How Danielle Smith went from political outcast to presumed frontrunner in the UCP leadership race
Smith, more successfully than other candidates, picked up on what the party’s base wanted to hear: Re-litigating the pandemic and hammering away at Trudeau
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EDMONTON — When Danielle Smith left provincial politics in 2015, she didn’t fade away entirely. She ran the local breakfast joint in High River. She went on to host a radio show on Calgary’s CHQR. She wrote a column for the Calgary Herald.
And, when the pandemic was in full swing, and Smith had ditched her radio show, she was ready with an email newsletter, a product that seemed tailor-made for the grievances that had arisen during the pandemic.
Those very same grievances — business-harming lockdowns, policies promoting vaccination, governments refusing to use unproven treatments like ivermectin — were the ones that, in May, helped bring down Premier Jason Kenney, opening the gates on the race to become the next United Conservative Party leader and premier of Alberta.
Smith, who once led the now-defunct Wildrose party, is now the frontrunner in that race. There are several reasons why: it’s good timing for what some describe as a “burn it down” candidate running to lead a party with an aggrieved base.
And Smith, more quickly and successfully than the other candidates, picked up on what the party’s base wanted to hear: re-litigiating the pandemic and hammering away at Justin Trudeau.
Smith is a household name for many Albertans, certainly conservative ones, but her well-known public brand was once a liability. When she left politics seven years ago, she did so having betrayed her supporters. But she has used the time since then to explain that betrayal, express contrition and own the mistake — whether she was talking to people in her restaurant or over the radio.
“It takes a certain level of humility, I think to not kind of walk away from it all,” said a former politico who knew Smith. “Danielle kind of doubled down on her hometown, doubled down on folksiness. And years later, she’s basically ready to take over the province.”
It’s not guaranteed that Smith will win, though conversations with UCP sources in recent weeks suggest that the available evidence — little of it public — puts Smith in a nearly unassailable position.
Sources to whom the National Post spoke — including former officials with the Wildrose party, those within the United Conservative Party, and those working on various campaigns — did so on the condition of anonymity, in order to speak candidly about the race, and the candidates, without fear of professional repercussions.
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When Smith left politics in 2015, it was after a wild miscalculation. She was a relative neophyte, even then, having served for 11 months on a Calgary school board in 1998, when she was in her late 20s. After the board was dissolved by then-education minister Lyle Oberg because of dysfunction involving Smith, she joined the Calgary Herald, a newspaper later owned by Postmedia, which also owns the National Post, as an opinion writer. She also hosted a show on Global television.
It wasn’t until 2009 that Smith returned to politics, winning the leadership race to head the Wildrose party, then a nascent, splinter conservative party formed 2008. By 2012 with conservatives abandoning the tired, old Progressive Conservatives for Wildrose in droves, it looked like Smith was en route to becoming the first woman to lead a party to victory in Alberta. But her shot at it was scuppered, primarily because Smith, citing religious freedom, stood by candidate Allan Hunsperger, who said gays and lesbians would burn in a “lake of fire.” The Tories won. To this day, the troubles caused by socially conservative candidates for mainline conservatives are, in Alberta political parlance, called “lake of fire” incidents.
Still, Smith hung on for two more years. Until in 2014, still Wildrose leader, she suddenly defected to the PCs under their new leader, Jim Prentice, with eight other Wildrose MLAs, outraging party loyalists who loathed the PCs. She then lost her riding nomination and some still blame her for the NDP victory that followed. Her political career was in ruins.
“I think the biggest risk that Danielle has is her record. You know, she’s been quick to take positions on issues, whether that’s, you know, in her role in media commentary or in her past experience in politics,” said Matt Solberg, with New West Public Affairs, who worked with Smith between 2012 and 2014. “When you’ve got a record in the public life as long as hers … that’s a lot of positions that you need to account for.”
After her political self-immolation, Smith returned to the media, hosting a mid-day talk radio show on Global News Radio 770 CHQR. On her program, one of the most popular in the province, Smith was unafraid of courting controversy. She very publicly quit in 2021, saying “too many topics have become unchallengeable,” thanks to the “mob of political correctness.”
She announced she would immediately build a community online safe from political correctness, through the members-only social media platform Locals, as well as a weekly newsletter about politics and COVID, quietly building a database of names and email addresses of people who liked what she had to say.
But this period in radio was crucial to her rebirth, Solberg said, giving her the connections and insight that she’s since parlayed into a return to politics.
“She was able to connect with tens of thousands, if not more, Albertans every single day in a very sort of intimate, real way that you can’t get from simply attending a town hall or a political rally, you can’t get that listening to a speech in the legislature,” said Solberg.
One day after Jason Kenney announced in May that he would resign in October, after a leadership review victory that he considered too narrow, Smith announced she was running. Despite running against Kenney’s former finance minister Travis Toews and former Wildrose leader Brian Jean, Smith immediately got the bulk of the media coverage, defining the early debates of the campaign.
“Danielle Smith is probably, if not the best, one of the best political communicators that I’ve ever worked with,” said Solberg. “Her ability to take, to channel complex problems as experienced by people in the province and regurgitate it in a way that resonates with people but also points to a solution, I think is masterful.”
She began signing up thousands of new members, drawn to her heterodox views on COVID and vaccines, many of whom had never belonged to either the Wildrose or PCs before. Since the review of Kenney’s leadership began, the party has doubled its size, now numbering more than 120,000 members.
And she managed to keep everyone talking through the entire race about her signature platform policy proposal, the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which proposes to allow the Alberta government to ignore federal laws, court rulings and regulatory decisions, should legislators so choose.
“Danielle wanted this and knew this was the right issue to launch a campaign on,” a source within Smith’s campaign said.
Still, pundits attacked it. Kenney publicly criticized it. Her rivals joined in a rare show of unity to film an ad warning against it. In other words, it succeeded in making the race all about her.
“(Smith) has really been the only one who’s acted like this is a conservative leadership race. She’s talked about ideas that I think are exciting ideas,” said a former Wildrose official. “She’s actually had her finger on the pulse and she’s brought a new base to the equation which nobody else has done.”
While Toews, a rancher and accountant who entered politics in 2019, and Jean and the others have talked about affordability and inflation, Smith is “going after the hardcore activist conservative vote,” as another former Wildrose official put it.
“That’s why she’s gonna win, because she’s been talking with them and not just for the duration of this campaign, but for years,” the source said.
Alberta alienation is a regular feature in leadership and general elections. The province’s conservatives have, over the decades, flirted with naked separatism, but more recently the current government has enthusiastically adopted an anti-Trudeau stance, while demanding that Alberta maximize powers of its own, similar to Quebec.
Jean’s campaign suggested a suite of constitutional negotiations to address Alberta’s grievances with Ottawa. Toews’s campaign has proposed retaliatory levies on goods and contracts, should Alberta’s interests be harmed by other orders of government, while also adopting ideas previously proposed by Kenney, such as an Alberta Pension Plan. But a source close to Toews’s campaign said they had basically dismissed the Alberta Sovereignty Act, “thinking that it would fall out of favour pretty quickly.”
“Our read was that affordability was going to be a bigger deal in Albertans’ minds right now,” said the source close to Toews.
One rival leadership campaign said that, no matter what some candidates say, some members just like that Smith has “offered to burn it down harder and faster.” This has made it a struggle, the source said, to remind people there are other issues to discuss. Still, said Solberg, the other candidates — namely Jean and Toews — have made “extraordinary efforts” to differentiate themselves from the other candidates with policy announcements.
“Everybody else is saying like, ‘we’re gonna run a competent government,’” said a senior UCP source who’s unaffiliated with any of the campaigns. “Well, you know, what’s going to speak to Joe Blow … who’s just upset about everything?”
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The next election is scheduled for spring 2023. The New Democrats are well into their planning, doing opposition research and generally casting their party as a government-in-waiting. Polls suggest that the UCP, with or without Smith, will sweep the rural parts of the province. The NDP, in all probability, will sweep Edmonton. There’s a seat or two up for grabs elsewhere, such as Lethbridge — which will make Calgary the battleground.
And the question before the UCP — if Smith is leader — is what’s the appetite for her red-meat populism beyond the party faithful, among those who voted UCP in 2019, who voted NDP in 2015, and who might be eyeing both parties as a place to park their votes. And whether Smith — as opposed to a more moderate candidate — can win the crucial battlegrounds in Calgary is a fairly open question.
Recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute has 42 per cent of Albertans saying a Smith premiership would be “terrible” for Alberta. (Then again, 43 per cent say Notley becoming premier again would also be “terrible.”)
Those who worked for or alongside Smith said she’s highly ideological, and that this could translate into problems for governing, especially with a party base that has expanded considerably.
Many of these new members are motivated by issues like COVID-19 and sovereignty — not necessarily the same issues prior members or UCP voters are concerned about; that same Angus Reid polling says 53 per cent of Albertans oppose the Alberta Sovereignty Act. In fact, Janet Brown, a prominent Alberta pollster, says that this focus has damaged the UCP brand, to the extent that if an election were held now, the New Democrats would form government.
A source close to the Jean campaign suggested that the people motivated by the issues Smith is talking about aren’t the ones that motivate many Alberta voters, whether UCP members or potential UCP voters. And while the other campaigns knew that a pro-sovereignty strategy could work to win the leadership, they didn’t think it would be taken to such an extreme.
“The damage is so obvious, which is that yeah, you can use this strategy to win the leadership race but it’ll lose you the general election,” the source said.
One source, who works for the UCP government, compared Smith to a campus libertarian, “less rooted in reality” than a politician. Another former Wildrose official described her as a “true believer,” undiscouraged by those who call her proposals unworkable or even dangerous.
“She’s an ideologue,” said the former Wildroser. “And getting her to be a politician was always difficult.”
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