Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is flying to Florida on the taxpayers’ dime to help fundraise for PragerU, a media platform that promotes “pro-American values” and is funded by fossil fuel interests.
Smith is scheduled to co-host PragerU’s east coast fundraising gala on March 27 alongside Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator who has made light of President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada. Individual tickets to the gala start at $1,500 USD.
In a December 2024 clip from the Ben Shapiro Show posted to YouTube, Shapiro predicted Canadians “will greet us as liberators” if Trump follows through with his annexationist threats while at the same time bemoaning how “humourless” Canadians have been about the threat to their national sovereignty.
“I’m not saying Canadians should vote in American elections, god forbid. We can annex it and call it an outlying territory, like Puerto Rico but of the north,” Shapiro added.
Smith spokesperson Sam Blackett told Canada’s National Observer the premier’s expenses associated with attending the gala in south Florida will be covered by Albertans.
“At this event, the Premier will be able to share Alberta and Canada’s message with an active, engaged, and influential U.S. audience, amidst the ongoing trade war,” Blackett said. “Given this travel will be part of the Premier’s advocacy in the U.S. the costs for the Premier’s travel and accommodations will be covered by Alberta’s government.”
This will be Smith’s second trip to Florida this year. In January, with the threat of tariffs looming, she visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort for a “friendly and constructive conversation” about the importance of the Canadian oil and gas industry.
Keith Brownsey, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, told Canada’s National Observer that to “be very generous,” there’s nothing inherently wrong with speaking to Trump supporters about the negative impact of tariffs on both sides of the border. This trip is different, he added.
“She’s actually going down for a fundraiser with the far right, which puts her in a unique place in Canadian political life. I would be very reticent to think that this just has the motive of trying to convince Americans that Trump’s tariffs are wrong,” he said.
PragerU, which is not an accredited academic institution, was co-founded by conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager and filmmaker Allen Estrin in 2009. Its signature five-minute videos routinely dismiss the role that burning fossil fuels play in rising global temperatures, in addition to expounding on the superiority of “Judeo-Christian” values and downplaying the evils of American slavery.
On Monday, Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi issued a statement demanding that Smith “cancel this event immediately,” referring to PragerU as a “far-right online platform” and Shapiro an “extremist.”
Danielle Smith isn’t the only Canadian Conservative politician who has associated with Shapiro and PragerU in recent years.
Drinking from a cup labelled “Leftist Tears,” former Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared on the Ben Shapiro Show in 2018, and in 2019 produced two five-minute videos for PragerU — one titled “Politics and Populism” and another called “Israel and Human Rights.”
However, Harper was not a sitting Member of Parliament at the time, and, Brownsey noted, did not use taxpayer resources to help fundraise for PragerU. “There’s a big difference there,” he said.
Shapiro, the founder of conservative media outlet the Daily Wire, has also weighed in on Canada’s federal politics, lending support for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. On Jan. 7, Shapiro responded to a tweet from Poilievre proclaiming that “Canada will never be the 51st state,” saying the U.S. “will call off the planned invasion if you are elected PM.”
Shapiro has taken a more conciliatory approach towards Canada since then, criticizing Trump’s decision to level tariffs on Canada for increasing energy prices for U.S. consumers, as well as for hurting Poilievre’s electoral prospects.
Beyond his flippant approach towards Canadian sovereignty, Shapiro and other contributors to his website, including Jordan Peterson, have been key players in promulgating broader transnational culture war narratives, including climate denial.
Shapiro insists he believes in climate change but questions “what percentage of global warming is attributable to human activity” and has decried “climate change hysteria.” In 2018, Shapiro suggested that people whose coastal residences are at risk of flooding “just sell their homes and move.”
Fossil Fuel Funding
Both PragerU and Shapiro’s Daily Wire are funded by fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks. Farris Wilks, who is a pastor, told his congregants in 2013: “If (God) wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there.”
In 2013, two years after PragerU was founded, the Wilks brothers donated $6.5 million to the non-profit, which Dennis Prager has said “enabled PragerU to expand more rapidly.”
When the Daily Wire was founded in 2015, the Wilks brothers provided $4.77 million in seed funding to the business.
PragerU has produced many videos questioning the scientific consensus around climate change, with titles such as, “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “The Paris Agreement Won’t Change the Climate” and “Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?”
In a July 2015 video, entitled “The Truth about CO2”, Patrick Moore, a Canadian former environmentalist turned fossil fuel enthusiast, argues that fossil fuels are 100 per cent organic.
“If there were no carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, the Earth would be a dead planet. Period,” he said in the video.
In November 2024, Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP membership voted overwhelmingly in support of a resolution calling on her to abandon any CO2 emissions reduction targets.
Representatives of PragerU didn’t acknowledge a request for comment on why they invited Alberta’s premier to headline their fundraiser.
Comments
Why is there a feeling of betrayal when you read the actions of Ms. Smith? It is very hard to understand her behaviours when Canada is in an unprecedented crisis.
Yes. I’m with Nenshi. She should immediately cancel this engagement, especially in the light of a Trump’s annexation threats. She us betraying her country, and the health of the planet as well.
Heard Smith has been taking many interviews from right wing US media sites.
Her and Scott Moe truly do not understand the meaning of loyalty to one’s country. But they do know the meaning of loyalty to big oil. Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall was the same. A sellout to the whims of big oil..
Oh yeah, Brad Wall was also an advisor for the illegal convoy crew.
Birds of a feather?
Just to be clear--they're sellouts to the whims of big AMERICAN OWNED oil. The oil companies exploiting the prairies almost all send the profits south. So no big surprise if they're traitors.
The only word that comes to mind to describe this latest action by Danielle Smith is: TRAITOR
There's a different word that comes to mind for me: puke (verb and noun). But wouldn't it be fascinating to trace her life to find out what it was that made her choose money, profit, greed and power over life and survival?
I try so hard in life to be kind, or at least not be unkind, but that principle is being tested left, right and centre. Anyway, apologies to any I have offended.
Hopefully Albertans wake up and realize that Danielle Smith is nothing but a traitor to Canada in her actions. She needs to be kicked to the curb, and put in place responsible government interested more in protecting Alberta and Canada, than her oil & gas friends only. The federal government should impose an export tax on oil & gas exports if she isn't willing to stick it to Trump and his band of losers who are all 10 bricks shy of a load these days.
Clearly Smith is not a Team Canada Player and the people of the province should demand her resignation!
The whole Canadian right wing has always been pro-American. America has the economy they would prefer for Canada: higher inequality, private health care, a quarter as many unions.
It's core to their whole proposal that we should be more like America; always has been. Their "Canada is broken" chant, historically familiar as "declinism", relates to Canada having more government services and regulation of business than America, if not as much as most of Europe. (They also have a chant that Europe is "tired" and unproductive.)
Conservatives are now being confronted with the inevitable end-point of their long-held logic. Carney just has to harp on this obvious truth and corner them in their pro-American history
It's easy to understand how people can be swept up in the logic that fossil fuels are forever when so many oil company owners and their support organizations are pumping the hype and publishing reports chock full of complex data and modelling. But, in the simplest terms, said reports (mainly from OPEC) have magnificently accurate calculations resting on flawed assumptions.
We are seeing a monstrous build up of oil and gas expansion promotion that, too obviously, never fails to beg for loads of taxpayer cash, which politicians who are funded by oil and gas interests never fail to reciprocate. This support structure is truly huge, but it never questions (at least publicly) its own assumptions.
The counter data is out there and was conducted by independent energy analysts in the research departments of large organizations like the IEA and S&P Global. Fossil fuels are NOT forever and the demand for them is nearing its crest.
The Smiths, Moes and Poilievres out there probably won't recognize the peak in oil demand right away, and you can be sure they'll deny it or pull another "Blame Trudeau" (with a name change) when the numbers stall or decline.
The fact remains that there is no business case for more pipelines in Canada. Period. There is a reason why the private sector is not offering to build even one on its own and prefers to maximize their own wealth with internal share purchases
So, once the cold economics is addressed, then we get down to the craziness. There is no excuse for conspiracies, annexation bullshit, and the cult-religion now surrounding oil mixed with evangelical claptrap and social conservatism.
These folks will probably become very desperate once the fossil fuel infrastructure starts to rust, the foreign owners of Canadian oil extraction companies abandon Alberta, and the money changes course to build out clean energy projects instead. It's at that point it will be important to keep that crowd away from guns.