Popular opinion would have that summer is a quiet and boring time in politics, but not so in Alberta.
I can’t remember there was a boring political summer in Alberta?
Last year was the Best Summer Ever disaster and the summer before that was the first COVID summer. Before that was the Summer of Repeal. And so on.
This summer, the most unexpected political comeback might be happening before our eyes.
In almost every aspect, former Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith is defining what the United Conservative Party leadership race is about.
Following her “Alberta First” campaign slogan, Smith declared plans to introduce an Alberta Sovereignty Act to let Alberta MLAs vote on which federal laws they want the province to follow.
The other candidates responded.
Even Finance Minister Jason Nixon, a staunch Jason Kenney-loyalist, stepped in to pooh-pooh Smith’s idea (Nixon was nominated as Wildrose candidate back when Smith was still party leader).
Her campaign chair, Rob Anderson, is founder of the Free Alberta Strategy and was one of two Progressive Conservative MLAs to cross the floor to Smith’s Wildrose in 2010 (he later crossed the floor back to the PCs with Smith in 2014).
Smith declared Alberta will never ever have a lockdown again (we never *really* had a lockdown).
The other candidates responded.
She made wild statements about any cancer before Stage 4 is a result of poor personal choices.
Everyone responded.
Postmedia columnist Don Braid wrote that her “dabbles in quackery” are sometimes almost funny but “this one is dangerous.”
When Smith hosted a popular radio talk show she promoted hydroxychloroquine as a cure to COVID-19. She even touted ivermectin as a treatment. Now she wants to appoint chief medical officers of alternative medicine.
Quackery is putting it politely.
It’s the realm of internet pseudoscience.
As my friend David Climenhaga opined, it is the Donald Trump strategy of saying outrageous stuff that appeals to the base voters and damn the consequences.
And it might be working.
Smith has now nabbed 4 MLA endorsements.
Airdrie-Cochrane’s Peter Guthrie, Calgary-Falconridge’s Devinder Toor, Lethbridge-East’s Nathan Neudorf, and Lesser Slave Lake’s Pat Rehn, who dropped his endorsement of establishment favourite Travis Toews to support Smith.
But it’s not exactly the crème de la crème of the UCP Caucus.
Toor was fined $15,000 by Elections Alberta for breaking political finance laws in 2018 and 2019, and was allegedly part of group who bullied and harassed a food truck owner in northeast Calgary.
Rehn was briefly expelled from the UCP Caucus in 2021 after taking a hot holiday to Mexico while most Albertans respected the government’s own COVID-19 travel advice and stayed home, and local municipal leaders called on him to resign after spending more time in Texas than his own riding.
Kenney said Rehn would not be allowed to run for the UCP nomination in the next election but he was quietly allowed to rejoin the UCP Caucus last summer. But now Kenney is on his way out.
Some might say I’m playing into the Smith-comeback narrative by writing this article, but she’s the only candidate saying anything interesting – even if it’s quackery.
She’s drawing crowds and appears to be hitting the right notes with a motivated segment of the UCP base, which says a lot about who the membership of the UCP is today.
This isn’t your father’s Progressive Conservative Party, folks.
The other candidates in the UCP race better get their acts together, because the membership sales deadline is on August 12.
That’s just 16 days away.
The final 7
Smith might be getting the most attention but she’s not the only candidate in the race. Leela Aheer, Brian Jean, Todd Loewen, Rajan Sawhney, Rebecca Schulz and Travis Toews also made the cut. Bill Rock dropped out to endorse Jon Horsman, who dropped out, and, as expected, Raj Sherman was not allowed to run (his old job as Liberal Party leader is open though).
More separatist drama
If there’s one thing we can depend on Alberta’s cottage industry of fringe right-wing separatist parties to deliver, it’s drama.
It looks like Paul Hinman has been ousted as leader of the Wildrose Independence Party. The ouster comes shortly after the Independence Party of Alberta announced that merger talks with WIP broke off.
Hinman has been replaced by Jeevan Mangat, who ran for the Wildrose Party in Calgary-Fort in 2012 and 2015.
The WIP was created in 2020 through the merger of the Wexit group and the Freedom Conservative Party (which was previously known as the Alberta First Party, the Separation Party of Alberta and the Western Freedom Party). The party has struggled with fundraising and Hinman placed a distant third in the recent Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche by-election.
Before his time as WIP leader, Hinman served as a Wildrose MLA from 2004 to 2008 and 2009 to 2012, and as leader of the Wildrose Alliance Party immediately before Danielle Smith was chosen as leader in 2009.
Meanwhile, the IPA is still looking for a new leader. Past federal Liberal candidate Katherine Kowalchuk is the only candidate in the race, so far.
2 replies on “Danielle Smith is making sure Alberta doesn’t have a boring political summer”
Crazy is back! Although in fairness, it never really left. Smith sure does seem to resonate with some in the UCP, particularly rural areas where the previous Wildrose Party (the one that merged with the PC’s) did well.
Prior to her spectacular flame out before, she at least tried to seem reasonable. This time, it doesn’t seem she is bothering. Perhaps her tone and message is partly fueled by personal grievance (her political career did end badly before – that might make one a bit bitter), or she realized that trying to sound moderate and reasonable was not really an asset in leading a fairly right wing party.
However, what works for winning a party leadership if she is successful in that, which I have my doubts about as she is divisive and extreme, even by UCP standards, is only half the battle. As she should know well from before, the lake of fire type of extremism goes over well with the fairly right wing party crowd, but not with voters in general.
So there is a saying about winning the battle, but losing the war. I think some contemporary conservatives in their anger and bitterness have lost sight of that. You can’t easily pivot to sounding moderate in the general election if you run around the province for several months saying all sorts of silly things sounding like an extremist.
Only a complete fool would make statements like this about cancer. Danielle Smith has proven that leopards can’t change their spots, and that the more people expect things to change, the more they stay the same. Many of us know people who have had cancer. There are people that have gotten cancer, and they did absolutely nothing to cause it. It was beyond their control, as in the case of people, such as children. Danielle Smith is also foolish if she believes that naturopathic medicine is a cure for cancer. It isn’t. Clearly, Danielle Smith hasn’t learned from her past blunders in politics, and as a radio talk show host, and is carrying on this way. It’s going to ensure she is defeated as a politician, once again. Both Danielle Smith and Paul Hinman will be put aside, and they will have to do something else, outside of politics, and outside of working in the media, in the case of Danielle Smith.