Laying it Out: In Alberta, apparently we only act tough when we face East

By Scott Schmidt on February 8, 2025.

Following the #BestSummerEver as issued in by former premier Jason Kenney in the oh so distant year of 2021, 57 human beings in Medicine Hat lost their lives over 60 days. It was the single deadliest one-cause killer over a two-month period in the city’s history.

During that stretch, Dr. Paul Parks said the situation at the hospital was so dire, they had patients in the basement and were using baby monitors to keep watch.

In that moment I thought Kenney had embarrassed his role as premier beyond anything that could be matched. I seethed in anger at the man, as did many Hatters and Albertans, so much so that most everyone was quite happy to watch the leopards in his party proverbially eat his face and send him packing.

But after the last few weeks I actually wish he was still here. Even he would have done the right thing.

For the first time in any of our lives we’ve had our personal sovereignty threatened by another government, led by objectively one of the most disgusting humans on Earth, and yet Premier Danielle Smith refuses to stop kissing the ring long enough to defend it.

Every leader of every ideological background in this country stood up, joined hands and said none of our interior squabbles matter today. Defending the sovereignty of Canadians is all there is.

Every leader except ours.

Our leader is trying to cleverly paint the narrative that she was the voice of reason, the one who said, “diplomacy will win the day,” and that the “tough guy” approach doesn’t work.

Pretty rich coming from Danielle Smith, leader of the F*ck Trudeau province. Gee, tell me more about diplomacy, a word you’ve literally never used before last week.

Smith wrote an op-ed in the National Post that ran Monday, the day the trade war began and paused. She said Canada must, “De-escalate the rhetoric as much as possible and look to diplomacy and advocacy as our primary tool to solve this conflict.”

Alberta has spent 40-plus years revolving its entire personality around being anything but diplomatic to our own nation. For cryin’ out loud, we once threatened to shut off oil to B.C. – Kenney’s UCP wrote a law to allow it – and we seem to threaten to take their wine off our shelves twice a year.

But when the U.S president says he is going to increase economic warfare on Canada until we “cease to exist,” now we cower and want to play nice?

Barf.

All Alberta ever does, and all she’s ever done, is take the ‘tough guy’ approach within this country, but we’re the first and only province to stand down when facing a true existential threat to our livelihood.

It’s an embarrassment, and every Albertan who says they are “a Canadian first,” should be ashamed.

Smith couldn’t even be diplomatic toward the prime minister or other premiers in the very op-ed where she called for diplomacy with a wanna-be dictator who just told us he’s gonna annex us. The whole piece was her saying Donald Trump has valid reasons for his concerns – objectively and overwhelmingly false, since Canada is ‘responsible’ for less than 1% of the fentanyl concern which the U.S. itself created for all of us – and that a true ‘Team Canada’ is basically one that just does everything the hostile president asked for, and also, everything she wants.

I repeat: Trump is threatening our sovereignty. You remember, don’t you? It’s that whole freedom thing people lost their minds over when they couldn’t both go to the movies AND be susceptible to a deadly virus at the same time.

Did she talk about your freedom in her column? Nope. Way too busy suggesting we “build pipelines in every direction.”

Wow, what a necessary insertion at such a pivotal moment in time. What would we do without you?

Doug Ford, about as conservative a premier as we have, stood up in front of his entire province and country and essentially said, ‘If you want a piece of them, you have to go through me.’

NDP MP Charlie Angus stood up and said to Donald Trump, “We Canadians are polite until we are not, and we will be one day stronger and one day longer than you.”

For everyone else but our premier, it stopped being about “left or right” and became entirely about standing up together against a would-be tyrant.

We. Will. Not. Kneel.

She will though, gladly. Do you remember that picture from the inauguration party with her gleefully standing between one man who would soon threaten her country, and another man – Canadian investment mogul and all-around awful guy Kevin O’Leary – who has come out in full support of Canada being annexed?

Do think she’d say she regrets that photo? I certainly don’t, and neither do you.

I get that she’s not without support here – she’s not the only Albertan whose personality has long revolved around hating Ottawa and its outgoing prime minister. The usual-suspect columnists in Calgary could not get to a keyboard fast enough to call Smith a ‘saviour,’ and we’ve had some doozy, unrepeatable anonymous comments sent into the News.

Donald Trump likely doesn’t even remember her name, but if Smith is your hero in any of this, that’s your right. For me personally, I seek people who don’t puff their chests out whenever they face East, then be the first to fold and sell us out when anything but a pretend fight comes to our door.

Danielle Smith is not a fighter, and she has a history of doing whatever necessary to be on the winning team. The problem for her is she’s bad at it.

As soon as the late Jim Prentice showed up and she didn’t think she could win, she abandoned all her supposed values and crossed the floor in the legislature, only to become the No. 1 reason for the ‘accidental’ NDP win in 2015.

She betrayed her party and her apparent values, and no one let her get away with it. Make no mistake, what she’s doing now screams similarities to her past.

The difference now? That thing she’s put aside in order to chase her own interests is your country.