Recall “was not intended to have unions weaponize it to bus people in and put GoFundMes online in order to be able to topple the sitting government”
Today in the Legislature, Danielle Smith launched yet another salvo of victim-language. accusing unspecified “foreign money” of funding recall campaigns targeting United Conservative Party (UCP) MLAs. She told the legislature that, among other things, “a GoFundMe is being used to raise money.” The claim deserves scrutiny for three interlocking reasons.
First: the claim of victimhood is integral to the populist ideology, authoritarian-libertarianism, that she promotes. Smith’s rhetoric locates the threat to “our freedoms” in some shadowy conspiratorial force. Her political style emphasizes “you vs them,” “us losing to outside forces,” and “elite actors pulling strings.” When she blames foreign money for recall petitions, she is recycling exactly this tired script.
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.
Second: she has provided not one shred of publicly produced, verifiable evidence for her claim.
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 — that “there’s a GoFundMe being used” — with no further substantiation.
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.
Third: the UCP — her party — have used precisely this playbook before. Back in 2019, then-premier Jason Kenney’s government commissioned the Public Inquiry into Anti‑Alberta Energy Campaigns, explicitly to examine “foreign-funded activism” against Alberta’s oil and gas industry. The inquiry itself was triggered by the “research” of Vivian Krause — whose claims of foreign money influencing Canadian environmental non-profits have since been debunked.
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’s conclusion was that the groups in question had done nothing illegal) the lack of rigour here is predictable. Smith is essentially deploying her party’s old toolkit.
Putting these three objections together — ideological lens of victimhood, absence of evidence, prior institutional behaviour — 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.
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. That is not the language of pluralism or of democratic humility. It is the language of incompetence.
The UCP’s 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.
Invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to End the Teachers’ Strike
Smith became the first premier in Alberta history to use the notwithstanding clause 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.
Instead, she chose political convenience.
The Auditor General’s Scathing Report on Healthcare Failures
Alberta’s Auditor General delivered a devastating assessment of healthcare governance under Smith’s restructuring agenda. The report cited poor oversight, lack of accountability, fragmented decision-making, failure to provide clear performance measures, and significant risk to patient care because of chaotic reorganization.
It confirmed what health-care workers have been saying for months: Smith’s “reform” has produced confusion, instability, and declining system performance.
Smith’s invocation of foreign funds is simply the latest chapter in a long story of the most inept government in Canada.
What’s at stake is not just this recall fight. What’s at stake is public trust in democratic institutions. The recall process is meant to be a tool of citizen accountability. It is meant to allow constituents to hold elected representatives to account. Smith is effectively defaming the very notion that voters might legitimately disagree with her government, might legitimately exercise a democratic tool, might legitimately say: you are not representing us.
She is framing dissent not as local political agency, but as external sabotage. Again, this is standard authoritarian behaviour.
There is also a sharp irony in Smith’s outrage: she is furious about a recall mechanism that her own party put into law. The UCP framed recall legislation as a populist accountability tool when it served their interests — a way to posture as champions of “the people” against unresponsive politicians. But now that citizens are using that very law against her own MLAs, Smith treats it as an abuse, even a foreign-funded plot.
It’s the classic boomerang of bad-faith populism: a tool designed for political theatre suddenly functions as real democratic accountability, and the government that created it recoils in indignation. This is not sabotage. It’s consequences.
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