“Albertans have had just about enough of this!” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told Jordan Peterson near the start of an hour-and-a-half-long interview posted online two weeks ago.
Well, calling it an “interview” is generous: The good doctor fails to challenge Ms. Smith on any of her sometimes misleading characterizations of Alberta’s plight, and he frequently goes on extended monologues about his own usual stable of cultural issues. But between his tirades, Ms. Smith was able to squeeze in some red meat for her base, including laying out her criticism that Ontario and Quebec are happy to sap the wealth of oil-producing Alberta, yet stand in the way of the province’s attempts to produce those same resources.
“The past seven years have been a catastrophe in our relationship with the federal government, and as a result, we have to take some dramatic steps in order to save Confederation, to get the country working as it was originally intended to work,” she says.
If we were to judge solely by her statements, Ms. Smith hasn’t exactly pivoted from her trademark strident rhetoric since becoming premier. On matters of actual policy, however, much of what she has done since then has been rather milquetoast – and at odds with the aggressiveness of her words.