From COVID care to cancer, there's a pattern to Danielle Smith's 'alternative' medical thoughts

It's not a candidate's ideal day on the campaign trail when one must issue a video that takes pains to assert that, no, you did not intend to besmirch cancer patients and survivors in your video from a few days ago.

Danielle Smith, who seems to lead the race to become United Conservative Party leader and then Alberta's premier in October, got into the factually-dubious murk in a lengthy campaign video discussion with a naturopath about cancer being preventable and "completely within your control" until the disease reaches Stage 4.

Outrage ensued from the NDP ("cruel and wrong," said Rachel Notley) and UCP leadership rivals ("irresponsible" — Travis Toews, "hurtful" — Brian Jean), as well as medical practitioners and those who've survived cancer or lost loved ones to it.

When Smith tried to clarify her comments, she didn't walk them back; rather, she reiterated that the "first three stages of cancer are more controllable in terms of what complete care is available to a patient," and insisted that mainstream medicine and naturopathy alike agreed with this point.

We can dissect these comments shortly, but know what's clearly more preventable? Getting into this sticky situation by injecting alternative or contrarian medical arguments into a political discussion.

But this is par for the course with Smith, going back a few years.

Her Twitter feed was completely within her control in the early days of the COVID pandemic, when she used a single study and something she'd read on some blog to proclaim that "hydroxychloroquine cures 100 per cent of coronavirus patients within six days of treatment." That would later be proven quite wrong. The bosses of her AM talk radio show took action, and Smith apologized and deleted that tweet.

Smith later gained more control of her own messaging by leaving Global News' radio show. On an online podcast, she'd also give lengthy airing to doctors she reported she wasn't allowed to host on her mainstream program — men who doubted much of the science of COVID, including one who called it "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated."  She'd also advocate for wider use of ivermectin as coronavirus treatment, though it remained unapproved and would later be discredited and debunked.

Her own apparent curiosity on the fringes of established medical science brought her here, well before Smith was in a leadership race and cultivating a base of the same sort of pandemic-rule skeptics and detractors who rose up against Premier Jason Kenney's leadership of the UCP. 

She now speaks often of the "vaccine choice movement," which would include anti-vaxxers and those forced reluctantly to get vaccines due to mandates. At a Calgary rally, she invited as her special guest Theo Fleury, the conspiracy-minded former hockey player who told her crowd the trauma from his sexual abuse was akin to the trauma of government pandemic rules.

Smith's supporters cheered for Fleury's message, and for hers.

These positions stray from the mainstream of Alberta opinion — and expertise — as does her "sovereignty act" proposal to stop enforcing in this province any federal laws a Premier Smith-led government deems run afoul of Alberta's jurisdiction.

But Smith doesn't need most Albertans to buy into her agenda. She just needs a select number, in the tens of thousands, to be UCP members by Aug. 12 and vote for her.

The whole reason she wound up gabbing for a full hour on video with a naturopath (including that bit about cancer being "controllable") was in support of her campaign promise to give every Albertan a $300 health spending account.