Danielle Smith’s wild ride. What to make of Alberta politics in 2025?
It was one of the most chaotic and frantic years in recent memory
“It’s really been a wild ride” - Rakhi Pancholi, December 11, 2025
As 2025 comes to an end, it’s hard to describe the past twelve months in Alberta politics, but Edmonton-Whitemud NDP MLA Rakhi Pancholi summed it up well in the opposition’s year-end press conference by describing it a “wild ride.”
It has been a chaotic 12 months in Alberta politics. Even for someone who pays very close attention to provincial politics, the pace of the past year was so fast and frantic that it has been hard to keep track. The recently ended fall session of the Legislature might have been one of the most chaotic in recent memory.
It’s clear that Premier Danielle Smith’s governing United Conservative Party is using a “flood the zone” strategy but there were many times when it looked like the government was just flying by the seat of its pants and no one was really in control of the political agenda.
And if it’s hard for political watchers to keep track, that means it’s probably almost impossible for normal Albertans to figure out what’s going on — and that’s the point. The strategy keeps the opposition off balance and doesn’t give them time to respond before the next big announcement or political controversy steals the attention of shrinking newsrooms and a fast paced social media eco-system.
Anyone familiar with the chaos of American politics will recognize this strategy because it’s employed almost hourly by President Donald Trump.
It’s what’s happening when you see Alberta cabinet ministers and senior staffers jumping from licence plate slogans to limiting immigration to increasing speed limits to using the Notwithstanding Clause to invoking the Sovereignty Act to changing rules around citizen initiatives to banning books in schools to blaming Ottawa for Alberta’s problems to using the Notwithstanding Clause again, again and again to legalizing more health care privatization to travelling to Mar-a-Lago to stoking the fire of separatism and threatening a national unity crisis to hobnobbing with Ben Shapiro in Florida to passing the Jordan Peterson law to banning other political parties from using the name “Conservative” to limiting access to COVID-19 vaccines to abolishing the monarchy and official bilingualism to announcing data centres that will never get built to banning vote counting machines to musing about investigating chemtrails to getting into weird public fights with teenagers to supporting boycotts of local bakeries — are you exhausted yet?
You probably get my point.
But the chaos doesn’t mean that the UCP government doesn’t have an agenda. It clearly does.
Smith’s strength as a confident political communicator and her ease in front of a camera and crowd means she has mastered the skill of disarming and deflecting criticism. She has been especially effective at deflecting criticism about the affordability and cost of living crisis that many Albertans are facing today.
Health care chaos the most underreported story of the year
The complete dismantling of Alberta Health Services, which is almost certainly a vendetta for the role the organization played in implementing public health measures meant to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, is one of the most underreported stories of the year.
The province-wide health authority that was created by Premier Ed Stelmach’s Progressive Conservative government in 2008 is being carved into five or six different administrative silos (depending how you count) which will have a real impact on hospitals and health centres from big cities to small rural communities — and health ministers like Adriana LaGrange and Matt Jones haven’t been able to clearly answer the question of how this will make patient care better for Albertans.
Mental health and addictions services have been increasingly outsourced to private companies with close connections to influential people in the UCP and a political corruption scandal that involves the push to increase private surgical services has become a big problem for the government that won’t go away and might be the only big scandal that has been able to stick (thanks in part to the work of intrepid Globe & Mail reporters Carrie Tait and Alanna Smith).
The Premier has done everything she can to avoid calling an independent public inquiry with the power to investigate the matter, despite serious allegations of political interference and corruption at the highest levels of the government.
Separatism the biggest and most dangerous distraction of the year
The biggest distraction of the year is the fight over Alberta staying in Canada.
Smith is walking a narrow line between Albertans who want a better deal with Ottawa and those who just want Alberta to outright leave Canada (or join the United States), though she has actively tipped the scales in favour of the separatists in her party.
The UCP has twice amended the Citizen Initiative Act this year. First to lower the number of signatures required to trigger a province-wide referendum and second to block the Chief Elections Officer from referring initiative questions to the courts to determine their constitutionality.
Alberta has long had a fringe separatist movement that has usually lived on the margins of the far-right, but today’s separatists are a deeply intrenched and active force inside Smith’s UCP. They showed their strength at the recent UCP AGM when Smith was booed after trumpeting her government’s memorandum of understanding about pipelines and the electrical grid with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government in Ottawa.
The Premier’s nervous laughter suggested that it wasn’t the response she was expecting from her party’s activist base, who want no truck or trade with Canada’s federal government. What Smith had hoped would be received as a real governing achievement quickly became a political liability for her — a liability that became more perilous when separatist-endorsed candidates won 5 of 9 races in the recent UCP board elections.
That leaves Smith in a very precarious situation. About half of her party’s supporters want Alberta to separate from Canada — a movement that she happily gave oxygen to on her rise to the UCP leadership in 2022. She may have expected it would be easy to control once she became Premier but her threats of a national unity crisis if Carney’s Liberals were re-elected this year gave the separatists in her party a boost.
So confident are they that prominent separatists like Alberta Prosperity Project lawyer Jeffrey Rath have made numerous trips to Washington DC to seek support from the Trump Administration.
UCP direct democracy tools give Albertans a way to fight back
Albertans unhappy with the government are used to protests outside the Legislature in the deep and dark winter months but direct democracy tools introduced by the UCP a few years ago have given people new avenues to express their discontent.
A citizen initiative launched by former Edmonton-Castle Downs PC MLA Thomas Lukaszuk calling on Alberta to remain in Canada collected more than 456,000 signatures, blowing way past the required threshold of 293,000 signatures. The amazing organizational feat of the Forever Canadian campaign inspired citizen initiatives calling for a referendum question about ending government funding of private schools and banning coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
Amendments to the citizen initiative law introduced by Minister of Justice Mickey Amery during the final week of the fall session meant that country music artist and rancher Corb Lund needed to re-submit his citizen initiative to ban coal mining but was exempt from the huge fee increase for new citizen initiatives.
Cabinet orders released this week show the UCP increased the fee to start collecting petition signatures for a citizen initiative from $500 to $25,000 — a change that will move this direct democracy tool out of reach for most ordinary Albertans.
It’s notable that the 4900% fee increase was made after a citizen initiative introduced by UCP constituency president Mitch Sylvestre calling for a referendum on Alberta leaving Canada was approved by Elections Alberta.
MLA Recall is the other tool the UCP likely didn’t expect would be used against them so soon after adopting it into law and trumpeting it as a way to let Albertans fire their MLA. So far there are 23 recall campaigns targeting 22 UCP MLAs and 1 NDP MLA.
It is unlikely that most of these campaign will collect the number of signatures required to trigger recall votes against MLAs in their ridings but it is a very clear demonstration that Albertans unhappy with Smith’s UCP have reached the point where they want to do something about it.
Where does that leave the opposition?
To their credit, the opposition Alberta NDP has avoided trying to chase and respond to every single government attempt to flood the zone, which is a change from previous years when they frequently fell into that trap. Being in opposition means you can talk about whatever issues you want to focus on, but getting attention is a big challenge. That challenge summed up the first year of former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s time as leader of the NDP.
Without a seat in the Legislature, Nenshi was unable to engage in the daily cut and thrust of Question Period and the social media clips that are staged in the process. His winning a seat in the Legislature in the June 2025 by-election in Edmonton-Strathcona gave him a new platform and resources of the opposition caucus but being opposition leader still requires a lot of work to get attention.
There were moments when a lot of political watchers were wondering “where’s Nenshi” but the fall session and his fiery response to the UCP government earlier this month was what a lot of NDP supporters were looking for.
NDP wins in by-elections in Lethbridge-West, Edmonton-Ellerslie and Strathcona suggest that support for the party hasn’t dropped since the last election, though it will need to be ready for a possible early election — and that means nominating candidates soon in ridings the party will need to win if it hopes to form government.
With 38 MLAs, healthy fundraising returns, and a solid base of support in the polls, it’s likely that the NDP will be the main opposition to the UCP. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be smaller parties trying to nip at their heels.
Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Peter Guthrie was kicked out of the UCP Caucus earlier this year and joined the Alberta Party, which announced yesterday that it has been renamed the Progressive Tory Party of Alberta after attempts to resurrect the defunct PC Party were blocked. Guthrie is the party’s leader.
Republican Party leader Cameron Davies had a disappointing third-place showing in the Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills by-election but the UCP organizer-turned-separatist leader has continued his crusade with visits to the United States and appearances in MAGA-aligned US media.
Where does that leave Alberta in 2026?
Hold on, the wild ride isn’t over. There’s no sign that 2026 will be any less chaotic than 2025 in Alberta politics. I’ll have a lot more to share about this in the first weeks of 2026.
Best of Alberta Politics on Real Talk
In what’s become a bit of an annual tradition, I was happy to join Ryan Jespersen on Real Talk to discuss the results of the ninth annual Best of Alberta Politics Survey. Thank you again to everyone who voted and congratulations to the nominees and winners.
Twenty years of Daveberta
This year marked twenty years since I launched Daveberta. I shared some thoughts and reflections about two decades of writing about Alberta politics earlier this year. Here’s a link to that column in case you missed it:
Thank you for reading!
Thank you for reading and subscribing to Daveberta. It continues to be a real pleasure to be able to write about Alberta politics and share it with the more than 8,800 subscribers of this newsletter.
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This is likely my final column of 2025. I wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. I will be back with a new Alberta politics column in the first week of 2026.
Thanks again,
Dave
Albertans are waking up. Check the results of the latest polling on her government’s handling of the economy. Her government is under water on 5 key issues facing Albertans. She’s resorted, as you point out, to Trump’s deflect, deny and deter strategy. BUT it isn’t working. She can attack transgender folks, grizzly bears and gun laws all she wants, but nothing will succeed in getting Albertans to ignore the miserable economy, lack of healthcare and destruction of the education system. And the separatists are coming for her! The advent of a new Tory party alternative will hasten the arrival of a new election in 2026. She will go to the polls sooner because to wait for 2027, guarantees a split vote on the right and an NDP victory à la 2015.
All I have to say is has it really only been 2 1/2 years of Smith and the UCP? It's seems like it's been 10 years. The damage they've done will take that long to repair. They are exhausting. It's one thing after another and another and still more with this extremist provincial government. Anyone who doesn't want Smith and her government gone has got to be as evil as they are.