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June 3, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:06:26
Special Report: Taking Alberta Backwards (w/Jeremy Appel)

On Monday, May 29, Danielle Smith, the leader of the UCP of Alberta, seized the reigns of majority government power with the help of a right-wing antivax group called Take Back Alberta.  Jeremy Appel, founder of The Orchard, joins Matthew for a masterclass on how things got so bad in Alberta, and how conspirituality played a key role. Show Notes The Orchard — Jeremy Appel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello everybody, I'm Matthew Remsky with a special episode of Conspiratuality Podcast called Taking Alberta Backwards with special guest, independent journalist Jeremy Appel, who runs a really great platform covering Alberta politics called The Orchard, which we'll link to in the show notes.
This past Monday, May 29th, Danielle Smith, the leader of the United Conservative Party of Alberta, seized the reins of majority government power in the province after a tight but also extremely boring race against the NDP's Rachel Notley.
Who tried to beat back Smith's right-wing supported libertarianism from a milquetoast centrist position that's very much at odds with her party's more socialist and pro-labor roots.
Now for anybody interested in the fate of public health and universal health care in Canada, and anyone interested in the climate change emergency internationally, Smith's victory is a disaster, and a tribute to the power of conspiracy theories, conspirituality, and propaganda.
During the pandemic, the former TV and radio personality covered herself in contrarian glory by saying tonic water would cure COVID, that hydroxychloroquine was a perfect treatment, and by spreading vaccine skepticism as she platformed disgraced doctors.
On the road to power through a party leadership coup organized by the far-right activist group Take Back Alberta, Smith said that the unvaccinated were the most discriminated against group in history, and that the vaccinated were like the followers of Hitler, just to cover both sides of the equation.
In other words, she brought all of the major conspirituality themes to the ballot box, and she won.
The results map will be very familiar to U.S.
Democrats.
The entire province, which is mostly rural and boasts some of the most fertile farmland on the continent, is a mind-numbingly blue UCP slab with tiny pinprick enclaves of NDP orange peeking out of the urban centers of Calgary and Edmonton.
How did Smith do it?
By pretending that the senselessly inconsistent neoliberal response to the pandemic was more harmful than the virus itself.
She appealed to white supremacists by casting doubt on Canada's genocidal heritage in relation to the First Nations peoples.
She joined a long tradition of Western Canada separatist sentiment by riding her libertarian stallion through the oil fields, and she was a huge supporter of the Ottawa occupation.
Then, she cosplayed as American President, telling fundamentalist Catholics she could get them out of their blockade charges by leaning on Crown prosecutors.
But the Ethics Commissioner disagreed.
But Smith is not one of those old-timey, Melanarian, Prairie Fire brands who haunts the childhood memories and beef-addled fever dreams of Jordan Peterson.
She does yoga, she loves the Atkins diet, and she hangs out with naturopaths who believe all cancer can be treated naturally before stage 4.
So, taking Alberta backwards, as my title today plays on the name of her support team, but it's not exactly backwards.
It's more like Smith is taking the province into an alternative reality, where policy is hammered out in Facebook groups, disconfirming evidence is called censorship, And Justin Trudeau is a mid-level operative in the CCP.
Smith has mused about making the world better by giving everyone $300 in an alt-health Uber account that they can spend on massage or acupuncture.
And that's some relief, because the next four years with her sitting on top of some of the world's biggest oil reserves are going to be very cruel and stupid and painful.
And she's also proven two things that anyone on the left in Canada should keep in mind.
You can't beat back fascism from the center.
Actually, everyone on the planet should get that clear.
And she's also shown that Pierre Poitlieu can absolutely win in the next federal election if ground-level, values-based organizing doesn't ramp right up.
Joining me now with a masterclass on how things got so bad in Alberta is independent journalist Jeremy Appel, founder of The Orchard.
We spoke before the election from Edmonton, where the air was thick with climate change wildfire smoke.
Welcome, Jeremy.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Great to be here, Matthew.
Now, Alberta, I'm afraid to say, is on fire currently, so I just wanted to ask first off, are you safe?
I think you're in Edmonton, right?
Yeah, yeah, I'm safe.
The air quality has been atrocious here, so I guess that's a level of danger.
I mean, it was raining ash the other day, which, I mean, If that's not a sign of the end times, I don't know what is.
But in terms of the actual fires, I mean, they're all fairly distant from Edmonton.
We're not at the point in climate apocalypse yet where major cities are on fire.
But it's certainly concerning, and a lot of the evacuees from the northern part of the province have been evacuated to Alberta at our big convention center.
But it's a troubling sign of what's to come, I think, in the next decade or two.
You can feel it.
Yeah, you can feel it.
Yeah.
Well, this episode is being recorded not only in the shadow of the wildfires, but also as a provincial election looms in your province.
So, Daniel Smith of the UCP is running in a dead heat with Rachel Notley.
Of the NDP, a lot of the issues on the table involve Alberta's healthcare landscape.
And with regard to conservative politics, it really looks like COVID broke things wide open.
So just as a bit of background, I know that in June of 2022, the previous premier, Jason Kenney, who rose to power through kind of like a standard conservative reactionary pro-oil, anti-federalist set of positions, was forced out by opposition to his general support of COVID mitigation measures.
He was in favor of vaccine requirements for travel, so-called vaccine passports, and he narrowly won a leadership review vote, but then he decided he didn't have a strong enough mandate to continue.
But then he pissed his party colleagues off by saying that it was anti-vax activists who were scuttling party unity.
They said that he was dodging blame.
But was he right there?
I actually think both are true and they're not mutually exclusive.
He was evading personal responsibility, which is a major line throughout his career.
But it was also the anti-vax, anti-restriction crowd that ultimately split the party.
Kenny, in fact, there was a secret recording that came out while he was battling for his political life.
Where he called his opponents within the party just kooky people generally.
Bugs, as in, you know, a bright light attracts a few bugs.
Oh, right.
Extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted, and crazy views.
Which sounds an awful lot like what Justin Trudeau was saying about the convoy crowd, which certainly did not help his case with the party base.
Although, as you know, he did win a narrow mandate.
But to lead a party, especially going into election, 51% support is a recipe for disaster in internal discord, right?
So he, of course, did have to resign.
But the people who mobilized against him were precisely the people he riled up when he returned to Alberta from Ottawa to unite the PCs in Wild Rose parties in 2016.
Kenny, of course, represented Calgary riding, but he didn't spend a whole lot of time there because he was sort of the federal conservative's point man on outreach to ethno-cultural communities and sort of building their support within those and cultivating conservative elements within them.
So he spent a lot of time in like the suburbs of Toronto Where a lot of these immigrant communities are based, and suburbs of Vancouver.
So he was, in a sense, a bit of a carpetbagger.
He bought this blue Dodge Ram pickup truck that he drove across the province in to sort of rally support, put on a cowboy hat, and no one was really buying it.
Like, everyone knew who Jason Kenney was, but they figured he would give the populist right establishment credibility.
And in return, they give him their support.
Right.
And that worked for a while.
But I mean, vaccination wasn't a major culture war issue at that time.
Right.
Then it is now in our sort of post-COVID world.
A big part of his pitch to them was the hard line he would take with the federal government.
Separatist sentiment in Alberta sort of ebbs and flows based on essentially when the liberals are in power.
And he sort of seized upon that and promised that he would have a referendum on the equalization formula, which he helped write as part of the Harper government, that He claimed was unfair to Alberta.
And just for listeners who are from all over the world, the equalization plan is the way in which the monies from the federal government are divided up amongst the provinces and how they're supposed to be spent.
Yeah, exactly.
So it takes federal income tax dollars from across the country and then redistributes a portion of them to provinces that are less wealthy so that all the provinces can maintain a similar level of public services.
Radical idea for our American listeners, let me just say.
I mean, yeah, it is.
It is redistributive.
Yeah, certainly.
And I mean, that's one reason Alberta conservatives, who are the most conservative conservatives in the country, I mean, they would fit right in in the Republican Party.
There isn't as much of a tradition.
of sort of moderate Toryism in Alberta, as there is in eastern Canada.
But there is some of that in Alberta, especially in the cities, which I suspect we'll get to.
This coalition can be forged between the more moderate urban PCs and the Wildrose, which is more rural based and populist.
and sympathetic to notions of Alberta separatism.
The pandemic really brought the tensions between these two factions to the forefront.
Right.
But throughout the pandemic, we saw that Kenny was always reluctant Like, at one point, you couldn't have any private gatherings either outside or inside, but you could go to the mall.
hodgepodge of restrictions that, and exceptions that didn't make a whole lot of sense.
Like at one point, you couldn't have any private gatherings either outside or inside, but you could go to the mall.
You could go to church.
There were capacity restrictions, which produced a backlash against him,
but these were very lax measures compared to what was going on elsewhere in the province.
Like in Ontario, which also has a conservative government, they were much stricter, but any restrictions whatsoever proved a bridge too far for the more hard-right populist forces within the party whom Kenny cultivated in order to attain power.
So that increasingly became an issue for him throughout the pandemic and then sort of came to the fore
in, you know, early, late 2021, early 2022.
You know, this pattern of the sort of neoliberal superstructure of the state providing people with a kind of,
you know, choose your own adventure during COVID Impose restrictions as you will.
We're not really going to do that much about it with regard to standardization.
that becomes reinterpreted by right-wing movements all over as being somehow draconian
or somehow oppressive.
When really, what you're talking about with regard to Kenny's patchwork of decisions,
that's just really on the spectrum of how everybody did it, especially as we get down through the states.
Varying degrees of mitigations applied inconsistently because the objective wasn't really to protect health
at all costs.
The objective was to get people back to work.
Yeah, precisely.
And so sort of this confusion, the fact that none of these restrictions really made any sense, of course, fueled the rise of the conspiracists.
Right.
Because they didn't make sense.
Because they didn't make sense.
And it allowed someone like Danielle Smith, who is criticizing them from her radio show and then her podcast and newsletter, to sort of become the champion of this movement.
Right.
And not only in terms of resistance towards COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates, but also in terms of this belligerent position towards the federal government, because that was another component of Kenny's legacy, was he set up all these panels that gave him these recommendations that he said, oh, these are interesting.
We're going to look into some of them.
Some of the more minor ones they were already in the process of implementing, like giving Alberta its own firearms officer to protect them from Trudeau trying to take their guns.
But he didn't really do a whole lot.
And Smith said, not only do we need to implement all this, the Fair Deal Panel's recommendations that Kenny set in motion, but we need to actually go further and start talking about, like, collecting Alberta's own taxes.
Right.
For example.
So she is basically always able to say, look, Jason Kenney is always on Ottawa's leash, and that's not the kind of conservatism we need.
Right, exactly.
And Kennedy, of course, pretended when he first came back to the province to be something else, which everyone knew he wasn't.
But as long as he was winning, you know, pursuing other like sort of more standard conservative policies, people were willing to overlook that.
But with the pandemic, then that became more of an issue.
Yeah, it added pressure.
So how would you understand a conservative landscape that basically lines up over the climate denial pseudoscience that is kind of like central to sort of pro-oil interests in that part of the country, but then splits when it comes to COVID realism versus COVID fantasies?
I mean, is the Kenny Conservative Just more pragmatic when it comes to the shorter term economic benefits of public health versus the harder to see benefits of climate change mitigation.
So there's explicit hardcore climate denial that says there's no problem and it's just an invention of the World Economic Forum or George Soros or whomever.
And then there's soft climate denial which acknowledges that there's a problem But suggest we should just let the fossil fuel industry innovate its way out of the crisis and conveniently continue providing subsidies for them to do so.
Invest in things like carbon capture and storage.
So, of course, the sort of the anti-Vax crowd dovetails entirely with the explicit climate denial, which is outright hostile towards the scientific consensus.
In both cases, Kenya was torn between the two.
Right.
Right.
He comes to power in 2019 promising this fight back campaign against this quixotic Conspiracy of foreign-funded environmentalists, which appealed to sort of both those who don't believe in climate change at all, and those who believe the government doesn't need to do anything to combat it, but acknowledges its existence.
Now, from the outside of the pandemic, he pursued a similar balancing act with the restrictions.
His mantra was sort of lives and livelihoods, right?
That we need to protect people's lives, but we also need to keep the wheels of capitalism turning.
Now, he always leaned much more heavily towards the latter than the former.
This slogan was sort of a guise for keeping business as usual, running to the greatest extent.
And a good illustration of this would be the outbreaks in deaths in the meatpacking industry in Alberta early in the pandemic, during the first wave.
Where the government lied to people at the Cargill meat processing facility in High River, which is actually the town where Danielle Smith lives, and told them it was safe to go back into work.
The distancing measures the company had imposed were sufficient and everyone was going to be safe.
And that led to the biggest outbreak in North America at the time, and two workers died, as well as the father of a worker who was visiting from the Philippines.
And this was precisely the product of this prosperity first mentality, it's been called, right?
The need to keep the economy running.
Now, as a result of this, The restrictions that were imposed weren't as effective as they could have been.
Workplaces weren't even targeted for restrictions until the spring of 2021.
And just as they were starting to work, Kennedy announced his infamous Open for Summer plan to eliminate restrictions entirely and permanently.
And this was an effort to please sort of the other side of his coalition, right?
The ones who didn't want any restrictions whatsoever.
That also informed his promise never to impose vaccine mandates.
Sure enough, as the consequences of this open for summer plan came, and ICUs began to feel immense strain in the fall of 2021, Kenny reluctantly imposed what was in practice a vaccine passport system, although he called it the Restrictions Exemption Program.
And so what this did was impose new restrictions, but businesses could opt out of them if they required proof of vaccination.
So this was sort of an effort to please everyone, but it was pretty transparent and it, as a result, pleased nobody.
To get back to the question you asked and answer it directly, I think that hardcore climate deniers and anti-vaxxers both share a religious perspective, whether explicitly or implicitly, that sort of things like plagues and natural disasters that are a result of climate change are God's will.
And so why Are we doing anything to interfere with God's will?
Right?
There's a clear religious component, though not everyone who holds these beliefs is religious.
That's sort of the subtext, if you will.
Well, that brings me to the question about whether there's a longer-term background here as well, you know, with regard to culture and religious influences specifically.
Like, did Kenny inherit this medical libertarian faction from Wildrose supporters?
Is there a deeper history as well?
I mean, I think, I'm not an expert, but I believe that if we go back to the days of Ralph Klein and Preston Manning and the Reform Party, They would speak about freeing up choice in the universal health care system, but I think they also probably remembered being vaccinated against polio and thought that that was a really good thing.
So what's the what's the 50 year arc here?
It's important to place Alberta's more libertarian political culture in the context of millenarian Protestantism, which was imparted from the United States.
The interesting thing is Kenny was himself a devout Catholic, but this is the political tradition he inherited, which goes all the way back to Preston Manning, the founder of the Reform Party's father, Ernest, who was the province's premier.
with the Social Credit Party that is now extinct, and a guy named William Bible Bill Eberhardt, before the elder Manning.
There's a good book called God's Province by Clark Bannock, who's a University of Alberta professor that discusses this history in great detail.
Basically, the view of the Mannings in Bible Bill and those who came after them, Preston Manning, although he wasn't religious himself, Ralph Klein, operated in this political culture, is a premillennial belief that you can't create the kingdom of heaven on earth.
So rather than trying to create heaven on earth, Eberhart and the Mannings and their ideological inheritors thought you had to unshackle restrictions on individual liberty and give people a choice about how to act.
And they'll be judged on that in the next world.
So key to these politics aren't just individual rights, but also a collective responsibility that would be encouraged, but not mandated.
And so you see this manifest itself with Kenny during the pandemic, constantly reminding Albertans to get vaccinated, but only implementing a vaccine passport when he thought he had no other option.
But even in that case, businesses were given the choice of whether to require vaccination or impose distancing requirements.
All right, well, coming to the present, with Danielle Smith, I can see how there is a real vulnerability within Kenny's legacy that she's able to exploit with a harder line turning towards alternative health And she's gotten a lot of mileage out of a kind of new turn of this privatized notion of healthcare.
And for her, I can start to see that it's not just about Alberta and Albertans controlling more of their healthcare choices or the province's healthcare dollars, or it's not just about privatization.
It's also about riding the idea of bodily sovereignty through alternative health.
Now, what's your read on how popular this particular influence or support for Smith is now in Alberta?
And does it mostly come from Calgary and Edmonton?
Well, it's tough to say precisely how popular alternative Health is province-wide, but if you look at vaccination rates by province, Alberta's is the lowest at just under 80%, and that's just one dose.
Yeah, and let's just say, too, and let's just say, too, that that 80% at one dose is it implies a very low percentage at two doses or three doses and probably a very low percentage of people who are actually completely caught up, right?
Right.
And that's, you know, throughout the country, and I suspect throughout the world, that as you add a dose, the percentage of people who've gotten it go down.
Because, of course, after people got their first doses was really when the anti-vax movement started picking up steam.
Right.
Once they're talking about vaccine mandates.
I mean, Alberta was very late to that, as I mentioned.
But once you started hearing about it in other jurisdictions, I think that's when the anti-vax movement Really started getting a lot of support.
You know, when you start talking about employers determining their workers' health care decisions, that raises a lot of concerns that at the time I didn't really appreciate.
But now it seems that they may have had a slight point.
I have a friend who works for one of the big unions in Alberta and she was telling me the vast majority of grievances they've gotten over the past couple of years have been about vaccine mandates when their job allows them to work from home.
There is a sense in which those concerns are valid.
Correlation isn't direct because people who believe in alternative health treatments might get vaccinated because they had to, which Danielle Smith did.
She flew to the United States, actually, to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine instead of the mRNA because she had to be vaccinated at the time when she was working as a corporate lobbyist.
Also, people have all sorts of reasons for refusing to get vaccinated, not all of which are related to belief in alternative health treatments.
And some people who believe in alternative health might also believe in mainstream science, right?
So it's not an apples to apples comparison necessarily.
But vaccine hesitancy, I think, provides a barometer for distrust in mainstream health science, even if In terms of healthcare privatization, I think it's important to note for listeners outside of Canada that when we talk about healthcare privatization, we're essentially talking about the government contracting out certain health services to the private sector, but those services are still funded by the government.
Under the Canada Health Act, You aren't allowed to make Canadians pay out of pocket for basic healthcare services.
But this also excludes a wide range of important healthcare services like dentistry, mental health cancelling, and medication prescriptions.
This leaves provincial governments who are in charge of delivering healthcare, increasingly so since the austerity craze 90s and the government downloading various responsibilities onto the provinces.
The ability to subsidize private for-profit healthcare delivery Uh, Ralph Klein, uh, really pursued this in the 90s when he was Premier of Alberta.
And Kennedy sort of accelerated this, but Smith, at least in her previous career as a political commentator and broadcaster, Uh, mused about moving beyond this, uh, in multiple ways.
So one way was, uh, she spoke explicitly of making people pay out of pocket for healthcare, specifically visits to the doctor, which Alberta can't do as long as it's a Canadian province.
But Smith is also mused about giving every Albertan $300 in a sort of healthcare account where they can use an Uber-like app to purchase Yeah, she is a huge fan of Uber and has talked about using that sort of technology across a wide range of public services.
But this app would allow Albertans, with the $300 they're getting in their account from the government, to purchase alternative health services like acupuncture and naturopathy.
Do you know, every time I hear about a proposal like this, where a conservative politician is willing to throw a bone towards a particular concern, you know, and it's a credit for $300 or $500 or something like that.
I mean, in this circumstance, she would be saying, here, go Uber yourself three acupuncture appointments or three massages, and I hope you feel better.
And I imagine, I wonder what she imagines the health outcomes would be,
like the positive health outcomes would be for that money.
It's incredible.
Yeah, and I mean, this is of course, while the public healthcare system is increasingly strained,
workers are, from the trauma of the past few years, workers are increasingly burned out
and hospitals and other health clinics are having trouble retaining staff.
But hey, here's 300 bucks to spend on acupuncture.
So turning to her COVID record, Smith claimed that hydroxychloroquine was 100% effective against the virus.
She advocated for ivermectin.
When she was advocating hydroxychloroquine, she was also saying that drinking tonic water prevents COVID.
Tonic water?
I didn't see that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she said that she's been drinking a lot of tonic water so she doesn't get COVID.
So this is going back to sort of like, I don't know, the British Imperials drinking quinine against malaria.
That's her idea, kind of.
I haven't heard the tonic thing before.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was one of her, because she had a couple of tweets relatively early in the pandemic that she had to apologize for when she was with a mainstream broadcaster, Global News.
Yeah.
And yeah, one of them was endorsing tonic water as a preventative measure for COVID.
I just want to note too for American listeners that notice what Jeremy said here that she had to apologize for those tweets.
So that is something that is distinct about our culture, our political cultures.
People actually have to apologize once in a while for incredibly stupid things.
So she also Boosted Christine Perkins, who's a Calgary naturopath who teaches Kundalini Yoga and says that unless cancer is at stage four, it can be treated with herbs and so on.
Now we don't have Smith's browser history, but from the work we've done over the past three years, these are all breadcrumbs that kind of lead back through Joe Rogan to organizations like, you know, the Frontline Doctors.
These are also like standard medical views in QAnon circles and among convoy protesters.
So, do you have a line on where Smith is getting this stuff from?
Yes, I think it comes from her deeply held hyper libertarian views.
She's a big fan of Ayn Rand, for example.
Awesome.
And unlike the Mannings or Kenny, her views don't have these religious roots, right?
I mean, Ayn Rand was famously a staunch atheist.
And I mean, she's also into, you know, Hayek and John Locke and Adam Smith.
But I think the Ayn Rand stuff is interesting.
Although she's not a member of the religious right, the religious right supports Smith because the type of libertarian she believes in allows them to do their thing without government interference.
When she was last in politics a decade ago and was the leader of the Wildrose Party, polls showed that she was likely to win the election by a lot.
A series of misfortunes beset her campaign, one of which was her saying that she's not sure climate change exists.
Now she's moved to a much more soft climate position, which is, yes, we need to reach net zero, but the oil and gas industry is just going to do that anyway.
Leave them to it.
But also, one of our candidates famously, a guy named Alan Hunsberger, who was a pastor, wrote in a blog post that gay people are going to burn in a lake of fire.
The issue for Smith electorally was when she was asked to condemn it, she refused to.
She said, I don't agree with him.
I support gay rights.
I'm pro-choice, but he's entitled to his views.
And that really tanked her campaign in the sort of dying days of that election.
And I think that's a good illustration of how this secular libertarianism can coexist and overlap with religious social conservatism.
For Smith, all responsibility is individual.
Right.
Right.
There are no collective issues.
I remember I interviewed Smith in the summer of 2021 when I was living in Calgary about Calgary municipal politics.
We were outside and she had just come out of a meeting where masks were required.
And I asked if I could interview her for the story, and she said, yeah, for sure.
And then she asked me if I mind whether she takes her mask off when we spoke, which for me was very revealing and symbolic of her approach to these issues.
That government needs to get out of the way and allow individuals to make decisions based on whatever their level of concern is for others.
So if you want the story and you're standing two feet away from her and she's going to be speaking into your face.
And she's been traveling around the province, and she has maybe been hanging out with anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.
She's basically saying, you know, I'll give you the story, but I'd like to be able to do it on my terms.
And you should have the power, Jeremy, to say no, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it's funny, too, because it was outside and this was the summer of 2021.
So it's not like it wasn't known that outdoor transmission of COVID is very rare.
Right.
But I thought it was interesting that she sort of gave me that courtesy being like, Is it alright if I take my mask off?
Are you comfortable with that?
At the same time that she was saying that mask mandates are tyranny.
I'm not saying she's being hypocritical.
I just thought it was interesting in sort of revealing of her personal philosophy.
Now, you mentioned the interview with Perkins, where she's sort of saying a very different tune, much less, I guess you could say conciliatory.
I mean, the most notorious part of that interview was when Smith said that until you get stage four of cancer, which, as you said, Perkins thinks can Now, I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that she's saying that cancer is a choice.
Yes, yeah, totally.
Right?
And that if you want to prevent cancer, well, take some personal responsibility.
Now, her candidate in a Southern Alberta roll riding in this election named Chelsea Petrovic Who's a nurse, similarly said that people who have heart attacks need to own up to their own decisions that led to the heart attack.
Oh, boy.
My point being that this mindset isn't just limited to the leader of the UCP.
It's a belief within the party.
And I would argue that it's the logical conclusion Of the views expressed by the Mannings, Klein, and Kenney, right?
It's taking it to its logical conclusion that, well, if people need to be free to do whatever they want within the bounds of the law, and that There are still responsibilities that they have.
Then I think you get to a point where it's like, yeah, everything is within your control until you get stage four cancer.
And then, you know, you're a burden on the health care system.
Smith is also tied to the Ottawa Convoy incident and I just noticed that she got support tweeted recently by Ava Chipiuk, who is the Calgary Bikram yoga teacher and lawyer for Tamara Litsch.
So, how close are those ties and are they influential at present?
Well, they're very close and very influential.
Smith was a passionate proponent of the Freedom Convoy's cause, and her leadership campaign was very closely linked with its most fervent and militant supporters, such as those who blockaded the Cootes border crossing with Montana, which Resulted in the Feds, the RCMP, which is roughly the equivalent of the FBI in Canada, raided this blockade and they found a cache of guns, ammunition, and insignia associated with the Diagonalon movement.
I don't know if people outside of Canada are familiar with Diagonalon.
We've mentioned it in a panel discussion, a couple of panel discussions that we've had with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, but let's do a refresher.
Diagonalon is a white supremacist organization that seeks to establish a white ethnostate that runs as a diagonal line from northern British Columbia to Florida, which is what they consider to be sort of the sane jurisdictions Danielle Smith has nothing but praise for Ron DeSantis in Florida, specifically how he approached the pandemic, which was to do nothing at all.
Not as much his anti-trans crusade, like Smith has actually come out and said she has a relative who's non-binary and she supports trans rights.
But as I mentioned earlier, many of her supporters don't share that belief.
Yeah, and it's not like she's going to lean into allyship.
On the subject of the blockade, she said that she wanted to see the blockaders win against what she considers to be federal government overreach.
Sort of shades of like Ruby Ridge in Waco there, I think.
And her top advisor, Rob Anderson, called the blockade a beautiful thing.
And said that the sort of broader convoy movement that it's a part of was, quote, one of the most important events, certainly in recent Canadian history, and I would say in Canadian political history.
Amazing if true.
Amazing.
But I think most importantly, the Coots blockade spurred the growth of an organization called Take Back Alberta.
That's become a key player in Alberta politics.
David Parker, who leads the organization, used to be a Kennedy staffer and before that was a Harper staffer, Stephen Harper, the former Prime Minister of Canada.
Who became disillusioned with Kenny during the pandemic, and he used the Coots Blockade as a recruitment tool.
One of the organizers for Take Back Alberta, a guy named Marco Von Hugenbois, who's a town councillor in the nearby town of Fort McClellan, Cloud was arrested on mischief charges relating to the
blockade, as was a guy named Artur Pavlovsky, whom I'm sure we will discuss shortly.
The point here is that Take Back Alberta played a key role in mobilizing against Kenny and
then supporting Smith's leadership campaign, and now in support of the UCP in this election.
They accuse the NDP of being a socialist menace, which may have been true 75 years ago when
it was the CCF, Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, but the party is very explicitly running a
calculated small C conservative campaign in this election.
Now, Parker once infamously said that you can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out of it.
Now, the NDP were in power from 2015 to 2019, and not a single shot was fired.
Right.
And their tenure in power wasn't socialist in any capacity.
I mean, there weren't any nationalization of the means of production.
It was very much like a small L liberal technocratic government.
There are three things Take Back Alberta wants.
Chief among them is no more vaccine mandates or restrictions.
They also want a radical restructuring of health care in Alberta.
They've been very vague about what that might look like, but I think you can use your imagination.
And they want to prevent digital voting.
Does that play on electoral fraud conspiracy theories coming out of the states primarily?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
But, you know, I think it's sort of like David from adding North Korea to the axis of evil.
Like it's something that makes their position appear as something else.
Right.
Like in the case of the war on terror, it's like you got Iran and Iraq.
to Muslim states, so we'll throw in North Korea so people can't say we're anti-Muslim.
In this case, it's all about creating chaos in the healthcare system, essentially.
They have deep ties to the religious right in the province.
David Parker is himself the son of a pastor.
If you look at what some of his organizers are saying, they essentially view him as a prophetic figure and see their struggle against what they regard incorrectly as socialism as divine in nature.
But the appeal to the religious right is also targeted towards those who felt aggrieved by pandemic restrictions on Church services.
Parker said that in a really unhinged interview, he said that he's got one rule in life.
Don't mess with my friends and don't mess with my family, which I guess is two rules.
But yeah.
Who's counting?
And he said that when Kenny started arresting pastors who were openly defying public health orders, he messed with his friends and family.
And that is when he decided his goal was to take Kenny down.
Take Back Alberta has been in the process of seizing the levers of power within the UCP to push the party to implement its agenda and are explicitly willing to abandon ship if Smith betrays them.
Right.
Like Kenny did.
At the party's annual general meeting a couple weeks after Smith won the leadership race, Take Back Alberta bussed in hundreds of people according to them, so grain of salt.
Half the attendees there were brought in by them, and the party's board of directors had nine vacancies, and there are 18 positions on the board, including the premier.
All nine of the Take Back Alberta-affiliated candidates won their seats on the board.
With those nine Take Back Alberta affiliates and the premier, who's essentially a Take Back Alberta
affiliate, that's a majority on the party's board.
Danielle Smith is also quite close to David Parker.
She attended his wedding a couple of months ago, which was to a media personality
with a far-right news outlet who essentially just writes whatever Smith says as gospel.
On a more local level, Take Back Alberta are taking over some constituency associations, including the riding represented by Jason Nixon, who's sort of one of Kenny's most loyal goons.
And a candidate who appears to share all their views, Eric Bouchard, is running for the UCP in Kenny's Old Riding, which he vacated near the end of 2022.
Now, Smith was at a fundraiser for Bouchard when she took a photo with a guy named James Bowder, who was one of the convoy organizers, and she claimed she'd never heard of the guy.
And he begged to differ.
And given how enthusiastic Smith was about the convoy, I find it hard to believe she didn't know who one of its organizers was.
Take Back Alberta is also hosting Jordan Peterson for a series of events in Alberta.
This is leading right up to the eve of the election, right?
So there's several events planned.
He just sold out some big hall in in Calgary over the weekend.
Is that right?
Initially, it was just one event, which was in Red Deer.
They've since added a couple elsewhere in the province.
Right now, of course, as your listeners, I'm sure know.
Peterson has his own history of alternative health practices.
Well, it's classic because he's making a homecoming here, right?
He's coming back to the province of his birth.
He is going to be able to talk about how Rachel Notley is leading a great socialist Marxist charge, and he's going to really lean into the anti-climate change and anti-medical mandates materials as signs of coming authoritarian rule and how all of these are
indications that the country of his homeland has lost connection with God.
Pearson also grew up with Rachel Notley. I think it's worth noting. Right. In Fairview, Alberta,
her mother was the librarian at their school and he actually credited her with
getting him interested in politics.
And he was a New Democrat, you know, at the time.
So this sort of feeds his narrative that he understands the leftist mindset because he, you know, was involved with the most right wing NDP in the country.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, he really is the perfect person for the Take Back Alberta crowd.
Like, that's just red meat for their supporters in terms of opposition to COVID restrictions, connections with the religious right, and endorsement of quack health Measures.
And amazing fundraising potential, too, as well.
Now, we have tapes of Smith promising now convicted, you mentioned it before, Artur Pawlowski, that she would intervene on his coots blockade mischief charges.
She's backing away from him now as an ethics probe has found that this constitutes a conflict of interest.
But does she need to keep that fringe on board as she backs away from them?
She absolutely does need to keep at least some of the hard right fringe on board.
I mean, this is this is her base, right?
But I mean, when we're talking about the far right fringe, I mean, it's a spectrum.
Pavlovsky started his own party called the Solidarity Movement of Alberta.
Pavlovsky is a Polish immigrant, so obviously he's hearkening back to the Solidarity Movement against Communism in Poland.
He has explicitly said he started this party as a result of Smith betraying him.
She had initially said publicly when she was running for the UCP leadership that she was going to give clemency for anyone who was arrested on COVID related charges.
And then in her phone call with him, 10 minute phone call that he leaked to the media, she said, well, you know, it turns out that I don't have the same powers as the U.S.
president, which is amazing for her to realize.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I have no doubt that she actually thought the Premier does have those powers.
But as a result, he insists that she betrayed him.
Which, I mean, she kind of did.
But this Solidarity Party, interestingly, was co-founded by Pavlovsky and a guy named Rob Anders.
who was a longtime Conservative MP and was an ally of Kenny's going back to when they were both first elected in 1997.
With the Reform Party, him and Kenny formed what was called the Chastity Caucus in Parliament at the time because in 1999 they both decided for whatever reason to announce to the media that they were celibate.
Oh my gosh.
Did they name the Chastity Caucus themselves or is that, uh, did some journal come up with that?
No, no, no.
That was some journalist.
I think it was Glenn McGregor who was at the Otter Oscars in that time.
Right.
Now he's a CTV news hound.
I just thought that was a fun bit of trivia.
Now, Pavlovsky is such a fringe figure that Smith doesn't need him and, in fact, probably benefits from having some distance between herself and him.
But she does need the Take Back Alberta crowd, who are essentially her foot soldiers.
They've proven incredibly effective in mobilizing for her so far.
And this election is going to be the true test of their organizing prowess.
Right. It's one thing to take over a political party and flood
its membership with people who share your views.
It's quite another to win over a broader electorate.
Right now, because Smith herself represents the hard right
of her party, her task is to win over the more moderate
conservatives who think taxes should be lower and that climate
change is real.
But we shouldn't do anything about it and also believe
that Kenny was too reluctant to impose pandemic restrictions
rather than to aggressive.
Right. With the UCP, that brings us back to square one and the
question of how to hold together these two disparate conservative
factions who I would argue want the same
thing. Kenny's first months in power back in the halcyon
days of twenty nineteen.
Feels like a lifetime ago.
Pursued an agenda that could appeal to both sides of this coalition.
He cut taxes and regulations for businesses.
He rolled back labor rights, made it harder to start a union.
And he went after environmentalists in a uniquely aggressive fashion.
He set up this energy war room to sort of, what he said, fight back
against disinformation, against the oil sands in real time.
And he launched this inquiry into this conspiracy about foreign funded environmentalists.
But with the worst of the pandemic over, not that the pandemic itself is over, but I mean,
we're not seeing the mass deaths or overflowing ICUs that we did a couple years ago.
I don't think Smith's anti-vax views are as.
As concerning as they might have been even a year ago, it's an easier issue for her to ignore.
And I'm sure she is being instructed by her communication staff not to talk about that, among other contentious issues like, you know, the Alberta sovereignty stuff, setting up provincial police force or pension plan.
Which she has advocated as recently as like six months ago, but isn't running on that.
Instead, she's talking about training more doctors and nurses and creating a lower income tax bracket for people who make under $60,000 a year.
Typical, you know, brokerage politics.
You know, as I said at the outset, the election has been a lot more about leadership qualities than actual concrete policy, with Notley and Smith sort of Suggesting the other is untrustworthy.
In my view, the real question isn't whether soft conservative voters believe that Smith isn't going to act on the more radical aspects of her agenda.
It's whether they even care.
Right.
Right.
And I think that remains to be seen.
I suspect for a lot of You know, more urban, conservative types, particularly in the suburbs of Calgary and Edmonton.
They're fine as long as they have someone in power who's going to cut their taxes.
Well, now, do they care about this type of playing dumb of anti-Semitism by false equivalency stuff where Smith has made several comments comparing COVID mitigations to the Holocaust.
I mean, this was standard in far-right and QAnon circles from the very beginning of the pandemic.
And Smith has had to apologize and walk that stuff back.
But how do these comments play with her base?
And do you think they hold the door open to more overtly anti-Semitic and racist supporters?
I would start by noting that I don't think Smith is anti-Semitic compared to, say, her views on indigenous peoples, which she's articulated for years as a columnist at the Calgary Herald that, you know, contain a lot of the tropes you would associate with anti-indigenous racism.
Like, about how, you know, reserves are like these backwards hell holes and what indigenous people need is, uh, you'll never guess what she thinks they need.
What do they need, Jeremy?
The market.
Oh, right.
The free market.
The free market.
Okay, right.
But interestingly, that is based on scholarship by Thomas Flanagan, who was sort of a big conservative strategist who has since been somewhat discredited.
But you compare that with this sort of playing footsie with antisemitism, where that's coming from, you know, the fringes.
And I think the issue is her inability to separate fact from fiction, similar to Joe Rogan.
Well, she's a media personality herself, right?
In not the same job that he does, but in the same kind of magpie, I'm going to look for the interesting hook and the thing that seems transgressive and the shiny object.
And she gets captured by that, it seems.
Yeah, which is her argument for why you shouldn't take any of her past comments seriously.
Right.
OK.
All right.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because she said it's it's her job.
It was her job as a media personality to be provocative and to sort of just talk about ideas in the abstract.
And, you know, and I think it's quite ironic that someone who's spent the better part of the past, you know, quarter century in media lacks media literacy.
You know, by her own admission, she doesn't have a bullshit detector.
And those are her words, bullshit detector.
Right.
And that leads her down some dark places.
In early 2021, she quit her mainstream radio job in part because they made her apologize for endorsing hydroxychloroquine and tonic water.
She said, of course, that this was an example of cancel culture, political correctness, the woke mind virus, you know, whatever it's being called these days.
It's incredible because it's like bad medical advice being put out by a media outlet and you might want to put some guardrails around that, right?
But, you know, as one does when you've been censored by the mainstream media.
She wrote a column in the Calgary Herald in March 2021, two years later after she dramatically quit global news.
Where she compared vaccine mandates to Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
And then eight months later, remarks recently surfaced where she compared people who were getting vaccinated to those who blindly followed Hitler.
Right.
Beyond that, she twice linked to an anti-Semitic blog in her newsletter she started after her self-cancellation.
As one does, Worth noting that she didn't link to anything anti-semitic in particular.
She linked to articles about the dangers of digital banking and how Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine.
But it doesn't take long on that site to get to its references to a global Jewish banking mafia and Rothschild Zionism and all these things that you would read in like a Davidite treatise.
You know, you started by saying, I'm pretty sure that she's not anti-Semitic, and that would be, to be able to sort of make that ascertainment, you'd have to know her personally, and that's a very difficult sort of threshold to approach.
But, you know, with no bullshit connector and the capacity to link to a blog that has obvious materials that are anti-Semitic, The plausible deniability with regard to what you actually care about and whether you have good internet hygiene, that becomes, it becomes a little bit thin, right?
It's a fine line.
I do genuinely believe she read this article and she was, you know, like Joe Rogan.
She was just like, whoa, that's crazy.
And then shared it without.
Yeah.
Seeing, you know, who this source is, what are what's their perspective and those sorts of things.
Right.
Right.
Like, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if she reads, you know, the Grayzone Project as well.
Not that that website is anti-Semitic, but, you know, it has a lot of fringe perspectives on vaccinations and the war in Ukraine and all that.
Right.
I just think she reads Uh, whatever people send her or just whatever she stumbles across on forums or whatnot and just internalizes it and doesn't think, you know, the stuff you learn in like elementary school, right?
Like, what is this source?
What is it trying to sell you?
And what are some like differing perspectives that might give you a more complete picture?
Now, there's certainly an anti-Semitic undercurrent on the Christian right.
I would also say that there's an anti-Semitic undercurrent on the Jewish right you see from guys like Ben Shapiro, who the way they talk about Jews who disagree with them, like, you know, the 80-so percent of Jews who vote Democrat, invokes some anti-Semitic tropes.
Like, especially when you're talking about a guy like Soros, right?
But for the Christian right, they hold an ancient grudge against Jewish people whom they blame for killing Jesus.
Now, I think it's worth noting that in her most recent apology for the remarks comparing the 80% of Albertans who
got the first dose of their vaccine, which she did too, to followers of Hitler,
she described herself as a close friend of the Jewish people and Israel. And support for the state of Israel is
often used as a ghetto jail-free card for people on the religious right who dabble in anti-Semitic tropes.
The Christian right, of course, supports Israel as a means of bringing about the end times.
The ethno-nationalist right, as well, supports Israel because they want all the Jews to get lost and go there, and they have their ethno-state, we have ours.
Right.
This was sort of a way for Smith To apologize while at the same time dog whistling to the religious as well as the ethno-nationalist right.
I think that Smith's far-right base understands that she has to make these apologies and shut up about culture war issues during the campaign to get elected.
Now, the reason Take Back Alberta is seizing control of the UCP party machinery is precisely to ensure that if she's re-elected, she doesn't veer too far from the agenda that she's been clearly outlining for years and that they support.
Jeremy Appel, this has really been a masterclass in the Albertan political landscape.
Thank you so much for helping us understand a little bit more.
I hope you keep safe and that there's no anti-mask movement with regard to wildfire smoke and ash falling from the sky.
Yeah, you know, I had a similar thought.
You know, the other day I was outside wearing a mask and I was like, I wonder if these anti-maskers are against masks when it's hard for them to breathe.
But yeah, no, thank you so much for having me.
I had a great time.
Thank you, Jeremy.
Bye.
All right.
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