Front Burner - Big plans and controversies: Alberta’s Danielle Smith charts a path

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Danielle Smith has been premier of Alberta for about six weeks. Her anti-Ottawa rhetoric and proposed sovereignty act ignited the leadership race. Then, on the day Smith took office, she commented that unvaccinated people were the "most discriminated against group.” A First Nations leader in Alberta has even called into question her claims of Indigenous heritage. Smith took to television Tuesday evening to address the province and lay out her agenda. Now, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of who she is as a leader and where she plans to take the province. Today, CBC’s Jason Markusoff is here to explain what has happened during Smith’s first weeks as premier.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Allie Janes, in for Jamie Poisson. This week, Alberta's new Premier took to Supper Hour TV to address the province. We're facing a very difficult time as a country and as a province. We've been through a lot together these past three years, but still have many challenges ahead of us.

Daniel Smith used the opportunity to lay out her agenda. First off, I wish to address the inflation and affordability crisis. Our government will be implementing a series of affordability measures to benefit all Albertans with additional targeted relief for seniors, the vulnerable, and families. Our province's other big challenge is health care. Smith has been in office for about six weeks, and we're starting to get a clearer picture of who she is as a leader and where she plans to take the province. In about a week's time, our government will introduce the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act. We will put the rights of Albertans first, always. And in that relatively short time, she's had a few hiccups, missteps that needed some damage control. Danielle Smith is starting

her term on the back foot, apologizing for statements she made on day one of the job. She's been under fire since she said that people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 are the most discriminated group she has ever seen. Premier Danielle Smith is coming under fire for comments she made online earlier this year about the war in Ukraine, among other topics. Now the local Ukrainian community says that the comments were ignorant and they're calling for retraction. All with the provincial election quickly approaching in the spring, when Smith will be up against former Alberta Premier Rachel Nolley. CBC Calgary's Jason Markisoff has been watching all of this closely, and he's here with me now to explain what has happened in Daniel Smith's first few weeks as Premier. Hi Jason, welcome back to FrontBurner. Always wonderful to have you.

Hello, Allie. So, I want to start by just talking about what this TV address is, because this is something that doesn't really happen in the rest of the country, as I understand it. It's kind of a special Alberta thing. So can you just explain what exactly this is? It's an oddly American thing to exist within a Canadian context. But Alberta's been doing it for at least two decades, I think, going way back to when Ralph Klein was premier. And every premier since, from progressive conservatives, UCP, NDP have done this. They pre-record or live record or air live a speech from their office, much like the President of the United States, talking about some crisis or speaking to their agenda, basically their own version of a speech from the throne.

I call it a speech from the tube sometimes. It's almost like an infomercial. Sometimes they put in, splice in B-roll, they have fancy graphics explaining their agenda or their plans. And it's become such an institution that now we have this other section like the response to the State of the Union Address in America, where the TV stations also give 10 minutes response to the State of the Union address in America, where the TV stations also give 10 minutes response to the official opposition leader. In any other province, this would be seen as wildly controversial and weird. In Alberta, it is a thing a premier gets to do. Right.

And wildly controversial and weird in the sense that they're not taking questions from the press. They just give their speech and then it cuts out. That's right. And the TV stations just run it as though it's, you know, yeah, as though the president of the U.S. is talking from the Oval Office. So let's talk about what Danielle Smith put in this TV address during her campaign as leader.

You know, she was criticized quite a bit for and I mean, I recall you coming on on the show and sort of talking about how, like, she was talking less about like bread and butter issues and, you know, focusing more on beefs with the feds, pandemic management. But those weren't the issues that she kind of front loaded on Tuesday night. So right out of the gate, she hit affordability. What was her plan there? Yeah, if we're talking a supper hour television, she was providing bread, butter, wheat, potatoes. And look, groceries are hard for people to afford these days.

harder for people to afford these days. This is universal across Canada, across much of the world right now with supply chains and everything with inflation. So this was the, you know, polls have identified this, you know, inflation to healthcare as the number one issues, not relitigating COVID and some of the federal fights that animated Danielle Smith in her leadership campaign.

And she needs to now sell herself to the general public. So she's using Alberta's ample oil wealth to do so. For seniors and families with dependent children under 18 years of age, we will provide $600 over six months for each child as well as each senior. This will be targeted to middle-income families with household incomes below $180,000. That same amount will be provided to vulnerable Albertans collecting AISH and PDD and income support. That's a lot of Albertans will get that, many won't, but for those who have kids or are elderly or on fixed incomes, that's going to probably mean something.

She's going to give rebates for electricity. She's going to extend a freeze that her predecessor, Jason Kenney, had on fuel tax. She's going to give a small raise to keep up with inflation for disability benefits and seniors' benefits. She's going to cap electricity rates somehow. And finally, we will invest in food banks and expand low-income transit passes to ensure every Albertan has access to food and mobility for their families. She's going to do a whole big

affordability suite with an eye-popping price tag, $2.4 billion. And she hopes that that's going to help people and help them like her more. So the second big kind of bucket in this address was health care. And so she talked about things like reducing emergency room wait times, ambulance wait times, you know, reducing wait times for surgeries.

But did she say anything about how she's going to do that? Not really. She announced this stuff last week in a very controversial move she had talked about doing, in her leadership race, she sacked the entire 11-member board of directors for the Alberta Health Services, which is Alberta's hospital super agencies. There's one big board that runs all the hospitals in the province. She pitched it as sort of a comeuppance for the restrictions of COVID and the vaccine mandates that she and her base deplored. A lot of that problem was created by policies at Alberta Health Services of having mandatory vaccinations. So it prevented us from being able to hire back everyone who had been let go up until about two and a half months ago when cabinet directed them to end the mandate, prevented us from being able to graduate students across the full range of professions because they

also had vaccine mandates. It prevented us from being able to hire from other jurisdictions through the full range of people who would have otherwise wanted to come here because of vaccine mandates. So they actually, at the management level, made things even worse for our front line. And when you see that kind of... This time, it's for smoother management, more effective decision-making. Replace those directors with one appointed administrator that has a direct line to the Premier's office and health minister's office.

And they've set out these goals. They're very ambitious goals. Every province is struggling with how to unclog its emergency rooms, shorten its surgery wait times, figure out its staffing shortage. We have an acute paramedic situation here where ambulance waits can be nightmarish for many people. Are there clear ways she's going to improve all these? Not necessarily, but she set out the ambition and it's squarely in the alley of what people want from their healthcare system. So if she can make it work somehow, that'll be huge. She sacked the chief medical officer of health, Dr. Dina Hinshaw, our top public health official. The funny thing is, though, she replaced her with a guy from AHS, this agency that she had deplored, a Dr. Mark Joffe, who advocates for vaccination, advocates for assertive masking,

was in Alberta Health Services when they were letting go of their staff that refused vaccination. So the messaging is a bit blurred, but she's still trying to make good on some of these basic promises. And we'll see going forward whether she stays true to the no more mask mandates, no more mask rules, no more vaccine mandates, no more restrictions come what may on COVID or other illnesses. So something that she didn't talk about was a promise that she has previously mentioned in regards to health care, which is something called a health spending account. This is something that the opposition has been really critical of. What exactly is a health spending account? It's an interesting promise that she made during the campaign and she still wants to implement maybe before the election. What she's promised is kind of like it's a benefit for

some in some public sectors and some major employers. They offer you $300 or so for medical services or quasi-medical services that don't get covered by Medicare. Families can use these accounts to visit a dentist, a physiotherapist, chiropractor, counselor, or other needed health professional. And it will be your choice on how to best use these funds for your family. Massage therapy, psychological services, podiatry, some of the non-publicly covered medical services. And she's promised that.

Where it's gotten controversial lately from the opposition is that Danielle Smith, as a pundit, as a commentator in her past life, last year was talking about using these as a precursor to having more direct spending by individuals throughout the public system for family doctor visits, say, which sounds a lot like healthcare privatization. We need to change the conversation about what we pay for through our health spending accounts and what we pay for through catastrophic government insurance and that

the government pays for directly. So I think we can all agree you need a knee replacement, you need heart surgery, you need cancer treatment, that falls into the catastrophic category. Most of us would be bankrupt if we got diagnosed with any of those illnesses and had to be treated. But a regular checkup to your doctor, does that really have to be something that is covered 100% by government? Or should that be paid for under your health spending account? Danielle Smith has said, or her office at least has said, that's not her now. That's not what she's talking about. Let's turn the page on that, please. Right. Because if I'm correct, I mean, she, again, you know, long prior to becoming premier had sort of talked about how, you know, this could be something that might sort of prime people to be more comfortable with the

idea of also paying for some Medicare services out of pocket. That's right. Her background is deeply conservative, very pro-Margaret Thatcher, very, like Fraser Institute, very traditional conservative, pro-deregulation, pro-privatization. Now that she's in government, she realizes that some of those are a bit dicier and harder to sell than they are in think tanks or policy papers,

so she's trying to skedaddle away from those. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new

book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So coming back to her TV address on Tuesday night, she did bring up the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which was like a centerpiece of her campaign, something that you've talked about on FrontBurner before. But I did notice that in her address, she was calling it by a different name, which is a bit of a mouthful, the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act. So how has that plan changed since Smith became premier? It's really hard to say. This has been the challenge with talking about it, wrapping our heads around it, because what she's proposing to do seems to many legal experts highly unconstitutional. This idea that Alberta would declare certain federal policies or laws against Alberta's jurisdiction and refuse to enforce them within Alberta's boundaries.

That is on its face. It seems unconstitutional. But she has said she's going to let, when she tables legislation, probably next week when the legislature sits for the first time during her premiership. There will be something that's constitutional. Now, some are attempting to scare folks into thinking that this legislation has something to do with leaving Canada. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this new law will have the opposite effect. By restoring and respecting the constitutional rights of our creative and diverse provinces, including Alberta, Canada will become stronger, more prosperous,

and more unified than ever. But no matter whether it's called the ASA or this acronym we're trying to call ASWCA within the United Canada, we're going to find out what it is. It's clearly still meant to be provocative, a big poke in the eye of Ottawa. And we'll see how much oxygen it sucks up from the rest of her agenda. It's separate from the

affordability agenda. It's something her base really wants. It's still a big part of who she is and what she wants to do. And even if she is trying to dampen any perceptions that it's a separatist move by having the words within United Canada in the act, we're still going to call it the Sovereignty Act. We're not going to call it the United Canada Act exactly. Right, right. Okay, so moving on from her address, I mean, it's been about six weeks now that she's been premier. And during that time, she's had to walk back or explain herself over a number of comments and previous posts that she's made. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yeah. of her premiership, she was doing a press conference and declared that the unvaccinated were the most discriminated people that she's aware of in her 51 years on this planet.

The community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated. I don't think I've ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to go visit a loved one in long-term care or hospital or not allowed to go get on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border. So they have been the most discriminated against group that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. That's a pretty extreme level of discrimination. We are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice. Matthew Feeney, Jr.: She had to mop up that saying, I didn't mean to compare different

types of discrimination. Shortly after that, it became exposed on social media back in the spring. She does a lot of social media, says a lot, does a lot of things, says a lot of odd comments, gets information from weird, often alt-right or rogue non-mainstream sources. She was espousing some beliefs on the Ukraine conflict that sounded like the Russian propaganda lines. Alberta has a very large Ukrainian population. So ultimately, she had to apologize for that and has had to do a lot of relations with the Canadian-Ukrainian population and communities in Alberta. And the challenge for her politically was that normally when a premier is new or prime minister is new, out the gate, they have a bunch of things they want to do.

Danielle Smith wasn't ready until recently to actually do things. So the dominant discussion about her leadership and her premiership was these messes that she got herself into through things she had said as premier or things she had said months before becoming premier. I mean, I thought it was striking, you know, coming back to her address for a moment that she made these comments at the end of it, kind of trying to, it seemed like, you know, distance herself from things that she had previously said when she was, you know, working in media, when she was a talk show host, and she said, but I know I'm not a talk show host or media commentator any longer. That is not my job today. So it seemed like kind of an effort to distance herself from that. Serving as your premier is by far the most challenging thing I've ever done. I know that I'm far from perfect and I make mistakes. And having spent decades in media and hosting talk shows, I discussed hundreds of different topics and sometimes took controversial

positions, many of which have evolved or changed as I've grown and learned from listening to you. You know, one more thing I wanted to talk to you about that doesn't really speak to her policy plans per se, but some reporting has raised questions about her ancestry claims recently. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, not one situation that's been dicey, but two. In the first one, when she was mopping up these Ukrainian comments, she spoke about how her great-grandfather immigrated to Canada from Ukraine to escape communism. She understands these situations.

The thing is, as some online sleuths quickly found, and journalists quickly found, her ancestor came to Canada in 1915, or 1913, I think it was, which is years before the Bolshevik Revolution. So there's a bit of, you know, fact-myth blurring there. And also, several times in the past,

as she's discussed indigenous issues, she's talked about her own indigenous roots. Danny Parody from APTN News dug into this and found that this claim she has had of a great, great, great, I forget how many greats back, grandmother with Cherokee roots in Oklahoma. Danny Parody from APTN found this ancestor. Turns out they are not Cherokee.

And this is, again, myth-making on Danielle Smith's part. So yes, this isn't policy, but of course, these things go to character. Is she, and what she believes and what she holds up is true and whether it is true. And what is myth?

Is she espousing myths? Is she telling us facts? Is she giving Albertans straight goods? Is there more to be said? Do we have to fact check so many things she says? These are not things most politicians want to have on their rap sheet. OK, and I'll just note that in a statement, Smith's press secretary said that, quote, like so many Albertans that have origins from all over the world, Premier Smith has heard about her heritage from her loved ones. And that, quote, the premier hasn't done a deep dive into her ancestry, but is proud of her roots. But just finally, Jason, I'd love to, you know, just bring this all together before we finish today.

So Smith is six weeks into her time as premier. We've seen some genuine policy proposals from her and also some bumps in the road, as we were just talking about. So, I mean, overall, you know, what do you think are going to be the premier's main challenges from here? Well, right now there's an election in May and she's losing. Polls show her behind by a fair margin, behind the NDP and former premier Rachel Notley. So she needs to convince Albertans that their first impression of her, which was pretty rough, is not who she is. that their first impression of her, which was pretty rough, is not who she is, that she's going to address the issues that Albertans are really concerned about, not some conservative-based pet issues.

And she has to make fewer mistakes. They're aware of that. They're trying to keep her very scripted. This is why this infomercial worked as opposed to, say, a big speech in front of a live crowd in a press conference to explain herself afterwards. The margin of error for her is very slim, and she has catching up to do. What's working for her, though, is she has the power of the Treasury, and it's an ample Treasury. Alberta is awash in oil cash right now. So if she can spend her way and improve policy to make people think better of her, then she's got a chance.

If she doesn't and still has several, you know, more road bumps, it's going to be a real challenge for her to hang on to this. Okay. Jason, we will be watching this and I'm sure we will be checking in with you very soon. This is fun to watch. Thank you. Cheers. All right. Before we go today, a heartbreaker of a loss in Canada's first World Cup game in 36 years yesterday.

Belgium beat Canada 1-0. But we put on a great show against the team that FIFA ranks second best in the world. Canada has two more chances to advance beyond this group stage. Their next match is on Sunday against Croatia. That's all for today. I'm Ali Janes, in for Jamie Poisson. Thank you for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.