How Danielle Smith Blew Her Chance to Build a UCP Dynasty

With the referendum behind us and the 2027 election looming, it’s a good time to take a look back at the first three-and-a-half years of the Danielle Smith government and consider what they mean for next fall’s election.

Recently, I went back to look at my post-election musings from 2023. This jumped out at me.

“Smith’s long-term strategy now appears to be centred on an effort to recreate Ralph Klein’s electoral trajectory. He was first elected in 1993 with 51 seats, only two more than Smith’s UCP won. He recovered the party’s electoral dominance in subsequent elections, winning 63 seats in 1997 and 74 in 2001…

“What would it take for Smith to win Calgary back? Four years of low-drama, stable government, generous public support for health care and education and occasional spats with Ottawa that don’t actually go so far as to involve the Sovereignty Act or embarking on a provincial pension plan. Smith might be able to pull this off, as long as oil prices stay relatively high, the federal government doesn’t embark on ambitious actions around greenhouse gas emissions, and Take Back Alberta doesn’t demand that Smith become the DeSantis on the North Saskatchewan.”

With the benefit of hindsight, I think I was right to argue that there was a path available to Smith to replicate Ralph Klein’s “miracle on the prairie” and build the United Conservative Party into an electoral fortress. To take that path, Smith would have had to suppress the Take Back Alberta/anti-vax/separatist movement inside the UCP from the outset, rather than leaving it to the eleventh hour.

It’s not certain she would have survived that fight, but if she had, it would have freed her to govern as premier of Alberta, rather than premier of the UCP.

Instead of trying to constrain the radical fringe that had captured her party and elected her leader, Smith pandered to it. She spent her summers touring the province to meet UCP members in town halls, where she would validate their worries about chemtrails, vaccines, transgender people, and other issues that weren’t top of mind for everyday Albertans. She made sure the separatists would get their referendum, even if she didn’t endorse their cause.

Looking at the Smith government’s legislative agenda over the past three years, there’s not much evidence of “low-drama, stable government.” The teachers went on strike largely to protest large class sizes and complexity, and were legislated back to work using the notwithstanding clause. Alberta Health Services was carved up into four separate silos, and there have been so many purges of senior leadership it’s a wonder anyone is willing to take these jobs. Some aspects of health care appear to have become a matter of “personal responsibility.”

Edmontonians, having spurned the UCP electorally, have been sentenced to interminable and sometimes deadly waits in the ER. Much of the legislative agenda has seemingly been intended as rage bait for bicycle-riding woke urban progressives rather than sober good governance.

And then there was the referendum no one (except the separatists) wanted. And the data centres that no one (except the government) wanted.

With an enormous surplus to grease the wheels, the UCP grassroots under gag orders, and a redesigned electoral map designed to protect UCP incumbents, Smith may be able to eke out another narrow win next October. But it seems safe to conclude that her choices have made the Klein trajectory unavailable to her.

There was another path available to Smith in 2023 that would not have left her changing electoral riding boundaries at the eleventh hour in a last-ditch effort to give the UCP an advantage. Having not taken it, she has all but guaranteed competitive two-party politics in the province for the next several years.