Danielle Smith is the Premier of the Canadian province of Alberta. If you already knew that, my condolences. You may already be aware of the absurdity and tragedy that statement entails. If you don’t know who she is, or you don’t know why her premiership, or indeed, the course of her very life are travesties, I’m sorry — this article must unfortunately alleviate your blissful ignorance.
Danielle Smith is also an enemy of the people. As a serving Canadian politician, this status is almost automatic — she shares the gamut of genocidal opinions without which one is politically ostracized and removed from power. For instance, Smith believes that Israel should exist and has a right to defend itself, that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7th constituted a “terrible terrorist attack,” etc. What are the full historic depths of her depravity and crimes against the working classes, which are only increasing as she seeks to dismantle Alberta’s social security, healthcare system, and pensions?
Smith lived in subsidized housing growing up. She attributes her interest in politics to her father scolding her about the evils of Communism and the U.S.S.R in the eighth grade after a teacher presented them in a glowing light. One is forced to wonder what her father knows about Communismbeyond the usual misconceptions and propaganda. Indeed, that Smith ever had a teacher in McCarthyite Alberta during the height of the Cold War who portrayed Communism in a remotely positive light beggars belief.
Concerned about “Marxist indoctrination” happening in Alberta’s schools (don’t laugh), Smith’s father scared her back into politically acceptable anti-Communism. He taught her about the non-communist politicians of whom it’s considered appropriate to think highly, such as Ronald Reagan. Smith would become a libertarian who admired all the standard ghouls such as fellow social security recipient Ayn Rand and the queen of the ghouls herself, Margaret Thatcher. While she was in university, Smith was a favored student of disgusting reprobate and conservative thought leader Tom Flanagan. Flanagan is notorious for his affirmative comments about child pornography, his anti-Indigenous political positions and racism, and for once advocating for the assassination of Julian Assange.
Today, Smith’s politics are a crude synthesis of Thatcherism and the ideas of what’s called the “Calgary School” in order to lend gravitas to its specific blend of Austrian economics and Straussianism; in other words, to validate it as a legitimate political and economic philosophy when it’s actually nonsense. Unfortunately, an elaboration of the many and varied deficiencies in this “school” would be beyond the scope of this article.
Even with no knowledge of Marx or the philosophy underpinning Smith’s actions, the span of her career illustrates the amorality and harm of neoliberalism and conservatism. What she lacks in original ideas, Smith makes up for in a mindless goferism for recapitulating conservative talking points. Even the fact that her own party thinks little of her individuality or autonomy does not discourage her from implementing their platform and pushing it further right. When the party was in danger of losing seats in the most recent Alberta election, they reminded voters that it’s the party’s principles that are important, and the party that makes decisions, not foot-in-her-mouth Danielle Smith. Still, neither the lack of propriety nor knowledge have dissuaded Smith. She’s often spilling out the shit that right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute fill her with — and spew she does.
As a “Private Property Rights Advocate” in the nineties, she argued that private property rights trump all other rights, so protections for endangered species should be removed. Naturally, she’s vitriolically anti-Indigenous.
After a brief stint on the Calgary Board of Education, on which she operated as a poison pill against progressive interests, she became a journalist. She didn’t have any journalistic credentials, but was hired as a scab during the 1999-2000 Calgary Herald strike, proving that she has the most important journalistic qualification of all — the sycophantic zeal to regurgitate whatever garbage the Fraser Institute or tobacco lobby put on her plate. Her peers at the Herald didn’t call her “Trash Can Dani” for nothing. At the behest of both the Fraser Institute and the tobacco lobby, Smith famously lauded the “special health benefits” of smoking cigarettes — specifically that “smoking half a pack per day reduces the traditional risks of disease by 75% or more.” She also wrote an article entitled “Natives ultimate losers as reserves become ghettoes” in which she repeated Tom Flanagan’s perverse argument that increased constitutional protections and sovereignty for Indigenous nations encourage segregation and apartheid.
We must make abundantly clear what a bastardization and insidious framing of the issue this perspective is. Flanagan has written several historically revisionist texts which are meant to reframe and justify colonialism as beneficial to the colonized. He would have us believe that the problems which beset Indigenous reserves — from crumbling or non-existent infrastructure to the general poverty and social ills — are all due to Indigenous mismanagement. For him, it’s the Indigenous unwillingness to peacefully integrate into the “superior, European-modeled society” that is the cause of their troubles — not the underlying issues of colonial trauma and apartheid. Of course, which society imposed the reserve system on the other conveniently slips his mind. This is so he can say any increased sovereignty for reserves, or any token acts of reparation by the Canadian state towards its Indigenous people are actually harmful because they incentivize Indigenous peoples to remain in their own inferior civilizations. Smith espoused this opinion as a journalist about the Nisga’a Treaty of 2000, and the same attitude has pervaded her political stances towards Indigenous nations since. For Flanagan, and, by extension, Smith, any money or support rendered by the Canadian state to Indigenous nations is self-defeating; he believes that corrupt Indigenous leadership will squander whatever is given so that they always have the pretense to ask for more.
In her career as a journalist, Smith enthusiastically propagated this nonsense — it’s a very comforting narrative to a certain strata of settlers who would eventually form her political base.
Flanagan also wrote a dubious biography about Louis Riel, which frames Riel as a millenarian in order to delegitimize Metis land claims. This is eerily similar to the zionist obfuscation that the Palestinian struggle is purely religious and existential, not rooted in the ownership and occupation of land.
Flanagan and his mouthpiece Smith falsely equate the integration of Indigenous Nations into the Canadian state with the desegregation of the United States and the end of South African apartheid. This is a prevarication. An actual end to Canadian apartheid demands the dissolution of the legal fiction that is the Canadian state and the complete reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty by Indigenous nations.
Eventually, Smith turned her latent fascism into gold and became a politician. In this way, she made the leap from speaking and writing toxic waste to dumping it on millions of Albertans. Informed by her faulty understanding of sovereignty (thanks to having read and repeated Flanagan for so many years), her government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in December 2022. Though it masquerades as protection for Albertan interests against interference from the federal government, the only interests it truly defends are those of the same corporations and conservative political insiders we’ve been describing. The act was criticized by Indigenous leaders on the grounds that it could supersede their tribal rights. Smith even had the gall to compare the quibbles between Alberta and the federal government as comparable to the struggle between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Of course, she apologized for this.
The controversies and gaffes of her political career are well-documented and too numerous to get into, and are identical to those of any other fascist politician such as Ron DeSantis, whom she admires. She shares his COVID denialism, has compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler, and called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed.” Again she issued some lackadaisical apology, but the statement’s function as a dogwhistle had done its work. Ultimately, Smith’s apologies always take this insincere form — she says something that appeals to her base and is incendiary to everyone else, then hastily apologizes. But by the time Smith apologizes, whatever she said has already achieved its purpose, and the apology is comparatively meaningless.
If there’s one way Smith is unlike many similar figures, it’s her “live and let live” attitude about 2SLGBTQIA+ people and communities. But even this is not commendable. Although she is not vocally anti-2SLGBTQIA+ or “anti-woke” in the way many of her supporters wish she was, her desire to “depoliticize the issue” is functionally the same as theirs. By giving equal validity to oppressors and the oppressed, she is siding with the oppressor.
But this all pales compared to Smith’s latest neoliberal machinations, though we should stress one final time that these ideas do not belong to her, per se — she is merely the current, spineless functionary who must enact them. Smith wants Alberta to leave the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) in order to create an Alberta Pension Plan; she wants to dismantle the Alberta Health Service and cannibalize it into four new bureaucratic entities. Even Margaret Thatcher regarded the National Health Service as sacrosanct — if by “sacrosanct” we mean, “a line that even the bourgeoisie hesitate to cross, lest the masses come for their heads.” Though the details of what these nascent policies would entail are murky, history shows that their enactment can only have disastrous effects for the working class. Similar reforms, like those enacted by Thatcher and Pinochet in the eighties, only ever benefited corporations and the government officials who implemented them. They had deleterious impacts upon the social security of the working classes, and their effects remain apparent today.
Both AHS and the CPP leave much to be desired — they are meant to only benefit people as inexpensively and minimally as possible. But that even these programs risk vivisection by Danielle Smith and her handlers should still raise anyone’s alarm. For these policies, her anti-Indigenous attitudes, and for being the pliable tool of humanity’s most reprehensible elements, Danielle Smith is an enemy of the people.