Today in the Legislature, Danielle Smith launched yet another salvo of victim-language. accusing unspecified \u201cforeign money\u201d of funding recall campaigns targeting United Conservative Party (UCP) MLAs. She told<\/a> the legislature that, among other things, \u201ca GoFundMe is being used to raise money.\u201d The claim deserves scrutiny for three interlocking reasons.<\/p>\n First: the claim of victimhood is integral to the populist ideology, authoritarian-libertarianism, that she promotes.\u00a0 Smith\u2019s rhetoric locates the threat to \u201cour freedoms\u201d in some shadowy conspiratorial force. Her political style emphasizes \u201cyou vs them,\u201d \u201cus losing to outside forces,\u201d and \u201celite actors pulling strings.\u201d\u00a0When she blames foreign money for recall petitions, she is recycling exactly this tired script.<\/p>\n Claims of victimhood are part and parcel of authoritarian-libertarianism. She portrays her opponents (and democratic challenge) as illegitimate, not merely part of the normal political process. In that worldview, recall efforts transform from an accountability mechanism into an external attack.<\/p>\n Second: she has provided not one shred of publicly produced, verifiable evidence for her claim.<\/p>\n We have no published financial trail. We have no named foreign donor. We have no independently verified audit or investigation showing foreign funds flowing into these petitions. But we do have her suggestion \u2014 that \u201cthere\u2019s a GoFundMe being used\u201d \u2014 with no further substantiation.<\/p>\n Raising an allegation without delivering evidence is classic populist behaviour. It allows the speaker to court outrage, distraction and grievance, rather than engage in the messy business of transparency and truth. Smith has absolutely no shame in asserting what amounts to an unsubstantiated conspiracy claim, thereby shifting attention from the substantive issues of recall law, democratic accountability and the concerns raised by voters.<\/p>\n Third: the UCP \u2014 her party \u2014 have used precisely this playbook before. Back in 2019, then-premier Jason Kenney\u2019s government commissioned the Public Inquiry into Anti\u2011Alberta Energy Campaigns, explicitly to examine \u201cforeign-funded activism\u201d against Alberta\u2019s oil and gas industry. The inquiry itself was triggered by the \u201cresearch\u201d of Vivian Krause \u2014 whose claims of foreign money influencing Canadian environmental non-profits have since been debunked.<\/a><\/p>\n The money-under-the-bed narrative worked then for the UCP: framing challengers not as citizens but as foreign agents. And because the earlier version failed to produce meaningful findings (the inquiry\u2019s conclusion was that the groups in question had done nothing illegal) the lack of rigour here is predictable. Smith is essentially deploying her party\u2019s old toolkit.<\/p>\n Putting these three objections together \u2014 ideological lens of victimhood, absence of evidence, prior institutional behaviour \u2014 one arrives at a clear conclusion: this is not serious governance. This is theatre. It is distraction. It is a defensive reflex. It is the posture of a party and leader who feel the ground shifting beneath them.<\/p>\n When a premier claims foreign actors are funding democratic petitions against her, she is not engaging in good-faith democratic dialogue. She is signalling a retreat into grievance and blaming.\u00a0 That is not the language of pluralism or of democratic humility. It is the language of incompetence.<\/p>\n The UCP\u2019s playbook is long-established: create the outsider threat, mobilise the base, shift blame away from her government’s many recent failures. Here are just two of them.<\/p>\n Smith became the first premier in Alberta history to use the notwithstanding clause<\/em> to suspend Charter of Rights and Freedoms protections. She didn’t have to. As Energi Media expert interviews clearly showed, there were other regulatory tools at her disposal.<\/p>\n Instead, she chose political convenience.<\/p>\nInvoking the Notwithstanding Clause to End the Teachers’ Strike<\/strong><\/h3>\n