It has been a few months since Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s speaking tour in the United States, where she advocated for the position of Canadian capitalists on free trade and anti-tariff policies, culminating in a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump. For Americans who had no idea who she was, she was suddenly thrust to the center of right-wing politics, appearing in interviews with right-wing darlings Ben Shapiro and PragerU.

What many failed to realize was that her politics were focused on free trade with oil-rich Alberta — an instrumental fiscal tool she promotes while leveraging Western Canadian resentment, including separatist sentiment, as political currency in her battles with the federal government and in threading the needle among Alberta’s competing voting blocs. Smith is often painted as a simple populist reactionary due to her stances on COVID lockdowns, medicine, and the fact that Alberta, under her premiership, became the political face of a massive measles outbreak. In reality, she is a lifelong neoliberal ideologue, shaped by Canada’s neoliberal thought collective, the Calgary School, and a product of the Canadian right-wing think tank ecosystem, most notably the Fraser Institute.

Beyond this, she situates her politics in two contexts: the structural economic problems of Alberta’s oil-resource economy within Canada’s federal system, and the recurring crises of capitalism that fuel right-wing recessionary and populist grievance politics. Any attempts to understand her rhetoric — especially her opportunistic platforming of Western separatist politics — need to take this lineage into account.