Danielle Smith seeks conflict before clarity on Facebook and Ottawa's job plan

It would be no small thing if a social media giant blocked the account of the premier of Canada's fourth-largest province — either for a declared reason, or "for who knows what," as Danielle Smith's top aide put it.

It would stand to reason, then, that it's no small thing if the premier of Canada's fourth-largest province declares such a brazen form of censorship, when it does not appear that's why one person with access to Smith's Facebook page was temporarily prevented from posting.

Free speech and censorship are critically worth debating and understanding, especially in our fast-evolving digital age in which private multinational companies have towering influence on what gets heard and what doesn't.

Also of massive importance, especially in Alberta, is another major file that figured prominently in this week's political conversation — the complementary issues of climate action and the massive employment revolution that will accompany it. It's no small wonder the Smith government is demanding a say on the makeup of a new federal sustainable jobs advisory council, given the amount of disruption that an energy transition, "just" or otherwise, will have on much of Alberta's workforce.

These consequential matters deserve full and serious debate. But they also can prompt panic and overreaction, which does disservice to the public conversation — especially if coming from high office. 

In January, Smith started the new year publicly scrutinizing Ottawa's then-unpublished "just transition" plan, just as the Liberals were fine-tuning a report and had begun rebranding it "sustainable jobs."

Quickly, the premier's warnings against a "phase-out" of the oil and gas sector turned to rhetoric about the wholesale annihilation of the industry.

Why? An Ottawa media outlet had just highlighted a June 2022 briefing note to the natural resources minister, which mentioned a "large-scale transformation" in the same sentence as a reference to 202,000 Canadians employed in the energy sector, and a tally of 2.7 million jobs nationwide.

Premier Smith characterized this as "eliminating entire sectors of our economy" in a pair of interviews with Postmedia columnists. "When I saw the memo, I felt a pit in my stomach," she told the Calgary Herald.

Not all cases of nausea are preventable, but this one likely was. The minister's office clarified that the memo's passage referred to the total number of jobs — period — in energy and other sectors, not a forecast of losses.

After the contorted rhetoric was revealed, Smith dropped it, having already used it in interviews, a fundraising letter, a social media video and more.

Free speech and the spectre of online censorship have also been at the core of Smith's politics, especially in the last few years during the pandemic when she quit talk radio (and Twitter, briefly) because she didn't want to feel restrained.

Wary of crackdowns in mainstream social media, she launched an account in 2021 on the upstart locals.com, where controversial utterances would later cause her political headaches.

But a return to mainstream politics necessitated a return to Twitter (where she has more than 190,000 followers) and more presence on Facebook (93,000).