Alberta gets a new hardline Premier: Right wing maverick Danielle Smith set to take over

The new pre­mier of Alber­ta, Canada’s oil pro­duc­ing province, is a right-wing pop­ulist and for­mer online radio talk show host.

Danielle Smith, fifty-one, was cho­sen Thurs­day as leader of the Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty in a vote of par­ty members.

The UCP holds a major­i­ty of seats in the Alber­ta Leg­is­la­ture, so its leader becomes pre­mier. Under a par­lia­men­tary sys­tem, as seen recent­ly with ouster of Britain’s Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son, a head of gov­ern­ment can be forced to resign and replaced with­out a vote of the people.

“Peace, order and good gov­ern­ment” has been Canada’s infor­mal mot­to of set­tle­ment and devel­op­ment from the time of Confederation.

Smith is like­ly to soon dis­rupt all three pil­lars by ask­ing the Alber­ta Leg­is­la­ture to adopt some­thing called the Alber­ta Sov­er­eign­ty Act. The act would allow the provin­cial leg­is­la­ture to veto any actions by Canada’s fed­er­al gov­ern­ment or reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies “that vio­late the juris­dic­tion­al rights of Alberta.

The Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty can­not be described as united.

Out­go­ing Pre­mier Jason Ken­ney, who resigned in May after com­ing up short in a UCP lead­er­ship vote, has described the Alber­ta Sov­er­eign­ty Act as “cocka­mamie” and “cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly stupid.”

Sim­i­lar opin­ions came from Smith’s oppo­nents in the UCP lead­er­ship con­test. A for­mer fed­er­al cab­i­net min­is­ter, Ken­ney rep­re­sents a more staid, busi­ness-ori­ent­ed con­ser­vatism, in the man­ner of the Bush fam­i­ly in the Unit­ed States.

Under Ken­ney, Alber­ta imposed few­er restric­tions to com­bat the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic than any oth­er Cana­di­an province.

Yet, protests erupt­ed in rur­al parts of the province along with a late win­ter “Free­dom Con­voy” block­ade at a bor­der cross­ing into Montana.

The RCMP uncov­ered a large arms cache at a near­by home.

An activist on the right from Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary days, and alum­nus of The Fras­er Insti­tute think tank, Danielle Smith is known for con­tro­ver­sial views.

On the top­ic of health, she has sug­gest­ed that there can be health ben­e­fits from a mod­est con­sump­tion of tobac­co, and that growth of can­cer is influ­enced by a patient’s behav­ior. She espoused the dis­cred­it­ed view that that hydrox­y­chloro­quine could pre­vent a SARS-Cov­‑2 infec­tion.

“We are not going to be enforc­ing fed­er­al lock­down mea­sures or fed­er­al restric­tions,” Smith declared after win­ning the UCP leadership.

Smith was a cli­mate skep­tic a decade ago in the Albert Legislature.

She claimed dur­ing the lead­er­ship cam­paign, how­ev­er, to have “come around full cir­cle” on the need to curb car­bon emissions.

Not quite. She oppos­es a fed­er­al car­bon tax and has backed Big Oil’s response to con­trol­ling emis­sions from its vast tar sands project in north­ern Alberta.

“I’m not a sci­en­tist,” she has said, words heard from Repub­li­can politi­cians in the U.S. “I defer that the indus­try has agreed: This indus­try accepts the con­sen­sus (on cli­mate change) and they’re work­ing on pro­tec­tion solu­tions and it’s my job to sup­port them.”

Huh? In plain Eng­lish – one of Canada’s two offi­cial lan­guages – that means resist­ing con­trol mea­sures pro­posed by Canada’s fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, as well as efforts by Ottawa to reg­u­late or lim­it new ener­gy projects.

Alber­ta has always been a con­ser­v­a­tive province, except for the peri­od of 2015 to 2019 when it had a reformist gov­ern­ment from the cen­ter-left New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. Its con­ser­vatism is cen­tered in rur­al areas, and has a lib­er­tar­i­an bent.

In fed­er­al elec­tions, rid­ings (the Cana­di­an equiv­a­lent of con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts) give mas­sive majori­ties to the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty. The country’s gov­ern­ing Lib­er­al Par­ty holds only two of the province’s forty-two seats in the House of Commons.

A right-wing provin­cial move­ment, the Wil­drose Par­ty, grew up ear­ly in the twen­ty-first, oppos­ing Alberta’s cen­ter-right gov­ern­ment. Danielle Smith was its leader in the Alber­ta Leg­is­la­ture. In 2015, how­ev­er, she aban­doned the par­ty with four fel­low leg­is­la­tors and crossed the floor to sit with the Conservatives.

She was show­ered with unfa­vor­able pub­lic­i­ty and could not even win a provin­cial rid­ing nom­i­na­tion in 2015. The road back was a talk show on Cal­gary radio CHQR. And, to Smith’s advan­tage, the frat­ri­cide of the Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tive Party.

Con­ser­v­a­tives rule Alber­ta, but inter­nal bat­tles and par­ty divi­sions have forced out a suc­ces­sion of pre­miers. The usu­al sin, not fight­ing hard enough against Ottawa. The casu­al­ty list includes Ken­ney, Ali­son Red­ford, Jim Pren­tice, Ralph Klein (drink­ing was a fac­tor) and Ed Stelmach.

Ken­ney has not gone qui­et­ly, how­ev­er. In a recent mag­a­zine inter­view, he said: “Con­ser­vatism, there­fore, means pro­tect­ing what’s best about what we’ve inher­it­ed, not being opposed to thought­ful reform, but being opposed to rad­i­cal overnight change and the destruc­tion of insti­tu­tions. And some of what I see now, what I call ‘pop­ulism with a snarl,’ is not con­ser­vatism. It’s tear­ing things down and blow­ing things up, and that con­cerns me.”

The bot­tom line, Ken­ney added: “I think a con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty or gov­ern­ment focus­ing on recrim­i­na­tions over COVID, politi­ciz­ing sci­ence, enti­tling con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, cam­paign­ing with QAnon is a par­ty that can’t form gov­ern­ment and shouldn’t.”

Polls show the Alber­ta Sov­er­eign­ty Act to be unpop­u­lar even among vot­ers of a province that dis­likes Canada’s fed­er­al government.

Its dan­gers are obvi­ous, one province set­ting itself apart from the oth­er nine. Court bat­tles are cer­tain. Busi­ness invest­ment would be shroud­ed in uncer­tain­ty. The chaos might build sup­port for what has been a small but noisy move­ment favor­ing sep­a­ra­tion from Canada.

The UCP gov­ern­ment must call a provin­cial elec­tion by next spring. The New Democ­rats under for­mer Pre­mier Rachel Not­ley are poised for a come­back and can­not be dis­pleased that the most con­tro­ver­sial UCP can­di­date prevailed.

As well, Alber­ta is chang­ing. Its prin­ci­pal cities, Edmon­ton and Cal­gary, are becom­ing more pro­gres­sive and diverse, not just in pop­u­la­tion but in an econ­o­my no longer dri­ven entire­ly by oil. Envi­ron­men­tal resis­tance blocked an Aus­tralian magnate’s plan for coal min­ing in the front range of the Cana­di­an Rock­ies. “We will nev­er mine our moun­tains for coal,” Not­ley said in a recent tweet.

The New Democ­rats held onto Edmon­ton and Cal­gary rid­ings even while being vot­ed out of office in 2019. Long labeled left­ist, they may appear to rep­re­sent peace, order and good gov­ern­ment… giv­en Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty tur­moil and the incom­ing premier’s rad­i­cal views.