Dispatch from the Front Line: Marco Mendicino knows a thing or two about stunts!
Why Danielle Smith can win. Why Putin can't. A Canadian military procurement "success." Poilievre's metadata, and Mendicino's multiplying mistakes.
We at The Line would like to start this week's dispatch with a confession; it's always a little exhilarating to see some random stranger reading one's work in the wild. Writing is an insular profession, and we admit that we are still both gratified and amazed to see signs that actual people besides our immediate friends and family are reading our rambles.
We received such a sign on Thursday. One of your Line editors happened to be travelling through Ottawa for an event over the week. On her way home, she stumbled upon some random dude sitting in the Ottawa airport reading Andrew Potter's latest column on his phone.
So, she did what any self-respecting writer would; she nonchalantly took a seat at a table kitty-corner to the Line fan and began snapping pictures of him to send to her fellow editor, journalist friends, husband, and mother. "Look, look, this dude is reading The Line!" she texted in an entirely normal and not-stalkerish kind of way.
In order to celebrate the event, we at The Line would like to offer this reader a free annual subscription. If you are said person, please send us a note at lineeditor@protonmail.com; tell us about what time you were at the Ottawa airport, and what restaurant you were eating at while reading Potter's column, and we'll gift you a sub.
Please enjoy this week’s dispatch video.
And the podcast version! Enjoy that, too!
With our uplifting note and cheerful video out of the way, now on to the news. Of course all of our attention was on Alberta this week as Canada's best long-running soap opera of a province picked Danielle Smith to be its premier. More specifically, the UCP selected Smith to replace Jason Kenney and she will be sworn in as premier on Thursday. She is expected to serve in that role until the next election is called, by May 2023 at the latest.
We've already spent quite a lot of time talking about Smith, and, in particular, her signature proposal, the Sovereignty Act, in this fine newsletter. If you are not familiar with Smith's background in Alberta's political scene, we're not going to enlighten you at this time because to go over this woman's backstory would take more room than a dispatch blurb would allow. To sum it up, her ascension to premier is a comeback story worthy of daytime TV. And not even the good telenovelas, either; we're talking Passions. We're expecting a witch and a talking puppet named Timmy to show up in the provincial legislature any moment now.
Anyway, the Twitterverse was predictably baffled, outraged, confused, depressed, etc. by Smith's win. We think Ken Boessenkool did a fine job summing up the sentiment of the hour in his Friday column, Premier Smith is a kamikaze mission aimed at the UCP, conservatism and Alberta. Noting, gently, that Boessenkool also worked for one of Smith's leadership competitors, we have to admit that we don't entirely share his pessimism.
The next election is a long way away in uncertain and bizarre times, and Smith's defeat to NDP leader Rachel Notley is by no means assured. The absurdity of the Sovereignty Act aside, Smith is often underestimated. She's a deft politician with a talent for speaking — and also for listening. She is in that way a big departure from Kenney, and may prove far more able to unite her caucus than her critics expect. The macroeconomic factors general will generally favour Conservatives in the coming few months.
If Smith can hold the reins of power for the next few months, avoid getting dragged into secessionist talk, and offer effective reforms in health care and economics without totally spooking the business community, she might be able to pull the UCP's disastrous first term out of the fire. After all, the NDP has its own blindspots. If the province's progressive movement gets sucked into re-litigating COVID, is cast as oil-and-gas haters, or tarred with a too-friendly connection with the reviled Trudeau regime, well, Smith may be able to create an argument against Notley.
On the flip side, Smith has been a public figure for decades. As Boessenkool noted, she has a long history of siding with quackery, and the oppo file on her must be as heavy as three bricks on Jupiter. If she can't surround herself with disciplined, sane staffers and supporters, it's not going to be hard to paint Smith as a fruitcake whose ideas flirt with secessionism.
In short, we don't rule out any outcome at this juncture of history. While we understand perfectly why so many conservatives would be dismayed by this outcome, we're also not convinced that a Notley win would be disastrous for Alberta. Notley is the last premier to serve a full term since Alison Redford, and she ran a competent ship comparatively free of scandal and graft.
In short, the coming Alberta election is going to be fascinating and we at The Line — particularly its Alberta contingent — expect to be wallowing in the political drama like pigs in shit.