For seven years, between her fall from political grace and her ascension to the premier’s chair, Danielle Smith hosted a talk show at Calgary’s 770 CHQR radio. Eventually the endless negative feedback from listeners—“the mob of political correctness”—got too much for her. It was becoming “perilous to speak truth to power.” So, on January 11, 2021, Smith said she’d be leaving the station. In a farewell column she quoted New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who in his The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics, wrote: “I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.”
To this Danielle Smith added: “I assure you, so do I.”
She wasn’t silent for long. In fact, the day before Smith quit the radio, she announced her new account at locals.com, a libertarian videoblogging site, where she could resume speaking her truth, only this time directly to an audience of paying subscribers and free from repercussions from boss, advertiser or mob. At least one freelance journalist paid for full access to Smith’s content. This is how non-subscribers could learn, for example, that Smith decorates her High River home office with the US revolutionary Gadsden Flag, a coiling rattlesnake—“Don’t Tread on Me”—said to represent the individual standing up to unjust authority. Snippets of Smith’s more controversial videos (on COVID, vaccines, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) began circulating on social media.
The municipal realm is “the healthiest level of government.” Smith, 2022
But on May 13, 2022, a year into her newfound freedom, Danielle Smith said something on locals.com that a great many Albertans would agree with. Sitting at her desk, wearing a grey blazer, she first read aloud a subscriber’s two-part question: “What are your thoughts on other electoral systems? Do you think there’s one best suited to represent the views of most Albertans?”
“You know,” Smith began, “my leading contender, if you want the truth, would probably be… Nunavut’s system, or the [one] you see in a lot of rural municipalities in Alberta.
“You get elected as an independent, based on your own steam. You get elected based on who you are, what you stand for. You’re not tied by some kind of partisan restriction. You don’t have some leader who can decide to punish you. You don’t have some leader who can decide not to sign your nomination papers.” (Here Smith chuckled; she was by May 2022 trying to re-enter politics by seeking a UCP nomination, and needed leader Jason Kenney’s blessing.)
“So… you’re removing the partisan labels and you’re just choosing the best person for the job,” she said. “I know—what a concept…! I think maybe we’re too polarized now. [But] when you look at the municipal level of government, it’s kind of the healthiest level of government.”
Her opinion was uncontroversial then. It’s notable now. Because just two days after praising non-partisan politics, Smith’s life again turned upside down when UCP members ousted Kenney. Smith dropped her UCP nomination bid. She leapt into the leadership race. She won. Eight months later she led her UCP to a general election win. And then premier Smith injected a heavy dose of partisanship into Alberta’s healthiest level of government.
A Janet Brown poll found that two in three Albertans want municipal candidates to be independent.
In October 2022, in just her third week as premier, Smith used a Calgary Sun columnist to float a trial balloon. She was being lobbied to legislate municipal parties, she said. “Calgary wants it, and Edmonton wants it too. There seems to be an appetite for it.” The Edmonton Journal later reported that third-party advertiser Take Back Alberta (TBA) was in fact behind the push.
Smith owes TBA. The group infiltrated the UCP—in leader David Parker’s words, “declaring war on Jason Kenney”—and orchestrated the premier’s removal through a leadership review. Its support was critical to Smith’s subsequent party leadership win. But the policy document that emerged from the UCP’s late-October AGM, Smith’s first convention as leader, at which TBA supporters dominated policy discussions, was silent on municipal parties. So too was the UCP platform during the spring 2023 election campaign.
By fall 2023, however, Smith said she was serious about bringing in municipal parties. Local politicians were angry. Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek called it “the kiss of death for local representation.” Red Deer mayor Ken Johnson called the idea a “poor move,” saying cities should be “unfettered by party or partisan politics.” Cathy Heron, president of Alberta Municipalities, said partisan politics creates “votes along party lines or the party thought process. And so it doesn’t lead to good governance of a municipality.”
The sentiment went beyond politicians. “This is a terrible idea, and the public knows it,” Edmonton Journal reporter Keith Gerein tweeted. “Albertans don’t want it, the UCP didn’t campaign on it—but hey, why let those factors get in the way?” Said Andrew Knack, former Edmonton ward Nakota Isga councillor and current mayoral candidate, “If you’re looking at the provincial or the federal systems, that partisan system that’s set up, how many Albertans would really look at that and say, ‘Yeah, I want more of that municipally?’”
A Janet Brown poll in September 2023 found that two in three Albertans (68 per cent) want municipal candidates to be independent. Only one in four (24 per cent) want parties. Fully 81 per cent say their main concern is councillors “who are part of a political party would vote along party lines, and not necessarily in the best interest of the community.” Most (69 per cent) agree “parties would make municipal governments more divisive and less effective.”
Premier Smith commissioned her own survey that November. The results, published in late January 2024 in the Edmonton Journal—after that paper filed a freedom of information request—showed that more than 70 per cent of respondents were opposed to seeing parties on local ballots.
By this point Smith was back on the radio, on a Saturday-morning province-wide call-in show co-broadcast by 770 CHQR and 880 CHED. On the February 24, 2024, edition of “Your Province, Your Premier,” she said parties would now be legislated only in Alberta’s two biggest cities. The rationale was no longer that Edmonton and Calgary were asking for the change; it was that those cities’ elected representatives weren’t truly independent. “The smaller the municipality, I don’t know that they’re as partisan,” she said. “But when you get into a city the size of Calgary or Edmonton, you better believe it’s partisan.” The solution to this lack of independence, she suggested, was to tether councillors and mayors to parties, thus creating “more transparency.”
Her government introduced the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, that spring. It defined municipal parties, which can’t be formally affiliated with provincial or federal parties, and created them in time for October 2025’s civic elections. The bill passed in fall 2024 with all UCP MLAs in favour and all NDP MLAs against. Said then-municipal affairs minister Ric McIver, parties will ensure councils “make decisions that are clearly in Alberta’s interest and reflect the transparency and fairness the citizens of Alberta deserve.”
If citizens deserve better, Smith’s prescription is tough to swallow. Since the time of Plato, people have been wary of their fellows who seek power. Trustworthiness surveys today rank politicians last, below even car salespeople and ad executives. A cottage industry of articles and books explores the “unique narcissism” of politicians. MPs and MLAs call their colleagues liars, incompetent, “a colossal piece of shit” or worse, and dismiss the parliaments and legislatures they themselves serve in as “daycares” and “kindergartens.”
But parties earn special contempt. An Environics study measuring trust in political institutions from 2010 to 2023 found that while 35–41 per cent of Canadians express “a lot” of pride in our political system, only 6–17 per cent have the same level of support for parties. The municipal realm performs at least twice as well as partisan politics, with “a lot of support” ranging from 16 to 31 per cent. (Other than Montreal and three cities in BC, most Canadian cities don’t have parties.)
In 2019 Angus Reid found that nearly two-thirds of Canadians say politicians can’t be trusted. One-third of Canadians believe politicians are primarily motivated by “personal gain” rather than a genuine desire to serve their communities. Forty per cent say the problem is getting worse. Again municipal politicians performed better, perhaps because most don’t belong to parties.
Clips from the House of Commons and legislatures confirm the public’s suspicions. Grownups in suits shout at grownups in suits, or heckle, jeer and bang on desks—behaviour that in a normal workplace would get you fired. Ads show grainy photos of party leaders at their worst (scowling, shrugging, sweaty) with circus music and out of context quotes. Party bots send frothy text messages as much to harvest respondents’ data as to influence voters. (In the 2025 campaign a Conservative “flash survey” gave as one of respondents’ two options on crime policy: “I want dangerous criminals terrorizing my streets.”) Once elected, parties often appoint their own donors and one-time candidates to “non-partisan” positions on public boards and commissions and pay them to write “independent” public reports.
Even the “healthiest level of government” isn’t perfect. But lacking party loyalties and machinery, civic politics doesn’t stoop to the blood sport and cronyism of federal or provincial politics. Organizations that seek more diverse political representation in Canada say the potential for collaboration and civil disagreement at city hall—and less need of powerful connections to get elected in the first place—is why newcomers or members of under-represented groups considering a run for office often prefer the municipal level.
This may already be changing. “I entered [politics] with an expectation that teamwork would win the day and that city hall would be a space for practical problem-solving and dialogue,” said Evan Spencer, Ward 12 councillor, in a February 2025 Calgary Herald column. “After all, municipalities are responsible for delivering essential services—transit, infrastructure, community safety—without the partisan baggage that dominates higher levels of government.”
“Or at least,” Spencer wrote, “that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, the political climate has shifted dramatically… Municipal councils are succumbing to the pressures of party politics. This transformation threatens the very foundation of local democracy. Party politics, by its nature, demands loyalty to a platform, a leader and a base of supporters. This dynamic creates an environment where councillors are pressured to vote along ideological lines rather than engage in the give-and-take necessary for effective governance.” After one term, Spencer isn’t running again.
The problem of elected representatives prioritizing their party over the people who elected them sometimes erupts to the surface.
In May 2015 junior-high teacher Robyn Luff was elected for the provincial NDP in Calgary-East. Here, in working-class Dover, Forest Lawn and Penbrooke Meadows, incomes are $9,000 below the provincial average and the percentage of renters is 30 per cent higher. Rents in Alberta back then were rising at three times the inflation rate, and nothing stopped a landlord from hiking the rent as much as they liked. Luff’s constituents wanted a limit—and a modest rent cap was in the NDP platform in late 2014. Rachel Notley called premier Jim Prentice’s notion that the market could deal with a housing affordability crisis “profoundly irresponsible.”
But by the following summer, after the NDP had toppled the PCs, rent caps were off the table. Said municipal affairs minister Deron Bilous, “Quite frankly… our government is not at this time looking to rent controls.” An undeterred Luff brought forward a private member’s bill in 2016 that included a proposed 2 per cent cap. The premier’s office told Luff to water it down. The bill was sent to committee, where it languished.
Two years later Luff was kicked out of caucus. The NDP said she didn’t understand party discipline. Luff said she wasn’t being allowed to represent her constituents. “Every power that MLAs are supposed to have has been taken away,” she said in a statement. “MLAs must vote at the direction of the leader at all times [a.k.a. whipped votes]. Questions from private members are written by ministries and given to them to ask… Decisions about who speaks in the House and to what bill are all made ahead of time by party leadership. Statements and questions at committee are all highly scripted and agreed upon ahead of time. If MLAs should choose to go against any of these directives, there’s a fear they’ll lose privileges …they’ll be isolated, their political career will be finished, their nomination papers will not be signed.”
Luff said stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and to no actual debate on bills. Everything that happens in the House is predetermined, rendering everything that happens there to nothing more than a vehicle for scoring partisan points.… This is a mockery of representation and a tragedy of democracy.”
That MLAs are powerless, votes are whipped and messages tightly controlled is “modus operandi” for all parties, Mount Royal University professor Duane Bratt told the CBC. “Everything [Luff] described… sounded like traditional party behaviour.”
Stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and no actual debate… a mockery of representation.”
More recently, Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair and Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Pete Guthrie said their UCP colleagues were prioritizing party interests over the public good. Sinclair refused to support the 2025 budget because it has little for healthcare and highway improvements in his riding but does have $183-million to help the Edmonton Oilers. He was kicked out of caucus. Guthrie said premier Smith had “deliberately” misled caucus about procurement issues at AHS, where reportedly over $600-million in public contracts were given to a UCP donor. He was kicked out a month after Sinclair. “Competent, honest governance has taken a backseat to political manoeuvrings that jeopardize the best interest of Albertans,” wrote Guthrie.
None of this is new. Edmonton-Meadowlark MLA Maurice Tougas, in the May 2009 edition of Alberta Views, described the legislature as badly scripted theatre. “Very early on in my term, I came to the realization that it hardly mattered what was said… 90 per cent of what was said in the Legislature was irrelevant.” Brent Rathgeber, a St. Albert MP who in 2013 quit the Conservatives to sit as an independent, said prime minister Stephen Harper’s staff would pressure caucus to obey talking points and vote “like trained seals.” With backbenchers tightly scripted, he said, “MPs don’t represent their constituents in Ottawa, they represent the government to their constituents.”
Since 2008, the Ontario-based Samara Centre for Democracy has conducted exit interviews with 160 MPs from across the political spectrum. In the book Tragedy of the Commons, MPs describe to Samara the fealty of party politics. “Almost without fail,” the interviewers write, “each MP describes the tremendous influence of their political party. From the manipulation of the nomination process to enforced voting in the House and in committees, the unseen hand of the party dominates every aspect of the MP’s existence.”
When Smith in 2024 brought in legislation to add parties to municipal politics, Robyn Luff tweeted: “The literal best thing about municipal politics in Alberta is that there are no political parties.”
In politics, language that conveys a specific message to one group and a different one to the wider public is called a “dog whistle,” named for the ultrasonic tool that’s inaudible to people but heard by their pets. Smith is telling us she doesn’t much like party politics; all she wants is to create “transparency.”
But that’s the dog whistle. “Transparency,” to the Albertans who wanted municipal parties, evidently means something different: We want more conservatives to get elected.
Alberta’s reputation as a conservative monoculture stems from the provincial PCs’ 44-year reign and from federal politics, where, over the dozen elections before 2025, 94 per cent of seats were won by Conservatives or Reformers. But our cities produce much more diverse representation. Progressive mayors Jan Reimer and Don Iveson in Edmonton, and Dave Bronconnier, Al Duerr and Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, served multiple terms. Prominent conservatives such as Calgary’s McIver (in 2010) and Edmonton’s Kerry Diotte (in 2013) failed in their mayoral bids. Progressives such as Brian Mason, Linda Sloan, Karen Leibovici, Bob Hawkesworth and Joe Ceci went on from city politics to win provincial seats for the NDP or the Liberals.
That the same Albertan might vote for a Conservative federally, the NDP provincially and for Iveson or Nenshi municipally shouldn’t be impossible to fathom. Different levels of government face different challenges and have unique responsibilities. And municipal issues are thought to be less ideological. As former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia said: “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.”
But in October 2021 high-profile conservatives in Alberta’s biggest
cities were trounced. In Calgary, mayor Gondek soundly defeated Jeromy Farkas, a former Manning Centre fellow. In Edmonton Amarjeet Sohi beat one-time UCP nominee Mike Nickel by 20 percentage points. A CTV reporter put a fine point on things: “Alberta’s two largest cities are now led by progressive people of colour.”
The results especially grated on conservatives who feel entitled to win every election in Alberta. The creation of municipal parties could fix this “mistake” of municipal politics. Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge: “It seems obvious that this is about stacking the deck in support of like-minded candidates in two cities where conservatives have often been on the losing end,” he wrote in April 2024. “Provincial and federal conservatives tend to fare much better, and that’s not lost on this government. There is, of course, the added bonus of potentially dealing with more-pliant city councils.”
Calgary Ward 13’s Dan McLean was one of the few councillors to openly embrace parties. He’s also a special breed of partisan, tweeting that if the Liberals won the 2025 election, “Canada will be invaded by the US.” He’s running for A Better Calgary (ABC), the city’s first party. McLean predicts more conservatives will now get elected in cities where otherwise “far-left” candidates hide their agendas and “common sense” right-wingers split the vote. “I feel like the majority when I walk out the doors,” he told the Calgary Sun. “[But] when I’m at city hall it’s all, like, ‘We’re doing the right things’ and ‘We’re saving the planet.’ With political parties, you’d have to identify who you are and what policies you stand by.”
But proponents of municipal parties may be missing a larger point. Danielle Smith, for example, when she re-emerged from the political wilderness in 2022, said she knew what she’d done wrong. “What I learned,” she told reporters, “is that a party doesn’t belong to its leader—a party belongs to its members.” But arguably a party doesn’t belong to its leader or its members but to its voters.
University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane writes in a 2025 Substack essay that Canadian parties have been gradually giving less power to delegates, MLAs or MPs to elect their leaders and more to individual party members. But despite seeming “more democratic,” the move has “come at the significant expense of further disempowering… [the] elected MPs whose primary job in Parliament is to hold governments to account.”
“By establishing a direct link between the leader and party members,” Macfarlane writes, “leaders assume an effective mandate not from their caucus [e.g., MPs elected under the same party banner]—people elected by millions of Canadians—but from a relatively tiny proportion of the Canadian population. For example, Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership in 2013 with 81,389 member votes. By contrast, 5,556,629 Canadian voters selected Liberal candidates to represent them in Parliament. The democratic legitimacy of the Liberal caucus as a whole far outweighs the democratic legitimacy of the party leader.”
Voters, Macfarlane admits, are often more attuned to leaders than to local candidates. “But when we ignore how our democratic institutions are designed and how our representative democracy is intended to operate, we see why problems like excessive concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister prevail, and why aspects of it have gotten worse.”
The end of independent councillors will embolden Take Back Alberta and empower party donors.
Smith herself has argued as much, writing in 2010 in Policy Options: “MLAs don’t work for their leader or their party; they work for the people of the constituency they represent, and more generally for the people of Alberta.”
But Smith’s creation of municipal parties siphons power away from the people of Edmonton and Calgary. Many local candidates are now beholden to parties, to party leaders and to opaque nomination processes. The shift away from independent civic councillors will empower party insiders and donors. It will embolden organizations such as TBA.
Indeed, all of this seems intentional. The same UCP legislation that enabled municipal parties brought corporate and union donations back into local elections (a change likewise not in the UCP’s 2023 election platform). These kinds of donations were banned from provincial politics by Alberta’s government in 2015, with the unanimous support of all MLAs. The donations were banned from municipal politics in 2018. Wildrose MLA Wayne Anderson that year told the legislature: “It’s important to keep special interests at bay when influencing [municipal] campaigning. The reality is that an individual cannot compete with a large union or corporation when they want the candidate’s ear. Under this legislation, local election candidates will only be able to accept donations from individuals, thus giving individual citizens more of a level playing field.”
Worse, under Smith’s new rules, donors can give to a candidate and to that candidate’s party. This essentially doubles the spending limit for party-aligned council and mayor candidates. “It puts local governments up for sale to the highest bidder,” Alberta Municipalities president Tyler Gandam told reporters. “Local elections will end up being about what influential [donors] want, not about what voters want. Independent candidates risk being outspent and drowned out by party candidates who enjoy the financial backing of corporations and unions. Who stands to benefit?”
In 2021 Jeromy Farkas did a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). Farkas, as a councillor, was often seen as a universal naysayer. But in his AMA he said municipal politics produces more agreement than most people realize. “The reality is different from the soundbites,” he wrote. “I may not have agreed with council on issues like corporate welfare, the Olympic bid or the closed-door arena deal, but each time, I had the support of much of my constituency. I had to raise those issues, because that’s what my residents needed me to do. The media rarely portrays that I’ve worked closely with every other member of council to consistently deliver for my constituents—often with people you might think would be unlikely allies, such as councillor [Druh] Farrell and mayor Nenshi.” He gave as examples a city plan to remove lead pipes; support for a tool to help police find high-risk missing children; and funding for summer students.
Farkas lost that mayoral election. In a January 2023 interview with the Calgary Sun, he said it’s already hard for councillors to resist political pressure from parties. “We’re trained by the politicians and by the media that politics is tribal. If you’re on the red team, you have to always support the red team no matter what stupid things they do. The same thing goes for the orange team and the blue team. It’s even worse than that. It’s covering up the bad things your team does and turning a blind eye.”
Today Farkas is again running for mayor. He has chosen—as has Gondek—to run as an independent. Two party-aligned candidates are challenging them both. After Danielle Smith’s government brought in municipal parties, Farkas was asked by the Sprawl for his assessment of the idea. His reply: “Municipal parties at the city level—I think it’s cancer.”
Jonathan Haidt opened the book that Danielle Smith cited in her farewell-to-the-radio column with a quote from Rodney King: “Can we all get along?” King’s 1992 near-fatal beating by Los Angeles police precipitated five days of riots and 63 deaths. Haidt used these words deliberately, he wrote, because today so many people “are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of co-operation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.”
Smith, the radio host who just wanted to have lively discussions about controversial ideas, said she endured vitriol and threats from the public and became overwhelmed by “extreme” political polarization. Scholarly research and polling back up her fears about the spread of polarization in Canada. Smith the online libertarian pundit then professed to admire above all other political models the “healthy” freedom from party straitjackets enjoyed by city councillors.
Smith the premier, however, stokes the flames of division.
In early 2025 Smith introduced legislation to make it much easier for Albertans to initiate a separation referendum. She admitted to CTV host Vassy Kapelos that the change was done to benefit her own party. “If there isn’t an outlet [for separatists], it creates a new party,” she said. A separatist splinter group, in other words, could do to Smith what her Wildrose once did to the Progressive Conservatives. Or it could do what TBA did to premier Kenney. It could send Smith back into political exile. Calgary Herald politics columnist Don Braid wrote, “Nobody expected the premier to reveal the raw cynicism behind her changes to referendum rules.”
One concern about polarization that Haidt foresaw is a growing threat of violence against politicians. Alberta isn’t immune to this. Rachel Notley, in her first two years as premier, reportedly received 11 credible death threats. In 2016 alone, 26 cases of “inappropriate contact and communication” involving the premier were sent to police. In 2022 MP Charlie Angus wrote in Policy magazine about federal politicians’ risk. “I can no longer count on my political ‘sixth sense’ when meeting people in public, because the conspiratorial mindset fed by disinformation doesn’t fit into a simple profile of age, class or demographic,” he wrote. “Parliament Hill security is advising elected officials to scope out public events before entering, to be briefed in advance on potential threats, and have an escape plan in case things go wrong.” That year, Canada’s MPs were issued panic buttons.
Haidt recalls that Rodney King, as he stumbled through his TV interview, choking back tears, said, “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.” “This book,” Haidt wrote, “is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.”
Political disagreements are a part of life. But we don’t have to further divide ourselves into hostile groups. We don’t have to encourage the worst kind of politics. Danielle Smith knows this. Yet she chose to drag Edmonton’s and Calgary’s municipal councils away from their imperfect independent traditions and into the partisan muck.
Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views.
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Read more from the archive “Why I Left Politics” May 2009.
