Please Advise! Albertans Are in Quite a Mood, Eh?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

Premier Danielle Smith is touring Alberta, holding town hall meetings as part of her “Alberta Next” campaign to promote more provincial autonomy from Ottawa. The recent meeting in Lloydminster reportedly drew "large cheers for mass deportations and Alberta separation."

Is this healthy, Dr. Steve?

Signed,

Al Burton

Dear Al,

Smith has been getting around all right — Red Deer, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Medicine Hat, Mar-a-Lago — she might have a real shot at appearing on South Park. Smith has been in the news so much, you'd think she just got engaged to a football player. Dr. Steve almost expected her to show up at the Labour Day football game between the Calgary Stampeders and the Edmonton Elks. After they sang the national anthem, Smith might have come out for a rebuttal.

Smith swears that her provincial tour is simply about investigating the causes of Alberta separatist sentiment. OK then. Perhaps motorists who toss lit cigarettes out the car window are simply testing the capacity of local firefighters. If nothing else, she seems to be turning over some rocks. Lloydminster partisans seemed interested in creating an Alberta Alcatraz. One attendee at the meeting told Smith she and her family are ready to leave Canada over the federal government’s immigration policies. She asked Smith to negotiate with President Donald Trump to create an asylum system for people like her.

Hang on — maybe these meeting are a great thing after all. Those mass deportations could become self-serve. We'll call it Alberta Asylum. Justin Trudeau has time on his hands these days — we could send him door-to-door in Wainright and Taber and Lloydminster, offering people free Uber rides to Montana. Maybe Smith would grab one.

Smith has gotten some static at her little klaverns, notably from people upset about her scheme to opt out of the Canada Pension Plan, or to start charging Albertans $100 for COVID vaccinations. When it was pointed out to Smith that Manitoba and B.C. both intend to offer free vaccination to Albertans, Smith said, “I don’t think they’ve done the analysis we’ve done.”

Dr. Steve can only guess the results of Smith's analysis. But it probably amounted to vaccines: expensive. infectious disease: free. Death: the inevitable fate of all humankind. A hundred bucks: enough for two 40 ounce bottles of Wayne Gretzky Red Cask Whiskey. Why interfere with God's plan for us all? Relax. Have a drink.

This is not the first time Smith has balked at the price tag of saving lives. She once implied to a podcast host that stage four cancer is a personal choice we just can't afford: "There’s radiation and surgery and chemotherapy, that is incredibly expensive intervention... When you think everything that built up before you got to stage four and that diagnosis, that’s completely within your control and there’s something you can do about that."

Smith is no simple crackpot — she's an entire cracked Pottery Barn. In her newspaper days Smith wrote that research into the effects of smoking had become “political” and that instead of trying to stop tobacco use, we really ought to be researching safer cigarettes. She once suggested that complying with vaccination requirements was equivalent to naziism, and plugged the horse dewormer Ivermectin as a COVID cure.

Smith's paid vaccine plan has the same "Just asking questions" odour of her "Alberta Next" events. Behind the disingenuous explanations lurks an ideology that typically distills gaseous fumes from the most paranoid, febrile regions of the internet and the worm-excavated cavities of RFK Jr.'s brain, offering them up as vaguely plausible alternatives to established scientific fact.

Grant her this though: Smith is a dynamo of dogma, a veritable Xena the Culture Warrior Princess. Somehow, while conducting her Separatist Safari and marking clear-out prices on human lives, she also found time for some recreational book-banning. Smith's government set out to ban what it called “sexually explicit” books from school libraries, in what seemed to be a thinly disguised attack on LGBTQ+ publications.

But Smith got pranked. Annoyed by the order, the Edmonton school board responded by banning hundreds of books, from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Smith complained it was a case of “vicious compliance” (a term of her own coinage, likely a misquote of the legal term “malicious compliance”).

Vicious, malicious or delicious, the school board's response had the desired effect, drawing an avalanche of opprobrium, including a message from Atwood herself. Smith temporarily backed down on Tuesday, complaining all the way. “This isn't about banning books,” Smith said of her attempt to ban books. "It's about protecting kids."

If that's the case, why doesn't Smith revert to form? Charge the kiddies a hundred bucks. It's protection. And Premier Smith has a nice little racket going.