Odd Woman Out

Premier Danielle Smith is on Team Canada —for now

- BY CHRISTINA FRANGOU

ON A SATURDAY morning in February, Danielle Smith took questions from Albertans for forty-six minutes during her weekly radio talk show, Your Province. Your Premier.

One of the first callers asked if a prohibition on the sale of raw milk could be eliminated now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the prominent vaccine skeptic who is US health secretary, may open sales south of the border. Smith told him, “[For] anything that we see in the United States changing, we’re going to have to assess our own policies here.”

Another listener asked —this time by text—about Energy East, the longdormant plan for a pipeline that could carry 1.1 million barrels of crude oil per day to refineries in eastern Canada. Smith said its time has come, and proposed five possible pipelines that could run east, west, and north from Alberta.

A fourth-generation farmer wondered about a tariff exemption for beef and grain. Smith told him that she thought it was doable.

Smith was in her element: listening, validating, promising to look into things, no matter how shocking the request. (Raw milk—milk that has not been pasteurized—may harbour dangerous germs like salmonella, E. coli, and listeria.)

Over the first two months of 2025, Canadians got a taste of Smith’s propensity for the unpredictable. First, she flew to Florida in the last days of the Biden administration for an unscheduled meeting with president-elect Donald Trump at his Mara-Lago resort—a visit organized by Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman and Trump supporter who'd once offered to invest a million dollars in Alberta’s oil patch if then premier Rachel Notley, of the New Democratic Party, stepped down.