Danielle Smith flips another flop – takes credit for federal child-care program she recently reviled

CALGARY – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith took to social media on Tuesday to take credit for the federal Liberal Government’s $10-a-day daycare plan, which Alberta only reluctantly signed onto and to which the province contributes nothing. 

There is something disorienting about Ms. Smith’s willingness – for the moment, anyway – to change her tune on opinions that she has advocated passionately throughout her career, indeed, her entire adult life. 

“We’re committed to ensuring all Albertans have the supports they need to succeed, including reliable, accessible, and affordable child care, so nobody has to choose between a family and a career,” Ms. Smith burbled cheerfully in a video distributed by the United Conservative Party on social media. 

The video has everything a good conservative needs for such a message: A new mom, a newborn, and a Neudorf, the latter being one of Ms. Smith’s two deputy premiers, Nathan, who is also the UCP MLA for Lethbridge East. (OK, that kid’s not exactly a newborn, but who could resist the sheer poetry of that image?)

“I’m committing that a re-elected United Conservative Government will ensure all Albertans have access to $10 a day daycare by 2026,” Ms. Smith vowed. “We’re proud of the agreement we’ve negotiated with the federal government, because it’s an amazing Alberta plan that works for Alberta families …”

In fairness, Ms. Smith tried hard to pretend that the deal Alberta signed onto with Ottawa was different from all those other provinces’ child-care deals because it gave a little more scope for private daycare operators.

Still, ’twas only the day before Christmas 2021 when all through the land Ms. Smith was carolling quite a different message, one much more in accord with the worldview she has long espoused. 

Conservatism, she complained then, “is becoming indistinguishable from liberalism.

“All parties massively overspend, rack up debt, restrict businesses and deliver social programs exactly the same way,” she wrote in a Christmas Eve op-ed gleefully published by the Calgary Herald. 

“A case in point is the new deal announced for child care. It was framed as returning $3.8 billion in federal tax revenue to Alberta. In practice, it’s given total control to Ottawa over how we deliver child care.” (Where’s the Sovereignty Act when you need it, she might have added, but didn’t, presumably because Rob Anderson, now her chief party ideologue and office manager, hadn’t thought it up yet.)

“If you put money in the hands of parents as consumers, they would decide which operators should get their business,” she argued. “Businesses could choose their own fee structure depending on their size, space, location, operating costs, staffing and salary. If an operator prices their services too high, having more options would give parents more ability to shop around.”

Yeah, right, as we say in our language, in which, grammatically speaking, a double positive isn’t supposed to imply a negative. 

She moaned: “How could we sign a deal like this?”

She concluded: “It’s not too late to change course and tell Ottawa we are going to deliver child care the Alberta way.”

The Alberta way … And if she ever got to run Alberta, she didn’t say but obviously thought, she’d fix that up right smartly. 

Public pressure being what it is, however, once she had the job she had to put that principle aside – at least until after the election scheduled for May 29, and until a suitable excuse can be found to deep-six it as unaffordable.

Like, say, if Ms. Smith’s man Pierre Poilievre ever gets the chance to eliminate the federal program.

“When you say about cutting supplementary spending,” the federal Conservative leader was asked a week before Ms. Smith’s op-ed appeared in the Herald, “in your view does that include the newly signed child care agreements with most of the provinces?”

Mr. Poilievre responded: “We have said we do not believe in a $100-billion slush fund to increase the cost of living on Canadians. We believe in putting money back in the pockets of the people who actually earned the money, and we believe in, uh, our proposal is to cancel tax increases, and cancel any new deficit spending.”

In other words, yes, it does. 

Premier ignored constitutional conventions associated with criminal prosecutions: profs

“Any contact by the Premier with the Department of Justice in relation to any particular case or class of cases is inconsistent with the constitutional conventions associated with the prosecution of criminal charges,” Nigel Bankes and Jennifer Koshan concluded in a post published yesterday by the University of Calgary Faculty of Law’s blog. 

Mr. Bankes is a professor emeritus in the U of C law faculty; Professor Koshan, a former Crown prosecutor, teaches in the faculty. 

Based on Premier Smith’s extended telephone conversation with radical street preacher Artur Pawlowski in early January, the two legal scholars concluded in their post on Ablawg.ca that, “whether or not the Premier or members of her staff actually communicated with prosecutors, the evidence supports the view that the Premier’s conduct and that of her staff … is inconsistent with the constitutional conventions pertaining to prosecutorial authority and principles of equality before the law.”

“At a stroke,” they wrote, “the Premier has seriously undermined the principle of equality before the law of all persons, and public faith in the fairness of criminal prosecutions.”

The Alberta Ethics Commissioner’s investigation, they noted, will not deal with the question of whether Ms. Smith ignored constitutional conventions – unwritten but widely accepted rules that fill the gaps in a written constitution like Canada’s. 

Ablawg.ca does a good job of explaining the complexities of constitutional law in ways comprehensible to lay people. It is essential reading for any Albertan who wishes to follow provincial politics in this time of Sovereignty Acts and similar constitutional nonsense.