Danielle Smith’s ‘Pillow Talk’: All we are asking, is give oil a chance!

In what must be one of the more bizarre settings for an official news conference in Canadian political history, a cranky Alberta Premier Danielle Smith held forth on her meeting with Donald Trump from what appeared to be her hotel bed yesterday. 

Only John and Yoko did it better! But all they wanted was for us to give peace a chance.

According to Ms. Smith, she asked the president-elect to imagine there’s no tariffs. She suggested it’d be easy if he tried. But apparently her self-reported Mar-a-Lago elevator pitch Saturday to the man who is about to be sworn in as the Leader of the Free World on Monday fell on deaf ears. 

Well, what did she expect? The guy’s almost 80. Maybe he forgot to turn on his hearing aids. Or maybe – this would be more likely, actually – he just thought Ms. Smith was another loser, the governor of Albania or Atlantis or something, come to suck up to him and ask for favours like everybody else. 

Whatever he thought about his visitor, when she told him all Alberta is asking is give our oil a chance, his answer, according to her version of events, was basically Fuhgeddaboudit! “No. I’m not expecting any exemptions,” she told the media grimly between frequent gulps of water. Sounds like a hard no to me.

So if Ms. Smith imagined she would emerge as the hero of her Florida stab at diplomacy with a tariff carve-out for Alberta, she was obviously disappointed.

And I do mean obviously. Several times during a half-hour “media round table” posted to the Internet – recorded on an unsteady smartphone by the look of it – she wore an expression sour enough to curdle the cream in the minibar whenever she sneered about “eastern politicians.” 

Asked by a reporter about a suggestion by Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly that Ottawa might block oil and gas exports as a response to huge U.S. tariffs, Ms. Smith was surly. “Oil and gas is owned by the provinces,” she said, her lip curling, “principally Alberta, and we won’t stand for that.”

“I can’t predict what Albertans would do,” she responded to another reporter. “But, as you know, um, part of my strategy over the past two years has been to say that we can have a constructive relationship with Canada, and I would hope that would continue to be the case.”

What? We’re a different country now? 

Well, maybe not yet. But, Ms. Smith continued, those eastern politicians “will have a national unity crisis on their hands at the same time as having a crisis with our U.S. trade partner” if they try anything. One wonders what the federal Conservative leader will have to say about this, or if anyone will think to ask him. Pierre Poilievre would probably prefer it if Ms. Smith would just zip it for the time being. 

I suggest readers make a point of watching Ms. Smith’s comments about Ms. Joly, which begin at about the seven-minute point in the recording. This is a flash of a different Danielle Smith from the cheerful gas-lighter we’re used to seeing when the premier steps up to the lectern at a normal press conference back home. 

Well, maybe she stayed up too late the night before. She looked tired. She should have a chance to recover some equilibrium now that her “family vacation,” which her official itinerary indicated last week was the only thing on her agenda this week, has resumed. 

Or maybe it was all a ruse. This interesting clip from a 2021 meeting of the apparently misnamed Canada Strong & Free Network, as the Manning Centre is nowadays known, shows former Reform Party Leader Preston Manning schooling Ms. Smith on how to blackmail Canada into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51^st state. He says this stuff while cheekily wearing an Order of Canada pin in his lapel. 

Since the premier looked as if she were propped up by pillows in bed, the virtual news conference was immediately dubbed the “pillow talk” by social media wits. This prompted a snippy online response to a reporter by one of the premier’s staffers, who insisted the premier was sitting on a couch. The reporter accepted the correction.

Well, whatever, as long as everyone understands that if a couch looks like a bed, and it has pillows like a bed, folks are going to think it is a bed. The Premier’s Office has refused to tell reporters where the couch or bed is located, “for security reasons,” although you’d think security would be pretty good nowadays anywhere near Mara-a-Lago.

Maybe it’s unsupervised journalists they’re worried about. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about Ms. Smith’s freelance diplomacy. 

Rachel Notley returns to the practice of law

Former Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley, once upon a time a staff lawyer for the United Nurses of Alberta, has returned to the practice of labour law with a midsized labour law firm with offices in North Vancouver and Calgary. 

Southern Butler Price LLP said in a news release that Ms. Notley will bring “a wealth of experience in leadership, governance, and conflict resolution to SBP,” which is hard to dispute. The release did not make it clear what Ms. Notley’s duties will be, however.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about Ms. Notley’s post-political career in the fullness of time.