“In Alberta we believe in free speech. Full stop.”
So says Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith.
And it’s true… sort of.
We absolutely believe in free speech here in Wild Rose Country… except when we don’t. And there are no exceptions, ever… except when there are.
Well, you’ve got to hand it to Ms. Smith, she has chutzpah — famously defined by American humourist Leo Rosten as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”
Smith made the comment quoted above in a little video widely circulated online Tuesday, apparently in response to another short video, posted by the Edmonton Police Service, encouraging members of the public to report incidents of hate.
This was part of a swift and sharp response on social media by Smith and her so-called minister of public safety, Mike Ellis, himself a former police officer, objecting to the idea of enforcement of hate speech laws — at least in cases where it’s members of the United Conservative Party base who want to say hateful things.
It may be a coincidence, but in the past few days, there has been a prominent example of a sign with a hateful message about First Nations people erected by one of the UCP’s Alberta separatist allies. This of course doesn’t reflect what all Alberta separatists think, but one wonders if news coverage of that prompted calls to the premier’s office by party supporters who connected the dots between the expression of such sentiments and the Edmonton police campaign.
At any rate, Smith posted on Facebook: “Free Speech is a foundational Alberta value. We don’t believe in policing unpopular or religious-based statements even if they are controversial. That’s a slippery slope other countries have fallen into and we can’t go down that road.
“Our Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services, Mike Ellis, will be writing to our provincial and municipal policing providers to ensure they understand Albertans’ policing priorities should focus on violent crimes, illegal drugs, theft and vandalism… not people’s free speech.”
For his part, Ellis tweeted: “We are committed to supporting and respecting everyone’s right to free speech. We have duty to uphold these rights and freedoms, regardless of an individual’s religious or political beliefs.
“Alberta’s government does not condone hate speech or violence, but we believe law enforcement should be focused on stopping violent crime, not policing opinions or ‘hurt feelings,’” Ellis’s social media message continued. “Our government will be in contact with our provincial and municipal policing agencies to ensure Albertans’ policing priorities continue to be cracking down on violent crime, theft, illegal drugs and vandalism.”
So there you have it. Alberta police will soon have their marching orders from the offices of the premier and the Ministry of Public Safety: If you see hate, ignore it!
If you see students camping on campus and exercising their right to free speech about certain topics, though, billy clubs, knuckle-duster gloves and pepper spray are probably OK. And if your idea of free expression has anything to do with pancakes, you can expect to be escorted from the premises expeditiously.
Just in case Albertans didn’t understand how this is supposed to work, Smith said in the little video clip noted above: “I can tell you our approach in Alberta is that the federal government does have the power of criminal law. We have the power of non-enforcement. And… what that means is, we choose our policing priorities and we choose our Crown prosecution priorities.”
Translation: We choose to ignore laws we don’t like.
“We’ve gotta draw a line,” the premier added piously. “We have to be able to toughen up!” By which she meant, presumably, if you’re a member of a group her party base relentlessly attacks on whatever grounds, you’re going to have to toughen up.
Of course, as many Albertans soon pointed out on social media, the UCP’s profound commitment to free speech comes with a notwithstanding clause.
Indeed, it comes with the actual notwithstanding clause — the one that never should have been in the Canadian Constitution, but is, that her government used in October to end a strike of 51,000 Alberta teachers, suspending their free speech rights along with their fundamental right to free association.
As the secretary-general of Amnesty International’s English Canadian section put it at the time, to the UCP’s great irritation, “by targeting teachers, the Government of Alberta is attempting to silence workers exercising their rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the right to strike.”
Even counselling, threatening or encouraging a continued strike would violate the terms of the Back to School Act, which will remain on the books until Aug. 31, 2028. Individuals faced fines of $500 a day for violating the act. The teachers’ union would have incurred fines of half a million dollars a day if it had advocated continuing the strike. The law also imposed a contract on the teachers that 90 per cent of them had rejected in a vote the month before.
The strikers could have been ordered back to work without using the notwithstanding clause, of course, but that would have meant there would be court challenges, and the union might have won them, embarrassing the government.
Using Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Justice Minister Mickey Amery told a news conference at the time, “will remove the uncertainty a court case would create.” In other words, the uncertainty about whether the government might win or lose. The UCP, obviously, is not a government that respects the rule of law or intends to allow it to be practised if inconvenient.
After that, Smith hopped on a jet and took a powder to what was then the relative safety of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as one does.
There are other examples of the UCP’s intolerance of free expression, but we need not belabour an obvious point. The UCP’s commitment to free speech is a kilometre wide and a millimetre deep, even though as a MAGA-adjacent government one imagines it would prefer another unit of measurement. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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