It's the extremists' party, Danielle Smith is just leading it
While the premier sailed through her leadership review at the Red Deer AGM, the UCP's policy resolutions revealed a deep grassroots alignment with the radical right.
Perhaps the least interesting part of the United Conservative Party annual general meeting was Premier Danielle Smith cruising to 91.5% support in her leadership review on Nov. 2 in Red Deer.
David Parker, the Take Back Alberta founder who turned on Smith after she fruitlessly told him to touch grass and apologize to Anaida Poilievre for insinuating her husband, federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, might be having an affair with one of his top staffers, is washed.
TBA, the hard-right faction that helped propel Smith to power, no doubt still wields considerable influence over the party machinery, but given the sheer scale of Smith’s approval among the party brass, its members clearly like what they’re seeing from her.
Besides, there’s a new rebellious faction in town—the Black Hatters, who to my disappointment aren’t an offshoot of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch sect. They just share part of their aesthetic.
I saw a member walk into Red Deer’s Westerner Park conference hall on Saturday with a bulletproof vest, suggesting their overall vibe is more Jewish Defence League than Chabad.
This band of self-styled revolutionaries from Medicine Hat appear to have changed their branding from the “Black Hats Gang” of media reports to the “Black Hat Group” of official AGM literature.
They got a special debate on their proposed Bill of Rights, Responsibilities and Freedom on the AGM agenda, with the support of the party’s TBA-dominated board of directors, after a meeting with Minister of Justice Mickey Amery last week.
On Oct. 28, Premier Smith announced her intention to beef up the Bill of Rights to enshrine the right to refuse medical treatment (unless, presumably, you’re unhoused and addicted to drugs), own firearms and, in a throwback to Smith’s Wildrose days, property rights.
These additions, according to University of Alberta legal scholar Eric Adams, give some teeth to the historically unsharpened Bill of Rights, since they deal with rights that go unmentioned in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—the supreme law of the land.
But the Black Hatters, whose ranks include former Medicine Hat MP LaVar Payne, want Smith to go further, with a 22-point document that reads like it was written by the type of people who might show up to a political convention in body armour.
I won’t reiterate all 22 points in the document, but here are some highlights to get a sense with what we’re dealing with:
The Right to Life, Liberty, Property, & the Pursuit of Happiness…
Freedom of Parents to Make Decisions Concerning the Health, Education, Welfare and Upbringing of Their Children;
Freedom to Keep and Bear Arms, including Ownership and Use of Firearms;
Freedom to Keep and Own Private Property, Including Land, Livestock; and Chattels;
Freedom from Supervision, Surveillance, and Unreasonable Search and Seizure…
Freedom to Demand Natural Justice and Procedural Fairness in All Civil or Criminal Matters…
Freedom to use Sufficient Force to Defend Person, Family, Home, and Property from Any And All Occupation, Theft, or Destruction;
Freedom of Informed Consent and to Make Personal Health Decisions, Including to Refuse Vaccinations, Medical or Surgical Procedures…
Freedom from Excessive Taxation, and Taxation Without Representation… [Sic]
The Black Hatters are still aggrieved by the pandemic, with one member citing the federal Act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness, or Bill C-293, which is being debated in the Senate, as a key motivator factor for this document.
“If you're not afraid before [sic], you should be terrified now,” explained one member. “They have been relentless in attacking Alberta—Alberta industry, our jobs, our people, our rights, our freedoms, our families—for years.
“C-293 is going to finish the job. We are one emergency away.”
During the debate, opponents of the Black Hatter policy noted that a number of its clauses would appear to contradict UCP priorities.
The second clause, for example, “supports drug addicts in their right to pursue happiness and get free drugs from the government,” Calgary-Edgemont delegate Raymond Chang said.
Christopher Bataluk, a lawyer representing Edmonton-West Henday, noted that clause 15, which enshrines Albertans’ ability to make their own health care choices, “could immediately be used to attack all the transgender legislation that we've clapped for Danielle passing this morning.”
The same, I would add, could be said of clause four, which empowers parents to make their own choices regarding the health and welfare of their children.
The debate over this document was originally scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m., but the party executive moved it an hour earlier without explanation, meaning it coincided with lunch.
I suspect the reason for the debate’s time change—to which one Black Hatter responded hilariously by shouting, “We are the people”—might have been a case of the party brass getting cold feet about the optics of adopting the right to shoot people who enter your property as official party policy.
If that was the case, it was a total failure. The resolution passed overwhelmingly, as did each of the 35 other policies brought forward at the AGM. Not a single headcount was required.
While the party leadership is under no obligation to adopt party policies as legislation, Smith was open to the possibility of amending the bills she introduced last week to bring them into closer alignment with party policy.
“That’s the reason why we have three readings of bills,” she told reporters at a press conference prior to the policy debates.
At Canada’s National Observer, I wrote about the knots Premier Danielle Smith tied herself into to reconcile her stated commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 through carbon capture technology with members’ support for a resolution calling on the government to abandon any emissions reduction targets, since CO2 is “a foundational nutrient for all life on earth.”
In short, she claimed that members who support the resolution couldn't have possibly meant what it clearly said, blaming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for polarizing the conversation around net zero.
Rebecca Schulz, Smith’s environment minister, blamed “eco-radicals” for the motion’s glaring factual inaccuracies.
The most bonkers policy resolution promised to prevent governments from using “neocolonial interpretations” of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to seize Crown land, give it to First Nations and then transfer ownership to the United Nations.
Stunningly, this bit of racist conspiracism passed without a single person willing to speak against it.
Earlier in the day, I approached Robert Melzer, a member of the Banff-Kananaskis constituency association, who was easily identifiable due to his bright blue “Banff-Kananaskis ❤️ Danielle Smith” t-shirt, to explain the rationale behind this resolution his party proposed.
Melzer cited the B.C. government’s use of UNDRIP to seize private property on the Haida Gwaii archipelago and transfer it to the Haida Nation.
“They just gave the natives carte blanche—control of all the land, total disrespect to private land ownership that has already been established there, and no mechanism for those private landowners to fight against the system,” he claimed, adding his suspicion that the World Economic Forum is somehow involved.
The text of his riding association’s resolution refers specifically to “provincial Crown land,” not private property.
Even then, what he said is simply not true, according to a leading expert in UNDRIP. The “Rising Tide” Haida Title Lands Agreement, UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples chair Sheryl Lightfoot writes in The Conversation, stipulates “that existing private property rights will be honoured.”
A similar sloppiness was manifest in the afternoon’s second policy resolution, which called for the banning of union donations to political parties, a practice banned as part of the NDP socialist menace’s first piece of legislation in 2015.
A couple party members who spoke against the motion noted the same glaring inaccuracy.
Bataluk, the Edmonton lawyer, decried the resolution as a waste of time.
“We can pass this, but we can also pass resolutions saying we're against murder and theft. I mean, there's no point in us adding to our policy book, saying things that are already illegal should remain illegal,” said Bataluk.
Peter McCaffrey, founder of the libertarian Alberta Institute think tank, emphasized his credentials as a critic of union donations to political campaigns, but correctly noted that, by law, these contributions are indirect.
“We have to remember they donate to PACs, not political parties,” he said, referring to political action committees, which are known as third party advertisers, “so this doesn’t cover that.”
On the topic of unions, just one person raised objection to a motion calling for teachers’ membership in the Alberta Teachers’ Association to be made optional.
“To keep it short and simple, this is union busting,” said Douglas Hartt, who was wearing a separatist “Alberta Republic” t-shirt.
Last week, Premier Smith introduced legislation to prohibit bottom and top surgery for minors—not a thing and almost not a thing, respectively—as well as puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, force teachers to out their trans students to their parents and ban trans women from women’s sports.
But the party membership voted in support of three resolutions to broaden Smith’s efforts to eradicate trans people from society.
Sheila Cunningham, a trans woman representing the Red Deer-North constituency, spoke against all three.
The first, proposed by the Calgary-Lougheed riding association, seeks to ban trans women from “exclusively female spaces and categories.”
Cunningham’s reasoning was bizarre, framing this policy as potentially targetting cisgendered men, rather than blatantly targetting trans women like herself.
“The NDP really hopes that we pass [this policy], because the NDP raging leftist man-hating feminists see how they can use this policy to criminalize all of Alberta's biological men,” she said.
A resolution proposed by the Cardston-Siksika riding association called for the undoing of NDP legislation that allowed people to put their gender as X on government documents.
Again, Cunningham’s argument was peculiar, focusing on “our push against government overreach.”
“Why does sex need to be on so many government forms anyways? On our driver’s licenses? Let’s reduce red tape, take this policy back and bring it back when we’re truly reducing red tape for Albertans,” she said.
The cruelest of the cruel was another Cardston-Siksika policy calling for the defunding of gender affirming care, which it characterized as a luxury.
“If a person is unhappy with the shape of their fully functioning nose, they have to pay for surgery,” explained one supporter, who no doubt thought they were being quite clever.
“Taxpayers should not be paying the exorbitant costs of cosmetic surgery and medications because a few people are preoccupied in an unhealthy way with their bodies.”
In this case, Cunningham rose to the occasion, striking a balance between humanizing trans people and speaking a language fellow conservatives could understand.
“In some cases, gender dysphoria in adults is so strong that they attempt to commit suicide, they attempt to commit surgery on themselves, and repairing them back to health from those attempts is paid for by your public tax dollars,” she said.
“For some of those people, the only solution is surgery to change their genitals, so how do you want to spend your dollars?”
On none of these policies was Cunningham able to sway more than a handful of members.
Far more remarkable than the resounding mandate Premier Smith’s leadership received is what the suite of policies that same party membership overwhelmingly endorsed says about her leadership.
It’s the extremists’ party, Smith’s just their conduit to the mainstream.
Thanks Jeremy for your venture into the Weird World Circus cult. Had no doubt the clowns and grifters would endorse the ringmaster. Alberta had a poor reputation under Klein, but the UCP has managed to take it to a new low. Alberta is now more than ever a magnet for every carpetbagger, grifter, and batshit crazy conspiracy theorist in the world. The new Alberta Advantage. The Black Hat boyz???? Really Alberta. I'm surprised there weren't chants of U.S.A. U.S.A. And no Open Carry or Stand Your Ground policy. That's disappointing. It'd be fun shopping with a glock on my hip or a shotgun hanging off my shoulder.
On the brightside the federal Liberal and NDP parties were handed a gift for the next election if they have enough smarts and guts to use it. The UCP is a clone of the Harper/Poilievre CPC with the same backroom people and dark money donors and the same agenda. Canadians need to be made aware of what is behind Poilievre's memes. It is a power grift feeding off legitimate fears (which need to be acknowledged and addressed not ridiculed) of a rapidly changing and out of control world where the familiar is disappearing and economic expectations have been destroyed..
If there were any doubts before that Canadian conservatism (the conservatism that demanded intellectual rigour and respected academic achievement) is dead this definitely should make it clear. It's the bait and switch grift. Canadian conservatism is dead replaced with MAGA and the Grift.
The good news is, they are out in the open....now it is going to be interesting to see if we talk about it in Alberta, and if the majority of Albertans have the courage, the language ability and the goodness of heart to talk about this rising tide of irrationalism without resorting to the same kind of demonization the UCP radicals are using to push their agenda against their 'imagined' other.
The outright lies might be a good place to start. Thanks to the Black Hatters we now know the details of the land transfer on Haida Gwaii.....current private property WAS NOT CONFISGATED BY THE LAND TRANSFER.
What I find interesting is that the UCP right flank somehow believes they can blatantly lie about reality........and get away with it. In the case of CO2 in the atmosphere being too low rather than too high: Perhaps its time more of us radical lefties got our ducks in line vis a vis climate change?
You can't fight disinformation or blatant lies.,...if you too are scant on the details. Too few Canadians understand exponential growth........or why CO2 in the atmosphere is a massive threat that has little to do with the biological fact that plants need CO2 to thrive. God is in the differences...as is our future resilience.
To some extent, our desire that everything be the same...simple and universal in application...is a fallacy all of us need to disabuse ourselves of, and quickly. Sloppy silver bullet thinking is partly what is fueling these folks....arriving at conventions in bullet proof vests....with violent rhetoric defending the indefensible.
We are not their enemy. Let's stay clear about that. From the evidence Jeremy presents, its seems that complex reality/objective truth, is.