{"id":591483,"date":"2023-09-14T17:16:23","date_gmt":"2023-09-14T14:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-unsteady-reign-of-danielle-smith\/"},"modified":"2023-09-14T17:16:23","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T14:16:23","slug":"the-unsteady-reign-of-danielle-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-unsteady-reign-of-danielle-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"#The Unsteady Reign of Danielle Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nOn a sunny Saturday morning this past April, one month before Alberta\u2019s provincial election, about 200 boisterous supporters of the governing United Conservative Party descended on a parking lot in suburban Calgary. The throng\u2014seniors, families, bearded guys in cowboy hats, bearded guys in UCP-blue turbans\u2014were there for a campaign-launch rally, steeling themselves for a long day of door-to-door canvassing. The atmosphere was electric: polls showed a dead heat between the UCP and the NDP. The former was expected to handily win rural ridings, the latter to sweep Edmonton. It was here, in Calgary\u2019s too-close-to-call suburbs, that the election would be won or lost. The fate of the race depended on these placard-peddling canvassers.<\/p>\n

The volunteers congregated around a stage where, after a few opening speakers, UCP Leader Danielle Smith app<\/a>eared. She was already premier\u2014she had been since October of 2022, when her predecessor, Jason Kenney, stepped down following a disastrous leadership review. This spring, she was asking Albertans at large for a mandate. From the podium, she delivered a six-minute speech the door-knockers could parrot: the UCP would lower taxes, curb violent crime, build the Flames a new arena and, most importantly, defend the oil and gas industry. She pledged, as she unfailingly does, to defy Justin Trudeau\u2019s edicts to decrease fossil-fuel emissions. She pitched a roguishly romantic vision of Alberta, where hard-working citizens could live and let live without the big, bad government getting in their way. Then she shouted, \u201cLet\u2019s go knock some doors!\u201d<\/p>\n

Canvassing is exhausting\u2014awkward hellos, argumentative strangers. But that morning was especially deflating. Here, in ridings that had gone blue for decades, voter after voter confessed the unthinkable: they might defect to the NDP. The problem wasn\u2019t the UCP or its platform, they said. The problem was Danielle Smith.<\/p>\n

Smith is the most polarizing politician in Alberta\u2014and arguably in Canada, thanks largely to her inability to keep her foot out of her mouth and her susceptibility to some truly out-there ideas. In the lead-up to the campaign, she mused about privatizing hospitals and claimed that cancer is preventable until stage 4<\/a>. She baselessly claimed Cherokee ancestry<\/a> and refuted the existence of mass graves around residential schools. Last March, on a right-wing social<\/a>-media platform called Locals.com, she trumpeted the fiction\u2014embraced by QAnon\u2014that Russia invaded Ukraine to fight neo-Nazis and shut down U.S.-funded bioweapons labs.<\/p>\n

She has been especially vocal when spreading misinformation about COVID-19. She\u2019s compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler and called unvaccinated people<\/a> \u201cthe most discriminated-against group that I\u2019ve ever witnessed.\u201d In one of her first acts as premier, she implored her justice minister to drop criminal charges against Artur Pawlowski, a preacher who flouted lockdown restrictions. Like Ron DeSantis, the self-declared \u201canti-woke\u201d presidential hopeful for whom she\u2019s expressed admiration, Smith can\u2019t quit COVID.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just her out-there pronouncements that inspired queasiness among moderates. It was also that she\u2019d embraced\u2014and been embraced by\u2014the fringiest elements of the province\u2019s right wing. That includes an insurgent far-right group called Take Back Alberta, which emerged out of anti-lockdown protests and ended up giving Smith the ballots she needed to take control of the UCP.<\/p>\n

During the campaign, two former Progressive Conservative MLAs denounced Smith and endorsed the NDP. They couldn\u2019t stomach the thought of Smith running the province, especially with Alberta confronting multiple challenges: record-breaking population growth straining housing and infrastructure; hospitals critically short of doctors, nurses and beds; a school system grappling with shortages of teachers and cash; and one of Canada\u2019s worst opioid crises. The scandal-prone Smith did not seem to be the steadying hand the province needed.<\/p>\n

At first, the party tried to offer up a gentler version of Smith: the folksy everywoman. And it\u2019s true that Smith\u2019s personal life is exceedingly vanilla. She drinks pinot grigio with friends at standing Sunday-night dinners. She relaxes by walking her dogs, Caine and Colt. Her go-to hobby is reading. She splits her time between the legislature in Edmonton and her home in High River, a quaint frontier-town-turned-suburb south of Calgary. Until recently, she and her husband, the former broadcasting executive David Moretta, ran a restaurant there out of a historic railway carriage.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

(Photograph by Jason Franson\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When the everywoman angle didn\u2019t take, Smith\u2019s team adopted a more cynical argument: vote for the party, not the leader. Don\u2019t worry about Danielle, her colleagues told apprehensive voters. She\u2019ll be gone in no time.<\/p>\n

On May 29, those voters held their noses and elected Smith\u2019s UCP, albeit with a smaller majority than any conservative government in decades. Now Albertans are trying to figure out which Danielle Smith they\u2019re going to get. Will it be the poised, palatable, plain-spoken leader? The paranoid populist who spouts disinformation online? The Alberta sovereigntist who has all but promised to provoke a constitutional crisis to win concessions from Ottawa? And what of those extremist forces that helped propel her to power\u2014how much, exactly, is she indebted to them? Smith\u2019s mandate may be temporary, but whatever chaos that follows will shape Alberta, and Canada, for years to come.<\/p>\n

One day, when Smith was in Grade 8, she came home from school singing the praises of communism\u2014a left-leaning social studies teacher had eagerly introduced her class to socialist ideals. Her unwaveringly right-wing parents, Sharon and Doug Smith, realized it was time to teach their children about politics. Sharon was a blue-collar Catholic with a job at a drive-through diner, and Doug worked for Firestone Tires. They\u2019d married as teenagers, moved into subsidized housing and had five kids; Danielle was their second. After his daughter\u2019s brief Marxist indoctrination, Doug started bringing her photocopied news<\/a>paper articles, saying, \u201cRead this.\u201d At the dinner table, he taught her about conservative icons like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Peter Lougheed, the revered premier who led Alberta from 1971 to 1985.<\/p>\n

Smith was a bookish kid who dreamed of writing fantasy and sci-fi novels. She worked at McDonald\u2019s and an oyster bar to pay her way through her studies at the University of Calgary, where she majored in English before switching to economics. But politics were inescapable at the U of C in the early \u201990s. Preston Manning, the father of Canada\u2019s modern conservative movement, occasionally visited campus, tailed by an introverted grad student named Stephen Harper.<\/p>\n

Smith jumped at the opportunity to take a political science<\/a> elective taught by Lougheed, whom her father had lionized. His class took the form of a mock first ministers\u2019 meeting, with students representing different provinces. It was a petri dish of budding political talent. Naheed Nenshi, the future mayor of Calgary, and Kevin Bosch, who later became a federal Liberal strategist, acted for Quebec. Smith role-played as a parliamentary reporter, interviewing them about the Charlottetown Accord. Lougheed\u2019s students came from programs in commerce, history and economics\u2014but their majors hardly mattered. \u201cI once missed my bus and had to walk home because we were busy debating constitutional policy at the bar after class,\u201d says Bosch. He remembers Smith as a star student: warm, friendly and extremely smart.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s political education continued at the student centre, where crowds gathered by the stairwell for informal debates called Speakers Corner. She watched students standing on lunch tables, facing off over taxes, reproductive rights and whether the cafeteria should stock Coke or Pepsi. In a typical matchup, Rob Anders, a political science student who was later a founding member of the Conservative Party of Canada, duked it out with Ezra Levant, who would found Rebel News and become one of Canada\u2019s most notorious right-wing agitators. Smith loved watching the debates, but Nenshi doesn\u2019t recall if she ever took part. She didn\u2019t fit in with the big mouths and big egos, he says\u2014she was a head-down achiever who\u2019d rather read Ayn Rand than showboat.<\/p>\n

At Speakers Corner, Smith met Sean McKinsley, a political science student she later married. (They\u2019ve since divorced, but remain friends.) After debates, McKinsley and Smith would debrief over beer and wings at the Den, the smoke-filled campus pub. Smith was always brimming with ideas, recalls McKinsley, but she was hardly a radical. She supported staid, centrist candidates like Jean Charest\u2014practically a Liberal by Alberta standards. \u201cIf she comes across as a feisty agitator, I don\u2019t know if that portrays the person she is,\u201d McKinsley says. \u201cShe\u2019s a severely normal human being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nenshi says he often wonders what happened to that version of Smith. He and a few alumni still maintain a group chat where they try to trace her metamorphosis from affable bookworm to pugnacious firebrand. Some say that, deep down, she\u2019s always been like this and simply found her voice later on. Others think it\u2019s a vote-grabbing act. Most agree that something changed.<\/p>\n

The transformation seems to have started in Smith\u2019s senior year, when she was elected president of the campus Progressive Conservatives. At the time, the PCs were an unfashionable choice. By the mid-1990s, many Albertans had soured on the centrist, tax-friendly federal party. The fiery Reform Party, a populist movement born of Western discontent, was emerging as the standard-bearer of Canadian conservatism. Most of Smith\u2019s conservative classmates\u2014McKinsley, Anders, Levant\u2014were Reformers. Smith shared a 150-square-foot office with the heads of the other political clubs, where they badgered her to the right.<\/p>\n

Nenshi and other former classmates still maintain a group chat, tracing Smith\u2019s evolution from bookworm to firebrand<\/p>\n

Her true conversion, though, began when she took a class taught by political science professor Tom Flanagan. He belonged to a group known as the Calgary School, which also included U of C professors Barry Cooper, Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff. It espoused old-fashioned fiscal conservatism. Most members were also social conservatives, variously opposing gay marriage, abortion rights and sovereignty for Indigenous people. Above all, the group was informed by a deep wariness of the federal government.<\/p>\n

Of course, discontent with Ottawa is as old as Alberta itself. Throughout the 20th century, Western politicians argued that Alberta\u2014agrarian, traditional, conservative\u2014would be better off without the influence of Eastern liberal elites. The Calgary School reflected a new era of Western alienation that began in 1980, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program, a federal policy that siphoned oil and gas profits out of Alberta. The group\u2019s solution was to radically decentralize Canada, handing more power to provinces. In 2001, three of the School\u2019s professors co-signed a document that became widely known as the \u201cfirewall letter,\u201d urging then-premier Ralph Klein to kick the RCMP, CPP and CRA out of Alberta and replace them with a provincial police force, pension plan and tax-collection agency.<\/p>\n

Flanagan saw promise in Smith, and became a mentor to her. She soaked up the School\u2019s philosophies, adopting them as foundational pieces of her own political persona. She was such a strong student that, when she graduated, Flanagan recommended her for an internship at the Fraser Institute\u2014a Vancouver-based think tank that advocates for free markets. Around that time, Smith also accompanied Levant and McKinsley to the Leadership Institute, a bootcamp in Virginia that trains young conservatives on how to get elected, pass policy, take over school boards and infiltrate newsrooms. Its alumni include Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell.<\/p>\n

By the time Smith returned to Alberta, her new ideology was fully formed. She was no longer a soft-spoken moderate but a fed-bashing libertarian, immersed in a world of hardline reformers and Western populists\u2014the same circles that incubated Harper, Kenney and premier Ralph Klein, one of Smith\u2019s political idols. In 1995, Smith met another hero when the Fraser Institute invited Margaret Thatcher to Vancouver to speak about her book The Path to Power. As the Iron Lady signed a copy, Smith told her, \u201cI hope to run for office myself one day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twenty-seven years old and fired up with partisan zeal, Smith could have run for city council, or even the provincial legislature. Instead, in 1998, she took her piss and vinegar to a stranger place when Peggy Anderson, an early aide to Jason Kenney, invited Smith to run alongside her for a trustee spot on the Calgary Board of Education. Despite having no kids, nor any apparent interest in education, Smith agreed. The board, until then managed by a cadre of more progressive trustees, was grappling with school closures and a $35-million budget shortfall. Smith and Anderson campaigned to bring accountability to the board. What ensued was chaos\u2014just a hint of the mayhem that has followed Smith everywhere since.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Pollock, one of the board\u2019s trustees, says Smith arrived to an early meeting declaring, \u201cI don\u2019t know why we have to meet so much.\u201d Within weeks, Smith started skipping votes. Once, Pollock blocked Smith from leaving the boardroom before a vote about supporting Indigenous communities. \u201cDon\u2019t be unaccountable,\u201d she said. Things didn\u2019t run much smoother when Smith did show up; she and Anderson were consistent contrarians. The other trustees wanted to address their financial crunch by collecting new taxes directly from Albertans. Smith wanted to close 30 public schools instead.<\/p>\n

The board never resolved this dilemma. Instead, it imploded. After reviewing her colleagues\u2019 expenses, Smith complained that one trustee had racked up $4,500 worth of cellphone bills in a year and that the board had spent $25,000 on travel<\/a>. The press ate up the story of the profligate board. Smith and Anderson then aggravated the situation by publishing board documents online without consulting other trustees.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 1999, the tensions became all-out war. During a meeting in August, Smith noticed two trustees passing notes to one another, which they tore up and discarded. When the meeting adjourned, Smith retrieved the notes, pieced them back together and handed them over to reporters. The National Post and Calgary Herald reprinted the messages, which read like excerpts from a Mean Girls\u2013style burn book. Smith, one said, had \u201ccrappy hair.\u201d Another called her a \u201cslow learner.\u201d At the next meeting, Pollock intentionally discarded a note that read \u201cFuck you. Publish this on the front page of the paper. I don\u2019t give a fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response, Alberta\u2019s education minister, Lyle Oberg, dismissed all seven trustees, though one of Oberg\u2019s senior staffers called Smith and urged her to run again; he\u2019d only fired her because the law required him to can everyone. But Smith declined. Another opportunity had popped up, as a columnist with the Calgary Herald.<\/p>\n

Peter Stockland, who edited the paper\u2019s op-ed page at the time, says that Smith was a sharp thinker whose contrarian views made for engaging copy. Her curiosity and willingness to challenge colleagues\u2019 ideological positions, he says, made her a valuable asset. \u201cShe was willing to admit when she was wrong,\u201d says Stockland, \u201cbut she never changed her principles.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

(Photograph by Jeff McIntosh\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Not everyone at the Herald was so impressed. Some staffers took issue with her behaviour at the school board, calling her \u201cTrash Can Dani.\u201d Others were annoyed that, at 28 years old, she\u2019d landed a coveted writing gig without any journalistic experience. And around the time she joined the paper, the newsroom went on strike. Smith crossed the picket line, inviting more ire.<\/p>\n

Yet she stuck around for years, pumping out columns criticizing the Chr\u00e9tien government, defending property rights and lauding the privatization of pretty much everything. Her columns challenged conventional wisdom and, foreshadowing her future COVID claims, often questioned medical orthodoxy. She once even wrote that smoking cigarettes could reduce the risk of disease. Doug Firby, who edited Smith in the early 2000s, says her columns often read like mouthpieces for whatever sources she\u2019d spoken to. \u201cThere was a kind of na\u00efvet\u00e9 at play,\u201d says Firby.<\/p>\n

In the mid-2000s, Smith added a few more roles to her CV, hosting two talk-radio shows as well as a current-affairs program on Global Television. To many of her media colleagues, Smith seemed like a politician first and a journalist second. Once, when Stockland was covering a conservative conference, he was surprised to find Smith sitting with the delegates, voting on party matters. \u201cDanielle, you can\u2019t do that,\u201d he told her. \u201cWe\u2019re journalists.\u201d Firby suspects that, for Smith, journalism was a means to an end\u2014a way to boost her profile and lay the groundwork for another run at elected office.<\/p>\n

As Smith inveighed against Liberals and the federal government in the Herald, the conservative dynasty that had governed Alberta since the \u201970s\u2014the longest winning streak in Canadian political history\u2014was falling apart. In the late 2000s, under premier Ed Stelmach, the government amassed a massive deficit, shifted to the centre on social issues like LGBTQ rights and hiked royalties on oil and gas companies, a controversial move as the industry reeled from the 2008 financial crisis. Even steadfast supporters were growing uneasy.<\/p>\n

This discontent created an opening for the fledgling Wildrose Party. Like Reformers before them, the Wildrose promised a platform of small government, low taxes and traditional values. The party had momentum, but it lacked a high-profile leader. When Wildrose co-founder Paul Hinman stepped down in 2009, he courted Smith, by then known more for her inflammatory columns than the school board debacle. Her competition was Mark Dyrholm, a hard-right candidate supported by several activist church groups. Smith, a libertarian who supported gay marriage and a woman\u2019s right to choose, campaigned as a big-tent uniter, someone to bring conservatives together, rather than marginalize the Wildrose as an intolerant fringe movement. She won, with more than three-quarters of the vote.<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, Smith reformed the party in her image, rolling out a platform hearkening back to her Calgary School roots: decentralizing education and health care, championing oil and gas and fighting against federal incursions. She hired her old mentor Tom Flanagan as campaign manager for the 2012 provincial election and pledged to enact elements of the firewall letter, including a provincial pension plan. She built a base of voters by holding rural town halls, where she promised to run a balanced budget, institute tax credits for young families and save $2 billion by scrapping the PCs\u2019 carbon-capture program. Ian Donovan, a former Wildrose MLA, says Smith shone on the road. \u201cShe\u2019d talk with someone at a rally in Athabasca, then meet them again in Lethbridge and say, \u2018I remember you,\u2019\u2009\u201d he says. Pollsters predicted a landslide Wildrose win.<\/p>\n

Instead, the crackpot wing of the party re-emerged in very public fashion. In one interview, a candidate claimed he had an advantage over his opponent because he was white. And just days before the election, a blog post by Edmonton candidate Allan Hunsperger surfaced, claiming that gay people would \u201csuffer the rest of eternity in a lake of fire.\u201d Ever the libertarian, Smith defended Hunsperger\u2019s freedom of speech\u2014but her defence also stemmed from disastrously miscalculated political optics. She simply didn\u2019t realize that Albertans would recoil at such vehement homophobia. On election day, her seemingly assured victory evaporated. Moderate Albertans\u2019 fears seemed confirmed\u2014that behind the grassroots veneer, the Wildrose was really a bunch of racists and rednecks.<\/p>\n

That perception hardened after the election. In 2014, as the official Opposition, Wildrose members voted against adopting a relatively banal statement affirming the rights of Albertans regardless of race, religion and sexual orientation. Smith started looking for the exit. Privately, she negotiated with premier Jim Prentice to meld the moderate wing of her Wildrose caucus with his PCs. In 2014, Smith and eight other Wildrose MLAs crossed the floor to join the PCs. She framed it as a way to unite the right\u2014and it did, against her. Thousands of Wildrose diehards\u2014the volunteers, candidates and donors she\u2019d cultivated for years\u2014felt betrayed. No Canadian opposition leader had ever joined a sitting government. Voters punished her and her fellow floor-crossers in that year\u2019s provincial election; all lost re-election bids. Even worse, with the PCs and leftover Wildrosers splitting the right-wing vote, the NDP snuck up the middle, stunning everyone by winning a majority. Smith\u2019s career in elected office, it seemed, was over.<\/p>\n

Banished to the political hinterlands for a second time, Smith again retreated into media punditry. In 2016, she landed a talk-radio show on the Calgary airwaves. The program was signature Smith: wonkish interviews with MLAs, energy experts and property-rights advocates. She couldn\u2019t help but opine on her old party, which had merged with the PCs to become the United Conservative Party. And she waltzed right into the growing culture wars. Whatever her own social views, the staunchly libertarian Smith has complained about the hazards of cancel culture and the supposed silencing of conservative voices in mainstream media. Among hundreds of guests, she welcomed John Carpay, a lawyer who had compared rainbow flags to swastikas; Tom Quiggin, an Islamophobic former RCMP officer; and Caylan Ford, a former MLA candidate who subscribed to the far-right myth that elites are systematically replacing white North Americans and Europeans with immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.<\/p>\n

Then came COVID. Smith consistently erred on the side of medical quackery, promoting bogus cures and giving airtime to vaccine-skeptical doctors. She chafed at mask guidelines and lambasted UCP premier Jason Kenney for kowtowing to federal health mandates. During a panel discussion on conservative news site the Western Standard in January of 2022, she cheered on the coalition of anti-vaxxers, free-speech activists and Christian fundamentalists who had coalesced in a tiny border town in southern Alberta called Coutts to protest vaccine mandates on health-care workers and restrictions on religious gatherings. Smith never visited the demonstration, which blocked the U.S. border for 17 days, but it became a springboard for her political comeback.<\/p>\n

Among the crowd in Coutts was a political operative named David Parker. A home-schooled, 34-year-old pastor\u2019s son from a tiny town in rural Alberta, the bearded and bespectacled Parker had served as an adviser to Stephen Harper and worked in Smith\u2019s Wildrose war room. The blockade, he saw, had the makings of a movement that could reform the United Conservative Party and push it further to the right.<\/p>\n

Contrary to its new name, the UCP had been deeply divided from day one. The old PCs clashed with the former Wildrosers. The suit-and-tie conservatives in Calgary didn\u2019t like the gun-toting libertarians from Taber. Edmonton progressives chafed at Christian social conservatives who\u2019d been brought into the fold. And as leader, Kenney was increasingly unpopular with them all, especially with the hard-right faction who resented COVID restrictions.<\/p>\n

While the party was searching for its soul, Parker zoomed around rural Alberta in a blue Ford pickup, hosting hundreds of town halls in barns, churches and community centres, telling rural Albertans that it was time to stand up for freedom and religious liberty. He turned this base into a new group, called Take Back Alberta, or TBA. Though the group nominally formed to fight COVID measures, it quickly embraced a range of separatist, pro-privatization, religious fundamentalist and anti-trans views.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago, Parker might have turned TBA into a new far-right party, a spiritual successor to the Wildrose. But Alberta was a different place in 2022: more urban, more centrist, more diverse. It was obvious that splitting the conservative vote would merely hand power back to the NDP. So Parker resolved to take over the UCP itself. He told supporters to buy party memberships so they could pack its board with TBA-aligned candidates. Benita Pedersen, a TBA volunteer from the town of Westlock, told me she thought the plan was brilliant. \u201cTons of people bought into the concept,\u201d she says. \u201cSome had never participated in politics. But the messaging was so effective at firing people up.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Parker\u2019s goals was to remove Kenney, and he could think of no better replacement than his old boss. Smith\u2019s conspiracy-tinged, libertarian persona resonated strongly with TBA supporters, and though her social views skewed more liberal, she\u2019d soft-peddled bigotry before, in particular during the Allan Hunsperger lake-of-fire fiasco. Anyway, the prize was too alluring. If she could win the leadership, she\u2019d instantly become premier, a position she\u2019d missed a decade earlier.<\/p>\n

The strategy worked. Speaking to caucus staff last March, Kenney remarked, \u201cThe lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.\u201d In May, the UCP held a leadership review, where Kenney barely squeaked out a win. He announced that night that he\u2019d resign. The following morning, Smith declared her intention to run for the leadership.<\/p>\n

Soon, she was accompanying Parker around the province, promising to stand up for the unvaccinated. Parker spoke glowingly at her rallies. She attended his wedding in Canmore. When a reporter questioned Smith about her perceived coziness with Parker\u2014and his influence\u2014she replied, \u201cI\u2019ve got lots of friends.\u201d (Smith declined to be interviewed for this piece, and Parker did not respond to requests.)<\/p>\n

Speaking to caucus staff last March, Kenney remarked, \u201cThe lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond appealing to the COVID-weary and the vaccine-skeptical, Smith\u2019s platform focused on her old standbys: the don\u2019t-tread-on-me tenets of the Calgary School. Conveniently, Barry Cooper, lawyer Derek From and former Wildrose MLA Rob Anderson\u2014today the executive director of the premier\u2019s office under Smith\u2014had just co-authored a policy document called the Free Alberta Strategy, a dense action plan that envisioned a radically different future for Alberta\u2014a nation within a nation \u00e0 la Quebec that would govern, police and tax itself.<\/p>\n

Smith took up their strategy as the blueprint for her Alberta Sovereignty Act. As originally written, it would have allowed Smith\u2019s cabinet to unilaterally rewrite provincial laws and ignore legislation from Ottawa. The act became the controversial centrepiece of her campaign. Party moderates balked at its radicalism, but the TBA base\u2014the angriest people in the room\u2014ate it up. In October of 2022, roughly 900 TBA members showed up at the UCP\u2019s annual general<\/a> meeting. With their support, Smith defeated rival Travis Toews to become the UCP\u2019s new leader and, at last, premier of Alberta.<\/p>\n

The version of the Sovereignty Act that passed last December was watered down after legislative debate<\/a>\u2014Smith\u2019s cabinet would no longer have the power to alter laws unilaterally. But it still allows the government to direct provincial entities\u2014police forces, schools, municipalities\u2014to ignore a federal law if the provincial legislature declares it unconstitutional or harmful to Alberta. If, for instance, the government wanted to block a federal gun-control bill, it could order police not to confiscate firearms.<\/p>\n

The act is a cunning piece of political theatre. As Barry Cooper<\/a> wrote in the National Post last summer, it is unconstitutional on purpose, an intentional affront to the conventional division of federal-provincial powers. If Smith ever uses it, she\u2019ll almost certainly trigger a constitutional challenge. According to Eric Adams, a constitutional scholar at the University of Alberta, it\u2019s not entirely clear what would happen next. \u201cThere is no road map because no provincial legislation has ever walked this road,\u201d he says. It\u2019s possible, he says, that if the act is found unconstitutional and struck down in a challenge, support would grow for a stronger form of separation.<\/p>\n

The only guaranteed outcome of its application would be, again, chaos, that recurring feature of Smith\u2019s career. I asked Cooper, who is now 80 years old, how it felt to see a premier take up the blueprint he\u2019s been pushing for the past half-century. \u201cBetter late than never,\u201d he said. \u201cThese ideas are not news to a lot of Albertans. I learned this stuff from my grandfather.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Smith is no longer catering to the separatists of yore\u2014prairie pioneers and octogenarian professors. She is pandering to a more volatile generation of revolutionaries motivated by misinformation and rage. Her ties to Parker and his group helped put her in office, but they\u2019re also her vulnerability. If Smith ventures too far into radical TBA territory, she\u2019ll alienate mainstream conservatives. If she shifts too far to the centre, Parker has threatened to do to her exactly what he did to Kenney. As he put it, \u201cThere would probably be a grassroots movement to remove Smith if she didn\u2019t do what she said she\u2019d do.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, Smith has focused her attention squarely in the direction every Alberta conservative can agree on: against Ottawa, and Justin Trudeau specifically. Minutes after her election victory in May, Smith was standing onstage at Calgary\u2019s Stampede grounds, goading the feds in front of a hollering crowd. \u201cHopefully, the prime minister and his caucus are watching tonight,\u201d she declared, explaining that Alberta would not be meeting the Liberals\u2019 mandated emissions targets or following their electrification plans, which she claimed would ravage the economy. On this, Smith has been a broken record. When the Liberals announced new clean electricity regulations, Smith called them \u201cutterly out of step with reality.\u201d To twist the knife, she announced in August that Alberta would pause development<\/a> of new wind and solar projects for six months. Smith claimed the moratorium was designed to give the industry time to prepare the electricity grid\u2014but some observers see her motive as sticking it to Trudeau.<\/p>\n

That rebellious spirit is spreading. Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe has taken a page directly from Smith\u2019s playbook with the Saskatchewan First Act, giving the province more autonomy over natural resources. He also declared Saskatchewan \u201ca nation with a nation.\u201d Quebec\u2019s Fran\u00e7ois Legault has demanded Ottawa cede control over immigration to his government. And in 2021 and 2022, Doug Ford\u2019s Ontario government invoked the notwithstanding clause\u2014the rarely used clause enabling provinces to override Canada\u2019s Charter of Rights and Freedoms\u2014to pass legislation. These premiers aren\u2019t threatening to blow up Confederation. Their actions can\u2019t all be pinned on Smith, either; Ford\u2019s challenges to federal authority came before she was elected. But Smith is fast becoming the de facto figurehead of a growing strain of anti-federalism.<\/p>\n

Still, she knows how to play nice. When she met Trudeau in person at the Calgary Stampede this July\u2014an encounter buzzed about like a cage match\u2014she shook his hand and resolved to reconcile their differences. Trudeau wanted Alberta on board with his net-zero ambitions; Smith hoped to make the most of her province\u2019s fossil-fuel resources while there was still a market for them. They agreed that Canada should reach carbon neutrality by 2050, but disagreed on how fast progress would be in the meantime.<\/p>\n

Instead of fireworks, the scrum of reporters at the event was treated to promises of collaboration. It was all so tame, so boring. For a moment, Smith appeared to be the politician that her university classmates had once expected her to become: principled, amiable, even bland.<\/p>\n

Smith then fixed a cowboy hat on her head and blundered straight back into controversy. Shortly after the meeting, photos circulated online of Smith posing with a man wearing a \u201cstraight pride\u201d T-shirt. The same man appeared in a photo with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.<\/p>\n

If the photos mean anything, it\u2019s this: Poilievre is Smith\u2019s federal parallel. Like Smith, he owes his leadership in part to the cohort of Canadians who wave \u201cFuck Trudeau\u201d flags on highway overpasses. Both must walk a razor-thin line between mainstream and fringe factions of Canadian conservatism. As Smith was to Kenney, Poilievre is an imperfect alternative to a leader many see as past his prime. There may be enough Canadians who, like those voters in suburban Calgary, are willing to hold their noses and vote for change. But those Stampede photos are a reminder that the vitriol, fear and intolerance that propelled Poilievre and Smith to power will always accompany them\u2014and threaten to tear them back down.<\/p>\n\n

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Smith crossed the floor to join the PCs in 2015, when it was in fact 2014. <\/em><\/p>\n

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