Danielle Smith’s Dog Whistle on Newcomers

“Alberta has always welcomed newcomers who possess our shared values,” Premier Danielle Smith said in a statement published on the government’s official web page Thursday.

“Who possess our shared values”! What values would those be, pray?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a louder dog-whistle from an elected official since I came to Alberta decades ago, and there have been plenty of dog-whistles around this place since the United Conservative Party, now led by Smith, came to power in 2019.

Smith was barely trying to conceal her message to the UCP base in the usual coded deniability as she ginned up another attack on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals for trying to find a way to ensure asylum seekers are settled in all parts of the country.

“Alberta’s government is opposed to the federal government’s plan to relocate tens of thousands of asylum claimants to Alberta, especially without any financial assistance to support the province in doing so,” Smith huffed in the opening of her statement, repeating a lie being spread by New Brunswick Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs.

Higgs faces an election next month, and polls suggest it’s a tight race that’s shaping up to be a referendum on his divisive style of conservatism. His claim last week that federal officials are considering sending more asylum seekers to his province without financial assistance was quickly dismissed by federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller as “fictitious.”

“We at no time have said that we would impose asylum seekers on provinces without financial compensation,” Miller told reporters at the Liberal caucus retreat on Vancouver Island.

That fictional element didn’t stop Smith’s commentary, of course. “We are informing the Government of Canada that until further notice, Alberta is not open to having these additional asylum seekers settled in our province,” her statement concluded defiantly. “We simply cannot afford it.”

That’s pretty rich coming from a premier who’s been talking for months about her ambition to increase Alberta’s population to 10 million people by 2050.

And so much for those subway cars in Toronto that her predecessor, former premier Jason Kenney, paid to have wrapped in photos of the Rocky Mountains telling Ontarians that “Alberta Is Calling.”

Apparently “the dream of home ownership is alive in Alberta” only until people with the wrong sort of values, whatever her base has in mind when she says that, might move here.

“When I was a refugee from Poland, I never had to pass a ‘Shared Values Test,’” observed former Progressive Conservative MLA Thomas Lukaszuk in a tweet responding to meme published by the premier. He asked: “You mean No Muslims?”

You have to wonder what Smith is going to say next? Is she going to warn us that asylum seekers will eat the dogs, eat the cats, like that batshit old Republican con running for president south of the Medicine Line?

I’m not joking about this. Because, like Higgs, Smith has an election problem of her own. The far-right extremists who used to be her party’s base and are now about all that’s left of it just might dump her, just as they dumped Kenney, if she’s isn’t MAGA enough for their taste.

She’s desperate to keep them sweet, at least until the vote on her leadership at the UCP’s annual general meeting in Red Deer on Nov. 1 and 2.

That’s why she’ll be sitting down for a live, in-person interview with their favourite “news” source, Rebel News, on Oct. 5. That’s why she’s publishing dog-whistling nonsense about certain kinds of immigrants in official government statements. And it’s certainly not going to stop until the AGM is over.

It may not stop then, either.

Smith understands that the party’s MAGA base now poses the biggest threat to her political survival. And when it comes to ousting Conservative premiers, the National Observer’s Max Fawcett observes “the call almost always comes from inside the house.”

This is likely to keep getting worse until Alberta voters take it upon themselves to purge the UCP by electing a different government.