According to a news account by The Canadian Press that will be read across the Dominion, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith delivered an emotional appeal to Albertans to remain in Canada Saturday as “Conservative elder statesman” Preston Manning benevolently looked on.
I’ll concede this much about Premier Smith’s performance as the warm-up act for Manning’s online “Alberta and the West Assembly,” she was emotional. The jury remains out about what she was blubbering about, though, if indeed it was anything other than the kind of ham acting we have seen from her before. The quality of the video isn’t good enough to see if she was really “holding back tears.”
As for urging Albertans to vote to remain in Canada on October 19, that would be in the deceptively worded and highly unpopular referendum question that she herself and her separatist-dominated party insist we must vote on. Smith claims she will be voting to remain in Canada.
At any rate, the premier’s defence of Canada before Manning’s online audience wasn’t much of a defence. It was a long list of complaints about what the credulous news report described as “historic indignities Albertans have suffered at the hands of the federal government.”
Her remarks were larded with spin and occasional outright falsehoods, clearly intended to leave the impression that Canada has treated Albertans so badly they would be insane not to set up their own landlocked petro-republic and get the statehood train rolling into Union Station in Washington D.C. as quickly as possible.
“A lot of Albertans are angry and some are more than angry,” she said as she moved into the tearful part of her performance.
“They’re hurt. I hear it at town halls, in coffee shops, at hockey rinks and in my email inbox,” Smith continued, confabulating about events that may or may not have happened, that may or may not have involved real people, behaviour that anyone who is familiar with the Alberta premier’s political career has observed time and again.
This could have happened, of course, as long as she and her aides were careful to curate the people she meets, and ensure she only talked to folks she agrees with. And she could really believe it when she says it – as the late Ronald Reagan, another right-wing ham actor although a considerably better one, is said to have believed his own made-up stories. At least president Reagan had the excuse of having read some of his tall tales in scripts he’d memorized.
The premier rambled on: “… Some came to ask (pause) a painful question (long pause), does this country (pause) actually want (pause) us? (really long pause; sniff) – so (pause) that question (pause) is what 700,000 signatures (pause) represent.”
Again, as anyone who follows politics in Canada’s richest province understands clearly, some 400,000 of those signatures, those on former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition, were intended to prevent there being a referendum and to be a powerful statement of faith in and loyalty to Canada. When the premier says otherwise, as she does repeatedly, she is lying.
Indeed, the whole premise of her performance was hogwash. What she described is not the view of the majority of Albertans, as poll after poll illustrates, and as the Oct. 19 referendum will prove – unless there is some serious electoral jiggery-pokery, which is all too possible given the history of separatist scheming by Smith’s government.
“The fight to make Canada work for Alberta is working,” she declared, coming to the climax of her performance and what appears to have been her key point. “When Alberta stood up and refused to back down, the country started listening. … Your anger was not wasted. … Why walk away from the table when we’re finally winning at it?” (Emphasis added.)
This isn’t an appeal to Albertans to remain in Canada. It’s an appeal to the separatists who dominate her party not to send her packing for not being separatist enough – which is starting to sound like a very real possibility.
Putting a little shine on the increasingly unpopular referendum campaign also seems to have been a key point of Manning’s two-day online improv festival.
As for Manning, while at 84 he is certainly an elder, he is no statesman, and journalists need to stop repeating this nonsensical trope.
He is the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right who has played a role in Smith’s schemes before, including her controversial 2014 effort to persuade her fellow Wildrose Party MLAs to cross the floor of the Legislature and join the Progressive Conservative Party led by Jim Prentice. For a time, that seemed to have laid waste to her political career.
The purpose of Manning’s “assembly” – co-chaired by another elderly political has-been, former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell – seems mainly to be to polish up the UCP separation referendum and maybe find a way to make the Conservative Party of Canada relevant again as it withers in the bright glow of a popular (though not populist) Liberal prime minister.
Canadian Conservatives, who can’t seem to find a leader Canadians like, may be feeling a bit emotional about Mark Carney’s success as well.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
