasteful when billionaires brag about how much control they have over political leaders,” she said at the time.
Smith attained power on the back of a campaign to oust her predecessor, Jason Kenney, who was perceived by hardliners within his own party of being a spineless confederate for a pro-lockdown, pro-mandate public health establishment.
A key player in the drive was the group Take Back Alberta, which now has a remarkably firm hand on the UCP tiller after getting several of its members elected to the party’s board of directors.
Marco Van Huigenbos, the group’s chief financial officer, is currently facing charges related to his participation in the Coutts blockade.
Kenney made no public statements during the recent election campaign, and his exact physical location is actually a bit of a mystery these days.
But in his official resignation letter from last year, Kenney made sure to throw a couple of not-so-subtle barbs at the fringier bent of his party’s new masters.
“I am concerned that our democratic life is veering away from ordinary prudential debate towards a polarization that undermines our bedrock institution and principles,” he wrote.
Smith ultimately clinched victory Monday night by the slimmest margin in the province’s history. For most of Alberta’s history, centre-right governments have captured commanding majorities without even breaking a sweat. But according to an analysis by University of Calgary professor Trevor Tombe, all it would have taken was 1,600 Albertans to switch their vote to put NDP Leader Rachel Notley back in the premier’s office.
Easily one of the deciding factors in getting Smith over the finish line was an unexpectedly high quantity of message discipline. Aside from the pro-Coutts statement on May 3, she managed to spend the rest of the campaign without saying or doing anything particularly controversial.
When audio emerged of a UCP candidate, Jennifer Johnson, delivering a convoluted anecdote about how institutional support for youth gender transitions was akin to spiking a batch of cookies with feces — Smith said the candidate wouldn’t sit in caucus if elected.
“The language used by Ms. Johnson regarding children identifying as transgender is simply unacceptable and does not reflect the values of our party or province,” said Smith.
“The UCP is committed, to all Albertans, that under no circumstances will any Albertan ever have to pay out of pocket for access to their family doctor or to get the medical treatment that they need,” Smith said on the eve of the election call.
Although, as Elections Alberta struggled to deliver the initial returns Monday night, there seemed to be one decidedly American political import among the UCP ranks: Distrust of the electoral system itself.
“Something fishy is going on,” read a Monday night tweet by Take Back Alberta founder David Parker amid delays — although he dropped the issue as soon as the totals swung for his candidate.
Something fishy is going on.
— David Parker (@DavidJPba) May 30, 2023
IN OTHER NEWS
The NDP’s Jenny Kwan told reporters this week that she just got briefed by CSIS that she has been a target for agents from the People’s Republic of China. That makes three MPs whom CSIS has warned were directly targeted by Chinese interference operations (the others are Conservative MPs Michael Chong and Erin O’Toole). It’s not clear precisely what China did to the three MPs, if anything, only that they had apparently singled them out for special attention.
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