In Red Deer, the Canada Strong and Free Network prepares for culture war
Premier Danielle Smith may have snubbed fellow keynote speaker Christopher Rufo, but her remarks hammered on many themes that would likely resonate with the far-right agitator.
It was striking that in her keynote remarks to this year’s Canada Strong and Free Network regional conference in Red Deer, Alberta premier Danielle Smith didn’t acknowledge the day’s other keynote speaker — far-right U.S.-based provocateur Christopher Rufo.
Given her apparent obsession with American culture war discourse, Smith would certainly be familiar with Rufo’s work. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom Smith has repeatedly cited as a political inspiration, is a close collaborator with Rufo.
In January 2023, DeSantis appointed Rufo to the Board of Trustees at Sarasota’s New College of Florida, with Rufo promising a “top-down restructuring,” which he likened to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, in an interview with the New York Times.
A month later, Rufo was front and centre at the launch of DeSantis’s campaign to “abolish” diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities.
Not only did Smith ignore Rufo’s presence at the Sept. 21 event, but she didn’t even stick around for his remarks.
That might have been a product of the controversy surrounding Rufo’s appearance.
Multiple sponsors, including big names like RBC, SunLife and the Canadian Bankers Association, pulled out of the event after journalists Rachel Gilmore of Check My Ads and John Woodside of Canada’s National Observer publicized Rufo’s appearance, alongside his track record of virulent anti-2SLGBTQ+ sentiment.
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Major sponsors, such as Meta, which has quite the track record of amplifying far-right narratives globally, Coca Cola and DoorDash remained on the bill.
I suspect Premier Smith didn’t need the added headache of a clip of her praising Rufo circulating as she enters a legislative session in which she’s determined to pass legislation that would make Rufo and DeSantis proud.
The premier’s keynote was introduced by Erika Barootes, Smith’s former director of issues management who has since been hired by MaKami College, a for-profit former massage therapy school that Smith’s government quietly added to the province’s list of Independent Academic Institutions (IAIs) last year.
Other IAIs, including Concordia University of Edmonton and Burman University in Lacombe, are privately operated but publicly funded—essentially post-secondary charter schools. MaKami, however, hasn’t received public funding, at least not yet.
Barootes was originally hired as MaKami’s director of external relations, but since May has been the department head of the college’s new Applied Politics and Public Affairs program.
The college was advertising this new program at a table in the conference room, handing out free MaKami College-branded fidget spinners, sunglasses and coupons for a free massage.
In addition to working for MaKami College, Barootes has joined a long line of elected Alberta senators who aren’t actual senators, because that’s not how the Canadian Senate works.
Smith opened her speech bemoaning the fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t appoint Barootes to the Senate, and then slammed those who were appointed through the official process—MacEwan University academic Kristopher Wells and corporate lawyer Daryl Fridhandler.
Without naming them, Smith referred to Wells as a “radical, extreme LGBT activist” and Fridhandler as a “radical, extreme fundraiser for the Liberals.”
The bulk of Smith’s remarks focused on her plans for the upcoming legislative session that she knew would be a hit with the Strong and Free crowd.
Smith vowed to “ensure that children are protected” by introducing a suite of policies that will harm trans children by denying them access to puberty blockers and hormone treatment and requiring parental notification if kids decide to begin a “social transition” by changing their name at school.
She promised to invoke the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act for the federal Liberals’ forthcoming emissions caps on oil and gas, fertilizer and methane, just as she did earlier this year for the feds’ Clean Electricity Regulations.
Smith gave the conference’s dozens of attendees a sneak preview of her proposed amendments to Alberta’s Bill of Rights, promising to great applause that she “will make it illegal for the government to discriminate against any individual for refusing medical treatments, including vaccines.”
A minute later, Smith spoke of her forthcoming “compassionate intervention act,” which will allow the state to force people who use drugs into medical treatment for 90 to 128 days, without hint of irony.
On Sept. 24, Smith unveiled her full proposed amendments to the Bill of Rights, which notably occurred on her personal YouTube channel and not the Government of Alberta page.
In addition to banning discrimination against people who refuse medical treatment (except for those pesky addicts), Smith plans to enshrine property and gun rights.
The province’s Bill of Rights has as much legal force as the Sovereignty Act—which is to say, none.
The comfort some speakers felt to make lewd, incendiary remarks in front of a like-minded audience was notable.
Longtime conservative activist Andy Crooks, sporting a flashy bowtie, opened up a panel he moderated on constitutional issues by noting that his wife recently moved to Victoria, B.C.
“As I like to say, if I want marital sex, I have to go to the west coast,” Crooks said, likening being back in Alberta to a “refreshing shower.”
He then proceeded to read a mock land acknowledgement, which took care to note “the great men and women of all races and origins who have built up and developed this part of the country.”
Crooks, alongside two of the panel’s participants—Calgary School academics Barry Cooper and Ted Morton—signed the infamous 2001 “firewall letter.”
Published in the National Post as an open letter to then-premier Ralph Klein, it advocated a series of policies that would sound familiar to anyone who follows Alberta politics today, including a provincial police force, pension plan and tax collection agency, as well as more health-care privatization.
In more recent years, Cooper co-wrote the “Free Alberta Strategy,” part of which includes the Alberta Sovereignty Act, alongside a revival of firewall letter policies.
Cooper was quite open about the sovereignty act being inherently unconstitutional, because it’s designed “precisely to change the constitution,” which he portrayed as a colonial relic.
“Law exists downstream from politics,” he said, paraphrasing the late American right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart’s remarks on culture.
Cooper predicted that implementing the Free Alberta Strategy in whole will cause “tax revolt, insurrection [and] constitutional crisis.”
“Exactly,” he said gleefully, adding that Albertans will understand “that the province is getting serious—no more nice, polite, futile begging for changes.”
Josh DeHaas of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, whom Crooks introduced as the panel’s “token millennial,” provided a more cautious voice on the panel.
Given the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling last year that elements of the federal Impact Assessment Act unconstitutionally invade on provincial jurisdiction, he sees an opportunity for Alberta to challenge the “really radical” Clean Electricity Regulations.
At the same time, he suggested a constitutional challenge to Canada’s equalization formula, in which a portion of federal income taxes are redistributed to lower-income provinces to ensure every province is capable of offering the roughly same level of services, would be fruitless.
“For Alberta, since you're such a low tax jurisdiction, I just don't think that's going to work out very well,” said DeHaas.
Morton, a two-time failed PC leadership candidate and former cabinet minister, emphasized the need for judicial reform to implement a right-wing agenda. It’s unfair that the federal government gets to appoint not only provincial court judges, but even Supreme Court judges, he complained.
“The judiciary has a very Laurentian, centralist, woke, DEI agenda, because it's appointed by the political party in Canada that wants that perspective, that lens, when the court does its work,” he said, referring to the Liberals.
According to Morton, the requirement that judges be “functionally bilingual” is another manifestation of this radical leftist agenda.
“Bilingualism is not just about language, it's about ideology,” he said.
During the panel’s Q&A portion, DeHaas and Morton both sang the praises of the Federalist Society for its growing influence over the past 42 years in securing right-wing judicial appointments in the U.S.
“When they started off, they were marginal,” said Morton. “People hardly knew who they were. There were some law professors involved, some activist politicians. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, the Federalist Society had a very extensive, well-developed network.”
He cited the Runnymede Society, which was founded by the Canadian Constitution Foundation in 2016, as an effort to establish a Canadian equivalent of the Federalist Society. Just give them time, Morton implied.
I did some straight reporting on Rufo’s keynote speech for Canada’s National Observer, so I’ll use this space to editorialize briefly.
Rufo opened his remarks by expressing pride in his wife being pregnant with their fourth child and first girl, presenting himself as an all-American family man.
Two days before the event, documentarian Lauren Windsor revealed on Twitter that she found Rufo’s email address in the 2015 Ashley Madison data leak.
Texas Observer investigative reporter Steven Monacelli independently verified Windsor’s reporting, questioning why someone else would sign Rufo up for an extramarital affair dating website years before he was a public figure.
Rufo responded by falsely accusing Windsor of having an Onlyfans account and threatening to sue her, linking to a searchable database of the leak that doesn’t include his email.
But, as Monacelli pointed out, the website doesn’t include anybody’s emails, because it’s fake. For his part, Monacelli received a block.
I thought Rufo might bring up what he’s characterized as a “smear campaign” from a “left-wing operative” as an example of his political opponents’ perfidy.
He didn’t, which is unsurprising in retrospect, given how it would distract from the focus of his talk.
Rufo’s speech centred on how to build a successful political campaign by carefully cultivating a set of facts designed to elicit an emotional response that spurs people to action.
He was received enthusiastically by the audience as he boasted of his efforts to ban critical race theory, DEI and gender affirming health care across the U.S., as well as his role in forcing former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation over plagiarism accusations.
Rufo was especially proud of his role in drafting President Donald Trump’s executive order banning critical race theory, or what the order characterized as “offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.”
Rufo, who is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, was critical of how think tanks are often excessively focused on facts, data and statistics, which he called the “raw material” of political campaigns.
In order to get results, one needs to trigger some sort of emotional response, which allows you to dominate the traditional news cycle, go viral on social media and, most importantly, influence people “to skip cooking dinner for their family to go do something for two hours.”
“Outrage is fundamental,” he said. “If you don't have outrage, you're not winning in politics. This is just a fundamental kind of effect that has to be cultivated and directed.”
Rufo, like the premier, has a gift for spinning a convincing yarn of bullshit peppered with some kernels of truth.
If you ignore the policies he’s advocating, his advice for political campaigning is sound.
It is important to not just spout off a list of facts, although Rufo’s definition of facts is quite lax, but to create an emotional connection with your audience that inspires them to do something about it.
When it comes to the substance of policy, however, Rufo doesn’t have the slightest clue as to what he’s talking about, as Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs aptly demonstrated in a July 2023 sit-down with Rufo.
At the conference, Rufo spoke of how “the left has control over all of the organs of knowledge production, with a few exceptions,” citing supposed leftist dominance of the media, academia, K-12 education and the bureaucracy.
It’s a bit rich for someone who’s been profiled in the New Yorker, Politico and the Washington Post, been invited to write an op-ed for the New York Times, and appeared on Fox News—America’s most watched news network by a longshot—dozens of times to claim that his political opponents are in control of the media.
Rufo collapses the tepid neoliberal incrementalism that tends to dominate these institutions with radical leftism, presenting himself, Gov. DeSantis, Trump, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, or whomever, as courageously standing in the way of a total Marxist takeover of society.
By rejecting the notion that systemic racism or trans people exist at all, and pushing for these subjects to be removed from public conversation, Rufo obscures key differences between reformist and radical solutions to these issues, grouping anyone who so much as acknowledges their existence as a radical attempting to subvert Western civilization from within.
The most amusing portion of the conference was hearing former federal Leader of Opposition Stockwell Day rant and rave about “cultural Marxism” on the conference’s final panel, which was ostensibly about Alberta’s efforts to create an “energy-secure future.”
I doubt Day, who once sat on the board of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), despite not being Jewish, is aware of the antisemitic origins of the phrase cultural Marxism, nor do I suspect CIJA cares an iota about their associate’s fondness for this dog whistle, given their mutual, full-throated support for anything and everything Israel does—the reason he ever sat on the board to begin with.
Every question asked by moderator David Knight-Legg, Jason Kenney’s former chief of staff when he was premier, was an opportunity for Day to pivot towards what has quite clearly become an obsession for him.
I shuffled into the conference hall a tad late, just as Day was complaining about a “culturally Marxist dogma, related to oil and gas, to prosperity and the human condition” that seeks to shut down all energy production that isn’t cow dung.
In response to a question on how the energy industry can give Canada a bigger voice on the international stage, Day went to bat for nuclear energy, which makes up 55% of Ontario’s electricity grid and 40% of New Brunswick’s, but isn’t a source of electricity in any other province.
“More people are killed and injured installing solar panels than have ever been injured in any way with nuclear installations,” he said, as if the greatest danger posed by nuclear power plants is their construction.
“And by the way, I'm not promoting nuclear. I'm just talking about how we are afraid to talk about it.”
Why are we, whomever that may be, afraid to talk about it? Well, according to Day, that has something to do with university students feeling the need “to modify their papers to align with what the Marxist professor wants.”
“We're not going to change that, but we can through alternate institutions,” he said, adding that the Marxist infiltration of society begins before university.
For this reason, suggested that conservatives establish an alternative to the Alberta Teachers’ Association, which he claimed is “the only certifier of teachers” in Alberta.
Just one problem—the ATA doesn’t certify teachers. That’s what Alberta Education does.
Day closed his contribution to the panel, which need I remind you was about Alberta’s contribution to energy security, by providing an anecdote about how his granddaughter didn’t want him to kill a bee that had invaded his living room, because many bee species are going extinct.
“I'm telling you our upcoming generation is seized by a mindset that is culturally Marxist, uninformed or wrong, informed on these issues,” said Day.
The transformation of Stockwell Day from presiding over key Cabinet portfolios in Stephen Harper’s government to someone whose brain is so cooked by the internet that he sees preventing bees from going extinct as a Marxist plot tells you everything about the trajectory of Canadian conservatism.
......"a gift for spinning a convincing yarn of bullshit peppered with some kernels of truth."