Danielle Smith is auditioning for Team America

By now, most politicians understand that the best way to deal with Donald Trump and his reckless pronouncements and policies is to take him seriously rather than literally. That was former adviser Anthony Scaramucci’s advice back in 2016, and it held true throughout Trump’s first term. And yet, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has repeatedly chosen to take him at his word when it comes to his repeated threats against Canada and the supposed reasons behind them. 

That credulity was on full display last week, when Smith and some of her key ministers gathered to respond to Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Canadian exports. Flanked by Minister of Justice Mickey Amery and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services Mike Ellis, both of whom were sporting spiffy new security-cosplay jackets — and, in an unusual sight, a rifle-toting police officer — Smith touted the progress her government had made on border security. 

This might have made some small modicum of sense a few weeks ago, when it was at least theoretically plausible that Trump’s stated concerns about the border were genuine and not the fig leaf he needed to invoke the International Emergency Economic Power Act and impose his long-desired tariffs on Canada and Mexico. But now, with his administration’s reported interest in forcing automakers to relocate their activities in the United States, renegotiating the Columbia Water Treaty and even redrawing our border, this continued focus by Canadian conservatives on border security is bordering on the delusional. 

So, too, is her apparently unshakable belief in her own powers of persuasion. She continues to appear on far-right podcasts and programs, and is listed as one of the headline speakers at PragerU’s “East Coast Gala” in Florida later this month. According to its own website, “PragerU is an educational media platform dedicated to promoting pro-American values,” one that just happens to be funded and financed by oil and gas industry executives and other right-wing sources. Why, exactly, is Smith travelling to Florida to promote “pro-American values”? 

She would, I’m sure, suggest that it’s another example of the diplomacy that she continues to believe is working, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. I’d suggest it might be about trying to seed the ground for a post-political (and post-Canada) career as a talking head in America’s well-funded right-wing media ecosystem. But either way, one thing is clear: she believes that her mutual self-interest lies more with folks like Ben Shapiro (her co-headliner) and PragerU than with her fellow Canadians. 

That would explain her obvious reluctance to offend or upset Americans with the kind of tough talk that Ontario Premier Doug Ford has used in his recent media interviews. In the same press conference that supposedly amounted to her joining “Team Canada,” Smith refused to even entertain the idea of using Canada’s oil and gas exports as leverage. “There’s no circumstance under which I would support an export tax,” she said. Nothing says “Team Canada” like forcing it to take its most dangerous scorer off the ice, I suppose. 

Rather than supporting efforts to reduce our dependence on the American market, Smith continues to promote deeper trade relationships with the United States. That includes her repeated promise to double Alberta’s oil and gas production, requiring even more American purchases of Canadian fossil fuels. “We’ve been approached with several new pipeline proposals to take more Alberta oil and natural gas to the United States given the U.S. president’s stated goal of U.S. energy dominance,” she said last week. “It’s in both of our countries’ best interests to double the amount of Canadian crude moving south.”

Ironically, for all of her assiduous care and attention to the Trump administration’s needs, Smith accidentally delivered the most striking threat to its ambitions in the course of laying out her own. “Whether the U.S. president wishes to acknowledge it or not,” she said, “the United States not only needs our oil and gas today, they’re also going to need it more and more with each passing year once they notice their declining domestic reserves and production are wholly insufficient to keep up with the energy demands of US consumers and industry, let alone having anything left over to export.”

Here, again, Smith is making the mistake of taking him literally rather than seriously. Trump’s notion of “energy dominance” is almost laughably incoherent, given his stated desire to both reduce imports from Canada and build the Keystone XL pipeline — which would, of course, increase imports from Canada. But he seems deadly serious about his desire to make America self-reliant when it comes to resources, and waving their apparent vulnerability on that front in his face is just asking for trouble. 

It’s not just trouble for Smith, of course. In repeatedly putting petroleum and province over country, she’s inviting disaster for Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre. Mark Carney will surely be tempted to test where his loyalties actually lie, and there may be no better way to do that than with the very export tax Smith has preemptively rejected. Would Poilievre side with Carney and Doug Ford, or with more appeasement-curious leaders like Danielle Smith and Scott Moe? That’s a question he may have to answer in public soon — and far sooner than he’d like. 

Either way, in her efforts to promote and defend Alberta, Smith seems determined to keep putting America first. Maybe that’s because she’s afraid of the pro-separation movement that lurks within her political base. Or maybe that’s because she genuinely believes that she can flatter her way to victory. Regardless of what’s driving her decisions, though, one thing should be clear by now: Smith has no interest in actually playing for Team Canada. The rest of us should start acting accordingly.