Danielle Smith, big government's unlikely fan

When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambition of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, and many other points, the questions came quick: Are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boondoggle or two?

Her answer wasn't typical fare from a conservative politician, let alone one with a libertarian symbol tattooed on her arm. Smith replied with a strong defence of government intervention.

"This is why people elect governments: To do the things that they can't do in the private sector, and that includes building massive new infrastructure that connects cities and requires this kind of major investment," Smith told reporters.

Never mind that Canada's founding passenger rail service was privately run, or that the construction consortium that pitched an Edmonton-Calgary high-speed line said they'd do it as a private-sector investment.

Smith has a vision to master-plan all future intercity lines, and mused this week about managing her provincial train network with a local version of Metrolinx, the provincial Crown agency created in 2006 by an Ontario Liberal government to run Toronto-region transit.

That would, of course, be on top of the Crown corporation Smith created this spring to research drug addiction recovery, or when Smith proposed potentially Crown-run natural gas plants as a "generator of last resort."

Add in her ambitions to potentially wrest more provincial management for pension and police from Ottawa, and plans for stricter control over the affairs of municipalities and post-secondary schools, and you might wonder what happened to the Danielle Smith who had long believed in shrinking the size of government.

We're a long way from the 1990s, when Smith cut her teeth as an intern with the Fraser Institute free-market think tank, or her 2000s newspaper columnist days when she praised "smaller government" as a "central tenet of conservatism," or her 2012 Wildrose Party campaign when she branded herself a "small government conservative."

Now, she's in government and has taken over its levers. She's shown ample interest in not only wielding the government machine's powers, but often expanding or maximizing them.

She's maintained a larger cabinet than predecessors Jason Kenney or Rachel Notley.

The premier has also outspent them, considerably.

This year's budget, the second under Smith, features $71.2 billion in spending — a 20 per cent increase over the $59.4-billion budget tabled under Kenney before he left in 2022. Smith hiked provincial spending in two years by more than the Notley government did in four years, between her final $56.2-billion budget in 2018 and the last one by the PCs.

But it's the UCP and Smith that tend to get more credit for spending within their means — in part because oil revenue has made the province's means so much greater.

That has let Smith offer direct "affordability" payments, keep up health and education spending as the population balloons, build infrastructure around the next Calgary Flames arena, and boost grants to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to their highest levels yet.