Danielle Smith’s win marks one of the most remarkable political comebacks in Canadian history.
But comeback isn’t new for Smith. She’s spent decades reinventing herself, over and over.
Despite the harshness of her exit after the floor-crossing — her constituents even denied her the nomination to run again in 2015 — she didn’t let her long-standing political dreams die. “I always hoped that I’d be able to have a chance to come back,” Smith said in an interview with CBC News earlier this week.
Outside work and English seminar classes, she fell hard for the University of Calgary campus politics of the early 1990s, which spanned the spectrum with other future luminaries like Naheed Nenshi and activist-cum-media mogul Ezra Levant. She was active in the campus Progressive Conservatives, dabbled in provincial campaigning, and met Sean McKinsley, a fellow undergrad she began dating and would later marry.
She returned to U of C for another degree, one that would help her carve out a living. She majored in economics, honing her fiscal conservative ideas, but her bond with political science professor Tom Flanagan would prove most formative. Not only would he be campaign manager for her Wildrose Party 2012 election, but in 1996 he also recommended her for an internship with the conservative think-tank Fraser Institute, back in Vancouver.
Smith and Anderson became the unofficial Reform bloc on the Calgary Board of Education, getting into regular spats with more progressive trustees. The future premier, testing out her political chops, would boldly show public support for higher school fees and school closures, for the sake of better budgeting.
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