Braid: Smith says her government will be rural in makeup and thinking, with fewer Calgary ministers

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Check your termination deals, AHS managers.

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Snap to attention, federal government lawyers.

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Rural MLAs, get ready for big cabinet jobs and a dominant rural tone in government.

RCMP officers, be prepared to work alongside a growing provincial police contingent, very soon.

All that came out before and after Premier Danielle Smith was sworn in at 11:23 a.m. Tuesday. She first appeared on Real Talk with Ryan Jesperson, the masterful interviewer. Later, she spoke at her swearing-in ceremony, and once more at a full news conference in the legislature media room.

Smith has said plenty in the past three months, much of it dismissed as political wind aimed at unhappy UCP members.

Now she’s the premier. The wind is policy.

Calgary’s dominance of cabinet is about to end. This was one of the weirdest features of premier Jason Kenney’s government — a cabinet that at one point had 17 of 26 posts filled by Calgary MLAs. Some rural folks called the UCP the “United Calgary Party.”

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“We have a largely rural caucus because we have 39 of 41 seats that are not in Edmonton and Calgary, and yet the bulk of the cabinet was from Calgary,” Smith said.

“And I think what happened is that those rural voices really felt like that couldn’t get on the radar, that there was an inner circle and then an inner-inner circle.”

She doesn’t need to mention what happens when those rural members go into full rebellion. A premier loses his (her) job.

But she’s comfortable with a much stronger rural voice and tone in Alberta government. “I think people know my style of conservatism is very rural-based, there should be no surprise at that,” she said.

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She has also appointed herself as the Brooks-Medicine Hat UCP candidate, using her power as party leader to name the candidates in up to four ridings.

She does that while refusing to call a byelection in vacant Calgary-Elbow.

She seems to feel there’s a problem with “rolling byelections.” But former PC premier Jim Prentice, whose caucus Smith joined, held four simultaneous byelections in 2014 after he became premier, including the one in his own riding.

Smith says she got a call from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and they talked about some things they can agree on, including carbon capture and hydrogen.

“I’m not starting off trying to find things to find areas of disagreement . . . But I did also ask if he would allow us to get out of litigation on Bill C-69 by modifying the law so it actually falls into compliance with the Constitution.

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“He begged to differ with me on that. That’s a prime example of the way in which the federal government operates. They pass unconstitutional laws all the time. They should not be legislating in our area of jurisdiction any more than we can legislate in theirs.

“Then they force us to go through an extensive court process to try to get laws struck down and rewritten.”

Although her top aide, Rob Anderson, has said Alberta wouldn’t defy Supreme Court rulings, Smith wants Ottawa to be chasing Alberta in the high court, not the reverse.

She does sound somewhat softer, however. For instance, Smith says she didn’t “holus bolus” adopt the Free Alberta Strategy fronted by Anderson, although it was the political jet fuel in her campaign

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She also didn’t say she would replace the Mounties, but promised to quickly “augment” them with a provincial police service to initially deal with the crisis in addictions and mental health.

“We will move right away . . . on provincial entry into these areas.”

There’s no nuance in Smith’s view of Alberta Health Services. She is contemptuous.

“It’s mostly AHS that is in my sights. We’ve been told time after time, leave it to the experts, we’ve got this, we know what we’re doing.

“They don’t know what they’re doing. They made that very clear. COVID didn’t break the system, it just revealed that the system was broken.

“But we want to make sure that we are staffing the front lines properly. If that means we’re going to be reducing some of those bureaucratic layers of management, yep, they should be a little bit worried . . . We’re going to change the management.”

Later she promised front-line health workers: “Reinforcements are coming.”

And that was Day 1.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald.

Twitter: @DonBraid