Danielle Smith: she shoots, she scores

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/06/2023 (894 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s begin our twice-weekly ritual with a skill-testing question.

Is it smart politics for a provincial premier to guarantee the local NHL team will not move to the United States? In Politics 101, you may never get an easier question. If your response is that no, it is not smart politics to do what it takes to keep the team, you may be stuck inside an NDP mind.

Rachel Notley continues to be the opposition leader in Alberta because her instincts were as poor as those of you who offer the wrong answer to my question.

Days before the official kickoff of the Alberta provincial election campaign, the United Conservative Party premier, Danielle Smith, made an important announcement, where she was joined by the mayor of Calgary and representatives of the Calgary Flames.

She announced financial support for a new home for the NHL team, not in Houston, which is where the team could be moved if it were sold, a sale that would have made a killing for the owners of the Flames. It would also kill morale in the city of Calgary and any mayor or premier could suffer collateral damage.

But for all the foolish things that Smith has said on broadcasts and podcasts and other platforms, things that built a very strong brand for her in rural Alberta, this political survivor fired a game-winning slapshot with the announcement that the Flames would have a palatial new home in the heart of Calgary. Fair-minded people will look back on the recent campaign and say that Smith won it with that big play. And the only way that her opponent could have neutralized the announcement was to endorse the deal.

But unlike Smith, Notley had no game-winning slapshot in her tool kit. The leader of Alberta’s NDP, when asked about the deal, said she couldn’t say yes or no before further study, and in the ensuing days, decided to take a traditional position. She didn’t like the idea of government doing secret deals putting the people’s money into the bank account of a billionaire.

If you want to have the moral high ground in the NDP ecosystem, which always includes union leaders, academics and sanctimonious political pundits, Notley’s position is a winner. But outside of NDP world, to hockey fans in Calgary, Notley had laid an egg bigger than a Zamboni.

Look, I get that she picked up seats in Calgary and NDPers declared a moral victory.

I’m old school when it comes to wins and losses. A win is forming government.

When your opponent does that, it means you lost. The term “moral victory” is most frequently employed by those who are much too casual about losing.

I have never interviewed a superstar athlete who did not hate losing much more than they loved winning. Notley lost the election by trying to seize the moral high ground on the issue of public subsidies going to a hockey barn. If you’re reading this with NDP eyes and feel I’m being cold-heartedly conservative, please allow me to pour salt in the wound.

Since hitching my wagon to a Western Canadian star 40 years ago, there is no retail politician I have admired more than former Manitoba premier Gary Doer. His instincts were razor-sharp.

He proved it in his first term, which began in 1999. Hoping to secure a second term, he was good with pumping over a hundred million public dollars into a new Winnipeg downtown arena. A critic in 2001, Todd Scarth, wrote, “Doer heard a ghostly voice that said, ‘If you build it, you will get to cut the ribbon just months before you go to the polls.’ And so build it they will.”

And Doer did. And he blew away the PCs in the 2003 election and again in 2007.

If Doer had faced the question about whether or not he would support a deal with the Calgary Flames, he simply would have said that he would back the democratically elected Calgary mayor and council who were enthusiastically supporting the deal with municipal tax dollars.

Smith is a very fortunate politician. She wasn’t facing a Gary Doer this past Monday. And if the Alberta premier survives the alligator-infested swamp of UCP politics for the next four years, she will face either Notley or someone else with NDP instincts — not Doer’s horse sense.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com