Danielle Smith's Bridges to Terabithia

Enter Danielle Smith. A middling Alberta premier who has continued the glorious multi-generational march of draining provincial coffers to keep the province from building itself into something decent. American companies and investors have deeply integrated themselves into the Alberta Oil and Gas sector - many of whom are in/directly responsible for dumping unwanted oil wells while taking the profits.

What makes Smith exceptional, would be her near titanic capacity for corruption. From the Corrupt Care scandals, the disarming of the Office of the Ethics Commissioner and Elections Alberta, to an open ended effort to gerrymander electoral boundaries to a province already skewed in favour for arguably 20-25% minority rural voters, Smith continues to push forward shamelessly.

What amazing destination does Smith have left to sell for her best customers? A referendum about referendum, and a Memorandum of Understanding with the Federal Government. She is literally selling Bridges for griefers in Alberta who still somehow imagine that the National Energy Program was some kind of foul play, and are haunted by the images of Trudeau and Carney chasing them through Terabithia.

In order to understand how we got to this con, we have to appreciate the challenges confronting Canada and the world. PM Carney’s Davos speech, the end of the old order speech, was an explicit expression of the understanding that the strategy for doing business in the world had changed. Countries once relied on a global set of rules for trade. There’s less need to diversify an economy broadly for self-reliance when the global system via the US and US currency can open up products and services.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

We the world were happy to fall into this symbiotic arrangement because the US market was expected to remain open, and individual countries could pursue competitive advantages by focusing on certain sectors.

What no one expected in Trump, was the US destroying the very symbiotic arrangement that pulled in the world’s best products, services, and minds. The US imposed tariffs against countries around the world, became antagonistic towards international institutions like the UN and the ICC, and basically destroyed energy and chemical production out of the Strait of Hormuz.

The US has successfully broken the very system that supports its own superpower capabilities and capacity. In the face of such a suicidal, and probably now fascist neighbour, Canada must literally rebuild itself with a war like posture for reliable supply chains. We are talking about re-establishing ties around the US, and repositioning Canada to fill a production void left by the US-Israel-Iran conflict.

We are now in a race. Every deke, and every tactic is to climb at each other to fill this void. Our primary competitors are Russia and the Middle East, and our ball and chain - as it always has been - is the US.

Danielle Smith’s been selling Canadians Bridges to Terabithia, and we’re seeing all of its madness into no where. Depending on who has done the polling, there may be up to 27% of Albertans who claim support for separation. But there’s also a portion of this group that wishes to move towards some kind of fascist monolithic state, tacitly and expressly stated by one of its leaders, Mitch Sylvestre. Even if we give some of the separatist movement the benefit of the doubt, and we remove the racist and fascist portion, we’re still left with a dangerous group that is responsible for the Electoral List Data Leak - one of the worst data leaks in the history of Canada. So whether Alberta remains or leaves Canada, the separatists have done real harm to Albertans. We cannot tell the extent of this harm for probably years to come.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-separatism-janet-brown-mitch-sylvestre-9.7178496

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/anti-racism-watchdog-field-complaint-arising-from-immigration-comments-made-at-separatist-town-hall

At what point will the rural Albertan voter realize that their power is probably at its maximum in Canada - that this minority group of 20-25% of Albertans are literally holding the other 75% and the Alberta and Canadian economy hostage. This vocal, overpowered Albertan minority is carrying out a violence to the majority of Albertans who don’t want anything to do with separation. When will these rural voters realize that everyone’s been watching them speak to a fence post for the last 6 months.

Analysis: There's no road map for where Alberta's riding boundary controversy is headed next

CBC’s Jason Markusoff follows up with the UCP Gerrymandering campaign, bringing us the details behind the majority and minority reports, and how the UCP are setting the stage for politicians to redraw the ridings.

If anything, I disagree with the headline, and I say that the road map is absolutely in full colour with legends attached. Canadians understand that politicians are always motivated to change goal posts in their favour. Even a layperson will understand that an absolute priority is to reduce the effort it takes for a politician’s voters to get them re-elected, and to ensure the process repeats in their favour over and over again.

In a farcical universe, if a politician could choose to have 1 vote count as 5000, provided they had absolute understanding of how to manipulate that 1 vote, and the world accepted this arrangement, they would choose this universe. Hence there are norms in place - voluntary by design - in the assumption that the politician would not willingly destroy personal credibility to interfere with the Process designed to build and maintain Legitimacy.

Here the UCP are indeed attacking that Process, and in turn reveal that Legitimacy does not matter to them. Danielle Smith’s UCP are engaged in Institutional Combat. They are prepared to maintain and defend any system to hold power. On the other hand, the UCP will attack and destroy any system that is perceived to be a hurdle to power.

Smith has blown by political norms elsewhere, becoming the first Alberta premier to repeatedly use the notwithstanding clause, using legislation to nullify a court challenge to the referendum that separatists are pursuing, and even passing a law to make sure a former minister couldn’t name his fledgling party “Progressive Conservative.”

I would add to this list how the UCP have disarmed the Office of the Ethics Commissioner, Elections Alberta, and interfered with the Office of the Auditor General.

As hard as it may be to hear, the map charts a course to fascism.