Naheed Nenshi: Danielle Smith has surpassed all expectations. Not in a good way.

A few weeks from an election in Alberta, and Danielle Smith has surpassed all expectations – not in a good way. Nonetheless, she remains the favourite to win, albeit with a very narrow victory. While there has been much news lately on recent items such as her botched affordability payments plan, or wasting $80 million and counting on off-brand children’s medication from Turkiye that no one is buying, it’s worth taking a look back at her record since coming to power just six months ago.

Her time in office has been so delightfully wacky there’s just too much to cover. She’s tripled down on the Alberta Sovereignty Act while admitting that she would follow any Supreme Court rulings on its constitutionality, and admitting she will likely never use it.

Since everyone knows the Act cannot achieve what she says it can within the confines of the Constitution (indeed, one of the authors of the strategy, Barry Cooper, has written that its unconstitutionality is ”exactly the point”), many Albertans are left wondering “what the hell is she doing?”

The same question has been asked again and again since Smith was elected by a razor thin of her own party in a surprisingly close race. (She got 53.7% on the final ballot, but about 5500 members who voted in the first ballot declined to rank either her or her final opponent, so she ended up with almost exactly 50% of votes cast.)

There are so many greatest hits to choose from; indeed, it seems every time she opens her mouth, something bizarre drops out.

On Day One, for example, she called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated group” that she’s witnessed in her lifetime.

'WE WENT TO UNIVERSITY TOGETHER'

It’s worth noting that she’s a few months older than I am. We went to university together. Residential schools existed for the first half of our lives, as did apartheid.

Gay people could not marry. Today, in a city that is 44% non-white, BIPOC people in Calgary do not always have access to the same opportunities as their majority counterparts. Hate crimes, including acts of antisemitism and Islamophobia, are massively on the rise across Alberta.

Heck, Smith even named the largest cabinet in Alberta history, and could find room for only four women and three non-white people, one of whom is the minister of trade, immigration and multiculturalism, another of culture. At least she didn’t relegate the women to the status of women portfolio – because there isn’t one.

She attempted to clarify her comments about discrimination, highlighting that, since her grandmother had “Cherokee relatives,” she has Indigenous ancestry and understands discrimination.

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Notably, she did not apologize and instead doubled down, vowing to make vaccine status a protected class under the Alberta Human Rights Act (does this mean your hairdresser can’t be required to be vaccinated against Hepatitis B, or a firefighter who lives in close quarters with others, against measles? Who knows?). Of course, she has not actually done so, having perhaps received some legal advice.

False claims of Indigenous ancestry have cost so many people their reputations and careers. Smith merely shrugged off an investigation from APTN finding no proof, with a breezy reference from her press secretary about “family history” perhaps being wrong and the fact that she hasn’t done “a deep dive” on her ancestry.

She was forced to apologize for another gaffe, in which she parroted Russian talking points about Ukraine and NATO being responsible for the invasion and suggesting that if only Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (which it did in the 1990s) and just ceded some territory to Russia, all would be fine.

Before her advisers reminded her that Alberta has one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world, she blamed the controversy on the media digging up things she had said long ago, while she was wearing a different hat.

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However, the comments were made last year, when she had declared she would run for the leadership of the UCP.

When she finally did apologize, she noted that one of her great-grandparents (not the Cherokee-adjacent one) fled Ukraine and that she, like so many Albertans, is proud of her Ukrainian roots.

However, even in that simple statement, she suggested her great-grandfather’s journey fleeing Communism was what has shaped her views and why she hates “socialists” so much. Only one small problem: he left Ukraine before the Russian revolution and the Communist victory. Oh well, close enough.

And there’s the constantly changing story on whether she interfered with criminal prosecutions of those facing not just COVID-related charges, but those involved with alleged criminal activity around the blockade of the Coutts border crossing.

Regardless of which of her explanations one believes (and it’s impossible for more than one of them to be true. She calls it “imprecise” language, others call it “lying”), she has admitted to far more than Justin Trudeau was accused of doing during the SNC Lavalin affair.

The only thing she has not done is replace her Attorney General – because she has no one to replace him with. (He’s under investigation for bad behaviour from the Law Society himself, but that’s yet another story)

How in the world did we get here? There are two schools of thought: one is that Smith is simply incompetent (she’s never been in government before and has only worked in media, lobbying, and politics, other than washing dishes and light bookkeeping at her family restaurant).

Indeed, amongst University of Calgary grads of the early 1990s there are active group text debates on whether she’s always been like this or if something has broken.

The other school says this is all an act. That like Boris Johnson or her political idol Ron DeSantis, she’s putting us all on.

She herself has lent credence to this theory. In an attempt to change the channel, she told a press conference that she sees journalism as a form of entertainment, focused on getting clicks and ratings. Therefore, she shouldn’t be held responsible for anything she said or espoused as a talk radio host.

Setting aside the cynicism of this statement – was she always playing her listeners for chumps? Will they abandon her when they figure it out or is she counting on their blind loyalty? – there is a political strategy here.

Shortly after taking office, she again said the quiet part out loud, suggesting that the math meant she could get a bare majority by sweeping rural Alberta and more or less ignoring Calgary and Edmonton.

She believes, therefore, that there is an audience for her extremism in rural Alberta and in cities such as Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer and the Grande Prairie region (all of which elected NDP members in 2015) to bring her back to the Premier’s office.

She may well be right. Polls consistently show a deadlocked race, with a small lead for the opposition NDP. However, the NDP must run a perfect campaign and win every seat they are competitive in, while the UCP has much more room for error.

'THE LURE OF KEEPING POWER IS SEDUCTIVE INDEED'

Her caucus knows this. While they grumble loudly in private, they have fallen behind their leader in public, even on issues such as the Sovereignty Act that they had previously angrily denounced. The lure of keeping power is seductive indeed.

Many of them understand that all but one of the last five Conservative premiers have been removed by a party revolt after winning an election but before finishing the term. Many of them figure that they’ll be rid of her soon enough, so why put their necks out now?

Time will tell if Smith proves to be a good premier after all, but one thing is certain. She has done what I would have thought impossible: she’s made many Albertans long for the leadership of Jason Kenney.

Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi wrote this opinion column for CTV News