“In Alberta we believe in free speech. Full stop.”
So says Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith.
And it’s true … sort of.
We absolutely believe in free speech here in Wild Rose Country … except when we don’t. And there are no exceptions, ever … except when there are.
Well, you’ve got to hand it to Ms. Smith, she has chutzpah – famously defined by American humourist Leo Rosten as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”
Premier Smith made the comment quoted above in a little video widely circulated online Tuesday, apparently in response to another short video, posted by the Edmonton Police Service, encouraging members of the public to report incidents of hate.
This was part of a swift and sharp response on social media by Ms. Smith and her so-called minister of public safety, Mike Ellis, himself a former police officer, objecting to the idea of enforcement of hate speech laws – at least in cases where it’s members of the United Conservative Party base who want to say hateful things.
It may be a coincidence, but in the past few days, there has been a prominent example of a sign with a hateful message about First Nations people erected by one of the UCP’s Alberta separatist allies. This of course doesn’t reflect what all Alberta separatists think, but one wonders if news coverage of that prompted calls to the Premier’s Office by party supporters who connected the dots between the expression of such sentiments and the EPS campaign.
At any rate, Ms. Smith posted on Facebook: “Free Speech is a foundational Alberta value. We don’t believe in policing unpopular or religious-based statements even if they are controversial. That’s a slippery slope other countries have fallen into and we can’t go down that road.”
“Our Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services, Mike Ellis, will be writing to our provincial and municipal policing providers to ensure they understand Albertans’ policing priorities should focus on violent crimes, illegal drugs, theft and vandalism … not people’s free speech.”
For his part, Mr. Ellis tweeted: “We are committed to supporting and respecting everyone’s right to free speech. We have duty to uphold these rights and freedoms, regardless of an individual’s religious or political beliefs.”
“Alberta’s government does not condone hate speech or violence, but we believe law enforcement should be focused on stopping violent crime, not policing opinions or ‘hurt feelings,’” Mr. Ellis’s social media message continued. “Our government will be in contact with our provincial and municipal policing agencies to ensure Albertans’ policing priorities continue to be cracking down on violent crime, theft, illegal drugs and vandalism.”
So there you have it. Alberta police will soon have their marching orders from the offices of the premier and the ministry of public safety: If you see hate, ignore it!
If you see students camping on campus and exercising their right to free speech about certain topics, though, billy clubs, knuckle-duster gloves, and pepper spray are probably OK. And if your idea of free expression has anything to do with pancakes, you can expect to be escorted from the premises expeditiously.
Just in case Albertans didn’t understand how this is supposed to work, Ms. Smith said in the little video clip noted above that “I can tell you our approach in Alberta is that the federal government does have the power of criminal law. We have the power of non-enforcement. And … what that means is, we choose our policing priorities and we choose our Crown Prosecution priorities.” (Emphasis added.)
Translation: We choose to ignore laws we don’t like.
“We’ve gotta draw a line,” the premier added piously. “We have to be able to toughen up!” By which she meant, presumably, if you’re a member of a group her party base relentlessly attacks on whatever grounds, you’re going to have to toughen up.
Of course, as many Albertans soon pointed out on social media, the UCP’s profound commitment to free speech comes with a notwithstanding clause.
Indeed, it comes with the actual Notwithstanding Clause – the one that never should have been in the Canadian Constitution, but is, that her government used in October 2025 to end a strike of 51,000 Alberta teachers, suspending their free speech rights along with their fundamental right to free association.
As the secretary general of Amnesty International’s English Canadian section put it at the time, to the UCP’s great irritation, “by targeting teachers, the Government of Alberta is attempting to silence workers exercising their rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the right to strike.”
Even counselling, threatening or encouraging a continued strike would violate the terms of the so-called Back to School Act, which will remain on the books until Aug. 31, 2028. Individuals faced fines of $500 a day for violating the act. The teachers’ union would have incurred fines of half a million dollars a day if it had advocated continuing the strike. The law also imposed a contract on the teachers that 90 per cent of them had rejected in a vote the month before.
The strikers could have been ordered back to work without using the Notwithstanding Clause, of course, but that would have meant there would be court challenges, and the union might have won them, embarrassing the government.
Using Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Justice Minister Mickey Amery told a news conference at the time, “will remove the uncertainty a court case would create.” In other words, the uncertainty about whether the government might win or lose. The UCP, obviously, is not a government that respects the rule of law or intends to allow it to be practised if inconvenient.
After that, Premier Smith hopped on a jet and took a powder to what was then the relative safety of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, as one does.
There are other examples of the UCP’s intolerance of free expression, but we need not belabour an obvious point. The UCP’s commitment to free speech is a kilometre wide and a millimetre deep, even though as a MAGA-adjacent government one imagines it would prefer another unit of measurement.
It’s very nice Queen Danielle now champions chaos and the extreme freedom to say whatever the f*ck you like about whoever you like. There is no such thing as grace and polite behaviour; the world must become a wild social media hellscape; serious people are no longer valid, because everything is farce.
Danielle Smith and the UCP are way off base. Canada doesn’t have freedom of speech, because we have freedom of expression. The United States has freedom of expression. However, neither of those things are exempt from consequences. This is a basic principle that youth are taught by their parents, and their teachers in school. If a six year old child is walking with their parents down a street, and their child sees a man walking by, who has issues with their weight, and the child calls them a fat pig, if the parents were responsible, they would scorn their child for saying that. If a child is in second grade and calls another student a derogatory name, because of their skin color, their teacher will do something about it.
Years ago, in Alberta, there was a school teacher, Jim Keegstra. He was openly teaching his students that the Holocaust was a lie. Unfortunately, there were students of his who carried on with that sick belief. Others who knew better, didn’t. (Countless photographs, film evidence, and testimonials from eyewitnesses prove the Holocaust had happened.) Jim Keegstra was punished for this, because it also shows that freedom of speech is not free from consequences. Jim Keegstra grew up in the Social Credit Party reign in Alberta. William Aberhart and Ernest Manning were definitely anti-Semitic, hated minorities, and the handicapped. Peter Lougheed was not a fan of the Social Credit Party, because of how horrible and hurtful their policies were, and he ensured their defeat, 55 years ago. Even Social Credit Party MLAs couldn’t challenge Peter Lougheed, because they knew what he was doing was right. The Reform Party was stripped of its party status, because it had fascists in their party. Peter Lougheed didn’t support the Reform Party, because they reminded him of the Social Credit Party that he worked so hard to defeat. The Reform Party had to merge with the Progressive Conservatives, which made the CPC.
Now we have the UCP. Danielle Smith has created multiple horrible bills. One is Bill 13, which is Jordan Peterson’s Law. That bill exempts professionals from being held to higher standards, when they are off duty. This is extremely dangerous. It also insults our veterans. Jordan Peterson has no credibility to begin with. He also denied that fascism is an issue in Canada, when it is still there.
Section 33 is something that the UCP have taken advantage of, and have not used it in the way it was intended to be used. That’s a slippery slope when the UCP uses it to knock down people’s rights that are protected by the Charter. Ralph Klein tried to do the same thing, after victims of the Social Credit Party’s cruel eugenics policy wanted to sue the Alberta government for compensation they were entitled to. He thought he could use Section 33 to silence these victims of eugenics, but he was met with strong opposition, and backed off.
In Lethbridge, an NDP MLA, Shannon Phillips was harassed by police officers who disagreed with her, and they weren’t even properly disciplined. It would be obvious that they support the UCP. The UCP are abolishing the R.C.M.P, and are replacing it with a much detested provincial police force, with a very hefty cost. The UCP wants this so they can go punish those who disagree with them. In Latin American countries, and in the Philippines, there are issues with rogue police.
If anyone read the statement of claim from Athana Mentzelopoulos, who is suing the UCP for wrongful termination, they will see that the UCP and Danielle Smith wanted private investigators and hackers to find out the identity of an X (Twitter) account of Hansard The Cat. The UCP and Danielle Smith also wanted Athana Mentzelopoulos to fire Nate Pike, a paramedic in Calgary, who hosts a podcast, The Breakdown AB, in his spare time. He is critical of the UCP and Danielle Smith.
Anyone who tries to phone in Your Province Your Premier, isn’t acknowledged if they criticize the UCP and Danielle Smith. At UCP press conferences, reporters from the media are limited to the questions they can ask, and are controlled on how they can ask the questions. In the Alberta Legislature, Danielle Smith changed the rules for how MLAs can ask questions. As it is, Alberta has had the least amount of Legislature sessions in Canada, and in North America, for that matter, for a long time, and Danielle Smith lowered them even further. At UCP public forums, anyone who speaks out against the UCP has their microphone shut off.
Double standards exist with the UCP and Danielle Smith. Who are they trying to fool?
Anonymous , that double standard was created by the Klein Government. When we went to one of their gatherings to ask them questions we had to write down what questions we wanted to ask, then they only picked the ones they wanted to answer. It was really a farce and intelligent people stopped going they were so disgusted.
In Calgary at one a guy asked a very simple question that Klein should have been smart enough to answer. Instead Klein asked him if he was another one of those Left-wing Nuts he was so famous for accusing people of. The guy took his P.C card out of his wallet, tore it up, and walked up to where Klein was sitting and threw it at him, and about 30 others did like wise and as they walked out dozens of stupid seniors hurled their sarcastic comments at them in support of that idiot Ralph Klein and they still think he was a hero that’s how stupid they are.
I wasn’t at that one but certainly heard about it.
He made the mistake of telling people at one of these gatherings “ Albertans aren’t smart enough to understand our plans for healthcare reform, so we aren’t going to tell you what they are.” It got him kicked out even the fools that had been supporting him kicked him out. Everyone was concerned about what he was doing to our healthcare system even his father Phil.
Alan K. Spiller: Ralph Klein and Danielle Smith have experience in broadcasting. They were/are able to sound convincing, but people need to read between the lines. Both had a stupid looking smirk on their faces, which gave away that they were lying. I remember hearing about Peter Lougheed era cabinet ministers and MLAs who were so dissatisfied with Ralph Klein, after he became leader of the Alberta PCs, that they cancelled their Alberta PC memberships.
And I’m sure this group meeting in Alberta is just a co-incidence.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/large-white-supremacist-meeting-shakes-residents-of-alberta-town-9.7297070
So with her saying that, can we expect more right wing supremist groups to hold meetings in Alberta? The Second Sons of Canada were just in the Millarville area holding exercises and meetings. It’s nice to know that under Smith and the UPC, Alberta is attracting all the right kind of people.
Exactly!
Yes, as Danielle Smith states, free speech is a foundational Alberta value. Unless that speech is, for example, a phrase like ‘Fuck your fascist pancakes!’ and is directed at the Premier, in which case the speaker is physically removed from the premises. Perhaps the Premier needs to toughen up in case a similar incident occurs in the future. After all, it seems entirely possible that other Albertans, ones who have read the questions about immigration that we are expected to answer in October and who also don’t approve of the Premier’s defense of signage that promotes hatred of Indigenous people, might conclude that her pancakes are not only fascist but racist too.
Still leading in the polls! It would appear that rural Alberta and half of Calgary voters are still enthralled with what she is doing.
Not by much according to Ipsos, and the lead is within the margin of error. Ipsos therefore cautions, it is impossible to predict which party would take government in the next election with any certainty. Another factor to toss in is polling consistently is now showing Smith’s popularity is trending downwards. There is nothing here to celebrate for any party. Ihave no skin in this game.
You wait. It kills me to say this but all Smith has to do for a short time before the next election is to stop serving up her fascist pancakes, squirt out a few crocodile tears and all will be forgiven.
Yankee Doodle Dani is more odious by the day. I can smell the sulphur from here. It would appear the UCP believe BIGOTS are the remainder of their support in this province. I for one encourage these people to self identify, for reasons….
To be fair, Maple MAGAs are only able to do one thing at a time to the exclusion of everything else. It’s called monotasking. They think sane people are all similarly afflicted.
You get a fascist pancake. And you get a fascist pancake. Everyone gets a fascist pancake!
Pretty soon we’ll be compelled to report that man in the parking lot of the local shopping mall who took out his prayer rug and prayed on it behind his car. We’ll face harsh punishment if we don’t. Next, we’ll have to phone 911 about that gay couple we saw walking into the store holding hands. Remember that time in 1990 we saw two men kissing in the parking lot of a popular restaurant? Report that, too.
These things will not be tolerated in the Independent Nation of Fascist Pancaka. “We” (being Lord Sith of the United Crap Pancake Party) control the police and the crown prosecutors. If “We” decide to chase you down city streets and club you like baby seals for taking part in a peaceful protest on a university campus, or for any other reason anywhere, that is what “We” will do. Soon “We” will bring our International Democracy Union advisors out into the open and place them in unelected cabinet minister roles. You know all those pasty white legs and necks that appeared on the Aldersyde overpass last month? They’re coming for you unless you vote “yes” to the nine questions that punish immigrants on the October 19 referendum, ‘kay? Obey in advance. Also vote for separation so you can enjoy all the features of full fascism.
Sorry, we do not know if Madison Square Garden is hosting a celebrity wedding right now but we’d like to fly y’all there on a private Saudi jet to party like it’s 1939.
Alberta is already an independent country in the mind of Lord Sith. Why should she listen to the laws of Canada, or respect its constitution when she has off ramps near Aldersyde? If you stay home on October 19, this is what you will get, without balances, but send cheques to Lord Sith for “protection”, if you know what’s good for you.
The Republic of Pancakistan, shurely. DJC
OH, David!!!!!
“Pretty soon we’ll be compelled to report that man in the parking lot of the local shopping mall who took out his prayer rug and prayed on it behind his car”. Just like in Québec, which has banned public expressions of religious belief or exercises in religiosity, under the guise of “secularism”. Except that in la belle province, it even applies to the majority faith community, Roman Catholics.
The waitress from a flimsy roadside diner; a rogue cop on the take in with the mob … what a script for an original mini series! …The ending? They both abscond with all the booty and leave burnt offerings, but live happily ever after – somewhere.
You can get anything you want in Alice’s restaurant.
Also, Alice’s restaurant fell down a rabbit hole. Welcome to Tea with the Mad Medicine Hatter, served on the ceiling.
“I can tell you our approach in Alberta is that the federal government does have the power of criminal law. We have the power of non-enforcement.” This the “sovereignty within a united Canada” concept in a nutshell, and this is what the other nine referendum questions are about. But make no mistake: in Confederation no province has the power of non-enforcement. To support this is to go into open conflict with Canada, and without the benefit of at least voting on separation. The UCP’s power rests exclusively on a thin majority in the Legislature based on an election campaign that was never about independence or even what Smith calls “sovereignty”.
It will be interesting to see if the federal government directs federal Crown Prosecutors to conduct criminal prosecutions that the province chooses not to … such as on firearms laws.
“as a MAGA-adjacent government one imagines it would prefer another unit of measurement” Pure genius. David Climenhaga you’re a national treasure
From the video, Danielle Smith is proposing cutting a deal with Elon Musk and Starlink, plus cutting a deal with so-called “independent media” to get better news (ref. Tamara Lich and Rebel Media)?
Say, what’s with the white outfits these days? Do tell us why Elon’s Canadian (and Social Credit) grandfather Joshua Haldeman decided to move to South Africa under apartheid.
This has certainly taken a swift turn to the dark side.
@Abs
Trudy started the Arctic satellite building project and Carney’s taken it on. Starlink is crapping themselves because many countries are rapidly axing him out of the equation and his money-making babies are tanking.
The sky is fed territory so for all her ego mania–who is paying billions to launch satellites just to be told “no” by the feds?
Starlink still has to go through the CRTC who may very well–slam on the brakes.
Not by much according to Ipsos, and the lead is within the margin of error. Ipsos therefore cautions, it is impossible to predict which party would take government in the next election with any certainty. Another factor to toss in is polling consistently is now showing Smith’s popularity is trending downwards. There is nothing here to celebrate for any party. Ihave no skin in this game.
Dixie Dani is flailing.
I took a dive down SeppieTube yesterday (hadda shower afterwards) and they are screeching that she’s a sellout and cozying up to the feds, she’s a closet lib and gonna cross the floor etc etc.
These people are getting upwards of 10k-30k views. That looks like all of Maple MAGA. It’s more than some mainstream commentators, get.
Like her mentor the Mango Mussolini she’s clucking around like a headless chicken because she can feel the heat.
The problem with hatred politics without a platform is that when the same chuds that put you in power, whose support you rely on, turn on you–you’re cooked. She’s throwing them a “free speech” bone but looking at what they’re saying–they’re well beyond that pacifier. She let them work themselves up into a lather by supplicating herself to them and they’re eating their own.
Ah, hope springs eternal.
Yes, in Smith’s Alberta apparently freedom of speech is a “foundational” value, whatever the heck that means, the right to strike or freedom from hate speech, is not so “foundational”. Although if you are in a truck convoy, perhaps your freedom of assembly would be more supported by her government than say for teachers or people protesting a pipeline and lets not get into where she feels rights for indigenous people rank on her list.
I feel what this means and Smith is trying to say in her usual glib way is that freedom of speech trumps everything else, which is sort of US law looks at this. In Canada historically there has been more balance between this and other rights. We have been more mindful that excessive focus on one right to the exclusion of other things is not necessarily the best way to go.
The best thing Smith ever said in all the years she has been in politics was, “Stay in your own lane”. Unfortunately, she only applied this to others and never took her own advise. Leave the policing to the police and leave the interpretation of rights to the courts.
Interesting to see a site affiliated with Broadbent Institute opposing free speech that it doesn’t like but supporting alleged free speech when it suits the public sector union narrative.
Doug: What site affiliated to the Broadbent Institute are you talking about in this comment? This is not at all clear. You will note that I have also deleted a sentence from your comment. This is because it references a litigious individual and makes no sense without that person’s name as written. DJC
Just more gaslighting by the Smith government. It’s one thing to have an opinion but you know, and they know, and I know that the purpose of the banner was to provoke hatred, at the very least, towards First Nations people. We also know if it was any other ethnic or racial group vilified (I can think of a couple right off the top of my head) there would have been hell to pay and vociferous condemnation by Smith and her cohorts. Has the Minister for Indigenous Relations, Rajan Sawney, spoken to this, do you know? Aside from the importance and relevance of her position in Alberta’s government, she understands first-hand what racism and hate speech are. I remember she and her daughter getting media coverage a few years ago when her daughter was subject to a racially-motivated attack in downtown Calgary. It’s quite negligent of her to ignore this issue. I don’t imagine First Nations people are feeling a lot of support from her right now. It makes you wonder what the heck she is doing there. I have thoughts but I’ll just keep them in my own little head. I’d better not be free with that speech.
And the Western Standard, that beacon of Hellenic culture and civilization no doubt.
We’re reminded of a certain “Lake of Fire” incident when a certain leader of a certain Wildrose party used that very same belief-in-free-speech tripe to address criticism of one of her WR candidates in the 2012 electoral upset who posted that homosexuals will be condemned to said Biblical Lake for their alleged “sexual choices.” The “upset” was the disappointing election result the WR party got, presumably because of the WR candidate’s odious comment which garnered a lot of public criticism, but also because the leader was amighty tardy in sort-of-apologizing for the psephological gaff. It did not recommend her as premier of Alberta which polling hitherto had predicted she would become. That must have been upsetting for many.
That leader was good ole “free-speech” Danielle Smith herself! Despite the disappointing result, she did manage to win her own seat at least in 2012—her first in the Legislative Assembly. Her only previous political experiences were to taunt government, first from the seat on the Calgary School Board —which was soon decommissioned and a provisional board appointed by the provincial ministry of education because of her agenda-frustrating obstructionism and tendentious grandstanding; her second was as a Calgary newspaper’s right-wing opinion columnist. Her 2012 election to the big leagues did not quell her thirst for diving into the shallow end of the roiling pool that is the partisan-right in Alberta. Exercising her freedom to cross the floor to the troubled governing ProgCons with several of her WR shadow cabinet just two years into her tenure as Leader of the Loyal Opposition, she failed to win her riding nomination (as a PC) during the snap-election of 2015 when the taint she imparted upon the ProgCon government of 44 consecutive years cost both WR and PC parties dearly because the NDP came out of nowhere to win four-dozen more seats and a convincing majority by default. (The NDP did not resume its fringe-party status in 2019 but rather increased its number of opposition seats by several-fold of its pre-2015 count, became Alberta’s largest Loyal Opposition ever in 2023, and is placed very well to defeat the UCP in 2027.)
Wildrose and the ProgCons never ran another general election. Big-Bitumen’s reaction to ProgCon Premier Ed Stelmach’s attempt to restore former Premier Peter Lougheed’s Red Toryism by restoring higher petro-royalties to revive the Heritage Fund (which had been heavily pilfered, post-Lougheed, to make micro-conservative pseudomarket-fundamentalism look like it could balance the public books) was to support the upstart WR party. Big-B instead ended up with an NDP government that was very like Stelmach’s with respect petro-royalties, but branded by the hapless and shattered partisan-right as “communists” from “Redmonton” because most of the NDP caucus represented ridings in and around the Capital and naturally advocated for ordinary social spending which the governing partisan-right had for decades neglected purely on partisan grounds.
Smith’s latest goofy guardianship of “free speech” fairly qualifies her as one of the most gormless politicians of our time because she seems not to heed the lesson she should have learned during that 2012 election which in many ways initiated the landslide of conservative principle and purpose that continues to slump downhill to this very day. If it only it would be a harbinger of a repeat that, along with the hypocrisy of her “free speech” dictum, the divisiveness of her stupid referendum, the brewing schism within the partisan-right, and the absolute incompetency of her governance will make 2027 the last election the UCP ever runs.
Culture wars partisan-rightists try to incite only get louder as failure to snuff rising disaffection with this pseudo-dichotomy continues to frustrate them and expose their chauvinism as rank charlatanism. It doesn’t work for Big-B to interfere with public administration simply to assuage its own paranoia about worldwide paradigmatic changes that can’t be blamed on local or national political parties—much more blame should fall upon the climate-changing pollution the petroleum-industry’s products create. Yet no Canadian government is out to kill this gigantic industry. What Alberta needs is, if I may speak freely from BC, is a centrist government espoused to a sensible mandate that recognizes that the primary beneficiaries of the province’s sovereignty should be Albertans first, Canadians second, and Big-B somewhere after that.
In all seriousness, that could be the NDP. Only Big-B’s radicalized proxies think it’s an extreme leftist, or “communist” party. As a Dipper myself I realize the political reasons the NDP has moved towards the centre (traditional Dippers condemn any “movement to the right” whatsoever as antithetical, but I can’t think of a less politic position to take) in many places across Canada—it’s the compromise part of today’s politics. I also think Nenshi et al could—it might sound contradictory —bring some sensibility to the partisan-right from the Dippers’ position somewhere near, if not partly on the centre-right part of the spectrum. What identifies as right-wing in Alberta has been brain-twisted for so many decades now, especially since Stelmach’s 2006-11 term, that it can’t cogently govern.
This is simple diagnoses – INTELLECTUAL IMMATURITY