Misinformed

Danielle Smith believes that the future is in oil. Max Fawcett writes that she is misinformed: 

Alberta’s UCP government may like to pretend it sees the world differently than Saudi Arabia but when it comes to their biggest industry, they speak the same language. Both have said the International Energy Agency’s predictions about the imminent arrival of peak oil demand are massively overblown and that consumption will remain strong for decades to come. That’s why the kingdom’s recent announcement to abandon plans to increase its maximum sustained production capacity should have gotten Danielle Smith’s attention. The explanation that Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman offered at a recent industry conference, meanwhile, should have stopped her cold.

“I think we postponed the investment simply because … we’re transitioning,” bin Salman said. “And transitioning means that even our oil company, which used to be an oil company, became a hydrocarbon company. Now it’s becoming an energy company.” They might not ring a bell at the top of a market, as the saying goes, but his statement is about as close as it’s going to get for fossil fuels.

So far, Smith has refused to reckon with this reality. In a world where global demand for oil is in the process of starting to roll over, she actually seems to think Alberta can double its production by 2050. As she told Tucker Carlson (during his brief stopover in Alberta en route to his date with Vladimir Putin in Moscow), “I think we should just double down and decide we’re going to double our oil and gas production because truly, where else does America want to get its oil from?”

And she's selling that idea to the Americans:

She tried to play this card again during her recent visit to the United States, where she met with some of the most notoriously retrograde Republican senators in an apparent attempt to drum up business for Alberta. “Serious question for America,” she posed on Twitter. “Would you rather get your energy from Iran and Venezuela or your friends in Canada?” Here’s one serious answer: America currently imports almost no oil from Venezuela and has only registered imports from Iran in six months over the last 32 years. There is, in other words, almost nothing for Canada to replace here.

This wasn’t the only aspect of America’s energy system she doesn’t seem to understand. In a video posted to social media, Smith suggests the United States is actually behind Canada when it comes to climate policy, and we should avoid getting too far ahead. “I know that there are often proposals for what decarbonizing might look like on a number of fronts,” she said, “but I’m not seeing that America is moving as quick as Canada. That’s one thing I’m hoping we can bring in sync.”

She's not the sharpest tool in the shed. But, like the guy to the South, ignorance does not slow her down.

Image: CBC

Will She Leave?

Rumors are circulating about Danielle Smith's future. David Cleminhaga writes:

There’s a whiff of smoke in the air, as if a cow has kicked over a lantern in a stable somewhere, and flames are just starting to spread.

On Saturday, the Breakdown, an Alberta political podcast, tweeted “Heard from multiple reliable sources today that the UCP caucus is a hair's breadth away from boiling over and prospective leaders to replace Smith are actively being discussed.”

The Breakdown’s thread continued: “Apparently caucus is split along rather predictable lines, and there are increasing concerns within the larger faction that Smith is more focused on the ‘Danielle Smith Show’ than she is actual governance or winning the next election.”

“This all comes at a time where the same groups that elevated Smith are becoming more frustrated with her constant equivocation on her promises to them,” the folks at the Breakdown said. “One source told us today that there is a very real possibility of a new leader before the next election.”

There are leaks in the UCP house:

On Sunday, former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk tweeted an intriguing fragment of a message he said was from a member of Smith’s cabinet.

“It would be easy to leave,” the purported minister lamented, with a certain lack of clarity. “To stay. Not so easy when I see something that has been said that is unacceptable from my new leader. Honestly. Is she going to lead this party in the next election? I don’t know. Do you? Won’t be me but who? A good opposition is as important as a good government.”

Lukaszuk commented that Smith “indeed has problems when her cabinet ministers exchange among themselves messages like this one.” Most of us would want to respond to the mystery minister: “So, resign already? Make a scene!”

Still, if this really was said by a member of Smith’s cabinet, it’s hard to disagree that it suggests the premier’s problems are growing.

Has she overplayed her hand?

Image: The Globe And Mail

The Alberta Sovereignty Act

Danielle Smith has unveiled her Alberta Sovereignty Act. It really is a piece of work. Jason Markusoff writes:

Premier Danielle Smith's much-awaited Alberta Sovereignty Act more or less delivers on what she promised it would do when she was United Conservative Party leadership candidate Smith a couple months back. It does, indeed, empower Smith's government to order provincial authorities to refuse to enforce any federal law or policy it believes harms Alberta.

In other words, it's similar to the incarnation of her big idea that several of her leadership rivals — including three current Smith cabinet ministers — warned was chaos-inducing, constitutionally problematic, and, in now-Finance Minister Travis Toews' words, "dangerous for the province." Since that now-bygone bit of intra-party tension, Smith has added to her bill the title words "within a United Canada," and a whole lot more.

As was clear before Toews swiped like that at his future boss, Smith's first bill wouldn't automatically nullify, squash or ignore federal laws in this province. It takes the legislature passing a special motion that opines about a specific Ottawa-related grievance, before the new extraordinary cabinet superpower detailed in the bill take effect.

However, the superpowers in the bill are indeed super. And Smith didn't announce several of them until now:

Section 4 of the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act gives the provincial cabinet the kinglike powers to amend legislation by circumventing the legislature, and all the debates and democratic trappings therein. Once the UCP-dominated legislature approves a resolution that beefs about — say, federal methane regulations for fertilizer — there's nothing in Smith's bill that constrains the secret law-rewriting powers of the premier and her lieutenants.

There's a second extraordinary thing this bill does. It severely limits Albertans' rights to challenge use of the act's superpowers in court.

She's talked about the bill as a "shield" against Ottawa. It also shields her government from its own concerned citizens.

Someone only has 30 days to challenge any decisions or deeds made under the Sovereignty Act. For normal laws, the time limit is six months.

Anybody trying to launch such a challenge also must meet an unusually high legal standard to knock it down. The act also immunizes anybody carrying out this act's provisions from civil liability — cabinet ministers and MLAs, too.

There is a tendency these days for politicians to declare themselves kings or queens.

Image: Jason Franson/The Canadian Press

Some Of The Inmates

Danielle Smith has fired Alberta's chief public health officer. Graham Smith writes that Canadians should pay attention to what Smith is doing:

If you can’t wait until the next movie in the Fast and Furious franchise, might I suggest you start watching Alberta politics.

Premier Danielle Smith is taking Albertans on a white-knuckle ride that, depending on your perspective, promises to be an exhilarating joyride to freedom or a maddened race into a brick wall.

Albertans should buckle up. So should the rest of Canada. Nobody will be a bystander to Smith’s erratic driving. Her tactics are aimed not just at her home province but could yet see the rest of the country involved in a pile-up involving the Constitution or health care.

Smith took aim at more people than Dr. Deena Henshaw:

On Thursday, Smith once again stomped on the gas, this time by dismissing the entire board of Alberta Health Services and replacing it with an official administrator.

“We need a health-care system that meets our growing demands and to take action to improve access and today we are doing just that,” said Smith in a comment bereft of any mention of the just-fired board.

Smith said she is simply trying to fix a broken health-care system. While it’s true Alberta’s health-care system needs improvement, Smith appears motivated as much by revenge as by reconstruction.

She won the recent United Conservative Party leadership race after promising to punish health officials who, in her expressed view, violated Albertans’ rights and freedoms by imposing mandates during successive waves of the COVID pandemic.

Smith pledged never to reimpose any pandemic-related mandates, even a mask mandate. In fact, she wants her justice minister to take steps to remove the power of school boards to impose their own mask mandates.

No province has reintroduced a mask mandate, despite a wave of respiratory illnesses, particularly among children, flooding emergency rooms across the country.

But no province has slammed the door on future mandates as deliberately and loudly as Premier Smith. While Ontario Premier Doug Ford has recommended people “wear a mask every time possible,” Smith will only say people can decide for themselves.

“I think it’s important that we not cause an overreaction or a state of panic,” she said this week, as schools reported massive rates of absenteeism due to illness.

Smith’s rhetoric has boxed not just her into a corner politically but every Albertan who sees a mandate not as a restriction but as a protection.

Clearly, some of the inmates have escaped from the asylum.

Image: The TorontoStar

The Fortress Of Crazy

Under its new premier, Alberta is fast becoming the Fortress Of Crazy. Kieran Leavitt reports that:

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she wants a “blanket amnesty” for residents charged with violating public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic and, in what one expert called a nod to conspiracy theories, to cut ties between the province’s health authority and the World Economic Forum.

Smith has spent much of her time in her new position as premier railing against decisions made during the pandemic, moves she was also a loud critic of as a radio host and UCP leadership contestant.

The new premier has already pledged never to lock down again, come under fire for suggesting unvaccinated people were the most discriminated-against group she’d ever seen, and promised to protect unvaccinated people under the Alberta Human Rights Act.

Smith’s latest step in ripping the provincial government away from its past record of health restrictions was delivered Friday during an internet livestream with the Western Standard just minutes after announcing her new cabinet picks.

“I believe that Alberta Health Services is the source of a lot of the problems that we’ve had,” she said.

Smith sees the World Economic Forum as the source of great evil:

“They signed some kind of partnership with the World Economic Forum right in the middle of the pandemic; we’ve gotta address that. Why in the world do we have anything to do with the World Economic Forum? That’s got to end.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what Smith was referring to, although Alberta Health Services was invited to join the WEF Global Coalition for Value in Healthcare in the summer of 2020, according to a news release from the time. The website for the coalition bills it as a global partnership where solutions can be explored for delivering better health outcomes and “innovative new approaches to person-centered health care.”

The World Economic Forum has been at the centre of conspiracy theories propelled through misinformation on the internet around a supposed “Great Reset” that would, the theories falsely assert, see global elites launch a coup to essentially take over world governments.

Lori Williams, a policy studies professor at Mount Royal University, said Smith took a day where she could have ushered in a new tone of stability after a series of headline-grabbing missteps and instead “shoots herself in the foot.”

“Rather than signalling continuity and competence, which I think her cabinet picks were meant to do, she has signalled an association with conspiracies again,” Williams said.

Smith has recently come under fire after independent journalist Justin Ling unearthed social media posts she’d made in the past dabbling in misinformation, some of which she’s already apologized for after making “ill-informed” comments about the war in Ukraine.

“She’s basically reminded anybody who might have forgotten or been willing to look in a different direction … of her inability to distinguish between credible, critically assessed information and conspiracy theories,” Williams said.

The American Disease has flourished in Alberta.

Image: The Toronto Star

Wooden-Headedness

Danielle Smith's first week on the job did not bode well for her future. Gary Mason writes:

At what point do Albertans begin to wonder – what just happened?

I’m referring to the new Premier, who has been foisted upon them by members of the United Conservative Party (largely from rural parts of the province) who thought Danielle Smith would make a perfectly fine head of government.

Maybe not so much.

As first days on the job go, Ms. Smith’s was pretty much a disaster. At a news conference on Tuesday, after her swearing-in ceremony, Jason Kenney’s successor was going on about one of her pet subjects: the terrible abuse and prejudice endured by the poor souls who chose not to get vaccinated during the pandemic.

She detailed the many things these saintly folks weren’t allowed to do over the past couple of years – enter hockey rinks, hop on planes, go to jobs, cross borders – and described them as having “been the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.”

You could hear jaws hitting the floor across the country.

How could someone who is supposed to be the leader of a population that includes Indigenous people, members of the LBGTQ community and immigrants from any number of countries – in other words, people who truly understand what discrimination is – compare the lived experiences of these groups with those who chose not to get vaccinated?

It was not just tone-deaf, but profoundly hurtful.

Lost in all the sound and fury was Smith's attempt to soften her Alberta Sovereignty Act:

The act, as she envisioned it during the leadership race, would empower her government to ignore federal edicts deemed not to be in Alberta’s best interests. These edicts, she indicated at the time, included rulings of the Supreme Court.

At her news conference, however, the new Premier said that the province would, in fact, adhere to all rulings of the Supreme Court.

This course reversal isn’t a complete surprise, as her proposed act has been universally panned and derided as unconstitutional folly tantamount to a separatist document (the criticism even came from people in her own party).

You have to wonder:

She quickly made it known, for instance, that Deena Hinshaw, the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, would not have her contract renewed. To be sure, Dr. Hinshaw is a sacrificial lamb, a gift to the anti-vaxxers who blamed her for the restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

But there will not be any “lockdowns” on Ms. Smith’s watch. She’s promised that. Even if, one is to presume, another wave of COVID-19 threatens to buckle the province’s hospital system, as it has several times over the past couple of years. Mr. Kenney’s downfall, in fact, was precipitated by his decision to end lockdowns in the summer of 2021 and declare the pandemic over, leading to an avalanche of new cases.

What is it they say about those who ignore history being doomed to repeat it?

The American historian Barbara Tuchman called it "wooden-headedness."

Image: The Globe And Mail