The One Bird Danielle Smith Is Most Like

To understand Alberta’s chaos-making premier, consider the magpie.

The bird is a black and white relative of the crow that excels at opportunistic feeding. A magpie will eat anything out of anybody’s trash can. It will even follow coyotes to carrion and then barge in.

All the while the scavenger squawks. Tranquillity is not a magpie virtue. A magpie nest outside your bedroom window will rob you of more sleep than a night of Donald Trump’s lunatic social media bleatings. The yappers, whether parents or young, yell at each other all the time. That’s what magpies do, hector and scold. Squawk. Squawk. Squawk.

And that’s what poor Alberta (and Canada) must now contend with during the reign of Danielle Smith. Some days the right-wing populist pretends to be a conservative and other days she swears she’s a libertarian. Both are total malarkey.

The free-spending ways of her United Conservative Party government — she’s hiked government spending more than the NDP ever did — show that she is not a conservative. And her unprecedented concentration of power in the premier’s office means she isn’t a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.

So what does Danielle Smith actually stand for? Hint: she flies from one issue to another as though they were all rank elk carcasses, ripe for the picking. Anything goes as long as Smith comes out on top.

Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Alberta politician, gets the credit for describing Smith as a political magpie. He knows what he is talking about, having served in the provincial Progressive Conservative cabinet from 2010 to 2014 and as deputy premier for a year. He sat across the aisle from Smith and had a front-row seat to her antics as the leader of the Wildrose Party from 2009 to 2014.

Lukaszuk now is battling Smith’s duplicitous crusade to separate Alberta from Canada.

In a recent interview with podcaster Nate Pike of The Breakdown, Lukaszuk elaborated on his avian analogy. Premier Smith, he said, “picks up shiny objects that will get her through the day. And the next day she will look for another shiny object,” whether it be chemtrails or vaccine conspiracies.

In other words, Smith the political magpie will say what she has to say to survive another political moment.

“It is about appeasing fractious groups of supporters one at a time,” he said.

One day she is banning books to appease her evangelical base; another day she is giving away money to Australian coal miners to appease her resource supporters.

The next she ignores an embarrassing measles epidemic, the largest in North America, just to appease her anti-science fringe. And on it goes. Squawk. Appease. Squawk.

More examples flutter into view. In 2022, say-anything Smith was pretty much a Vladimir Putin supporter because much of the far right supports the ruthless czar as a saviour of western civilization. Then, when Smith realized that nearly 400,000 Albertans are of Ukrainian descent, she spun in the air and apologized. Squawk. So sorry. Squawk.

In many respects a political magpie isn’t much different from a shameless radio talk show host (Smith’s former trade). They forever juice their audience with fear, anger and a rich sense of victimhood. It’s all about the host and the ratings, of course. A political magpie never has any skin in the game because it is always skinning the game.

The constant ruckus serves to distract the citizenry from the leader’s gross incompetence. It also distracts from the chronic abuse of government to support special interests such as the oil and gas industry. Incessant squawking, too, draws attention away from scandals such as the big mess at Alberta Health Services. A major lawsuit alleges that government officials pressured a senior official to sign off on contracts with surgical facilities at unjustified and inflated prices. One cabinet minister resigned to protest Smith’s unaccountability on the subject and demanded a public inquiry.

Chaos reigns with magpie politics because it turns every event into a calculated opportunity to appease a faction of a belligerent political base. As Lukaszuk says of Smith: “She will be whatever you want her to be as along as it gets her through the day.”

In the meantime, watch her dive-bomb Ottawa again and again, diligently repeating distortions about the past to support delusions about the future. Why should Alberta separate from Canada? asks the magpie. Well, because those nasty feds have blocked oil and gas development for the last decade. Oh, really? Then explain why oil production has grown 43 per cent since the Liberals took office in 2015. Or why the Alberta economy has grown faster than the Canadian average. Energy analyst David Hughes recently reviewed the numbers and found Smith’s claims about the Liberals to be completely bogus.

Remember how Smith treated the great Jasper fire last year? As just another opportunity to bash Ottawa. Then, earlier this month, a no-nonsense report by the town of Jasper on that tragedy concluded the action of provincial officials “contributed to confusion, increased safety risks and hindered effective allocation of resources.” This time Smith demanded Jasper apologize to her. Squawk. Say you’re sorry. Squawk.

Alberta’s timid and complicit media are no match for the magpie’s natural instincts. Members get so overwhelmed reporting on Smith’s daily screeches they forget they are relaying nonsense. Every article on Smith should come with a political health warning: this premier is a political opportunist who will say anything to distract you from the truth.

Let’s take the question of how many people should ideally live in Alberta. The province has been breaking population records for the last three years because the UCP has been begging folks to move there to exploit its so-called endless advantages. Earlier this year Smith chirped about doubling the population of Alberta to 10 million.

Never mind that her idea would drive up the cost of living and turn the province into a wasteland of energy-sucking data centres. Smith argued all these new people were needed to, you guessed it, fight Ottawa. More squawking to appease her Alberta First base. But months later the magpie changed her tune. Now she’s talking about taking benefits away from immigrants to appease the xenophobes in that same Alberta First base.

Perhaps no subject better illustrates the scale of Smith’s hypocrisy than her advocacy for coal mining. Back in 2018 Smith wrote a newspaper column castigating the B.C. government for allowing terrible things to happen in its waterways thanks to open-pit coal mines in the Elk Valley. “Health effects from overexposure to selenium include gastrointestinal disorders, nerve damage, liver cirrhosis and death in humans, while fish become deformed and unable to reproduce,” she correctly warned.

That was then. Fast-forward to 2025 as Smith now thinks southern Alberta should look like the Elk Valley. At a raucous coal forum earlier this summer, the premier shamelessly defended foreign Aussie speculators while trying to convince a hostile audience that selenium is the best thing for you. Why, even Brazil nuts contain it.

As we’ve seen, inconsistency doesn’t bother a magpie flitting from one political podcast to another. First Smith castigates renewable energy as a threat to farmland and “pristine landscapes” while imposing regulations tighter than for cleaning up oil and gas facilities. Then, elsewhere, she defends coal mining in the Rockies on the grounds that solar panels and windmills need more coal-fired steel, and that’s the future, right?

So now you know why Smith says crazy stuff (it grabs and distracts your attention) and why she has the province in a state of chaos. Her game lacks any plan or vision as she haphazardly pads the nest for an increasingly extreme and volatile base.

In the meantime, she scavenges off the province’s battered democracy to reward special interests. Because she stands for nothing, she can champion separatists and defend the policies of the tariff oligarch Donald Trump without shame.

Flap. Squawk. Flap. Where does Danielle Smith ultimately land?

On the next, shiniest political opportunity. The one that will help the magpie and her cronies keep and concentrate power.