(LifeSiteNews) — Much like the recently elected leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, the frontrunner for Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) October 6 leadership race is no friend of social conservatives.
Danielle Smith, like Pierre Poilievre, has managed to win the hearts and minds of many pro-freedom Canadians, positioning herself against the tragic premiership of the current UCP leader, Jason Kenney.
Running on a pro-medical freedom, anti-lockdown and anti-COVID mandate platform in addition to an emphasis on Alberta sovereignty, it is no surprise Albertans prefer Smith to the pro-lockdown, pro-masking, vaccine passport-implementing Kenney.
But what about the other issues? What about the issues that plagued society before the COVID era, and in fact set society up to eagerly accept the tyranny of the COVID era?
COVID tyranny may have been the nail in the coffin — or for many the wake-up call — but it is of little surprise a society that has for years permitted its own destruction through abortion-on-demand, gay “marriage,” transgenderism and euthanasia would inevitably struggle with understanding basic concepts such as the right to keep a business open, not wear a mask or opt out of an experimental injection.
After all, can a society that allows the dismemberment of 9-month-old children in the womb really be shocked when it loses the right to medical privacy or bodily autonomy?
Danielle Smith and the LGBT agenda
In 2012, while serving as the leader of the Wildrose Party — a now-defunct conservative provincial party in Alberta — Smith laid to rest any confusion about where she stood on both abortion and gay “marriage.”
“When our members elected me they knew they were electing a candidate that was pro-choice and pro-gay marriage,” Smith said, as reported by The Globe and Mail at the time.
“The only way we’re going to be able to become a mainstream, big-tent conservative party capable of forming government is to focus on the issues that matter to Albertans. If I am elected premier, a Wildrose government will not be legislating in areas of morality.”
In effect, Smith was positing that the only way to win was to sacrifice on foundational principles of life and family. But if one has to become the opposition in order to win, then is that really winning?
Ironically, this attempt to betray conservative values to secure the victory did not work, and in 2014 her own members voted against her proposal to add “sexual orientation” to the Wildrose platform as an officially protected class, eventually leading Smith to leave the party and join the Progressive Conservative Association.
In response to that defeat, Smith told the Calgary Sun at the time that she was “gravely disappointed” and was “facing backlash” within her “own party.”
“It really was a turning point. It was one thing that made it impossible for me to continue as leader. After five years of fighting this battle to get acceptance of a more mainstream position I thought we had won that battle,” Smith relayed. “But our members organized to vote against a direction I had set. We had our members make a decision to go in exactly the opposite direction I wanted to go.”
“I found out afterwards there was a group who came specifically to vote it down to teach me and some of my caucus colleagues a lesson about having walked in the gay pride parade.”
‘Personally, I’m pro-choice’
In a 2018 blog piece for Global News, Smith once again addressed the issue of abortion in a public manner.
Her piece was written as a criticism of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government’s decision to discriminate against pro-lifers by withholding funding from the Canada Summer Jobs Programs to any group that does not support abortion.
While Smith admirably took the Trudeau government’s insanity to task, she still threw her support behind abortion, seemingly more disturbed by the move from a legal perspective than a moral one.
“Personally, I’m pro-choice, but I could support the U.K. approach which limits abortion once the baby becomes independently viable, somewhere around 24 weeks. But according to Trudeau, I am somehow violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for saying as much,” Smith wrote.
“Good thing I’m not trying to hire a summer student through the Canada Summer Jobs program,” she remarked.
While this opposition to the outright demonic obsession with abortion from Trudeau and his ilk is good, it is a far cry from the authentic conservative view and not a good sign for Alberta.
Conservatives do not oppose murder because it violates Canadian law, they oppose murder because it is a violation of the natural law and the Divine law.
So, where do we go from here?
Ultimately, the onus is going to continue to reside with pro-lifers. Much like having Poilievre as the leader on the federal level, if Smith becomes the leader of Alberta’s UCP — and the polls indicate this is likely — pro-lifers must remain cognizant that the decay of government is downstream from the decay of society, and the decay of society is downstream from the decay of our morality.
That is to say, the political problems Canada is facing are a consequence of the moral problems we have been facing for decades. Taking a stance against the political problems — as Smith and Poilievre have admittedly done well with respect to COVID and other issues — without taking a stance against the moral problems is akin to quitting smoking after being diagnosed with cancer.
Quitting smoking is well and good, but if the cancer is already present, it needs to be treated as well.
As I wrote in a similar piece about Poilievre, “if being a conservative has been reduced to a lackluster defense of freedom that takes place two years after government mandates ravage the country, and no-brainer arguments against delusional communists, then conservatism is nothing more than the useful idiot of outright malevolent liberalism.”
