Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has changed her story again about her controversially congenial telephone conservation with street preacher Artur Pawlowski about the criminal charges against him. 

Controversial street preacher Artur Pawlowski (Photo: Independence Party of Alberta).

This time, using the Saturday morning Your Province, Your Premier call-in radio program provided by Corus Entertainment, Ms. Smith claimed she took the very political preacher’s call about the charges, which stemmed from his actions during the convoy blockade of the international border crossing at Coutts last year, because she thought he wanted to talk about something else

“Obviously, Mr. Pawlowski holds some very extreme views that I disagree with completely,” Premier Smith began her response to a softball question lobbed by Corus host Wayne Nelson.

This is certainly not what it sounded like during her original conversation with Mr. Pawlowski, which took place in January and was first reported by the CBC on March 29. Recordings of their chat have been posted all over social media. 

Said Ms. Smith to Mr. Nelson yesterday: “When we talked, I thought we were talking in the context of him being a political party leader, ’cause he was at the time the leader of the Independence Party, and it turned into a discussion about what I was doing with COVID amnesty …” (Mr. Pawlowski was booted as leader of the Independence Party of Alberta, apparently for being too extreme even for them, the same day as the CBC broke the story about his call with the premier.) 

This is simply not what happened, as anyone understands who has listened to the various recordings of the conversation circulating on social media, which were presumably put there by the street preacher himself or his supporters. 

NDP Justice Critic Irfan Sabir (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

From start to finish, the conversation was about how Mr. Pawlowski wanted his charges dropped, and about how much Smith sympathized with his predicament – which, it must be noted, was entirely of his own creation – and what she would try to do about it.

Be that as it may, like other excuses that have been proffered by the premier up to now, her latest claim raises more questions than it answers. 

To wit: What did she think Mr. Pawlowski wanted to talk about, leader to leader, if it wasn’t the changes he faced? Some kind of political deal in return for getting the charges dropped? Approval to run as a UCP candidate? The imagination boggles! 

Ms. Smith has still offered no reasonable explanation of why she, the premier of Alberta, was willing to chat for 11 minutes with a man whom she knew had been charged with breaching a release order and with criminal mischief for, prosecutors say, inciting violence with his call to make the blockade Alberta’s Alamo moment.

Mr. Pawlowski was also charged under UCP founder Jason Kenney’s likely unconstitutional Alberta Critical Infrastructure Defence Act with damaging or destroying essential infrastructure. It will be ironic if that act is overturned as a result of the exertions of one of Mr. Kenney’s former allies, and not the environmentalists, trade unionists, and First Nations protesters the legislation was intended to target. 

After her improbable claim she had intended just to chat about politics with Mr. Pawlowski, Ms. Smith rambled characteristically about her plans to “look into ways that we might be able to address the non-violent, non-firearms-related, non-contempt-of-court-related charges,” and repeated her previous claim she’d listened to the advice of her Justice minister and nothing more could be done until the matters before the courts are all resolved. 

Whether or not those court actions include her own threatened defamation suit against the CBC is quite unclear, as is almost everything said by Ms. Smith about the Pastorgate affair. 

“This is yet another desperate move from Danielle Smith to distract from her attempt to block the prosecution of Pawlowski and others at Coutts,” said NDP Opposition Justice Critic Irfan Sabir in a statement sent to media soon after the premier’s comments aired yesterday.

“The entire call between Pawlowski and Smith is her describing her efforts to block these charges, either by weekly calls to prosecutors or her expressing her dissatisfaction to the Attorney General and deputy Attorney General,” Mr. Sabir said, quite accurately. “There’s absolutely no discussion of party politics in the call.”

Mr. Sabir accused Ms. Smith of “yet another fabricated explanation” and repeated the NDP’s call for a quick independent investigation led by a judge – which as has been said here before was a risky strategy for the NDP, but which looks to have paid off because of Ms. Smith’s apparent inability to ever admit she is wrong or to stop making hard-to-believe excuses. 

A judge is expected to deliver a verdict on Mr. Pawlowski’s charges next month. A provincial general election is also expected to take place in Alberta next month.

A recording of Saturday’s Your Province, Your Premier show is found here.

A recording of the money clip, as it were, was published here by Postmedia’s Trevor Robb.

A transcript of the money clip was made and posted here by City News reporter Courtney Theriault

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32 Comments

  1. So, now she says she took the call just to chit chat about politics with the pastor because he was leader of a political party. I suppose she must have forgotten about or didn’t think about all those charges he was facing, which might have been the more pressing concern for him. Can she be this clueless?

    I don’t think this shifting story will help Smith. In fact, I feel it may undermine her credibility even more, if that is even possible at this point. This latest reason was so top of mind that she didn’t even think of it, or come up with it, for a number of days.

    Yes, it was mentioned in some of the coverage related to this that the pastor was leader of a small fringe right wing party, so I believe that part is correct. However, the party is quite small, so it would be the sort of thing a governing party would normally probably just easily ignore.

    Although, perhaps this is good news for any high level official in say the Alberta Liberal Party or some other similar smaller party who has a traffic ticket or some other pesky legal problem. Call 1-800-DANI-SMITH. She is very sympathetic, she will look into it almost weekly or yet again for you. She would love to talk to you too.

  2. How can Albertans trust someone who lies so much, like Danielle Smith does? I just can’t figure out why people put up with her for even this long. There are people who are easily fooled. A provincial election is on May 29, and the writ still hasn’t been dropped. I hope that people will smarten up. Another four years of Danielle Smith will be a nightmare.

  3. It’s time to start a pool. I’ll start. My prediction is that the Premier’s next story–and I use the term ‘premier’ in its most formalistically titular sense–will portray Pastor Pawlowski as her spiritual advisor, the matter of whose guidance is deeply personal.

    1. Interesting idea. If she did as you suggested, she could next claim that the conversation was between priest and parishioner, and was therefore confidential.

  4. Danielle Smith continues to embarrass herself, the UCP, and all Albertans.

    Stay tuned for the next version. Will it come mid week, or will come next Saturday?

  5. I wonder if Danielle Smith misses the days when she was the smartest person in the room, as she sat alone in her broadcast booth?

    (I shared this line on Susan Wright’s ‘Susan on the Soapbox’ a few weeks ago; apologies to those who read both for telling the same joke twice)

  6. Maybe she should have talked to Ric McIver. McIver had his own years-long relationship with Art Pawlowski, until it was exposed by the media. It’s funny how these politicos are fine with Art Pawlowski and all that he stands for, until they get caught. Hands in the kooky jar, and all that.

    Whatever the reason Smith demoted McIver from his cabinet post, it certainly wasn’t for his past affiliation with Art Pawlowski. She’s the one engaging with Pawlowski now.

    Ric McIver is out door-knocking on the campaign trail this Easter weekend. It’s the perfect opportunity to ask him about his years-long relationship with radical extremist Art Pawlowski. Did he advise Dani on this new phase of allyship with Art? Happy Easter!

    1. Was it McIver who privatized driver testing for heavy truck drivers under Redford? If my memory serves, the guy who ran a stop sign maiming and killing all those kids on the Humboldt hockey team was a product of the deregulated Con system where the trucking company was allowed to operate for 60 days without meeting safety standards.

      It fell to NDP Transportation Minister Brian Mason to clean up the administrative and regulatory mess. April 7 is “green shirt day” to remember the victims of the Humboldt bus crash and is a reminder of the damage the UCP/Cons can do with their simple-minded nostrums.

  7. This is getting good.

    Danielle Smith does have a tendency to change her story in the wild-eyed hope that she can change the narrative. But when the story changes so much that the narrative starts to look like some freak of pretzel logic, you know that, either, Smith can’t remember the last lie she told, or she’s so desperate she will say anything to save her hide.

    At some point in the daily statements from Smith, that amount to little more than word salad, Artur Pawlowski became a “political leader”. So, now the charges against him are the stuff that make him a political prisoner? Smith has gone to some lengths to make this go away. So much so that she’s now relying on social media freakazoids, like Theo Fleury and Brett Wilson, to tell everyone on Twitter than this is nothing more than a mere mistake by Smith and … look a communist! When these two, as well as the usual assortment of bots, are the only ones standing up for you, things are really not going your way.

    And judging by the recent public freakout, where Artur Pawlowski’s brother went after Tyler Shandro for not helping Artur Pawlowski get out of his legal troubles, one wonders what has Smith got herself into. Even Rebelmedia, who was in Jason Kenney’s court for so long, before turning on him, is beginning to change their minds about Smith. Why doesn’t Smith just pardon Artur Pawlowski? She can. All she needs to do is invoke her “extraordinary powers” as the Premier, through Orders in Council, to use her executive authority to order the court … yeah, Ezra Levant used to be a lawyer, don’t you know.

    The best part is that TBA seems to be using the Artur Pawlowski dust-up as a litmus test for their support for Smith. If things keep going to way they are, could TBA apply pressure on Smith to order the fixed-election-date law be repealed, and do all their dirty free of electoral disruption? As they take over more and more riding, and leverage more and more UCP MLAs into their court, Smith may have no choice but to do the incredibly insane. Stop and election because they will lose.

    I need to expand my popcorn budget.

    1. This has conjured up an earworm. Witchy Woman by the Eagles is playing in my head. Thanks a lot, Just Me.

  8. She’s an idiot!
    A lie has a hundred different stories. The truth only has one.
    If you’re going to lie, make it consistent and repeat the original lie until it becomes the truth. That’s clearly laid out in the official Nazi propaganda bible. Alas, she fails at being a competent Nazi as well. No surprise there.

    1. Yes. I’ve recently come up with this thought in light of the “post truth”, “it’s all fake”, propaganda frenzy happening in the USA and ruZZia:
      The Truth does not need our acknowledgment of it to be True. Acknowledgment of Truthful knowledge, information, data and history are steps towards True Freedom.

    2. Judging by the amount of articles on this non-story,I think you may have a point. The propagandists are really looking for a story.

  9. I get a kick out of the presumption from the progressive mob that you shouldnt talk to everyone. Pretty ironic that they think they can make hay with stuff leaked from “extremists”.

  10. Danielle’s ill-thought out chat with a pastor
    Was a complete and utter disaster
    To add to this ruin
    She keeps changing her tune
    So any chance of reprieve have surpassed her.

  11. Everybody already knows this, but it is worth both further reasoned consideration and repeating:

    “In her [The moral philosopher Sissela Bok] contemporary classic, Lying, she argues on behalf of what she calls the “principle of veracity” as a minimally necessary basis for a functioning society. This is a lowest-common denominator principle based on the common human intuition to favor truth over lies. Humans across time and cultures prefer truth because, she says, “trust in some degree of veracity functions as a foundation of relations among human beings; when this trust shatters or wears away, institutions collapse.””

    “Indeed, she calls lies about politics the “most dangerous body of deceit of all.” This is not because all politicians lie, as common cynicism holds. To the contrary, Bok says, there is a notable difference between political societies that honor the principle of veracity and political societies that don’t. Instead, the great danger of political lies comes from harnessing on a huge scale the coercive physical force of the state to the coercive mental force of lying. Such societies – one lie at great scale at a time – fail to distinguish truth from falsehood and finally collapse.”

    The radical, foaming at the mouth loyal supporters and defenders of Ms. Smith need to fully understand just what it is they are supporting and the entire range of consequences that accompany and follow from that same unquestioning supportive behavior.

  12. I’d feel more optimistic about Smith’s latest bout of foot-in-mouth disease hurting her election chances, but I see two problems.

    1) Smith’s followers, and especially her enablers in the Take Back Alberta cabal, don’t care. They don’t care what she says. They don’t care what she does—as long as she does what they want. What TBA wants is mostly what Smith wants, too, so there’s no hope she’ll stop the Republican-wannabe act, or that TBA will stop backing her.

    2) Every sensible person in Alberta has already decided Smith is utterly unsuitable for a responsible political office. There aren’t that many people who haven’t made up their minds—but there ARE enough to decide the election.

    Of those still undecided (around 20%, according to recent polls), some can’t stand the idea of voting non-Con. To them, I’d point out that Rachel Notley’s dad Grant was well-respected by Peter Lougheed’s truly progressive Conservatives—and Rachel would have worked very well with Lougheed’s Tories, too.

    At this point, we can only hope that Smith’s broken-record “I didn’t do it” mantra will irritate enough non-separatist Conservatives to annoy them into giving Rachel one more chance. Otherwise, it’s four years of Smith crowing about how she was right all along—and demonstrating, again and again, that she doesn’t know squat about Canadian political law, and cares even less.

    1. While I agree entire with the gist of your first point, I would beg to differ on the particular handle of the cabal. They don’t need to “take back” Alberta, as they never lost it. Even during the interregnum of the Accidental Government, there was scant evidence of an economic program that differed particularly from that of the usual place-holders in the Legislature.
      I likewise agree with your assessment of the nature of the Accidental Premier in relation to the first post-SoCred one-party reign in Alberta. The current Alberta NDP would definitely fit the bill for a mainstream right-wing party in the US imperium of the 1970s. I forget, is that a good or a bad thing?

  13. On this day, April 9, in 1865, the traitor Robert E. Lee surrendered to US federal forces. Lee’s surrender ended the US civil war after hundreds of thousands of casualties, displacements and unspeakable sadness.
    Stupid a*s Arthur Pawlowski, with his childish understanding of history, dubious moral superiority and ridiculous reference to the Alamo thinks slavery was okay? Great, if you were a billionaire white man who owned slaves, thousands of acres of land plus buildings and had the 3/5’ths voting rule to amplify your vote. The regular white land owning males who got to vote got one vote counted. Women, colored people were barred from voting.
    Part of my family is from the south. Part is from western Canada. All were from other places originally.
    Premier Smith needs the votes of this Arthur person and his band of misinformed/white supremacists.
    We are Canadians, regardless of where we’re from. Our Canadian identity is built on who we are and what we stand for, not where we’re from.
    Vote! People around this world died for this right and we take it for granted…

    1. I have little doubt that Pastor Art has a limited grasp of history, but I fail to see the connection between the silly American Alamo fable and the US civil war, other than the military conquest and theft of 50% of Mexican territory by the US by and the latter conflict both representing the manifestation of the penchant for couching imperialist US economic expansion in absurd moralizing fables.
      The very notion of a “Canadian identity” is a very scary proposition. Some person, much wiser than me, referred to nationalism as it manifested in the US destruction of Yugoslavia in the nineties as “the passion of the idiots”.
      Nobody died to give me the vote. Wars are fought for economic reasons. We have the vote in order to placate the masses in the enormously complex economic dominance hierarchy in which we all live, a dominance hierarchy which is bolstered by the misconception of the average citizen that they have a say. There is little to distinguish the modern “liberal democracy” from the Roman Principate.

  14. The picture at the top of the page, should have caption ” I missed getting away with b.s.ing everyone by this much”.

    1. Brett: I wouldn’t be surprised they had a pretty good idea what was coming. DJC

      1. I don’t think their decision to bail was voluntary by any stretch.
        Who walks away from a guaranteed comp life? I doubt they did it based on any kind of noble motivation. If they cared about Alberta, their citizens or improving society, they wouldn’t have joined the UCP to begin with.

  15. Perhaps Danielle Smith isn’t quite as gormless as I’ve repeated many times since she tried to sneak in an apologetic qualifier after one of her Wildrose candidates said homosexuals should be damned to an eternal lake of fire: she should have immediately condemned and even sanctioned that candidate despite the fast approaching 2012 election —the one pollsters had her pegged to win until that lake-of-fire thingy; instead she added to widespread opprobrium over the remark, first by hesitating and second by lamely excusing her tardiness with a quip about respecting freedom of speech. ProgCon Allison Redford won the election and Danielle Smith won the gormless award. (She attempted to beat her own record by crossing the floor of the Assembly but was completely overshadowed by the milestone 2015 election (in which her new party was defeated for the first time in nearly 44 years).

    ProgCon members of Smith’s High River riding confirmed her Crown of Gormlessness by rejecting her nomination bid for the 2015 election. Naturally Wildrosers were sore at her for crossing the floor with about half their caucus, but perhaps not quite as sore as the ProgCons were when her floor-crossing failed to save them from defeat. Despite being instrumental in both parties’ demises, she deftly swooped down upon the first-term governing United Conservative Party then in an existential crisis of its own—this time one which nobody could pin directly on her. Not that championing the schizophrenic party’s anti-vaxxers took much heed or care—she simply jumped aboard the loudest faction’s bandwagon for which she’d already cultivated sympathy.

    But to be fair, She did manage to claw her way back into politics, deftly swooping down upon the UCP’s most dangerous schizophrenic crisis to date. And she’s wisely, if not popularly avoided by-elections to fill vacated UCP seats in ridings which the NDP stood to win. One senses some modicum of political awareness in these moves —although it’s hard to say whether those decisions were genuinely hers.

    No, the smidgen of gormlessness I feel should be deducted from Danielle Smith stems from the fact that she appears to realize her excuses for trying to interfere with the administration of justice aren’t working. We know that because she keeps trying new ones, as she did again yesterday.

    Well, at least that’s something…

  16. A little late to the discussion to point out that if the latest Danielle ” Spin ” is true then the idea of taking the CBC to court for defamation is false.

  17. I like to leave the policies to people who are actually running for office to implement them. For me? Why my best contribution is ridiculing the people who are running for the votes of a minority of dead beat dads and grifters with a side of holy rollers and grievance junkies! That’s what my youth in Alberta gifted me!

  18. Now that the Ethics Commissioner has the file, I suspect he will clear Smith of all and future wrongdoing before resigning and taking early retirement.

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