November 1st, 2025 | Ryan Tyler

Danielle Smith's Fatal Mistake

There was a smarter way.

Let's talk about strategy, not feelings and subjective ideas. Never mind your feelings about unions or conservatives, mind only the political strategies and logic that keep a party in power. If we focus only on those things, we should agree that Danielle Smith has made a potentially fatal error for the UCP.

Unions are archaic, authoritarian organizations that have no place in a democratic society. We know that. A simple piece of legislation would obliterate them completely, but most governments are scared to do it. Let's keep that in mind and get it out of the way. We probably agree on it—but now let's talk about how the UCP and Smith sacrificed the next election and handed Naheed Nenshi more power.

Any party in power should avoid allowing a strike, let alone a general strike.

The very second the ATA began whining about salaries and class sizes, the UCP should have listened and acted. To many conservatives, this sounds like capitulation and weakness, but it's not. It's pure strategy.

No one cares when a non-essential service goes on strike. This is why no one cares about the rolling Canada Post strikes. They have no effect on anything, because most people only get flyers in the mail. Amazon, UPS, FedEx have all taken over the areas where overpaid government-run services have failed. Ironically, it has been unions that caused the death of Canada Post. As the service became more irrelevant, they demanded higher pay. This caused an over-funded bureaucracy that became too costly and less efficient. In the end, the private sector won.

The same is not true about teachers.

Private schools are expensive, so most of us send our kids to public school. We need teachers as much as we need roads. When teachers go on strike, it disrupts everything for parents and normal people. With childcare costs still unsustainable, it puts a lot of families in a jam. Although it's great to pay families like the Alberta government did, it doesn't change the fact that this disruption was a disruption. Parents still had to find babysitters and daycares with available space—in competition with thousands of other parents.

The teachers' strike caused a disruption no one needed. Any kind of disruptions like what happened in Alberta often cause irreparable harm to the governments in charge—for good reason.

Danielle Smith is the leader of the government. Her government is in charge of class sizes, payrolls, and benefits for teachers. Although unions have political influence, they don't directly control these things. They represent the teachers who spend their lives in classrooms. So, when they go to the leader of the government with a complaint, that government should listen. Not because the unions are necessarily right, but because the fallout from not listening can be politically fatal.

Yes, the ATA is a biased, politically left-wing organization. By its very nature and design, the ATA is a right-wing government's natural enemy.

Any conservative leader knows this. In most provinces, unions have more control than they should. However, the best way to fight them isn't through letting them strike and allowing them to disrupt the daily lives of ordinary people. The best way to fight is to give them what they want.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but it's not.

Remember Canada Post? The federal government has spent the last 20 years giving them what they wanted. As their services became more expensive and less efficient, people turned to more efficient and less expensive alternatives. In fact, Canada Post became so inefficient and bloated that most people stopped caring about the costs of private services. This is how private services came into dominance. The same happened in the United States.

Most Canadians can now get a package across the country in less than two days—without Canada Post.

What Danielle Smith should have done was give the ATA exactly what it wanted, even if its demands were unreasonable. Class sizes can't be fixed overnight. Both the ATA and UCP know that, but the UCP chose to be honest about it, and Smith chose to be vindictive.

After capitulating and disarming the ATA by giving them everything, the UCP could have introduced legislation that strengthens and funds private schools. It would have caused some crying from public teachers, but they would not have been able to justify striking over it. In the end it would have cost taxpayers a lot, but any other outcome would have been the same.

In terms of legislation, the UCP could have done a bunch of things to strengthen private schools. They could have incentivized investments from the private sector and billionaires with massive tax deductions and grants. It would have created big deficits, but Alberta is going to get those anyway—but with less to show for it.

Sadly, by being vindictive, Danielle Smith and her dopey ministers may have done irreparable harm to the UCP and Alberta by bolstering unions and giving more influence to disgusting pigs like Naheed Nenshi. Once you put a bitter taste in a voter's mouth, it stays. If polls are accurate, the damage is real and Smith's approval is now below that of Nenshi—which is a horrific sign of political failure.

That failure, unfortunately, is believable.

Smith's UCP has been hearing about a potential teachers' strike for more than a year. Alberta does, in fact, have a serious problem with class sizes and schools. We don't have enough space for more kids. What's worse, is that the UCP has been running ads across Canada encouraging more people to move to Alberta.

Overall, this has been a self-inflicted crisis. Alberta's education system, healthcare system, and infrastructure are all suffering. Too many people are moving to Alberta and it is one of the few provinces in Canada that has experienced exponential growth. Other provinces, like Ontario, have actually begun to experience a decline in population—despite the federal government's mass immigration policies.

Running ads in Ontario and Manitoba, to encourage people to move to Alberta, was short-sighted and stupid.

Conservatives, like Liberals and New Democrats, remain strapped to the idea that more people is a good thing. It can be, but all people are not the same. As statistics prove, Canada has welcomed millions more within a few short years, all while productivity continues to decline and debt continues to climb. The old model, where more people manifested into higher productivity and revenue, is dead.

Danielle Smith believes stupid shit. Like most Canadian conservatives, she comes from a school of thought that has been failing them for decades. Yet, they still keep believing it.

I can't think of any other country where conservatism fails as miserably as it does in Canada. After a few more election cycles, Alberta will be a solidly socialist province and conservatives won't know why. It's bad enough to watch so many dumb conservatives arrogantly believing the NDP “will never win again” in Alberta, while cheering on Smith's moronic strategies. When the full conversion to socialism and firm NDP-union control happens, those same conservatives will be scratching their heads and trying to find somewhere else to live.

Alberta, the last bastion of hope and freedom in Canada, converted to orange because of how bad conservatives are at everything. Imagine that.

How To Fix It

One of the biggest problems conservatives have is that they don't take accountability. They blame liberals and leftist voters for all their problems, while saying stupid shit like, “I don't care about political strategy,” and “only good policies and small government matter.”

How has that worked out?

Conservatives have let the left take full control of the culture, but that's something smart people already know and its another battle. The short fight now is keeping Alberta out of the NDP's hands. If Alberta falls, conservatism will be dead forever.

Smith and the UCP might be able to fix their impending electoral defeat by doing the things I mentioned here.

Furthermore, they can prevent a general strike by doing what teachers and nurses want. In fact, they should give them all more than they are asking. The UCP should change course completely and make Alberta teachers and nurses the highest paid in Canada. Give them so much money that it makes the news in Ontario.

Run deficits, spend bigger, and tell the “libertarian” wing of the UCP to fuck itself. They're retards and they are one of the biggest setbacks the UCP currently has—more than the party's progressive wing. They're the ones who mutter stupid phrases about how much policies and smaller government matter more than political moves, while disregarding the bigger picture.

This is a do-or-die moment in Alberta's history for conservatives. When the dumb libertarians break off and start their own party, it won't matter if the UCP plays its cards right. Pierre Poilievre's strategy to appeal to unions and working class people had big, historic payoffs for the federal party in the last election. Smith could try the same.

Making friends with unions isn't a long-term solution, but it's a good strategy that could flip the script for the next 10 to 20 years.

Making Alberta the envy of Canada for nurses and teachers also has big long-term benefits economically and socially. We can worry about how to pay for it later. As nurses and teachers from other provinces flock to Alberta, it will solve a lot of our current problems with healthcare and education. Those extra teachers the ATA wants (to grow their own power as a union) would come on their own. The government would then generate more, real revenue from an excess of taxpayers that aren't employed at Tim Hortons.

A lot of what Alberta spends will come back in higher tax revenues from people who ACTUALLY increase productivity and our quality of life.

Had the UCP done this two years ago, our population growth would have resulted in real, positive outcomes—rather than the shit we are seeing now. We never needed more waitresses and Uber drivers, we needed more teachers, nurses, and doctors. Instead of housing shortages for more low-wage workers, we could have made real progress with fixable struggles along the way.

All while paying teachers and nurses big money with good benefits, the UCP dumps money into private schools. Not to stick it to unions and the public sector, but to give Alberta's growing population more choices.

With more nurses and hospitals come more doctors. With more teachers and schools come more principals, administrators, and superintendents. With all of them come higher salaries and demand for bigger homes, private schools, and retail stores.

I mean, do I really need to keep laying this out for you?

This all sounds counter-intuitive to the old-school conservatives and their out-dated ways of thinking, but this is why liberals and leftoids keep winning elections. In the long-term, the UCP could build a strong foundation for future conservatism, which would include real conservative policies. In a couple of decades, Alberta would have a higher population of real professionals, with more private schools, more high quality services and—therefore—more appeal for investors and big business. This all happens while conservatives maintain lower taxes and minimal regulations.

That's how real conservatism takes hold.

It's a long game that most conservatives don't know how to play. By making enemies now, Danielle Smith is squandering the future of conservatism. Rather than making the UCP the trusted source of real economic growth and stability, Smith is making the UCP a despised relic that might get sent to the dustbin of history.

In ten years, Albertans should be praising the UCP for getting them to a better place, not scoffing about how they handed the future to socialists through arrogance and stupidity.