Chemtrails, moon men, and United Conservative Party 2.0 – nope, this is not your father’s Conservative Party! 

A political party that has completely lost its mind is no laughing matter, but I’m going to start with a dad joke. 

Since my late dad was an astrophysicist and one of the founding members of the University of Victoria faculty, his dad jokes could sometimes take a scientific turn, like the one he used to tell his first-year astronomy students. 

We know that tiny people live on the moon, he’d explain. (That, presumably would perk up a few laggards in the room who thought Astronomy 100 was going to be an easy science course.) We’ve developed extremely powerful telescopes, you see. We’ve scoured every part of the moon. And yet we’ve never seen any evidence of life. So … (beat, beat) … the people who live there must be really small! 

I assume that elicited a chuckle or two from some of his more alert students. 

God only knows what would happen if a real astrophysicist told a joke like that at a members-only UCP meeting like the ones Premier Danielle Smith has been going to all around the province to ensure her most loyal supporters don’t skid her like they skidded Jason Kenney in her leadership review at party’s AGM in Red Deer on Nov. 1 and 2. 

The UCP base may not believe in tiny cultural Marxists from the moon – yet – but they certainly believe in chemtrails, the loony* fairy tale that someone is using jet contrails to spray us with secret chemicals to do something to us, presumably something at least as bad as COVID vaccines, possibly to control what’s left of our collective mind.

Thanks to Katie Teeling, the former editor of the University of Alberta student newspaper who has been showing up at Ms. Smith’s constituency meetings and live-tweeting them, we know that the premier was asked a question about chemtrails in the airspace over Edmonton at a meeting in Alberta’s capital. 

And thanks to someone, there’s even a poor quality video with iffy but serviceable sound showing how Ms. Smith responded, an answer that has caused some controversy since the premier failed to say to her questioner, Now look, madame, there are no chemtrails. So just stop it! 

The conventional wisdom is that Premier Smith feels the need to take anyone who might question her suitability to lead the UCP seriously, and placate them if possible. This is strategy we are all forced to adopt from time to time at family dinners, so it passes an initial credibility test. 

“The best I have been able to do,” Ms. Smith began her response, “is to talk to the woman who is responsible for controlling the airspace, and she says no one is allowed to go up and spray, anything, in the air.”

This on its face is troubling, since it suggests that Alberta’s premier has already been asking people with serious jobs questions about something that is taken seriously only in the most deranged corners of the Internet. (Take note, regular readers, we will likely be hearing from some of those people in the comments section of this blog. Probably at length.)

“We have a…,” Ms. Smith continued as some groans and gumbles begin to be heard from the audience. According to Ms. Teeling, some members of the crowd even booed. “…Nope,” the premier resumed, “she told me!” 

Ms. Smith then goes on in this short clip posted by @disorderedyyc, an unidentified self-described purveyor of video clips who is worth following if you follow Alberta politics. 

“The other person told me that if anyone is doing it, it’s the U.S. Department of Defense,” she said, apparently completely serious. “And, you know, like, I, I, I have some limitations in what I can do in my job. I don’t know that I would have much power if that is the case, if the U.S. Department of Defense is spraying us.”

Now, who can know what’s in another person’s mind? Not me! But this certainly suggests – does it not? – that Ms. Smith really does think someone is misting us with chemtrails unknown, and that the only hard part is figuring out who? (To be completely clear, no one is spraying us – at least not with contrails from passing airliners. And that skunky smell you smell on Edmonton’s streets? That’s neither from chemtrails nor actual skunks.)

“So, I will do what I can to investigate,” the premier promised, “but, I, everywhere I have gone, I have found no evidence that there’s any private sector company involved, my environment department’s not involved, my airports tell me that they have a record of every single plane that goes up, so … (she shrugs) … “I’m kinda dead-ended here.”

“If you have some special lead that you wanna give me afterwards,” she concluded, “please let me know and I’ll track it down.”

Throughout this short video clip, “Red Tape Reduction” and Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally stares off into space, occasionally squirming, as if wishing he could be magically transported somewhere else. And – who knows? – maybe if someone in the Premier’s Office notices the expression on his face when his boss is talking, he will be!

So, in case you’ve been wondering, while our health care system collapses, while no one is looking for teachers to staff those empty schools the government promises to start building, our peerless leader will be trying to figure out who’s responsible for the invisible, undetectable chemtrail mist slowly settling over Edmonton – perhaps explaining to credulous UCP supporters why so many of their neighbors here vote for the NDP.

Meanwhile, while the premier is preoccupied with the question of who’s controlling our minds with chemtrail pixie dust, who is going to figure out the vital question of what the heck kind of miniaturized Alberta-Bill-of-Rights-protected weapons we’re going to need to stop the invasion of Alberta by pint-sized illegal aliens from the moon?

*Derived from the late Latin, lunaticus, in turn derived from Roman Latin, luna, or, the moon, which was thought to cause temporary lunacy.