Criticized for the company she keeps, Danielle Smith countered by insisting she doesn’t know who her friends are.
When Alberta’s premier caught flack for posing at a fundraiser last week in Calgary with a couple of convoy agitators still facing criminal charges for their role in the February 2022 Ottawa occupation, her instinct was to deny she knew them.
Presumably responding to NDP Justice Critic Irfan Sabir’s comment Thursday that this was part of “a pattern of behaviour for Smith to meet with people who undermined the rule of law, harmed our economy, and caused tremendous hardship for ordinary people,” the United Conservative Party (UCP) issued a statement saying it wasn’t so.
“The premier took part in a routine photo line-up with nearly 200 people last night,” the UCP told Global News in the statement. “The premier does not personally know these individuals.”
Well, as the author of this blog has proved on more than one occasion, politicians will often pose for photos with folks they don’t agree with – so her office’s statement had a ring of verisimilitude.
But the problem for the premier was that one of the folks with whom she controversially posed, and who published the photo on social media, quickly disavowed her claim.
“We know of each other,” James Bauder told Press Progress. “I’m a public figure. She’s a public figure.”
Naturally, the Premier’s Office didn’t respond to a follow-up question from Press Progress.
It’s fair to say, though, that it’s likely the premier knew perfectly well whom she was posing with and didn’t think it was a big deal. Posing with folks wearing convoy colours at the fundraiser certainly wasn’t a problem for Smith, as another photo from the event illustrates.
They were all there to support candidate Eric Bouchard, who is campaigning in former premier Jason Kenney’s old Calgary-Lougheed riding. Bouchard is affiliated with the far-right Take Back Alberta (TBA) faction of the party, which played a major role in pushing Kenney out of office and engineered the victory of Smith to replace him as premier.
And Smith does, as Sabir noted, have a track record for this kind of behaviour – most notably her notoriously congenial 11-minute phone chat with extremist pastor Artur Pawlowski. “This is not the behaviour of a premier,” Sabir said – or, at least it ought not to be.
Meanwhile, Smith’s relationship with the leader of the TBA insurgency was back in the spotlight Saturday when the Globe and Mail published a long and colourful story about the group and David Parker.
There wasn’t much new in the story, but it was nice to see it in the Globe, whose imprimatur lends a level of legitimacy to concern about TBA’s extremism that was lacking when it was merely bloggers and political scientists ringing the alarm.
The new tidbit – hitherto rumoured by never reported – was that Smith attended Parker’s wedding to a reporter for a busy right-wing propaganda site treated as legitimate media by the UCP and its federal counterpart.
“Mr. Parker denies this reflects an inappropriate coziness between himself and the premier even though he publicly says TBA could turn on her if she strays too far from its ideals,” Globe reporter Carrie Tait wrote in her story, which appears behind a paywall. “‘She’s my friend,’ Mr. Parker explains over lunch, adding he populated his side of the guest ledger with people he worked with on ‘projects.’”
Smith’s response to sharp commentary on social media about that was to attack a member of Opposition Leader and former premier Rachel Notley’s family, which presumably seemed like an appropriate tit-for-tat to the premier’s political advisors.
The UCP, in a rather lame statement to media, huffed: “What the premier would like to ask Notley, who is married to a communications representative for CUPE, is why is her husband’s union spending massively on third-party attack ads to elect the NDP, and how is it legal?”
There is, of course, no law against anyone being married to a union employee, although the UCP may wish it could make that so along with other categories of citizens it would like to keep from marrying whomever they wish. Y’all know what I mean.
As for the UCP’s statement that Notley’s husband, Lou Arab, is actively involved in the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), that is simply incorrect.
Meanwhile, several mainstream media news reporters took to social media to insist that despite Smith’s controversial recent praise for U.S. Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, she doesn’t buy into the whole campaign of anti-“woke” hysteria they are fomenting in their states.
Postmedia political columnist Don Braid even devoted most of a column to this notion, claiming Smith’s personal beliefs are sufficiently inclusive to pass a test for wokeness. Why, he rambled on, even some of her best friends …
Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
This is a little like pointing out some of the economic policies of that well-known German dictator of the 1930s actually made sense, which may be true but doesn’t add up to much of a defence for what he did.
If the role models for the “little bastion of freedom” our premier says she’d like to create here in Alberta ban books, suspend abortion rights, promote hatred of gays, trans people and immigrants, deny science, and advocate assault weapons for all, the consequences be damned, she’s bought into the whole program.
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