@acoyne:
Ms. Smith said her differences with Mr. Kinew illustrate the importance of the courts: “This is why we have the courts, because you can have politicians disagree, and that’s why you take it through the court.”
WHOA
@2815Lucy:
Well the court ruled. So why doesn’t she honour the ruling? Because…… she doesn’t like the ruling
@gilmcgowan:
lol. Says the Premier who has constantly demonized the courts, thumbed her nose at the constitution and changed the rules at every turn to help her separatist friends.
Speaking of the courts, rules and the law:
@Rambo26924136:
No no guys let’s totally let this dude and his racist buddies like Marty run our province
What could go wrong?
@stephenlautens.bsky.social:
To paraphrase the 1998 Supreme Court of Canada reference re: separation – provinces don’t “belong” to their residents, they belong to Canada as a whole.
Referendums have no legal authority and provincial governments cannot unilaterally act like they own their territory and people.
@johnroscoe.bsky.social:
I resent this ridiculous waste of everybody’s time and money.There’s no way in hell that the count of Smith’s referendum and hate-filled anti-immigrant questions will be trustworthy. I expect the results will be fraudulent.
@tangibullah.bsky.social:
We should just crowd-source a couple of buses and offer them free tickets to Montana. Immigration counselling optional.
Charles Fraser:
Once again, Danielle Smith, is following the path of trumpler/maga concerning the environment, shame. Bad people prevail when good ones do nothing”! This whole referendum is a smokescreen, she knows it could never fly. She is doing this to give trumpler an excuse to annex our country starting with coming to aid her in Alberta. She is colluding with the enemy, shame! Very dangerous times in our country, the planet actually. Canada is like hitler’s poland, he will invade; like Ukraine to putin. Things are not as they seem, shame on the conservatives siding with trumpler/maga. She and her government must go as well as any other politicians who support trumpler. The climate is bee-coming like pre=war 11, in Canada. Let’s stop this madness with ballots and not bullets. Elbows-up!
@nickkellett.bsky.social:
The Farage comparison is apt since they are both patient zeroes of Russian and MAGA psyops
@charlesrusnell.bsky.social:
Very insightful analysis belowhere of Danielle Smith, Canada’s Nigel Farage in waiting. A must read.
That snarling shot of Smith is her most accurate portrait yet.
@RussDiabo:
[Wab did a good job fact checking Premier Smith, but Treaty rights are more then hunting & fishing! There’s a right to say how lands & resources are managed!]
@TravelStar44877:
Narcissists can’t handle being corrected…… especially so publicly. That Premier Kinew also said that they had already talked about the issue really punted her perpetual lying right back in her face.
@marnie1616:
I loved when he said there’s many incorrect things in what you’ve said!
@Rexie54755059:
Ugliest mug in Canada. How do Albertans vote for her. She is arrogant, obnoxious and that smirk just wants me to barf. Lordy Lord and on top of it she is a traitor MAGA shill.
@pbontoast1:
That arrogant pos Smith likely has a mean girl side to her too, as all narcissists do. Looks like she’s plotting
@RGBAtlantica:
I noticed her face while Wab Kinew corrected her on constitutional law, she looked awfully upset.
Barney Panofsky’s Best Intentions @mynamesnotgordy.bsky.social:
Local woman says independence key to being united.
Journodale.bsky.social:
There have been secessionist movements in the province going back to at least the sixties, most active in the early eighties, but they’ve always been marginal cranks until Jason Kenney invited them into his party.
The people who have made anger and grievance the bedrock of their political fortunes for four decades are now going to campaign on hope and opportunity.
I am going to lose my fucking mind.
Danielle Smith spent years promising a ‘sovereign’ Alberta utopia. It was a mirage by Justin Ling, May 27, 2026, Toronto Star
Justin Ling is a staff columnist for the Star and an investigative journalist based in Montreal. Reach him by email: email hidden; JavaScript is required
Imagine, if you will, an Alberta of endless opportunities. The landscape glistens with a thousand shiny new data centres, each of them furiously mining bitcoin. The Alberta Provincial Police patrol the highways. Go 300km in either direction, and the poor citizens of Canada are living in globalist tyranny.
This is Danielle Smith’s Alberta.
At least, it’s the vision of her nation that she conjured up when she first re-emerged in politics four years ago, when she made common cause with multiple different sovereigntist groups.
Since then, she has helped them accomplish their mission. She has stoked grievances and aired fictions about the state of the country while making it easier to call a vote to break away from the country.
Now, Smith swears she is “trying to find the solutions” and says she will campaign to remain in the country. Good for her. But this is a mess exclusively of her making — and she absolutely should not be leading the “Remain” campaign.The lying evil turd is doing that to destroy it.
Smith has always been a populist-libertarian, but she morphed into something altogether different during the pandemic. Convinced that Canada was sliding into autocracy, she came to see her home province as the only sane and safe place.
She detailed her shift on a private, paywalled social media community; in her newsletter; on her podcast; and in townhalls and events held across the province.
A prime example is her “Alberta First Initiative,” a manifesto for how Alberta could become “the bitcoin mining hub of the world,” delivered at a cryptocurrency conference in 2022. She’s just copying Trump, her hero. She loves him so much, I worry she’s also a pedophile and or sex trafficker, she’s sadistic enough.
She imagined a society where any and everything — wages, taxes, oil and gas royalties — could be paid for by bitcoin, instead of the Canadian dollar. The province would greenlight as many data centres to mine bitcoin as possible. All the province would need to do, she wrote, is build “eight 500 MW natural gas power plants … in each region of the province and turned them into bitcoin mining hubs.”
Why? Because “central banks are bankrupt. It is only a matter of time before they collapse,” Smith wrote, citing a talk from billionaire pro-Trump oligarch Peter Thiel.Nazi who is now running away from Nazi USA to Nazi Argentina, haven for Nazis the world no longer wants
It’s all economic quackery, of course. Smith’s is just a modern take on those who want to return to paying for goods and services with gold coins.
“This is what Alberta sovereignty can look like,” she proclaimed. “He who holds the gold makes the rules.”
That is the vision of Alberta Smith was selling to her growing base of fans, frustrated with the federal government — or at least her caricature of it.
“Albertans are looking for something bold and Ottawa is an oppressive force we can’t seem to escape,” Smith wrote.
A lot of her verbiage is like this. The status quo is “dependence and bondage.” Canada is “one of the most oppressive regimes in the world” and “a nation of one-man rule,” under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Ottawa has become “so hostile toward Alberta,” and such an “existential threat,” that “I don’t want them to make the decisions on anything to do with us anymore.”
In the near term, as COVID lockdowns continued, she argued this would mean internal exile, akin to living in the USSR. She cited Czech dissident Vaclav Havel as an inspiration, writing that Albertans ought to form small groups “free from the snitch lines and terrorizing of the authoritarian regime.” She shared a link to a survivalist blog which argued that this “parallel society” would be necessary to avoid a government plot to create “cybernetic transhuman organisms through genome modification and technological implantation.”
In the longer term, Smith always maintained that her preference was for Alberta to become a nation-within-a-nation, like Quebec.
@LindaMcQuaig:
Quebec sovereigntist movement has deep linguistic & cultural roots, but Alberta’s separatist movement has been shaped & nurtured by corporate interests – indeed foreign corporate interests.
@TomPark1n:
Strikes me that Alberta separatism has been significantly amplified by US corporations and their UCP friends for the purpose of extracting more of Albertans’ non-renewable resources with as little benefit to Albertans as possible and leaving them paying for the mess
Smith insisted that turning Alberta into a bitcoin utopia is just step one. “Ultimately, once we have firmly re-established our economic dominance,” she dreamed, “we can collect our own taxes, employment insurance, pension plan, police force, immigration system (we are going to need a helluva lot more people to fuel this growth) and other areas that we have allowed Ottawa to take care of for us.”
Even as she sold this vision where Alberta, technically, remains in the federation, she never actually comes out against separating. And she certainly spent a lot of time gassing up a full-on exit.
“People keep asking me about Alberta sovereignty. My view is we need to stop complaining and start doing,” she wrote at one point. Taking her inspiration from the Freedom Convoy, she declared “there is no turning back” and “the fight lies ahead.”Ya, with Putin as her boss? I don’t think the spoiled princess would like that. I expect soon as Putin gets what he wants, Smith and her separatists will find their ways out windows of tall buildings or perhaps doors of planes in flight.
She attended multiple events put on by separatists, including a 2022 meeting of the Alberta Prosperity Project, where she chatted onstage with its leader Dr. Dennis Modry. “Modry is on a mission to build a 500,000 strong movement in order to put the question of Alberta sovereignty to the people of Alberta,” she wrote. (A straw poll of the crowd showed that full independence was “the crowd favourite,” she wrote.) Modry, who steals from his family members suffering mental illness. Mr. Fucking Creep Thief. He’s reportedly not paid back the money as ordered by the judge in the case he lost.
And she shared articles promoting sovereignty, including one which argued that Canada would be legally required, under international law, to transit Alberta’s goods to the West coast: A “winning hand,” the column argued. She’s got her head up Trump’s orange ass.
All of this is what Smith says she believes. She iterated that last month at the Cornerstone Forum, dominated by separatists, where she suggested that Ottawa was going to start rounding up Christians and accused it of suppressing supposedly life-saving alternative treatments during COVID-19. (Which was “immoral, unethical, and possibly criminal,” she wrote in 2022.)
And we’re supposed to trust her to lead the campaign to remain in Canada? I learned when she interviewed me with Encana way back when, about the company illegally frac’ing my community’s drinking water aquifers, that she’s just a lying sleazy untrustworthy polluter pimp. Then, when she fucked her own by crossing the floor leaving her Wildrose to fuck themselves she reaffirmed that for me. Nothing’s changed, except now she also pimps for rapist pedophile Trump.
Smith, it’s worth noting, does get things right — including things that we, or at least I, got wrong. She was onside, all along, in thinking that Canadian energy exports could have helped Europe better quit Russian energy before and after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She rightly called out some of the most absurd anti-COVID measures that amounted to total theatre. And she was correct that the vilification of unvaccinated people ended up being counterproductive.
But for her few Ws, she has so many more Ls.
She has fawned over far-right Republican Governor Ron DeSantis (“my hero”) and anti-vaccine quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. She lapped up pro-Russian propaganda from a host of obviously unreliable sources, including a Holocaust denial blog.Ya, for an intelligent human she is mighty stupid, and getting more stupid by the minute
Her genuine grievances are what make her incredible beliefs seem credible. Her many crackpot plans — an Alberta of many resplendent bitcoin mining rigs; a magic pipeline fairy delivering a conduit to tidewater; an autonomous Alberta with a direct line to a free, prosperous, democratic Nazi mass murdererUnited States of America — have fallen apart. So, naturally, those who wanted magic solutions are chasing the ultimate mirage: Sovereignty.
Many observers compare Smith to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, a tragic figure who thought he could kill the Brexit movement — and extract concessions from Europe — by putting it to a vote.
That’s too charitable to Smith. She is far more like Nigel Farage, a politician who told the public what they wanted to hear: That leaving the EU would put money back in their pockets, that it would fund their national health service, and that it would usher in an era of unchecked freedom.
Thanks to Farage, the UK is suffering under sluggish growth, higher unemployment and declining investment.
Smith, Canada’s very own Nigel Farage, has long promised things she can never deliver. She offers only a hand-drawn map that will lead to misery. My god, the misery is already thick throughout Alberta because of Smith’s hideousness, stupidity and cruelty.
Now politicians in Alberta and Ottawa have to do the difficult work of selling a decidedly unsexy reality — one where we can’t simply exit from our problems.
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