Jen Gerson: Danielle Smith, then and now
What would Smith circa 2014 have thought about slapping a political motto on a licence plate? Actually, she told us.
By: Jen Gerson
For the life of me, I’ll never understand why licence plates are such a talker. Every generation or so, some politician catches a brainwave: by changing the provincial licence plates, they will make some kind of permanent mark on the culture of the electorate. And every time they do, the process is met with insistence that the current plates are just fine, along with sly questions about what the true motivation for the alterations may be.
Maybe it’s because we all spend too much time in traffic. Or, perhaps, we have all whiled away road trip hours seeking out the plates of foreign lands and imagining what such exotic bureaucrature tells us about distant travellers’ homes and lands.
Either way, Alberta tried this before. In 2014, back when premiers like the late Jim Prentice roamed the plain, the government sought to replace its minimalist plate with more generically pleasing images of mountains. Albertans would be able to choose from three different designs. The rationale for the change? Alberta’s plates required a new reflective coating. Further, the logos imprinted at the bottom “Wildrose Country” essentially offered free partisan advertising to the Progressive Conservative Party’s main competitor, the Wildrose Party.
The new logo would read, simply, alberta.ca.
People hated it.
Danielle Smith — then opposition leader — said Albertans will “See ... pretty clearly that it’s a transparently political move.”
Lol. What I love most about people is when they tell on themselves.
Prentice dropped the decision to redesign the plates, and 11 years later, here we are. Smith has introduced eight new designs Albertans will be able to choose from — including one that is almost identical to the current plate. (One of them is shown at the top of this column.) The only real change: again, the motto. The leader of the now-United Conservative Party wants to replace “Wildrose Country” — a reference to the province’s official flower — with “Strong and Free.” And, yes, “Strong and Free” is a motto that has legitimate historic ties both to Alberta, and to the Canadian national anthem.
It also just happens to be the motto of the United Conservative Party.
Also, and this is crucial to note, all of the new designs somehow manage to be even uglier than the ideas introduced in 2014. I mean, they’re not “new passport Corporate Memphis” art style bad. But they all feature utterly generic stock art of Alberta’s rural landscapes — and in some cases, are badly framed aesthetically. Like, if you want to feature a pumpjack and the characters of Brokeback Mountain on your licence plate, fully lean in. Don’t shunt the clip art, weirdly, to the bottom of the frame.
Back in the day, opposition leader Smith would have said something like: “[the government] missed a golden opportunity to engage with Albertans and give them a direct say in choosing how to express our collective identity.” She would have invited the province’s art community to create something truly aesthetically interesting — instead of just punching the words “alberta” “rural” and “mountains” into an AI slop generating machine and getting citizens to vote on which version of her party’s logo they liked best.
In fact, she said and did exactly this back in 2014.
But, alas, actually being in government is hard.
I was thinking about this while watching the results of the Calgary municipal election roll in this week. The province introduced legislation last year to alter how municipal elections are run and even counted.
Bill 20 created a requirement for election workers to check voters against a “permanent electors register” to confirm eligibility to vote. The additional paperwork added so much hassle to the process of voting, that electors reported waits of up to two hours as each individual was required to complete a “statement of eligibility form” at the voting station.
There was literally no reason to do this.
Despite the fact that certain factions in Alberta politics are enamoured with the fiction that our polling stations are being overrun with illegal voters — a conspiracy that allows them to play into romantic fantasies still spreading around the U.S. about Donald Trump’s stolen 2020 election — these amendments have done absolutely nothing except make it harder for ordinary Albertans to vote. The results should be a scandal in and of themselves, and veer us terrifyingly close to an outright attempt at voter suppression.
The second major shift was the UCP’s attempt to introduce changes that would ease the creation of partisan affiliations in municipal elections. And, indeed, this election was the first to introduce parties that were all-but-explicitly affiliated with both the UCP and NDP, respectively.
No normal person was actually calling for this change, of course. And the only actual reason I can think of for introducing it is that the UCP wants to build itself as a totalizing political juggernaut in the province. They’re trying to create an environment in which anyone who wants to hold office has to kiss the ring of party apparatchiks in order to gain access to voter contact lists and fundraising links.
The results of the election suggest the electorate is pretty definitively opposed to the idea. Jyoti Gondek, a creature reviled by the right, is out, but I don’t think there’s anyone to thank (or blame) for that outcome other than Gondek herself. She was always a bad fit for the job who managed to alienate people right across the political spectrum. Meanwhile neither the UCP nor the NDP’s pick for mayor won in Calgary; ward-by-ward, it doesn’t seem to me as if the party system ruled the day either way.
What’s left for me to ponder is this: why is a supposed libertarian-minded government introducing rules that make voting harder, and centralize more control in the provincial government?
I can’t answer that question except to note that the Danielle Smith of 2014 seems awfully different from the Danielle Smith of 2025. Power does that, I guess.
The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today. Please note: a donation is not a subscription, and will not grant access to paywalled content. It’s just a way of thanking us for what we do. If you’re looking to subscribe and get full access, it’s that other blue button!
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter.Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.
Im in Ontario but of course this is applicable here too. I’m so tired of the dominant provincial parties having no opposition because the opposition parties haven’t yet figured out how to throw off the weight of 2012-2022 Social Justice insanity and pick a centrist leader again.
Guys: the federal LPC did it and it worked amazingly well!! The US Dems might do it with Jamie Dimon!
The “conservative” or United Conservative or Progressive Conservative or fake-conservative parties, whatever you want to call them, aren’t going to get better on this stuff without a functioning Official Opposition and real threats at the ballot box.
Amazing how Smith is so good at making things more ideological, less efficient and more expensive, all in response to issues nobody cared about.
If only she invested that same energy into measles, funding education, diversifying the economy and delivering health care.