Danielle Smith And The Lake Of Hitler

On Smith's Latest Gaffe

This could be memory failure, but I can’t think of an election where everybody doing analysis is basically in the same place. If you asked me what % chance the NDP have of winning, I’d say roughly 25%, which is very close to what the statistical models of both Breguet (28%) and Fournier (23%) have. In terms of aggregate results, everyone has the NDP between 40 and 43, and while we can argue about individual seats, nothing’s really that interesting.

It's not quite this simple, but you could essentially sum up the NDP’s chance in two questions – will they finally make socially liberal, wealthy Calgary trust them, or will Danielle Smith say something so wild, so crazy, and so indefensible that she costs the UCP an election she should win. For months I’ve said the chances of the latter happening were pretty low, and everyone who reads me knows the NDP haven’t done the work to make the former happen, which is why I’ve been rather low on the chances Notley could walk back into Government. And then the tape came out.

In case you’ve missed it, Danielle Smith compared the 75% of Albertans who got vaccinated with those Germans who followed Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s, which is the kind of comment that makes me wonder if she has finally lost the plot. And now I’m stuck, between a belief that this is the exact kind of comment that will cost her amongst the 2015 PC-2019 UCP voters who will decide her fate, and knowing that I hate her, and therefore could be in effect trying to wish a result into action.

So, let’s work this out together – will Smith’s Hitler folly be her Lake Of Fire?

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The case for no is mostly a really pathetic case for the Alberta NDP, which is to say that they should be able to beat Danielle Smith. If they cannot beat a leader whose head is so far up her own ass, who has closed herself off to contrary opinions such that she thinks the only reason people got vaccinated is because of tyranny, and not a good faith belief that it would make them healthier. Smith, who only got the one shot Johnson and Johnson in late 2021 to get around federal travel restrictions, cannot extend the good faith she has called for the vaccinated to extend to people who didn’t get the jab in return, because she is manifestly crazy. (That she posits herself as better than the 75% of the population who got vaccinated when she herself, in her words, “succumbed to the charms of a tyrant” seems pretty notable, but whatever – I’m allowed to hate her for being a nutter and a fraud, even though the fraud part won’t matter electorally.)

So what we end up with is this government that really ought to lose, and if they don’t it’ll be for an obvious reason – the NDP didn’t give well off Calgarians who have been the second order beneficiaries of the oil industry reason to think that the economy won’t crater if they take office, which means that they voted with their wallets and not their social values. This is a very plausible outcome, and one that if it comes should cause a lot of ended careers in the NDP, and a complete overhaul of that party.

To be clear, there’s still a large part of me that thinks this is the likeliest outcome, but that could be as much analytical dispassion as it is just emotional hedging. In the US last year, the same instinct was being fought, but there the case for the GOP’s inevitability was much weaker. The polls in Alberta do have a historical tendency to undershoot the right and that does matter here. But what also does is that Smith’s comments are an issue for the most important voters in this province.

I know I am a broken record on this front, but a lot of the discourse about Alberta from (for lack of a better way of saying it) Laurentian Elites has always viewed Alberta as a backwater place, when it’s not one. Parts of Alberta are the boonies, sure, but so are parts of Quebec, but the external legacy of Quebec isn’t the stuff north of Quebec City, it’s the two major cities, which are incredible. For the Canadian elite, Alberta has always been defined by their regions, and the very real differences between the two forms of conservatism have never been really focused on. And that ignorance matters now that Smith is lighting herself on fire.

The swing areas of this election – outer Calgary (mostly the north west) and the Greater bits of Greater Edmonton – are places where the people aren’t conservatives because they’re too stupid to know any better, but because conservatism has done them well. They’re areas of affluence, they’re areas of economic success, and they’re areas where frankly I’d never worry about going out in public with another man. They’re also the areas where vaccines were very popular and people were rushing to get them, and frankly telling voters they’re akin to Nazi enablers isn’t a good strategy.

Paul Wells once told a story in a column during his oft forgotten time at the Star about living in Paris and what his roommate once told him about the war – “Everyone’s grandparents fought in the Resistance … the Resistance wasn’t that big.” As Smith herself said, nobody ever wants to think they’d acquiesce to fascism or authoritarianism, and yet that’s what she accused 75% of the province of doing, and especially the voters she now needs to vote for her despite not liking her.

We know from the Janet Brown Calgary poll that the vast majority of the Notley Neutrals were voting for the UCP – 45% of Calgarians had a good impression of Notley, and 47% of the city was voting for her. Smith, on the other hand, benefitted from 42% vote share and 29% approvals, which is consistent with the idea that if the UCP wins, it’ll be in spite of, not because of, their leader. And this is only going to make this worse.

I don’t have a strong opinion on where this election will be in 20 days, but I do feel more optimistic about the NDP than I have in months. Smith is showing herself to be a completely insane, psychologically broken person who doesn’t deserve the job of MLA, let alone Premier. She is a genuinely frightening leader, both for the extent of her radicalism but also for the sheer dumbassery that comes out of her mouth on a regular basis.

The NDP will likely tip into the lead in my model this week, as either through genuine voter movement or some form of non-response bias the NDP gains in the aftermath of these comments. Will it hold? I don’t know, and I certainly wouldn’t put any money on the NDP right now, but the NDP are in the best position they’ve been in to win since Jason Kenney announced he’d be resigning.

Will it be enough? The NDP need to make sure their campaign draws in complaints about power prices, health care, and whatever else into a narrative with these Hitler comments, as opposed to making the campaign solely about Smith’s controversial comments. As a one off, it’ll disgust people. As further evidence that Smith’s UCP are incompetent, useless, and fucking mental, it’ll win them this election.