The cheers and jeers of Danielle Smith's private party summer

A couple of Tuesdays ago, Premier Danielle Smith's evening began with her facing heat for not rushing to ban COVID vaccines for children.

Then it moved on to Smith having to answer about why she wasn't pushing harder to remove Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan.

Before the night's end, she also fielded questions on whether she'd legalize property owners holding up intruders at gunpoint, and if the Alberta government would act on the "chemtrails" theory that aircraft are emitting chemical clouds for "geo-engineering" in the skies above us.

That evening might not have been an entirely irregular summer night for the premier — not with her current schedule.

Smith's interrogation last week came at a UCP members-only gathering at a Calgary church, following similar ones earlier in July in Bonnyville and Coaldale.

The United Conservative leader has since attended town halls for her fellow partisans in High River, Peace River and Grande Prairie. She does Olds this weekend and has a schedule dotted with several more evenings of UCP Q&As throughout Alberta the rest of the month.

All about that base

She's conducting this party town-hall tour ahead of her party's annual convention in November, where members will vote on whether to keep Smith — or not — in a leadership review.

She's certainly aware of how UCP members drummed her predecessor, Jason Kenney, out of office, and how other past conservative premiers have withered under internal party pressure.

So to limit risk of another revolt, she's spending heavy time listening to (and answering to) crowds composed solely of her UCP grassroots. Smith will surely have appreciated the standing ovation party members gave her at that more than two-hour town hall grilling, but likely less appreciated were moments when the audience occasionally heckled her when her responses weren't what they wanted.

The UCP base is likely dwelling longer on the COVID restrictions and vaccine issues than the general public that's largely moved beyond the pandemic, and members are also in the clear minority of Albertans who want a province-only pension plan.

But she won't have to directly deal with what the broad range of Alberta voters want until the 2027 election. More immediate for her is that date with the narrow band of voters at the UCP meeting, less than three months away.

It's unclear whether she's gotten the same reception and sorts of questions at all her town halls; the UCP is not permitting media into these members-only events; it does not even post the town halls' dates and places on the party's main events page; CBC got to this image through a direct link from the members' newsletter.

However, we know what happened at the Calgary church event because independent journalist Katie Teeling got in, and wrote an extensive play-by-play on social media. (CBC News corroborated details through additional sources.)

She didn't appear to delight the crowd by insisting that rather than suspending innoculations for children, she wanted to preserve Alberta parents' choice. 

She also said she'll await more financial details and a potential referendum on exiting CPP. Smith dodged the question about permitting self-defence with guns on one's property, saying rural RCMP need to improve response times.

On the question of chemtrails — widely viewed as a conspiracy theory — Smith at first tried reasoning that airplanes were seeding clouds to prevent hail, according to a recording that CBC News reviewed.

When the questioner pointed out the cloudy trails appeared on clear days, and the crowd heckled the premier, Smith refused to dispute the chemtrails theory. She instead stated that aviation is a federal matter. "So it'd be something I have to ask the environment minister to ask her counterpart," the premier said. "We'll see if she can get anywhere with [federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault] on this." 

(Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has come under fire recently for not debunking his constituents' musings about chemtrails, but afterwards clarified that he doesn't believe in them.)

Shot down

Smith's July 30 event was hosted by the party's Calgary-Lougheed riding association. That's the same group that held June's night of lectures by several advocates against COVID vaccines — some of whom have been sanctioned by provincial medical regulators for spreading misinformation.

This one riding association has found plenty of common ground in the party's base for its advocacy against the vaccines Ottawa and Alberta, and governments around the world, deem safe and effective.

Party brass championed that "Injection of Truth" event and UCP watch parties streamed it across the province. What's more, the party's board of directors have taken up that group's cause, lobbying the premier to change Alberta policy on vaccines for children.

At last year's convention, UCP members voted overwhelmingly for policy resolutions to protect and enshrine rights of the unvaccinated and those who oppose public health restrictions. And of the policy proposals submitted for the November meeting, it's still a grassroots preoccupation: last month's party newsletter shared with members the most frequent and duplicated resolution topics:

Vaccines run second only to resolutions about the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum, two multinational groups that have drawn scorn and suspicion from right-leaning and anti-vaccine activists. (WEF did come up in questions at Smith's Calgary party town hall, too.)

While Smith isn't wooing her base with pledges to quickly change government policy on COVID vaccine availability or pensions, she is trying to do more than simply listen and show up. She's pledging to add to Alberta's little-used Bill of Rights with protections for those who refuse medical treatments like vaccines, and to introduce the legislation right before the party's gathering. 

At the same time, she's moving forward to legislate limits on the rights of transgender or transitioning youth and apply gender policy changes in schools — and it was at last year's UCP convention she first pledged such action in the name of parental rights, to great applause from the crowd.

To secure support from some party members, she may need to go further.

"There are people out there who do not believe she has followed through on her promises and her commitments and that she may have, even in some regards, backed away from those commitments," party activist Nadine Wellwood tells CBC News.

Wellwood, who was disqualified for running for the UCP for her own inflammatory remarks on  vaccines, leads the 1905 Committee, a group pushing for provincial action on measures like a provincial pension and the tax cut Smith pledged last election, but has since delayed.

Wellwood warns the premier not to disappoint UCP members and trigger "another Jason Kenney event" — a leadership ouster.

"She has to recognize that in order to be the premier, she needs to be the leader of the party, and it is her base that put her there," Wellwood says. "You run a risk if you ignore your base."

In 2022, it was bitter memories of Kenney's pandemic rules that led him to get a fatally low 51.4 per cent approval in the leadership review — and Smith became UCP leader after him by echoing member outrage about COVID policies.

There doesn't appear to be such high unrest that she gets as poor a result as Kenney, and Calgary-Lougheed is one of many ridings publicly supporting Smith in her review.

Perhaps she'll have more difficulty clearing the 77 per cent approval rating that past conservative premiers Alison Redford and Ed Stelmach got — enough support to stay on for a while, but a signal of the party infighting that pushed both to resign.

A newer measuring stick may be the 86 per cent of NDP members who crowned Naheed Nenshi their leader in June's leadership contest.

Political risk, of course, doesn't only lie in Smith not doing enough to please her own base.

Do too much to curry favour with conservative activists, and she risks losing the support of moderates, especially the ones in Nenshi's own Calgary the UCP cannot afford to alienate.

But perhaps that's a long-term fight she can concern herself with more after November. As Wellwood reasoned, Smith can't do any of that if she's not still leader of her own party.