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Smith a puzzle to rest of Canada

HEATHER MALLICK HEATHER MALLICK IS A TORONTOBASED COLUMNIST COVERING CURRENT AFFAIRS FOR THE STAR. TWITTER: @HEATHERMALLICK

So Alberta did not go full-bore Alberta — it has returned to democratic stability with a healthy NDP opposition — but Premier Danielle Smith is more Albertan than most Albertans, including many who voted United Conservative Party. To the rest of Canada, she’s not a cipher but she is a puzzle.

Alberta is emphatically not Texas. Smith is actually a bit Wyoming, which is hidebound in its love of the oil and gas that made up nearly 30 per cent of total state revenue in 2019. An eccentric, she’s hard right like Liz Cheney, but with no intellectual base and socially conservative in ways that are alien to modern progressive Alberta (Edmonton, mainly).

Smith’s a bit Idaho, which has extremists so right-wing it’s hard for Canadians, and even Americans, to understand. In Idaho, “far-right figures feel emboldened enough to threaten a judge, wield their followers against the institutions of the state,” the Guardian reports.

But Smith, something of an eccentric, personally talks to unhinged people when she should know enough to stay far away. The cranks, including the scary ones, are not alien to her. She will have to develop ethical guardrails but who’s to encourage her to do so?

And then there’s Montana, but I’ll offer only one analogy. Smith, like the bullying Gov. Greg Gianforte, buys into a myth that the West, as a cowboy hat declares, is special. It isn’t. Nobody is now. Alberta’s debts are coming due and oil prices are dropping. The province is suffering just like the rest of us as global heating brings flood, fire, agricultural change and economic pain. We’re all alike in our sorrow when fire hits terrified Albertans and Nova Scotians. We’re all Canadians.

But Alberta, soaked in paranoia that Central Canada looks down on its Red State Americanized ways, won’t co-operate with Ottawa in trying to slow global heating. Smith’s position endangers every Canadian everywhere.

But never mind that. Alberta faces many of the same problems Ontario does, a worrying economic future combined with a careless premier. The UCP hacked spending, turned against doctors and health-care workers, privatized public services, began messing around in school curricula (always a losing bet) and started talking about leaving the Canada Pension Plan, which is absurd.

Damaging health care to the point that citizens fear hospitalization is never a good mood cloud for government. People age. People have accidents. Women have babies.

Sometimes they have babies by accident. Sooner or later you end up in a hospital in which you have little confidence.

The idea that excellent health care is not available to them messes with their heads. Health care, education and a justice system are the basics, the reading, writing and arithmetic of government.

But Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Smith seem to care little about them. Ford likes real estate developers. Smith likes oil and gas corporations. Or rather, they both want these entities to like them very much. Voters don’t seem to excite them in the same way.

I wish Alberta well partly because I have family there and because of a landscape that thrills me. I love Alberta’s mountains and lakes, the easy friendliness of the locals, so different from Toronto coldness.

But the Alberta government’s love of guns, its previous flat refusals to enforce federal laws regulating gun ownership, are troubling to urban Canadians.

Every sphere, notably drug abuse at the moment, has its activists and advocates. In Alberta, you’re mostly hearing from gun campaigners, a small group of irrational and heartless people who fancy themselves as special. Spiritually they wear a cowboy hat.

I tire of these people and wish Alberta would abandon them. The world is closing in on us, hotter, wetter, more dangerous and certainly poorer. At times like that, you turn to your own country for help.

I don’t see the point of “Canada (+Alberta).” We are one nation. I don’t think Smith believes it or even wants it. But we’ll see.

OPINION

en-ca

2023-05-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://torontostar.pressreader.com/article/281754158703517

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