Smith Unveils a Performative Plan to Create a 'Beacon of Freedom’

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith generated a huge amount of virtual ink Tuesday yakking about her planned amendments to Alberta’s Lougheed-era Bill of Rights, passed by the legislature in 1972 and not thought about very much ever since for good reason. 

In tune with the zeitgeist, Smith announced her planned changes in a three-and-a-half minute YouTube video in which she made big promises and failed completely to explain why they cannot be delivered. 

In a few weeks, Smith vowed cheerfully, uplifting royalty-free piano music tinkling in the background, the changes will reinforce Albertans’ “rights” to own dangerous firearms they don’t need and refuse vaccinations they do. This, she said, will show that Alberta is a “beacon of freedom.” Or something, I suppose some might say. 

“It is my firm conviction that no Albertan should ever be subjected or pressured into accepting a medical treatment without their full consent,” said the premier, who is also expected to soon introduce legislation that will force users of addictive drugs into “compassionate” treatment without their consent. 

But, you know, as Oscar Wilde famously observed, “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

One doesn’t need to be particularly imaginative to understand why Smith is doing this. She’s trying to inoculate herself against the condition that laid former United Conservative Party premier Jason Kenney low and handed her his job: the MAGA virus that infects the UCP’s base. 

And, as vaccines go, this one will probably prove to be effective for a politician with a Damoclean sword forged by her own supporters dangling by a flimsy Take Back Alberta thread over her head. 

“These amendments to the Bill of Rights are not just legal changes,” Smith boasted in her video, and in a sense she was right about that. As Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi noted in a short statement to media, “Danielle Smith’s comments today on YouTube about her proposed amendments to the Alberta Bill of Rights are nothing but desperate virtue signalling over issues that she thinks will help her leadership review.”

“Canadians’ fundamental human rights are protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and this, or any, provincial bill does not override this,” Nenshi said. 

This is not just hyperbole. It is technically true. The Alberta Bill of Rights — premier Peter Lougheed’s aspirational version and Smith’s performative codicil — is what legal scholars call merely an organic statute. It is entirely symbolic and is unlikely to be able to be used to annul another Alberta law, let alone federal legislation. 

No matter how fine its word are, Alberta’s Bill of Rights is just another piece of provincial legislation, passed by a simple majority in the legislature, without any logical legal reason whatsoever for a court to give it precedence over another law. 

Prime minister John Diefenbaker’s Canadian Bill of Rights, it should be noted, suffered from exactly the same fatal flaw.

Courts can only strike down a law by citing a higher law. And you’d have to be high to think the Alberta Bill of Rights met that standard. 

Count on the courts always to find some way to uphold a law challenged on the grounds of the meaningless Alberta bill — even Smith’s planned coercive drug treatment legislation.

Thankfully, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms remains the supreme law of the land, including the Alberta part of it, so that will remain the best place to challenge unconstitutional laws. 

So let me pause here to say thank god for Trudeau — Pierre Trudeau, that is — who more than anyone else was responsible for the adoption of the Charter, wherein the fundamental rights enjoyed by all Canadians are entrenched — or would be but for the “notwithstanding clause,” which weakens the document considerably by allowing provinces to opt out of the Charter in some cases. 

However, I digress. Notwithstanding the flaws of the Charter, as it were, Smith did not speak the truth when she said in her video that the Alberta Bill of Rights “serves much like a constitutional document, in that it ensures all provincial laws and policies must align with those listed rights and freedoms.”

This is a fantasy, simply false. It enshrines nothing, as Albertans who buy this bill of goods will undoubtedly soon discover.