RED DEER — “I don’t want to see the police monitoring Sunday services!”Thus, Danielle Smith said to a Christian audience in Red Deer earlier Monday, to thunderous applause. The federal government’s Bill C-9 Anti-Hate bill, now at Second Reading before the Senate, is expected to and Christians generally to publicly discuss their faith. This crowd is worried.Smith again: “Once the legislation is passed, it falls to the Government of Alberta. We have control of the police and the courts. So it will be as with the federal firearms legislation. They pass their legislation, it is for us to administer it. So, we are not going after gun owners. Bill C-9? We’ll have to wait and see what federal intentions are but what problem are they trying to solve?”Smith was speaking at the Alberta Christian Leadership Summit, a roughly 800-strong gathering organised by the Christian Impact Network. Also on stage with the premier were Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, Primary Health Minister Adriana LaGrange and Affordability Minister Nathan Neudorf — a combination responsible for two thirds of the money spent by the Government of Alberta. The NDP seethes, no doubt.To Alberta Christians, Smith is an enigma. She has never claimed to be a Christian and will in fact deny it if pressed. Nevertheless, she is wildly popular with ‘her’ Christian base and sometimes compared to biblical rulers such as Cyrus who despite their pagan beliefs, nevertheless advanced God’s purpose..Certainly, she has taken up several causes dear to Alberta’s Christian community… to name a few, withdrawing pornographic textbooks from Alberta schools, using the notwithstanding clause to prevent teenagers from receiving sex change operations, and above all for strongly supporting alternatives to public education, widely perceived — with good reason — as toxic to Christian values.People are responding. “When I came to office,” says Smith, “the number of students outside the public system was 3.5%. Now, it’s 7%. But we have to fix the main system.”Certainly the Marxist slant of education is hard to account for in a place that for something like 40 years had a Social Credit government, the premier of which had a Bible radio show on Sundays and was followed by thirty years of conservatism.“Only for four years was the stall left unguarded,” commented Minister Nicolaides “and in that time, the school system fell apart. I think we assumed that parents were holding the school boards accountable and the boards were holding the system accountable, but they weren’t. Now we have to go in there and fix it because no matter how well the separate system does, the public system is still where most children will be.”.Nicolaides laid out the scope of Marxist infiltration into the teachers’s training colleges, the use of ‘revolutionary’ textbooks for prospective teachers and the pre-graduation requirement for them to not only study DEI but attend a protest.“Schools should be places where our children are taught how to think, not what to think,” he added, announcing a plan for people in later stages of their careers to take a six-month crash course to become a teacher and bring their wisdom into schools.The one awkward moment was when Minister LaGrange was asked what would be done about those babies who survive abortion procedures who are now just left to die. (There are 17 recorded instances of this in Alberta, last year.) LaGrange, a lifelong pro-life supporter, acknowledged her intense discomfort over it.“As our laws stand, any child who survives birth, is a human being and deserves respect. We are having the Alberta Health Services review their policies and procedures. People deserve dignity and respect, from conception onwards.”Minister LaGrange will not be the only one awaiting the results of that review with interest…So how do we put together Danielle Smith, darling of Christian voters, with Danielle Smith who says she isn’t one?Maybe on her own terms: she acknowledges the history of good government based on good values that has brought about the country so many people want to come to.“Faith is to be expressed openly and carried into the public square.”Massive applause. They are ready to vote for her again.Maybe they should not forget to pray for her more often…
