Who would have thought an animated cartoon from 1940 would be applicable to Alberta in 2025? In “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” part of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Mickey Mouse plays the lowly helper to a powerful wizard. Anyone who grew up watching Disney cartoons will remember poor little Mickey fetching buckets of water to fill the well. When the sorcerer retires for the night, Mickey gets a bright idea. He dons the sorcerer’s hat and conjures up darkly powerful magic to compel a broom leaning against the wall to do the heavy lifting. Convinced of his brilliance, Mickey nods off.
He wakes up to find the broom flooding the house, bucket after bucket. He can’t summon the magic to stop it, and so he destroys the broom with an axe, leaving it in splinters. Unfortunately, magic proves more powerful than the axe. Each splinter turns into a new broom, and they take up the bucket work a hundredfold. It’s full-on chaos, a flood Mickey has no power to halt. He is rescued only when the sorcerer returns and restores control through a mature use of magic. Mickey is chided by the sorcerer and literally swept out of the room. The message is obvious: don’t play with things you don’t understand and can’t control.
We’re living in an Alberta version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” In the most fraught of political moments, we’re governed by a premier playing with forces she doesn’t understand and can’t control.
When Donald Trump won a second term, people of sound mind worried about a thousand things. Ukraine, NATO, the Supreme Court, the media, higher education, the climate, Russia, Taiwan, the global economy, the state of democracy, race relations, LGBTQ+ rights, the nuclear arsenal, Iran, the Middle East… the list goes on and on. It’s probably safe to say that Trump threatening to take over Canada wasn’t one of them. But now that that bizarre threat is here, it seems an almost obvious extension of Trump’s grotesque sense of entitlement. Of course he wants to take over Canada. It just makes sense! The border is artificial (as opposed to, you know, all those other borders), and wouldn’t America be even greater if Canada were the 51st state? It’s not annexation, it’s a win–win!
Absurd and offensive and ignorant, yes. But that doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real. Because in his uniquely and yet somehow captivatingly moronic way, Trump has put his finger on (and poked) Canada’s most exposed nerve, our vulnerability in being on the north side of the world’s longest undefended—and now longest disrespected—border. It’s a fate that brings with it certain realities and certain comparators, such as Russia and Latvia, or China and Taiwan. Latvia and Taiwan are minnows hooked to whales through history, geography, language, economics and culture. Yet they are distinct and unique countries. As is Canada.
But as David French in The New York Times and Will Saletan in The Bulwark, among others, have recently pointed out, Trump views Canada as “his Ukraine.” Meaning, he sees Canada as a territory well within his rights to annex or, at the very least, to make us, in French’s terms, a “nominally independent vassal” of the US. Saletan even noted the similarities in the rhetoric between Trump and Putin when talking about Canada and Ukraine, respectively. “Artificial borders,” “economic reliance,” “shared language”—Trump sees these as evidence of his imperialist thesis. Take him literally or take him for a fool, but anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth has the potential to be acted upon.
Cheryl Oates is a political and public affairs consultant who was premier Rachel Notley’s executive director of communication and planning. Oates sees a transition in the current climate from farce to something considerably more alarming. “From the beginning,” she says, “people didn’t take the things Trump said very seriously. But the rhetoric escalated quickly, and the day he said ‘I have ruled out using military force to take Canada’ was really, to me, a wake-up call. Wait, what?! What have you ruled out? We’re talking about an economic war, I think, with huge implications for Canada. It’s not a joke anymore.”
In other words, on top of all our internal challenges, Canada currently finds itself next door to a country run by a sociopathic criminal advocating the dissolution, or at least the submission, of our country. He wants us to bend the knee to the sovereign. Not only do we dismiss this threat at our provincial and national peril, but it has broader and bleaker global implications.
Into this maelstrom of geopolitical chaos skipped our folksy premier, arriving, as she said, to “play good cop,” in the middle of a Canadian federal election no less, which, I guess, made Mark Carney the bad cop. But even if the situation had called for a good cop, Danielle Smith would hardly be suited to the role. Her political track record is full of the kind of mistakes, misreads, naiveté and political miscalculation that doom most politicians not named Trump. As Maclean’s noted prior to the last provincial election, Smith’s troubles are due mostly “to her inability to keep her foot out of her mouth, and her susceptibility to some truly out-there ideas.” The article noted she has “refuted the existence of mass graves around residential schools… and [said] Russia invaded Ukraine to fight neo-Nazis and shut down US-funded bioweapons labs. She has been especially vocal when spreading misinformation about COVID-19… and compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler.” The magazine reminded readers that Smith won the UCP leadership by embracing the fringe right through such groups as Take Back Alberta. Since getting elected she has threatened to delink Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan and wrought havoc at AHS, prompting multiple investigations into corruption.
When external menace was added to the mix once Trump began musing about making Canada the 51st state and began referring to Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau,” it seemed a signal, surely, to recognize that these are different times, serious times. Prudence, caution and national cohesion would have seemed appropriate.
A country run by a sociopathic criminal advocates the submission of our country.
Instead, Danielle Smith has gone her own way, mostly by playing footsie with so many elements of the American right that she’s worn a hole in her socks. Visiting Mar-a-Lago like some giddy tourist. Appearing on stage at PragerU in Florida with extremist Ben Shapiro. Standing alongside Trump bootlicker Kevin O’Leary. Sending direct signals to the Trump administration that the oil and gas sector (wink, wink, Alberta) should be exempt from tariffs. Refusing to join her fellow premiers in a put-Canada-first show of strength. Presenting Carney with a MAGA-adjacent set of ultimatums upon first meeting him and threatening a national unity crisis if her demands are not met. Siding with a loony op-ed from Preston Manning advocating Alberta secession if the Liberals emerged victorious in the federal election. And interfering in the federal election to the detriment of fellow conservative Pierre Poilievre, by appearing on Breitbart News and pointing out to extreme-right Americans that Poilievre was “in sync” with Trump, a move that may have helped scuttle the Conservative ship in the election.
“When you start to put together all the things she’s doing,” says Ken Boessenkool, a long-time conservative strategist, “you have to ask yourself, what exactly does she think she’s doing? I don’t even know what she herself believes. All I know is that some of the things she says and believes are crazy and deeply worrying.”
Carney said during the campaign that Canada and the US have, effectively, divorced. He doubled down in his victory speech, referencing the “American betrayal” and added, “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. President Trump is trying to break us so he can own us. That will never happen… This is Canada, and we decide what happens here.” Ontario Progressive Conservative premier Doug Ford sent Carney a note after the election congratulating him and stating explicitly that he was looking forward to working with the federal government to strengthen our union in the face of the American threat. Carney has clearly been reflecting the mood of the country by bluntly telling Trump to butt out.
Smith, on the other hand, has all but sent Trump roses and chocolates.
“It’s almost as if she’s been saying Trump is right and Canada should be the 51st state,” says Boessenkool. “When a prominent—idiotic but still prominent—Canadian in Kevin O’Leary says we should negotiate this 51st state thing with Trump because it’s a real opportunity, and then you go stand beside him to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago, what do you think Trump thinks? She may not have said it explicitly, but implicitly she put herself in the camp of ‘Huh, there just might be something to this 51st state thing.’ You really do have to wonder what she thinks she’s doing there.”
It’s a good question. And an urgent one. This is not about decoding whether Smith is courting the American right. She is. Nor is it about whether she thinks she’s cleverly using a hypothetical Americanization of Alberta, literal or figurative, as a crowbar to pry concessions from Ottawa. She does. No, the real question is whether she actually understands what she’s playing with.
Political grievance in Alberta is like the weather. Sometimes it’s stormy, sometimes a bit calmer, but no matter what, the turbulence is going to come back. Yes, in some ways Alberta is taken for granted by Ottawa, but so is every other province. That’s the nature of our system of government. I have argued in the past that Alberta’s grievances are exaggerated, misunderstood or both. The emotion behind them, however, is powerful. A wise approach would be not to stoke anger but to understand and ease it, to damp down the outrage with common sense, facts and dialogue. Smith doesn’t work this way. She knows precisely in which lobe of the brain voter indignation resides. She can agitate it with precise political tools. She’s activating a real emotion with disingenuous stimuli. The persecuted Albertan is her lab specimen.
Whatever you think about why Smith is positioning Alberta this way in relation to both Canada and the US, the people around the premier certainly have a plan. Her inner circle and particularly the executive director of the premier’s office, Rob Anderson, have long had designs on unravelling Canada and making Alberta more like the US. Anderson is a big ideological influence on Smith; in the same way Rod Love was Ralph Klein’s brain, he is the breeze that fills the Smith windsock. Anderson was one of the co-authors of the 2021 Free Alberta Strategy, which outlined how and why Alberta should pursue independence, and which then became the template for the Sovereignty Act of 2022. Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary political science professor and another co-author of the Free Alberta Strategy, noted that the Sovereignty Act was expressly designed to be unconstitutional. Numerous prominent Conservatives, including former premier Jason Kenney, labelled the Sovereignty Act ill-advised or worse.
Cheryl Oates has long seen the pattern. “I don’t know if there’s ever been an Alberta politician who didn’t pick up on the anti-Ottawa sentiment,” says Oates. “It’s popular. If you ask Albertans if they feel they’re getting a fair deal in Canada, most will say no. Where it goes too far is when because of that frustration people are willing to consider themselves Albertans before Canadians or even consider not being a part of Canada. To me, it’s crazy that the leader of our province sees the prime minister of our own country as more of a threat to Alberta than Donald Trump. It’s disappointing that she tries to act as a diplomat toward the Americans and yet can’t demonstrate that inside Canada.”
“Danielle Smith is one of the most skilled communicators Canadian politics has ever produced,” says Boessenkool. “[And] I know what Rob Anderson’s strategy is, because he wrote it down. It’s not complicated. We should bring in the Sovereignty Act, we should fight Ottawa at every step, and if we don’t win, we should separate.”
Smith and Anderson must see currying favour with the US as a handy tool to advance their aims. It surely demonstrates to Ottawa that Alberta deserves better, because “Look, the most powerful country on earth loves us, so why can’t we get more love from our own country?!” Smith’s strategy of cozying up to MAGA to weaken Canadian federalism and therefore strengthen our province might seem in line with time-honoured tactics from any Alberta premier. “We’re being disrespected by Ottawa… Americans ‘get’ Alberta better than our own capital does… our energy is prized worldwide but despised and restricted at home.” And so a convenient way to bolster provincial clout is to hold national unity hostage.
It’s going to get worse if Danielle Smith continues to animate the splinters of authoritarian sentiment.
But in dark times the pursuit of such a strategy is troubling. Smith isn’t flirting with Barack Obama’s regime. This isn’t a rancher’s coffee klatch between Ed Stelmach and George W. Bush. Trump and the MAGA movement are not Republicans. They’re not Democrats. They are not even democrats. They don’t value the principles of justice, equality or transparency that their own country was founded upon, let alone ours. Why would anyone want to become part of the US at this point in its history? It’s a troubled society: polarized, unhealthy, violent, plagued by inequality, beset by corruption, ruled by a man who keeps surprising the world with how low he can set the bar. And yet this is the country and the leader that Smith is prostrating herself before.
And so what happens if Trump and his lieutenants take Smith at her Sovereignty Act word and aggressively pursue annexation or vassal status with Canada, thinking, “Okay, clearly people up there want to join us”? Or what if Trump just comes out and says “You know what, all we want is the oil and water anyway, so forget about Canada, we’re moving in, Alberta!” What happens if Smith’s rhetoric normalizes MAGA culture at home just enough to convince enough Albertans that a referendum on separation or joining the US ought to be put on a ballot? Such a vote might have trouble making it to a referendum question due to a variety of issues, including Indigenous rights. (And Edmonton might decide to hold its own vote and separate from Alberta.) But the fact that I’m thinking this is just unlikely, rather than sheer insanity, is in itself a comment on our situation.
A situation that has, of course, only been made worse by Smith’s utter failure to read the realpolitik room. She thinks she’s been both savvy and statesmanlike in trying to play all sides, propping up Alberta, supporting the US and snubbing Canada. This despite the fact that Canadians have rallied everywhere—including in Alberta!—in looking across the 49th parallel and saying, loudly, that that is precisely what we do not want to become. The pivotal factor in the federal election was detestation of Trump and the disrespect he has shown towards an ally, so much so that Trump’s former communications director said after the election that the greatest achievement of his first 100 days was Mark Carney. And yet Smith, with accelerating obliviousness, has decided that now is precisely the right time to start pushing Alberta even further away from Canada and towards the US. She is openly signalling that Alberta should turn away from one of the most stable and prosperous countries on earth in order to embrace Rome on the verge of collapse.
But here is where the truly serious consequences emerge. More is at stake than the provincial and even national damage invited by Smith. There are wider and historically significant implications. Smith probably thinks she’s creating leverage and strengthening Alberta through threats of separation and closer ties to the US, but what she’s actually doing in Alberta is releasing, or at least encouraging, a set of forces that are pulsing with geopolitical radioactivity. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Gulf State leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Erdoğan… these leaders can read the room and know that this moment favours their anti-democratic impulses.
The world is walking a very unsteady line right now between democracies and the rise of illiberal pseudo-democracies, autocracies and soft-authoritarian regimes. Most of the world’s more powerful countries are either non-democratic (China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia) or teetering on the democratic precipice (India, Brazil, Turkey and increasingly the US). In other words, the future of true democracy—individual rights and freedoms; the rule of law—is currently being guarded by a handful of countries (Japan, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, most though not all EU countries, Ukraine, South Korea), few of which have economic or military clout to offset what’s happening in China, Russia, India and the US.
The weakening of democratic institutions is a process that echoes Hemingway’s famous line from The Sun Also Rises in which one character asks another how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” More recently the book How Democracies Die has gained currency for detailing “democratic backsliding,” in which formerly democratic countries slowly dissolve into autocracy, drip by drip, so that the public almost doesn’t notice. An article in The New Yorker in April 2025 showed how democratic backsliding is well underway in the US. I reported in 2019 on Viktor Orbán’s campaign against the Central European University in Budapest as part of his ultimately successful recasting of Hungary into an authoritarian state. In its most recent Democracy Index, published in February 2025, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that its global average democracy score (out of 10) was 5.17, its lowest in decades. Democracy isn’t quite on life support, but it’s at the ER waiting to see a doctor.
Yet in this dangerous and delicate political moment Smith has decided it’s the right time to jam that crowbar into the Alberta border and pry open any crack she can find. Which raises the question of why one would choose to weaken one of the very few countries—your own country to boot—that is holding back the global surge of authoritarianism. There can be only three answers. You yourself are anti-democratic. You simply aren’t in possession of the political and historical wherewithal to know better. Or, like Trump, you’re the first and second reasons combined.
Anti-democrats like Trump or Putin know all too well that if an established and respected country such as Canada can be fractured without too much trouble—and, as a bonus, with help from the inside—then the rest of the world shouldn’t be too hard to divide up and take over. This is precisely why Trump keeps insisting, even on the morning of our federal election, when he posted on social media that Canadians should vote for him, that Canada would be better off as part of the US.
There could not be a worse time to be enabling these leaders—and similarly aligned sectors of the Alberta electorate. The spectre of MAGA authoritarianism looms in our province.
“Treasonous” may be too strong a word to describe Smith’s actions, but “misguided” and “reckless” are not. “She’s certainly earned political points with her base,” says Cheryl Oates. “But the more she cozies up to the US, the less unified we look and the less unified we are as we take on the threat from Trump.”
Like Mickey Mouse when he puts on the sorcerer’s cap and then drifts off for a nap, much here depends on when or whether Danielle Smith wakes up. But odds are it’s going to get worse before it gets better if through political malpractice she continues to animate the splinters of authoritarian sentiment in our province. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem about the apprentice, the young helper realizes he’s vastly out of his depth: “The spirits that I summoned / I now cannot rid myself of again.” In Disney’s version the sorcerer rescues Mickey, saving him from having naively toyed with forces far beyond his abilities.
Albertans are living through their own version of this tale right now, and our premier thinks she’s the sorcerer, imbued with special magic and powers. Unfortunately, that’s not her role. Better late than never, now would be a good time for her to take off the sorcerer’s hat and go back to filling up some buckets the old-fashioned way, instead of playing with things she doesn’t understand and can’t control.
Curtis Gillespie is the author of five books. His magazine writing has won seven National Magazine Awards.
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Read more from the archive “Island Alberta” May 2025.
