According to a news account by The Canadian Press that will be read across the Dominion, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith delivered an emotional appeal to Albertans to remain in Canada yesterday as “Conservative elder statesman” Preston Manning benevolently looked on.
I’ll concede this much about Premier Smith’s performance as the warm-up act for Mr. Manning’s online “Alberta and the West Assembly,” she was emotional. The jury remains out about what she was blubbering about, though, if indeed it was anything other than the kind of ham acting we have seen from her before. The quality of the video isn’t good enough to see if she was really “holding back tears.”
As for urging Albertans to vote to remain in Canada on Oct. 19, that would be in the deceptively worded and highly unpopular referendum question that she herself and her separatist-dominated party insist we must vote on. Ms. Smith claims she will be voting to remain in Canada.
At any rate, the premier’s defence of Canada before Mr. Manning’s online audience wasn’t much of a defence. It was a long list of complaints about what the credulous news report described as “historic indignities Albertans have suffered at the hands of the federal government.”
Her remarks were larded with spin and occasional outright falsehoods, clearly intended to leave the impression that Canada has treated Albertans so badly they would be insane not to set up their own landlocked petro-republic and get the statehood train rolling into Union Station in Washington D.C. as quickly as possible.
“A lot of Albertans are angry and some are more than angry,” she said as she moved into the tearful part of her performance.
“They’re hurt. I hear it at town halls, in coffee shops, at hockey rinks and in my email inbox,” Ms. Smith continued, confabulating about events that may or may not have happened, that may or may not have involved real people, behaviour that anyone who is familiar with the Alberta premier’s political career has observed time and again.
This could have happened, of course, as long as she and her aides were careful to curate the people she meets, and ensure she only talked to folks she agrees with. And she could really believe it when she says it – as the late Ronald Reagan, another right-wing ham actor although a considerably better one, is said to have believed his own made-up stories. At least president Reagan had the excuse of having read some of his tall tales in scripts he’d memorized.
The premier rambled on: “… Some came to ask (pause) a painful question (long pause), does this country (pause) actually want (pause) us? (really long pause; sniff) – so (pause) that question (pause) is what 700,000 signatures (pause) represent.”
Again, as anyone who follows politics in Canada’s richest province understands clearly, some 400,000 of those signatures, those on former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition, were intended to prevent there being a referendum and to be a powerful statement of faith in and loyalty to Canada. When the premier says otherwise, as she does repeatedly, she is lying.
Indeed, the whole premise of her performance yesterday was hogwash. What she described is not the view of the majority of Albertans, as poll after poll illustrates, and as the Oct. 19 referendum will prove – unless there is some serious electoral jiggery-pokery, which is all too possible given the history of separatist scheming by Ms. Smith’s government.
“The fight to make Canada work for Alberta is working,” she declared, coming to the climax of her performance and what appears to have been her key point. “When Alberta stood up and refused to back down, the country started listening. … Your anger was not wasted. … Why walk away from the table when we’re finally winning at it?” (Emphasis added.)
This isn’t an appeal to Albertans to remain in Canada. It’s an appeal to the separatists who dominate her party not to send her packing for not being separatist enough – which is starting to sound like a very real possibility.
Putting a little shine on the increasingly unpopular referendum campaign also seems to have been a key point of Mr. Manning’s two-day online improv festival.
As for Mr. Manning, while at 84 he is certainly an elder, he is no statesman, and journalists need to stop repeating this nonsensical trope.
He is the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right who has played a role in Ms. Smith’s schemes before, including her controversial 2014 effort to persuade her fellow Wildrose Party MLAs to cross the floor of the Legislature and join the Progressive Conservative Party led by Jim Prentice. For a time, that seemed to have laid waste to her political career.
The purpose of Mr. Manning’s “assembly” – co-chaired by another elderly political has-been, former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell – seems mainly to be to polish up the UCP separation referendum and maybe find a way to make the Conservative Party of Canada relevant again as it withers in the bright glow of a popular (though not populist) Liberal prime minister.
Canadian Conservatives, who can’t seem to find a leader Canadians like, may be feeling a bit emotional about Mark Carney’s success as well.
Narcissists manipulate. That’s the performance. They usually look up to see if they’ve hooked their audience. Tears, please, or get off the stage. This will never be a hit on Broadway.
Albertans again seem to accept her manipulative grandstanding, lies & vacuous rhetoric. Paying these two old useless, inept geezers to nod beside her desecrates the office of premier.
Many Albertans don’t support the premier. They find her to be a disgusting, harmful embarrassment! We can see all the damage she’s done to the province and it’s people. We can’t wait until she is voted out in 2027!
Pray to the good Gord, may this be the moment the deluded see light: Smith and the UCP are not what they claim, and may their ilk be voted out of office, from rural, urban, little city, big city, towns, farms … this whole Canadian province.
Time to sell the province to the USA. Sane Canada can finally be rid of the perpetual whiners and filthy racists who define that province.
The,MAJORITY of Albertans want to remain in Canada. A handful of slime moulds don’t. Somehow you missed that point. Hating Albertans is pretty Neanderthal and prejudiced. I’ve spent 13 months working on 3 campaigns. Forever-canadian.ca Albertafundspublicschools.ca and waternotcoal.ca What have you done in your province? NO DOUBT NOTHING BUT ERRONEOUSLY JUDGE. FED UP WITH THIS BS. You actually turn us patriots off thinking oh ya, then there’s the judgy lot no doubt from BC. Eye roll. Get a life. How about supporting our work and out your money where your mouthis.
You fail to understand that whiners and filthy racists don’t define our province. Canadians who live here do.
The performance of a lifetime using all of the available tricks of the trade and/or tools in the toolbox:
1. Manoeuvring by deception, manipulation, and an Oscar worthy performance all in a one act play. Bravo! And all this from one of the key players that is constantly promoting and skillfully employing the finely honed trope of provincial grievance politics and the various modes of extortion, such as emotional and economic, that accompanies it.
2. “Appeal to emotion fallacy occurs when someone tries to win an argument by evoking emotion, without using facts or logic. Arguments that appeal to our emotions often attempt to influence our viewpoints in a manipulative way.”
3. “Narcissist fake crying is a calculated manipulation tactic used to deflect accountability, generate sympathy, and regain control, and it works precisely because human beings are wired to respond to tears. Narcissists often use tears not to express genuine emotion but to shift blame, avoid consequences, and redirect attention to themselves.”
“Are you not entertained?”
Maybe the news about the Highwood constituency association calling for a leadership review upset her. Personally, 0 out of 5 kernels of popcorn.
It seems unlikely that statehood would be in the cards for the fledgling Derpbertistan. A relationship more akin to that of Puerto Rico to the metropole is likely in the offing should the Grifter-Yokels pull of this scam. The place is already run by US oil and gas rentiers, so why would they want to accord voting rights and representation to their subjects? Marlainia is only carrying on the fascist tradition of alleging a “stab in the back” and pinning it on an enemy. The notion that the province with the highest median income is the victim of bullies is absurd on its face, which begs the question as to where the cross-eyed inbreds and the hustlers came up with this trope. As I am wont to do, I put it all on progs/liberal bourgeoisie. The CIA cooked up the Congress for Cultural Freedom and it went to work in at least 35 countries convincing people that a dollar a day was a white man’s pay and to love, honour and cherish City Bank, Morgan Stanley, Exxon, General Motors and Freeport. Canada was no exception to this vast behaviour modification program, and the result is a political and economic spectrum that moves from the fetishization of the master-servant relation on one end, all the way to the right until Marlainia and the Grift-o-Kons appear. Which is to say that the prog/liberal worldview is as goofy as that of Marlainia and cooked up by the same people. Progs like to repeat nonsense like the ridiculous claim that Henry Ford, in his pragmatic wisdom, paid workers so that they could buy his cars. This is patently absurd and completely at odds with perceivable material reality. And the cherry on top of that is that Ford’s head of security, Harry Bennett, liked to have his pet lions and tigers in his office when he met with union organizers or anyone else he needed to intimidate. Because that was the real nature of the relationship between capital and labour, and it never changed. As the Carny Banker readies the Canadian economy to join the failed EU, which of course, is not a political entity with an elected legislative body, but rather the latest iteration of the European Coal and Steel Community cartel, in its suicide charge against Russia, , it’s fun to remember that our Elbows Up military is completely reliant on and integrated into that of the US Empire. Did they ever track down those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? Or did the good progs conduct a regime change in Washington, to remove the kind of structures, including the 81 Democrats who voted for the invasion, that could produce a massive region-destroying war of conquest? I forget.
Paragraphs are your friend.
I watched the video of emotional Smith and my immediate feeling is that she was stoking the fabricated resentment of Albertans against the federal government and central and eastern Canadians. Her mention of 700,000 Albertans wanted to have a referendum on Alberta’s future was totally wrong and manipulative.
In addition, not sharing the voter list with other party is in fact a defunction of scrutineering of the voting process.
One tear, left eye. Definitely this performance was aimed at her increasingly restless separatist UCP members. The rest of us be damned. I have to say though that appearing next to Preston Manning – who is giving off decidedly Mitch McConnell vibes these days – and disgraced former premier/High Commissioner to the UK Gordon Campbell is not a good look. Especially when Stephen Harper keeps hanging out with Mark Carney. Preston and Gordo represent a seedy past. Harper and Carney are looking to a ‘prosperous’ future. She’s been outflanked. Or maybe it’s Rob Anderson who’s messed up. Again. Or perhaps she’s still taking advice from disgraced doctor Dennis Modry. I wonder if he ever paid back the $1.3 million dollars he misappropriated (according to a BC Supreme court judge) from his relatives with dementia? Danielle Smith has a knack for surrounding herself with only the best people.
Don’t forget Spanky McAllister the AfD fan. Given his remarks, I have to wonder if he wrote the referendum questions about immigration.
I do wish they’d quit lumping BC in as it appears every time they speak for the “west”. They most certainly do not speak for me. It’s just a craven attempt to make their arguments sound more widespread than they are.
Agreed. They don’t speak for me either (and I have lived in Alberta all my life).
Same old scare tactics employed by Parson Manning since he started wearing his first pair of awkward glasses. Don’t cry for me, Venezuela!
Alberta is facing two stark choices. Remain in Canada and continue to be ignored by the “Laurentian elites.” Or join the US, becoming part of what is known as “flyover country” and ignored by the coastal elites.
Alberta Dream-( An Ode to Marlaina)
At times, an appropriate song comes up to fit the bill. Cudos to Crosby Stills, Nash and Young:
Alberta Dream
I used to see you on every t.v.
Your smiling face looked back at me.
I used to see you on every t.v.
Your smiling face looked back at me.
Then they caught you with the boys next door,
People’s money piled on the floor,
Accusations that you try to deny,
Revelations and rumors begin to fly.
Don’t know when things went wrong,
Might have been when you were young and strong.
Don’t know when things went wrong,
Might have been when you were young and strong.
Reporters crowd around your house.
Going through your garbage like a pack of hounds,
Speculating what they may find out,
It don’t matter now, YOUR All WASHED UP!
She Cut Benefits for Disabled Albertans. Then Sheds Prosperity Gospel Tears for the Wealthy.
Did Danielle Smith get an award for act? I’m sorry but the majority of the UPC Party signed the petition. To separate. Danielle Smith like Trump always wants to go backwards. Rachel Notley pushed for the TMX Pipeline. Danielle Smith knows her polling numbers are terrible because she has been taking away things from Albertans like handicapped benefits, senior benefits, 2 tier healthcare, using the not withstanding clause 4 times instead of the established process of arbitration, ethic violations. Tylenol scandal, healthcare scandals, forcing Albertans to apply for a hundred dollars when the law is reducing the gas tax by $0.13 per liter for everyone, reducing MAID benefits, changing the law so she doesn’t have to post expenses etc. sucking up to Trump the pedophile and American billionaires like Zuckerberg who was fined $18 BILLION for software manipulation on children and his META AI Data Center. Who is Danielle Smith working for? Alberta issues are highest electrical rates in Canada, highest insurance rates in Canada, increasing property taxes, horrible healthcare services, making voting difficult, hand counting votes like Trump etc. What has Danielle Smith done for you?
This constant stream of gaslighting to keep Albertans from asking “why aren’t we like Norway? Why don’t we tax big oil like Norway does at 78%? Is it too late?
Danielle Smith, the epitome of Alberta Strong!
Danielle Smith is also a former actor. She is a failed actor. That’s when she went to the Calgary school of Public Policy, after she flamed out as an actor. Still found a way to get her face on tv though, didn’t she.
She is trying to be a clone of Klein and is copying him as much as possible. I haven’t forgotten his fake tears when he went on TV and admitted to having a drinking problem, that we all knew about, and that he would change yet those of us that had know him personally knew he never would.
A few months later a lawyer told me about a meeting she had with him and there was no question he had been drinking.
Smith has had an eclectic career: a newspaper columnist, leader of the opposition who she later betrayed, a radio talk show host, running a diner and now a Premier.
However, she has never at least formally been considered an actor. Although she must have realized fairly soon on that an ability to give a good performance could be quite helpful and go a long way in politics.
If Reagan was to give her advice, it would not be about delivering her lines which she does well, it would be to stay in character. The remain in Canada side does not trust her and the separatists are becoming increasingly skeptical too now. Her tears remind me of the woman in the old movie who has committed a terrible crime who desperately pleads innocent. She cries as if her life depends on it, which it may. In the end its a good performance but it doesn’t fool anyone.
Those tears may be yet another sign the long running Danielle Smith show is now getting closer to its end.
Danielle Smith is such an incredible actor. She also has a hard time telling the truth.
Our Premier is pathetic. She is disingenous in so many ways and so very often. As an Albertan I am embarrassed by her so called leadership.
Preston Manning. A never was has been who the UCP keep dragging out at these events to somehow prove that they are close and insinq with the average Albertan. Manning seems to embarrass himself at every opportunity.
Is this all that the have? A Premier given to a B class act of Cry Me a River nuanced with crocodile tears. And a washed up unsuccessful politician who is years past his prime?
Alberta is truly in trouble if this is the best that our Leadership can do.
If Danielle Smith was emoting that the pot of black-gold independence at the end of the acid-rainbow appears farther away the closer voters look over details of the unfolding secession controversy, her lachrymosity could well be genuine—but it plays against her studied persona as the queen of glib who blithely ignores the political wreckage tailing her from Calgary School Board trustee to floor-crossing ex-leader of the Loyal Opposition and on to leader of the governing party created when her predecessor shotgun-wedded the two parties of the right she was instrumental in destroying after the NDP came out of four-seat nowhere and terminated eight straight decades of right-wing government in Alberta in 2015 (Smith lost her ProgCon nomination bid in that contest and became host of a right-wing radio talk-show).
But it’s also hard to square even a few of her patented tin teardrops with her pretentious pass at patriotism. She spent a whole career bashing Ottawa, has done everything she can think of to keep the moot secession threat alive and, instead of larmes pour notre pays, showed Team Canada the landlocked version of Stockwell Day’s jet-ski Parthian shot as she hightailed it down to MAGA Logo to pose dry-eyed and smiling with our country’s antagonist.
The baggage of political ‘has-beens’ stacked bedside Smith during her cringingly insincere weeping suggests the broadcast was intended for a specific audience that doesn’t remember or has no qualm about the dubious CVs packed therein. All three once inspired the partisan-right as up-and-comers, and all three tripped and stumbled at the zenith of their respective arcs. What other kind of audience would call Preston Manning an “elder statesman of conservatism” when in fact he was instrumental in destroying the last federal party worthy of the name “conservative” in the nationwide, communitarian sense? What auditor would nod with approval of former BC premier Gordon Campbell’s sole political purpose to stealthily bankrupt public enterprises and sell them for pennies on the dollar to insider cronies? All three cock a snook at public authority, Campbell by sabotaging public enterprise, Manning by demanding from Canada what no federation may give and then blaming the federal government for not giving it, and Smith for peddling Alberta separation as if it were a viable option.
Those are positions allowable in a free and democratic county but their respective pursuits have rendered the respective pursuers thusly: Campbell won his third mandate in 2009 but quickly implemented the Harmonized Sales Tax he expressly promised not to do on campaign, fomenting across-the-board outrage, driving his Gallup polling down to single-digit parity with Richard Nixon’s nadir, forcing the BC cabinet to oust him, and resulting in BC’s only successful Citizens’ Initiative when a legislated tax was rescinded by force of popular measure (the HST Referendum held under Campbell’s successor Christy Clark) for the first time in eight centuries of Westminster parliamentary history. Campbell was rewarded with a consular patronage plum in UK by his co-conspirator, prime minister Stephen Harper (for whom Gordo carried the can whilst Harper campaigned successfully for his first and last majority without wearing the half of BC’s HST outrage that rightly belonged to him), but years later had to accept his perfunctory Order of BC (which all BC premiers receive) in an unannounced private ceremony to and from which the disgraced premier used a back door.
Manning, son of Earnest Manning, former premier of the Socred regime of almost four decades which was terminated by Lougheed’s ProgCons in 1972, thought he had predestination written all over him when his folksy “The West Wants In!” went down well in Western Canada as “the west wants Quebec out!” —mistaking Lucien Bouchard’s schism of Les Bleus as his steppingstone to the PMO if he could only convince Quebec conservatives that he really didn’t mean any of his slightly anti-francophone remarks that the folksy elder statesman might have refrained from had he bothered to read any Quebec licence plate. Manning had to settle for leader of the Opposition—and to take a turn with the Bloc Quebecois. Reform MP Harper had already left the party and the only success of Manning’s knee-jerk “Unite the Right” was actually achieved by that same erstwhile Reformer along with the new leader of the federal ProgCons Manning helped destroy—but not until Manning’s final stab at power where he lost the leadership contest for the new and ill-fated Canadian Alliance party which the hapless Stockwell Day surfed into oblivion after giving Preston a jet-ski squirt in the eye. Thus the arc of Manning debuted from prefabulation, rose to his zenith as cosmeticians drew back the curtain to reveal the leader of the Opposition, and throws in with the separatists after appearing to have been most recently groomed at the taxidermist.
So, it has come to this: accepting support from two such former politicians who are not only has-beens but also spectacular political flop has-beens. Worse, neither of them doubts Danielle’s maudlin tears are a tad overwrought. And, worst of all, the segment of Alberta’s electorate that actually believes her blubbering is sincere is too small to win a secession referendum —even if it were legally or constitutionally possible for any province to secede from the Canadian federation. Which it is not.
Well, yes, I can see why Danielle might shed a few in the circumstance, but let us wait for the day when the referendum fails to support another referendum, or when tRump gets his comeuppance following the duck-laming midterms, or perhaps when the TBA faction follows through on its threat to oust Smith for any backsliding from unilateral secession. Then we’ll see if she can squeeze out a contrite tear or two.
To see her fail in every aspect of public life will make mine only tears of joy.
el gordo in Alberta with a couple of wackie politicians? sounds about right. it is funny though because el gordo, when he was premier of B.C. he fronted the B.C. Lieberal party. Of course if danni wants lessons in acting I guess old gordo might work as well as the next drunk driver from Maui. He might be able to give her lesson on how to sell of the provinces assets, he has experience. There was the B.C. Rail scandal. there was the contract to replace all the electrical meters in B.c. the contract worth a shit load of money went to a one person company. Can’t remember what it cost but we could have built a hospital at least with the funds. the guy who got the contract was not unfamiliar to el gordo. Then there were the run of the river contracts which weren’t going to be good for the fish or the people–Rafe Mair’s blog wrote a great deal about that. Then el gordo lied about the GST thing and some of the caucus found out, twelve B.C. Liberal MLAs handed el gordo a letter. he did resign and harper rewarded him with a gig in europe which he blew and got known as a sexual harasser. Of course those of us in B.C. who read blogs and lived in Vancouver knew all about el gordo and women. Perhaps he was in Alberta to find a replacement for the lovely Lara. Mind you he isn’t premier of anything so he won’t be attractive to many. Smith must be desperate to have him there or she needed some one who once had a name tag which said Liberal. Having lived through he reign of error, the guy is no Liberal. He just as always come across as a wanna be and not making the cut
if the guy shows up in Alberta again, read all the blogs about what he did with B.C. Rail and the rest of it He maybe there to help Danni leave politics with something more than the door hitting her ass.