Premier Danielle Smith’s televised speech to the province on Tuesday probably achieved the No. 1 goal Smith and her UCP had for the dinner-time address: It stopped their bleeding in the polls caused by Smith’s serial stumbling in her first weeks as Alberta leader.
And at the very least in her Tuesday address, Smith looked as if she had the potential to grow into being premier. That means she will have surpassed the competence level many voters gave her credit for, following her obsession with a sovereignty act during the months of the UCP leadership race and her fixation on refighting the COVID-19 pandemic during her first seven weeks in office.
Two of the many emails I received from readers are indicative of what I mean.
In fairness, Smith has never raised the spectre of our province leaving Confederation. Calling her pledge to increase Alberta’s autonomy a veiled threat separate is an NDP campaign concoction.
Still, my St. Albert correspondent made a valid point: Smith’s Tuesday address revealed that she can wrap her mind around basic governance concepts (the things like inflation that matter to ordinary Albertans), rather than just the fringier nuggets like human rights for vaccine refusers.
In a nutshell: Smith looked more like a premier on Tuesday, less like a sensationalist radio host.
That was a big plus for her.
That’s huge. In this day and age of cancel culture, with its agree-or-be-silenced mob rule, most politicians don’t get a second chance.
Perhaps that reader was the only person in Alberta willing to think twice about Smith. However, if she was voicing a wider sentiment, the UCP at least have a chance to perform well in the upcoming legislative session and be rewarded by voters.
Fair or unfair, the UCP are still the default choice to lead Alberta, meaning voters (at least in Calgary, the smaller cities and rural Alberta) will vote right-of-centre so long as the right-of-centre party is halfway competent and united.
Politically, then, Smith’s speech seems to have served its purpose of stopping her party’s slide in the polls.
Will it achieve its more direct policy goal — to help blunt the effects of inflation? I’m less sure.
The suspension of the gasoline tax for at least six months is a good thing. It comes off everyone’s tax bill immediately, at the pump, without any huge bureaucratic intervention. (Unlike the federal carbon tax, which sucks billions out of consumers’ pockets, then costs billions in bureaucratic oversight to repay billions to everyone, no matter how much tax they paid.)
That’s how federal pandemic supports caused the current inflation.
But unlike federal pandemic relief, the Alberta amounts are much, much smaller and spread out over six months.
So perhaps Smith’s speech will end up being both a political and a policy triumph.
