We should take Smith at her word
By Lethbridge Herald on September 30, 2025.
Scott Sakatch
Herald Editor Opinion
Around this time in 2018, my wife and I were in the process of moving from Red Deer to Calgary. My wife was taking on a new position at work and I was about a year into a professional fiction-writing gig, which was an entirely new experience for me. At that point, we had been back in Alberta for about eight months, after two years living and working in Saskatchewan.
Fast forward to today, seven years later. Since October 2018, we’ve lived in four different homes, bought three homes, sold two, moved to Lethbridge, and I began working for the Lethbridge Herald again, some 19 years after I originally left. Our beloved dog Pepper passed away and we’ve since adopted a rescue named Phoebe. Our grown daughter and her fiance are expecting our first grandchild in December, which has changed our perspective on parenthood.
In short, a lot has changed in our lives over the last seven years. I imagine many of you reading this could say the same. Change is the only constant, as they say, and it happens to everyone. Some of my perspectives have certainly changed, and I’m sure many of you have experienced this as well.
But I also believe in another aphorism about change, the one that says “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” I still have the same general world view I had in 2018, and I haven’t experienced any shifts in my fundamentals values. I haven’t suddenly started believing something I didn’t believe then, or changed my personal morals and ethics just because my circumstances changed. I would venture to say you probably haven’t, either.
So why am I bringing this up now? Because of something that’s been circulating on social media the last few days. It’s a quote from 2018 by Premier Danielle Smith, who at the time was a talk radio host for Corus, which also owns Global News. In a 2018 article for Global, Smith wrote: “Maybe every independent school needs to be fully funded and we need to phase out every government-run, union-controlled public school more interested in indoctrinating students than teaching them critical thinking skills. We are spending billions of dollars to graduate students that have no capacity to think. When are public schools going to be held accountable for that?”
Smith is talking about Canadian universities in the quote, but that doesn’t stop her from using the general term “public schools.” In short, she’s suggesting that maybe the public purse shouldn’t pay for any education that doesn’t reach some nebulous goal that she refers to as “critical thinking skills.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. First and foremost, to my mind, is the shot taken at “government-run, union-controlled” public schools” that are “indoctrinating students.” One has to wonder what she would consider a better model? Schools run by private corporations, funded solely by tuition and taught by faculty that have no access to organized labour? That takes on new meaning at a time when Alberta teachers have just voted on a new contract.
And how far does this attitude extend toward the primary school system, especially when negotiating the future of education in Alberta? Do we need to somehow break the ATA’s “control” over the system? Hand over public schools to private interests dedicated to teaching what politicians thinks kids need to know?
Obviously I’m exaggerating here, but not as much as I could. What it boils down to is the person who is now premier of Alberta once suggested that unions and government control were some sort of detriment to public education. And while she wasn’t premier when she originally said it, she’s still the same person. If my fundamental beliefs and values haven’t changed in the last seven years, should we think Smith’s have?
Remember, this is the same person who once told radio audiences that maybe we should start thinking about paying out of pocket for a doctor’s visit. And here we are today, registering online to pay out of pocket for COVID shots. And we still haven’t stopped talking about Alberta separation.
The great Maya Angelou once said that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. I think we definitely know who Danielle Smith is now. Believe her.
13-12
The list of crazy attributed to Smith is long,
But on Truth and Reconciliation day , let’s remember when she (falsely) claimed to have native ancestry
https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/alberta-premier-danielle-smith-says-she-has-cherokee-roots-but-the-records-dont-back-that-up/
i suppose smitty could back this up with a dna test…but, shucks, being so busy and all, and being such a great benevolent queen, we had best respect her word.
truly, there is absolutely no shame in politics or big business. i guess that is only so because too many of us find these sociopath/psychopaths to be more than acceptable.
For the last thirty years of neoliberalism we have witnessed a steady assault on public services and privatization of the public sphere, including health and education.
This same period has seen the greatest redistribution of wealth to to top 10% since the robber barons before the First World War – while the real wages for the rest of us has steadily dropped, along with job security and benefits.
This is the corporatist vision of Danielle Smith. This is her vision of a sovereign Alberta (with herself at the helm). Editor Sakatch is absolutely correct in saying that we should take her at her word. This is an ideological assault on civil society designed to benefit the few.
well presented!
smith is one of the far too many demagogues that have far too much power in otherwise civil society. it is her type that stirs up intolerance and unrest, and then uses the resulting dysfunction as a means for more govt and corporate control and obfuscation, ruling through riling up a division of the masses, and using our increasing taxation less and less to help equalise the imbalances of crony capitalism and most to line big corp and the incrowd pockets. i suppose eventually this consumer based house of cards economy – credit cards in particular – will topple when folks cannot find yet another way to consolidate their debt; however, at such a time how much democracy and govt of the people for the people will truly remain.
Smith’s failure to intervene in McAllister’s public denunciation of high school student, Evan Lee, at Calgary’s Alberta Next panel illustrates the emptiness of ALL of her rhetoric and ALL of the associated legislation vis a vis education in this province.
https://theconversation.com/why-have-authoritarianism-and-libertarianism-merged-a-political-psychologist-on-the-vulnerability-of-the-modern-self-218949
https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com/2022/05/25/authoritarian-libertarianism-and-the-freedom-to-do-what-i-say/
More NDP bias comments by the NDP biased paper! What you say is proof!
“First and foremost, to my mind, is the shot taken at “government-run, union-controlled” public schools” that are “indoctrinating students.” “
A shot? No, it is a fact, although she missed the foreign indoctrination of students to appease foreign government investments into post secondary institution, China and some radical elements from the Arab states to name a few.
She missed the public schools which it appears is run by unions where the union has just blundered in negotiations with the province, bysupposedly bringing forth the teachers concerns, then the province giving the union what they asked for in what was supposed to be an agreeable offer, but the teachers voted against. Apparently the union was not negotiating for the teachers, but themselves?
Not much point stating more to this since it will no doubt be ignored!
No common sense here! No ethical journalism for an editor!