Resign, Danielle Smith. Resign

Dear Premier:

It’s reckoning time.

And we can smell your desperation.

You just lost the referendum that you engineered against the public’s explicit wishes, and that you had no mandate to hold.

You gambled with a province and a nation, and you lost.

And you did so to appease the separatists in your own dysfunctional political party. Why?

To maintain your preening grasp on power.

So, the time has come to accept the consequences for your bad choices and your outrageous behaviour.

Resign, Danielle Smith. Resign.

You divided a province. You violated your political mandate. You abused your citizens. You appeased the extremists in your party. And you wasted $130 million on a referendum that told us nothing we didn’t already know: that 75 per cent of the province want to remain in Canada.

But contrition, accountability and responsibility aren’t part of your political blame-everybody-else-but-me vocabulary.

And now your shark-like instinct for political self-preservation has gone into high gear.

One day after the referendum, you had the absolute gall to give a public address that talked wistfully about D-Day and Terry Fox and the Canadian flag.

Isn’t it striking that you couldn’t say these things before or during the referendum?

And then after denigrating the courts, disparaging First Nations, scapegoating immigrants and imposing an unnecessary referendum upon the province, and all to appease your separatist buddies, you suddenly found the courage to ask these very separatists to leave your party.

How convenient. How opportunistic. How disingenuous.

The thing is, Premier, Albertans don’t believe a word that comes out of your motor mouth anymore.

A leader that drags her province through the mud and puts her self-interest and dysfunctional political party first is no leader.

Consider your record.

After the 2023 election, you promised to lower taxes, end social disorder and provide better supports for mental health, education and career training along with investments in tourism.

But what did we get instead? A load of chaos-making and authoritarian decision-making no one voted for. Under your leadership, your party started to enact the 2021 Free Alberta Strategy, a document few Albertans have ever read.

“For Alberta to assert its sovereignty,” the plan proposes, “offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against the Province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed confederation, or if necessary, as an independent nation.”

This strategy, which your party had no mandate to follow, calls for an Alberta pension plan, an Alberta police force and other revolutionary changes. By any calculation the plan concentrates more power in the United Conservative Party and the office of premier. That’s the bottom line.

And most citizens know that power grabs never have anything to do with freedom.

What else did we get with this adolescent Free Alberta Strategy? Oh yes — a costly and unnecessary referendum that the majority of Albertans didn’t want.

But you had to appease “the seppies” at any cost, didn’t you?

You then ignored and belittled the concerns of First Nations.

In so doing, you betrayed every inch of this great province. You rolled the dice and risked our collective futures. And then you made us wade through nine other questions on immigration and constitutional law — all calculated to support the Free Alberta Strategy — before we could find the separation question.

And while this dangerous political parade unfolded, you gave Albertans something else they didn’t bargain for: a shoddy, two-faced, MAGA-inspired government.

Here’s the short list of your accomplishments: Record government spending. Rising cost of living.

The country’s lowest minimum wage. Stressed-out food banks. A decade-long decline in wages. Rising car insurance premiums. Ballooning government debt. A bloated bureaucracy. A struggling health-care system. An unprecedented concentration of power in the premier’s office. Attacks on local decision-making, including bike lanes and libraries. Serious corruption and accountability scandals throughout the government. Rising oil and gas cleanup liabilities. Erosion of individual freedoms with fascist ID programs. Attacks on the judiciary aimed to lower checks on your personal power. A detested program, again with no mandate, to pepper the entire province with foreign-owned data centres. Plans to gerrymander the next election. And on it goes.

While stoking conflict on every front, you have built in the smoke of your culture wars another Trump-like oligarchy. Pure and simple, your government serves the rich with tax breaks, subsidies and exemptions.

And that’s what the separation debate was designed to hide. Wasn’t it?

So, understand this truth: Your self-serving power mongering and disingenuous behaviour have pissed us off.

We know that’s what talk show hosts do for a living. Talk, blame and squawk.

But Albertans expect more from a premier than the cultivation of fear and anger.

We expect more than “concierge services” for billionaires.

We actually expect to be represented.

We expect election mandates to be honoured.

We expect fairness.

We expect honesty.

We expect competence.

In other words, we expect a premier that puts her province ahead of her party and her own self-interest.

And that’s not you, Premier.

So resign, Danielle Smith. Resign.

Enough.

It’s reckoning time.