Danielle Smith’s supporters can’t handle the truth

Live by the conspiracy theory, die by the conspiracy theory. That seems to be Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s guiding principle right now, as she stares down a vote on her leadership at November’s United Conservative Party AGM in Red Deer. During a recent town hall, Smith made it clearer than ever that there’s no rabbit hole too deep for her to jump down. 

During the Saturday session at Edmonton’s Maharaja Banquet Hall, some 500 party members showed up to ask questions of the premier and a few of her MLAs. While more mainstream things like healthcare and the economy came up, it was her answers to the more exotic questions that caught most people’s attention. From so-called “15-minute cities” to an imaginary wave of asylum seekers headed for Alberta, there was no far-right fever dream she wasn’t willing to indulge. 

And yes, that includes chemtrails. In response to a question about their supposed existence over the skies in Alberta, she suggested that it might be the US Department of Defence doing it. “I have some limitations in what I can do in my job. I don’t know that I would have much power if that is the case, if the US Department of Defence is spraying us. So I’ll do what I can to investigate.”

This is about as far from John McCain’s famous 2008 rebuke of one of his supporters as you can get. At that town hall, McCain fielded a question with an equally ludicrous premise — that Barack Obama, his opponent in the presidential election, was an “Arab” — and cut the woman off before she could finish her half-baked thought. “No, ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about.”

Those days are clearly over, to our considerable collective detriment. As University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach noted on social media, “if you can't unequivocally state that the US Defense Department is not spraying us with chemicals through jet exhaust, that's disqualifying. It's disqualifying for a premier. It's disqualifying for a columnist. It disqualifies you as a thinking member of society.”

It also betrays a fundamental unkindness that contemporary conservative leaders like Smith consistently inflict on their own followers. Rather than trying to pull them out of the muck of misinformation, paranoia, and outright conspiracies, they instead encourage them to roll around in that intellectual filth. It makes them less capable of fully participating in their communities and the broader society, and more likely to say or do things that limit their economic and social opportunities. It also binds them more closely to the conservative cause, and helps feed the personal and political ambitions of those leading it.  

This is the subtext to the Smith government’s proposed changes to the Alberta Bill of Rights, which are also aimed at placating the UCP membership in advance of November’s leadership vote. There is nothing in those changes that could possibly override or enhance our existing Charter rights, and the weirdly American stuff about firearms rights is clearly out of Alberta’s jurisdiction. The fact that the Alberta Bill of Rights is mere legislation rather than a constitutional guarantee means there’s a built-in future use of the notwithstanding clause on everything enumerated in it, since the next government — or even the next UCP premier — could simply pass new legislation rendering it moot. 

The key driver behind these changes are the pandemic-era grievances that so disproportionately motivate Smith’s rural base. The updates to the Alberta Bill of Rights will, according to the premier, “reinforce the right of every Albertan to make their own choices regarding medical treatments they receive.” This was always a right they had, and one that wasn’t actually violated during the pandemic. It’s just that there were consequences attached to the choice not to get vaccinated that were intended to protect both the healthcare system and the broader society we all share. 

The possibility of similar choice-based consequences being reintroduced in the midst of some future public health crisis isn’t getting legislated away here, either. When pressed by journalists about the need to balance individual liberties with community-level safety, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange let the truth slip out. “It will be balanced to make sure that we have the ability to function as a society as well and ensure the safety of all.”

That’s not a truth that either LaGrange or her boss are eager to share with their most devoted supporters. They will instead tell them they’ve struck a blow for personal liberty and freedom and hope that another public health crisis — one that forces the same sort of tough choices and tradeoffs that governments like Jason Kenney and Doug Ford’s made during the last one — doesn’t rear its head before the next election. They will wait for federal courts to overturn the most flagrantly unconstitutional aspects of their new bill, perhaps knowing that outcome was inevitable. And they will use the ensuing outrage and anger to further the grievance-industrial complex that both animates conservative politics in Alberta and distracts voters from the failings of their own provincial government. 

If the UCP really wanted to help its most ardent supporters, it would start by telling them the truth — even, and maybe especially, the uncomfortable truths. They need to better understand what different levels of government can and can’t do, and they ought to be told when they’re trading in ideas and theories that are demonstrably (and often dangerously) false. They should be encouraged to seek out the best and most accurate sources of information on the things they care about, not driven to do their own research in the dankest corners of the internet. 

Instead, they’re being treated like glorified mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of crap. This clearly serves the interests of the politicians who depend on their votes. Whether it serves the interests of the people casting them is, in the end, up to them to decide.