Of all the students he had taught, Flanagan said in an interview three years ago, Smith was the most brilliant student he could remember.
In his statistics course, a notoriously tough senior political science class he taught at the University of Calgary, Flanagan remembered Smith as the top student in that class.
Smith, a former newspaper columnist for the Calgary Herald and researcher for the Fraser Institute, recalls her professor’s assessment a bit differently.
She took that class with her then-boyfriend, who was too busy with his job working for Conservative MP Art Hanger to do his assignments.
“I ended up doing the course work for both my boyfriend and me so Tom saw that I was a fairly hard worker. He kept marking my boyfriend with a higher grade and I ended up with a lower grade,” Smith said in an interview, with a laugh. “He gave me a B+ but he thinks he gave me a higher grade.”
Today Flanagan plays a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in transforming his former pupil into premier of Alberta, after he was brought on as a campaign manager for the Wildrose Alliance.
It’s a similar role to one he played in helping another Calgarian, Stephen Harper, become prime minister.
Others may brand Smith, 41, the Sarah Palin of Canada. But those who know her see her evolving into becoming the Stephen Harper of Alberta. The difference between them, says one Wildrose adviser, is time and their comfort levels with control.
Harper has been forced by governing to learn how to compromise. Smith has not yet had to learn those lessons. The prime minister likes to micro-manage, unlike Smith, a self-professed libertarian.
These days, Flanagan isn’t talking much. He’s notoriously tight-lipped when running political campaigns and loose-lipped when he’s just a regular pundit when campaigns are over. But there’s no doubt he has been instrumental in the rise of Wildrose Alliance into a party that appears ready to topple the 41-year-old Progressive Conservative dynasty.
On Monday, Alberta’s two million voters themselves will grade Smith and determine whether she’s ready to lead the province or needs to do more coursework.
She has won just one election before, as a school board trustee for the Calgary school board in 1999. Smith and another elected trustee, Peggy Anderson, both then connected to the Reform party, were pitted against the other trustees.
Liberal supporter Jennifer Pollock, one of the trustees on that board, says Smith’s purpose for being on the school board was purely political.
“She wanted to show there was a failure in public education,” said Pollock. “No matter what we were talking about, poverty in the community, university entrance scores, she always went back to the message that public education was failing.
“For her, everything was a way to make a political statement. Her political statements were all about issues within the public sector, the unions and First Nations and failures in public education and public health care.”
The board was so fractious that Alberta’s minister of Learning, Lyle Oberg, dismissed the entire board calling it “dysfunctional.”
Oberg is now an adviser to Smith and the Wildrose party. Smith took over as leader in 2009 after the provincial Wildrose and Alliance parties merged in 2008. From winning no seats in the 2008 election, the party is now poised to win a majority. Polls have the party leading the Progressive Conservatives by five and seven points with huge support in rural ridings.
During a stop in Stettler on the last week of the campaign, 67-year-old Wildrose supporter Errol Squires said it makes sense to switch his allegiance from the Progressive Conservatives to the new party.
“In this riding, I would say it’s 75 per cent Wildrose. Three out of every four doors,” he said. “There’s still a few die-hard Conservatives, mostly women.”
Squires said in the last election, he tried to volunteer to put up Conservative signs along the highway but there were already too many volunteers to do that job. This round, he says there are too many Wildrose supporters and not enough jobs for them to do.
Squires said Smith speaks to the frustration of many rural Albertans who think the Progressive Conservatives are not “conservative enough.”
Smith was born at Grace Hospital in Calgary 41 years ago, one of Doug and Sharon Smith’s five children. Her parents held commerce degrees and work in accounting positions in the energy sector.
Smith, who had two younger brothers and sisters, didn’t get an allowance but got paid for babysitting her siblings, starting when she was 10. Her parents still live in the house Smith grew up in Calgary’s northwest and Smith alternated between public and Catholic schools.
By the time she was 17 or 18, Smith said she had no doubts that she was a conservative. In eight grade, she learned her first lesson about free speech, Communism and politics.
“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a conservative except for perhaps one week in Grade 8 when I came home from school,” said Smith. “My teacher had been talking about how great Communism was and my dad with his Ukrainian heritage didn’t think much of the way Stalin treated the Ukrainians so he went to the school and gave heck to the teacher.”
After that, conversations about politics were encouraged at the dinner table.
It was at the University of Calgary where Smith developed her political philosophy, surrounded by other young conservatives including Sun TV commentator Ezra Levant and Reform-turned-Conservative MPs Jason Kenney and Rob Anders.
She met her first husband Sean McKinsley at the U of C and is now married to David Moretta, who was with Global TV and now works for Sun TV.
She received her English degree and for a while considered being a fiction writer. (If she were to write a novel today, the genre would be in science fantasy. She had hoped to finish reading Eragon by Christopher Paolini before the campaign was over.)
But after receiving her English degree, Smith said she realized she needed to study something more analytical. She had done well in math classes and thought about a business degree but opted instead for an economics degree after studying with professor Frank Atkins.
Atkins, who still teaches at the University of Calgary, taught both Smith and Harper.
“They were both very smart but in completely different ways,” he said. “Stephen would sit there in my office and stare at me with those piercing eyes and he was always thinking, thinking very hard about something. Danielle was a good talker — she had strong views and articulated them. She is a libertarian.”
Smith’s libertarian views were at the forefront in the last days of the campaign after two Wildrose candidates expressed their thoughts on social issues. While Smith has maintained she is pro-life and pro-same-sex marriage, she has also made clear that the party she leads has a wide diverse range of opinions.
Ron Leech, a Wildrose candidate in Calgary said being a Caucasian allowed him to speak to everyone.
“I think, as a Caucasian, I have an advantage,” Leech said during an interview with a radio station this week. “When different community leaders, such as a Sikh leader or a Muslim leader speaks, they really speak to their own people in many ways. As a Caucasian I believe that I can speak to all the community.”
Another Wildrose candidate in Edmonton, a pastor, wrote in a blog post that accepting gays and lesbians candidates means they will suffer throughout eternity and be thrown in a “lake of fire.”
Atkins said Smith has been able to moderate the fringe in her party, and that her framework has been that she doesn’t care if someone is gay or religious. She has gone on record as saying she will not legislate on social issues.
Atkins said he never expected his other famous student, Harper, to become a pragmatic leader.
“He was pretty strong-willed and that’s like Danielle. She’s pretty dogmatic and as we’ve seen, Harper has had to make trade-offs,” Atkins said. “How Danielle will react when she has to do the same is still unknown.”
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Petti Fong
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