O n a Saturday morning in February, Danielle Smith took questions from Albertans for forty-six minutes during her weekly radio talk show, Your Province. Your Premier.
One of the first callers asked if a prohibition on the sale of raw milk could be eliminated now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the prominent vaccine skeptic who is US health secretary, may open sales south of the border. Smith told him, “[For] anything that we see in the United States changing, we’re going to have to assess our own policies here.”
Another listener asked—this time by text—about Energy East, the long-dormant plan for a pipeline that could carry 1.1 million barrels of crude oil per day to refineries in eastern Canada. Smith said its time has come, and proposed five possible pipelines that could run east, west, and north from Alberta.
A fourth-generation farmer wondered about a tariff exemption for beef and grain. Smith told him that she thought it was doable.
Smith was in her element: listening, validating, promising to look into things, no matter how shocking the request. (Raw milk—milk that has not been pasteurized—may harbour dangerous germs like salmonella, E. coli, and listeria.)
Over the first two months of 2025, Canadians got a taste of Smith’s propensity for the unpredictable. First, she flew to Florida in the last days of the Biden administration for an unscheduled meeting with president-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort—a visit organized by Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman and Trump supporter who’d once offered to invest a million dollars in Alberta’s oil patch if then premier Rachel Notley, of the New Democratic Party, stepped down.
Next, Smith refused to sign a joint statement with other premiers in response to Trump’s threat of 25 percent tariffs on Canadian products. “I campaigned on putting Alberta first, and this is what it looks like,” she told Postmedia. She went on a solo mission to Washington for Trump’s inauguration and came back calling for Canada to name a border czar and a fentanyl czar—ideas that later made their way into Canadian policy and may have helped get a thirty-day reprieve on Trump’s tariffs.
In early February, back to Washington she went, this time flying the “Team Canada” colours with the rest of the premiers and claiming she’s been wearing the jersey all along.
None of this was a surprise to Albertans, who have come to expect the outrageous from their premier. She has built her career on never saying no to a wacky idea, so long as it’s one that will win the hearts of at least some of her constituents, many of whom live on the far right of the political spectrum. The NDP used to mock Smith as capricious—their ads in the 2023 Alberta election depicted her head on a weathervane. Smith won with a majority.
The what-will-she-do-next theme is part of Smith’s appeal, a political chameleon who is always open to ideas, even when they are bananas. “We were worried she was crazy, and now she seems crazy like a fox,” says Janet Brown, a pollster in Alberta. “And that seems to be the right balance.” Brown points out that it’s been twenty months since the last Alberta election, and Smith’s numbers haven’t slipped. “That’s sort of outstanding,” she says. “I think a lot of people are just shocked by the fact that she can maintain this level of popularity when she keeps defying the norms of what you would expect a successful politician to do.”
I n 1998, Smith entered politics with a successful bid to join the Calgary Board of Education as a conservative member, even though she was neither an educator nor a parent. One year later, the learning minister—as the education minister was then called—found the board dysfunctional and disbanded it.
By then, Smith had drawn the attention of the Calgary Herald ’s management and joined the paper’s editorial board, where she wrote columns on everything from the value of the Canadian dollar to what she saw as the overhyped dangers of smoking. She became the host of a current affairs TV show on Global Television, where she met producer David Moretta, whom she married in 2006. The pair opened a diner in an old railway car in High River, a town seventy kilometres south of Calgary. (As premier, Smith once posted a photo of herself working a weekend shift in the restaurant after the dishwasher broke down. That same month, the restaurant was listed for sale. It is still available for purchase.)
Her staunch conservatism appealed to the team behind the Wildrose Party, a right-wing party with deep rural routes. Smith won the party’s leadership in 2009 and, by 2012, posed a major risk to the reigning Alberta Progressive Conservatives, then in their fifth decade in power. Smith lost, tripped up by the kind of things that she herself called “bozo eruptions,” such as a fellow Wildroser’s speech that gay people would burn in a “lake of fire.” With her party’s popularity plummeting, Smith and eight other members crossed the floor in December 2014 to join the Progressive Conservatives. Smith was not selected to be the party’s candidate in her riding the following year.
She joined CHQR, a Calgary talk radio channel, where she spent three hours every day listening and chatting to Albertans. She was willing to go down almost any rabbit hole—questioning vaccines, doubting climate change, flirting with Alberta sovereigntists without quite calling for the province to leave.
She was always happy to speak to groups that otherwise felt ignored. That mattered in Alberta, especially rural regions, where people believed their needs were ignored by city-focused politicians, and in corporate Calgary, where many argued that their major economic driver—the oil-and-gas industry—was slowed down by Ottawa.
“She’s a really good communicator,” says Shannon Phillips, a partner at Meredith Boessenkool & Phillips and a former NDP cabinet minister in Alberta. “That doesn’t imply virtue or morality or any of these things. It is simply that she is very good at communicating her perspective.”
In 2021, after then premier Jason Kenney called for limited vaccine mandates, Smith jumped back into politics. She’d flown down to the US to get a Johnson & Johnson vaccine, avoiding the two-shot mRNA vaccines—she said she was bad with needles, the CBC reported—that she felt were unfairly pushed on Albertans. Kenney’s support plummeted because of unhappiness over how he was managing COVID-19. He announced he was stepping down, and Smith set her sights on the leadership of the United Conservative Party. By fall 2022, she was premier.
S mith is sometimes compared to Trump, who also led a dramatic lurch to the far right for his party while tossing science out the window and who often seemed headed for a political graveyard. They both say things out loud that would have been unimaginable a decade ago and are comfortable around far-right figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.
If Smith has been constant about anything over her career, it is this: she is an impassioned cheerleader for Alberta’s oil-and- gas industry. Albertans of all political stripes will tell you that the industry is undervalued by the rest of Canada. Ideas for pipelines running east and west across the country came and went; all were killed but for the Trans Mountain pipeline (which, as many left-of-centre politicos point out, was a project accomplished by Notley and Justin Trudeau). Without the ability to stretch nationally, Alberta focused its economic growth south. According to Statistics Canada, Canadian businesses and workers earned nearly $150 billion from oil and gas exports to the US in 2022. That’s more than five times higher than any other sector.
“It’s the source of her political support within Alberta,” says Lisa Young, professor of political science at the University of Calgary. “People who might not be enthusiastic about other dimensions of her ideology or her approach to politics will look the other way, because being an effective advocate for oil and gas is the number one requirement for a premier of Alberta from the point of view of the industry.”
What’s at stake now for Alberta is huge. Energy accounts for one quarter of the province’s gross domestic product and almost the same share of its revenue, points out Gary Mar, president of the Canada West Foundation and Alberta’s former representative in the US. “This is a serious issue for Alberta. . . . That’s the reason why she’s willing to be so aggressive in defending it.”
So far, Smith’s tried-and-true strategy of listening to all the crazy ideas and never being afraid to be the odd woman out hasn’t blown up. She’s said that her strategy has had the opposite effect, that it was her work in Washington—her careful listening to the people around Trump about what he wanted—that led to changes in border security and fentanyl control and, perhaps, ultimately a delay in tariffs and a reduced tariff for Canadian energy. “She probably has better connections into Trump’s movement than, I would hazard a guess, any other Canadian politician,” says Young.
Still, Smith is facing a growing political crisis at home: allegations that government officials pushed the provincial health authority to make deals favouring private businesses. Cabinet minister Peter Guthrie resigned at the end of February, saying he is concerned with the government’s procurement practices. On March 6, the RCMP launched a formal investigation into potential interference and conflict of interest at Alberta Health Services. It remains to be seen whether this will affect Smith’s career.
And it’s impossible to predict what Smith will do if she’s unhappy with events south of the border over the next few months, or if the federal government decides to impose an export tax on oil. “Where would Danielle Smith’s loyalties [be] at that point and how many Albertans would she bring with her with those loyalties? There, I think, is where much of the risk lies,” says Young.
No other premier in Alberta’s history has pushed more heavily for decentralization, passing a bill called Alberta Sovereignty with a United Canada Act and proposing that Alberta leave the Canada Pension Plan. Smith is on Team Canada now, but there’s an asterisk to her willingness to play. She’s clear about putting Alberta’s interests first.
As her Saturday show wound down, Smith listened to one caller’s concern about fluoride in water and another’s fears about what would happen to two kitten cougars after their mother was killed by a hunter. One told her that they wished Smith were prime minister.
“I’m glad I’m not prime minister,” Smith said. “I don’t spend one minute thinking about how to win votes in Toronto or Montreal. I wake up thinking about how to win votes and represent my people of Alberta.”
