Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has made multiple attempts at challenging the norm in Canadian politics.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Every so often a Canadian politician comes along and decides he or she is ready to challenge the orthodoxy. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, who insisted that universal, publicly funded medical care was possible in Canada, despite strong opposition from health care providers, which culminated in a doctors’ strike.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was NDP MP Svend Robinson, who introduced a private member’s bill to legalize same-sex marriage years before it would actually become law (he was also the first openly gay MP). And roughly 10 years ago, it was then-Conservative leadership hopeful Maxime Bernier, who centred his candidacy on a pledge to scrap Canada’s supply management system for milk, eggs and poultry. Mr. Bernier lost the leadership because of it.
There are many more examples of efforts to cull sacred cows. Some were enormously successful in broadening the Overton window of acceptable opinion; Mr. Douglas’s notion of universal, publicly funded health care morphed from a radical idea to a defining feature central to the current Canadian identity. Others, such as Mr. Bernier’s attempt on the life of the supply management system, failed miserably, and in turn, served as a cautionary tale of what can happen if that sacred cow dodges the knife and survives: it rises like a phoenix – immortal, powerful – and one that no one else dares to touch.
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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s plan to introduce a new model for health care delivery in the province is an attempt on the holiest cow in contemporary Canadian society. Many will see it not simply as an attack on medicare, but an attack on Canadian identity: on the thing that makes us distinct from the Americans, on what three-quarters of us see as a great source of national pride. If she attempts to kill that cow and it survives (or, say, muddies up the process with perceived conflicts or waste, as this government seems to do on matters involving health care), there is a risk it emerges stronger, more resilient, virtually untouchable.
But this is not Ms. Smith’s first attempt at challenging convention. Indeed, she has long been a disruptor, starting back in 2009, when she left the governing Progressive Conservatives, whom she criticized as “conservative” only in name, to lead the Wildrose Party. She shook things up again five years later, when she crossed the floor as leader of the Wildrose to join the PCs – a decision she later acknowledged was “naive.”
But the disruption she has ushered in as Premier has been less about party politics, and more about ideas. She took Alberta separatism as a fringe idea and legitimized it with legislation lowering the threshold by which Albertans could trigger a referendum. She challenged the social and cultural orthodoxy on the best practices for care for children experiencing gender dysphoria by tabling legislation that, among other things, prohibits the use of hormone blockers for children under 16.
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When the prevailing mood among Canadians was to fight back against tariff threats from U.S. President Donald Trump with retaliatory tariffs and other blunt instruments, Ms. Smith tried to make the strategic case for a more co-operative, conciliatory approach (an approach that Prime Minister Mark Carney has since adopted after safely winning the election on an “elbows up” promise). And now she’s challenging the notion that the best way to deliver health care in Alberta – and by extension, in Canada – is by prohibiting doctors from working in parallel private and public streams.
It would be naive to presume that Ms. Smith is motivated purely by a public-good desire to broaden the scope of acceptable opinion, and to test new policies and ideas. For one, she owes her leadership to a cohort of right-wing activists and institutions in Alberta, for whom she is expected to make good on her promises of social and cultural reform. For another, she is challenging a national orthodoxy from within the soft confines of conservative Alberta, where she is somewhat insulated from the blowback that might occur in, say, B.C., if a Premier there was to float the idea of health care reform or restrictions on medical interventions for trans youth. This is also not to suggest that the ideas she has legitimized are good ones; requiring kids who play recreational sports to attest to their sex at birth is, arguably, needlessly divisive.
But there is something to be said for a politician that is willing to take conventional thinking and turn it on its head. One who will touch the third rail – on health care, on social issues, on an erratic U.S. President – and stand behind policy changes that pose some risk to his or her reputation. In doing so, he or she might broaden the scope of acceptable public opinion, and usually (usually!) that is a good thing. Danielle Smith is that disruptor.