Justin Trudeau and Danielle Smith shook hands yesterday. You could see the pain on Smith's face. Graham Thomson writes:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Tuesday’s video of Danielle Smith’s painfully awkward handshake with Prime Minister Trudeau is worth a novella.
Then again, given the soap-opera quality of Alberta politics these days, it’s really a telenovela.
Packed into the five-second video is years’ worth of Alberta conservative political theatre embellished with anger, cynicism, partisanship and hypocrisy.
When a smiling Trudeau offered Smith his hand, she looked so ill at ease you’d think he was offering her a dead fish. She responded in kind with a handshake so reluctant that Trudeau ended up pretty much holding her hand while the photo-op cameras clicked.
This is Alberta-Ottawa relations 2023.
For Smith and her supporters, Justin Trudeau is the boogeyman:
Smith won a United Conservative Party leadership race in which she pandered to angry Conservatives by, among other things, relentlessly demonizing the prime minister as being anti-oil, anti-pipeline and all-around anti-Alberta. As premier, she has said the Liberal government is not a true national government, and in December passed an Alberta Sovereignty Act aimed at thwarting federal laws Smith deems to be un-Albertan.
But Smith's rhetoric has put her between a rock and hard place:
The problem — call it a trap — for Smith is she has to get along with the federal government, particularly when it comes to getting money from Ottawa. This week’s long-anticipated first ministers conference on health-care funding is such a trap.
Ottawa is offering the provinces money — a whopping $196 billion over 10 years — if they agree to strings attached. Premiers say it’s less money than they hoped and need time to think it over. Smith won’t commit to accepting the money but at the same time can’t simply refuse it. And she can’t take too long to accept it, especially with a provincial election campaign on the way in May.
There’s historical precedent. In April 2021, then-Premier Jason Kenney undermined his dwindling popularity in Alberta’s major cities by attacking the federal $10-a-day child-care plan by dismissing it as a “cookie-cutter, nine-to-five, urban, government and union-run institutional daycare” plan. He dragged his heels on a bilateral deal but finally signed one in November of that year at a brittle news conference with Trudeau that almost matched this week’s Smith-Trudeau clumsy handshake for awkwardness.
Kenney had put himself in a politically vulnerable spot by courting angry anti-Trudeau supporters to win the UCP leadership in 2017 and the Alberta election in 2019. They rebelled against him during the pandemic when they accused him of cosying up to Trudeau after Kenney pleaded with the federal government for more COVID-related help. (Ottawa responded with more per-capita funding for Alberta than any other province.) Kenney’s reward from his angry rural Conservatives was getting booted out as UCP leader in 2022 and being replaced with the even angrier anti-Trudeau leader, Danielle Smith.
So Smith should both look and feel uncomfortable. Hers is not smart politics.
Image: The Toronto Star
