Smith's Risky History (Part 3) Government Smith Style

This is the third of a three part series about Danielle Smith’s history as a School Board Trustee. This one has the least to do with reproductive rights and is completely off the regular topic of this blog, but in terms of the Alberta Provincial Election, it is probably the most vital. It’s about governance. I can already feel you glazing over.


An issue like conscience rights is something people can wrap their heads around and something they care about with passion. An issue like abortion is like an explosion. Abortion is what I call a “deaf” word, like cancer. People hear it and they go deaf. Although my original questions to all the parties were about abortion, the response from Wildrose made the issue much bigger. It became about using referenda to decide social issues. It became about democracy. It became about governance.


As in my other two posts, Smith’s disastrous history on the School Board gives us some vital information about her. This history matters. On to Part Three.


Part Three: Government Smith Style

As everyone knows, Smith’s only elected political experience is her ten months on the School Board.
I have often wondered why Smith never spoke out against the government's decision to dismiss a democratically elected board. I can't find any evidence of it in the media, and I don't remember her speaking out at the time. For someone saying she's all about democratic rights, it makes me wonder about her definition of democracy, just like I wonder about her definition of pro-choice and pro-gay. Maybe this is another thing she talks a good line on but does nothing about. Other Trustees vilified the government and called the tactic anti-democratic. If the public elected the Board, and the public was sick of them, the public should have been given the opportunity to get rid of them in the next election. Or better yet, someone on the Board could have shown some leadership and found a way through the divisions. No one did. The Chair at the time did not. Smith certainly did not. She was obstructionist, to say the least. I'm not interested in what blame is to be shared among the other Trustees. Smith is the only one of them vying to lead the province right now. Instead of showing leadership, instead of being productive and moving public education forward, she helped tear it apart in Calgary. Having Big Daddy Oberg come in and send the bad girls to their rooms was something almost everyone had an opinion about. Yet, when it happened, Smith was quiet. So was Anderson. Smith did not speak up for democracy.

[addendum April 15. After everyone was fired, Alberta Report said that Lyle Oberg had asked Smith and Anderson to run again which would seem to indicate they were in agreement on many things. Today, Oberg is a key advisor of Smith's, and Oberg just opened a five star private hospital in BC. Neither has a commitment to keeping public education or public health care public.]


The operating budget of the CBE back then was roughly $700,000. That’s not much compared to the provincial budget. And Smith wasn’t keen on getting into the details of it. As I mentioned in Part Two, Jennifer Pollock confirms that Smith and Peggy Anderson took a political stance not to participate in budget meetings. This was part of a broader philosophy about governance and what they felt the role of a Trustee was. Again this tells us something about Smith's style of governing. As a Libertarian, Smith believes there should be less government. Anything that makes less government is justifiable in and of itself. This would include non-participation in budget processes. As a Libertarian, she can say she believes anything. She says she is pro-choice, (See Part One for questions about that) but government shouldn't pay for abortion. But the thing is, Libertarians don't believe government should pay for anything. They don't like taxation. Leave it all to the individual.

In these circumstances, what would happen to public school?

Smith was an enthusiastic supporter of something called the “Carver Model” of governance. (Again, I feel your eyes glazing over, but try to stick with me. I’m getting to the point, honestly.) Right after I was elected, the new Trustees were sent to a weekend of presentations on "How to be a Trustee." I was happy at the time to have any guidance at all. I didn’t know until later it was an indoctrination into how administration wanted us to behave and the Carver Model. I soon learned the job really wasn't what I thought it was, or what it had ever been in the past. It had changed. I thought I had been elected to represent constituents on matters of public education. With the Board moving to the Carver model, I was wrong.



Under Carver, the Board creates policies and something called “Ends statements” that say what the goals of the organization are, but stays out of the details of how to get there. You can see why administrators would approve of this model. They have no elected representatives looking at the gory details of how they do things, the gory details like budget line items. As long as they work within broadly defined policy and meet the Ends Statements, it’s all good.  



The Carver model was not designed for use with an elected political body. (I feel you yawning, try to stay with me. This is the part that matters.) It needed to be creatively adapted so that the Board could still do its job as elected officials and achieve goals Smith and others wanted, like less micro-managing by Trustees, a goal that I shared in some respects. We have to trust, to some extent, that administrators know what they are doing. But this has to be balanced against having enough knowledge and input to be accountable to constituents, both in reporting back to them and carrying out their will. Smith was against any kind of creative adaptation to this model and wanted it used in its most orthodox way.



It might be hard to believe, but this topic was a hot one among Trustees, and could not have been more boring, less understood, or less cared about by Calgarians. I had no idea when I became a Trustee that I would be spending my time on implementing this new governance model. But the adoption of the Carver model changed everything about the way the board worked and how it related to both CBE administration and citizens. What has never been made clear to citizens, even to this day, is that Trustees don't function anymore as representatives of their constituents. They are not someone parents can call and get help from beyond the Trustees acting as receptionists and referring calls to the appropriate administrative person. I think that the adoption of the Carver model is the reason that now, the Trustees have handed over financial decision making power to Administration and try to limit public input on the school system.



And this is how Smith wanted it. As we all know, the devil is in the details, and most of us looking at a fiasco like the “no meet committee” would agree that the person in charge should have had an eye on that. It’s pretty hard to be accountable to the electorate otherwise. I have never met a person who does not think their elected representative should be accountable to them. This is an issue that goes to the heart of the nature of democracy.


Smith says she wanted to join the CBE board of Trustees in part because she felt the Board had been unresponsive to parents. Yet, she was solidly behind a governance model that could only result in less responsiveness. In the article by Maurice Tougas about Smith’s leadership potential mentioned in Part One, Pollock notes that Smith has a history, one that I can personally vouch for, of not showing any interest in constituent issues she didn't agree with. A lot of people lost faith in the capacity of the School Board to represent them. And once that happens, people start to ask why we even have one. That can only help Libertarians achieve less government.


In the Tougas article, Pollock says that, “Smith went her own way as a trustee.” Smith took “the unusual stand of advocating school closings, suggesting up to 30 schools should be closed.” Danielle Smith and I have met only once that I remember, and I'm sure she wouldn't remember it. It was while she was a Trustee. She was visiting my daughter's elementary school, one of the 30 schools she wanted to close. The other parents and I joked that she walked around it with the eyes of a real estate agent. Remember, Smith had also run on her support for charter schools. In Calgary, closed public schools often get leased to charter schools and sometimes private schools. It's a pretty good deal for them. I've never been convinced it's a good deal for public schools. Finding buildings is a pretty significant way to support Charter Schools. If she was talking to parents, she wasn't talking to us about saving our school.


I quit my job as Trustee a few months before the end of my term, stressed out and ill, disillusioned and disappointed at everything I had learned while I was there. I was often alone in my opinions, but the divisions among Board members when I was there never came close to what happened on the Board Smith was part of. We were divided, but civil. I quit when I realized my job was not to be the representative of the people who elected me, even though they thought it was. I quit when I realized I could no longer support what the Board was doing. My job was to be the yes-woman, and I couldn't do it anymore. I felt like a hypocrite. I couldn’t pretend I was a representative of my constituents when the board had basically eliminated any capacity for that, as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t pretend that what I was doing had anything to do with democracy. I was criticized for my decision, but not by many. Most people understood. I made sure my resignation was close enough to the next election that it wouldn't trigger a by-election. I didn't want it to cost the taxpayers money. And I also knew that there was not a single vote result between my departure and the end of the term for this Board that would have been altered by my presence. By that time, votes were generally going 5-2 or 6-1. The school closure issue was finished and we were moving into summer. To me, what would have been worse for Calgary Public was another divisive, bickering board. I wouldn't be that person. Calgary didn't need that again. Sometimes it's better to walk away.



That’s the end of this series. I hope you found it instructive. I've told this story from my perspective and the interpretations I've given are mine alone. I wish I could find my freaking glasses. Sorry about any typos. Apparently I've called Daveberta a bogger instead of a blogger. Sorry Dave. At least I didn't call him a bugger. I correct my mistakes when I find them. In other words, no one's perfect. I don't expect anyone, elected or otherwise, to be perfect. I do expect some integrity. I just want everyone to understand the history of this school board so they can decide for themselves if Wildrose represents their values, and if they think Ms Smith can represent them well. Like I've said, if the best indicator of future performance is past performance, everyone is entitled to know what I know. Blogs can be useful for that. 

Part One is here
Part Two is here


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The Abortion Monologues is available as an e-book on Smashwords

Danielle Smith's Risky History (Part 2) Narrative of Persecution

This is Part Two of Smith's Risky History - Part One is Here

As I said in Part One, I was the School Board Trustee for Wards 6 and 7 after Ms Smith. Since the best indicator of future performance is past performance, we need to look at her past as a Trustee.

One of the things I've been blogging about lately is how Smith likes to blame liberal conspiracies for any dissent against her. It's interesting to note her language. She has blamed "eastern Canadian critics" (read liberals) for her troubles, attacking her opponents for doing their best to protect reproductive rights and gay rights, while she herself says she's pro-choice and pro-gay rights. On the one hand, Smith claims philosophical alignment with pro-choice and pro-gay rights folks, and on the other, she blames them for trying to bring her down.

Something doesn't add up. A person who is pro-choice and pro-gay rights doesn't propose or encourage strategies that will harm reproductive rights and gay rights. As Part One makes clear, there's nothing in her history to characterize her as a progressive on these issues except her statement at last night's forum. If there were, the media would have printed it when the stories broke. Progressives with some credibility as progressives understand her "fauxgressive" rhetoric. I think her party knows exactly who she is - someone who can appear moderate compared to the rest of them and won't lift a finger to stop their regressive agenda. Now, on to Part Two.

Part Two: Smith's Narrative of Persecution

Smith's tendency to demonize her critics and portray herself as persecuted was clear while she was a Trustee and continues today.

Here's one example from the School Board days. While on the Board, Smith and Peggy Anderson had their poor attendance reported to the government by a constituent, Donn Lovett. Lovett wanted them removed from the Board in accordance with the School Act. Smith claimed that the daytime budget meetings conflicted with her day job and suggested the scheduling of those meetings was done just so it would be impossible for her to attend. Jennifer Pollock, a Trustee at the time, confirms that Smith and Anderson had a political stance against attending budget meetings. They didn't think the elected board should have anything to do with the details of the budget, except to write general policy or guidelines. (I'll talk more about this in part three, when I talk about Smith's record on governance.) Smith and Anderson said trustees Jennifer Pollock, Liz LoVecchio and Judy Tilston had put Lovett up to the letter. Lovett responded, "Nobody needs to tell me to do anything." (See this source and Daveberta again.) [Addendum April 13, 2012: I've just been able to confirm with Donn Lovett that Smith initiated a law suit against him as a result of this incident.]

More recently, when opposition to the idea of “conscience rights” arose and a former supporter publicly bailed on Wildrose as a result, Wildrose started saying it was a plot against them by a liberals. Their former supporter was labelled a conservative mole. Like Lovett, she affirmed that she acted independently. (As do I, by the way.) Smith and Wildrose deny that their opponents might have brains of our own. To them, we are all puppets on a conspiratorial string.

Here's another example. Smith was well known as the subject of some legendary "mean girl" note passing during school board meetings, a situation widely believed to be the final straw for a frustrated public and the catalyst for the Board's removal. Smith released the notes to the media, and has since called this "good opposition research." She is obviously proud of her work here. Although she denies she retrieved the notes from the garbage, other trustees said that was the only place she could have found them. The point here is that Smith made it an issue, found the notes and made them public. She wanted those notes in the media. The media in turn were delighted to outline all the details of who said what about who's hair and someone's ugly suit. (See Daveberta's blog for excruciating detail on the whole note passing fiasco.)


In this campaign, Wildrose used another "mean girl" comment and made hay out of it. The Globe and Mail reported that Wildrose had used the ridiculous tweet about Smith's family life and childless status so that it played strongly in Smith's favour. At first, media was ignoring the tweet, because it was completely insignificant. Anyone who's ever been on Twitter knows it's full of crap like this. After being unable to light a fire under the tweet, Wildrose sent out a press release just to make sure everyone knew. They wanted it to be an issue. Yes, the tweet was ridiculous and insulting and the woman who tweeted it was idiotic and was dealt with. Similarly, yes, the notes were ridiculous and petty and all involved were publicly shamed. But Smith sure made the most of both of these situations to draw attention to herself. Even I felt sorry for her after the idiotic tweet. What a woman wants to do about a family is no one's business. I'm pro-choice. But I never would have known someone took a pot shot at her unless her people had spent so much time making sure I did. After I learned that, my sympathy evaporated. It reminded me too much of the "mean girl" note incident.


What’s interesting to me is that the "mean girl" notes about bad hair and the recent tweet are genuinely petty compared to saying you’ll put “issues like abortion” to citizen initiated referendum and enact conscience rights that override human rights. But it is this abortion issue and this conscience rights issue that Smith portrays as frivolous. Again, as the Globe and Mail notes, Smith says it's all liberal lies, electioneering and those darned easterners are behind it. (For the record, I'm from Toronto and moved to Calgary in 1988. In Smith's world, that fact alone would seem to be enough to dismiss my concerns about her policies.) If, as Smith says, “It’s typical of liberal politicians to demonize a conservative party using fear-mongering,” it is just as typical for Smith to demonize progressives and use their well-founded concerns to portray herself as hard done by and misrepresented.

This week, journalists are finding out just how little negative opinion Smith and the Wildrose are willing to brook. Another article in the Globe and Mail says that journalists who aren't towing the Wildrose Party line are being rebutted. But Wildrose is not just rebutting what they find to be errors in facts; they are rebutting so-called errors of opinion. They are coming down on people who merely disagree with them. This is all sounding very Stephen Harper to me. When Harper first got into power, he de-funded Status of Women Canada the Court Challenges Program, certainly both venues for dissenters. I could write a book about how Stephen Harper has quelled dissent, and right now the last chapter would be about CBC cuts.

As I've said before, the very idea that Conservatives are the subject of liberal media persecution is  hard to buy when you remember that Smith used to work for the Calgary Herald, has had more than enough presence in media in both print and television, and that her husband is an executive with Sun Media. The media is biased? Really? In what direction? Does Smith really want to open up that can of worms?

I don't want a Provincial leader who cries persecution anytime anyone disagrees with them, or a leader who dismisses and derides dissent. And I sure don't want a leader who is going to pick a fight with the rest of Canada. I get a sense that Wildrose could start another persecution narrative, the old one where Alberta is hard done by within Canada. It's already started. Wildrose policy has enough in it to show us how a Wildrose government will relate to the rest of Canada. Wildrose is bothered by the fact that Albertans give more in transfer payments than we get. Oh poor Alberta. No reason for us to help out our neighbours. Libertarians leave that kind of stuff to individuals, remember?  Wildrose policy suggests Alberta get its own immigration policy, opt out of Canada Pension in favour of our own, and that Alberta reject any federal legislation that might come to bear on our industry (read environmental rules). If Quebec were saying some of what's in the Wildrose policy book, the word "separatist" would surely arise. Someone else can blog about that.

Part Three: Government Smith Style

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The Abortion Monologues is available as an e-book on Smashwords