Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s response to a U.S. podcaster’s quips about Canada as the 51st state last week was to tell him and a conservative group’s Florida donor gala that they’d regret having tens of millions of progressive Canadians voting for the U.S. president, according to video of her speaking event obtained by CBC News.
It stands in contrast with other Canadian leaders, even Conservative ones, who have handled Donald Trump’s rhetoric about absorbing Canada by vocally denouncing “an unjustified threat” or declaring the country’s not for sale. Instead, Smith gently deflected the 51st state references from Ben Shapiro at a fundraising dinner for PragerU by cautioning about how it would hurt the U.S. right wing’s electoral prospects.
“That would be like adding another California to your electoral system, and [you] would never have a Republican president in the White House again,” Smith told the audience. “So I would just caution you that it’s probably best for us to just stay friends, and friends should never move in together.”
CBC News has obtained a video copy of the full onstage dialogue between Shapiro and Smith.
In her remarks, Smith stuck largely to advocating about the harms of Trump’s planned tariffs on the U.S. economy, and stressed the historically friendly cross-border relationship.
She not only highlighted the reliance U.S. refineries have on Alberta’s heavy oil, but also highlighted the exports of uranium from Saskatchewan, aluminum from Quebec and critical minerals from several provinces.
“I think what you’re seeing is some hurt feelings,” she said. “I think we don’t understand why it is that this relationship is having the tension that it is right now.”
Smith avoided repeating some of the messages she’d delivered in a Breitbart News interview this month, about how she’d advised Trump administration officials to “pause” tariffs to avoid boosting the Liberals’ election fortunes, and that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was “in sync” with Trump’s direction.
Both comments triggered backlash back at home. Liberals made an attack ad out of her Poilievre comparison with Trump, which the Conservatives dispute.
There wasn’t any of that at her Florida event, which suggests she prepared for how closely domestic audiences would be watching her comments for any political hazards, said political scientist Lisa Young.
“She was being very careful throughout the interview,” said Young, a University of Calgary professor who reviewed the video. “Shapiro tried to lure her toward the pitfalls a couple of times anyway, and she sidestepped them quite neatly.”
Shapiro, who has consistently criticized the tariffs on Canada, referred to the trade war as an impediment to getting the Conservative victory that he said Republicans would prefer in April’s Canadian election.
“Let’s work together to get those obstacles out of the way so we can get to a better government in Canada that actually acts to be a more solid American ally,” he said onstage.
Later, he referred to an offstage discussion with Smith in which they apparently discussed Liberal Leader Mark Carney as a “bad negotiating partner” who wants the trade tensions to continue as “political wind in his sails,” and who’s fine dealing instead with China.
In each case, Smith changed the subject. When Shapiro referred to Conservatives as a “better partner to make those deals with,” the premier replied “Yeah, it’s true,” before pivoting to her criticism of Carney’s net-zero emissions ambitions, and Alberta’s preference to greatly boost oil and gas production.
She did comment at one point about the Carney Liberals’ resurgence in the polls after the party’s distant second-place standing under former leader Justin Trudeau.
“When you do a quick switcheroo on a brand-new face, sometimes it gives you a little bit of a surge. That’s the point we’re at in Canada now,” the premier said.
She compared it to the Democrats’ revived fortunes when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as their presidential candidate last summer, though she lost the election.
Ahead of the April 28 vote, Smith wondered aloud: “Is there going to be enough time for some of those conservative ideas and some of that to come back?”
Shapiro himself called Canada an “excellent ally” to the United States, and cheekily explained he didn’t think his country should annex its northern neighbour.
“Yes on Greenland, maybe Cuba, yeah, but I don’t think we need Canada. They can’t even spell colour,” Shapiro said.
Smith took it all as humorous, making a War of 1812 reference at the end of the event: “And we promise not to burn down the White House ever again.”
But as Trump has repeated his 51st state comments over several months, other politicians have stopped laughing along.
“There was certainly an opportunity to say threatening to annex Canada makes people understandably upset,” Young said. “She did not push back in that way. She certainly didn’t wave the Canadian flag in the way I think most Canadian politicians would under those circumstances.”
Smith tends to build rapport with her audiences rather than alienate or make them uncomfortable, and has maintained a strategy to “gently convince Trump” against applying tariffs, Young said. The likes of Carney, Poilievre and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have more often threatened retaliatory measures as a deterrent.
Smith and Shapiro spoke for about 25 minutes at the gala, a $1,500-a-plate fundraiser for PragerU, a conservative education non-profit (that’s not an accredited university).
Smith has defended her taxpayer-funded trip to the Florida event amid the Alberta NDP’s calls for her to cancel. In the legislature, she’d said she was “going into the lion’s den to change the hearts and minds of the very Americans that we need on Canada’s side to avoid a trade war.”
Danielle Smith tells American conservative media tariffs are bad for business
She claimed a victory of sorts afterwards, when Shapiro reiterated his criticism of tariffs on his popular podcast Friday. He told his audience that the trade war was hurting the U.S. economy and Trump’s popularity and having the added effect of “propping up… the worst person in Canadian politics right now,” referring to Carney.
“He devoted his entire podcast to talking about how terrible tariffs were for American businesses, and for America and for North America and that’s exactly what we wanted to accomplish,” Smith told her own Alberta call-in radio program on Saturday.
In fact, tariffs occupied around 16 minutes of Shapiro’s one-hour podcast; other segments were on government downsizing, deportations and the new live-action Snow White film.
