2 weeks Ago By Rick Bell
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is not shutting up because people who call her a traitor want her to shut up. On Thursday, Smith has something more to say to Albertans and the rest of Canada. “Rhetoric that amps up Canadians to encourage a brawl with our biggest trading partner is irresponsible and will hurt Canadians and their businesses.
” Well, there has been a lot of rhetoric flying around since late last year when a weakling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Donald Trump and the U.S. president mocked him almost every chance he got from that day forward.
As the last column pointed out , the non-stop mocking by Trump was peppered with many references to Canada as the 51st state and, though even the Liberals wrote it off as a joke, more and more Canadians got scared. The poll number for the Liberals started going up as the anxiety increased. The ruling party knew a wave of fear when they saw one and decided to ride that wave to what is now seen as a possible majority government.
None of it was real. The trade dispute is real. The pain it is causing in parts of Canada is very real.
There are tariffs on vehicles and steel and aluminum. That is real. We will be in danger of losing our Canadian citizenship or could even be taken over by military force.
That is not real. That is “rhetoric that amps up Canadians.” Smith says we now have an opportunity.
An opportunity to do what? “We now have an opportunity to turn down the temperature and shift our focus to removing or significantly reducing the remaining tariffs in place.” In other words, focus on the real-life situation on the ground, not some torqued-up fantasy of national destruction designed to convince Canadians to run to the Liberals, the party who discovered the way their path to victory was to wrap themselves in the Canadian flag after years of thumbing their nose at patriotism. Smith is not done.
The premier, in a statement some in the press may not have in their possession, says Canadians should be talking about “undoing the disastrous Liberal anti-resource policies that have made our country economically weak, vulnerable and overly-dependent on one customer.” There shouldn’t be any disagreement there but, when one pollster finds a whole lot more Canadians think Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is more likely to divide the country than Liberal Leader Mark Carney, you have to wonder who spiked the Kool-Aid in the rest of Canada. If Carney and the Liberals win, and especially with a majority of House of Commons seats, heads will explode in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
I’m seriously thinking of going into the heartland of Alberta in the days after the election if the Liberals win, just to take the political temperature..
