In her attempt to influence the federal election, Danielle Smith did something remarkably foolhardy.
During an interview with the right-wing outlet Breitbart News, the Alberta Premier said that she had urged American officials to back off on tariffs until Canada had gone to the polls, because the tough trade talk was lifting Liberal fortunes. In the same interview she touted Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre as being more “in sync” with the U.S. administration.
After a wave of criticism, Ms. Smith doubled down, telling the Alberta legislature Wednesday that “we will not be pushed around and called traitors for merely having the courage to actually do something about our nation’s and province’s predicament.” Treasonous? No. But also not courageous. Her ham-fisted intervention was a mistake, in many ways.
First, it is a long-standing principle of politics that partisanship stops at the border. This shouldn’t need to be restated, but apparently it does. Trying to get a foreign government to do something that helps one party in an election campaign is wrong.
Ms. Smith erred as well by asking for the tariff threats only to be put on hold. They need to be stopped, buried, finished – not just paused. Canadians are rightly concerned about tariffs, and Mr. Trump’s annexationist rhetoric. The U.S. going silent on the issue for a month wouldn’t affect that.
She also fundamentally misunderstands Mr. Trump. Other than his fondness for authoritarians, he sees other leaders not as potential allies but as targets for extracting concessions. Leaders from both left and right have found that their treatment does not appear linked to where they stand on the ideological spectrum.
Finally, Ms. Smith showed terrible political acumen, offering the Liberals a cudgel with which to beat Mr. Poilievre. While it’s true that a rump of his supporters poll higher than the Canadian average in favour of joining the U.S., his tent also includes the majority of Tory voters who don’t.And Mr. Poilievre has been full-throated in his denunciation of tariffs and attacks on sovereignty.
The U.S. President is perhaps the most loathed person in Canada and being associated with him is kryptonite. Just ask Wayne Gretzky. Any leader going soft on Mr. Trump would risk wiping out their party for good. For a populist, Ms. Smith seems to have little sense of the popular mood.
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