It looks like Alberta’s going to need a Sam Donaldson in this election campaign. 

Former ABC White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson in 1995 (Photo: John Matthew Smith via Wikipedia).

You know, someone with a voice big enough to be heard over the noise of Alberta’s premier and her United Conservative Party handlers running away from the danger of an honest journalistic question. 

Mr. Donaldson was ABC’s chief White House correspondent from 1977 to 1989. His famous voice was so loud his questions could be heard over the blades of Ronald Reagan’s presidential helicopter. 

Yesterday, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith decreed that reporters won’t be permitted to ask follow-up questions at government news conferences any more.

As Dean Bennett of the Canadian Press cleverly explained it, Ms. Smith, “four days after announcing she won’t answer questions on her ethics investigation, says she will limit questions on all other topics.”

Asked why, Ms. Smith giggled and chirped: “It’s an election, that’s why, we’re sorta getting into election mode … ”

Former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

A premier channelling the glib comment attributed to Kim Campbell, briefly Canada’s Conservative prime minister in 1993, that “an election is no time to discuss serious issues” is not evidence that we’re sorta getting into election mode, it’s evidence that the UCP’s strategic brain trust is in blind panic mode about what Ms. Smith may say or do next. 

And speaking of Sam Donaldson, Premier Smith may share a destructive conservative ideological agenda with the 40th president of the United States, but she’s no Ronald Reagan! For one thing, nobody’s going to call Danielle Smith a Great Communicator – especially not the people charged with the difficult task of trying to win the May 29 Alberta election for her. 

She’s literally been saying since before the turn of the century that she wants to privatize health care – the full, disastrous U.S. deal. “The first time I met @ABDanielleSmith, I was a new @AlbertaNDP leader being interviewed by the Calgary Herald editorial board of which Smith was a member,” Brian Mason recalled last night in a tweet. “She was very fixated on private health care models. That was in 2004, nearly 20 years ago. Nothing has changed.”

Just two years ago, Ms. Smith was still bloviating on the same topic in a paper she was invited to write for the University of Calgary’s publicly funded right-wing think tank, the so-called School of Public Policy, in which she explained why she thought Albertans should get used to paying out of pocket for health care. 

So no wonder reporters want to ask questions about what she really thinks now that she’s suddenly pivoted to insisting that “no Albertan will ever have to pay to see a family doctor out of pocket” and “you will never have to pull out your credit card to pay for health care.”

NDP Finance Critic Shannon Phillips (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

And whether or not it’s the subject of an official ethics investigation, there are also still many questions to be asked about Ms. Smith’s recorded mutual-admiration conversation with extremist street preacher Artur Pawlowski, who was facing criminal charges at the time and who she now insists is an extremist whose ideas she abhors.

Or her ridiculous lawsuit against the CBC for reporting her own words, obviously intended to intimidate more journalists than just those employed by the national broadcaster into not reporting stories inconvenient to the premier and the UCP. Or the R-Star scam to give oil industry polluters a royalty break for making a stab at cleaning up their own messes. 

Readers unused to the intricacies of political press conferences may wonder what the big deal is, after all, reporters are still going to get one question, right? And, as the premier said, there’s lots of folks with questions to ask. 

But this is a strategy to shut up the best reporters, not just to be fair to all the scribes clamouring to ask a question. 

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

The propensity of the premier’s media handlers to limit the number of reporters allowed to ask any questions and their tendency to favour sycophants from right-wing media sites who can be depended on to lob politically helpful softballs is already becoming obvious. 

Needless to say, the reaction to her announcement was not supportive.

“Folks, this is really wrong,” said former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. “This was a government announcement not an election announcement. It’s part of the job to answer questions no matter how tough. Why i scrummed almost daily. Not answering means you’re either hiding something or your staff are scared of what you’ll say.” 

“Danielle Smith is hiding from Albertans,” said NDP Finance Critic Shannon Phillips with characteristic bluntness. “Her ideas are so unpopular – and her views so offside the mainstream – that she now thinks her only choice is to run from questions.”

And NDP Justice and Ethics Critic Irfan Sabir said in a statement that “Smith is making a disgraceful attempt to avoid accountability for her failed, chaotic premiership.

“One of your jobs as Premier is to take questions from Albertans, and if you’re not willing to do that, you have no business being Premier,” he added, stating the obvious. “Journalists are the proxy for the public, and they serve a critical role in Canadian society by questioning elected officials. This kind of attempt to prevent journalists from doing their jobs is dangerous for our democracy.”

All true, alas, but I doubt either Ms. Smith or her handlers care very much about that. Indeed, given the way things have been going so far, they may have concluded it’s either stop answering questions or postpone the election. 

Given all this, how likely do you think it is that Ms. Smith will also refuse to debate NDP Leader Rachel Notley? You can’t be too careful, after all. Ms. Notley might ask her a question!” 

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23 Comments

  1. “Better to remain silent (not answer questions) and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

  2. She went to extraordinary lengths to avoid questions during the Bighorn consultations. She refuses to answer questions around her knowledge of the events leading up to the Selenium limit easing to pave the way for eastern slope coal development during here tenure as Environment Minister. I would think the NDP could come up with a better spokesperson to call out Danielle Smith on this issue than Shannon Phillips.

  3. I guess this is the next best thing to calling the mainstream media ‘biased’ or ‘enemies of the people’, something that would be difficult given the conservative slant of mainstream newspapers in Alberta. That and suing the CBC for reprinting her own words. Funny thing is, Smith’s words are he own worst enemy, so even replying to one question is a political liability for the UCP. I don’t think we’ve yet seen this election’s ‘Lake of Fire’ moment but I’m sure it’s coming.

  4. Not answering questions is the hallmark of a coward – a political coward in this case. There are shades of Kim Campbell, but also characteristics of Ralph Klein, who also refused to answer questions from the media, when they were grilling him with tough questions. He’d throw a fit and leave. Last year, the Legislature was closed for most of November, because Danielle Smith can’t take the heat, and is afraid to answer questions. She’s very afraid that she will get caught saying another fib. During a provincial election, questions do have to be asked, and politicians have to answer them. Kim Campbell was quite arrogant, and that toppled the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. Likewise, Danielle Smith is arrogant, and that will be her downfall. These Ralph Klein clones are are a detriment to the well being of Alberta. Ralph Klein was extremely bad, and Danielle Smith is trying to outdo him in that regard.

  5. Not unusual for Conservatives. They are such screwups that they always have something to hide, and they know it.

  6. Well at least for her sake, Smith did not say an election is no time to discuss serious issues, or something equally bad, at least not yet. However, it does seem to be the direction she is going in.

    I suppose her staff and party are now in damage control mode and this is one tactic to try limit or control the damage. It may help them, but I’m not so sure. A big part of the problem has been Smith’s inability to explain or reconcile contradictory or inconsistent things. Talking less isn’t going to fix this, although perhaps it might take people’s attention away from it a bit.

    A risk is if people get fewer answers, they might start to come up with their own. While Smith can control what others ask her, she can’t control the larger public discussion around issues, as she found out when she tried to stop talking about them before.

    It is a somewhat desperate plan by the UCP. Trying to delay the election or get out of a debate will only make Smith and her party look worse. When election ads start running with the questions she does not want to answer, it will be even harder for her to avoid them.

  7. You have to listen to her crafted radio show to hear her yakking….after a word from her sponsors…

  8. Brian Mason is absolutely right all our conversations with Smith and her candidates in 2012 were fixed on privatization of health care and education, it got her fired in 1999 by the conservatives for promoting privatization of education as a School Board Trustee in Calgary, and her stupidity in 2012 got her defeated by Allison Redford. You would have to be a damn fool to think she has changed. She has proven time and time again that she is as dumb as she ever was, going against what the people want is really stupid idea. She is only catering to 20% of the population, and I don’t think for one minute that the polls are correct. I can’t find anyone dumb enough it support her , but apparently the easy to fool rural Albertans still do. Peter Lougheed certainly wasn’t that stupid. Brian Mason , Laurie Blakeman, and I gave talks at the university of Alberta, in 2003 about what Klein was doing to us and how it would effect these students in the future, yet I felt it was a waste of time. The only students who seemed to care were foreign students I talked to afterwards and none were able to vote in Alberta.

    1. Alan K. Spiller: I have seen photos and videos of events where Danielle Smith was speaking. There was one in Edmonton, not long ago. There were a lot of seniors at the event. Rural Albertans also don’t care. In Postmedia newspapers, many of them still follow Danielle Smith. They don’t seem to learn.

  9. Dec 10, 2020 — I reject the entire premise of your question,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Same old same old UCP.

  10. Do you really think that Smith would refuse to debate Notley? That would be a real disappointment. I was looking forward to Smith’s performance.

  11. Well, well. Shades of the Harper government media control, which was also tried in BC with Crispy Clarke. In both places it was a grand failure. Why would the UCP think the strategy will win in Alberta?

  12. A few things. Firstly, avoiding journalists’ questions feeds the extreme right-wing narrative that our corporate oligopoly Canadian mainstream media are riven with socialists and other lefties — it’s a howler, of course, but that’s the narrative among the UCP’s and federal CPC’s most rabid base of supporters. What can you expect from a party that thought Jason Kenney — probably the most ideological, doctrinaire right-wing Premier Alberta had seen since Peter Lougheed threw the SoCreds out in 1971 — wasn’t conservative enough?

    Secondly, I wonder whether Press Gallery journalists could pool their efforts and each ask their one permitted question as a follow-up to their colleagues’ questions, drawing lots for first question.
    Finally, once the election campaign truly begins, she won’t be able to dodge the questions of voters. This election is going to be such a squeaker, especially in battleground YYC, that flipping even a few hundred votes between the UCP and NDP in some of those Calgary seats could decide the government, and if she turns off too many moderate conservative voters, so that they stay home, Rachel Notley could be in for a good night.

  13. Harper muzzled everyone after the election , all MPs and government employees.
    This will make elections much more fun . You will get up the morning after and open a great big mystery box , won’t we? Assuming that the no questions move isn’t codified and we just get to look at it unopened as edicts magically appear.
    Vote Schrödinger!!!

  14. This one question restriction was not Smith’s idea. We have known for years that Smith loves to prattle on about her crackpot ideas. This restriction was mandated by her handlers, most likely at this point in time, Take Back Alberta.

  15. To former-ProgCon PM Kim Campbell’s glib faux pas I would add former-CPC PM Stephen Harper’s attempts to squelch questions about his own policies: he “stumped” at invited-only, invited-questions-only rallies of the preacher’s-choir sort during the 2015 federal campaign; when his minister John Duncan defended his own incumbency in the riding where I live during the same election when he was ordered to avoid any venue where questions might be asked about the CPC platform, he assiduously never showed up for a single candidates’ debate—a weird thing since if ever there was a swing riding, this one would have been it and Duncan would have known it since he had to sit-out one CPC term out, defeated by NDP candidate Catherine Bell, before regaining the riding in 2011. Yet in 2015 he was twice as shy as he naturally is because of Harper’s omertà campaign and was again defeated, this time by Gord Johns, most capable NDP MP, now serving his third term as our MP—a very engaging and, so far, very popular MP.

    Note the incumbencies for all three defendants named were dismissed by voters (Harper’s defeat was somewhere in the middle between a fairly competitive result for Duncan and a total blow-out for Campbell). It might be a truism that politicians who dismiss questions risk dismissal themselves.

    Presumably Danielle Smith has whipped her UCP candidates into maintaining her version of political omertà—at least ostensibly and for now —handcuffing them like puppets on a perp-stroll through the many public engagements and news media scrums to come—if they come. For now the election writ dangles pendulously as if from a bib, and about to drop in a fortnight. It’ll be interesting to see if the one-question rule is foist upon UCP candidates while they’re out on the hustings, or if it’s a bozo-eruption nappy specially pinned onto Danielle alone.

    Not every UCP candidate is as dangerously inarticulate and non-circumspect as Smith, so a blanket order to evade questions from rival contenders, constituents and reporters is bound to stifle whatever naturally adventitious elocution chi might have and, of course, make chim sound evasive and suspect chimself. That’s gotta rankle some candidates because it reduces the UCP campaign to an embarrassing “Vote For Danielle Smith And Her Marionettes” slogan. It also puts paid to any candidate’s claim that chi really wants to hear about and understand cher prospective constituents’ concerns. Then again, there’s so little for UCP candidates to boast about—certainly with regard their new leader—it mightn’t matter all that much anyway. Not even in swingin’ Cow-Town.

    Now, I’m only a wrinkly old rustic who’s cast his votes at the same place for half my life, but I seen aplenty. Like the time a really feisty, smart woman we had high hopes for won the nomination to be our NDP candidate for a provincial election. Thing was, in a more intimate town hall engagement during the official campaign she seemed quite different: uncharacteristically reticent to answer even easy questions, and looking, I thought, conspicuously frustrated by her handler’s ball-signals from the back of the room. During this infamous 2013 election NDP candidates were ordered to practice “positive politics” while on campaign, including not attacking the corrupt BC Liberal government because, I guess, that’d be ‘too negative.’ The treasure trove of BC Liberal treachery was ignored and our challenger was disallowed her natural strength, reduced to giving gallingly potted answers one would sooner expect from an unpopular, defensive incumbent.

    Unsurprisingly, the BC Liberal candidate ended up winning a TKO despite stumping for a proven corrupt and unpopular government simply by responding forthrightly (somewhat advantaged by his rookie status). The Dipper candidate and her party should have soundly defeated the perfidious BC Liberals. I reckon stifling NDP candidates’ ability to correspond must have had something to do with the party blowing its 20-point lead going into the campaign. BC Liberal premier Christy Clark’s single-note campaign was so preposterous it should have multiplied her then-twelve year-old government’s litany of perfidy— and yet she won. Over the next four years BC got a hard lesson by electing this incompetent, and all simply because her main rival refused to grapple with her boring ad hominem (the BC NDP proved it learned its own lesson by becoming government two and a half terms ago—and not by turning the other cheek, either. The BC Liberals, on the other hand, just changed their name).

    Clam-up orders have gotta be a double whammy for candidates who happen to have innate rhetorical skills because it doesn’t matter how high their flights rhetoric, oratorical evasiveness is something voters’ olfactory acuity picks up on right away.

    Alberta’s next election (whether it happens on May 29 we’ll know in about a fortnight) is one of those strange contests where the governing party, in this case, does everything wrong until it’s natural advantages, this time of incumbency, are nullified and simply having power is the only thing to recommend it, at which point it’s at break-even only if it doesn’t slide further. A new leader can help: chi usually enjoys some insulation from cher predecessors’ mistakes (in Danielle’s case there was only one) and is initially forgiven for cher own opening-night jitters. But Smith is not new enough to shake her record as destroyer of parties of the right—now two-for-two and apparently going for trifecta— nor forgivable enough for her astoundingly incompetent mistakes so consistently and consecutively committed —and at the worst times possible, no less. Dodging legitimate questions is merely the latest blunder and, with 44 days to go, there’s sure to be more—really, a tribute to Danielle’s sincerity.

    Oh, and not to mention that the Loyal Opposition has a proven record of competent government, just the previous one, in fact, which makes comparison as easy as it could possibly be for voters. That might end up the only thing that recommends it to the Alberta electorate. Imagine Smith doesn’t commit any more boners: it could be a very tight race if power for its own sake were the only consideration.

    You just about can’t make this stuff up. Smith, who only got where she is by insinuating herself upon a desperately divided party and haplessly inept, first-term government has done almost everything she possibly could to disqualify her and, of course, the very party that picked her for leader.

    It’s really up to you, now, my Alberta friends, whether you take Danielle Smith’s invitation, “Down, down, down the dark ladder” (with nod to a famous Prairie chanteuse) or slam the sewer-manhole shut.

  16. Zombie Morley Safer: ” Madame Premier, I’m told I am only allowed one question, so, I’ll keep it brief. What day is it?”
    Danielle Smith: “Why that’s an excellent question! One I might have asked myself! However, Alberta voters need to know that no matter what day it is, I’m here to say what someone wants to hear!”
    A track for that? This media source is owned by an American hedge fund. Get your facts straight!
    A track for that? https://youtu.be/4THFRpw68oQ

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