On her phone call, the NDP swung hard. A lot of the UCP wants to move on
Danielle Smith thought that Alberta’s justice system worked like the American one when she went around the province for months trying to become the leader of the UCP. With this wrong idea, she told people who were upset about being charged for breaking COVID rules that, as premier, she would give them amnesty.
Smith told a legislature committee earlier this month that Alberta’s Justice Ministry knew about her assumption and wanted to put an end to it as soon as possible.
“When I got elected on Oct. 6 and was sworn in, I found that the Department of Justice had put together a PowerPoint presentation on the issue of amnesty to talk about what was possible and what was not,” the premier said.
After that, Smith said, her justice minister and deputy justice minister made it clear that the only person in Canada with the rare power to drop charges is the Governor-General.
Smith also says that she learned early on in her time as prime minister that a politician can ask two questions about Crown prosecutions: if a case was in the public interest and if a conviction was likely.
In her now-public conversation with street preacher Artur Pawlowski in January, Smith said she was “restricted” to that one line of questioning. Pawlowski was about to go to court on charges of mischief and a provincial offense.
Confined? Fin
But it seems like she took this as permission to get close to those limits a lot. Smith told the accused person that she talked about the cases and the questions “almost every week.” (She said directly that she would talk about them with “prosecutors,” but she has since insisted that she meant her minister and deputy minister of justice.)
She felt sorry for Pawlowski and his upcoming trial, and she promised to do the same thing again.
“Can you just give me this and let me ask that one more time?”
In the recorded phone call, Smith says she wishes she could do so much more, that a “political decision” couldn’t get Pawlowski and others out of their legal troubles.
Smith’s desire to do this, to see how far a premier can go with Alberta’s justice system, has once again made political and legal experts raise their eyebrows. Rachel Notley, the leader of the NDP, wants a formal judicial review, not just an independent investigation, into what Smith did. Ideally, this should happen before the election campaign starts on May 1.
Smith has been reluctant so far to let such outsiders watch what she does. Even though she and her team say she hasn’t done anything wrong, what she has done may be in a gray area between what is acceptable and what isn’t, and it may be politically shaky because what she has done is so out of the ordinary and against the rules for a political leader.
“I don’t know if there is a legal limit to how much you can mess with politics. It’s a rule in politics, “Eric Adams, a law professor at the University of Alberta, said this on the CBC Eyeopener show on Thursday. “Every time a politician gets too close to a set of criminal charges,” voters and Albertans will decide if this is “healthy” in a rule of law system.
He asks Smith and Pawlowski, the anti-COVID-rule activist with whom she agreed, what would have happened if an NDP leader had called a union leader who had broken the law and said she would do everything she could to help him.
In her call to Pawlowski, Smith talked a lot about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and how his team put pressure on his then-attorney general in the SNC Lavalin scandal. This shows that Smith was afraid of crossing the line.
But she wasn’t careful enough, and the premier’s staff couldn’t protect her from the fact that it might not be a good idea to talk to someone facing charges about those charges.
“When you have a system where the state brings charges and prosecutes people, you can’t have certain people, because of their connections, their beliefs, or their political ideology, get right back into the heart of power and have the premier say, ‘Let me help you with that,'” Adams said.
One has to wonder where her staff was during this call, since it was set up by Dennis Modry, a fellow critic of COVID rules and leader of a pro-separation group at the time. Rob Anderson, a lawyer and former member of parliament (MLA), was her top aide and also the chair of her campaign. He could probably tell Smith that U.S.-style amnesty is not a good idea.
Deputy Premier Kaycee Madu, who was a UCP justice minister until he was accused of going too far with his own traffic ticket and crossing the line into political interference, defended the premier’s interactions with Justice officials that were legal.
But on Thursday, when he was asked if it was okay for Smith to talk to Pawlowski, he chose his words carefully.
Madu said that Smith knows that COVID restrictions have caused divisions and has instead focused on issues like affordability, health care, and economic growth.
“During that work, the prime minister can talk to anyone she wants. This is how I would answer that particular question.”
One might wonder what the current minister of justice, Tyler Shandro, thinks about Pawlowski’s call. Someone asked. One did not get an answer.
Coming to an understandin
Smith has been careful about how she talks about the COVID prosecutions in public and, it turns out, even on private calls. But the way she talks about prosecutors is vague, which has caused her to try to fix the damage. (She has since said that she understands how clearly wrong it would be to talk directly with Crown prosecutors about cases and that she and her staff have not done so.)
Like with the amnesty file, she may have used “prosecutors” in the wrong way because she had the wrong idea about the provincial justice system she now has to run and protect as premier.
As Madu said, the UCP has worked to keep their leader and the rest of their team focused on issues that are more likely to help them win elections. They would much rather go into the election by making Smith look more normal and caring, not like she has crazy ideas and wants to fight over things like COVID prosecutions that only a small number of Albertans care about.
Here’s a sign of why.
Last fall, the conservative news site Rebel News hired the well-known pollster Leger to find out if Albertans agreed with the premier’s plan to let pastors and small businesses off the hook for crimes related to the pandemic.
The answerThis is not what a group campaigning for amnesty or Smith would have wanted. Only 36% of Albertans agreed with the idea, while 50% were against it. The rest didn’t know.
Smith’s help for a person facing a criminal trial and his focus on fighting for him and others like him show Albertans a side of their leader that the United Conservatives would rather not highlight. There’s a reason why the NDP is fighting hard over this, while Madu and others would much rather move on.