Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at a closing news conference of a meeting of western premiers in Kananaskis, Alta., on May 26.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Brian Topp is a former chief of staff to Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and former deputy chief of staff to Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow.
In 2021, Danielle Smith said in as many words that she didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be better for people to just pay their own doctor’s bills – her core argument for dismantling Canada’s public medicare system.
Three points about this.
First, it underlines how, in many ways, Ms. Smith is a stranger in her own country – a person at odds with the values of most Canadians and most Albertans. Debates there are about Canadian health care. But very few Canadians would explicitly say they believe in beggaring their neighbours as a core principle of the health system. In the developed world, only the United States does this.
Second, saying this would be a career-ending blunder for almost any other populist right-wing politician in Canada. Let’s imagine Pierre Poilievre smirking and saying (while mumbling around an apple and no doubt in some kind of nursery rhyme) that health care should be a survival of the fittest regime where every Canadian is on their own.
And third … she got away with it. She got away with it, and with many other similar views. And this is the big fact about Ms. Smith, who says she’s no separatist but is acting like one, that loyal Canadians from all parties need to think carefully about in the coming contest for our country she has forced for a contemptible reason we’ll get to in a minute.
Opinion: Danielle Smith is playing a dangerous game with her referendum question on secession
Ms. Smith – otherwise foolish (see Turkish children’s drugs), ignorant (see the belief that premiers have pardon powers just like U.S. governors) and incompetent (see the demolition job she visited on Alberta Health Services) – has this one unique superpower. She is a Michelangelo of cheerful, smiling, wide-eyed up-talking about nonsense. She is remarkably smooth and persuasive in the way, for example, that American politicians are remarkably smooth and persuasive when they say that school massacres are a time for thoughts and prayers. And so, in Alberta’s last election, Ms. Smith’s minority base of Americanized separatists liked what she was saying about health care. And a winning plurality of other Albertans basically concluded that she didn’t really mean what she said, because she is so friendly, relatable and reasonable sounding.
As governor of the Bank of England, Prime Minister Mark Carney watched the United Kingdom talk itself into the greatest act of economic self-harm in its history – separating from the European Union – on the smoothly delivered and credible-sounding lies and fantasies of populist right-wing politicians just like Ms. Smith. As Mr. Carney knows well, “project fear” wasn’t enough to talk a winning plurality of British voters out of what they’d been persuaded to believe – and that became clear at the ballot box.
So, simply telling Albertans that Ms. Smith is leading her province and the country to division and ruin isn’t going to cut it. And Ms. Smith isn’t going to be defeated by a few quips or a couple of speeches to business crowds on Bay Street and in Calgary.
Ms. Smith needs to be intellectually demolished, in the way Stéphane Dion intellectually demolished Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard in a series of notable letters following the 1995 Quebec referendum. Alberta’s premier needs to be demolished in the court of social media and on television, at scale and in volume, in the way René Lévesque was demolished by Richard Dicerni, the federal public servant who headed up Canada’s response to the PQ’s contorted 1980 referendum question – the same kind of “lobster trap” Ms. Smith is peddling now.
And Ms. Smith needs to be directly confronted and demolished by loyal Canadians who hold or held positions of trust in Alberta, just as former Quebec premier Jean Lesage did in Quebec in 1980.
Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney is doing this, to his immense credit. So is former Alberta Treasurer Jim Dinning, the best premier Alberta never had. Many more need to step up for their country. There is a role here for former prime ministers, such as Joe Clark and Stephen Harper. And there is a big role here for Canada’s current Prime Minister – an Albertan.
Another thing Mr. Carney knows is that you don’t win the hockey game if you don’t get on the ice.
Why is Ms. Smith doing this – leading an assault on her country that she didn’t breathe a word about while running for office? Contemptibly, she is doing this out of weakness and fear. Fear of her own cabinet colleagues, rural caucus and party members. In 2015, she was about to be run out of her job as leader of Alberta’s former Wildrose Party because she was too moderate in their eyes, and so she crossed the floor to join the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. She can’t run away from her own people this time (Mr. Kenney “united the right.” Happy?). So, she has decided to embrace them, while telling normal people in Alberta that she’s going to vote to keep the country united, provided the country accepts her terms.
In this she is trying to exercise her superpower once again. But here’s the thing. There are no issues in Canada, anywhere, that justify breaking it up. And the unity of the country is not another ridiculous populist meme to be fed to Ms. Smith’s supporters to placate them for another month. Our decentralized and tolerant federal system gave Ms. Smith the room she needed to waste her term running a wrecking ball through Alberta’s public services.
But not this.
One more thing. Ms. Smith’s referendum question reads as follows: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”
There is no such “legal process required under the Canadian Constitution,” which is silent on rules for separatists or their enablers, like the current Premier of Alberta. And there is no provision there for “a binding provincial referendum.” Even when it comes to the basic facts of its Constitution, Ms. Smith is a stranger in her country.