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Premier Danielle Smith is not the usual kind of conservative. In some ways, she’s not a conservative at all.
Traditional conservatives pride themselves on taking the best from the past and making it better. Smith is more likely to raze a traditional structure to the ground and start over.
There’s more than a hint of Trumpism in this, thankfully without the ugliness and poisonous rhetoric.
Millions of Americans mistrust their federal government and want it radically rebuilt or demolished altogether. President-elect Donald Trump obliges them with every new appointment of a system-wrecker.
The same dynamic is growing here.
Thousands of UCP members at the recent annual convention showed their deep mistrust of schools, teachers, health care, doctors, scientists, universities, elites of all kinds and “wokeism” in any form.
That’s a partial list.
Smith won 91.5 per cent support for her leadership — a thunderous mandate to effect radical change.
A premier in a majority government has a great deal of power. Much of it lies unused in normal times.
But Smith, with full support from her party, caucus and cabinet, is using power more forcefully than any premier in the modern era.
She’s staging political takeovers of organizations that have always stood arm’s-length from government with independence to do their jobs.
That latest example is the firing of the AIMCo board, a move that could affect hundreds of thousands of Albertans whose pension funds are invested by this agency.
AIMCo’s goal is to make as much money as possible for its clients, including those pension funds. Politics aren’t supposed to be any part of this.
Suddenly, AIMCo is political from top to bottom.
The acting chair is Finance Minister Nate Horner. Serving as interim CEO is Ray Gilmour, Smith’s deputy minister of executive council. He’s the boss of the entire civil service and works closely with the premier almost daily.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper will be the new chair. After running a government, he can surely handle AIMCo. But his mere presence suggests a bold reshaping of AIMCo as an investment vehicle for an Alberta pension plan.
Smith’s most dramatic action, a slow-release eruption still underway, is the takedown of Alberta Health Services.
It’s being split into authorities for primary care, acute care, continuing care, and mental health and addictions (the latter under Recovery Alberta).
This is a massive upheaval. Whole groups of health-care workers are being shifted from their former employer, AHS, to one of the others.
There’s no question AHS had become too vast to manage properly. A study into the June E. coli outbreak in child-care facilities found the AHS food inspection branch had been virtually ignored by management for years.
AHS needed reform, but this is a political takeover that hands enormous power to Health Minister Adriana LaGrange. There’s no longer a clear dividing line between the political wing and health-care operations.
On the civic front, Smith has assumed power to fire councillors, and forbids towns and cities from striking funding agreements with Ottawa unless the province approves.
The signpost move on the civic front is the takeover of Calgary council’s Green Line LRT project, with an ultimatum to accept the province’s planned route or there will no project at all.
Other premiers have done striking things. Former premier Ed Stelmach launched AHS as a provincewide agency in 2008. The PC founding premier, Peter Lougheed, bought Pacific Western Airlines in 1974.
But we have to go back to the Social Credit era in the 1930s to find anything like the UCP urge to dramatic upheaval.
In the desperate pit of the Great Depression, then-premier William Aberhart’s new government tried to print money and create banks to defy Bay Street.
But this wasn’t radical enough for Aberhart’s own MLAs. In 1938, he faced a formal revolt from his caucus.
It sounds familiar.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald
X: @DonBraid
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