This fascinating biography of Danielle Smith, Alberta’s MAGA-adjacent premier, by ivestigative reporter Jeremy Appel (author of “Kennyism: Jason Kenny’s Pursuit of Power”) dropped yesterday. I bought a copy straitaway and just finished it.
Appel sees Smith’s major strength not as a natural leader but as a master communicator. “One of Smith’s major talents,” he writes, “is taking the most outlandish, paranoid delusions of the far-right and translating them into terms that sound reasonable to the broader public.” Smith’s former editor at The Calgary Herald tells Appel he admired her “ability to think in small words.”
Thomas Lukaszuk, the PC deputy premier while Smith was Leader of the Opposition, shares many delightfully catty opinions with Appel, telling him at one point that Smith is a “political magpie,” explaining that, “She picks up shiny objects, and the problem is that she hasn’t got the intellectual capacity to discern gold from fool’s gold.”
Appel is struck by how many people –including colleagues who Smith betrayed– still remember her as polite and agreeable and don’t seem to hold any grudges against her. (Tom Flanagan being a notable exception.) This is another of Smith’s superpowers. Not having any clear ideology frees her to be a sort of “mirror” reflecting what she senses her audiences want to hear. This positions Smith as “a serious thinker exploring all sides of an issue” while at the same time she is “narrowing the range of political debate in Canada,” as Appel says.
Appel leads us briskly through Smith’s working class Calgary background, her nine-years (and two degrees) as an off-and-on University of Calgary student smitten by Ayn Rand’s “objectivism,” her short but disastrous term as a Calgary school trustee, her more succesful career as a call-in radio pundit and columnist and its troubling overlap with her career as a lobbyist, her rocky stint as leader of the Wildrose Party followed by her time in the political wilderness, and her eventual political rebirth following her election as premier in 2022.
Along the way we can see some of Smith’s recurring obsessions taking shape. The roots of Smith’s disregard for public education and for Canada’s Universal Healthcare system (preferring US style Charter Schools and privatized medical care) go way back as do her climate denialism and what Appel calls her “acrobatic walking of the tightrope” of Alberta’s separatist movement.
Appel ends the book with a warning about next week’s separation referendum. “Even if the independence referendum fails,” he writes, “I fear that we’ve gone down a path of no return…In addition to independence, Albertans are voting on nine ancillary measures that align with separatist ambitions. If any of these proposals pass, they will serve as further grist for the separatist mill, ensuring the topic dominates discussion in Canada for the foreseeable future. … The result will be a Canada that looks increasingly like Alberta.”
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