Danielle Smith isn’t trying to be a MAGA leader. She’s trying to be the Wildrose one she once was

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A superficial reading of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s policybook is that she’s simply following the blueprint laid out for her by her MAGA cousins down south. It indeed has many of the Republican highlights: enduring grievance politics, legislation on trans youth, a tinge of vaccine skepticism, and most recently, an initiative to effectively ban certain books from school libraries. On Thursday, Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced a new provincial standard to “ensure school library materials are age-appropriate and free of sexually explicit content.”

Each agenda item could be defended on its own merits; for example, if you actually look at the library material the United Conservative Party (UCP) cites as inappropriate for certain ages in public school libraries, including a graphic novel that shows scenes of oral sex that is available in K-9 and high schools in Calgary, one could make a reasonable case for intervention (though one could make a better case for the government staying out of it and letting schools and boards handle the issue).

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But taken together, the priorities Ms. Smith has zeroed in on as of late have that distinct MAGA smell that starts to waft around governments when populist policy meets deliberate distraction (better that Albertans talk about explicit materials in libraries than the Alberta Health Services scandal, right?) That’s why Ms. Smith’s critics have labelled her a MAGA wannabe: a low-rent version of the type of conservative politician who pursues easy social wins at the expense of serious public policy.

And that’s true to some extent. There was no major emergency that warranted swift provincial action on school policies on trans youth, but there was public polling that showed a majority of parents believe that they should be informed if their kids want to change their pronouns at school. There likewise wasn’t an epidemic of innocent school children suddenly poisoned by school materials that are no worse than anything they could find by a search on their phones, but there were a number of parents of school-age children (44 per cent) who responded to the government’s own survey who said they were supportive of the government setting standards for school library materials. Populist policy works.

But for Ms. Smith, it might be more complicated than that. As reported by the Local Journalism Initiative, two social conservative groups in the province – Parents for Choice in Education (PCE) and Action4Canada – took credit for bringing the issue to the government’s attention following Ms. Smith’s announcement about “ensuring age-appropriate groups in school libraries.” PCE said it had been working “for the past two years to expose this issue,” in concert with Action4Canada, which celebrated the announcement as a “major win.” In October, 2023, PCE called on the UCP to introduce “parental rights” legislation, which Ms. Smith did just a few months later. Action4Canada has long trumpeted conspiracy theories about vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines.

It is no secret in Alberta that Ms. Smith owes her rise in the UCP – which effectively was her political resuscitation – to these sorts of social conservatives. Her political career was all but dead when she crossed the floor as Wildrose Party leader in 2014 to join then-premier Jim Prentice and the Progressive Conservatives, who lost control of the government to the NDP in an election a few months later. That move was seen as a deep betrayal to Alberta’s social conservatives, who suddenly found themselves politically homeless, and Ms. Smith spent the next several years repairing that relationship, particularly through her radio show. On that show, she spent her time speaking to their concerns – on gay-straight alliances, on “woke” culture and on COVID-19 lockdowns – and slowly built up trust once again. And by the time Ms. Smith ran for the UCP leadership in 2022, social conservatives were firmly back in their corner. Those social conservatives include individuals like John Hilton-O’Brien, who was a founding member and past president of the Wildrose Party, and who now happens to be the executive director of PCE – one of the groups that pushed the government to act on explicit library materials.

Ms. Smith can’t betray those social conservatives now. And more importantly, Ms. Smith can’t betray them again. That’s why she’s pushing these MAGA-like issues, despite the splintering effect it might have on the party, and even as two former UCP – now independent – MLAs prepare to revive the Progressive Conservative party. It’s not that Ms. Smith wants to be the MAGA leader of the North; it’s that she wants to be the Wildrose leader she was in 2014. Social conservatives forgave her, supported her, and now, she owes them. A few library books and disgruntled progressive activists is a small price to pay, for now. But a significant fissure in the coalition party she now leads, should it come to that, would be far more costly.