Like her hero Donald Trump, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has always understood that populist movements like her United Conservative Party are based more on tribal identity than serious policy.
Indeed, from the UCP’s breakup of Alberta Health Services in revenge for enforcing public health policy during the pandemic, to its decision to interfere in municipal government to eliminate bike lanes, to its coyly racist anti-immigration referenda, to its attack on that tiniest of minorities, trans kids, no government in this province’s history has shown it is less serious about public policy.
These fascist tropes – and I use that particular F-word advisedly – are all about reinforcing identity and solidarity among the UCP’s always restive MAGA base, lest it turns on the premier.
This is not to say that unserious UCP policies are not dangerous. No policy could be less serious or more dangerous than Ms. Smith’s sly enabling of Alberta separatism as a mechanism to shore up the UCP as standard bearer of her party’s angry base of convoy-adjacent conspiracy cultists while maintaining enough deniability to keep sufficient numbers of inattentive traditional conservatives on side come voting day.
Since the Alberta NDP has essentially morphed into a progressive conservative party under Rachel Notley and Naheed Nenshi, Ms. Smith and her closest advisors have also turned to Red baiting that echoes U.S. President Trump’s increasingly desperate efforts to label his Democrat opposition as Communists. As in the United States, there is essentially no organized political Left in Alberta. So, one supposes, this dishonest tactic can be effective for low-information voters who have no real socialist party to compare to the Alberta NDP. And that includes the soft environmentalists of the federal NDP under Avi Lewis, by the way, notwithstanding the UCP’s repeated efforts to cast Mr. Lewis as Mr. Nenshi’s “boss.”
Nevertheless, sometimes long spells of misrule like that Alberta has been experiencing under the UCP have a way of suddenly becoming obvious to all, prompted by a memetic moment.
Every educated person knows that it was a question directed 72 years ago at U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy – “Have you no sense of decency?” – that was the beginning of the end of that generation’s anti-communist witch hunts in the United States. This is true even if we don’t recall it was uttered by U.S. Army chief counsel Joseph Welch or realize that there is a straight line through history running from Red-baiting Senator McCarthy to his chief legal counsel, the late Roy Cohn, to Cohn’s client and confidante Donald Trump.
But if you’ve been waiting for a moment when a respectable American or Albertan would utter a memorable phrase around which an increasingly angry but still-paralytic opposition majority appalled by the MAGA manifestation in public policy could rally, we have not yet seen it on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border.
Or have we?
Thursday morning at the “Premier’s K-Days Breakfast” on the south lawn of the Alberta Legislature, a young woman confronted the premier with a number of complaints about the UCP’s maladministration, among them the government’s pro-separation policies and its assault on trans kids. (K Days, once known as Klondike Days, is Edmonton’s lame imitation of the Calgary Stampede, whence comes the apparently culturally important tradition of serving partly cooked flapjacks and cold bacon to all comers one day a year.)
“You’re a separatist! You’re a fucking separatist,” she cried out in a video-recorded encounter with the premier. “You don’t care about us! You only care about selling us out for money!”
Notwithstanding the profanity – which thanks to Mr. Trump, his ambassador to Canada, and the Alberta pickup truck brigade with their ubiquitous black flags, is now a normal part of Canadian political discourse – who can argue with her conclusion?
Yes, she is a person with a presence on social media of the sort the well-funded political right would disdainfully dismiss as that of an activist or a community organizer. And, yes, she has an Instagram account – found @mikaylaresists. The video was probably recorded by someone who agreed with her. But so what? Committed people have a right in a free society to make their grievances known in public too. To hear her is to know her outburst came from the heart.
As she was dragged away by a couple of the premier’s security officers, she memorably shouted over her shoulder: “Fuck your fascist pancakes!” (Hereafter abbreviated as FYFP.)
It resonated. By gosh, it resonated!
The response from the UCP corner, naturally, was immediate. People who have no problem with F-Trudeau and F-Carney banners flapping their way past schoolyards or goons unoriginally screeching “Lock ’er Up” about Rachel Notley were suddenly afflicted by the vapours.
Rob Anderson, the Premier’s chief of staff, who on the open sewer formerly known as Twitter has become one of Alberta’s most obnoxious pubic figures, adopted a tone of faux sympathy and righteous Red-baiting. “Mentally unsound woman brainwashed with unintelligible leftist propaganda,” Mr. Anderson thumb-typed. “Hope she’s able to get the help she needs.”
“Danielle has to put up with this kind of garbage almost every day,” his post continued. “I don’t know how she does it – especially with class.” Actually, it would seem more likely she does it with aggressive security. But if she’s going to continue her efforts to destroy our country, she’ll need to get used to people asking her uncomfortable questions at public gatherings, and yelling at her when they get the bum’s rush.
Regardless, there was something about that young woman’s emotional – but hardly mentally unsound – outburst that has the quality of a have-you-no-sense-of decency moment. She hit a chord – at once discordant and harmonic!
It’s not just me. Within hours, the Internet was awash with offers from entrepreneurial Albertans promoting FYFP t-shirts and FYFP coffee mugs. No doubt there will soon be some FYFP bumper stickers, and maybe even pickup truck flags, spelled out or merely initialized, to suit a variety of tastes in free speech.
There’s just something about FYFP that so perfectly encapsulates the current state of political affairs in Alberta that to hear it is to fully get it.
Perhaps this, and of course their Victorian sensibility about strong words, is why almost no one from the few remaining legitimate media operations still employing Alberta reporters has bothered to report it. CTV News posted a video clip on social media.
It may have been rude, dear readers, it may have been emotional, but it sure feels good to be able to express a mood felt by increasing numbers of Albertans in a memorable phrase, or merely by typing out four letters.
What do you want to bet the UCP cancels the venerable pancake breakfast next year and ever after, or restricts it to party members, vetted, scanned, patted down and paid up in full.
FYFP!
