Braid: Smith says her government will be rural in makeup and thinking, with fewer Calgary ministers

OBSEQUIOUS FAWNING OVER A FELLOW SCAB JOURNALIST

Opinion by Don Braid, Calgary Herald - 

Danielle Smith speaks after being sworn in as Alberta Premier-designate

 in Edmonton on Tuesday October 11, 2022.© Provided by Calgary Herald

ONE OF THE WOMEN IN THIS PICTURE SHOULD NOT BE THERE

Check your termination deals, AHS managers.

Snap to attention, federal government lawyers.

Rural MLAs, get ready for big cabinet jobs and a dominant rural tone in government.

RCMP officers, be prepared to work alongside a growing provincial police contingent, very soon.

All that came out before and after Premier Danielle Smith was sworn in at 11:23 a.m. Tuesday. She first appeared on Real Talk with Ryan Jesperson, the masterful interviewer. Later, she spoke at her swearing-in ceremony, and once more at a full news conference in the legislature media room.

Smith has said plenty in the past three months, much of it dismissed as political wind aimed at unhappy UCP members.

Now she’s the premier. The wind is policy.

Calgary’s dominance of cabinet is about to end. This was one of the weirdest features of premier Jason Kenney’s government — a cabinet that at one point had 17 of 26 posts filled by Calgary MLAs. Some rural folks called the UCP the “United Calgary Party.”

“We have a largely rural caucus because we have 39 of 41 seats that are not in Edmonton and Calgary, and yet the bulk of the cabinet was from Calgary,” Smith said.

“And I think what happened is that those rural voices really felt like that couldn’t get on the radar, that there was an inner circle and then an inner-inner circle.”

She doesn’t need to mention what happens when those rural members go into full rebellion. A premier loses his (her) job.

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But she’s comfortable with a much stronger rural voice and tone in Alberta government. “I think people know my style of conservatism is very rural-based, there should be no surprise at that,” she said.

She has also appointed herself as the Brooks-Medicine Hat UCP candidate, using her power as party leader to name the candidates in up to four ridings.

She does that while refusing to call a byelection in vacant Calgary-Elbow .

She seems to feel there’s a problem with “rolling byelections.” But former PC premier Jim Prentice, whose caucus Smith joined, held four simultaneous byelections in 2014 after he became premier, including the one in his own riding.

Smith says she got a call from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and they talked about some things they can agree on, including carbon capture and hydrogen.

“I’m not starting off trying to find things to find areas of disagreement . . . But I did also ask if he would allow us to get out of litigation on Bill C-69 by modifying the law so it actually falls into compliance with the Constitution.

SHE PUTS HER CART BEFORE THE HORSE

“He begged to differ with me on that. That’s a prime example of the way in which the federal government operates. They pass unconstitutional laws all the time. They should not be legislating in our area of jurisdiction any more than we can legislate in theirs.

“Then they force us to go through an extensive court process to try to get laws struck down and rewritten.”



Danielle Smith entering Government House before being sworn in as Premier of Alberta on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022, in Edmonton.© Greg Southam

Although her top aide, Rob Anderson, has said Alberta wouldn’t defy Supreme Court rulings, Smith wants Ottawa to be chasing Alberta in the high court, not the reverse.

She does sound somewhat softer, however. For instance, Smith says she didn’t “holus bolus” adopt the Free Alberta Strategy fronted by Anderson, although it was the political jet fuel in her campaign

She also didn’t say she would replace the Mounties, but promised to quickly “augment” them with a provincial police service to initially deal with the crisis in addictions and mental health.

“We will move right away . . . on provincial entry into these areas.”

There’s no nuance in Smith’s view of Alberta Health Services. She is contemptuous.

“It’s mostly AHS that is in my sights. We’ve been told time after time, leave it to the experts, we’ve got this, we know what we’re doing.

“They don’t know what they’re doing. They made that very clear. COVID didn’t break the system, it just revealed that the system was broken.

“But we want to make sure that we are staffing the front lines properly. If that means we’re going to be reducing some of those bureaucratic layers of management, yep, they should be a little bit worried . . . We’re going to change the management.”

Later she promised front-line health workers: “Reinforcements are coming.”

And that was Day 1.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald.

Twitter: @DonBraid

UCP leadership race power rankings: Danielle Smith was a scab

Last week justice minister Tyler Shandro held a press conference where he announced that Alberta won’t be “participating” in the federal government’s gun buyback program, that it would be challenging the law in court and that it would be asking the RCMP to not enforce the law. When politicians start seriously talking about ignoring the laws they don’t like we’re not that far from things getting bad. Something that makes the situation even worse is the degree to which the UCP are whipping people up with false stories. The federal buy-back program isn’t a mass round-up of all the guns in the country. It’s a buyback program for very specific assault-style guns, that could only be shot on ranges under strict storage and transportation rules in the first place—before they were prohibited over two years ago.  Shandro had to watch his words to avoid sounding too much like he was cribbing from Danielle Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Act. But it didn’t matter.  After the announcement Smith was quick to suggest Shandro's approach is “closely aligned” with how the ASA would work and that she would have a vote on it.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Smith will just be carrying on Kenney’s political project just with more carelessness and recklessness. Smith has a proven track record of sending the organizations she’s running into the sewer. It seems everyone has forgotten about her time on the Calgary Board of Education which was so dysfunctional that the Tory education minister at the time fired her and every other trustee. We all know what happened with the Wildrose Party and now she’s back for a third crack at politics where surely things will go better this time.  From a young age Smith has been tapped as a political leader but while she might be an effective propagandist and mouthpiece with certain audiences she struggles when at the helm of a political machine.  The new UCP leader will be decided shortly, Oct. 6, and it’s probably going to be her, so let’s hope she keeps that failure streak going.  The competition between the UCP candidates has been so stagnant that this week I’m instead ranking the top 7 deep cut Danielle Smith gaffes, scandals, and wacky incidents. And if you want an excellent deep dive that goes into Smith’s history I recommend the latest episode of the Alberta Advantage. 7. The CBE disaster While the overwhelming dysfunction of the CBC that led to the firing of all the trustees was a group effort Danielle Smith was instrumental in making it a reality. Dave Cournoyer has written the authoritative wrap-up of that affair. 6. Tobacco isn’t that bad actually  Smith has been back and forth between politics, the media and conservative think tanks her entire adult life. Given the Fraser Institute milieu in which she was raised it is unsurprising that in 2003 she wrote a column for the Calgary Herald (where she ended up after the CBE affair) titled “Anti-smoking lobby does more harm than good.”  In the column she extolled the health benefits of a daily dart. “The evidence shows moderate cigarette consumption can reduce traditional risks of disease by 75 per cent or more,” Smith wrote. “Shouldn’t smokers be told?” Press Progress has the details.  5. Alberta should invade B.C. Being on the radio for hours on end does mean you end up running your mouth in bizarre directions. One time Smith said maybe Alberta should look into annexing Prince Rupert, B.C.  4. Pseudoscience enthusiast  Back in 2020 Smith deleted a pile of tweets she posted that made some incredibly incorrect claims about the effectiveness of Donald Trump’s favourite COVID cure, hydroxychloroquine.  3. Cryptobug  After reading that Smith argued for cigarettes and horse medicine, maybe you won’t be surprised to hear she’s into funny money. Smith is a big advocate of cryptocurrency, has invested—and lost money—in it, and trucks in some pretty wild conspiracy theories about central banks when she talks about it 2. The bus wrap  The 2012 Wildrose Party campaign bus.  1. Scab Danielle Smith scabbed for Conrad Black during the extremely contentious 1998-99 strike at the Calgary Herald. If you’re in the labour movement and you’re talking to other people in the other labour movement about Danielle Smith the first thing and the last thing out of your mouth should be that she happily crossed a picket line and helped break a strike.  “Scabby the Rat” outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, Sept. 26, as workers picketed. Photo by Jack Tomczuk via the Scabby the Rat Facebook page.  Duncan Kinney http://www.progressalberta.ca/ PS: If you want to share an online version of this story it's available here.

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Class War Returns

Once again the right wing in Canda has declared class war, on the heals of the attacks on public sector workers by the Harpocrite government.

Premier Ed Stelmach's government should expand no-strike legislation for public-sector employees to blunt the unions' main bargaining tool in contract negotiations, says the Alberta director for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Such a move, said Danielle Smith, would help deflate public sector payrolls. A national CFIB study examining the gap between wages paid in the public and private sectors at all three levels of government shows on average, public employees earn considerably more, especially when pensions and benefits are included. Federal employees get 17.3% more; provincial 7.9% more
A hiring freeze to shrink public payrolls or expanded no-strike legislation could help achieve that, she said. Now the question arises how politically realistic such measures are, given at the federal level, expanded non-strike provisions, as suggested by the Tory minority government, helped precipitate a putsch by the Opposition.

Dannielle Smith is a Calgarian like the PM, a former Fraser Institute student, a scab during the Calgary Herald Strike, a fellow traveler of the Canadian Reform/Alliance/Conservative party, do ya think this survey may have been leaked to the Harpocrites earlier than its release today to justify their attack on the public service unions in the fiscal update?

Once again the right wing ideolouges promote class war while claiming to speak for taxpayers, who really are not taxpayers but business interests who pay little or no taxes. The real taxpayers are the working class, especially those who are unionized and pay the highest taxes!

SEE:
Harpocrites Declare Class War
Wage Controls

Ed Stelmach Hires Scab

Union Busting Alberta Style

Tags
Harper, Conservatives, deficit, Government, politics, Flaherty, CFIB, PSAC, politics,Canada, Danille Smith, Economy, stike, wage controls,