As the newly re-elected premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith sits at the nexus of the two most powerful forces shaping contemporary politics: populism and climate change.

While the former may have carried Smith to the leadership of the United Conservative Party, her campaign in the general election was aimed at convincing enough Albertans that she was not the scary figure her opponents accused her of being. As my colleague Jason Markusoff wrote, Smith “turned her back on a lifetime of libertarian populism” and “largely jettisoned most of the ideas she’d campaigned on to win the UCP leadership.”

But the worried voices are still hard to ignore.

Jared Wesley, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta, wrote in April that democracy was on the ballot. On Monday, Politico quoted Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative MLA, warning that Smith would be “unbridled” if the UCP emerged victorious.

“If we thought she was radical now, and dismissive of any democratic norms, wait until she wins,” Lukaszuk told Politico.

Naheed Nenshi, the former mayor of Calgary, endorsed NDP Leader Rachel Notley and described Smith as an “existential threat” to the province.

“I did think that the NDP platform had a slight edge. However, I think there’s something deeper here. And I think a lot of Albertans are feeling the way I’m feeling, which is that this is no ordinary election. That the stakes are different, that the stakes seem higher,” Nenshi told CBC Radio’s Sunday Magazine this weekend.

“And what we’re seeing is Danielle Smith really pushing the boundaries of acceptable political behaviour … And I realize that when we look at what’s happened in places around the world, from Hungary to the United States, that silence is complicity.”

Smith did not make it hard for observers to draw those comparisons. Her first act as premier was to table the Alberta Sovereignty Act. At different points during this campaign, it was determined that she had violated ethics laws in her dealings with the justice minister, She also compared people who got vaccinated to the people who followed Hitler.

But enough Albertans were willing to look past such things.

It’s possible to overstate how well Smith did on Monday night. Four years ago, Jason Kenney led the UCP to 63 seats. Smith’s UCP won 49 seats. Smith very likely acted as a drag on her party’s support — much as Doug Ford did when he ran as an arch-populist while leading the Progressive Conservatives to government in Ontario in 2018.

But a narrow win is still a win — and Smith did it with Conservative stalwarts such as former prime minister Stephen Harper and federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre publicly lined up behind her.

It’s hard to know what direction Smith might take next — and Poilievre might eventually have cause to regret his endorsement. But whether Smith now reverts to her populist roots or sticks with the more moderate approach, there is at least one thing Albertans and other Canadians can count on: Smith will find reasons to fight with the federal government, likely over policies related to oil development and climate change.

Some things never change

To some extent, that would have been the case under Rachel Notley as well. Fighting with “Ottawa” is the easiest thing for any Alberta premier to do. It gets much easier to do whenever questions arise about how that premier is handling his or her own job.

But with Notley as premier, the fights might have been at least fewer in number — and would not be conducted in the shadow of the Alberta Sovereignty Act.

Of the climate policies promised or implemented by the Trudeau government, Smith’s government officially objects to at least three: a proposed cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector, clean electricity standards and methane regulations. She also opposes the federal carbon tax and has criticized the Liberal government’s plans to assist those who work in emissions-intensive industries. (She isn’t refusing to accept the federal government’s large subsidies for carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies.)

On Monday night, Smith devoted nearly a quarter of her 12-minute victory speech to the federal government.

“And finally, my fellow Albertans, we need to come together no matter how we have voted, to stand shoulder to shoulder against soon-to-be announced Ottawa policies that would significantly harm our provincial economy,” she said.

Trudeau might take solace from the suggestion that he could be such a unifying force for Albertans — a prime minister has no higher duty, after all, than bringing Canadians together. But Smith argues Liberal policies would increase household costs, endanger Alberta’s electricity supply, eliminate jobs and lead to economic ruin.

“As premier, I cannot under any circumstances allow these contemplated federal policies to be inflicted upon Albertans,” Smith said. “I simply can’t and I won’t.” 

The immediate response from Ottawa was conciliatory. “I think she’s going to see a lot of good faith on our part,” Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc told reporters.

Populism can’t beat climate change

The math here is not new — but it is inescapable. 

While national emissions were lower in 2021 than in 2005 — the baseline year for Canada’s current emissions target — emissions from oil were 12.5 per cent higher in 2021 and the industry now accounts for 28 per cent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Largely because of oil and gas development, Alberta is also the highest-emitting province in Canada.

There is no longer any real debate about the fact that those emissions have to be reduced substantially over the next 27 years — Smith’s own government is now nominally committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. The only thing unclear is exactly how she would have Alberta reach that target — especially after she has ruled out so many of the federal proposals.

It would be expecting too much to imagine that a discussion about getting to that goal would be perfectly sublime. But it’s a necessary discussion and the stakes are high — not least for the people of Alberta.

That discussion will benefit most from facts and reason and logic. It will gain nothing from populist appeals to anger and contrarianism.

AT ISSUE | Should Ottawa be worried about Danielle Smith’s win in Alberta? 

Should Ottawa be worried about Danielle Smith’s win in Alberta?

14 hours ago

Duration 9:53

In her victory speech, newly re-elected Premier Danielle Smith vowed to stand up against federal policies that she says undermined Alberta, including ambitious green energy plans. Should the Trudeau government be worried?

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WARSAW, Poland — The Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum has denounced a political spot by Poland’s ruling party that uses the theme of the Nazi German extermination camp to discourage participation in an upcoming anti-government march.

The state-run museum attacked “instrumentalization of the tragedy” of the 1.1 million people who were murdered at the site during World War II, arguing that it is an insult to their memory.

“It is a sad, painful and unacceptable manifestation of the moral and intellectual corruption of the public debate,” the state museum said.

The 14-second video published Wednesday by the Law and Justice party shows images of the former death camp, including the notorious “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, and the words: “Do you really want to walk under this slogan?”

The reference is to a now-deleted tweet from journalist Tomasz Lis, who claimed that President Andrzej Duda and ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski deserve to go to prison. He published the tweet amid a heated debate over a law passed by the party lawmakers and signed by Duda that is viewed by the U.S., the European Union and many Polish critics as anti-democratic.

“There will be a chamber for Duda and Kaczor,” the tweet said, using a nickname for Kaczynski.

He used the Polish word ”komora,” which can be simply a dark cell or chamber but which many in Poland associate with the gas chambers used by Germans in mass murder during the war.

Lis has since deleted the tweet and apologized.

“It is obvious that I was thinking of a cell, but I should have foreseen that people of ill will would adopt an absurd interpretation. I hope that Mr. Duda and Mr. Kaczynski will pay for their crimes against democracy, but on a human level I wish them health and long life,” Lis said. “I never wished death on anyone.”

President Duda weighed in with a tweet that implied criticism of the party that supports him. “The memory of the victims of German crimes in Auschwitz is sacred and inviolable; the tragedy of millions of victims cannot be used in political struggle; this is an unworthy act,” he said.

The purported aim of the new law is to create a commission to investigate Russian influences in Poland. But critics fear that it will be misused ahead of fall elections to target opponents, in particular opposition leader Donald Tusk. They say the commission could be used by the ruling party to eliminate its opponents from public life for a decade.

The law was approved this week by Duda, to widespread criticism in Poland and by the EU and the United States.

Critics in Poland have informally dubbed it “Lex Tusk,” and its passage has energized the political opposition. Tusk plans to lead a large anti-government march on Sunday in Warsaw, the capital.

The march is to be held on the 34th anniversary of the first partly free elections in Poland after decades of communism, on June 4, 1989.

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=The new Prairie party system, pathologically disconnected from the political authority of Ottawa, may be as significant a development as Danielle Smith’s win

So which party finished fourth? That would be our old friends from the centrist-vapourware Alberta Party (AP), whose support declined from about 172,000 to 12,715. Yikes. You may have noticed that the Alberta New Democrats’ vote count rose by 157,000 from 2019, and the party made the best of a disappointing night by talking excitedly about all the people who voted NDP for the first time. The mathematical coincidence here suggests that many or most of these dewy virgins weren’t disillusioned Jason Kenney voters, but just cranky Red Tories who were never on board with the United Conservative Party project in the first place and who had dallied with the AP in ’19.

(The high-profile “ex-Conservatives” who rallied noisily behind the NDP and Rachel Notley in the late days of the campaign were people who almost certainly voted AP last time, and who wouldn’t brake for Jason Kenney in a crosswalk if he was pushing a stroller with twins.)

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