It used to be that conservatives campaigned to the right and governed to the centre.

This tried and true strategy reflected the realities that conservative-minded people generally like to blow off some steam during campaigns (There’s too much government! Taxes are too high! Kids today! Grrr!), while quite liking a steady hand on the economic tiller, mostly honest, capable governance, and well-funded and reliable social programs like universal health care.

Lately, however, conservative politicians have increasingly adopted a more extreme approach. To wit, they campaign to the batshit bonkers and govern to the I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing incompetent with an unhealthy side-serving of conspiracy-laden tinfoil hattery.

Leading the charge, of course, is former US President Donald Trump, the undisputed king of the bananas brigade, spawning his own outrageously erratic empire of unhingery, while simultaneously boosting the likes of Marjorie “gazpacho police” Taylor Greene, Alex “false flag” Jones, and Herschel “I’d rather be a werewolf than a vampire” Walker. Indeed. Who wouldn’t?

Meantime, QAnon and “Q-adjacent” strains have wormed their way into the minds of an alarming number of Americans. And while (hopefully) most are at least skeptical that Trump is secretly battling hordes of satanic child-eating sex-traffickers, worrying polls show a not insignificant percentage of them believe that some kind of coming “storm” will shortly sweep “the elites” from power and restore the nation to the whiteous righteous. Yikes!

Naturally, the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially governments’ efforts at protecting their health care systems from becoming overwhelmed by COVID patients, not to mention protecting their citizenry from virus-related illness and death, has only upped anxieties around “state over-reach” and the supposed repression of “freedoms” among conspiracy theorists. Never mind assertions that COVID is a big old hoax, did you know that life-saving vaccines are actually a way to get 5G technology coursing through your bloodstream? Did you know that you can stymie lizard-in-a-skin-suit George Soros’s plans to destroy capitalism by consuming particles of silver? You can drink a bit of bleach, too, but the silver particles alone should do the job.

Canadians have not been immune to seeing nefarious actors operating behind the scenes to implement a New World Order, underpinned by the United Nations’ non-binding sustainable development action plan ‘Agenda 21,’ and any number of similar deep-state efforts at turning us all into sheeple, possibly with the help of population manipulating chemtrails and vaccines.

Among those attempting to mainstream this trend in Canada is Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a politician and media commentator who has rarely met a nutty idea she didn’t like.

In the lead up to the United Conservative Party leadership race to replace Alberta’s previously disastrous Premier Jason Kenney in October, Ms. Smith offered up some stunning self-owns of the Dunning-Kreuger variety.

Danielle Smith: “The evidence shows moderate cigarette consumption can reduce traditional risks of disease by 75 percent or more.” Narrator: “The evidence doesn’t show that.”

Danielle Smith: “[W]hen you think everything that built up before you got to stage four and that [cancer] diagnosis, that’s completely within your control and there’s something you can do about that that is different” from actual medical intervention. Narrator: “That’s not how cancer works.”

Danielle Smith: “hydroxychloroquine cures 100 percent of coronavirus patients within six days of treatment.” Narrator: “No, it doesn’t.”

Needless to say, Smith’s health advice is neither medically sound nor backed by any evidence whatsoever. Needless to say, too, that Smith is not a medical doctor. Nor does she have any training in anything remotely related to health care or medicine. Unless you count watching videos on the internet.

In any event, having watched her secure the leadership of the governing UCP and, by default, the premiership of Alberta two months ago, some commentators predicted Smith would ease up on the crazy and focus on the more mundane conservative business of underfunding social services, ushering in two-tiered health care, and implementing a program of severe austerity. Smith, some conservative pundits asserted, wasn’t serious about the things she said on the campaign trail. Smith is ‘smart,’ they said. Smith was just waving ‘red meat’ to her ‘base,’ they said. She’d operate differently once she became premier, you’ll see.

Alas, Smith’s performance suggests otherwise.

Straight out of the gate, at her first news conference as Alberta premier, Smith called the province’s motley band of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. That’s a pretty extreme level of discrimination.” Surely Smith, born in 1971, couldn’t possibly have missed the many groups experiencing actual discrimination, racism, hate, violence, xenophobia, and death over the course of the past 50 years, could she?

Next, she promised to restore stability to Alberta’s beleaguered health care system—by firing the entire board of Alberta Health Services, dismissing its head honcho Dr. Deena Hinshaw, and getting people “used to the concept of paying out of pocket for more things themselves” by ‘seeding’ an annual $375 ‘health spending account,’ and letting Albertans to either top it up themselves, or ask their employers, their wealthy friends, and their grandparents to ‘help them out.’ The only real beneficiaries of such a plan are quacky naturopaths and holistic health practitioners whose stock-in-trade are scented candles and healing crystals.

Smith also seems determined to push forward with wildly unpopular ‘firewall’ proposals of establishing an Alberta Pension Plan, an Alberta Provincial Police force, and an Alberta Revenue Agency. None of these are good ideas, and all of them will cost Albertans in both the short and long term.

The latest, of course, is the vaulting to the fore of Smith’s long-simmering Sovereignty Act, since renamed the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, which is a mouthful and which sowed confusion, consternation, and widespread charges of it being needlessly divisive, profoundly anti-democratic, and very likely unconstitutional. When Smith’s government finally introduced the bill less than two weeks ago, it immediately became clear that either the new premier didn’t know what she was doing, or she was cynically making an unprecedented power grab by granting the provincial cabinet authority to make laws without the onerous need to consult democratically elected members of the Alberta Legislature. The smart money, I think, is on the former.

This week, amid a growing chorus of opposition to the bill from as diverse sources as the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, Indigenous groups, municipal leaders, and the vast majority of Albertans who think that democracy ought still be “a thing,” Smith admitted that the “Sovereignty Act wasn’t perfect in its wording. That’s why it’s being amended.” The ‘everyone makes mistakes; that’s why pencils have erasers’ line might work for Ralph Wiggum. It sure doesn’t inspire confidence in a legislative bill produced by a government with access to professional policymakers, constitutional experts, and experienced legislative drafters.

The amendments removed cabinet’s ability to bypass the legislature, but left intact its usurpation of the judicial branch’s role to adjudicate the constitutionality of federal legislation, before Smith’s government rammed the bill through third reading in the early hours of Thursday morning.

For her part, Smith appears to have as firm a grasp on matters constitutional as she does on matters health. “It’s not as if Ottawa is a national government,” she suggested. “The way our country works is that we are a federation of sovereign, independent jurisdictions.” Narrator: “That’s not how our country works.” Smith’s principal constitutional adviser, University of Calgary political science professor Barry Cooper, a man who’s doing his best ‘old man yells as clouds’ impression these days, sees the Sovereignty Act as a “warning” to the federal government: acquiesce to Danielle Smith’s demands or face the threat of Alberta’s separation from the federation.

Back on planet earth where most of us live, there are serious issues requiring the attention of serious people. The brain trust advising the premier ain’t them. Neither is the premier.

Eric Strikwerda teaches Canadian history at Athabasca University. He is the author of The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929-1939 (AU Press, 2013). At present he is working on a history of western Canada following Canada’s acquisition of the region in 1870.