I’ve been writing these little meditations on the state of politics in Alberta now longer than it takes an infant to grow old enough to vote and in that time I have had many opportunities to observe certain failings in the quality of political discourse here.
Still, I must say I felt a little frisson of delight yesterday after returning from Ontario to hear our premier, Danielle Smith, declare with her usual unshakeable confidence that “we’ve got the lowest living standards in the world.”
Because Ms. Smith’s arguments sound persuasive but often don’t make a lot of sense when closely parsed, it was not entirely clear upon examination whether Ms. Smith had all of Canada in mind, or only Alberta.
Let’s go with the former, even if the latter plays a little better to Ms. Smith’s and other Alberta Conservatives’ constant whining about how Alberta is victimized by the East (a geographical region that appears also to include British Columbia).
To be fair, Ms. Smith then made a claim about how we’re falling behind all other advanced Western economies. This may or may not have been an effort to correct her earlier statement without admitting she was wrong. Admitting mistakes, after all, is not Danielle Smith’s style. Such breezy statements delivered with such apparent certainty are, it is said here, both intentional and instinctive.
Either way, I’m sure, Ms. Smith’s bombshell factoid will come as a surprise to the people of, say, Afghanistan, South Sudan, or Haiti – not to mention to those citizens of Canada and Alberta who haven’t yet gulped the MAGA Kool-Aid™ peddled by Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party and its federal farm team led by whomever leads it at the moment.
Nevertheless, Premier Smith explained with great assurance to Vassy Kapelos, host of CTV’s Question Period political program, this is all the fault of the Liberals in Ottawa for failing to build pipelines to seawater, or allow pipelines to be built to one coast or another, or something a lot like that. Also, carbon taxes!
This is Olympic-level gaslighting, of course, and it deserves acknowledgement as such before the backtracking, excuse-making, and tortured explanations begin to circulate. Surely by later today someone will have explained that Ms. Smith merely meant the rate at which our standard of living is improving, or something. Or maybe not. Why confuse the party base?
Regardless, the statement stands on its own as almost the Platonic ideal of gaslighting, and it deserves recognition and celebration as such. It can be heard at about 13 minutes and 20 seconds into the program, which CTV has kindly posted on its website if you can stand sitting through the advertisements.
Ms. Kapelos also deserves great credit for keeping a straight face when the premier uttered this howler. Most of us, I am sure, would have spat out our coffee, figuratively speaking, or stopped the premier immediately and wondered aloud if she was nuts, or if she thought we were.
Perhaps Ms. Kapelos just didn’t want Ms. Smith, who was obviously annoyed at the way the broadcaster kept asking questions the premier thought were impertinent, to tell her to piss off once again.
Garett Spelliscy, NDP executive director, sets June 30 departure date
Garett Spelliscy, Executive Director of the Alberta NDP, announced Friday on social media that after 14 years serving under three leaders and putting his name on countless fund-raising emails he will be stepping aside to pursue “new roles and projects.”
There is speculation, naturally, that party Leader Naheed Nenshi will replace Mr. Spelliscy with someone more Liberal red than NDP orange, but that remains to be seen. It may not be as easy as all that.
As Mr. Spelliscy said in his farewell note, “the party’s Executive will appoint a new Executive Director,” and Nenshi loyalists being thin on the ground these days, the leader depends on plenty of more traditional NDP stalwarts to keep the party machinery running.
Mr. Spelliscy was part of a small group of party officials perceived as close to former leader Rachel Notley. It would not be a shock if he popped up soon in a similar role in another province.
Nenshi all the way!
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
GDP per capita is an unreliable measure of how Canada is doing. I think it was Jim Stanford, formerly with Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and now with Centre for Future Work, or who pointed that out recently.
Join us on the Skip the rails! I have an old song for the old ones! God bless us! Here we go! https://youtu.be/J3H1Njg5eNo
Smith constantly and glibly says things with the confidence of someone who thinks about what she says, so this is not a surprise. She is a politician whose mouth is often engaged but her brain is not. As in she does not let the facts get in the way of her arguments.
She recently traveled to Asia, but skipped the poorer parts, but I suspect she still knows they exist. Maybe she has never been to Africa and the number of very poor countries there, but they still exist too.
Perhaps she will do the decent thing and clarify that she misspoke, but she is not much for contrition. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just tries to ignore her factually incorrect comments and move on.
If Alberta really wants to be taken more seriously by the rest of Canada a good start would for us to get a serious leader instead of a kook.
You are completly right, Dave!
Agreed but Albertans love her so say the polls. Not me particularly but UCP has significant lead. I often wonder what to call my fellow Albertans who seem to worship these comments, endorse them, forward to all, and never utter a word of criticism. Well maybe I don’t wonder but take a guess similar to your words
Voters in Alberta do not appear to care who leads the conservative movement as long as they are in fact very conservative and bash the rest of Canada.
So is the” lowest standard of living ” Marlaina’s version of Canada is broken”? Seems like a strange message for someone who a few short months ago was touting all the reasons people should be moving to Alberta: jobs, housing, prosperity etc. etc.
Walķ back Wednesday?
I’m giving the benefit of the doubt there because I’m sure there’s probably going to be more questions about her walkback on Team Canada’s not buying US alcohol.
Which in my opinion is just trying to earn brownie points for the visitors coming in for the G7, with an eye on whomever she’s inviting to the Stampede. Plus I’m sure the security people already here have probably been vocal.
Oddly enough, if Alberta’s “best Whiskey in the world ” was good enough for De Santis, I would think she should be proud to feature it for her American guests, right? She must have been listening to the remarks from the Ambassador.
How rude of us Canadians to stop buying their products.
Happy Motoring to the tone deaf.
Just out of curiosity, does inviting the PM to game 5 mean she won’t have to explain the tickets?
Wait…..when is game 5??
(need to check….)
Well, well….. so Marlaina makes a show of inviting the PM to game 5…..June 14th, the night before the start of the G7 meeting. How nice. (Zippers)
Danielle Smith lies and lies, and will continue to lie, while the blaming someone else for the problems that her own party, the UCP, and the Alberta PCs (before the Alberta NDP came into power, a decade ago) were responsible for causing. Vassy Kapelos knows that Danielle Smith lies, and she has even looked flustered when she has seen her lie during interviews.
The proper oil and tax rates that Peter Lougheed collected are gone, very large sums of money were wasted on very big boondoogles, all costing us billions of dollars. Public education, public healthcare, social services, infrastructure, and regulations for oil industry related reclamation were ignored. All of this lost Alberta at least whopping $1 trillion. Utility rates have soared to unaffordable levels, because of Ralph Klein dereguting electricity and natural gas, as well as the UCP messing with a bad policy of economic witholding. Former power engineers have said that electricity deregulation was a very foolish thing to do, and they were right.
Poverty rates in Alberta are going upwards. Many people are going hungry. Wait times in hospitals are getting longer. Class sizes in schools are not going down. Power and utility prices are not lowering either.
Danielle Smith wants to lay the blame on things such as the federal Liberal’s carbon tax, not realizing that the party she joined eleven years ago, via a mass floor crossing, which was the Alberta PCs, had created the first carbon tax in all of North America, in 2007, which was also in conjunction with the oil companies, because they knew greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are a serious threat. The provincial fuel tax, which the Alberta PCs put in to effect, wasn’t removed, or lowered by the UCP either. It happens to cost more than the federal Liberal’s carbon tax.
I remember someone mentioning how they went to Norway and Alaska, and they said how those places are benefitting from their oil wealth, and we in Alberta aren’t. This person also knew Alberta PC MLAs from the Peter Lougheed days, and said there is a big difference between them and politicians, such as Ralph Klein, whom they also knew for many years, as well as what we have in the UCP. They acknowledged that with Peter Lougheed, things were much better.
In regards to the NDP and Naheed Nenshi seemingly not making any progress, the fault is twofold. It actually began when Rachel Notley was the leader of the NDP, and it still is an issue with Naheed Nenshi. The media lies about the NDP and they will never hold the UCP to account for anything they do that is unethical, wastes so much money, and causes hardship to people in a variety of ways. In 2023, had the media took the UCP, as well as Danielle Smith to task for all the things they were doing wrong, and did not lie about Rachel Notley and the NDP, we would have the NDP remaining in power, and we wouldn’t see these plethora of problems in Alberta, which the UCPhas given us. Licia Corbella, is among those in the media who blatantly lied about Rachel Notley and the NDP. Postmedia columnists continue to elevate the UCP and Danielle Smith. The other matter is that Danielle Smith has shut the Alberta Legislature practically right off, so that it hardly ever has sessions. Danielle Smith intentionally postponed the by-election dates, including for Naheed Nenshi’s riding of Edmonton Strathcona, so she will avoid facing scrutiny by Naheed Nenshi in the Alberta Legislature. In no way can the NDP be faulted for this.
Despite this, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The very expensive boondoogles the UCP are involved with are very bad, but one of them, which is the MH Care (Corrupt Care) scandal, which is probably more than the $614 million price tag, is going to obliterate the UCP, because of how bad it is.
“Surely by later today someone will have explained that Ms. Smith merely meant the rate at which our standard of living is improving, or something.”
Fortunately, we won’t have to wait that long. The very next words out of her mouth were “like, we’re falling behind all the OECD countries in productivity growth and standard of living growth.”
So yes, Smith started with a wild overstatement, but she immediately dialled it back to a much more modest claim. I would bet that “falling behind ALL the OECD countries” is still an exaggeration, but she clearly didn’t have South Sudan and Afghanistan in mind. Is she right to be concerned that Canada is falling behind, let’s say, many of our peer economies in the OECD in productivity growth and standard of living growth? I don’t know, but I’d quite like to.
Corwin: As I said to another commenter, I’d buy it that this is a correction if she’d preceded the two statements with, “Pardon me, I misstated that,” or words to that effect. She never does this, though. She makes a wildly false statement. Then she makes another misleading statement. They may or may not be connected to one another. I think this is classic gaslighting and quite intentional, or at least instinctive. She is such a dangerous liar because she sounds to confident and well-informed throughout. That is why I said in the article that it pays to see what she is saying in writing and to parse it. DJC
So true!!!! Bang on Mr. C. Smith can talk and talk and it is absolute nonsense in the end. It goes to show you that reasonable words spoken in a well modulated tone can still amount to a steaming pile of horseshit.
Her voters do not care what she says or that it is wrong as long as she is bashing the rest of Canada and feeding their sense of victimhood.
She seems like someone with BPD, gas lighting is one of the leading indicators of BPD. In addition, in the short run they seem very convincing but their arguments, hypothesis can never stand up to critical scrutiny.
BPD = Borderline Personality Disorder. DJC
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
Here is a link to Jim Stanford’s article explaining that GDP is a “deeply flawed” method of trying to determine standard of living, and he explains the reasons for this.
https://centreforfuturework.ca/2025/05/06/per-capita-gdp-is-a-deeply-flawed-measure-of-economic-performance-and-living-standards/#:~:text=By%20Jim%20Stanford,divided%20by%20that%20jurisdiction's%20population.
I ❤️ Jimbo.
I am up to my eyeballs with the spin and lying. From all sides. And I’m a hardcore lunchbox lefty. It’s exhausting to have to dig out the truth all the time instead of just, y’know, opening up a “trusted” news source and knowing that if they say something wrong they’ll correct it later and I’ll still be well-informed.
“Lowest standard of living in the world”? That OUTRAGED me. Does that self-absorbed woman not know that while she was spouting this complete bullsh*t that Palestinians and the Sudanese and others are dying of starvation? That there are *children* across the world forced to mine gold, dig through toxic garbage piles, fight in armies and sell their bodies to put food on their families’ tables? Those are *facts*.
There’s spin, then there’s bold-faced lying.
Any respectable reporter who sits across the table from this woman in the next few days and *doesn’t* call her out is a coward. Part of it, I suspect, is that while Canadian journos are used to spin–they’re less accomplished at quick-witting a question to an outright lie.
There’s plenty here that could do with fixing, to be sure–but lying about it just diminishes the import when we try to explain how important it is to acknowledge and rectify those failings.
This “post truth era” crap can kiss my azz.
According to her, Ukraine is better off than we are as well as Venezuela all of Africa as well. I do not know where she is referring to in Canada, but as a premier, she is at least somewhat responsible for the conditions Canadians are living under. Perhaps she should step down due to her failure. Shame!
And here I thought April Fools’ Day was in April…I guess it can be anytime when you live in Alberta!
Any day appears to be good day to be a fool in her mind.
Marlaina knows that the rubes will buy whatever she’s selling as long as she taps into the incoherent rage of those who truly believe that the only thing preventing them from wealth is those crooks in Ottawa. Her lies and gaslighting get more and more detached from reality and it only seems to help her polling numbers. Why wouldn’t she lie when it works so well for her?
Maybe we have the lowest standard of living in the world because we allow the unvaccinated to be the most discriminated against group of people she has ever seen in her lifetime.
LOL! I had all but forgotten that one…. These have to be two of the MOST incredibly blatant misconceptions that any Canadian politician has ever put out there to my knowledge…yet her base, and the mainstream media, give her a pass! Unreal! Naturally, I did specify Canadian because, right now, there is NOTHING TOO OUTRAGEOUS for Trump and MAGA to push forward, but DS is definitely learning the ‘style’!
@DJC
If you want to get rid of the awful commercials, just watch CTV/CBC/Global etc on YouTube through FreeTube app and nary an advert will you see. Plus it will let you subscribe and make playlists without actually having to sign away your life with google.
B: Good to know. Thanks. I’ll do that. D
Should we here in Ontario begin organizing care packages and perhaps notify the Red Cross and the World Food Organization of Alberta’s desperate plight?
jrk, we can’t send them a freedom flotilla with relief supplies cuz they don’t have a port.
…
……
………………….too soon?
B…..just bring HMCS Calgary in through Marlaina’s proposed route to the west coast and slip her into the harbour @ Pigeon Lake, just like the Athabee did taking supplies to N’Orleans after Katrina.
She’ll accept it because of the name.
Just no mention of Greta, or you’ll resurrect Kenny’s war room initiatives.
Randi, I can’t resist this for sure…
https://youtu.be/kHAl1tWvvPA
lol. Not at all. I live in Alberta. Many here think if we separate BC will have to let us use one of theirs.
A commenter mentioned oil and royalty rates. I just finished Don Gillmor’ s 2025 book called on oil and thought I was fairly aware of what captured Alberta meant. Not a chance. Highway robbery for decades with the PCs and now the UCP offering more and more royalty reductions. And though I know it has been the Canadian Federal Liberal Party pouring billions into the oil sands, there were some surprising revelations. Short easy read and worth everyone’s time. Thanks David Climinhaga for your insightful observations and comments but like Harper never admit an error
Is Ms. Smith expecting a “We Are the World” pity party for poor Alberta/Canada, now that she’s made it clear we are deserving of such? Is anyone going to stop her from recklessly spending Albertans’ money to worship at the feet of wealthy Republicans in Washington, D.C. and Mar-a-Lago? Think of the famine, Dear Leader.
“Imelda, baby
Imelda, baby, what to do?
All the poor people saying
That they got to quit paying for you.”
— Mark Knopfler
Not a classy lady! Just a dame!
Anyone have a cake to spare for we poor Albertans?
What does it say about Albertans when they treat Smith’s gaslighting that even a pre schooler would role their eyes at, like it was a Papal Bull? Mind you, the UCP are still leading in the polls. As the song goes, “How Bizarre”.
If you actually listens to the interview, rather than the hyperbole, she clarifies immediately afterwards. She meant the lowest per capita GDP growth. That is true.
Doug: I did listen to the interview. Her clarification is muddled and half-hearted and not nearly as clear as your interpretation makes it sound. This may or may not be intentional. Regardless, it is fair to characterize this as gaslighting, as opposed to mere misspeaking, because it is. DJC
@DJC, she’s using the same kind of Trumpy tactics that he uses.
Say something outrageous then just dial it back a bit and *lie* some more.
@Doug, the problem is of saying “lowest growth in the G7” is that it’s a follow-up lie by omission.
What Dixie Dani is NOT saying is that we also have the lowest population in the entire G7. She is also not saying that we have a fairly low GDP to debt ratio compared to most of the others.
I’m not saying we don’t have poverty and housing crisis. We do. However it’s workable and could be fixed which is why it pizzes me off when someone like Smith makes it sound overwhelmingly bad rather than something we could choose, with a few better policies, to address in fairly short order. Because then she might have to get off her Chanel-covered butt and do it.
She gaslights all the time. She says we will get 52% of CPP assets if we pull out of Cpp. She is not truthful about the cost of a provincial police force. She was untruthful about trying to influence the trial of a guy charged at Coutts. I could go on, but I do not have all day.
I guess it can now be considered that Alberta’s race to the bottom with Haiti has been won.
Mission accomplished.
How do our living standards stack up against those in the Gaza Strip?
I keep telling the APP that they are among the top 10% of prosperous people in the world and any more prosperity won’t “trickle down” to those manning the tables at the farmers market. Ever.
A fav war cry is ” If Alberta separated we would be the second most prosperous country in the world” . Isn’t there a 1/4 trillion oil clean up pending? And the prosperity calls for more of the same? Fancy math that AB math, but they all know it.
I actually had one guy tell me that if musk with 400B divided it among the 8B people everyone would have 50B. Prosperity.
So in Cherokee Dans defence , she is not gaslighting, she is only agreeing with her base. And they are lit.
You should not brandall of us Albertans as the same as her base. A lot of us see her even more clearly than you.
Ditzy Dani regularly dances on the line between delusion and reality, like a watered down version of her cheeto camouflaged hero.
The internet has created a tsunami of fecal information, but here’s a rule of thumb for I use for flushing: shit floats to the top. Apply Occams Razor – if it looks & smells like crap, then it probably is.
Ain’t it amazing how politicians who actually know how to adult rarely cause voters to invoke their crap catchers?
Not really delusion. That would imply she believes what she says. She knows she is not being truthful.
Worth remembering that this Ms Smith is the very same person who claimed, post-COVID, that the unvaccinated were the most discriminated against in history, or ever, or whatever. Both comments, along with most of her other pronouncements and ongoing scandals, some of us here in BC find … amusing? wingnut crazy? Yeah, (polite) words fail me in this situation.
the potentate’s assertions regarding some jurisdictions’ standards of living, are similar to her views regarding the severity of “discrimination” covid anti vax types were exposed to.
high levels of exaggerations, embellishment, hyperbole and flaming b s seem to be standard traits of people like her and their ideological beliefs.
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
As I mentioned in a previous comment on one of your columns, Jim Stanford also wrote an article about the ways the Alberta government deliberately suppressed wages in Alberta. I would suggest that part of the reason that Albertans have lower wages and, consequently, a somewhat lesser standard of living is the the actions of the Alberta government, including Alberta government legislation. I am outraged at the dishonesty of Danielle Smith in her statement about Albertans’ or maybe Canadians’ (not clear which group she was referring to) standard of living.
https://centreforfuturework.ca/2025/01/28/alberta-continues-to-slip-in-national-wage-rankings/
I didn’t watch the interview (I just can’t bring myself to that level of self-punishment) but I’m assuming Vassy didn’t take her to task for making such idiotic statements. At this point I would have been happy with a simple “c’mon Danielle, even you can’t believe what you just said!”. Either way I think we all know what Schmidt really wants to say: “Our standards of living may be dropping but just think of how high they will be when we become the 51st state”.
Give that hell will have frozen over by the time we will become the 51 state, I am sure the standard of living will be lower then.
As an established fine connoisseur of the alternative narrative genre and full time political crank, ‘she who bullshits’, might want to consider upping her game and getting ahead (that is, as the superficial clown that leads the parade of gullible followers) of an established grassroots conspiracy movement in Alberta by promoting the idea that measles is a bioweapon and then profit off of that same promotion. HINT:
https://www.wired.com/story/antivax-grift-measles-crisis-bioweapon/
Where it is the case of a dedicated low information leader of our times catering to the needs of a select low information population of dimwitted cult followers.
https://www.bugeyedandshameless.com/p/danielle-smiths-own-private-alberta
If only Danielle Smith was as funny as Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen (an exerpt):
4th Albertan: “Well, when I say a ‘house’ it was just a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.”
2nd Albertan: “We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go live in a lake.”
3rd Albertan: “You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us livin’ in a shoebox in the middle of the road!”
Aye, some are lucky!!
Corwin and David; we are not behind all of the OECD either.
“The only comprehensive measure of quality of life is the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (iHDI). Among 38 OECD nations, Canada ranks 13, again well above the USA.”
https://x.com/deonandan/status/1932140378532016444
Here it is:
https://hdr.undp.org/inequality-adjusted-human-development-index#/indicies/IHDI
Sadly the truth matters little to Ms Danielle. She will say anything to align with tRump and try to rile up her base. Hopefully the base folks will use that thing between their ears as it meant to be used!! Its not an ear spacer folks, think about the BS you are being fed pls.
Speaking hate to her base of medieval peasants is essential to Smith’s survival as a leader of the neofascist UCP. Her cretins live off it, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter in the moment. At the same time, these pronouncements, which become increasingly absurd, are a test of how much these savages support her. It’s a feedback loop wanna-be despots use, like Trump, to test the waters.
Now that all that sweet, sweet American cough syrup is back on the shelves, Queen Danielle can get a binge going.
ah Dani Smith…..the ever petulant MAGA woman child…..maybe the newly formed Alberta Republican Party should adopt her and slither into the sunset….
lol. The leader of the Alberta party is a dual American Canadian citizen and we know his loyalty is with the USA so he and Danielle should do well together.
Do you mean the Republican Party of Alberta? DJC
WTAF is she smoking. Spreading BS just like her orange Jesus to the south.
O.K. obviously Smith has not travelled outside of Canada. Looked at Stats Canada. 92% of Canadians had graduated high school, People live to about 82 yrs on average and women live 84 yrs. Although Canadians spend more on housing we also have more rooms per person in our homes than other countries. The majority of Canadians feel safe walking in their areas at night.
Now, we know Smith has been to Mar-a-Lago but that is fantasy world. How about I purchase a ticket for Smith to some other ‘better’ spots in the country/world. How about the Artic where many do not have adequate health care, children have to leave their communities to go to high school. She can travel to Haiti or El Salvador, Columbia, a re-education center in China, how about Turkey. Canada is one of the best countries in the world to live in. If she thinks Canada is the worst, perhaps its time she left or perhaps she ought to get to work to improve at least her province because she certainly isn’t doing enough if she thinks all of Canada is such a lousy place to live. Some times I do wonder about Smith and her pronouncements, like is she having a “moment” or just having a second glass of wine on an empty stomach. omg, worst standard of living in the world, I think I’ll put that in the bat shit crazy column