Alberta voters need to turn their backs on Danielle Smith’s bid to lead the UCP

By Lethbridge Herald on July 22, 2022.

Editor:

It pays sometimes to take note of natural processes when considering Alberta politics. And here I’m thinking of the digestive tract as being most emblematic. In one end goes reams and gobs of general social and economic data, and out the other squirts a sometimes quite nasty and bilious effluent of dogma, invective and outright gobbledygook. This is especially true of certain alarming splinter elements of the United Conservative Party. 

This is an outfit which is not content to merely chase its own tail. It rather chooses to devour its own head from time to time. Who’s even bothered to keep count of how many would-be monarchs have followed in the boozy footsteps of King Ralph? A bunch. And now Jason Kenney has been lanced like a pernicious boil atop the noggin of the UCP to reveal the swirling pus-bucket beneath that passes for the party’s brains. Look – the putschists are lining up, and the deeply reactionary storm-clouds are brewing.

Perhaps the most entertaining contender in this line-up is the former leader of the Wildrose Party, Danielle Smith. Not content to rest on her laurels as a Machiavellian conniver and turncoat to her former base, she now seems to have had a stirring vision for the future which pivotally involves her becoming the next Grand Poobah of our fair province. Well, this is plucky stuff. Lazarus taking up his bed and walking is mere nursery-rhyming compared with this epic bid for miraculous resurrection. Yep – get tossed off your pony and climb right back up, only on a rutting T-Rex this time. 

It is clearly the case that Ms. Smith plans to carry on the important work undertaken by the dislodged Premier Kenney, which broadly involves undermining the social safety net, diverting tax revenues to corporate interests, starving and/or perverting public education, opening the natural world to the despoilers, pandering to cheap nationalism, touting ‘free speech’ as a façade for sexism and xenophobia, trashing expertise and objective journalism, debasing reasoned discourse, coddling religious zealotry, and just generally shoving our society down an antediluvian rabbit-hole of revisionism and stupefaction. Yes, look, dear voter – sometimes the aforementioned bowel bloats. Take Smith for the passing wind she is, therefore, and return her to the vaporous oblivion she so richly deserves.

Phil Burpee

Pincher Creek