Your Easter read: Danielle Smith is set to head to Red Deer-a-Lago for ‘Premier’s Annual Christian Summit’

Perhaps you’ve seen advertisements on social media for “The Premier’s Annual Christian Summit” on May 4 in Red Deer and wondered, What the Hell? 

If so, you’re not alone. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is not exactly known for her piety. In the past, she has described herself as agnostic, which nowadays is usually just a polite way of saying atheist.

Last May, she spent more than $10,000 of our tax money to fly to Mar-a-Lago in Florida to be at the side of U.S. President Donald Trump after he threatened massive tariff sanctions against Canada. While Mr. Trump is not a godly man, his political relationship with certain American Christians is well understood. Perhaps Ms. Smith trying to cement the same kind of relationship with the Christian right through this new annual gig at Red Deer-a-Lago. 

The “Premier’s Christian summit” – which turns out to be the first event so named – is a project of an organization called the Christian Impact Network, whose slogan is “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” Readers may recognize these words, although what is happening seems to have more to do with right-wing politics in the here and now than what happens in the sweet by-and-by.

You’re going to require a pricey ticket if you want to go to this particular event in the city of 100,000 souls best known for its highway strip of fast food, bad coffee, and fuel pumps along “Gasoline Alley,” the highway service road conveniently located exactly halfway between Calgary and Edmonton.

According to an Internet microsite set up to promote the event, general admission starts at $365 and an eight-seat VIP table will set you back $4,000. The website extends the invitation to “all Christian leaders and organizations that serve in Alberta” – but the majority of people who attend is far more likely to be made up of a highly political stream of modern evangelical Christianity than adherents of more traditional denominations. 

An email sent to likely supporters of CIN – a potential acronym that surely wouldn’t be pronounced by insiders the way it looks on paper – says that in addition to the participation of Premier Smith, there will be music by country singer and United Conservative Party favourite Paul Brandt; a keynote address by Preston Manning, the superannuated Godfather of the Canadian right; and sundry messages from “Provincial Cabinet Ministers, MP Andrew Lawton, MP Arnold Viersen, MLA Jennifer Johnson, MLA Ron Wiebe, Josh Senneker, and Michael Clark.”

“Together, these voices will contribute to a full day of discussion on faith, leadership, and public policy in Alberta,” the email says. (Emphasis added.)

What sort of public policy? The website isn’t explicit. It asks, however: “How can Christian leaders help cultivate the civic climate and societal momentum necessary for God-honouring laws and policies to be advanced and sustained … ?”

Some of the names on the list of expected speakers are more instructive, however.

Mr. Manning, now 83, is well known to all who follow Alberta politics. Preaching that “the West wants in,” he played a key role in the double reverse hostile takeover of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party by his Reform Party in 2003. Later, he worked behind the scenes to unite the Alberta PCs and Wildrose Party into what eventually became the UCP. 

A clip from a 2021 meeting of the so-called Canada Strong & Free Network, earlier known as the Manning Centre, shows him schooling Ms. Smith on how to blackmail Canada into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51^st state.

And shortly before least year’s federal election, as polls began to swing back toward the Liberals, Mr. Manning warned Canadians that if they failed to elect Conservatives, the West might now want out. As University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young wittily described his threat, “not just Alberta but all of Western Canada is going to pack its bags and leave if the Eastern Bastards elect Mark Carney.”

Mr. Brandt, who participates in a government task force on human trafficking, recently found himself in a controversy about what appeared to be Alberta separatist sympathies in an online post. At the time, he refused to clarify his intentions. 

Last year, a Muslim group in Mr. Lawton’s Ontario riding urged the federal Conservatives to dump the former journalist as a candidate over social media comments about many Canadians it called “fundamentally incompatible with the values of a democratic and inclusive society.”

Mr. Vierson, a northern Alberta Conservative MP well-known for his social conservative views, a notorious rap video and doggerel recorded in Hansard, was made to apologize in the House of Commons for asking a B.C. NDP MP who challenged him in a debate if she had ever considered sex work. 

Ms. Johnson, the UPC MLA for nearby Lacombe-Ponoka, infamously compared trans children in school to poop in cookie dough just before the last Alberta general election. She had to sit in penance as an Independent for a spell, but was welcomed back into the bosom of the UCP in the fall of 2024. 

Mr. Sennaker is described by the summit website as a political strategist. In a recent online post, he described how the hand of God used the pandemic to encourage Alberta parents to home-school their kids or enrol them in parochial schools. 

Finally, the event is hosted by Mr. Clark, who calls himself “Canada’s political missionary” on his website and has been involved in efforts to create a Canadian political movement dominated by right-wing Christians. CIN’s website describes him as the founder and executive director of that organization and “the driving force behind the Premier’s Annual Christian Summit.”

In a 2023 CBC article, Mr. Clark was identified as the author of a document published by a group called Liberty Coalition Canada that outlined a plan to “systematically manufacture 10,000 new Christian political candidates across Canada” with the aim of aligning Canadian laws with “biblical principles.”

A copy obtained by the CBC was marked “classified” and said the group’s goal was “the most powerful political disruption in Canadian history.”

The Liberty Coalition seems to have gotten its start opposing public health measures during the pandemic, but as those were lifted it moved on to other social conservative bugbears. In 2022, it supported scores of candidates in Ontario and B.C. who wanted to roll back protections for trans students. 

“Many supporters of this movement share a vocal opposition to LGBTQ rights and other social justice causes,” CBC reporter Jonathan Montpetit stated in his 2023 article. 

“Several Canadian pastors in the movement also have ties to a controversial branch of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. known as reconstructionism,” he wrote. “Scholars say reconstructionist ideals — often linked to Christian nationalism … — are influencing how some Canadian evangelicals are responding to issues like legalized abortion, same-sex marriage and added protections for gender minorities.”

“Experts say reconstructionists … see increasing tolerance for minority rights and other progressive policies as an attack on Christianity that will lead to the decline of Western civilization,” the story also said.

Obviously, not all Christian leaders are comfortable with this kind of political theology. In an open letter last month to the organizers of the Red Deer event “and all who care about the role of faith in our shared public life,” the bishop of the Alberta Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada wrote, “the church’s work is not to secure a proximity to power, but to bear witness to the love of Christ in the world.”

“It is my hope that our public witness together as Christians and political leaders would always be marked by humility rather than privilege, by openness rather than exclusion, and by a deep commitment to the wellbeing of all our neighbours,” said Rev. Trish Schmermund.

Still, the uncomfortable relationship between church and state being ginned up in Red Deer is not exactly unheard of in Alberta. Starting in the 1930s, Alberta premiers used to break from governing on the Christian sabbath to take to the radio waves to preach their own political version of the Gospel. 

First came “Bible Bill” Aberhart, who launched the Back to the Bible Hour on CFCN in Calgary in 1925. A decade later, he became premier in the Social Credit sweep of 1935, but continued his weekly broadcasts, weaving together end-times Bible prophecy, Social Credit’s kooky economic theories, and proselytizing for both.

Ernest Manning moved to Calgary after hearing the broadcasts across the line in Saskatchewan and was soon employed by Mr. Aberhart’s Prophetic Bible Institute. He also ran for Social Credit in ’35, and became the youngest cabinet minister in Canada after the election.

For a spell, the pair commuted from Edmonton to Calgary on alternating weekends to conduct their joint radiophonic mission. When Mr. Aberhart was unexpectedly called home in 1943 on a visit to Vancouver, Mr. Manning was ready to step into his shoes.

By 1948, Mr. Manning was the premier of Alberta and the director of the Back to the Bible Hour. His wife, Muriel, was the music director. And, eventually, his son Preston – yeah, that Preston, the proverbial bad penny of Alberta politics – was named assistant director of a national version of the program. 

Well, you know what they say: History doesn’t always repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

As retired Calgary Herald journalist Robert Bott observed in a wry comment last week, the Premier’s Annual Christian Summit “resurrects the merger of church and state promulgated by Preston’s dad. I call it the ‘Back to the Back to the Bible Hour!’”