UCP leadership candidate Danielle Smith’s been getting good crowds at her UCP leadership campaign events – the danger is she’ll draw other candidates into her dark, Trumpian tactics (Photo: Facebook/Danielle Smith).

The United Conservative Party leadership campaign took a dark Trumpian turn Monday when candidate Danielle Smith got a big cheer from her supporters at a rally in Airdrie for accusing Alberta Health Services of deliberately sabotaging the Kenney Government during the pandemic by falsely claiming the system was near collapse to bully MLAs into accepting vaccine mandates and passports.

Former Alberta Health Services CEO Verna Yiu, the victim of a defamatory suggestion by Ms. Smith (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

This is dangerous, paranoid stuff worthy of a Qanon meeting, but it seemed to work just fine for Ms. Smith – while flying almost completely under the radar of mainstream media. 

But she set out her conspiracy theory quite clearly in an audio recording of the rally provided to AlbertaPolitics.ca.

“Our health care system failed us,” she began. “I don’t think there’s any other way to describe it. And I think that we actually had an AHS, Alberta Health Services, that was either completely incompetent or they actively sabotaged our government.” 

“Because there’s no other way to describe, when the premier gave direct orders to increase surge capacity by eleven hundred ICU beds, by the time they got around to the Delta wave, they had to admit they hadn’t. Not only had they not increased ICU beds, but they’d actually decreased them, to 173.

“And that was used as a pretext to scare the heck out of all the MLAs, to go, ‘Oh my gosh, if you don’t do something and shut people down, bring in vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, that we are going to have the health care system collapse.’ (Emphasis added, both times.)

UCP leadership candidate Brian Jean (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

“Well,” Ms. Smith said, “my view is that all of the senior managers who showed themselves incapable of doing this work, they need to go and find another line of work!”

This was followed by what sounds on the recording like a huge roar of approval.

Ms. Smith must have liked that response so much she repeated her claim yesterday on broadcaster Ryan Jespersen’s podcast, tossing in a defamatory slap at former AHS president and CEO Verna Yiu.

When Mr. Jespersen asked if she really believed her claim the near collapse of the health care system during the pandemic was a deliberate ploy by AHS, she responded: “All I do know is that Dr. Verna Yiu was let go a year before her contract extension was up, so somebody’s come to the same conclusion that I have, that she just wasn’t up for the job.”

It will be interesting to see how Dr. Yiu responds. 

This is pure, undistilled Trumpism, heartlessly picking a victim to bully to justify unfounded, paranoid fantasies – and as we know from the ugly scenes in the United States throughout the Trump presidency, it stands a good chance of working pretty well for her. 

UCP leadership candidate Travis Toews (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

It’s pretty rich for a former broadcaster who spent months during the pandemic promoting quack remedies for COVID-19 to say stuff like this. One wonders how much that contributed to the chaos in the health care system as COVID cases spiked. It’s hard to believe Ms. Smith, an intelligent woman, actually believes this nonsense, but I suppose we can’t rule out any explanation for her behaviour – which seems likely to continue. 

The danger now, of course, is that other candidates in the UCP leadership race – seeing the traction she has gained through these tactics – will join in with inflammatory conspiracy theories of their own. 

Brian Jean and Travis Toews are already halfway aboard the vaccine denial bandwagon – or, as Ms. Smith charmingly puts it, “vaccine choice.” Why not go all in? 

So where is Danielle Smith going with this? 

“I’m going to need your help,” she told her followers in Airdrie, “because what we need to do very quickly in the fall is that we need a facility audit of all 100 health facilities in the province, so when AHS says, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s nothing we can do, we can’t expand surgical capacity,’ we’ll have local people on the ground saying, ‘No, that’s not the case.’”

Broadcaster and podcaster Ryan Jespersen (Photo: Facebook/Ryan Jespersen).

“There are whole wings of hospitals, whole floors, operating rooms that have been converted into storage spaces,” she claimed. “So, we need to get those back in action, so that when we get to the fall respiratory virus surge as we always do, every single year, we will not have Alberta Health Services saying this time there’s nothing we can do.”

As a remedy, she proposes a vaguely defined, completely un-costed health spending account scheme – which sounds a lot like a medical version of Ralph Klein’s 2005 prosperity bonuses. 

“I’ve been told by nurses that a lot of the pressure on our hospital system are that we have chronic conditions that have been allowed to deteriorate so far, to the point, so far that person has to be to hospitalized,” she said. So, “let’s give the people the money they need to take care of themselves. 

“All it would be is depositing in every Albertan’s account $300, and you can spend it on the health care that you need. Because when I look at all the different types of services we don’t cover, we don’t cover anything that’s going to keep you well, that will keep you from getting sick, and help you manage your conditions, whether it’s diabetes or obesity, or whether it’s a heart condition or COPD.

“There’s lots of people who are in the pro-, uh, in the vaccine-choice movement who would like to go to a naturopath or would like to go for acupuncture, or for chiropractic, or want to see a nutritionist, or want to see a counsellor.”

And that, she promised, would “take the power away from the bureaucracy that wants to be able to keep on with this model of just give us more money, and then every single year we just get worse and worse results.”

“So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna put the power back in the local community, and we’re gonna put the money back in your hands, so that you can hold everybody to account.”

“If it reduces money over here,” she blithely promised – again, without explanation or evidence – “then we’ll just feed back more money into your health spending account.” 

Ms. Smith does have an agenda, of course, and it’s radical privatization of public health care. 

She’s right about this much, though: Alberta does need to invest in more preventative medicine to reduce the burden of chronic disease. 

But giving every Albertan $300, presumably once, isn’t going to cure any chronic conditions or eliminate any surgical backlogs. Nor will running the health care system like a ride sharing service.

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65 Comments

  1. “It will be interesting to see how Dr. Yiu responds.” Dr. Yiu is an intelligent and principled individual. As such, I expect she will not respond at all.

    Ms. Smith is absolutely Trumpian. US Republican political strategist Rick Wilson wrote a book about Trump entitled “Everything Trump Touches Dies”.

    Let’s think about Ms. Smith – the Calgary Board of Education, the Alberta Property Rights Initiative, the Canadian Property Rights Research Institute, the Wildrose Party, the Prentice Government. Everything she touches dies. We can only hope there will not be much collateral damage when she kills the UCP.

  2. I happened on this amusing Twitter account, The Breakdown. It’s both a whistle-blower service and worthy of a chuckle or two.

    Right now, their favoured target is Danielle Smith and her regularly insane pronouncements, gaffes, and word salad complexities. While her serious policy positions are weird enough, it’s the things she’s likely to believe in that are worthy of guffaws.

    Some examples…

    It’s time that the views of Flat Earthers are respected and give equal prominence and scientific theory worthy of discussion.

    I can totally see this happening. And now that Smith wants Alberta to become a safe haven for unpopular opinions, how about a few of my own …

    Slavery was more than a useful agricultural labour project. It also assured African tribal peoples be given a safe place, where they would be cared for and encouraged to develop and promote their unique cultural identity.

    Because women are sensitive to the Moon cycles, as well as other physical forces of Nature, can they really be trusted with anything of importance? I mean, who really wants to put such a great responsibility as a vote in the hands of someone who can’t decide what to wear in the morning, let alone what weight they want to be? And don’t get started on ’emotional support animals’– your Terrier is not your child.

    There’s a very good reason why women earn less than men: they are completely insane (see above) and will only take their earned incomes and do something stupid with it, like buying an expensive emotional support animal.

    And finally, it is important to remember that in any marriage, anything goes, so long as the husband is happy. As for same-sex marriage, the genders have a natural inclination to be with their own, so people have to be forced to be straight. That’s how children are made.

    If any of the above appeals to Danielle Smith as policy options, he is encouraged to contact me. Oh, and I want the big bucks for my brilliance.

  3. Smith is unhinged, BUT, I did go to emerg during covid, and walked out after witnessing the staff COMPLETELY FAIL TO DELIVER BASIC CARE TO ANYONE. I said months ago that AHS is bloated and mismanaged. And theyre letting people die in their waiting rooms because of it. And try to blame the cons all you want, but they dont run every province, so….

    1. Dear “Smith might be onto . . .”
      Let’s apply a little basic logic to your assertion about AHS mismanagement: For the past 40 years governments of every type have cut back health care budgets, largely so they could lower corporate income taxes. Most of those cuts have never been reversed, and some of them, like not training new nurses and doctors, will take years to fix.

      So, you might be interested to learn that Alberta’s health care system has the lowest administrative cost of any system in Canada at around three and a half percent (3.6%). NB and PEI are close seconds with Ontario topping out at just under six percent. https://www.afl.org/alberta_s_health_care_administration_costs_lowest_in_canada

      To put it kindly, Ms. Smith is over-thinking the results of 40 years of budget cuts. Many of her followers do not accept the facts of evolution and are baffled by the evolution of the Corona virus and other pests. Ms. Smith is pandering to their bafflement, rather than lifting them up by providing factual information.

    2. “Letting people die in their waiting rooms…” this is like disrespecting the troops in the middle of a war. Do you think being a nurse or doctor gives someone a magic wand? It’s not health care workers causing those deaths, it’s billionaires and the politicians they own or coerce by holding our jobs for ransom. Oh and the rubes who are endlessly willing to be spoon fed their talking points. Where would we be without them?

      Had to walk away from this one on order to have anything more useful than swearing to add, and apologies in advance for the nastiness. Know nothing, vapid, entitled fartsniffers who have never thought about anything behind their next paycheque and/or boutique tax credit spent the whole pandemic reading about the health care system crumbling and would rather buy snake oil than deal with a complicated conversation or take responsibility for their choice to remain ignorant. Fwiw I don’t doubt you saw things in hospitals you wouldn’t normally – it was a pandemic! The rights of the people spreading covid mattered more than the rights of the people who didn’t want to get covid. That’s what went wrong. If you lit the entire goddamn city of Edmonton on fire then piss and moan because the fire department didn’t save your house I have no sympathy. I only wish that this disease ONLY preyed upon those who choose to believe easily falsifiable nonsense. Every one of you doorknob licking scavengers wearing your delinquency like it’s a badge of honor has an r value (you’ll learn what that means when you graduate to trying to deal with facts, please do this sooner than later because your actions have consequences and your neighbors aren’t going to endlessly clean up your messes). You know nobody is going to stop you from destroying your own society right? Which is absolutely crazy to me but here we are. Defiantly delusional gravel humping lackwits prepared to believe any dime store charlatan no matter how obviously sleazy or greasy is why the West is a tire fire!

      Fwiw there are a ton of job vacancies in health care. For some reason. Can’t imagine why. Maybe send a resume in? The adults are overwhelmed and need help. Either that or they’re all just lazy and they cause deaths because they like to, in which case you can expose them!

      1. Neil: my first response was similar to yours. “Doorknobs frustrated by reality” is the kindest characterization. Their vile leadership is happy to pander to them. And of course, big business is more than happy to finance that Con leadership. Leadership that over 40 years has allowed the oil and gas industry to loot Alberta while polluting the landscape while the world moves on. For example, Panasonic is building a US$4 billion battery factory in Kansas. However, the mask is slipping in some circles:

        https://youtu.be/hXMZ_CoUU14

    3. Short Staffed, Short of Resources, Short of money and political support. Do you actually believe our over worked health care providers are consciously and deliberately failing to provide.? And letting people die on purpose! Disgraceful view. The problem seems lie not in money but in political wrangling about whose jurisdiction. Our Premiers and Health  Ministers should care about we citizens not some ideology . Our health care providers are simply worn out.

  4. Danielle has one thing right in all of this; the levels of incompetence in the public services of Alberta is astonishingly, mind-bogglingly high and prevalent. Corresponding levels of competence are extremely rare and are frowned on, even actively scorned, by the vast majority of public service workers and management. This is the single greatest characteristic of the GOA workforce.

    This circumstance has been supported by conservatives since the Klien times; all that has ever been important to the gov’t and for success in one’s career in this workplace is Loyalty. Period!
    At this point in time we have 3 generations of people in the service who understand that career survival is all about saying, “Yes Sir, Yes Ma’am” and not uttering a single word of concern, of criticism, of change. Whatever hare-brained idea rolled out by the ideological nutjobs at the top is what every one works on. Period!
    Ready! FIRE! Aim – as they say in these here parts.

    Little wonder why a grasping, self-serving politician would choose this path. It’s what most folks know and understand. To try any other more rational method is more difficult and prone to failure in this jurisdiction

  5. Ms. Smith announces that each Albertan gets $300 “and you can spend it on the health care that you need.” Hopefully her plan for personal good health would include coffee enemas, which according to Wikipedia is “the injection of coffee into the rectum and colon via the anus.” A fancy clinic advertises $150 per session.
    However, for $54.39 walmart.com has a money saving special. “Non-toxic Silicone Enema Bag Kit for at Home Water Coffee Colon Cleansing.”
    Does not include the coffee.

  6. Of course, another better explanation could be that it was the UCP politicians who failed to manage the COVID pandemic well, not AHS. It is very Trumpian to try shift the blame and perhaps also politically appealing for some UCP supporters to try rewrite this history.

    Giving everyone $300 to spend on their own health care is the kind of kooky thing that on the surface sounds nice, but the flaw is obvious when you think about it even for a moment. People with chronic conditions may need much more and others young or in good health, much less.

    I hope the people who Smith is trying to rile up to gain their support don’t completely give up critical thinking like this, so they will see how kooky she is. While I don’t so much care if she destroys another party (she has a quite a history of leaving damage in her wake), I don’t want her to have a chance to do the same to our province.

  7. Jason Kenney certainly did not require any assistance from AHS to end his career as Premier. He did it all by himself.

    The cheering at her Airdrie speaks as much about the people in the audience as it does about her IMHO. I find it incredible that some people can accept that twaddle as factual, let alone cheer her on.

    This is a huge problem for the UCP. At least the clear thinkers and the movers and shakers. I have no doubt that there will eventually be a split in the UCP. Ms Smith could well be the catalyst to hasten that split.

  8. If a person is going to ride the krazee-train, surely they can come up with more than $300 to bribe voters with their own money. I mean, Ralphbucks were $400. Can we call her the Hydroxychloro-Queen now?

      1. Just checked. Wow, a very nice deposit from the Federal gov’t on the Carbon Tax Rebate! Thanks and keep up the good work! Take that Danielle Smith and your airy fairy nonsense! 🙂

  9. There’s so much that’s wrong with her ranting about the state of health care, it’s hard to know where to begin. But here are a few comments:
    – those empty units in AHS facilities are now storage space because of years of funding cuts & lack of staff. You can stick a bunch of hospital beds in there, but with no staff to provide the care their occupants need, it won’t help anyone.
    – she says, “lots of people … who would like to go to a naturopath or would like to go for acupuncture, or for chiropractic, or want to see a nutritionist, or want to see a counsellor”. So, part of the issue here is the lack of evidence that any of these “services” have any proven benefit at all. Many are pseudoscientific woo without any evidence of safety or efficacy. Why would we publicly fund fake care? We don’t even fully fund some legitimate, evidence-based services in the community — services like physiotherapy in private clinics (AHS PT is covered, but they limit what outpatient services they provide), CPAP for sleep-disordered breathing, and mental health care from Registered Clinical Psychologists outside of AHS Addictions & Mental Health clinics.

    I wonder what well-known pseudoscience debunkers like Prof. Timothy Caulfield https://www.ualberta.ca/law/faculty-and-research/health-law-institute/people/timothycaulfield.html or Dr. Jonathan Stea https://psyc.ucalgary.ca/profiles/jonathan-n-stea would say about this proposal from Ms Smith … ?

    Have a look at this website to learn more about pseudoscience in health care as it applies to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
    https://www.scienceupfirst.com/

    1. I think we should be cautious about labelling all forms of alternative healthcare as “pseudo-science.” I worry that those who swear by these alternative services that they can barely afford become allies to the right wing when there are calls for the regular allopathic services to be somewhat cut. Certainly in BC, since 2008, there has been funding for acupuncturists, chiropractors, and naturopaths for low-income citizens. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-acupuncture-coverage-begins-april-1-1.286019#:~:text=British%20Columbia%20will%20be%20the,health%20minister%20announced%20on%20Sunday. In an underfunded system, there may be little room for opening up to these alternative forms of medicine.

      1. There is a reasonable discussion to be had here. “Pdeudoscience” basically means “non falsifiable fields of study. ” So for instance, Einstein used his theory of relativity to predict an eclipse that was otherwise unpredictable, and if the eclipse hadn’t happened, it would have disproven his theory. That standard of proof is often unavailable in medicine, so it’s not really fair to use it in this context.

        That said, evidence can and should be required that something actually helps people before the taxpayer buys it. I think people should not be able to claim something is medicine if there isn’t evidence that it works. Nelliberalists believe that an individual has a right to effectively commit suicide by treating their cancer with nonsense, the idea is that “freedom” is the highest good and this transaction was freely entered into. The thing is, our lives are not just our own. Each of us represents a large investment in time and care by our families, communities, and countries, and all of these people and groups are harmed when we are murdered. I think we all have an interest in keeping one another safe from blatant predation. If I convince you orange juice will cure your cancer so you don’t get it treated and it kills you, I have murdered you. If the state is taxing my profits from selling you that orange juice it is accepting blood money. This should not be legal imo.

        For me, using public dollars to support people who claim, without evidence, to be able to heal people enables grifters and diverts desperately needed resources away from health care and towards snake oil salesmen.

      2. Once these alternative medicines can provide some evidence for their effectiveness, They stop being “alternative” and just become “medicine”. Then we can start asking about under what circumstances standards of care should be revised. That requires even more evidence.

        Until such time, these alternatives arequackery, at best little more that homeopathy.

      3. Mr Finkel: with respect, I use the term “pseudoscience” advisedly, as a Master’s-educated Registered Nurse with over 35 years of professional practice, & seven cumulative years on the governing Council of my professional regulatory College.

        Most of these so-called “complementary & alternative therapies” have never been tested to the gold standard of clinical efficacy: the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Those that are, tend to be found wanting for any evidence of efficacy.

        For example, Dr Stea, cited in my original comment, posted an article on Twitter from a 1979 issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which a nine-year-old girl, in a science fair project, debunked one of the central tenets of so-called “therapeutic touch” (TT) and by extension, its other so-called “energy-based therapies” like Reiki. Practitioners of TT claim there is “a ‘human energy field’ (HEF) perceptible above the patient’s skin”. The young lady did a randomized trial of 21 TT practitioners to see if they could accurately detect the proximity of the investigator’s hand,and found the results were completely consistent with random chance rather than some verifiable ability. If a “therapy” can be falsified by a grade school student, then it falls squarely into the category of pseudoscience.

        https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/187390

  10. ….and then there is Theo Fleury, the guest speaker at her Thursday rally, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire!

    1. Worse, there must be something in the air (diesel fumes?) that makes people vote for them.

  11. Yesterday someone who appears to be rightwing tweeted a video of some convoy trucks going to the Smith-Fleury rally.
    https://twitter.com/KirkLubimov/status/1547735845611835397

    It makes me wonder if the flutruxklan are travelling to various Smith rallies to pump up the numbers; if they have voting memberships in the UCP; and how many are actually able to vote in an Alberta election.

    I have no answers, just questions. Maybe they just went for Fleury. Maybe she’ll bring in James Topp or Jordan Peterson next.

    1. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Jordan at some point, his circle of influence isn’t exactly growing, and he’s from Alberta.

  12. What others don’t spend on health accounts ,the lurkers will ,aka thieves of the vulnerable

  13. Danielle Smith wants to do what her longtime hero, Ralph Klein, was aiming for. That is to have full on private for profit healthcare in Alberta. These pretend conservatives and Reformers will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. They will make any excuses they can to justify doing it.

  14. I have no doubt that some of my spouse’s relatives in Airdrie will lap all that nonsense up like mother’s milk. The more craziness, the more conspiracy theories that are presented …… the more they believe and the less common sense they exhibit. DW said it would not surprise her if a few of them were seated in the front row of that cheering audience.

    Is there something in the water in that part of Alberta?

    My only hope is that it is not contagious.

  15. In true Reform Party fashion it’s always someone else’s fault. Smith has learned it well. This is the same Danielle Smith who found it smart to praise Ralph Klein for creating the horrific mess in our health care system by closing hospitals, closing 1,500 hospital beds, and cutting 5,000 nursing positions and now she wants to blame the health care system. How stupid does she think we are ? Trouble she knows, people are listening to her. Of course she isn’t smart enough to realize that we have never fully recovered what Klein did to us and isn’t smart enough to understand that you can’t do all these wonderful things she proposes with out staff like the 14,783 we lost under Klein. You can bet her next step will be to tell theses ignorant seniors that she can fix it with privatization. It’s nice that she has found enough fools in Airdre to try to trick, isn’t it? Let’s hope she stays there.
    I had a letter in the Lethbridge Herald yesterday if anyone is interested in what I said about these fake conservatives. Lawyers have told me for years any stupid senior who thinks they would be better off if we separated from Canada is an idiot. Putting yourself in a position to lose your old age security payments, Canada pension plan payments, and public health care benefits is just plain stupid. Most seniors couldn’t survive without them and putting your children in financial ruin is not an option.

  16. The only thing I don’t understand about Trash Can Dani is our beloved blogger’s claim that she is in fact, *highly* intelligent. I’m sure DJC has at least met the woman, and I have not, but her reputation sure does proceed her. It would be misogynistic to suggest she’s made it this far on her looks, but conservatives sure do seem to love a moderately attractive woman telling them what they want to hear, don’t they?

    1. Bird: I have met Ms. Smith and I can prove it. It is my belief that she is highly intelligent. That said, I do not believe she uses her intelligence to do good. DJC

      1. Sorry David,

        I think your assessment relies on what your definition of what intelligence is.

        Engaging in divisive and hate-filled rhetoric that creates mischief, suffering, and animosity is NOT what intelligent people do.

        Thinking, speaking and doing good takes less effort and less time in the long run. It is a more efficient way to get what you want. Intelligent people know that.

        Helping others is the supreme way to help ourselves.

  17. I had this crazy idea once: save money by learning how to do my own brain surgery. But that thee-hundred bucks Smith promises to provide—in the remoteness of her election to a position of power which the UCP leadership might well not be—would hardly buy me gas to go look for a residence nearest the local DIY brain-surgery franchise.

    Believe me, I know all about government rigging it so you can’t “help yourself” without a bit of implicating assistance from a malicious authority. Me, I went to a chiropractor well over ten times more than the public medical system was willing to pay for. In fact, it was my boss who paid for it, concerned that, since I was bundled onto the plane from camp where I was injured under his employ, I would file a workers’ compensation claim that would seriously dent his payroll burden —forest workers already being the second-highest risk-group next to firemen, fishermen, and astronauts, injury claims adding significantly to compensation-plan premiums the employer has to pay in whole.

    But, as my condition worsened, I was forced to see a doctor—y’know, one a them universal-public-healthcare doctors. Well, she gave me this great big spiel about spinal stenosis and half-obliterated discs, and had the temerity to order me to stop seeing my chiropractor immediately else, she said, I do worse damage to my spine. Never enough doctors when you want one, and when you do find one, they’re no help at all!

    Now, me n the boss did agree that neither of us really like anybody telling us what and what not to do, and he generously supported my bid to be free of the officious depredations of the Workers’ Compensation Board—which was fine, so long’s the supposedly detrimental chiropractic treatments were paid for by him, not me because, in my struggle for rights and freedoms, serious depletion of my annual earnings seemed inevitable and, as a result, I’d be forced to resort to the officious, but free, bad-news public healthcare system. It’s like a trap. We are not free anymore.

    See, that’s how they do it: they get you into a position where you can’t make up your own mind to help yourself decide whether the chiropractor’s insistence that he could, say, restore my shorter leg to its proper length (we used to sing this little reel: the leg-bone’s connected to the hip-bone, and the hip bone’s connected to the pelvic-bone, and the pelvic-bone’s connected to the sacroiliac joint, and the sacroiliac joint’s connected to the vertebrae-bones, and so on, and so on until the next appointment) or whether the gov’mint’s doctor tellin’ me straight they ain’t no cure for what I got. What kinda freedom is that?!

    Way I see it, Danielle Smith—she all about choice.

    I get a headache just thinking about the public healthcare system conspiring to make us more unhealthy. Now pass me my cordless drill—I got instructions offa this here trepanning site, right here online , Danielle “DIY” Smith approved, I shouldn’t wonder…

  18. Picture this. Eleven hundred ICU beds fully staffed by “alternative” health practitioners dispensing quack cures. Welcome to Danielle’s World.

  19. Anonymous She certainly loved what Klein did to us. His father Phil and daughter Angie not so much. She is the queen of privatization. Wanting to privatize our education system got her fired as a Calgary school board trustee . Graham Thomson’s column in the Toronto Star brought some really good comments in the blog. Most people have Smith figured out. Which was great to see. The fact that she is leading the pack proves that many Albertans aren’t that smart.

    1. Alan K. Spiller: That’s correct. There is a proverb about dogs returning to their own vomit, and fools returning to their own folly. In Alberta, we see many fools returning to their own folly. Peter Lougheed definitely wasn’t impressed with Danielle Smith, or even the Wildrose, for that matter. Peter Lougheed definitely wasn’t very impressed with Ralph Klein. Danielle Smith seems to channel Ralph Klein, in many ways. Ralph Klein’s bad policies were a detriment to Alberta. Danielle Smith’s bad policies will also be a detriment to Alberta. If Pierre Poliveire gets into power, that will also make things worse. If Peter Lougheed were still alive, I don’t think he’d be impressed with these pretend conservatives and Reformers. He hated Reformers, because they were very much like the Social Credit Party that he so much despised.

  20. Considering Danielle Smith was addressing her flock in Airdrie, it’s no surprise that she actually found people willing to listen to her demented notions about everything.

    What can one say about places like Airdrie, Cochrane, Viking, and hosts of these other Rurban communities in Alberta? They like to governed by the crazies. Of course, many of them believe Donald J. Trump was not only a real billionaire (Hillary Clinton likely is wealthier than Trump) but that he really is a stable genius. They also believe that the pandemic is not real, Jesus saves, and PMJT really is Fidel Castro’s son. They also very likely believe that Ezra Levant is a real lawyer, which gives a sense of how far gone they all are.

    1. Just Me Your remarks reminded me of what an American cousin told me when COVID was killing so many people in the U. S. A governor was telling his flock not to bother to get vaccinated they had nothing to worry about God would save them. Even though they were experiencing the highest number of death per capita of any of the states. That is how stupid these fools are.

      1. And if they were a Covid fatality, it was because they didn’t have enough faith. It’s always about blaming the victim, of course.

  21. Hey David, I have a question about Danielle Smith.

    Lots of articles have come out recently stating that she can become the next premier if she wins the leadership race. However, wouldn’t she just be party leader until she is actually elected to the legislature? Sure this wouldn’t be a huge uphill slog to get elected because some UCP backbencher will probably be paid to vacate their seat so she can run in a safe riding, but it’s certainly not guaranteed that she would win (especially if she tries to run in Calgary while being completely insane, it’s not like there would be a lot of time for her to pivot from the extreme rhetoric of the leadership race to something that will appeal to voters who at least partially live in reality).

    It would take some amount of time for an MLA to quit and for there to be a byelection, so she wouldn’t become premiere automatically. So what would happen in the interim? Would Kenney stay on as premier until Smith actually gets elected to the legislature? It would be interesting to see what Kenney would do in this time to “keep the lunatics from running the asylum.”

    1. Tyler:

      The process of appointing g a first minister in the Westminster Parliamentary system assumes that she will have a seat in the Legislature. However, it is not strictly necessary that the premier or prime minister hold a seat in the Legislature at the time she is chosen. Neither W.L. Mackenzie King nor John Turner were members of the House of Commons when they were chosen party leader. Nevertheless, both became prime minister immediately and led their party from the hallways of Parliament until they won seats in the next election, which both of them did. It is reasonable to assume the same process would be observed in Alberta if a UCP leadership candidate without a seat in the Legislature were to be chosen by party members. Parliamentary tradition says such a PM or premier must win a seat within a reasonable period of time, reasonable not being defined anywhere in the constitution, after which Parliamentary convention would require that she resign and another leader/premier be chosen. In the mean time, the House Leader would manage the government’s affairs from the floor of the Legislature. So that’s the short answer to your question.

      This raises another question I’ve often wondered about: What happens if the new leader defies Parliamentary convention and attempts to stay on longer than a reasonable period of time without a seat in the Legislature? What would be the procedure for dealing with such a situation? In the event there were insufficient votes in the Legislature to bring down the government, someone, presumably, would have to take the matter to the courts – the very courts Ms. Smith has promised, if elected premier, to ignore and defy. And what is the enforcement mechanism in the event the courts rule against her? Certainly there would be a constitutional crisis. But it’s hard for me to imagine how it would be resolved.

      Democracy, regardless of the form it takes, hangs by a rather thin thread, that we all agree to abide by the rules of the constitution and, in the absence of one, the principles of democratic governance. As we have seen in the great democracy to the south, the right wing in North America, realizing that demographic change and the economic and environmental crises facing the planet mean its chances of gaining power in an honest election are steadily diminishing, is growing disillusioned with democratic rule. Canada and Alberta are not immune to this condition.

      DJC

      1. David, I think this little sidebar has the makings of your next column, namely the nuts and bolts logistics of the months between a Danielle Smith leadership victory and the general election next May.

        I have this vague impression that byelections do not have to be called within 6 months of a general election, so any non-MLA selected as leader will be in a tight squeeze, time-wise, to get a byelection called.

        A second thing of interest will be the response of the sitting MLAs. Comments made earlier in this column, and the links they have provided, make it clear the party’s brain trust are concerned about how Danielle Smith could take the party down Nutbar Road, and lose the next election as a result. Given that, it isn’t hard to imagine MLAs not really welcoming Ms. Smith to the fold.

        Who would Ms. Smith ask to step aside for her byelection, a loyal follower or a moderate? If the latter, it is too bad we will never know how many moderates refused her request.

        What will Premier Smith do about a cabinet? In spite of the contempt I feel for most of our current cabinet, I expect they are (barely) sane enough not to drink Ms. Smith’s cool aid. Does Smith rebuild her entire cabinet with Covid denying backbenchers, or retain cabinet ministers who do not support her?

        Danielle Smith has apparently also said she is willing to reopen nomination races where it is felt the UCP executive disqualified candidates primarily on the grounds that they had views similar to Ms. Smith. It will be interesting to see how many of those reopened nominations go to a different candidate. It will also be interesting to see how many current MLAs, even those that have already been nominated for 2023, choose not to run.

        Just Me, if you are interested in hosting a popcorn party, I’m in.

        1. Bob: These are all good points. It’s a little early, though, to be forecasting a Danielle Smith victory, IMO. She and Rob Anderson are certainly a dangerous pair – a deep well of bad ideas – when they work together. As David Harrigan pointed out in a comment the other day, she destroys everything she touches – a dangerous form of reverse Midas touch. I imagine there will be some work behind the UCP scenes to identify and agree upon a saner candidate who can defeat her. Or maybe not. If she becomes premier, even for a short time, she will do a lot of damage. DJC

      2. Mr. Climenhaga, yes that would trigger a constitutional crisis. I believe the Lt. Governor would have cause to exercise her authority at that point.
        And if the Lt Governor did not, the Governor General could, if I remember my poli Sci courses correctly.
        The pertinent question would be what is the reasonable length of time?

        1. I’m not aware that the ‘General’ in ‘Governor General’ has rank over a Lieutenant Governor — nor, for that matter, would any governor’s uninvited entanglement in the hypothetical situation proposed necessarily be a “constitutional crisis.”

          Every time something like that happened, nothing much changed —not in which party a governor would prefer to recognize (the basic problem in these so-called “crises”), nor in precedent-set protocol about how to find a resolution. Not in Ottawa in 1925, BC in 1952, or Ottawa in 2006: in all these cases, things returned to norbal in spite of the perceived inappropriatenesses of the players’ temporary impasses.

          Besides, there’s nothing all that unusual about a parliamentary caucus being led from a non-seated person, Alberta, for example, having been led by the former US presidunce—who doesn’t even hold THAT office anymore—ever since his UCP won power for him there in 2019.

          What’s more important than the public’s opprobrium about remote leadership is the parliamentary caucus’, as tRump’s UCP’s House Leader Jason Kenney has found out. Nothing has changed yet, but things will undoubtedly get back to norbal, somehow, eventually.

  22. Nurses work a lot of mandatory overtime and have been for years. People who do that tend to have savings, because they don’t have any leisure time to use to spend money. Many nurses can afford to quit and go do something else, or go do the same thing in a less incompetently governed province. Commentary such as that voiced by Ms. Smith is harmful to the health care system. Everyone who, thinking themselves to not matter, voices approval for her irresponsible and socially destructive blathering, is making their own health care worse.

    This is well past normal partisan bickering. Albertans have asked far more of their health care providers than they have ever asked themselves. Now they will ask more still. Shameful, harmful idiocy of the first order.

  23. Smith’s notion that giving people vouchers for health services and for education is reactionary garbage. The point about health services and education is that they are meant to target need, not flatten what each member of the population receives. And social determinants need to be front and centre. Services need to be targeted in such a way that those who are the victims of capitalist inequalities, of racism, of sexism, of homophobia, of ableism, etc. get the services that a compassionate society should provide. Giving me $300 that I don’t need to spend as I wish on healthcare is much like giving me Klein bucks. I don’t need them. But I know plenty of people for whom thousands need to be spent so that they can enjoy healthier lives. Pretending that we all start from the same spot and it’s all about “personal responsibility” is the conservative mantra that Smith pushes, and it is dangerous nonsense.

  24. $300?? How very generous. I might be able to buy a Dr Ho made in communist China TENS device and a quick round at the Asian happy rockets massage parlour. But, I should remind Ms. Smith real Medical treatment costs, and the Rexall play doctor bags aren’t it.

    At any rate, I must remind readers that the Lougheed government had extra billing at $10 per Dr. appointment. So the more things change . . . And yes Smith is living in la la land. Too sad.

  25. And cutting ICU beds had nothing to do with the cuts that the UCP gave to AHS?

    Ok then …

  26. There is a world of difference between what these candidates say during he leadership race and what the successful leadership candidate will say or promise during the next election. The audience is different.

    And there is a world of difference between what the UCP Leader says during the election and what he or she says or does post election.

    Politicians, in my experience, deal in nuances, half truths, deception, misinformation, and outright lies. I doubt whether any of the UCP leadership candidates are any different than the norm.

    They all have one over riding objective. To get elected.

  27. While our faithful blogger has made much of his belief that Danielle Smith is “highly intelligent” I tend to wonder if that fact is all is cracked up to be.

    One can go through the entire litany of supposedly highly intelligent individuals, all capable of functioning well in whatever sphere of endeavour they were accomplished in, only to find that more than a few were out-to-lunch, without-all-their-oars-in-the-water, a few-bricks-shy-of-a-load, and absolutely batshite crazy.

    Albert Einstein, as brilliant as he was, had eccentricities that would have surely caused him to be considered certifiable. While Bill Clinton is regarded as a skilled policy-maker and leader, he also couldn’t keep it in his pants, to his own detriment. Christopher Hitchens, a man with a brilliantly sharp mind and an incisive wit that skewered many an opponent, was a functioning alcoholic and prone to fits of anger and callous behaviour that could be called sadistic.

    In a nutshell, the problem with the highly intelligent is that they are loonies, who through hubris — the unfailing belief in their own state of perfection — will already believe or do something that is contrary to the common good. In other word, Smith as premier would be dangerous because she believes she can do nothing wrong, her actions are always correct, and if disaster follows, it’s only because everyone else is at fault.

    As for Danielle Smith, her high intelligence is not a laudable trait — it’s a warning.

  28. Wow. DS policies are Trumpism! Inflammatory rhetoric.

    Re that rhetoric from Toews, Kenney and others like DAVID J. CLIMENHAGA regarding the Alberta Sovereignty Act:

    The federal government’s landlocking of Alberta’s resources has caused market chaos for the last 20 years; resulting in companies not investing in new projects or expanding existing oil/gas projects. The ASA would push back against Ottawa’s anti-energy policies and help to restore investor confidence, not the other way around.

    To think one can negotiate with Ottawa is nonsensical. Various leaders have been trying to negotiate for 40 years. What have they achieved? Nothing, in fact we have gone backwards. We need backbone and action, no more talk. Passing the ASA is the first step.

    The Alberta Sovereignty Act follows the lead of Quebec, which aggressively protects its rights of provincial sovereignty within Canada. Why shouldn’t Alberta be allowed to defend its provincial sovereignty in the same manner? Passing the ASA gives us the mandate to operate no different than what Quebec already does.

    Alberta’s health system is inefficient as shown by a comprehensive comparison to other countries. Doing an audit is justified.

    The statement: ‘Ms. Smith does have an agenda, of course, and it’s radical privatization of public health care”

    This is absolute unsubstantiated rhetoric.

  29. It is not entirely accurate to equate Smith with Trump, makes for good click bait and may scare the already scared but on closer inspection falls flat. The path Smith is following is that of the Florida governor, with a little bit of Missouri mixed in. You have to remember that the vaccines that are still being used were the product of the Trump administration’s operation warp speed. You might say it’s very Trumpian to push these products, people seem to have a short memory these days unfortunately.
    Given the results in Florida compared to say New York state or California when looking at all costs from the pandemic this may be a good strategy for Smith to push. The Missouri reference is to the law there that fines state officers when enforcing a federal law the state doesn’t agree with. Smith’s provincial police force would allow her to do something similar here.
    Like I have said before it is an interesting strategy, I personally don’t agree with the path Smith wants the province to take. Medical choice is a good thing that most will agree with, but ignoring federal laws is the kind of thing that starts civil wars. Likely not in Canada but certainly south of the border as it did in the past.

    1. It’s interesting to me that there is no answer or comment to my question. “I spoke directly with Mr. Kenney about the Vaccine Mandates and one of his primary issues in bringing them in was lack of capacity. So back to the original assertion by Ms. Smith. Are government employees not supposed to be accountable?” It is government policy that has got us to where we are today with 1970’s and 1980’s levels of inflation which reduce our standard of living significantly. And yes, the taxpayers pay!
      It is also interesting that any type of idea or comment that presents ideas towards capitalism, accountability, free markets, and free speech by default gets blasted by the WOKE as being “Trumpian”, even though it is approaching 2 years since Joe Biden was elected. It is unfortunate that in today’s world that spirited debate cannot be had and that ideas / suggestions cannot be discussed based on the merits of such. Please remember that we got to where we are today, due to free democracy and capitalism, which provides opportunity to all that wish to work hard and explore the free market opportunities.

  30. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/letters-patent-1947

    https://lieutenantgovernor.ab.ca/role/constitutional-role/

    The LtG’s derive their authority from
    the GG, who derives their power from the letters patent & the Sovereign.

    As our host noted, this is a hypothetical. The LtG is responsible for the province having a premier, and constitutional convention dictates the first minister is an MLA.

    Should Ms. Smith become UCP leader and therefore premier, constitutional convention also dictates she become an MLA in a reasonable amount of time. Which in Canadian practice has been a quick by-election call in a safe riding. See John Turner for latest example.

    Should Ms. Smith refuse to run (by delay or outright refusal), or lose an election, we are in unprecedented constitutional waters.

    The letters patent make it clear what the LtG responsibilities are in regards to the office being occupied; what a viceroy would do is unknown, to my knowledge there is no Canadian prior example.

  31. So Why Didn’t AHS Expand Capacity?
    Lots of interesting and derogatory comments below. I spoke directly with Mr. Kenney about the Vaccine Mandates and one of his primary issues in bringing them in was lack of capacity. So back to the original assertion by Ms. Smith. Are government employees not supposed to be accountable?

  32. Does comparing anything politically right of Ghandi to Trump still work? Because all it really says to me is that the author is still suffering from a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and that anything they says comes from a place of deep rooted leftist resentment for anything that doesn’t align with their entrenched ideological possessedness.

    Which is to say, it’s less analysis and more puerile vomitus.

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