Western Standard - May 31, 2023


'Hey Premier Smith! Don’t blink!'

Topics
Danielle Smith election and legacy
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Ralph Klein Jason Kenney Notley Lawrence DeCore
MPC Daily Market Update May 30, 2023 The Pipeline： The UCP won. Now what？

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

189.91

Word count

1,028

Sentence count

63

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Danielle Smith is Alberta s new premier, and she has a mandate from the people of Alberta. But what will it take for her to continue down the path of reform that Ralph Klein took in the early 90s?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 and I'm sure she's getting it from all directions.
00:00:02.740 My advice, though, to Premier Danielle Smith.
00:00:06.040 So, Danielle Smith, I mean, she's gone against all conventional wisdom and political advice. 1.00
00:00:10.480 She's defied and ignored polls, pundits, and academics that all predicted her political demise, 0.99
00:00:16.720 and in dismissing those naysayers, she's found herself elected as Alberta's premier of the majority government
00:00:21.620 at her disposal, albeit a reduced one.
00:00:25.000 Now, the night of the election, Danielle Smith invoked the late Ralph Klein 0.97
00:00:30.080 in referencing what was called his miracle on the prairie,
00:00:32.980 and she wasn't drawing an unfair parallel.
00:00:35.440 The similarities between the 1993 general election won by Klein
00:00:39.040 and the 2023 election in Alberta are remarkable when you look at them.
00:00:43.540 When Klein took the reins of the Progressive Conservative Party in the early 1990s,
00:00:47.780 their party was in serious trouble.
00:00:50.100 It was polling down at sometimes as low as 20% against Lawrence DeCore's liberals,
00:00:53.980 and many were declaring the PCs as electorally dead in the water.
00:00:58.780 The elites, of course, and the chattering classes dismissed Klein as an uneducated bumpkin
00:01:03.240 who stumbled his way into the premiership and would become a little more than a footnote
00:01:06.760 in political history.
00:01:08.540 Voters, though, they felt otherwise and gave Ralph Klein a reduced majority government
00:01:12.360 on June 15, 1993.
00:01:15.000 The Alberta establishment, of course, they were aghast, but at least somewhat humbled.
00:01:18.560 Now we come all the way up to 2022, and we've got the governing UCP,
00:01:23.640 and they were polling as low as 22% under the leadership of Jason Kenney.
00:01:27.400 That led to the end of Kenney, and among a number of things.
00:01:30.020 And when Kenney was replaced by Danielle Smith, the usual establishment suspects
00:01:33.740 were all but confident this would be the beginning of the end of the UCP's reign in government.
00:01:38.780 There's no way a leader with such a controversial history as Smith could turn around the fortunes
00:01:42.760 of a party in such trouble, right?
00:01:45.080 Well, Smith proved her detractors wrong and pulled a reduced majority win from what was
00:01:50.020 the most personal and negative provincial campaign in living memory.
00:01:54.500 And while she may have fewer seats than the 1993 PC's did under Klein, she actually has
00:02:00.180 a larger segment of popular support.
00:02:01.940 I mean, Ralph Klein won 44.5% support in 1993.
00:02:05.940 Smith's UCP took 52.6% of the electorate.
00:02:09.000 Her opponents can no longer claim she doesn't have a mandate from Albertans.
00:02:14.220 Now, if Premier Smith wants to continue down a Klein-like path, she needs to take another 0.99
00:02:19.460 one of his favorite sayings to heart.
00:02:21.960 Don't blink.
00:02:23.860 The election might be behind Smith right now, but her opponents are far from gone.
00:02:28.140 Notley's remaining as the leader of the NDP for now, which ensures the negative tone of
00:02:32.000 the opposition against Smith is going to continue.
00:02:34.460 Legacy media is as biased as ever against Smith, and they're going to pan every move
00:02:39.020 she makes.
00:02:40.180 Just the other morning, I listened to a local talk radio station begin its newscasts saying,
00:02:45.460 Notley's NDP wins the largest opposition ever.
00:02:48.840 Since when is the second place celebrated in a two-party system?
00:02:53.900 You know, a two-party system.
00:02:55.060 They won't even give Smith a win in headlines when she just had a literal win. 0.98
00:02:58.960 I mean, you mentioned that the NDP won the largest opposition after you mentioned the
00:03:04.300 UCP won a majority, but not in the media environment of today.
00:03:09.380 Unions, academics, and media will all oppose Smith's every move, just as they did with Klein.
00:03:14.620 There's going to be people within Smith's own party.
00:03:16.140 They're going to get nervous.
00:03:17.720 And as her opposition to her policy starts mounting, they're going to put pressure on
00:03:21.660 her.
00:03:22.080 She needs to ignore her opponents and reassure her allies.
00:03:25.480 Most of all, though, or again, she can't blink.
00:03:29.240 Klein was counseled to back down as he put Alberta's finances back in order.
00:03:33.220 He was told by the experts he was moving too far or too fast.
00:03:36.420 He was upsetting the apple cart, and surely he'd be punished at the polls.
00:03:40.260 He didn't blink, though.
00:03:41.680 And political pundits assured us he'd be punished dearly in the next election.
00:03:44.720 Well, in 1997, Ralph Klein increased his majority with another 11 seats on top of that, and took
00:03:49.980 51% of the popular vote.
00:03:52.180 Ignore the experts.
00:03:53.320 Don't blink.
00:03:53.900 Smith has a mandate, and she needs to pursue it.
00:03:57.200 She can't succumb to the temptation to pull the political reform band-aid off slowly through
00:04:02.140 minor incremental policy changes.
00:04:05.000 For one thing, her opponents are going to go wild no matter what she does, even if they're
00:04:08.260 minor changes.
00:04:08.860 So you've got nothing to lose in going for the big ones.
00:04:11.040 Secondly, that's how Jason Kenney tried to govern, and look how well that turned out.
00:04:15.500 Albertans are willing to embrace positive political changes, even if it comes to the health
00:04:19.800 system and the pension plan.
00:04:21.320 Smith needs to bring about all these reforms quickly, and to offer no quarter to her opponents 1.00
00:04:25.440 in her work.
00:04:26.440 Changes need to be made in the first two years in power so the results can be measured in
00:04:30.720 the second two years before she faces the electorate again.
00:04:33.620 She can't let the civil servants, union heads, or even her own advisors slow roll her mandate. 0.94
00:04:37.980 Hesitation will be her undoing.
00:04:40.400 Premier Smith isn't showing any indications of being a shrinking violet in office.
00:04:44.420 I don't expect her to tiptoe around with policy.
00:04:47.360 I mean, Smith's historical biggest mistake ever, though, was to crumble under strong headwinds
00:04:51.540 and led the disastrous floor crossing from the Wild Rose Party to the Progressive Conservatives
00:04:56.180 with Under Prentice in 2014.
00:04:58.360 The pressure got to her back then, and she sought an escape hatch.
00:05:01.700 Now, Daniel Smith's been given a second political life that nobody would have expected of her
00:05:05.460 for her after that catastrophic lapse in judgment in 2014.
00:05:10.280 She's clearly learned a lot since then.
00:05:12.400 Let's hope, though, she's absorbed the most important lesson of all, especially when you're
00:05:15.860 getting tired of swimming upstream.
00:05:17.880 Don't blink.
00:05:18.880 You can become a Western Standard member for just $10 a month or $99 a year for unlimited
00:05:24.140 access.