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Every family has at least one. That slightly off relative that you’re not quite on board with; the cuckoo in the nest.

They’re often the auntie or uncle who never married, or even had a special friend, the sad loner who keeps the curtains drawn so no one suspects they’ve hoarded every Readers’ Digest ever published, have kept, but never opened, all their mail since 1990, and have decorated their walls with styrofoam container lids from the Sunny Good Luck Happy Panda Import-Export Company Szechuan take-out.

Top of my mind, at least, is my second cousin Don Tucker, who returned from World War II traumatized, according to family lore, and who barely spoke above a red-faced grunt. (This is the 1960’s I’m recalling, when I was five to eight years old.)

A confirmed bachelor, Don lived in a little bedroom above the pantry, indeed, the original maid’s room, at the gloomy Victorian house on Brock Street in Whitby, Ontario — or “Ontari-ari-ari-o”, if you’re still feeling nostalgic about that — where my Victorian great-aunts also lived; his lair was a bay rum- and shaving soap-scented time capsule down to the ancient dial radio, the tortoiseshell hairbrush and the crocheted doily on the oak dresser.

Not just a traumatized veteran, he was a joker manqué; he not only regularly trotted out the spinach-in-the-ears trick, he earned my eternal hatred one day, when my mother and I were visiting, by floating (so it seemed) down the big staircase in the front hallway, wailing, in a white sheet, pretending he was a ghost.

Any normal five-to-eight-year-old would have rolled their eyes at this moronic prank, but I was a “sensitive child” (a pre-pubertal queer suffering my own slow-motion trauma from inhaling the miasma of homophobia, and from a family dynamic whose demons demanded my childhood in exchange for survival) and was instantly triggered into a fit of hysteria. I shrieked for ten minutes like a flayed cat.

The visit was spoiled and I had to be sedated by being taken home, given a glass of milk, and then installed in front of our black-and-white TV to sniffle at life’s general unfairness and watch Lucille Ball, my second, grown-up, mom, being dyed green or getting wallpapered into irrelevance.

Now that I’ve grown old, can’t so easily be embarrassed or triggered, and look on my lunatic relatives with a sliver of compassion, I’m more inclined to notice the sinister markers of public, political craziness, those that signal our collective atomization and the resultant spooling out of democracy.

No longer dressed in a sheet for private shenanigans, our public bin-dwellers are all dolled up in the livery of the latest wacko conspiracy theory, like so many chauffeurs ready to drive right over a cliff.

This is because truth is not at all obvious. As historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, it’s messy and difficult, requiring in-depth research and significant expenditures of time; it requires media literacy and informed judgment. Who can be bothered? Our delirious but happy lunatics insist on Putin over Zelenskyy, Trump over immigrants, 9/11 as an inside job over 9/11-well, if you look at the history, you could sort of argue it was an inside job, but don’t get me going.

If Canada is like the extended family, then our dotty relative par excellence, the self-styled rebel gal who makes us wince whenever she stands behind a microphone, and who, like the first Mrs Rochester, insists on wandering out of the attic at unexpected times, wreaking havoc with the wedding ceremony then committing arson with a candelabra, is without a doubt our own Danielle Smith, the femme fatale of Canadian politics.

Now, any reasonable person, innocently turning up to, say, one of her press conferences — where her overall demeanour suggests a developmentally-challenged individual who’s finally convinced a reluctant caregiver to let her dress and groom herself — any respectable journalist listening to her promote her latest nugget of salt-and-vinegar-flavoured nonsense, would quickly realize that she’s just a card-carrying, bona fide, right-wing nut-job, a danger to herself and others.

Yet, she is, by some regrettable misalignment of the stars, the leader of the libertarian-leaning United Conservative Party and thus Premier (Governor!) of the western province of Alberta.

In Alberta you find pristine parks, soaring mountains cradling lakes like jewels, salubrious air, grizzly bears and prairie roses, stubborn and insistent First Nations people with their inconvenient treaties — and ultra resentful, ultra-right-wing conservatives galore.

And, taking their cue from the top, the disgruntled cons, egged on by dipstick-in-chief Danielle, clinging to their overweaning sense of superiority and entitlement, and yielding to a stubbornly north-south geographic orientation (those mountains) which encourages the poisoning of Canadian values of social democracy with toxically individualistic US culture, they have transmogrified into the closest thing to MAGA clones that Canada can offer.

(I’m reminded of one of the organizers of the Ottawa truckers’ convoy, a Canadian citizen, at their first court date, explaining that they were “just exercising their First Amendment rights”. “What are those,” responded the judge; and, though I have no visual proof, I am positive that she was rolling her eyes like slot machine fruit.)

It must be galling to have won the oil and gas lottery, only to be told that your fossil fuel mania marks you as hopelessly retrograde, and that oil and gas are heading to an extinction as guaranteed as the dodo’s — except any attempt to run the grid with the aid of a flightless bird would at least quickly fail, relieving you of your extinct-bird mania in time to visit New York City repurposed as an underwater theme park.

It must be unrewarding to beg the premier of British Columbia to allow an oil pipeline to the Pacific through his province, only to be answered with a bemused but firm refusal.

For Alberta, you see, is the Texas of the north: the once oil-and-gas-rich cousin, the Beverly Hillbillies of Canadian politics, swimming in the empty cee-ment pond of oil sands production, a truly unsustainable and grubby process that uses more energy than it creates, and produces huge toxic ponds of waste that threaten the water supply and taint the environment for man and beast alike.

Unlike Texas, however, your province is completely land-locked and to get your dwindling oil and gas to market, you need someone to take pity on you, which in turn requires you to at least be a team player.

The most salient point about Danielle Smith, the Premier of a western province which has been part of Canada since 1905, is that she is not a team player. She is a proud isolationist within Canada; a weird upstart who elbowed her way to the premiership only to work tirelessly against Alberta’s provincial status, obligations and duties.

She does not want to be part of a confederation, she does not want to follow Canada’s strict criteria for delivering healthcare (the federal government matches each province’s investment, leaving them to decide upon and deliver appropriate care to its residents, but only if they conform to the Canada Health Act and its non-negotiable rules); she does not want to believe the conclusions of science; she does not want to enlarge her view with the views of those who have expertise.

She is the very picture of conservative “common sense”, the kind of “common sense” that would tell you that it’s obvious your immune system doesn’t need a vaccine, or that parents should be able to control their children’s choice of pronoun. In other words, the kind of common sense which is simply outdated, ignorant opinions masquerading as fact.

Smith does not want Alberta to embody the basic way our country works: the federal government ruling on issues of concern for the whole country; the provinces dealing with local concerns. Oil and gas poses a problem, because provinces are entitled to their resources; Ottawa on the other hand is entitled to agree to the Paris Climate Change Accord and set a cap on emissions in order to meet its goals.

But Danielle has no intention of harming her populist appeal with long-term planning around climate change, not if the very mountains were to catch fire and walk to Calgary, which is actually pretty close to what is projected.

Only Ontario’s equally unsupportable Doug Ford is as adamant that Canada must continue marching backwards into the dirty past, proposing nuclear energy instead of already-competitive wind and solar power.

Danielle is at her most scoldy when she hints that Alberta police, Alberta pension plans and even Alberta immigration policies (to stop those undesirables accessing public benefits), deliberately undercutting federal provision of these, are all on the table unless PM Mark Carney virtually ends Canada’s commitment to the Paris Agreement.

As she frames it, it’s the federal government’s fault that there’s separatist sentiment at all: what else could you expect when the feds refuse to sabotage Canada’s global climate policies to secure Danielle’s political future? It’s all up to them! Tsk, tsk! Naughty feds! You know she’d love to send Cabinet to bed without dessert, she just hasn’t figured out the logistics.

With social issues, she’s as true to her “gee whiz, just-plain-folks” populism as you’d expect. For example, her bill that bans gender-affirming care for trans persons under 16, despite scientific evidence that such care lowers the suicide rate among trans youth; the law is under challenge in the courts to determine whether it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but Smith has vowed to use the Notwithstanding Clause* to force the law to stand. Amnesty International Canada has called this threat “cruel and unnecessary”.

*About the “Notwithstanding Clause”: The infamous “Notwithstanding Clause”, which was included in the Charter at the insistence of Québec, is a shifty provision that allows any lawmaker to violate a Charter right with a proposed law for five years at a time, if the law in question is deemed “in the public interest.”

Imagine if, for example, Congress could pass a law which violated the First Amendment, and Congress could just go ahead and let that law stand for five years before another review, and there was nothing any voter, Representative or Senator could do about it. Yep…)

Smith has also moved to impede the rights of trans kids at school:

In cases where the student is 15 or younger, Alberta’s teachers will be banned from using trans and non-binary students’ preferred pronouns and gender-affirming names without the consent of their parents or guardians. For students who are 16 and 17, parents or guardians will be notified when a name or pronoun change is formally requested. In addition, Alberta will require parent or guardian consent for students to participate in any formal classroom instruction involving gender identity, sexual orientation and sexual diversity.

“Furthermore, all third-party resource materials related to gender identity, sexual orientation or human sexuality in our K-through-12 school system will need to be pre-approved by the Ministry of Education to ensure the materials are age-appropriate,” Smith said in the announcement video.

— Amnesty International Canada

Of course, this is all to “protect children”, that tired trope. Surely medical decisions are best made with the teen and their family, not mandated by the state. Calling for the protection of children implies that, with trans and all queer people, children are in danger around the queer community. It’s the Centralia Mine Fire of homophobia; the lie that never dies.

It’s doubly damaging when anti-trans hate and homophobia are translated into actual policy. It does not inspire feelings of self-worth or especially safety. The message is that trans and queer people are “other” and should be treated with suspicion.

The Alberta government did not consult with the gay community, gay advocates, or even doctors — rather than let policy be shaped by the affected community and expert input, Smith simply pandered to sterotype and misinformation. It’s shameful.

Speaking of misinformation: Danielle Smith’s response to public health mandates during the pandemic were depressingly predictable. Danielle the spunky rebel, refusing to obey the dictates of the deep state! She encouraged non-compliance, both before and after taking office, publicly criticising masking, gathering limits and vaccine mandates, framing them as infringements on individual freedom.

She publicly stated she would pursue amnesty or pardons for those charged with violating public health restrictions, and mused about bringing charges against public health officials.

She actually described the unvaccinated as “the most discriminated-against group in her lifetime”, from which statement I deduce, with an outsized confidence, that she missed the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Marches, and nodded off when we were discussing the genocide of Canada’s First Nations children in the residential schools.

Most troubling, Smith poked her wandering fingers into the jampot of the justice system, regularly contacting Crown prosecutors to pressure them not to prosecute those who had been charged in connection with COVID protests, and questioning whether such cases were “winnable and in the public interest”.

Premiers, if you are wondering, are NOT supposed to instruct the judiciary on who or what to prosecute.

As well, Smith is one of those self-appointed holistic scientific experts, like RFK, Jr, and has repeatedly questioned the efficacy of COVID vaccines, promulgating the misinformation that the vaccines “don’t work particularly well”. Once again, dereliction of duty, as pseudo-science becomes policy, and Alberta residents looking to their leader for guidance are grievously misled to the detriment of public health.

She has actually changed vaccine policy to require most Albertans to pay for the COVID vaccine — at over $100 a pop. It’s hard to convey how shocking this is to the rest of Canada; it’s completely contrary to the Canada Health Act, one of whose pillars is that necessary care is free.

Flash forward to now and a disturbing outbreak of measles, with the highest numbers in south-western Ontario — among the Mennonite community, who are vaccine-averse (God will heal you, or some such malarkey; why can’t God have created vaccines?) — and, you guessed it, Alberta, with its population misinformed from the highest office in the province.

“Western Alienation”

It should be clear from all these examples that Danielle Smith does not have the talents of a leader or a politician. She has the mediocre skills of a lobbyist, which she was — for the oil industry. She cynically deploys western “alienation” to consolidate her power, and in a way that actually recreates the alienation. It’s rule by Karen.

Strong leaders broaden their public’s vision, teach by example, explain the difficult in a way that empowers and uplifts. Smith is content to wallow with the lowest common denominator of ignorance and blinkered self-interest.

As the rest of Canada modernized and created city economies built on technology, Alberta has remained stubbornly hooked on oil, like an old-timey country gal who once won the lottery and is determined to stick it to those down-east elites. There’s no use telling her that the bank account’s running dry.

Delusional to a degree rarely seen out of an institutional setting, conservative Albertans — whose UCP is an offspring of alt-right parties such as the Tea Party and the Wild Rose party, and is not comparable to the Conservative Party of Canada — have long enjoyed claiming that they are the economic powerhouse of Canada (it’s actually Ontario), and they chafe and itch at having to play the part of a willing member of something larger than themselves, that’s to say, Canadian confederation.

Instead, Danielle Smith, in true Karen-y style, is riled up and wants to speak to your manager, insisting that Alberta is only part of Canada as long as she gets her way with any and every demand.

This includes the, err, Trump card: secession from Canadian Confederation, possibly including becoming the actual, rather than the fantastical, “51st State”. Disingenuous Danielle insists that her real aim is simply to negotiate a fairer deal for an Alberta within Canada (though their “deal” is no less fair than any other province).

It’s hard to explain the laughable irrelevance of this threat. The machinations necessary to bring it about are almost impossibly difficult and arcane, and the resultant sovereign nation of Alberta, complete with Alberta dollars, border checkpoints, zero taxation (all that rapidly-depleting oil will subsidize everything to the end of time, you see) and all the other practicalities make it inconceivable that it would succeed.

When every province of Canada pulled itself together recently in response to the tariffs, when every premier dropped their self-interest and united against the threat of annexation, where was Danielle? Why, at Mar-a-Lago (Trump loves her, and could there be a more predictable and sinister connection?) and on Breitbart News (!), hinting that Trump should ease off with the tariffs — but not because they’re destructively bad economic policy, but because they made Canadian voters, making their way to the polls for the most important federal election in living memory, favour the Liberals!

There is a referendum question about Alberta secession, and it has the percentage of Albertans necessary to go to a vote. I just hope that someone, some true leader, will take a stand and shake Alberta out of its delusions of grandeur.

Because one other thing that true leaders have is humility.

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