It’s been a week, folks. As some of you may have noticed, I took an uncharacteristic four-day hiatus from Twitter (I think that’s the longest I’ve been off in … well, ever) in order to head up to the mountains. Well, I was up there to get married, and let me tell you — the post-nuptial hangover is real. I’m already missing the good vibes we had up there, and returning to a place where people routinely insult or provoke you is only making that worse.
Maybe there’s a world without Twitter in my future (and ours). Time will tell. But until then, back to reality — such as it is.
On the eve of an election that will be determined by the votes — and voters — in Calgary, Danielle Smith just made a very big bet. Wearing a Calgary Flames jersey, the Alberta premier and United Conservative Party leader announced $330 million in provincial funding for a new hockey arena, one that’s been the subject of starts and stops for many years.
“It’s a big amount of money,” Smith said. “We wanted to make sure that it could be debated during the election, and we’d hoped we’d be able to get a mandate from the people of Calgary to go ahead with it.”
In other words: re-elect us or we’ll shoot this arena.
The new funding arrangement, and the province’s participation in it, managed to join fiscal conservatives like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and left-wing advocates like Progress Alberta in a chorus of outrage. If politics makes for strange bedfellows, they don’t get much stranger than this. Ironically, Smith would have been part of that chorus not long ago. When she was the leader of the Wildrose Party back in 2012, she rejected the idea of any provincial funding for the new arena Edmonton was mulling over at the time. “This sort of corporate handout was, after all, antithetical to the rock-ribbed libertarian principles of the Smith-led Wildrose Party,” Rahim Mohamed noted in a National Post column.
But Smith’s principles, such as they are, have been falling by the wayside of late. Her enthusiastic embrace of private health-care delivery has been a defining aspect of both her political advocacy and public commentary, one that was most recently articulated in a 2021 paper published by the University of Calgary. In it, she suggested: “Once people get used to the concept of paying out of pocket for more things themselves, then we can change the conversation on health care.” For Smith, those changes would include a proposal where “the entire budget for general practitioners should be paid for from Health Spending Accounts.”
She has repeatedly refused to disavow this paper, or the ideas presented in it. But she has also offered up a “public health guarantee” that echoes a similar guarantee made by her predecessor, Jason Kenney. “Under this public health-care guarantee, the UCP is committed to all Albertans that under no circumstances will any Albertan ever have to pay out of pocket for access to their family doctor or to get the medical treatment that they need,” Smith said. You can see why some Albertans might be a little confused here.
Then there’s her first budget as premier, which contained the biggest orgy of spending in Alberta’s history (one that has seen its share of spending orgies). Smith has long been critical of wasteful government spending, whether it was done by the Progressive Conservative government she opposed as Wildrose leader or the NDP government she criticized as a pundit. But when it came time for her to make the choice to spend or save, she couldn’t help but open the spigots as wide as possible — even in the face of a record bonanza of oil and gas revenue. As the Fraser Institute’s Tegan Hill said: “It didn’t have to be this way. The Smith government had choices.”
Its preferred choice should be abundantly clear by now, though. When faced with the option of adhering to its principles or trying to buy votes, the Smith government will always do the latter. Yes, it’s fair — good, even — for a politician to change their mind on an issue, especially if the facts underpinning it have changed as well. We want elected officials who adapt and adjust to reality rather than try to impose their own ideology on it. But we also need elected officials who are willing to explain why they’ve said one thing and are doing another.
So far, we haven’t heard a word of explanation from Smith about why she’s so willing to depart from her core beliefs on things like government spending, corporate welfare and health-care funding when an election is in the offing. Is it that she doesn’t actually believe these things? Or is it just that her beliefs aren’t as important as her proximity to power? One thing is for certain: the Danielle Smith who used to lead the Wildrose would be very, very critical of the Danielle Smith who’s running the province today.
Bye, bye, blue check
While I was up in Banff over the weekend, Elon Musk finally got around to taking away my legacy blue verified checkmark. It wasn’t personal, mind you: almost all of the roughly 400,000 verified users under the previous non-paid system had theirs taken as well, from Pope Francis and Donald Trump to Yosemite National Park and the Paris transit system.
The idea, if you can even call it that, was to encourage the legacy blue checks to pay for Twitter’s new $8-per-month “blue” service. But almost none of them actually did, almost certainly because Musk’s version of Twitter hasn’t given them any reason to trust him or his platform. Case in point: Musk’s decision to retain the blue checks for accounts with more than one million followers has annoyed some of those users (like Stephen King and LeBron James, who want nothing to do with the new system) and offended the families and friends of others, who were essentially reverified posthumously.
Congratulations, Elon: you’ve managed to turn a once-coveted (and useful) symbol into a digital kick-me sign, one that opens the door on his platform even further for abuse and confusion. As if that wasn’t enough, Musk also removed the “government-funded media” label he’d stuck on the CBC’s account last week, along with the “state-run media” ones that were more properly affixed to the accounts of Russian and Chinese propaganda outlets. Whatever utility Twitter once had as a public square is being rapidly (and perhaps deliberately) eroded by Musk’s erratic behaviour and questionable choices.
As for me, I won’t miss the blue checkmark, especially in light of what it’s now come to signify. What I will miss is the version of the platform where its owners tried, however half-heartedly, to keep misinformation at bay, discourage digital vandalism and protect the identities of its users. Maybe that version returns once Elon is finished playing around with Twitter and moves on to something else. Or maybe the damage he’s done, and is still doing, is permanent. Either way, it’s an important reminder of why relying on a billionaire to protect an important public space is a very bad idea.
The Wrap
With a new king being crowned on May 6, we’ll have to brace ourselves for a torrent of royal nonsense. But as I wrote last winter, the odds of Canada actually getting rid of the monarchy are almost as long as the odds of the monarchy not behaving poorly.
On the Maxed Out podcast, I talked with Janet Bufton about the politics of pandemics and whether there really aren’t any libertarians during them. It was a refreshing conversation with someone who’s willing to analyze and question their own political convictions, which is a quality that’s all too rare these days.
(I’m still not reading Atlas Shrugged, though.)
And finally, can we please, PLEASE, get the federal NDP a housing strategy that’s more than just empty rhetoric and economic illiteracy? This Twitter thread by economist Mike Moffatt gets to the core of this issue — and helps explain why the NDP is bleeding votes to the Conservative Party of Canada, and will continue to until it removes its head from its posterior here.