The ebb and flow of the endless stream of MAGA nonsense in Alberta becomes more apparent at a distance

MELBOURNE, Australia – When one’s at home struggling to keep up with the stream of performative MAGA garbage emitted daily by Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party, it’s easy to forget how much Alberta these days is influenced by what’s happening in Washington. 

A few thousand kilometres of distance provides a little perspective about how, when the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is flooding the zone south of the Medicine Line, Ms. Smith and her Maple MAGA minions feel the need to flood the zone in Edmonton with the same unpleasant stuff. 

No sooner do Mr. Trump’s corporate toadies fire a popular television comedian for questioning the sincerity His Mightiness’s mourning in the aftermath of the assassination of that far-right icon, He Whose Name Must Never be Spoken in negative commentary, than Ms. Smith’s administrative toadies at the University of Alberta put a law professor on “non-disciplinary leave,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, for commenting on the same topic.

There may be nothing in the phone logs, but don’t tell me that phone calls weren’t placed from the Premier’s Office to the administrative suite at the U of A about this. 

According to the Canadian Press report of the goings on at the Edmonton university, the professor, who has not been identified but whose name a lot of people seem to know, will be on leave “during a review.” Sounds disciplinary to me. 

So what happened to the Chicago Statement on Free Expression that then advanced education minister Demetrios Nicolaides demanded Alberta post-secondary institutions adopt back in 2019, when the ridiculous first UCP premier, Jason Kenney, was still stoking the fires of separatism in Alberta. 

(In case you missed it, Mr. Kenney is now worrying aloud about how Ms. Smith is allowing “a tiny, perennially angry minority to drag the whole province through a deeply divisive debate” about separation. One need not be a particularly alert reader to recall that Mr. Kenney was the one who climbed into bed, metaphorically speaking, with the very same merry band of extremists, the better to “unite the right.”)

“Alberta’s post-secondary institutions should be bastions of free speech and academic freedom that promote critical thinking,” Dr. Nicolaides claimed in a press release back when the Chicago Principles still mattered to the UCP. “I will continue to explore greater steps we can take to strengthen free speech on campus,” he vowed. 

Now we know how serious the UCP was about that rhetoric. Well, as I warned at the time, “the ‘Chicago Principles’ are code for the right of the powerful and privileged to shout down everyone else.” Now, of course, with the bad example in Washington before them, they’re prepared to take sterner measures to ensure opinions that offend them and their friends remain unheard.

Meanwhile, in basically the same news cycle, Ms. Smith has accused former Progressive Conservative Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk of fomenting separation with his “Forever Canada” referendum petition, surely a stretcher worthy of Mr. Trump himself, announced AB-ICE-friendly drivers’ licenses, and claimed there are more than half a million fake Alberta Health insurance cards in circulation for which the government blames Alberta Health Services. 

Ms. Smith’s fantastic numerology is hard to believe, but even if true, AHS has never had anything to do with administering the province’s technically deficient Alberta Health cards. That’s the Health Department’s responsibility, so perhaps it’s the government, not AHS, that needs to be restructured!

And now we have the finance minister vowing to launch a commercial advertising campaign to call the Alberta Teachers Association liars because they’re demanding a raise for their members instead of meekly accepting as part of their contract additional spending on new teachers that the UCP was going to have to approve anyway to avoid outraging a lot of voters.

This is, of course, nuts. Unlike the teachers’ union, the government has the ability to command the media’s attention simply by making a statement. They have a massive public-relations bureaucracy on hand, which we taxpayers are already financing, to make their positions clear. 

The money used to respond to ATA advertising with ads ginned up by an agency hired by the government might be better spent on something like, say … teacher salaries!

Well, as ever, you couldn’t make this stuff up! G’nite from Down Under.