Danielle Smith & Conservative Election Shenanigans

There’s never just one cockroach

There have been two stories that have rocked Canada and the U.S. in the last couple of days.

The Editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, inadvertently became the most deeply-embedded journalist in history as Trump’s senior national security team slid into his DM’s to share their extensive planning details of war.

Goldberg read the messages in disbelief, thinking he was being subjected to some elaborate psyop or prank, until real-world events coincided with the messages he was reading from Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Marco Rubio and others. When asked about it, Trump, the Commander in Chief, had no idea what was going on.

If the Trump Presidency were a reality TV Series, it could go head to head with such dystopian zombie horror and suspense series as the Walking Dead, The Last of Us, and the Haunting of Hill House for in the Golden Globe for Series Whose Unrelenting Terror Leaves You with Harrowing Existential Dread that Lingers for Hours and Days After Viewing. (It’s a new category).

In Canada, the news broke that Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta asked the U.S. to pause tariffs - which were helping the Liberals - in order to help Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives win the election instead.

In a recent interview, I was asked about Trump’s about face where he claimed that Pierre Poilievre wasn’t MAGA and that he would rather the Liberals win.

Canadians have not been fooled by this elementary school level display of “reverse psychology” and I said that I thought the Conservatives had probably reached out to Trump to ask him to cool it.

It turns out I was right. Stephen Maher just reported:

“For weeks, the Trump problem had been top of mind for Conservative insiders. Two unrelated sources close to the CPC war room tell me that Poilievre's team had even floated going so far as trying to get a message to the White House in an attempt to persuade Trump to distance himself from Poilievre. In recent weeks, according to the sources, CPC operatives talked about trying to get Conservative MP Jamil Jivani to ask his former Yale roommate - Vice President JD Vance - to talk sense into Trump.

Poilievre's office did not reply to messages asking about those internal conversations, or whether Jivani has spoken to Vance recently.”

The idea that the only way to reach Trump was having Jamil Jivani talk to JD Vance, though they were classmates and are friends, ignores that there are plenty of people who have connections who could have done it. Stephen Harper, Conrad Black, Kevin O’Leary, or Mike Roman.

There’s a saying I learned about scandals like these: “There’s never just one cockroach”

You know, when you’re in a your kitchen and you see a cockroach, you don’t think, “Oh look at that one cockroach here all by itself, far far away from wherever it lives with its family.”

Instead, you think you have to find the nest, because there are certain to be plenty more.

I wondered how Smith’s news could possibly have leaked, only to discover that Smith herself declared it in an interview with Breitbart, which belongs to Trump’s eminence grise, Steve Bannon. (Eminence grise being French slang for one of those old guys you see in a bar who always looks super hammered and also glares at you with a watery-eyed crazed look as his brain churns tries to come up with a reason to punch you.)

On the bright side: you don’t usually see this level of government transparency.

The response from Smith, Trump & Co was the same, which was to shoot the messenger by accusing them of being untrustworthy, which is to completel debase themselves by denying reality.

“Who are you going to believe? Me, or every single one of your senses and power of reason?”

Smith is also currently embroiled in a corruption scandal involving funnelling contracts to a party donor.

Smith has made a vigorous denial, and it is being spun that by asking for a tariff “pause,” Smith was asking the U.S. to somehow not interfere in the election, as if it would be some kind of neutrality.

None of this explanation is remotely acceptable, but Smith’s entire framing is equally false.

The reason that Canadians are angry and that the Liberals have soared in the polls is not because of the tariffs: it’s because the tariffs are intended to collapse the Canadian economy and annex us to become the 51st state.

It’s really quite remarkable that Smith is framing the problem only as tariffs, when it’s the threat of annexation that 90% of Canadians hate. In addition, a trusted ally that we have stuck up for and bled with is betraying us, attacking us, lying about us, and trying to starve our economy into submission.

So Smith is suggesting, by omission, to Breitbart, that the 51st state stuff isn’t the problem, tariffs are.

But the other, is that Smith is the Premier of the Province of Alberta, but she’s not advocating for Alberta, or the oil and gas sector. She’s not advocating for Canadian jobs or businesses. She’s not explaining that Canada is not subsidized by the U.S., or pointing out the Americans - farmers, truckers, and refiners, who are going to be directly affected by higher gas prices.

Instead, the Premier of Alberta is asking for tariff relief to benefit to Trump, and the Conservatives, who are better aligned with him. Without mentioning the annexation of Canada at all.

While 90% of Canadians have stated they would never want to join the U.S. the 10% who were inclined to join were almost all conservative. Some of those are committed separatists, and many are motivated by a passionate and long-standing hatred for Trudeau, Liberals and the Federal government, a grievance that has been nursed and nurtured for decades by politicians and quite a few conspiracy theorists.

What’s happening in these conservative parties is that their leaders, Poilievre, and Smith, are trying to keep a hard core constituency in the big tent.

In 2023, I met Smith and had a very pleasant conversation at a meeting of the Council of the Federation. It could not have been more clear that the organization is run for blatantly partisan purposes, especially when Ontario Premier Doug Ford endorsed the PC Premier for re-election from the stage.

One thing Smith told me stuck with me, which was that if you don’t keep rural Alberta happy, they go off and start their own political party.

There are three points I want to make about the political radicalization we are seeing.

First, extremism always leads to dehumanization - including dehumanization of the extremists and people who are drawn to them.

So right now, people who could otherwise probably have a decent discussion, have now turned over their lives to being horrible and insulting about each other. People are incredibly, openly shitty to one another in a way online in a way that is completely inconceivable. This is behaviour that if it were happening in a single physical setting, would be a violent riot.

It is like a mob digitally stoning people. And it’s a mob filled with agents provocateurs doing everything they can to turn everything into a spreading riot. You know - making it go viral.

So I want to emphasize something I believe is really important about the current moment, which is that we are here because people have changed, and are being changed. We all know people who have been altered by the experiences of the last few years. I have been.

We need to recognize that people can change, and be persuaded to see things from a different point of view, or, at least, to stop screaming and making threats and empty accusations all the time.

We do not have to keep escalating the conflict. There are things we can do to find areas of common ground and de-escalate, whether it’s in Canada or the U.S.

The other is to understand the reasons have changed, which is because lots of people in Canada (and around the world) have endured some massive and extremely painful shocks, where huge populations were all affected at once. The oil price shock is one example, and the pandemic is another, where people faced a total loss of control over their lives.

The pandemic was such an agonizing mass experience that it has practically become a mass suppressed memory. It is all to painful to talk about, but we should at least talk about the pain.

It has to be said during the pandemic, there were moments that were inherently terrifying in ways we have not talked about. At some point, all of us experienced a near complete loss of control over our lives. I think this can be said that this was true for every person in the pandemic, even people in positions of authority.

Because it was a new disease that no one knew anything about except that it spread fast and killed people, it meant that we all lost control over our lives, and I personally was fearful not only for myself but my loved ones, my friends, and far beyond that anyone who was going to lose loved ones, because we were going to see waves of people dying, so many, many people would be grieving.

But the other is that the responses to the pandemic meant that people lost control over their lives. We ended up having “control economies” where provincial governments were choosing who got to work or not, whose business stayed open or not, as well as which workers and which businesses got help, and which they let go broke.

And beyond that, personal connections were shattered by public health requrements.

The economic aspect of it is incredibly important, because it meant that on top of everything else, people might completely lose control of their finances and, as a consequence, over their life.

This is an experience that breaks people. It’s a form of social and personal financial terror. That is the reality of poverty, that is the reality of personal financial loss.

It really was up to the decisions of provincial governments, many of which were conservative and therefore ideologically opposed to government assistance, even as they were imposing a control economy through public health orders.

Some of that happened in addition to the economic shocks they had experienced from the oil price crash, which drove personal bankruptcies.

It’s important to recognize that people have been persuaded, often by some demoralizing event in their life.

These are also people who have been bombarded with information about the economy that’s incredibly political, and I have to say, inaccurate in key areas.

It’s the Price of Oil, Stupid

The one thing that all Canadians should know, and be able to recognize, is the real source of our economic problems for the last ten years, and not one Canadian politician or party is responsible or to blame.

That is because after more than a decade of increasing oil prices, in October 2014, Saudi Arabia and OPEC launched an oil price war, creating the deepest and hardest oil price crash in history.

The result was an instant and massive collapse in oil sector and government revenue, layoffs, bankruptcies and hundreds of billions of dollars in cancelled projects. The nature of the oil business is that it doesn’t take that many people to run it - so productivity is high. When the oil price crashed and people lost their jobs, Canadian productivity slumped, and so did the Canadian dollar.

The result in Alberta and Saskatchewan was a crushing economic blow that from which there was no relief, because people were still stuck under the weight of debt they took on in the boom times.

Instead of recognizing this reality, and dealing honestly with it, Canada’s conservatives blamed everything on the Federal Government and the carbon tax, when the reality is that the actions of OPEC (and the U.S. under Donald Trump) made the oil business and investments economically unviable.

I wrote about the details here.

This was a deliberate “messaging" decision to push the narrative that the federal government’s carbon tax was to blame for everything - inflation, the cost of living, homelessness, and the oil industry, to the point that it came to dominate the national conversation.

OPEC’s price war was a kind of financial warfare directed at Canada - yet, the oil industry and Conservatives blamed the federal goverment instead. This is a blatant rewriting of history - recent history, and it was clearly something that was coordinated by the Federal Conservative Party and Premiers and working together to deceive Canadians, and it worked.

Conservative Premiers actively obstructed and delayed Federal projects. The feds would make announcements, but the money wasn’t making it to the people. That was a finding of the Parliamentary Budget Office.

In Manitoba, the Pallister PCs dragged their heels on hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, eventually totalling $1.9-billion in funds for health care, housing, transit.

This really was a form of political sabotage, with provincial governments taking federal money but inflicting pain on their own residents through cuts, freezes, austerity and layoffs, while Premiers launched a national campaign that falsely blamed the federal Liberal government for health care cuts that were being inflicted by Provincial Premiers like Jason Kenney and Brian Pallister, when the federal cuts that had happened were under the Conservative Government - which they had supported and voted for when they were Members of Parliament.

Our entire national debate on health care and the economy were hijacked by conservative propaganda.

The Council of the Federation (COF), which is the Premiers, all started singing from the same songbook, the goal of which was to paint the cuts and misery they were imposing on the Federal Government instead.

The Big Lie they told was “funding has never been lower and the need has never been greater,” as they demanded more federal funding, pointing out that Federal Government’s funding share had once been 50%, and was now 22%.

This blatant deception was repeated ad nauseam and accepted at face value. I happened to know this because one of my first areas of public policy research was in federal funding for post-secondary for provinces. There was a massive review in the 1990s, but even 35 years ago I knew that the federal share of funding was nowhere near 50%.

That is because in the 1970s, the Federal Government did *not* cut health care funding; the formula was changed so tax points were transferred from the Federal government to the provinces instead, with the agreement of the provinces.

The reality is that the federal cash contribution to dedicated health care streams has been around 22% +/- 3-4%, since 1980. It has been rising steadily since 2016, plus increased equalization, plus health accords, plus pandemic funding, plus a new health accord.

That did not matter. The deception by Brian Pallister and the Premiers was dutifully picked up by the Canadian Medical Association and Canada’s largest union, who all joined in bashing the Federal Government based on a misreading of history.

It was a massive PR coup and triumph for Conservative ideologues, who took the increased federal money and transfers, and used them to continue to finance massive and regressive tax cuts.

In Manitoba, that included borrowing $500-million to send education property tax rebates, with the largest cheques going to the people with the most property, while health care continued to rot.

Canadians are relentlessly lied to about the way our economy, and the way our country works. Premiers do it, think tanks do it, and those lies and “narratives” (political fairy tales) end up informing debates and decisions, because they are repeated by reporters and others.

When I say “political fairy tales” I mean that people are accused of doing the impossible - of being responsible for acts that they not only did not do, but could not possibly have done.

The other has to do with the practice of politics and elections themselves.

As it happens, Canada has pretty strict elections finance laws at the federal level. Provinces, much less so - and in the case of Saskatchewan, corporations from outside the province can donate.

I have worked on many, many election campaigns at the civic, provincial and national level, usually in a communications policy role, and usually on campaigns that were financially threadbare. It took all we had to keep one campaign running, and I marvelled at the fact that these organizations had enough money to run a multiple campaigns to elect one candidate or party.

Fake citizens groups (many of them) on the left and the right, think tanks, and entire networks and institutes paid for either with corporate money or money from organized labour.

The Federal Liberals faced a crushing scandal (originally in the 1990s) related to campaign finance and contracts. Compared to the shocking allegations being raised today it seems almost quaint.

Just today, for example, The Globe and Mail reported that CSIS, Canada’s Spy Service says that the Government of India interfered with the Conservative Party Leadership contest that Pierre Poilievre won. CSIS wanted to tell Poilievre, but couldn’t because he didn’t have a National Security Clearance.

Stephen Harper has never won an election without bending the rules or using outside funding for help

In his very first election in 1993, Harper became an MP with the help of a $50,000 ad campaign run by the National Citizen’s Coalition against his opponent (and former boss and mentor), PC MP Jim Hawkes. The losing Prime Minister was PC leader Kim Campbell, who succeeded Mulroney, and the Liberals under Chrétien won power for the first time in nine years.

The National Citizens’ Coalition is what is now known as an “astroturfing” group - monied interests falsely posing as a grassroots campaign of disaffected citizens. It was originally founded and funded by insurance companies to fight medicare, and Harper went on to run it.

One of the functions of “front groups”, think tanks and foundations in modern politics (more so in the U.S. than in Canada) is that they allow corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals to influence the outcome of elections without being held to account. They do this in a few ways - one is that by pretending to be “independent” they can spread propaganda in ways that political parties can’t such as producing reports that are generally seen as more objective and believable than if they were released by a political party.

The other is that they conceal who they actually represent, especially by shielding the identity of deep-pocketed donors. They may present themselves as “non-partisan” or “post-partisan” even though all of their funding comes from a few small donors with highly ideological leanings, or they may simply be a huge overlap between donors to parties.

The other is that they conceal who they actually represent, especially by shielding the identity of deep-pocketed donors. They may present themselves as “non-partisan” or “post-partisan” when all of their funding comes from a few small donors with highly ideological, leanings, or they may simply be a huge overlap between donors to parties.

This was the case with the National Citizens Coalition, whose overlap with donors and Conservative Party activities (including running attack ads against Conservative opponents) is considerable.

Harper quit as an MP and went on to run the NCC - a two-man operation - which bought ads attacking Liberal candidates across the West in 1997.

Though Chretien won a majority, many Liberals lost to Reformers - Before the 2000 election, Chretien brought in reforms that restricted the amount of third party advertising - limiting spending per riding to about $3,000, and requiring that someone doing so have an “official agent” - someone, who on election campaigns, is responsible for approving the money.

This was portrayed by Harper as an assault on freedom of speech. In the 2000 election, Harper and the NCC were prevented, mid-election from running a campaign of attack ads against the PCs and Liberals.

Now, there is certainly a legitimate question here about whether speech is being restricted for people who are truly independent, or non-partisan advocates on a particular issue.

But there is a reason why Canada had long-standing campaign finance and spending laws which put each campaign on a level playing field, so that the people with the most money can’t simply swamp citizens with their messages alone.

The reality of speech in campaigns is that speech may be free, but it costs money to distribute. Advertising, printing, distribution and communications technology of all kinds cost money, and it is be possible to dominate the debate through sheer volume alone.

Canadian campaign spending limits are strict, and the law through overspending, while not criminal, carries a possible punishment of five years in jail for the official agent - the person who makes that sure that all spending is just campaign spending.

So campaign spending laws ensure that elections are not just free, but fair.

What unregulated spending results in is third-party groups that are effectively surrogates, or proxies for a candidate or a party. Their messaging benefits one candidate or party, their donors may be the same - they may even have a revolving door of consultants and campaign workers.

They effectively allow candidates and campaigns to run parallel, or at least complementary campaigns - allowing more spending than allowed by a single candidate by law. It also allows candidates and parties “plausible deniability” and for third parties to say things or make outrageous accusations (run terrible attack ads, etc.) from which politicians can maintain a respectable distance.

In the U.S., the Citizens’ United decision allowed virtually unlimited spending by equating free speech with money.

While I am personally a strong proponent of freedom of speech, I also recognize that the fundamental obligation of politicians in a democracy is supposed to be to citizens, not to the always-small number of donors who tend to support elections. If third parties play a role in getting someone elected, the politician has obligations to them, as well - and that may mean that “mega-donors” who give to third-parties and campaigns become vested interests.

Third parties are not, themselves running for office. That is why it is so critical that it is clear just who they are speaking for, especially who is paying the bills and calling the shots, but in the US, and increasingly in Canada, there is no transparency on donors.

Harper v. Canada

It is important to understand this background, because this was the basis of Harper’s long-running “feud” with Elections Canada.

Elections Canada and the Chretien Liberals had passed laws to restrict 3rd party spending. Harper had geared up to run attack ads against the Liberals during the 2000 election, but the Liberals sought and won an injunction preventing the NCC from running ads.

Chretien won a 3rd majority, and Harper spent $1-million of the NCC’s money taking Elections Canada to the Supreme Court over third-party spending rules. He lost, because the rules were rightly seen as applying to everyone. Harper never saw it that way.

The myth of Harper’s innocence continues, however. There’s the idea that he lost the 2004 election in part because he refused to run attack ads - even though a turning point of the campaign was a press release when the Conservatives claimed that Liberals were in favour of child pornography.

In the mythic narrative, however, this is when Harper changed tack.

The Mysterious Offer to a Dying MP

In May 2005, the minority Martin Liberals were facing a confidence vote on the budget. Harper, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe had cobbled together the “strange bedfellows” coalition to make replace Martin with Harper as Prime Minister without an election.

Belinda Stronach crossed the floor, and whether the government would fall or not fell to the decision of a single MP - Chuck Cadman. Cadman, who ran for MP after his son was murdered by a young offender, was sitting as an independent MP after losing a stacked Conservative nomination race. He was also dying of cancer.

Everyone was begging Cadman to side with them. Then a book came out revealing that two of Harper’s closest advisors, Tom Flanagan and Doug Finley had gone to Cadman to make some kind of offer, the nature of which has never been admitted. This was a problem - it’s a crime to offer an MP an inducement to change their vote. It was also unclear what benefit they could possibly offer someone who was terminally ill.

The whole thing blew up - and landed in court - when Stephane Dion said, outside of the protection of parliamentary privilege, that a bribe had been offered.

At first, Harper claimed he had told Finley and Flanagan not to go. But in an affidavit that came out during the dying days of 2008 election, Harper admitted he had authorized the trip. The nature of the offer was never revealed.

2006

During the 2006 election, the in-and-out scandal happened. It involved 67 ridings, nearly a dozen cabinet ministers, and after years of legal challenges and claims of innocence, the Conservatives cut a plea deal so that none of the people charged - including two Senators, Doug Finley and Irving Gerstein - would be found guilty. They paid a fine instead.

Finley and Gerstein weren’t even kicked out of caucus.

After winning, Harper was featured in a big-budget “greenwashing” TV ad campaign run by the Biofuel lobby - the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association or CRFA whose members are in fact the major oil companies - whose President was Kory Teneycke. The ad sold Harper as a “green” Prime Minister

Teneycke’s next job was as Harper’s Director of Communications. He quit to head up Sun TV.

2008

Harper kicked off the 2008 election by breaking his own fixed date election law, and his parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro, ended up in jail for illegal donations & campaign overspending.

2011

In 2011, the robocall scandal, which played out in over 20 ridings (when Harper has a majority of 11 seats) when people misdirected voters to non-existent poll locations, and live operators impersonated Liberals using the Conservatives’ database, calling at odd hours on religious holidays.

That was quite aside from phony story planted with Sun News by Patrick Muttart, a Conservative consultant, that claimed that Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff was involved in the pre-invasion planning for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Muttart was not a junior staffer: he was a key Harper advisor and had worked in the PMO, and gave UK Conservative Prime Minister debate advice.

2015: The Fair Elections Act, or Legalizing Cheating

The Conservatives’ Fair Elections Act is a really terrible piece of legislation.

It effectively legalizes a number of election offences for which the Conservatives were found guilty, or pleaded guilty. Here’s a list of four:

1) The In-and-Out Scandal

The 2006 was a long election, and the Conservatives were running out of money in tight races, so they shuffled money around to get around legal spending limits, forged invoices to cover it up, and submitted claims for public reimbursement.

The longer campaigns are, the more you can spend. The 2015 election was by far, the longest and most expensive in Canadian history. Campaign finance limits are supposed to ensure elections are FREE and FAIR - and that no one gets an unfair advantage just because they have more money. The Conservatives ended that.

2) Dean Del Mastro - illegal campaign donations - Found Guilty, 2015

Del Mastro was Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary and spent his time bashing opponents on the robocalls scandal. Then it turned out he made large donations to his own campaign, which the Conservatives made legal.

3) Campaign overspending - Shelley Glover and James Bezan.

Manitoba MP’s Shelley Glover and James Bezan were almost kicked out of the House of Commons because of overspending on the 2011 election - which is an offence for which a campaign’s financial agent can face 5 years in jail. The Conservatives argued that Elections Canada just has to take candidates’ financial reports at their word.

The Conservatives then reduced Elections Canada’s investigative powers.

4) Voter Suppression

In 2011, voters across Canada were called by people telling them to go to the wrong polling station, including in St. Boniface, Elmwood-Transcona, and Winnipeg South Centre. A judge found that fraud had taken place using the Conservative Party’s voter database, but not who did it.

Canadians have a constitutional right to vote, but the Conservatives, under then-Minister Pierre Poilievre, implemented new ID measures that make it harder to vote for certain groups - Aboriginals, Students (who tend not to vote Conservative) but also Seniors in rural areas. It was projected the new ID rules could deny 500,000 Canadians their constitutional right to vote.

All of this - along with campaign finance rules designed to put other parties at a selective disadvantage, spending hundreds of millions in public money on advertising and on collecting voter information - is designed to put a thumb on the scale of what constitutes a fair election.

Which is the whole point. Harper and the Conservatives never won without cheating, and especially without third-party money.

The fact that Kory Teneycke - who once shilled for Harper as head of the CRFA, is now back, tried to run a third-party organization called “HarperPAC” and has been sending e-mails to Conservative Supporters talking about attack ads by third party organizations supposedly staffed by Liberals and the NDP underlines the pathetic hypocrisy and moral double standards of the Conservatives.

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