Alberta’s provincial election campaign features a showdown between outgoing United Conservative Party (UCP) premier Danielle Smith’s hard-right populist politics, and New Democratic Party (NDP) leader and former premier Rachel Notley’s center-left politics. This will be the first real test of Smith’s electoral viability since her predecessor, Jason Kenney, was turfed by the UCP for being insufficiently right-wing.

A key player in Kenney’s demise and Smith’s leadership win is an organization called Take Back Alberta (TBA), which is registered as a third-party advertiser — essentially a Canadian political action committee (PAC). But calling TBA a PAC doesn’t do justice to its organizing prowess and the dangers it poses to the social fabric. The group is filling town halls all over the province, seizing on the alienation many feel after three years of pandemic confusion and uncertainty.

Its message is simple — no more pandemic restrictions, no more vaccine mandates, no to online voting, and yes to radical health care reforms, thus paving the way for privatized health care in the province. With Smith in charge, the group is in the process of seizing the UCP machinery and purging it of any remnants of Kenney’s influence.