In Robert Kroetsch’s novel The Words of My Roaring, Johnnie Backstrom, a rural undertaker, is running for Social Credit in the 1935 Alberta election. He needs an edge, and so he tells the parched farmers of his riding that, if they vote for him, it will rain. When it rains on the eve of the election, Backstrom’s victory is guaranteed.
A comparison to Danielle Smith may not seem apt. Premier Smith, after all, won an election just last spring. Why would she have needed to make ludicrous promises? One reason would be if the election had been frighteningly close, but by most standards it wasn’t. She won a majority. Smith, however, might have been examining trends in Alberta and finding things potentially not so rosy for the UCP.
While Alberta’s population continues to grow at a rapid clip, it doesn’t grow uniformly. It grows fastest in cities and slowest in rural areas. The cities happen to be where the UCP is shakiest. Actually, shaky is kind. In 2023 the UCP lost Edmonton in its entirety. That’s 1.2 million (out of a province of 4.7 million) unrepresented by a UCP MLA. Even in Calgary, once thought to be an unassailable conservative bastion, the UCP lost more seats in 2023 than it won. It’s true that the UCP retained its iron grip on rural Alberta, but that’s not where the population is trending. The rural–urban shift, long underway all over the world, is projected to continue.
So maybe Smith did need to promise some kind of rain.
What the premier did promise—and has delivered on—is sovereignty, of a sort. Almost immediately after Smith’s victory in the 2022 UCP leadership race, her government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act. The latter part of the title sounds tacked on out of desperation, and the back also nullifies the front, but the Act has created some advantages. When Alberta found itself on fire for most of last spring and summer, we didn’t feel shy about asking Canada to send in the military and millions of dollars in financial assistance, nor did we hesitate to allow thousands of firefighters from elsewhere in the nation to come to our aid. Without all of that, we would have been hooped—but the “sovereignty” part of the Act lets Smith keep right on being shirty about the Canada Health Act, the carbon tax and federal equalization. The “united” part is her agreeing to continue to let Canada save Alberta’s bacon. (Please understand Smith is not a fanatic, just a reasonable person like the rest of us, with her own quirky aspirations toward specialness and her vast stomach for embarrassing contradiction.)
Johnnie Backstrom was offering people what they did in fact want and need. Danielle Smith’s politics are far stranger.
An even more recent example of political rain from the UCP is Smith’s refusal to be dictated to by Justin Trudeau and the federal government on the matter of decarbonization, climate change mitigation, call it what you will—the thing with the 2035 target date. In the UCP’s concept of nature and science, the massive forest fires of 2023 are not further evidence of human-caused climate change or any reason to tamper with Alberta’s first-rate cash cow, which is to say our oil industry. Mitts off. The whole world might be acting on this problem, but Smith feels our province and its oil companies are unique. In mid-summer her defence of our oil industry took the odd form of a “seven-month pause on renewables,” a period in which a multi-billion-dollar boom has been made to stop—or rather the Alberta Utilities Commission has been ordered to stop ruling on renewable project applications.
The reasons given were strange. The premier says municipalities asked for the pause; they didn’t. (They want the tax revenues and jobs.) She says the AUC asked for the pause; it didn’t either. Another reason given is that some rural communities don’t want wind farms—and this, while not representative of a large group, is true. I know this because there is a wind farm I don’t want either. It’s a case of 47 turbines, each slightly taller than the Calgary Tower, to be built on undeveloped land where migrating trumpeter swans take rest and endangered bats could be thumped out of existence—all within the Waterton Biosphere Reserve! But did we ask for all Alberta renewables projects to stop in sympathy? No.
Seeing wildlife advocates at odds with climate activists must have been an exciting moment for the premier. Perhaps her very first wedge issue…! And right there within groups traditionally pro-NDP. Of course, she went a little overboard and cost a whole lot of people who might ordinarily vote for her their (future) jobs. It’s also a little strange in the almost-sovereign-province-of-free-enterprise to send billions of capitalist-investment-dollars packing.
The thing about Johnnie Backstrom’s promise of rain was that he was offering people what they did in fact want and need. The wind-farm caesura is far stranger politics. Here, my fellow Albertans, have what you don’t want, and your government accepts your thanks.
Fred Stenson’s novels include Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.
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