Don't assume Danielle Smith will stop re-litigating COVID if that's what Albertans want

EDITOR'S NOTE: CBC News and The Road Ahead commissioned this public opinion research in mid-October, starting six days after Danielle Smith won the leadership of the United Conservative Party.

As with all polls, this one is a snapshot in time. 

This opinion piece, based on its findings, is by Duane Bratt, a political scientist and academic advisor to this research project.

For all the attention paid to Danielle Smith's proposed Sovereignty Act, the real galvanizing force behind her United Conservative Party leadership was her fixation on re-litigating the COVID rules she and her base so strongly opposed.

But those are views shared by only a minority of Albertans and a slim majority of UCP supporters, according to new polling data commissioned by CBC News.

Before entering the race, Smith had promoted on her radio show COVID treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. She was so skeptical of vaccines that she flew to Arizona to take the Johnson & Johnson shot because it was not mRNA, and admitted that she only did so because of coercions that would have limited her ability to travel. 

During the race, Smith promised no more school masking or remote learning. Smith also pledged to change the Alberta Human Rights Act to make vaccine status a protected class.

So naturally, after she became premier she continued to want to re-litigate COVID, and she's been doing so often.

In the first four weeks, she's asserted that the unvaccinated were the most discriminated-against people that she had seen in her lifetime, pledged to sideline Alberta's chief medical officer of health, publicly apologized to anyone affected by COVID rules and said she wants to pardon people who were fined or jailed for defying COVID restrictions. Last week said she would welcome as a COVID advisor Dr. Paul Alexander, the Canadian who had pushed the Trump administration to adopt herd immunity and went on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' show to claim vaccines were a bio-weapon. 

This is not political opportunism on Smith's part. If it was, she would be saying different things now that she's premier. More than a half-year removed from COVID restrictions, the public still supports them.

Half of Albertans believed the public health measures were applied at the right pace, while 18 per cent said they were not strict enough, according to the poll by Janet Brown Opinion Research. That's 68 per cent, leaving only 30 per cent who felt they were too strict — the group Smith preaches to and whose support was enough to win her the UCP leadership.

Most politicians, when faced with a 70-30 question, would easily choose the majority. For example, former premier Ralph Klein was famous for discovering which way the parade was going and then getting in front of it.   

Janet Brown's polling data reveals even more disconnect when it comes to the convoy protests in Coutts and Ottawa, which were ostensibly about federal and provincial pandemic rules. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents said they were not sympathetic to the concerns expressed by convoy protesters, while only 37 per cent agreed with their concerns.

In fact, 54 per cent of Albertans even approved of the federal government's handling of COVID, including, remarkably, almost half of UCP supporters. Yet, Smith put Todd Loewen, a long-standing critic of COVID rules who also travelled to Ottawa as part of the convoy, in her cabinet, while others who participated in or supported the Coutts blockade remain in the UCP caucus and were just elected to the UCP board.