Alberta election will provide insight into Canadian tolerance for extremism

OTTAWA—After a decade of the pursuit of power in the United States Congress and the White House, the right-wing revolution in America is now picking up new momentum at the state level, where extremist authoritarian rule-making that once would have been considered totally out of the question is becoming commonplace. As of May 1, state lawmakers across the U.S. had introduced close to 100 pieces of legislation aimed at banning all or most abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. As part of this push for what some call forced pregnancy, legislation criminalizing abortion for women or for the providers has been brought forward in 10 states. When it comes to transgender youth, some three-dozen states have attempted to restrict access to gender-affirming care. In some cases, the restrictions include criminal penalties against doctors and parents who help provide access to such care for minors. In a related campaign that some see as an attack on all LGBTQ people, there has been a Republican-led effort to limit drag shows in at least 15 states. And efforts to ban individual books from public schools and libraries in the U.S. increased by nearly 40 per cent last year, with a large proportion of the targeted titles involving protagonists of colour or dealing with issues of racism or LGBTQ themes. To cite just one example of the extremist environment at the national political level, former president Donald Trump continued last week to say the 2020 election was stolen from him and refused to express any regret for the Jan. 6, 2021, assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. He said, if re-elected, he would pardon many of the convicted rioters and insisted they were acting “with love in their heart.” From a Canadian perspective, these kinds of things seem impossible to even contemplate. But it would be a mistake to be too sure about that. In fact, there is ample and growing evidence of an unusually restive, angry spirit in Canada that, coupled with disinformation and conspiracy obsessions, is making experiments with populist extremism and once unheard-of behaviour by elected leaders more palatable. A case in point is the current Alberta election, where the context may be different than in the U.S., but where some of the same fragments of far-right, populist politics of resentment are at play in advance of the May 29 vote. United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier Danielle Smith might not support all or any of the authoritarian policies of the Republicans in the U.S., but she would still be right at home politically with many of these legislators. She is a prominent victor in the culture war born out of the rejection of COVID-19 public health measures, manufactured largely by Trump and the American right, that swept across much of North America during the pandemic. Smith made herself a champion of the anti-vaxx and convoy crowd, saying in 2022 that it was important that the convoys in Ottawa and at the Coutts, Alta., border achieve a win to thwart Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s totalitarian ambitions. The trucker occupations can be seen as Canada’s version of the 2021 riot in Washington, D.C., and Smith was in essence backing an event whose organizers were motivated to overturn the results of the recent Canadian election. She once said she refused to wear a poppy because of her conviction that the unvaccinated had been oppressed and compared vaccinated people to those who accepted Hitler’s tyranny. The allusion to tyranny is particularly telling because it is the same exaggerated nonsense about the Canadian government’s COVID restrictions used by right-wingers and conservative media in the U.S. in the outpouring of rabid anti-Trudeau vitriol there during the occupation of Ottawa. Harnessing the UCP base’s resentment of Ottawa and anger over COVID restrictions, Smith became party leader, and premier, late last year. Her most important idea was the Alberta Sovereignty Act. In that it allows Alberta to reject laws passed by the Canadian Parliament, it is again a refusal to recognize the legitimate results of the national democratic process. Although she has clammed up about it during the current election campaign, Smith has long been in favour of dismantling medicare in favour of U.S.-style private health care. Like Trump, Smith has shown no regard for the principles and guardrails designed to protect the justice system from political interference. And the Alberta premier is beholden to Take Back Alberta, a political pressure group that emerged out of the 2022 trucker blockades and whose leader says it’s an existential matter for Canada for women to be encouraged to procreate rather than pursue careers. The Alberta election is a potential watershed for Canadians, many of whom seem ready to give the kind of anger-based, hateful politics flourishing in the U.S. a try. Smith may not win, but the fact that she is even considered a legitimate candidate for premier is a stunning reminder of how off-the-wall extremist thinking has moved toward the mainstream in today’s public affairs. Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times. The Hill Times