No idea she was associating with convoy supporters? Danielle Smith poses with other participants at last week’s UCP fund-raiser, including a gentleman in a “Truck Trudeau” bunnyhug* (Photo: Twitter/Danielle Smith).

Criticized for the company she keeps, Danielle Smith countered by insisting she doesn’t know who her friends are.

Alberta’s premier hobnobs last Wednesday in Calgary with convoy leader James Bauder, his wife Sandra Collins Bauder, and convoyer Harold Jonker (Photo: Facebook/James Bauder).

When Alberta’s premier caught flack for posing at a fund-raiser last week in Calgary with a couple of convoy agitators still facing criminal charges for their role in the February 2022 Ottawa occupation, her instinct was to deny she knew them. 

Presumably responding to NDP Justice Critic Irfan Sabir’s comment Thursday that this was part of “a pattern of behaviour for Smith to meet with people who undermined the rule of law, harmed our economy, and caused tremendous hardship for ordinary people,” the United Conservative Party issued a statement saying it wasn’t so. 

“The premier took part in a routine photo line-up with nearly 200 people last night,” the UCP told Global News in the statement. “The premier does not personally know these individuals.”

Well, as the author of this blog has proved on more than one occasion, politicians will often pose for photos with folks they don’t agree with – so her office’s statement had a ring of verisimilitude. 

But the problem for the premier was that one of the folks with whom she controversially posed, and who published the photo on social media, quickly disavowed her claim.

Of course, it’s true that some politicians will pose for a photo with almost anyone (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

“We know of each other,” James Bauder told Press Progress. “I’m a public figure. She’s a public figure.” 

Naturally, the Premier’s Office didn’t respond to a follow-up question from Press Progress

It’s fair to say, though, that it’s likely the premier knew perfectly well whom she was posing with and didn’t think it was a big deal. Posing with folks wearing convoy colours at the fund-raiser certainly wasn’t a problem for Ms. Smith, as another photo from the event illustrates.

They were all there to support candidate Eric Bouchard, who is campaigning in former premier Jason Kenney’s old Calgary-Lougheed riding. Mr. Bouchard is affiliated with the far-right Take Back Alberta faction of the party, which played a major role in pushing Mr. Kenney out of office and engineered the victory of Ms. Smith to replace him as premier. 

And Ms. Smith does, as Mr. Sabir noted, have a track record for this kind of behaviour – most notably her notoriously congenial 11-minute phone chat with extremist pastor Artur Pawlowski. “This is not the behaviour of a premier,” Mr. Sabir said – or, at least it ought not to be.

Take Back Alberta leader David Parker (Photo: Screenshot of YouTube video).

Meanwhile, Ms. Smith’s relationship with the leader of the TBA insurgency was back in the spotlight yesterday when the Globe and Mail published a long and colourful story about the group and David Parker. 

There wasn’t much new in the story, but it was nice to see it in the Globe, whose imprimatur lends a level of legitimacy to concern about TBA’s extremism that was lacking when it was merely bloggers and political scientists ringing the alarm. 

The new tidbit – hitherto rumoured by never reported – was that Ms. Smith attended Mr. Parker’s wedding to a reporter for a busy right-wing propaganda site treated as legitimate media by the UCP and its federal counterpart. 

“Mr. Parker denies this reflects an inappropriate coziness between himself and the premier even though he publicly says TBA could turn on her if she strays too far from its ideals,” Globe reporter Carrie Tait wrote in her story, which appears behind a paywall. “‘She’s my friend,’ Mr. Parker explains over lunch, adding he populated his side of the guest ledger with people he worked with on ‘projects.’”

NDP Leader Rachel Notley with her husband, Lou Arab, in 2014 (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Ms. Smith’s response to sharp commentary on social media about that was to attack a member of Opposition Leader and former premier Rachel Notley’s family, which presumably seemed like an appropriate tit-for-tat to the premier’s political advisors.

The UCP, in a rather lame statement to media, huffed: “What the premier would like to ask Ms. Notley, who is married to a communications representative for CUPE, is why is her husband’s union spending massively on third-party attack ads to elect the NDP, and how is it legal?”

There is, of course, no law against anyone being married to a union employee, although the UCP may wish it could make that so along with other categories of citizens it would like to keep from marrying whomever they wish. Y’all know what I mean

As for the UCP’s statement that Ms. Notley’s husband, Lou Arab, is actively involved in the Alberta Federation of Labour, that is simply incorrect. 

Meanwhile, several mainstream media news reporters took to social media to insist that despite Ms. Smith’s controversial recent praise for U.S. Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, she doesn’t buy into the whole campaign of anti-“woke” hysteria they are fomenting in their states. 

Postmedia political columnist Don Braid even devoted most of a column to this notion, claiming Ms. Smith’s personal beliefs are sufficiently inclusive to pass a test for wokeness. Why, he rambled on, even some of her best friends … 

Sorry, but I don’t buy it. 

This is a little like pointing out some of the economic policies of that well-known German dictator of the 1930s actually made sense, which may be true but doesn’t add up to much of a defence for what he did. 

If the role models for the “little bastion of freedom” our premier says she’d like to create here in Alberta ban books, suspend abortion rights, promote hatred of gays, trans people and immigrants, deny science, and advocate assault weapons for all, the consequences be damned, she’s bought into the whole program.

*It’s now the official style of this blog to always refer to a hoodie as a bunnyhug, as they do in Saskatchewan. It just seems appropriate, especially when the bunnyhug has things like “I [HEART] Oil & Gas and Cage Fighting” printed on it. 

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19 Comments

  1. Danielle Smith is getting extremely desperate, and is doing whatever she can to try and keep a hold onto the position she has. She is trying to throw anything against the wall, to see what will stick. When her leadership capabilities are in serious doubt, and the UCP are doing very foolish things, and very pricey shenanigans, point to Rachel Notley. The company Danielle Smith associated with isn’t making her look that good either. You can’t expect anything good to come from pretend conservatives and Reformers. Recently, there were some MLAs from the Peter Lougheed era, and they were openly supporting the NDP. That certainly is telling. How long will Postmedia keep propping up the UCP and also Pierre Poilievre? That should be a concern.

    1. Anonymous You have nailed it. Most Alberta newspapers have stopped printing any of my letters damning these Reformers and I am wondering if they are being paid to do it. I wouldn’t be surprised. It makes it necessary for us to add our say in the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal blogs, who still are, and I hope others will also.

  2. Yeah Premier Smith seems to have serious memory issues. Her friends should be concerned. She seems to forget about phone calls she had, things she said about paying to see a doctor, about paying for arenas a few elections ago and now apparently about who her friends are. Actually we should all be concerned. Maybe she should go see a doctor before she calls an election. At the least, she seems to have developed what someone once called an advanced case of political amnesia. It is often a temporary thing, but seems unusually persistent in Smith’s case.

    I wonder if Smith would have remembered she recently attended the wedding of the Take Back Alberta leader, if the Globe and Mail did not mention it. Apparently only around 75 guests, so it was a fairly intimate gathering.

    Smith does seem to remember or know her opponent’s husband does work for a union. Of course there is no law against that yet. After all it is a free country as a supposed libertarian might say. However, Smith seems shakier on her own family circumstances. Did her grandfather immigrate from communist Russia, or did he leave before that? Was her grandmother a Cherokee or not? The list of forgetting or misrepresenting the past is getting troublingly long. However she still seems to remember she worked in a diner with her husband. I suppose no reason politically to forget that yet.

    Decent or competent people don’t forget who their friends are, phone calls they had, misrepresent their family history for political reasons or constantly contradict things they previously said. Amnesia, political or not, Smith is someone who is does not seem well.

    1. Using the UCP (il)logic, shouldn’t there be a conflict of interest when a government MLA own a business license (let’s say they are landlords) or, more on-the-nose, their spouse is a small business owner ( restaurant) and they campaign on lowering corporate taxes?

    1. Bob: Of course they do, or at least have, and presumably they sometimes get their picture taken with the leader. But there is really no equivalent to the Soldiers of Odin or Take Back Alberta in the NDP nowadays. The closest you could could come might be some old professor of Marxist discourse, or perhaps an environmentalist, about whom it would take a lot of heavy lifting to create anything approaching a scandal. Jason Kenney’s UCP tried with Tzeporah Berman, with some success, but David Suzuki never showed up at an NDP meeting to my knowledge. Why would he? What Ms. Notley was trying to do with the Trans Mountain Pipeline would have been anathema to him. The Waffle dissolved in 1974 and both James Laxer and Mel Watkins are dead. So not much for the UCP to work with there, either. DJC

  3. The more Danielle Smith opens her mouth, the more I am convinced we have seen this movie before. The the social satire Being There, we are introduced to “Chauncey Gardiner”, a somewhat moronic gardener. Chauncey Gardiner was evicted from the estate where he lived and worked his entire life and cast into the world, completely unaware of how it functions. Through a series of fortunate events, Chauncey Gardiner encounters people of wealth and influence, who believe Gardiner is a great mind and has a keen insight in the workings of the world. He also presents himself in the role of a useful idiot and gives unintended cover to the more destructive social forces in the circles he travels in.

    So…Danielle Smith walks onto the scene, first as a conspiracy spewing podcaster, then as their weird leadership candidate, and then premier. Of course, she says all the right things to appeal to a certain group of idiot voters, and this secures her political and social advance. And she allows herself to be manipulated by certain agents into engaging with the worst people ever, but who can further advance herself, but also because she’s told to it by certain influential forces. Smith plays stupid because that’s her means of deflecting and having to answer for her actions. It’s no different than if she started a fire and burned a building down, but dismisses her responsibility by declaring she didn’t the building was made of the type of wood that burns.

    Smith and the UCP have travelled far and wide, making wild promises and *spending* enormous sums of public funds to win over the masses, as well as convincing anyone who will listen that they were not responsible for causing the damage in the first place. And pulling the ole bait and switch, all those promises are walked back … the UCP are all about pulling up your own bootstraps. Did the voters really believe the UCP would deliver? Move to BC if you don’t like them.

    It will be interesting to see how things play out, but I expect to see full-on cultural war bias imported into Alberta’s election. Drag queens, female reproductive rights will be public enemies raging, while gun-wielding Angry Jesus (Ted Nugent) will be everywhere.

    Alberta is the crazy cousin you keep locked in the attic? It sure is.

    1. Just: Being There dialogue, from memory …

      CHAUNCEY GARDNER (dully, speaking about TV): “I like to watch…”
      MAN HE MET AT WASHINGTON PARTY (urgently): “I’ll get Warren!”

      DJC

  4. You forgot to mention that Florida under DeSantis came very close to requiring high school athletes to chart their menstrual cycles for the gov’mint, but settled for forcing them to declare their gender assigned at birth instead. This would be Smith’s Alberta if she became sovereign of the 51st state.

    For all we know, she might also aspire to put seniors out to pasture in The (Alberta) Villages, although that might be a bit risqué. Que sera!

    I read that dryland farmers sometimes lost their minds during the dust bowl era of the Great Depression. Here we see that it was not a giant leap.

    1. The bunnyhug with the pyramids didn’t make sense until I remembered the convoy trucks parting the Red Sea, ahead of the Sharknado. It was in the Drew Barnes version of The Bible.

  5. Regarding Danielle Smith’s attack on Rachel Notley’s husband Lou Arab, it goes to show in politics there’s no smear like an old smear. This one dating back at least as far back as the 2015 campaign.

  6. I hope Notley attacks Dani on her very unconservative spending habits (arenas, Dani bucks, electricity rebates) while the UCP continues with ridiculously low royalty rates and attacks on the health care system. Focussing on convoy supporters won’t generate NDP votes.

  7. Apparently the contagion of dishonesty [where it appears that rewards and ‘anything goes’ have replaced the consequent historically observed and it appears the now old fashioned and archaic socially approved sanctions or the general social disapproval for both the behavior and the serial aspect of lying lips] serves as a support for the confirmation bias[es] that in turn support the manufactured ‘populist’ ideology that further seeks to maintain the extractive economy, petrostate status quo.

    That much is self evident, based on the available facts. Once again, the far reaching social consequences . . . [widespread complete loss of trust in social institutions and individuals more generally, cf., “When Bannon has had access to political power, he has focused on undermining the functioning of governmental and nongovernmental institutions. The nominations of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, Mick Mulvaney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — all were figures who had either expressed outright hostility to their agency’s existence or who aspired to dramatically reduce the agency’s operation and mandate. And recall the flurry of executive orders Trump issued during his first week in office — those bolstering private schools, weakening the Affordable Care Act and environmental protections, . . . ” It is the same, if not similar playbook being endorsed, communicated, and freely espoused by Ms. Smith and her mob of followers, academic advisers/supporters, and wealthy benefactors.] . . . of normalizing rampant rule violations [in this case demonstrated as pathological lying] are not even considered, or maybe they have been and have been calculated to be a useful means to an end, i.e., the installation of a political demagogue and the continued maintenance of the economic status quo, at any cost.

    In this case as in past historical cases, “the primary rules appear to be, (a.) never allow the public to cool off; (b.) never admit a fault or wrong; (c.) never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; (d.) never leave room for alternatives; (e.) never accept blame; (f.) concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; and (g.) if you repeat the lies frequently enough (some) people will sooner or later believe them.”

    Finally, it should be noted very carefully that:

    “Taken together, our results reveal a biological mechanism that underlies the escalation of dishonesty, providing new insight into this integral part of human behavior. The results show the possible dangers of regular engagement in small acts of dishonesty, perils that are frequently observed in domains ranging from business to politics and law enforcement. These insights may have implications for policy makers in designing deterrents to halt deceit. Despite being small at the outset, engagement in dishonest acts may trigger a process that leads to larger acts of dishonesty further down the line.”

  8. I was at my parents house when my southern US aunt called. She was put on speaker. “Well, Ham has gone an’ dunnit agin'”

    We all laughed because we knew what “agin” meant. Another marriage, this was number 10. Ham, bein’ the charmin’ tomcat he was, was now wedded to his old high school sweetheart, recently widowed but livin’ two counties over.

    Auntie Ten’s youngest boy from her long only marriage was revealed to be the true son of Uncle Ham. One of those “devil made me do it” affairs fake religious people like to slide under the rug. I never read the book Peyton Place. Didn’t need to; just had to listen to some of my rellies. I think Ham was married to Auntie Three at the time (course it coulda bin Auntie Four).

    Ham and Ten came to visit us northerners in Canada and stayed with my parents. Very late one night, my newfound cuzzin called his momma; Ham and Ten were asleep. My mother opened the bedroom door and flipped on the nightstand lamp to tell Ten of the phone call. My mother nearly fell over.

    Turn’s out, Ten had draped her bouffant wig over the bedside lamp’s lampshade. In the darkness of night, it looked like a glowing human head on a lamp base.

    And yes, for their trip to Canada, Auntie Ten co-ordinated her and Ham’s outfits. Beige khaki slacks and color matching polo shirts. Everyday, matching.

    What I learned from my weird family is that city/urban people need to be a little bit kinder and more patient with our country cousins. They are scared enough about modern life. That makes country people susceptible to the con man tactics Take Back Alberta is using to exploit them for votes.

    Take Back Alberta is ruthlessly exploitative. Take Back Alberta is US Republican, funded by billionaires and committed to destroying democracy in Alberta. Our country cousins won’t know it until it’s far too late.

    Ham belonged to the NRA till the day he died despite the fact his one and only son by marriage to Auntie Two (or Three) was shot to death in the line of duty as a county sheriff.

    If we, Alberta, become divided, we become corrupt.If we elect the UCP, they will enact laws to entrench themselves in power.

    1. Wow! Any more Ham and Ten tales? Anecdotes about those two would make Alberta Politics even more fun.

  9. Notice the same green dress, off white blazer, necklace Danielle Smith was wearing in both photographs. Plus same smiling, hand clasping, same situational prominence of Smith in both photos. This is by design to provoke disagreement and ‘alternate facts’ if we don’t pay attention to details.

    Whoever is coaching her, they are American republican and they are pros.

    Details matter.

  10. The hand clasping is fascinating.

    https://www.chaldeannews.com/culture-and-history/2022/9/1/hands-clasped-from-the-ancient-sumerians-to-modern-day-chaldeans

    “When a person assumes the hands clasped in front gesture, they are exercising some sort of self-restraint. They’re symbolically ‘clenching’ themselves back and withholding a negative reaction, usually anxiety or frustration. The higher the person clenches their hands whilst standing, the more negative they are feeling.”

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