I was barred from Danielle Smith’s Christian summit. I went anyway.
The closed-door event featured remarks from the premier, three cabinet ministers and a roster of Conservative luminaries about policy.
This story was originally published in The Tyee.
I bought a ticket for Monday’s Alberta Christian Leadership Summit in Red Deer, keen to report on the event that promised a chance for religious leaders to talk about “faith, leadership and public policy in Alberta” with Premier Danielle Smith and other politicians.
But the night before, organizers called and told me, without providing a reason, that I was being deregistered and they were refunding my $200 fee. I wasn’t alone. A journalist from a major news outlet also got the call.
I’d already rented a car, so I made the trek down Highway 2 anyway to spend a windy day outside the Prairie Pavilion at Red Deer’s Westerner Park to see what I could learn about the event from attendees.
I leapt into action and approached the first person I saw, telling him I wasn’t allowed into the event but wanted to speak to attendees.
“Good luck,” he said, walking on.
The summit’s website promises a “direct dialogue between Christian leadership and Alberta’s government [to help] shape the policies affecting our families, churches, and communities.”
The event was billed as the “Premier’s Annual Christian Summit” when it was announced in March, but was rebranded soon after as the “Alberta Christian Leadership Summit.” Attendees paid $200 to $4,000 to participate and gain access to politicians.
Smith was advertised as the keynote speaker. She was interviewed onstage in the morning alongside Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange and Affordability and Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf.
The premier and her cabinet ministers left shortly after their panel discussion, with the premier apparently leaving through the back door.
Hours before I was informed that I was barred, I received an email that was apparently sent to all attendees, prohibiting any form of recording, streaming or photography inside the event.
Clearly, there was something the organizers really didn’t want the public to see.
Canada’s self-proclaimed “political missionary” Michael Clark organized the event at the behest of the Christian Impact Network, where he’s the executive director.
In a July interview with the Lethbridge-based Christian broadcaster Bridge City News, Clark called for a “return to good times” by aligning “the laws to biblical principles.”
“I believe it is incumbent on us as Christians to help shape society,” he added later in the interview. “We’re not to just be an ostrich, and we’re not to just focus on our four walls of our church and our nice Christian families.”
Clark was involved with Liberty Coalition Canada, an ultraconservative Christian organization formed to oppose COVID pandemic restrictions, which also opposes LGBTQ2S+ rights. In a “classified” report from the organization obtained by CBC in 2023, Clark spoke of a desire to “systematically manufacture” thousands of Christian candidates for office.
Conservative MPs Andrew Lawton, Arnold Viersen and Damien Kurek were also advertised as participants, in addition to former federal opposition leaders Preston Manning and Stockwell Day, country singer Paul Brandt and United Conservative Party backbench MLAs Ron Wiebe, Nolan Dyck and Jennifer Johnson — the latter of transgender “poop cookies” infamy.
Lawton, the former managing editor of the right-wing news site and registered charity True North, appears to be quite close with Clark. Seven of 10 videos on Clark’s YouTube channel include Lawton.
Some media more equal than others
Not all media were deregistered from attending the summit.
Separatist streamer Jason Lavigne posted on X that he was in attendance, Western Standard publisher Derek Fildebrandt was listed as a speaker, and a videographer from Bridge City News was present. Fildebrandt published a column Monday from Nigel Hannaford, right-wing commentator and former Stephen Harper speech writer, about the event.
Lavigne emphasized that he was there with his church and “didn’t register as media,” adding that he had no intention of broadcasting the event.
The Tyee spoke outside the venue to Fildebrandt, who said that he started regularly attending church about three months ago.
“I wouldn’t hold myself up as a model Christian of any kind,” the former Wildrose and UCP MLA emphasized.
“I don’t think you need to even be a theologically consistent, proactive, churchgoing Christian to be aligned with active Christians on their own issues.”
Fildebrandt said he’s been drawn towards the church this year out of a sense that “we’ve lost something in our civilization that has Christianity at its core.” Modern civilization is “nihilistic” and “empty,” he said.
He rejected the notion that any major Christian leaders are “advocating for any kind of theocracy where we’re governed by Leviticus.”
Rather, claimed Fildebrandt, there’s “an appetite for electing political leaders who are informed by the Christian faith.”
“I might have even been uncomfortable with that a bit at some point,” he conceded, “but everybody else does it... so why not Christians?”
Fildebrandt said the message he intended to convey to attendees during his remarks was “to stop being afraid of their own shadow, embrace their inheritance, Christian western civilization, and use it to inform what we’re building right now.”
Premier changes tune on press freedom
During the 2022 UCP leadership race, Smith spoke of turning Alberta into a “bastion of freedom,” including press freedom not just for right-wing outlets but also for progressive media. She even specifically cited The Tyee as one of the media organizations that should “set up here, where they’ll broadcast to the rest of the country” via Elon Musk’s Starlink technology.
Four years later, she appears to have no issue being the headline speaker at an event that wouldn’t even let The Tyee pay the hefty attendance fee and watch the proceedings.
Nor does this appear to be an isolated incident.
Last year, reporters from CBC and the Lethbridge Herald were barred from a government town hall on the province’s coal policy in Fort Macleod.
The premier’s spokesperson, Sam Blackett, didn’t acknowledge an inquiry about how Smith reconciles her stated commitment to press freedom with her participation in an event involving public policy discussions that barred journalists.
In a statement to the Red Deer Advocate, Blackett emphasized that the event was “organized and funded by third-party organizers, not the provincial government.” He said the summit was one of a “wide range of cultural, community, and faith-based events and celebrations” that Smith participates in.
The Tyee caught the education minister on his way out of the event. Asked what he thought of the event prohibiting journalists, Nicolaides said: “I don’t know. You’d have to talk to the organizers about that.”
Nicolaides said his appearance at the summit was just like attending any other community event.
“Everywhere I go, I hear opinions from people about or questions about government direction, why certain policies are being brought forward and bringing concerns forward that they have,” he said.
Nicolaides was responsible for the province banning certain “sexually explicit” graphic novels from school libraries. The Investigative Journalism Foundation’s Brett McKay reported that Nicolaides consulted with far-right social conservative organizations Action4Canada and Parents for Choice in Education, which provided him with lists of books to ban.
The education minister said he was on his way to meet with representatives of the Alberta School Boards Association.
“I’m sure they’ll have lots of questions about things we’re currently doing,” he said.
Inside the event, Hannaford wrote in his Western Standard column, “Nicolaides laid out the scope of Marxist infiltration into the teachers’ training colleges, the use of ‘revolutionary’ textbooks for prospective teachers and the pre-graduation requirement for them to not only study DEI but attend a protest.”
It’s unclear what mandatory protest Nicolaides was referring to. An inquiry to his office for clarification went unacknowledged by deadline.
While Smith isn’t herself a Christian, Hannaford noted that she’s “taken up several causes dear to Alberta’s Christian community,” including the book ban, restricting gender-affirming care and “supporting alternatives to public education, widely perceived — with good reason — as toxic to Christian values.”
According to Hannaford, Smith boasted in her remarks that she has doubled the percentage of K-12 students who are attending schools outside the public system.
Nicolaides added that, since the majority of students still attend public schools, “we have to go in there and fix it.”
Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister LaGrange, a former Red Deer Catholic school board trustee who once led the local pro-life organization, told attendees she had ordered Alberta Health Services to review its policies and procedures regarding the death of babies who survived abortions.
“People deserve dignity and respect, from conception onwards,” she said, according to Hannaford.
Attendees expressed appreciation for Smith’s fulfilment of a Christian agenda, despite her own lack of faith.
“She’s not religious yet, and that’s what we noticed very much in her speech, even today,” one attendee who declined to provide his name said of Smith. “But her ministers are Christian, so we’re very encouraged to see that those are the people that she chooses.”
“She does recognize Christian values,” added another.
The ‘fundagelical’ movement
Tickets to the festivities weren’t cheap, starting at $200 for general admission, plus $150 for a special VIP breakfast Tuesday, with the option to purchase tables of eight for thousands of dollars.
Dozens of faith leaders from across the province signed an April 20 open letter criticizing the event as a “gathering shaped by access and privilege” that caters to a narrow vision of Christianity.
Tim Callaway, a progressive Baptist pastor and author in Airdrie, told The Tyee in a phone interview that the Alberta Christian Leadership Summit is an example of the long-term penetration of what he calls the U.S. “fundagelical” movement into Canada.
Evangelism is a theology emanating from Protestantism that centres on the process of being “born again” by personally accepting Jesus Christ. Fundamentalism, Callaway explained, is a disposition of “militancy,” which can apply to various theological beliefs but is most pronounced among U.S. evangelicals who support President Donald Trump.
The notion of being at war with the secular world leads to the deliberate exclusion of certain perspectives, which Callaway called the “epitome of political correctness.”
“There are other views we don’t want to hear at all, and if you’re spouting any of that other stuff, we’re going to cut you right out of it,” he added.
“There are only certain politically correct viewpoints that we’re interested in having at our event, and you’re not one of them.”
The separatist-fundagelical nexus
One of the friendlier attendees I approached outside the Prairie Pavilion, Douglas Ferguson, said he’s a separatist.
“Canada is so corrupt,” he said, specifically citing the “criminal” invocation of the Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy’s Ottawa occupation.
Ferguson added that if Canada truly had the “rule of law,” the federal government would have had its bank accounts frozen and leaders jailed, just as the Freedom Convoy did, “because you have the same law for everybody.”
“We’re not a Christian country,” Ferguson bemoaned.
Shannon Whitehouse, the lead pastor of Leduc Alliance Church just south of Edmonton, identified “first of all as a follower of Christ” and second as an Albertan.
He told The Tyee that his “primary focus” is preserving the province’s Christian “heritage.”
Whitehouse didn’t explicitly identify as a separatist but sounded as if he was singing from the same hymn book.
He said that Alberta, as well as Saskatchewan, have a “God culture,” which has been “forgotten” by federal political leaders.
“God created our country. We have that in our national anthem, but yet we don’t acknowledge it,” said Whitehouse.
By “standing up for Alberta in opposition to our federal government that is pushing ideology that does not reflect Alberta,” Whitehouse said, Premier Smith is “respecting the history and the culture of this province.”
Callaway said it’s “absolutely historically false” to portray the Prairies as uniquely religious, noting that the Maritimes, and to a lesser extent southwestern Ontario, would more accurately be the country’s “Bible Belt.”
That’s not to deny, he emphasized, that there are politically influential religious currents within Alberta.
But Callaway said that those who seek to impose religious values on the state are fundamentally misunderstanding Christian principles.
“Jesus, I would argue, consistently said, ‘No, My kingdom is not of this world,’” said Callaway.
“What people in Alberta who call themselves Christian or Jesus followers need to get their heads around is that element, which is basic throughout the New Testament and Gospels.
“They refuse to do that because they want power.”
This is a somewhat scary exposé of an evangelical, fundamentalism being pushed in Alberta...I suppose drawing on the historical roots of the Socred movement that morphed into Conservatism under Peter Lougheed. As a student in Saskatchewan I remember a law student friend who would go on rants about the 'Bible Belt' running Alberta........so I do think Christian 'social conservatism' has a long history in our province.
But to imagine that there is some way to fix things by erasing the line between secular politics and Christian faith is one of those simplistic 'two ideas, one of them wrong' ways of thinking we have to eliminate across the west. That kind of reductive certainty is what has America losing another war in the Middle East and a growing band of young westerners rooting for Iran.
Alberta is home to people who grew up in the CCF, a political movement created by Christians who believed in the 'social gospel'. According to that political ideology, one lived his or her Christian faith by administering to the poor and working to create a society open to all. The CCF gave us most of our union rights such as holiday pay, overtime pay, the 8 hour day. They also gave us our single payer medical care system, currently being eroded by a UCP government infiltrated by right wing fundamentalists wasting time trying to 'cleanse the body politic' of equity and inclusion.
We would be wise, as citizens of Canada, to get up to speed on the evangelical fundamentalists eager to take away any of these freedoms under the guise of advancing the Christian faith. Alberta is home to indigenous people, often with their own spiritual belief system, to Moslems who routinely give more to charity than many right wing Christians, to citizens of Hindu culture and to a great many agnostic and atheistic people who nevertheless lead good lives.
Imagining the participating in a particular faith gives you carte blanche to erode other people's rights to live and think differently is a fascistic fantasy. Diversity of beliefs and values is an innate part of the natural order.
We don't need nutbars and ignoramuses such as the folks running the USA now, to be legislating morality or life style for others. They have some corruption issues of their own to deal with, and moral Albertans should be insisting they come clean about the many scandals....from Turkish Tylenol to upstart political 'parties' gaining access to our personal data.
SHAME ON SMITH AND ALL HER TOADIES FOR THINKING FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISIANITY WILL SPARE THEM THAT DAY OF RECKONING....and God help our children if we look the other way while diversity and inclusion are erased from our political heritage in Canada.
One of the few good things we can learn from the U..S. is the idea of separation of church and state. I believe it's enshrined in the the first amendment to their constitution. ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech...") Freedom of religion also includes freedom FROM religion. The thought that our elected representatives are pandering to the religious right is very scary.