“Premier Smith says she’s waiting on Nenshi to call Lethbridge-West by-election,” said the headline yesterday on the MyLethbridgeNow.com website.
I’m going to give the good folks at the Southern Alberta news site the benefit of the doubt and assume someone there is having a little fun with Danielle Smith, the occupant of the top political job in Alberta, who is acting as if she doesn’t understand who gets to call by-elections in the Westminster Parliamentary system. (Hint: It’s not the unelected leader of an opposition party.)
In addition to being a premier, Smith is the beneficiary of a first-class public post-secondary education at the University of Calgary – a leading Canadian institution of higher learning, surely – which presumably involved passing a political science course or two.
So I’m sure she understood as well as the rest of us do that when a vacancy is created in the Legislature, as occurred in the Lethbridge-West Riding last Canada Day when former NDP MLA Shannon Phillips’ resignation took effect, it is the lieutenant-governor who sets the date of the election on the “advice” of the premier.
Since in our Parliamentary system the advice of the premier is really a command, it is therefore Smith who gets to set the date of the by-election – within a limit of six months from the day the vacancy was created, no general election pending.
Nevertheless, as the MLN story put it more accurately than the headline, whenSmith was in Lethbridge Monday to campaign for the United Conservative Party candidate in the by-election that she has not yet called, she told reporters “she is holding off on calling an election in the riding to see where NDP leader Naheed Nenshi will be running for a legislative seat in the province.”
It would be fair to describe this as mischievous, or sophomoric, but either way it is nonsense.
What it illustrates above all else is that the UCP since Smith took over as premier sees itself, and often acts, as if it were the Opposition. That is a job, of course, in which the premier has some experience.
Without a doubt, she and her advisers have a childish desire to needle Nenshi for being in no hurry to set foot inside the Chamber of the Legislature, his non-member status bestowing certain political advantages on him in the short term, among them freedom to campaign full-time and no need to ask a sitting member of his party to give up a seat.
“I’m kind of waiting for the Leader of the official Opposition,” the premier told the reporters.
Of course, for the time being, the leader of the official Opposition is Edmonton-Mill Woods MLA Christina Gray, which should only be slightly confusing to a premier even though Nenshi is nevertheless the leader of the Opposition party. Readers of this blog, who follow politics closely, will instinctively grasp the difference.
For his part, Nenshi responded by advising the premier to fire one of her cabinet ministers to open a seat in Calgary for him to run in, a suggestion that is genuinely amusing.
The MLN story, which followed the outline of the Canadian Press account of the same event with a little local colour tossed in, continued: “Smith says for the interest of taxpayers it would be nice to hold both by-elections at the same time and with Nenshi having been elected leader of the party back in June she thought by now one of his caucus members would have stepped down for him.”
She argued, The CP reported, that it would be “in the best interests of taxpayers to have both byelections at the same time.”
Readers with longish memories will recall that in October 2022 Smith took a completely opposite position when it was convenient to her, refusing to call a by election in the Calgary-Elbow riding, which was known to be leaning toward the NDP after the resignation of MLA Doug Schweitzer, when she wanted to a safe seat in the Legislature for herself.
In the event, she induced a rural MLA to step aside and ran in Brooks-Medicine Hat without calling an election in Calgary-Elbow. Smith’s justification for that outrageous and fundamentally undemocratic plan to treat voters in different locations in dramatically different ways was, in her own words, that it would cost too much to hold two by-elections!
“I think it’s important for me to be there to introduce my legislation and so we’re going to try to limit the expense by having it, the only one by-election,” she told the CBC at the time.
I wasn’t making that up two years ago, and I’m not making it up now!
“Hypocrisy, thy name is Danielle,” Nenshi, Calgary’s former mayor, commented Monday.
Well, as has been noted in this space before, Alberta’s premier, like Oscar Wilde, believes consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
The Irish playwright and poet, possibly the greatest wit of the 19th Century, was kidding. It’s not clear Smith is, though.
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