CALGARY — Premier Danielle Smith delivered an impassioned ten-minute speech in front of a packed house on the final day of the Conservative Party of Canada’s national convention in Calgary on Saturday, drawing sustained applause from party members gathered from across the country.Delegates were already coming off a high from the previous night’s leadership review, in which Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre re-secured support among his party’s members with an overwhelming 87.4% approval vote, setting an upbeat tone for the convention’s closing day..The premier was introduced by Damien Kurek, the former Conservative MP who stepped aside from his Battle River–Crowfoot seat to allow Poilievre to seek re-election after losing his longtime Ottawa-area riding in the last federal election.“[Smith] is in the arena every single day, pushing back on the Liberal government to deliver results for both Alberta and Canada,” Kurek said in his introduction..During her speech, Smith also used her appearance to explicitly endorse Poilievre, praising his leadership and positioning him as the federal partner Alberta needs while also reiterating many of his talking points from the previous evening, such as promising a tougher approach to rising crime across the nation and the right for Canadians to defend themselves, their loved ones, and their property.“Conservatives believe in addressing the actual problem — the smuggling of illegal guns from outside Canada through the porous borders that Justin Trudeau created,” Smith said to a standing ovation.“When we can’t guarantee that Canadians are safe in their own communities, it is a failure; that is something any Conservative government would move to fix immediately.”Smith also reiterated that Liberal policies over the last ten years had decimated Canadian unity and Alberta’s economy..“We saw a prime minister who did everything he could to devastate the West and drive our investment and jobs out by implementing radical activist policies that ramped up disorder and chaos,” Smith said, adding that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh “choke[d] off and ultimately destroyed [Alberta’s] energy and agriculture sectors.”She also accused the federal government of overstepping provincial jurisdiction and undermining Confederation itself.“They intruded on areas where the provinces have primary jurisdiction. They violated our Constitution and the very ties that bind Canada together in the name of a top-down bureaucratic onslaught,” Smith said..She added that a Conservative government would refocus Ottawa on its core responsibilities while allowing provinces to develop their economies.“Pierre Poilievre and our Conservatives believe in our Constitution — in leaving the provinces to be provinces — and focusing on what the federal government actually needs to do,” she said.Smith also returned to a major talking point — pipelines — as a central pillar of Conservative economic policy, calling for new export routes in every direction.“As I’ve said many times before, we need to build pipelines to the west, to the east, to the north, and to the south,” she said.“I would love for pipelines to be boring. I would love to just get them built.”.The premier concluded that she was “proud” to work with Poilievre and believes “he will lead the Conservatives back to victory in the next election.”Smith’s speech comes at a sensitive political moment.Her appearance at the convention follows criticism from several provincial premiers over Alberta’s sovereignty movement, a topic she did not touch on during her speech.
