Danielle Smith’s latest attempt to own the libs will cost Alberta

“Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.” That’s the famous line said by Lord Farquaad in the Shrek movie that’s since become a popular meme, and it might as well have been what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said to her province’s post-secondary institutions last week. In her forever war against Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, Alberta will now vet all research grant funding coming from Ottawa in search of its supposed ideological bias. And you thought Jason Kenney’s war on expertise was self-defeating.

The Smith government’s new Provincial Priorities Act, which she described as a “stay out of my backyard bill,” will effectively erect a massive gate between the federal government and Alberta’s municipalities, universities, school boards, housing agencies and other provincial entities. It’s modelled after Quebec’s Act Respecting the Ministère du Conseil exécutif and states that any new, amended or renewed agreement between Ottawa and a provincial entity in Alberta must be approved first by the UCP government. For a government that likes to talk about the importance of freedom and the need to reduce red tape, this is laughable hypocrisy.

The entire thing is a bad joke, really. As she told the crowd in Ottawa at last week’s ManningFest (a.k.a. the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference), “We don’t need [Ottawa’s] policy advice on school lunch programs, on pharmacare, on dental care. Just give us the money and trust that we will be able to deliver.” But why would Ottawa trust a government whose recent track record includes blowing $1.3 billion on a glorified election bet and $80 million on off-brand Turkish Tylenol that the province couldn’t even give away in the end?

And when she says that “when we do spending, it doesn’t have an ideological tinge to it,” well, the jokes write themselves. For Smith, the almost biological need to own the federal Libs at every available opportunity clearly supersedes mere trifling concerns like honesty or intellectual consistency.

But her willingness to inflict lasting damage on Alberta’s universities in the process is no laughing matter. The data on federal research grants was already available for review, and the UCP could have simply looked at it to assess whether there’s any nefarious ideological agenda at work. If they had, as University of Alberta PhD student Andrea Dekeseredy did, they’d discover nothing of the sort. “There is simply no factual basis whatsoever to suggest that Tri-Council agencies like SSHRC favour research with a 'liberal' agenda,” she said on social media. “Whatever Danielle Smith is going to impose on post-secondary institutions in the province, it is based on nothing but ideological misinformation.”

Oh, but the unintentional ironies here are just getting started. As University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach noted, “If this were a progressive government testing grants for their DEI bona fides or other characteristics, Smith would be front and centre as a defender of academic freedom. But now, she's mad because there are academics who point out when the evidence doesn't support her positions.”

It’s not just about academics and their research, either. When the CBC’s David Cochrane pointed out that the data on federal research grants was already available, Smith pivoted to a familiar complaint about the supposed anti-conservative bias in the mainstream media. “If we did truly have balance at universities, then we would see that we have just as many conservative commentators as we do liberal commentators… Out of our journalism schools, we’d see just as many conservative-minded journalists graduate as we do progressive-minded journalists graduate. We don’t see that, and so that leaves me to be concerned.”

This is obvious nonsense, not least because Canada’s largest national newspaper company is unapologetically conservative. Postmedia’s papers, especially in Alberta, are staffed almost exclusively by conservative commentators who Smith routinely cites in defence of her government’s policies. But it’s also nonsense because Smith, an avowed and proud libertarian, is arguing for the academic and intellectual equivalent of affirmative action. Are journalism schools now supposed to test their students for partisan orientation and affiliation and ensure they enforce a standard of ideological equality? Once again, it’s hypocrisy and irony all the way down.

It might be tempting to dismiss this as just more chaos and confusion being sown by a government that thrives on it. But for Alberta’s universities, which punch well above their weight at the national level, this is an existential crisis. As University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young noted on her Substack, “Take away the ability to hold federal research grants, and decades of work building these institutions into nationally and internationally recognized research universities is gone overnight. As are the top researchers.”

Young suggests that this couldn’t be the government’s actual intention. “Surely her comments were meant to please the party base and rattle the ‘so-called-experts’ in their ‘ivory towers’ but not to signal an actual intention moving forward.”

I think this is unreasonably optimistic, and maybe even a bit naive. Like all populists, Smith resents what higher education represents. Universities tend to produce people who are more evidence-oriented, more educated about their society and less susceptible to things like misinformation, conspiracy theories and other forms of weaponized stupidity. If she continues down this road, she’ll turn Alberta’s first-rate research universities into third-rate intellectual backwaters. Worse, she might see that as a win so long as she can blame Justin Trudeau for it.