Danielle Smith — Canada's first 'alternatively informed' premier
National Post, 22 October 2022
Smith is the first premier to come from the world of alternative news sources
Were it not for Liz Truss, the soon-to-be-former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith would have been His Majesty’s first minister who had the roughest last 10 days.
(Spare a thought for King Charles III. His mother’s first prime minister was Winston Churchill; his first prime minister reigned for less time than it would take to read Churchill’s books.)
Premier Smith managed a spectacular triplex reversal to launch her premiership: first reversing her flagship policy on not abiding by adverse Supreme Court decisions; then clarifying her remarks about the unvaccinated as being the “most discriminated against group” in her lifetime; now apologizing for voicing some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for his aggressive war against Ukraine.
Back in April, Smith suggested that the Russian bear be permitted to swallow Ukraine’s eastern territories and that perhaps the war was Ukraine and NATO’s fault. In her October disavowal of those remarks, Smith said that her earlier comments were “ill-informed” and confessed that her “knowledge and opinion of this matter have drastically evolved since that time.”
Albertans have a bovine expression to characterize that claim. Danielle Smith may be many things, but “ill-informed” she is not. She is remarkably intelligent and articulate, and has spent a lifetime deeply engaged in public affairs, for years expatiating for hours a day on talk radio. By late April, Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine had dominated the news the world over for two months. Was Smith not watching?
Or what news was she watching? That’s the key part of Smith’s self-exculpatory remarks about her pro-Putin viewpoints. In the early months of 2022, Smith was travelling through rural Alberta, stirring up opposition to pandemic policies with the goal of taking out Premier Jason Kenney.
She achieved that goal by transforming the membership of the United Conservative Party; by the time of the May leadership review vote, more than half of the party members had not previously been members of the UCP, or either of the previous Progressive Conservative or Wildrose parties.
Who were these new members, who were mad as hell at Kenney and the UCP establishment? Many of them were consumers of alternative news sources, the kind that were very much against vaccines but not so much against Putin. The locals.com site where Smith made her Ukraine remarks is one such forum.
In her April 29 livestream, Smith said it would be best for Ukraine to “denuclearize,” arguing that, “It would be absurd, if you want to draw a parallel, for Canada to have nuclear weapons and be allied with Russia and not think that was going to upset America. So why would we be surprised if Russia is upset because Ukraine has nuclear weapons and is allied with the United States?”
Of course, Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons, having given them up in 1994 under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine. It was one of the most important steps in creating a post-Cold War, post-U.S.S.R. security structure. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity if Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons.
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