Written By Wyatt Claypool, Posted on August 9, 2024
One of the narratives put out by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith that has irked many members of the United Conservative Party is the continued insistence on using Liberal-style metrics to measure success.
Rightfully, nobody is patting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the back for increasing Canada’s GDP when it is all on the back of population growth. Canada’s per capita GDP has in fact been falling for years, and our quality of life has been falling by many measures.
So why is Premier Smith also citing population growth in Alberta as a sign of good governance? And why has she made multiple comments about wanting Alberta’s population to reach past 10 million people?
Back on April 30, 2024, Premier Smith was promoting her very expensive plan for a high-speed rail line to be built between Calgary and Edmonton, and in that speech, she noted in 2023 Alberta’s population rose by 202,000 people (mostly immigrants coming from outside of Canada), which she characterized by saying “it’s a tremendous blessing, but it brings challenges too.”
Now why would she say that knowing that Alberta is not able to build nearly enough new homes to cope with the sudden increase in population (over 4%), nor can we realistically integrate that large a population of people all entering at the same time?
In another post-Premier Smith made on May 11, 2024, she cited a BMO report that said Alberta has “arguably been best positioned to handle tough macroeconomic conditions” praising the continued fast population growth slated to be 2.3% in 2024.
This post can be seen as nothing but an endorsement of mass immigration into Alberta.
I for one, as a Conservative, am not excited by the macroeconomic prospects of the GDP going up at the expense of the quality of life for Albertans. It is immaterial to me that politicians are getting excited by the GDP number going up while affordability in Alberta is plummeting.
Smith detecting people didn’t like her hyper-pro-immigration stance once tried to sound tough on migration. She demanded the federal government send more financial support for asylum seekers if they were going to be sent to Alberta.
Premier Danielle Smith is asked if Alberta would be willing to accept asylum seekers from Quebec that the Legault government is trying to transfer to other provinces. pic.twitter.com/igx3npF3N1
— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) July 16, 2024
But contradicting her tougher-sounding stance, just a couple of days ago a clip of Premier Smith surfaced from January (from the Shaun Newman Podcast) where she stated that she would like to push for the population of Alberta to more than double to 10 million people within the foreseeable future.
I need Danielle or someone from her team to explain this to me because this isn't making sense.
— Kirk Lubimov (@KirkLubimov) August 8, 2024
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith:
"Let's have an aggressive target to double our population."
Smith wants to get Alberta's population to 10m people so we can be taken seriously by the… pic.twitter.com/IOvFrDSvuJ
She tries to justify this ludicrous position stating that it would be a way for Alberta to gain more political clout on the federal level, ignoring the obvious deterioration of the quality of life and damage to the local culture that a sudden increase in population would result in.
Premier Smith had previously even said she would like to see Red Deer become Alberta’s next city to exceed 1 million residents. Currently Red Deer only has a population a little over 100,000, making the dream of a 10x larger city an out-of-touch and dangerous one. You cannot simple add that many people to an established society and assume the culture and quality of life will not be shredded.
Let me be clear; I am not harping on a singular issue to validate my opposition to Premier Danielle Smith during her leadership bid in 2022. Since she became the UCP leader and Premier I have been willing to call balls and strikes fairly. During some months in the past year, she made decisions I openly praised her for.
The problem is that there have been several issue fronts Premier Smith has been performing badly on, and her priorities are out of whack. I will be highlighting many more in the coming weeks and months and am fully willing to praise her if she tightens up her governance and focuses on checking off promises.
At this point, she can still choose to be Ralph Klein 2.0 and stop acting like Allison Redford 2.0.
People mocked and attacked me in 2022 for warning that Danielle Smith has a track record and positions herself on issues far more like Allison Redford or Ed Stalmach than Ralph Klein.
— Wyatt Claypool (@wyatt_claypool) August 9, 2024
I don't want to be right. I want Premier Smith to succeed, but she is dropping the ball on… https://t.co/kbgi8f9uEg
Wyatt is a student at Mount Royal University, where he is the president of its Campus Conservative club. In his writing, he focuses on covering provincial and federal politics, firearms regulation, and the energy sector. Wyatt has also previously written for The Post Millennial.
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