Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has changed her story again about her controversially congenial telephone conservation with street preacher Artur Pawlowski about the criminal charges against him.
This time, using the Saturday morning Your Province, Your Premier call-in radio program provided by Corus Entertainment, Smith claimed she took the very political preacher’s call about the charges, which stemmed from his actions during the convoy blockade of the international border crossing at Coutts last year, because she thought he wanted to talk about something else.
“Obviously, Mr. Pawlowski holds some very extreme views that I disagree with completely,” Premier Smith began her response to a softball question lobbed by Corus host Wayne Nelson.
This is certainly not what it sounded like during her original conversation with Pawlowski, which took place in January and was first reported by the CBC on March 29. Recordings of their chat have been posted all over social media.
Said Smith to Nelson: “When we talked, I thought we were talking in the context of him being a political party leader, ’cause he was at the time the leader of the Independence Party, and it turned into a discussion about what I was doing with COVID amnesty …” (Pawlowski was booted as leader of the Independence Party of Alberta, apparently for being too extreme even for them, the same day as the CBC broke the story about his call with the premier.)
This is simply not what happened, as anyone understands who has listened to the various recordings of the conversation circulating on social media, which were presumably put there by the street preacher himself or his supporters.
From start to finish, the conversation was about how Pawlowski wanted his charges dropped, and about how much Smith sympathized with his predicament – which, it must be noted, was entirely of his own creation – and what she would try to do about it.
Be that as it may, like other excuses that have been proffered by the premier up to now, her latest claim raises more questions than it answers.
To wit: What did she think Pawlowski wanted to talk about, leader to leader, if it wasn’t the changes he faced? Some kind of political deal in return for getting the charges dropped? Approval to run as a UCP candidate? The imagination boggles!
Smith has still offered no reasonable explanation of why she, the premier of Alberta, was willing to chat for 11 minutes with a man whom she knew had been charged with breaching a release order and with criminal mischief for, prosecutors say, inciting violence with his call to make the blockade Alberta’s Alamo moment.
Pawlowski was also charged under UCP founder Jason Kenney’s likely unconstitutional Alberta Critical Infrastructure Defence Act with damaging or destroying essential infrastructure. It will be ironic if that act is overturned as a result of the exertions of one of Kenney’s former allies, and not the environmentalists, trade unionists, and First Nations protesters the legislation was intended to target.
After her improbable claim she had intended just to chat about politics with Pawlowski, Smith rambled characteristically about her plans to “look into ways that we might be able to address the non-violent, non-firearms-related, non-contempt-of-court-related charges,” and repeated her previous claim she’d listened to the advice of her Justice minister and nothing more could be done until the matters before the courts are all resolved.
Whether or not those court actions include her own threatened defamation suit against the CBC is quite unclear, as is almost everything said by Smith about the Pastorgate affair.
“This is yet another desperate move from Danielle Smith to distract from her attempt to block the prosecution of Pawlowski and others at Coutts,” said NDP Opposition Justice Critic Irfan Sabir in a statement sent to media soon after the premier’s comments aired yesterday.
“The entire call between Pawlowski and Smith is her describing her efforts to block these charges, either by weekly calls to prosecutors or her expressing her dissatisfaction to the Attorney General and deputy Attorney General,” Sabir said, quite accurately. “There’s absolutely no discussion of party politics in the call.”
Sabir accused Smith of “yet another fabricated explanation” and repeated the NDP’s call for a quick independent investigation led by a judge – which as has been said here before was a risky strategy for the NDP, but which looks to have paid off because of Smith’s apparent inability to ever admit she is wrong or to stop making hard-to-believe excuses.
A judge is expected to deliver a verdict on Pawlowski’s charges next month. A provincial general election is also expected to take place in Alberta next month.
A recording of Saturday’s Your Province, Your Premier show is found here.
A recording of the money clip, as it were, was published here by Postmedia’s Trevor Robb.
A transcript of the money clip was made and posted here by City News reporter Courtney Theriault.
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