Danielle Smith's war on Alberta has only just begun

Just a few thousand votes in a handful of suburban Calgary ridings decided the last Alberta election. With the Alberta NDP now led by former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, you might think Premier Danielle Smith would be paying extremely close attention to the needs and interests of people living in those parts of the city. Instead, her UCP government just killed the LRT project that would have served them. 

Believe it or not, there is a method to this political madness. 

In its original formulation, the Green Line would have connected more than a dozen under-served communities in the southeast and the north to the city’s existing LRT network. After years of deliberate slow-walking by the UCP government and its local enablers — most of whom, it should be noted, are wealthy octogenarians who don’t actually use transit — and the pandemic’s impact on supply chains and costs, the city significantly scaled down the route. But the provincial money, at least, was there: in an interview with CBC Calgary on Aug. 1, Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors Devin Dreeshen confirmed the province’s $1.53 billion contribution. “I've been working closely with the mayor and Calgary city councillors so that they know that the commitment from the province for the Green Line [is] in place and that they can bank on it."

Well, so much for that. In a letter this week, he pulled funding, saying the project was turning into a “boondoggle,” and tried to blame it on former Mayor Nenshi, now Smith’s rival, who hasn’t been in that office for almost three years. It’s hard to imagine many people in the communities affected by this decision buying that argument, and it’s one Nenshi himself has already addressed. But the UCP seems more interested in testing how many times they can poke voters in the eye than actually helping improve their lives. 

Take their ongoing demolition of the province’s healthcare system, which includes breaking Alberta Health Services into four different organizations and handing over control of some hospitals to Catholic-run organizations. It seems designed to sow confusion and chaos, not to mention increased bureaucracy, duplication, and red tape that conservative governments claim to abhor. How that helps attract more doctors and nurses to this province is anyone’s guess, but it’s clearly not the UCP’s main concern. 

The Smith government’s decision to move ahead with costly plans to create a provincial police force flies in the face of public opinion, which shows that more than 80 per cent of Albertans support retaining the RCMP. Her ongoing threat to pull out of the Canada Pension Plan — one she’s yet to actually withdraw — might be even more unpopular, and that’s after months of town halls, government-funded advertising campaigns and other taxpayer-funded attempts to persuade Albertans. 

So why is a populist politician like Smith pursuing all of these unpopular policies and positions? Because she, better than anyone else in Alberta today, understands where the real threat lies for a conservative premier. As former conservative premiers like Ed Stelmach, Alison Redford, and Jason Kenney have learned the hard way, the call almost always comes from inside the house. 

That’s particularly true in the post-pandemic version of the United Conservative Party, whose membership and internal leadership are dominated by far-right activists like Take Back Alberta who seem far more interested in re-litigating old battles and settling scores than actually governing in everyone’s best interests. With a vote on her leadership being held at the UCP’s annual general meeting in early November, Smith has been effectively campaigning for their support for months now. Even if Smith survives the vote, as seems likely, she’ll still have to prioritize their preferences over the best interests of the province as a whole. There’s always another leadership vote lurking in the middle distance, after all. 

That’s why, unless and until Smith’s UCP is defeated at the polls, the needs of the few will always outweigh the needs of the many. The province will remain beholden to a small subset of mostly rural and deeply conservative UCP members, and its policy agenda will disproportionately reflect their hobbies and hatreds rather than the best interests of more than four million people. And if Danielle Smith has to break the healthcare system, kill necessary public transit projects and yank Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan to keep her own party members at bay, well, then that’s exactly what she’s going to do.