Danielle Smith: Voice of Reason and Moderation

Yeah, you read that right!

Watching bits of the UCP AGM yesterday, I found myself thinking of Danielle Smith as a voice of reason, a moderating force relative to her party.

Then I shook my head, wondered if I had taken leave of my senses and reassessed.

But indeed, even a day later I’m still stuck with the idea that Smith is, in this context, a moderate. (This is a reminder that everything — EVERYTHING — is relative!)

There are a couple of excellent analyses of yesterday’s events already available: Dave Climenhaga reminds us that the UCP went full MAGA a while ago and CBC’s Jason Markusoff makes a compelling case that the turnout at the AGM was driven by mobilization around “parental rights” and anti-trans activism, a cause Smith does not herself embrace.

Although Smith served up some red meat to the crowd by saying that “parental rights are a core principle” for her party and government, she did not commit to following Saskatchewan and New Brunswick down the path of legislation. She said not a word about her government’s ill-advised Alberta Pension Plan caper when speaking to about the only crowd in Alberta that would cheer for it.

Something else in Smith’s speech caught my attention. She returned to one of the themes of last week’s throne speech, talking about rapid growth in Alberta’s population, suggesting that the province might be the second most populous province in the country in the foreseeable future (take that, Quebec!) and would need to build lots of high speed rail to get people from Calgary to Banff and Edmonton. If the vague commitment to parental rights was red meat, the vision of passenger rail was surely a heaping serving of brussel sprouts for this crowd!

When she spoke about the province’s rapid population growth, Smith asserted that these newcomers are coming “to experience the Alberta advantage.” That they possess the same “strength of character and vision as those who first built Alberta.” That “they are our people” and “we must reach out and welcome them.”

I interpreted this as an interesting shot across Take Back Alberta’s bow. What Smith did not say out loud was this: the newcomers to the province do not share the UCP members’ pasty complexions. As the provincial government’s population statistics show, the remarkable growth in Alberta’s population is primarily due to international migration. (Thanks, Trudeau!)

The perennial question for Take Back Alberta is this: from whom do you want to take back the province? The un-Albertan urban majority? The growing number of non-White citizens who think the ‘Alberta advantage’ shouldn’t come with a heaping side-dish of racism and discrimination?

And that brings us to the policy resolutions the TBA crowd enthusiastically endorsed. With their understanding of post-secondary education policy apparently informed by Fox News, the AGM participants voted to encourage the government of Alberta to do away with race-based admissions and close all Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offices at our post-secondary institutions.

I’ve been kicking around the Alberta post-secondary sector for quite a while now, and I can assure you that the kind of race-based admissions the UCP members are thinking of simply don’t exist. If the province were to move forward with such a policy, the most significant consequence would be to impair institutions’ good-faith efforts to increase the participation of Indigenous students. In fact, it’s Alberta government policy to increase participation rates among Indigenous learners, and it would be quite remarkable for the province to abandon this to keep Take Back Alberta happy.

The proposal to do away with EDI offices at Alberta post-secondary institutions cuts closer to the potential point of conflict between Smith and her party. Alberta is rapidly becoming more ethnically diverse, and the provincial government can either embrace this diversity and work with various organizations in the province (including post-secondaries) to help us all find ways to live and work together in harmony, or they can take a page out of Quebec’s book and pass laws reminding non-White and non-Christian citizens that they don’t really belong. Those EDI offices are part of a path forward to the first alternative, and shutting them moves us in the direction of the second.

On this issue — and not on many others — Smith is, in fact, a moderate. She finds herself trying to win over the activist grassroots of her party. It reminds me of Jason Kenney trying to explain why the government had to impose COVID mandates when the health care system teetered on the brink of collapse. Whether the politics of race and inclusion animate the TBA crowd in the same way that “parental rights” and COVID have remains to be seen.