Can Danielle Smith be trusted about anything she says?
Now that Alberta’s premier has introduced what is widely acknowledged to be the harshest anti-transgender legislation in Canada, rivalling that in some of the more benighted corners of the Republic to our south, we all need to pause and reflect on that question.
A CBC commentator called the suite of bills introduced by the United Conservative Party “Canada’s most restrictive and wide-ranging set of policies governing the rights and aspirations” of transgender young people. The three bills, wrote Jason Markusoff, “put Smith on the hard edge of Canadian reforms.”
Senator Kristopher Wells, recently appointed to Canada’s Upper House for his advocacy for sexual minority rights, described the legislation as “the most discriminatory and anti-2SLGBTQ+ legislation in Canadian history.”
When passed by the UCP majority in the House, Bill 26, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, will prohibit physicians from treating young people under 16 seeking transgender treatment with puberty blockers and hormone therapies.
Bill 27, the Education Amendment Act, will force students under 16 to get their parents’ permission if they want to change their names or pronouns at school. Bill 29, tendentiously named the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, will ban transgender athletes from competing in leagues not designated as co-ed, among other things.
When Bill 26 is passed by the United Conservative Party majority in the Legislature, it will interfere directly with medical decisions for strictly political reasons – principally the premier’s need to pacify her party’s radical MAGA base at leadership review vote taking place today in Red Deer.
So even if your medical concern is something more commonplace – say, getting your seasonal COVID-19 vaccination or reproductive health care, both of which like gender-affirming treatment have because obsessions of the American MAGA movement that now drives the UCP – you have to wonder what will become the next medical target for the social conservative busybodies of the premier’s caucus.
“This legislation will dictate what health care services Albertans can and cannot access,” said Friends of Medicare Director Chris Gallaway. “It is an appalling abuse of government power. Health care decisions are between patients and their doctors. The premier reaching in to set health policy like this sets a dangerous new precedent which should be of deep concern to all Albertans.”
Not so long ago, Ms. Smith stoutly defended the rights of citizens that she now wants to brush aside.
A decade ago, a Calgary Sun political columnist described Ms. Smith, then the Wildrose Party leader, choking up about the need for gay-straight alliances. “Wildrose leader Danielle Smith stands in the Legislature Tuesday and talks about meeting kids at gay-straight alliances,” Rick Bell trowelled it on. “It doesn’t take long for her to choke up as she speaks.”
But, hey, it’s been 10 years!
Just last year, though, in a statement on Pride Month during the 2023 election campaign, Ms. Smith was still insisting “everyone deserves to feel safe, welcome and respected in our province.”
“That’s why we will continue to listen to 2SLGBTQIA+ Albertans’ concerns and find ways to strengthen our relationships through dialogue and tangible action,” Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid quoted her saying in a column headlined, “Why Danielle Smith will lean away from past flakiness, toward sensible government.”
It would appear Mr. Braid has come to regret that assertion. Well, good for him for admitting it.
Soon after last year’s election, Ms. Smith even trotted out a sympathetic story about a non-binary relative, real or imagined.
“I have a non-binary family member, and I believe these decisions are very personal, and it should not be debated in public,” she said. “We shouldn’t be making any child feel like the issues they’re struggling with are something that’s a political football.” (Emphasis added.)
Well, that was then, and this is a whole year later. Gender identity issues are personal? Forget about it! Now they’re among the biggest political footballs in Alberta history – and this is a province that’s had a quarterback and a punt returner as premiers! Now Premier Smith is doing the punting.
Aggressively defending her policy at a press conference on Halloween, the premier barked to a journalist that “we’re going to be making sure that our medical professionals know that this is a treatment that’s available for adults only.”
“Look, doctors were given a lot of latitude to prescribe opioids and now we have a fentanyl crisis as a result of inappropriate prescribing,” she told another reporter by way of explanation, defaming physicians in passing. “And we have had to put guardrails around who can prescribe opioids, how they can be delivered. And I would say doctors aren’t always right.”
She continued, claiming that puberty blockers and hormone therapies will have life-long consequences: “This has supreme consequences on young people,” she insisted. “… If you’re medicalized for life, it has consequences. If you are medicalized too early, it has consequences on fertility. And we believe that sometimes you have to step in and make sure you’re preserving choice and protecting the rights of kids so they can make those decisions as adults.”
This is sophistry, needless to say. “She doesn’t have the medical expertise to be able to make that decision about whether gender-affirming care is appropriate,” an Edmonton pediatrician and University of Alberta professor told The Canadian Press. “Secondly, calling some of these things irreversible or harmful is simply false,” added Dr. Tehseen Ladha.
Readers can decide whom they believe on this hitherto esoteric topic.
But there’s no argument to be made that Ms. Smith can be trusted to stand by anything she says.
Not every conservative politician would fail to do the right thing regardless of the consequences, but Ms. Smith has shown us clearly what she does when political expediency demands.
Don’t expect her to change after today’s vote in Red Deer.
Perhaps Smith should now put former libertarian, current premier down as her social media profile.
Libertarians, which she once claimed to be, would not tell municipal governments how they must count ballots in their elections, professions how to regulate their members on political matters, or require provincial approval on Federal funding to municipalities. They also wouldn’t try to control what pronouns students and teachers use in the classroom.
I realized years ago when Smith backed up her Lake of Fire candidate, all her talk about being libertarian was a sham. Her party then was just another version of our grandfathers conservatives and she is now turning her current one into that as well. She is even making Kenney look a bit progressive now.
It sometimes can be politically beneficial to pick on minorities, although it didn’t work out for the former New Brunswick Premier and recently got the Saskatchewan one a much reduced number of MLAs. So maybe in a few years Albertans will once again repudiate a party that is turning into our grandfathers conservatives. But until then she seems to want to continue her war against doctors and also start one against trans people.
For those who are tasked with synthesizing data for a branding exercise, here’s the challenge. What is the UCP brand? “punch down and suck up”? That one is on the nose, and currently in first place.. although..”we’re not happy until they’re not happy” is in close at second! Oh by the way. When did it become bad to be different? According to many, it’s just the way we are! https://youtu.be/3830kIWgdZc
Yep, Daniele Smith has sure thrown a monkey wrench into the (profitable) medical gender pipeline. Seriously, Alberta is starting to catch up to other jurisdictions around the world which are starting to put the brakes on the routine dispensing of puberty blockers and other experimental hormone therapies that would have made Josef Mengele green with envy. The UK recently announced a ban on them for teens under 18.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-restrictions-on-puberty-blockers
Mengele, really? Good Lord. How many lives are hurt, even cut short, by this kind of moral panic?
Perhaps we will be lucky and the UCP will kick out Smith just like so many other leaders got kicked out of the PC / UCP premier’s chair? This time probably not, but of course we can hope this happens, before Smith totally runs Alberta into the ground.
Many an Albertan conservative pundit wishfully predicted Ms Smith would turn to the center when it came time to govern and / or be re-elected.
But those same Albertans moved the Overton Window so far towards the Neoliberal (see where the ABNDP government have ended up) that a shallow Libertarian (or is she just an opportunist?) like Ms Smith is easily steered even further away from representing all Albertans by the social conservatives.
Like an airplane trapped in a graveyard spiral, our premier is too inexperienced to pull out of this mess. Hopefully the people of the province can survive the crash.
Or will start to bail out?
Medicalized? That’s my word of the week especially after a few bourbons while self-medicalizing. And blaming doctors for the opioid crisis without a tip of the hat to Big Pharma is rich. Scotty, beam me up.
Lefty: I almost had to be medicalized when I read that word. While I’ve never encountered it before, Ms. Smith’s use of it suggests it comes from the American MAGA jargon generator, where we can be assured it is being used for malign purposes. I expect we’ll be seeing it a lot more soon. It’s not clear what it means, but it seems to be being used by the premier to describe a state of affairs in which we require medical treatment from time to time for the rest of our lives – you know, like everyone, everywhere, all the time. No doubt it is intended to be used as an antidote to public health care, implying that if we don’t take care of ourselves and can’t pay, we have no right to expect medical treatment without experiencing bankruptcy. After all, Ms. Smith has already said she is confident we can decide for ourselves whether or not we’re going to get cancer, diabetes, or whatever. DJC
I first heard “medicalized” in very trendy birthing centres in the States in the early 2000s. The idea basically was that birth is a natural process and the medical industrial complex has “medicalized” it for profit. You can see that might resonate in a society with privatized medical care. We were a bit caught up with it ourselves but luckily my wife gave birth in a birthing centre attached to a hospital and when she and my daughter were in distress she was able to get the help she needed. I’ve since learned that giving birth is one of the most medically complicated and hazardous things you can do, and while the medical profession has a lot to answer for when it comes to women’s health it is not medicalization but the lack of it that makes the US maternal mortality rate far higher than Canada’s or any other comparable nation’s.
American Friend, you raise an interesting point about the so-called “medicalization” of pregnancy & childbirth. Yes, this is a natural process, but in pre-industrial times maternal, neonatal & infant mortality rates were far higher than they are today, & women typically bore far more children than survived to adulthood. Today most women only bear one to three children, and there is virtually zero tolerance for losing any of them at birth.
An “all-natural” birthing process is all well & good until something goes wrong, then mom is desperate for their baby — and/or their own life — to be saved.
On the other hand, some advocates feel that caesarean section rates in Canada are far higher than they ought to be. So, there is clearly room for improvement in the balance between ensuring a safe delivery and excessive medical intervention in childbirth.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10196217/
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/phi/data-tool/index?Dom=2&Ind=7&MS=9
https://www.cihi.ca/en/indicators/low-risk-caesarean-sections
This is the ideology of the midwife or doula movement in fact that child birth has been “medicalized” and that it is only right to have your baby at home
Are they all Maga too?
RB: A lot of hippie “progressive” stuff is revealed as pretty MAGA if you scratch the surface. Distrust of scientific medicine because you want to take mega-vitamins is probably not all that different from distrust of scientific medicine because you think vaccines emit tiny radio signals to control your brain. Wanting low taxes and small government because you run a donut shop isn’t all that different from wanting the same thing because you sell organic honey from a roadside stand. And you’ll notice how the German Greens have all turned out to be warmongers – even though you’d think risking nuclear war isn’t actually a great way to protect the environment. DJC
Blaming doctors and/or Big Pharma for the drugs catastrophe is an expression of neoliberal supply-side economic philosophy. We have a major demand problem, which is being met with a supply response, in the manner in which economies actually work. The rate of abuse of opioids in Canada doubled from 3% of users in 2017 to 6% in 2019. During that time frame abuse of stimulants rose from 19% of users to 37%. I shudder to think of what the numbers are since Covidmania, and the Feds have nothing new since 2019. I still haven’t squared this prog notion that Big Pharma turned everyone into junkies as a function of psychopathic corporate avarice, but only kooks looked sideways at their mRNA concoctions that had proven consistently lethal in testing right up to the moment they got Emergency Use Authorization under the ol’ Drumpfster. But then, Russell Williams was a “model military officer” in our valiant Canadian Armed Forces. Yin and yang or some such thing, I suppose.
Trans kids are nothing to Danielle Smith but a foot in the door.
Why is she picking on this relatively small population? She wants to go after women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.
It is not a coincidence that Smith appointed a staunch Catholic as health minister, nor is it a coincidence that she’s farming out hospitals to Catholic Covenant Health. Look who’s with her in that photo: Mr. Foot-in-the-Door himself, Joseph Schow.
Smith’s argument about protecting fertility does not make any sense in the context of her new legislation. Puberty blockers for transgender youth are a form of hormonal therapy, but they are not permanent and therefore do not affect fertility once their use is ceased. Bottom surgery is not done on children under 18 and is not done at all in Alberta. This legislation is highly misleading with regards to preserving fertility and does not prevent adults from having bottom surgery outside of Alberta.
That leaves gender-affirming hormone therapy such as testosterone and estradiol that induce development of secondary sex characteristics. Why is estradiol important? It is used in birth control.
If Smith succeeds in forcing this legislation on Albertans, there is nothing to stop her from coming after hormones used for birth control. The wide sweep of banning hormones won’t just prevent the use of birth control. Women who need hormone therapy for breast cancer will be out of luck, too.
Without a doubt, abortion is on Smith’s agenda, too. Republicans do what Republicans do, and that is what Smith is. How long before Smith, who seems to thinks she knows better than doctors, intervenes personally to stop women having complicated miscarriages from getting a life-saving abortion? This is what her attacks on doctors are about. She intends to stop them from doing their jobs in saving the lives of women who will bleed out without an abortion. Because yes, a D&C is abortion, even if it’s done for a pregnancy that has already failed.
This is where we are. Wake up, Alberta.
It’s Dog Whistle politics, and at the end of the day it’s about property. If you want to turn to the medical profession for guidance in these troubling matters, they’re the ones who told us homosexuality was a mental disorder, until suddenly it wasn’t. Transsexualism was apparently discovered by medical researchers in 1987. Maybe it was a novel thing like SARSCoV2. Health care is a super device for cleaving the society into little bits. There is no alternative to the medical profession, despite what the grifters would have us believe. But there is no question that modern medicine in Canada has been completely co-opted by US health-care modes, which are entirely corporate-controlled and profit-driven. Doctors are still workers, at least the good ones, despite the propensity among the profession to side-hustle as rent-seekers. Affording lower status to any group, from women, to homosexuals to ethnic or religious groups, or to children experiencing identity crisis serves to preserve or increase control of property by a minority. Divide and rule. That’s the prime directive of any Kon worth its salt.
My family has had personal experience with the challenges trans-gender youth face in this country. Some years ago, not long after our daughter moved out of the family home and in with her boyfriend — now husband — a co-worker of hers in the retail store where they both worked was thrown out of their family home. You see, this young person had been assigned female at birth but was transitioning to identifying as male. Our daughter and her partner took this young person in as a roommate to keep him from ending up homeless.
He eventually was able to gain the footing necessary to support himself and moved to a more friendly city for 2SLGBTQIA++ individuals — Vancouver. But had our daughter and her partner not been willing to take him in at the outset, there’s no telling what might have happened to him. The statistics aren’t pretty: trans youth are far more likely than other young people to attempt suicide or become homeless.
“Parents’ rights” can’t be allowed to trump safety of children and youth. If the kids are safe to disclose at home, the parents already know.
“Medicalized” vs “2SLGBTQIA++”, fighting for neological supremacy in the greatest battle since Sky Low Low took on Farmer Brooks!
Truest statement ever, Mr. C – Smith will not change after this weekend. I will even venture a guess that she will be emboldened by the vote and as dangerous she is at this moment she will enact even more cruel legislation and eliminate more rights and privileges. Smith is only about keeping and expanding her powers. Albertans love what she is doing as evidenced by her lead in every poll. The proof is in the eating of the pudding.
“If you are medicalized too early, it has consequences on fertility.” And, of course, that is the UCP’s true objection. In the UCP worldview, women have one purpose in life, and that’s it. Certain exceptions may temporarily apply – like our premier and Margaret Thatcher.
I have an obvious answer for this “shift” in Danielle Smith’s thinking. It’s called Take Back Alberta. They hold values that she doesn’t. Danielle Smith doesn’t hold social conservative stances, while Take Back Alberta does. She still doesn’t, but since it’s her leadership at stake, she does their bidding. If Danielle Smith wants to remain in power, she will dump the social liberal values she has, or Take Back Alberta dumps her. It’s her only hope of survival. Candidates with socially conservative thinking made the Wildrose face defeat to the Alberta PCs, twelve years ago. Jennifer Johnson, the UCP candidate who made the poop cookie comments, was supposed to be kept out of the UCP party and that was final. Danielle Smith said that because she knew what happened eleven years prior to the 2023 provincial election. Then, she welcomes Jennifer Johnson back into the UCP, and before this UCP AGM, which also holds her leadership review. These other policies were put forth right before her leadership review, because Danielle Smith must follow the orders of Take Back Alberta. It’s mind-boggling how many people fall for her lies. Postmedia columnists aren’t even questioning Danielle Smith on this either. Neither are other media sources questioning her on this.
I find the article terribly unfair. And totally support every measure taken and new Bill. I’m 55 and have voted for every one ☝️ f the top 5 parties in Canada. Different times have different needs. But the point of concern is the article seems to think it’s anti this and that. So the question and point is, 16 is not young enough to do whatever they want I suppose. The evidence is in. Wrong. Im a teacher. 16 is a sweet spot in maturity imo. I think they got it right. How young should life changing and independence begin? The article’s position and the author ✍ is way off.
Keinan: The Wildrose Danielle Smith would certainly disagree with you there. Reading the linked article would tell you that, as well as premier Danielle Smith.
Smith and her idiot followers don’t know what is best for the health care of those under 16. Its also not any of their business unless child abuse is involved and in this case it isn’t child abuse, its saving children’s sanity.
Smith’s previous position was as good as the time she needed it for, to look “reasonable”. Now the gloves are off. The legislation will harm those it is applied to, may cause some families to leave the province so their child can obtain the health care they need. Blockers are a life saver for many. Who is she to say they aren’t. Smith doesn’t even have children. Has she even spoken to people who want and need blockers? People who tend to think they know best or think this is what their version of god wants, just don’t play with a full deck or are so full of themselves they can’t think rationally.
Come to think of it didn’t a former P.M. once say something along the lines of, the state has no business in the bedrooms of the country? That applies to keep your hands off other people’s bodies unless invited to and don’t practise medicine without an education and license. \
This will not end well.