Alberta Premier Danielle Smith named her cabinet yesterday.
It is absurdly large.
Premier Smith named 37 cabinet members – 24 full ministers with portfolios, two ministers without portfolio, and 11 parliamentary secretaries.
With her own presumably soon-to-be-elected self, that brings the total to 38.
By contrast, there were 12 ministers in Rachel Notley’s first NDP cabinet. Ms. Notley later added six more.
Recent first cabinets formed by Progressive Conservative premiers numbered 19 members under Ed Stelmach, 21 for Alison Redford (who was criticized by Ms. Smith’s Wildrose Party for the increase), and 21 for Jim Prentice.
Jason Kenney, the first United Conservative Party premier had a first cabinet of 23.
So if you thought Ms. Smith was the sort of conservative who believes in small government, you might want to reconsider that claim, especially since the UCP Caucus isn’t exactly a deep pool of talent.
However, Ms. Smith obviously had a bigger priority than keeping her government lean. That is, keeping her friends close and her enemies closer. Most of them, anyway.
She must keep the United Conservatives united or she risks facing a fate like that of Liz Truss, so recently prime minister of the United Kingdom for 45 days, beating even the record of Charles Tupper, prime minister of Canada for 69 days in 1896.
Like Ms. Truss, if worse came to worst, Ms. Smith might find the man she replaced waiting in the wings to replace her! So we can empathize with her political predicament even if we are appalled by her agenda.
To borrow an American political metaphor, faced with risk of draining the swamp to get rid of the alligators, Ms. Smith decided to flood it to keep them content.
That was not the only expected change cabinet that didn’t materialize quite as promised.
Before yesterday’s announcement, Ms. Smith had made it sound as if her new cabinet would dominated by rural MLAs, part of her strategy to win even if she loses by hanging onto the UCP’s loyal rural heartland at all costs.
In the event, however, there were 15 ministers and parliamentary secretaries with Calgary addresses. That compared to 13 ministers and parliamentary secretaries from rural ridings.
In addition, there are another eight ministers and parliamentary secretaries from what I would describe as “rurban” electoral districts – nine if you assume Ms. Smith will win her seat in Brooks-Medicine Hat in the by-election set for Nov. 8.
The caveat here is that not everyone would necessarily agree with the way I divvied up rural and mixed rural-urban ridings, but the general pattern still shows a cabinet that tilts rural – as Conservative cabinets often do in Alberta – but still has lots of representation from Calgary.
So, despite her brave country talk, it looks as if Ms. Smith chose to be more mindful of her need to win some Calgary ridings than her desire to abandon Alberta’s cities to their apparently unapologetic wokeness.
In the end, she shuffled the deck chairs on the Titanic a little, but mainly added extra chairs so Alberta’s new political elite would have good seats from which to watch the ship go down.
Ms. Smith left a number of Mr. Kenney’s key ministers in place: Travis Toews, the once and future finance minister and her chief competitor in the race to lead the UCP, Justice Minister Tyler Shandro, Health Minister Jason Copping, Education Minister Adrianna LaGrange, and Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides will all hang onto their previous jobs.
UCP Caucus members who openly supported Ms. Smith during the leadership race were rewarded: Kaycee Madu, formerly the labour minister and the UCP’s only Edmonton MLA, and Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf, were both named deputy premier. Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Peter Guthrie, hitherto considered a lightweight, was given the important Energy portfolio. Devin Dreeshen, who left cabinet after allegations of office drinking and tolerance of sexual harassment a year ago, is back as minister of transportation. Devinder Toor, MLA for Calgary-Falconridge, found a spot as a Parliamentary secretary for multculturalism.
As for Ms. Smith’s leadership challengers, only Leela Aheer failed to find a place in cabinet.
If readers have a burning desire to learn who else ended up doing what, the full list can be found in the government’s press release.
Of course, where there are winners, there must be some losers, and the biggest loser was probably Kenney loyalist and harsh Smith critic Jason Nixon, who served under Mr. Kenney as environment minister, finance minister and UCP House Leader.
Mr. Nixon was booted to the back benches. (His brother Jeremy, a Calgary MLA, joins cabinet as seniors, community and social services minister.) Also dumped from cabinet: Ric McIver (punished for seeking federal help with the Coutts blockade?), Prassad Panda, Whitley Issik, and Ron Orr.
Other important trends revealed in Ms. Smith’s first cabinet included seriously declining interest in gender balance in the political calculations made by the United Conservative Party.
Only four women hold portfolios in Ms. Smith’s cabinet – five if you count the premier herself. Three more will serve as Parliamentary secretaries.
This is a striking difference from Ms. Notley’s thoughtfully balanced cabinets.
In addition, status of women no longer rates a full cabinet portfolio under Ms. Smith’s leadership.
There was also some grumbling that the Labour Ministry has disappeared, along with its name.
This is highly unlikely, however, as someone will still have to be responsible for the administration of the provincial labour, employment standards and occupational health and safety codes.
No doubt we will discover next week whether the Ministry of Jobs, Economy and Northern Development (former leadership contender Brian Jean’s new perch) or the silly sounding Ministry of Skilled Trades and Professions (Mr. Madu’s portfolio) is responsible.
It is said here that a lack of focus on labour relations by a government like Ms. Smith’s is not necessarily a bad thing.
Ms. Smith also seemed not to have much time for mainstream media yesterday, posting the list of cabinet ministers without much notice or any opportunity to ask questions, then heading off for a congenial livestreamed chat with former Wildrose and UCP MLA Derek Fildebrandt, who nowadays operates a right-wing online news and propaganda site.
“I don’t want to have a scientific committee advising me that isn’t prepared to look at therapeutic options in the middle of a pandemic,” she told Mr. Fildebrabndt, among other startling things. (Presumably she had veterinary de-worming paste in mind.)
The clear message to mainstream reporters from the former right-wing talk radio host: You don’t matter anymore.
Did I miss seeing an Attorney/Solicitor General?
Loon: Yes you did. Or rather, neither position is mentioned. I assume the Attorney general is the Justice Minister. Perhaps the Solicitor General as well. DJC
So much for all of Smith’s brave or foolish talk of having an overwhelmingly rural cabinet. Like the last time she led a party, her more extreme supporters are going to have to learn to live with disappointment.
I suppose that is something they will have in common with former PC stalwart McIver and Mr Panda who was from the Wildrose side. We’re not quite sure what Smith’s main criteria were, but with keeping Mr. Madu and Mr. Dreeshen, it sure doesn’t seem to be competence. It was a bit surprising she made Mr Madu a deputy premier, but hey you can never have enough deputy premiers these days! It was a muddled and confusingly big, small government cabinet. I suppose that is much in the image of Smith herself – often confusing and contradictory.
I suppose the more interesting thing now will be to see who sticks around to run in the next election. Mr. Toews may have a safe enough seat, but is he really enough on the same wave length as Smith to want to be more than a transitional minister? It might be time to go back to sort of ranching or running a religious school. Mr. McIver may be reading the writing on the wall. If so, will there be any former PC MLAs left or is it now really just the Wildrose party united in name only? Has Smith now abandoned her idea of a rural cabinet, or is she now saving the rest for after the next election?
It looks like there are more people on the UCP’s sinking ship. The UCP has the largest government in the history of Alberta. No other provincial government in Alberta has been this large. Anyways, the UCP government is a disaster of epic proportions, and Danielle Smith isn’t going to change that.
“I don’t want to have a scientific committee advising me that isn’t prepared to look at therapeutic options in the middle of a pandemic.” Perhaps Premier Smith is on to something. Instead of a scientific committee, she could refer her voting base to televangelist Kenneth Copeland who promotes therapeutic options of a sort.
Wikipedia reports, “He urged followers to touch their television screens as a means of vaccination by proxy and also attempted to exorcise COVID-19 on at least three occasions by summoning ‘the word of God’ stating that this had destroyed the virus (either in the U.S. or worldwide.) Earlier he had urged his followers to ignore public health advisories and come to his churches, saying they could be healed there by the laying on of hands if they felt ill.”
While an all rural cabinet would be like asking to drink the hemlock, keeping and expanding the number of inept urban ministers won’t help Ms. Smith that much. Even if she takes the next six months to gild the cup with gov spending, do we really thing those urban voters will drink from it just because there’s a local cup-bearer?
When we were first married, my wife and I made an agreement. She would make all the small decisions, and I would make the big ones. After 30 years of marriage, we haven’t had any big decisions.
I was initially stunned when I saw Kaycee Madu had been appointed deputy premier, then I remembered the above joke and realized Danielle Smith had done a brilliant job dealing with Kaycee Madu. He has been a joke in his other cabinet posts, but being a visible minority, and her only choice for Edmonton representation, she couldn’t leave him on the back bench.
Solution: create a new, and nonsensical, cabinet post, where he will do the least amount of damage, then assure him it is not a demotion because he will be too busy in his role of deputy premier. Meanwhile, if she does need someone to act as her replacement, she can call on the other deputy premier, Nathan Neudorf.
What happened to Ron Orr, as Status of Women minister? I always thought the ladies would be comforted knowing he was sticking his nose in their business.
Bob: He was dumped. He was so insignificant I forgot him. DJC
Perhaps the biggest mistake she made on this day was ignoring the media. Come election time, she will regret it. She needs them if she wants to be elected. Is she saying she doesn’t need them because she doesn’t intend to be elected? Will there be no election?
Before long, I expect Smith’s attorney general to send her private provincial police into the hospitals to force doctors to give unauthorized Covid treatments to patients. We’re not Montana yet. We might be worse than Montana before long.
So much for Ric McIver being the voice of reason. None of the new cabinet has it in them to do the right thing. Shields up, as they say.
Abs, I don’t think ignoring the mainstream media was a mistake. It’s just that Derek Fildebandt is a fellow-traveler, is all. Queen Dannie likes to talk to people who agree with her; it was a personal choice.
Once Danielle Straitjacket got a hold of Jason Kenney’s Horn O’Plenty, she maintained his favored practice of buying the loyalty of everyone in the UCP caucus. Like Kenney, Smith has sowed the seeds of division in her own party, so she has to buy loyalty. This is why the new cabinet is insanely large, likely the largest of any provincial government. The abundance of new portfolios and special appointments is mind-blowing. And with the trend towards shrinking the size of government, there may not be enough for this abundance of officials. No matter. It’s not like the UCP actually believes that government is supposed to be productive.
And I suspect the unannounced increase in the numbers of so-called issues managers was equally impressive. After all, every time Smith opens her mouth, there’s an issue, so we can expect that crew to be excessively busy. As for the War Room, it maybe rebranded to make it sound less like something straight out of the Kenney era. And now that it’s been revealed that Smith still has her close association with Derek Alexander Gerhard Fildebrandt’s The Western Standard, maybe the role of that rebranded War Room could be expanded to include contracting out to the Standard. After all, Smith needs something to back up her claims about the WEF and that fake COVID stuff. Fildebrandt may realize his Alex Jones-sized dreams yet.
Danielle Smith intends to prove that she is a vengeful yet generous goddess. More popcorn is a must.
I presume Danielle will do a bit of shopping this weekend for a larger purse into which her dutiful cabinet will ceremoniously deposit their balls on Monday’s historic event.
Horrific Smith is the worst possible option for AB!
26 Cabinet Ministers, 11 Secretaries.
For a backwater like our Alberta???? Who is kidding whom?
Speaks volumes about Premier Danielle Smith. Even before one looks at the qualifications and the past record of those anointed many.
Nice salary increases.
Maybe her plan is to ‘buy’ caucus support by putting as many as them possible on the increased salary levels.
I think she’s showing a lot of forethought here. She’s going to need people to push under the bus, this way she has a whole bunch of cabinet ministers who don’t matter. They will be well compensated fall guys for the inevitable results of the whatever watered-down idiocy the UCP gets up to as it lame ducks its way towards the next election. A bunch of these shameless chumps are going to be the political equivalent of what Ricky from TBP calls “jail cover.”
I was going to remind premier Smith that Covid, that nasty old virus which has killed over 46,000 Canadians —almost 5,000 of them Albertans—is still among us. Although my squeeze and I have managed to avoid catching it, most of our kids and probably most of our grandkids (half of whom are independent-living adults) have gotten it. My brother got it about a month ago, now my sister (3,000 miles away) has it, too. One offspring had a bad experience with a vaccination; the others generally describe the infection the same way: it’s like a bad flu—except it just doesn’t seem to go away entirely and they all complain of enduring fatigue. All are otherwise in excellent shape (most of them are accomplished athletes). And they were all vaccinated and boosted before coming down with symptoms. Acquaintances who’ve gotten it say about the same thing. So I was going to remind Ms Smith that Covid isn’t equivalent to ordinary influenza (against which grandma and I also get vaccinated, doctors’ orders). It’s something one really needs to watch out for.
Maybe grandma and I are a bit more fastidious about our “bubble,” prob’ly because we’re old and retired (most everybody else in our family still works, many in the school system and the rest in retail or services—all interacting with lots of people). We still wear our masks at the grocery where we’ve noticed, since about the end of July, that fewer and fewer others are doing so, likely because it’s been so sunny and dry out here on the Coast, doors are wise open and people are more widely spaced apart (but it did sprinkle last night for the first time in almost four months). Now that school’s back and the nights (at least) are cooling off and people are moving back indoors, there’s been a significant spike of Covid here on our little Island. I mark my calendar in two-week increments (a fortnight being about the length of Covid infection, including incubation and infectiousness phases) starting at Labour Day (school-opening) and highlighting notable ‘super-spreader’ dates like Thanksgiving—which, no surprise to me, seems to correlate this traditional crowding and feasting with the recent spike in cases (we did ours outdoors —just lucky with the unusually warm weather). I don’t think I have to convince most people with any of this because already I see more mask-wearing —and all of a sudden too. In the past few weeks Covid-related staffing shortages have shut our ferry down a number of times and almost closed our general store. All in all I’d say that late summer mask complacency combined with typical epidemiological factors to do with distancing and approaching winter (indoor crowding) are having a typical result. To corroborate, a spate of influenza has appeared after two almost-zero seasons (coincidentally because of Covid restrictions).
Thing about Covid is that new variants may arise spontaneously and spread exponentially, as we’ve already seen. Vaccines are not as durable as many had hoped, and might not be at all effective against new, potentially more virulent Covid variants. This is an important factor that few want to dwell upon, certainly not likely if they can’t even wrap their heads around the seasonal Covid-favouring factors already mentioned.
So I was going to remind Ms Smith that she’d better be ready for another wave of Covid, potentially a more virulent or deadly strain but, in any case, bound to spike higher again because of the Holiday Season. New infections become apparent right in the credit-card hangover part of the new year, the part psychologists have long recognized and the most depressing and “blue” time of the entire year. With Smith’s ambitious agenda sure to be taking up most of her time by then, I’m sure she’d rather not have another bad Covid experience like the ones which already challenged Alberta hospitals to the max in 19-20, 20-21, and 21-22.
I was going to remind her, but the kind of bubble we’d recommend maintaining over the approaching winter seems to be commutatively excluded from the kind of bubble Smith seems to prefer staying in herself. She’s been preaching her Covid twaddle to the choir and congregation for so long that she’s come to expect unanimity. However, outside of her preferred bubble, anti-vaxxers are not nearly in such a majority.
I guess that’s why she preferred to discuss her new cabinet on a right-wing firebrand’s show instead of fielding questions from real reporters. There she could safely get away with eschewing the advice of experts who, she said, had the audacity to reject her own unproven prescriptions for Covid infections. How unscientific, she opined, apparently flummoxed why any old farm remedy wouldn’t be entertained, especially, she said in disbelief, “in the middle of a pandemic,” for heaven sakes!
Well, okay, I get it: your bubble’s better than my bubble. Okay, okay, but I would have thought Danielle would appreciate the risk of another Covid reminder upsetting her agenda. After all, that’s what upset her predecessor’s who, I remind, came into the job with a much higher party and electoral approval rating than Smith, herself having only a couple points more than Kenney’s 51% party review that precipitated his ouster, and the popular approval typical of a real one-percenter. See, our bubble protects me and my squeeze from real Covid, but Danielle’s bubble protects her from Covid reality.
Kenney left her with a perilously divided party and a medical system on the brink of open revolt, all because of Covid, such that any return of viral overload—or even any reminder of the past ones—will be less than opportune timing for reiterating her rejection of expert advice or messing with the medical system as she’s determined to do.
I mean, my reminder that Covid is still something to watch out for still stands, but after hearing her interview with Hiltedbrained I don’t reckon she’d hear me at all (not that I’m an expert, mind you). She is, by her own declaration, in her own bubble and my squeeze and I are in ours—hers with less than 20% of the population and ours with over 80%.
Times like this I really wonder if Danielle Smith has any kind of democratic sensibility about her at all.
Reports lately are saying Danielle Smith isn’t really stupid. In person, she’s said to be charming, witty and warm. That’s a welcome change from Jason Kenney, who was said to be “aloof” (or worse).
Great. She’s nice company over a cup of coffee. Even better, she seems able to learn from experience, and will listen to the advice of others. I guess that’s why she kept so many of Jason’s supporters in cabinet, and bloated it up with her new rural buddies.
Devin Dreeshen was also the guy who went to the Excited States to help campaign for his hero, Donald Trump. Could that be a reason—or THE reason—Smith resurrected his career?
Leela Aheer was the fourth-most-likely to win the UCP leadership race. Too close to the throne, too competent, too popular? Too much of a threat to Smith? “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”; this may yet return to haunt Smith.
That’s presumably why Smith whipped up a brand-new cabinet post for Brian Jean. Now he can help his buds in Fort McMoney hire labourers for the bitumen industry.
The lack of a “minister of labour” may either slow down or speed up the dismantling of labour and occupational safety codes. It’s too soon to tell. At the least, expect wholesale destruction of labour-organization rules.
As for Jason Nixon—good riddance. Should have happened years ago. It’s a shame he’s still an MLA.
Just turned on CBC ,in time for Danielle to say that the UCP is going to have a party Ralph Klein would be proud of….don’t cry for me Albertina…aaarough!!!, not enough coffee to watch the rest, will have to find something to fortify it with first, oye boje….sigh!
And then we have this: https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/alberta-premier-exploring-pardons-for-covid-19-related-fines-and-arrests-1.6120925
Does this dingbat think that she’s some latter day Donald Trump?
Not “latter-day,” CovKid. “Daughter of.”
Dingy Smith has not demonstrated much of a clue to what she is doing yet. On one hand she wants to cut 700 manager jobs from health care alone, yet builds the biggest cabinet in the history of Alberta. Contradiction? Why do we have two health care authorities (AHS and Covenant), each with their own executive structure and two school divisions (catholic and regular) again with their own executive structure? Seems to me these are duplications that are not necessary.
Former oil & gas lobbyist, & former Energy Minister Sonya Savage, was named “Minister of Environment and Protected Areas”. A certain aphorism about foxes & henhouses comes to mind.
I always had the impression that Sonya Savage was Energy Minister in name only. Did you ever see a picture of her where she wasn’t standing behind Jason Kenney?
Surprise, surprise – a large group of white male cronies. I can’t believe this POS was voted in.