At various times, Danielle Smith has either claimed to be, or acted as if she is a Libertarian. When she became Alberta's premier, people started labelling her "an Authoritarian Libertarian" - a term which I have always looked at with some skepticism. The performance of her government has led me to the conclusion that she is in no meaningful way a "libertarian".
First, let's talk about what a libertarian is in broad terms (yes, I know there are multiple "schools of thought" on the subject). Wikipedia describes it as follows:
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds liberty and personal sovereignty as primary values.
In practical terms, this often aligns with a general perspective that views government regulation as problematic, and wishes to reduce government to an absolute minimum in terms of its ability to intervene in individual lives. Often, libertarians will go so far as to insist that governments should not regulate markets at all, and that the only regulation needed arises out of the ability of individuals to apply pressure on markets / businesses via lawsuits. This latter concept is wild to me because while the libertarian argues that government should be minimal, at the same time, they want to be able to sue people using laws that they don't want the government to implement?
In what way has Danielle Smith's government acted even remotely "libertarian"? I've seen lots of awful governments in Alberta, but this one takes intervening in people's daily lives to new extremes.
For example, look at the Smith UCP government's interventions in the energy markets. One of the first things the UCP did was slam the brakes on renewable energy, and then they imposed a regulatory environment which more or less guaranteed that you couldn't build a renewable energy project in Alberta. A supposedly small-government libertarian should see this act as what it actually is: the government intervening in the market to pick winners (and losers). At its core, this makes no rational sense to a libertarian. Why would you intervene in a marketplace at all - isn't competition a good thing? (apparently not, at least not in Alberta when the oil patch is involved)
Then we need to look at other actions on the part of the UCP. Perhaps at the front of the list here in my books are the anti-transgender laws. Again, from a libertarian perspective, these laws make no sense - they represent a major intervention of the government in people's lives. It places the government in places that a libertarian should look at and go "nope, no place for government intervention here".
If that wasn't enough to make you wonder, there is the entire assault on municipal governance that the UCP has engaged in. Whether this is the UCP injecting itself in federal funding to municipalities, or dictating to municipalities over matters like bike lanes. All of these are in the category of the provincial government intervening in ways that should be anathema to an actual libertarian.
Does that make Smith an "Authoritarian Libertarian"? Frankly, no. In my view, this makes her an Authoritarian - full stop. Absolutely nothing that Danielle Smith has done as a leader comes remotely close to being a practical expression of libertarian thinking.
Let's think for a moment about what makes the UCP under Danielle Smith "Authoritarian"?
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.[1][2]
A more recent feature of political authoritarianism is an explicit rejection of expert knowledge and opinion. We've seen this repeatedly with the UCP - especially on high profile matters like renewable energy or the anti-transgender legislation where expert consensus and scientific research is dismissed with "we have our own studies" (which are often junk science).
The Smith government's rejection of political plurality appears in multiple forms. What comes to mind first is the obvious attempts to put their thumb on the scale by carving urban ridings up in Calgary and Lethbridge in ways that clearly benefit the UCP. The process itself was clearly partisan biased, which is a significant deviation from the approach we have used for over 50 years. Then to force "blended" urban/rural ridings where they have is clearly designed to achieve a particular electoral outcome.
Similarly, Smith imposed a 10 question referendum this year, and it was clearly designed to manufacture consent for specific policy positions that the government (not citizens) wanted to push. The resulting process was offensive - questions that were overly complex, clearly designed to lead people to certain conclusions; the Premier herself trying to position it as an exercise in "direct democracy" (it wasn't), it was an attempt to manufacture consent. The questions were misleading, and in many cases misrepresented the current reality.
Then we come to the UCP's conduct in the legislature. Under Smith, the UCP has invoked closure on debate in over 20% of the bills it has tabled; it has repeatedly tabled legislation and used its majority to ram it through in a matter of a day or two. You might say "well, they're allowing normal debate on 80% of bills" ... but you would be missing the point. They have normalized rushing legislation through the house to such a degree that open debate is simply being cut off when it suits the governing party. This is not a government which respects the legislative process, but rather one which views the legislature as a necessary evil that it does everything it can to bypass - another mark which puts the Smith-led UCP firmly in the authoritarian camp.
Another area which marks the UCP under Danielle Smith as authoritarian is the "Government Knows Best" approach to social issues. Not only has the UCP stuck its oar into the curation of libraries (unsurprisingly to ban anything that looks like it might recognize the existence of gender or sexual minorities), but they have actually mandated tracking what people check out of the library. This isn't "just in schools" either, but is in fact being imposed on public libraries as well. To be abundantly clear, this is a level of government intervention in people's lives that hasn't been common in North America since the 1950s when we had censorship boards running around.
The UCP has decided that it can use the Notwithstanding Clause (S33) any old time it wants to strip people of their civil rights. This is an abuse of what should be treated as an emergency power. Perhaps more striking is that they have used this clause to inject the opinion of government between a patient and their medical team, and have outright banned specific treatment avenues using S33. Again, this is a shocking level of intervention for any government, much less one led by a person who is allegedly a libertarian. In this particular situation, it appears to be a government that is in fact being led by its religious conservative wing, who are much more authoritarian than most people realize.
While the UCP claims to be the party of "law and order", the reality is quite different. When it comes to their perceived self-interest, the UCP has shown itself all too willing to simply rewrite the rules when it suits them. There are two major examples of this that I can think of. First is the multiple rewrites of the "Citizen's Initiatives Act" to benefit the separatists in 2025. Those rewrites went through at a nearly blinding speed. The other is the UCP stick itself between municipalities and the federal government, which was done basically in a fit of spitefulness. In both cases, these are not examples of a government "working with the rule of law" so much as a government redefining the law for purely political reasons.
Also, none of these matters are the kinds of things you would expect from a "libertarian". These are more synonymous with a government "making it up to suit themselves in the moment" - and in many respects the impacts are so surprising that they would not survive an actual challenge under The Charter - I doubt any of these matters would actually be saved by S1 of The Charter.
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