In a fiery legislature speech this week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the Mark Carney Liberals “want this lady and Alberta to just sit down and shut up.”
Smith was referring to her efforts to reach out and change the minds of Trump-friendly conservatives at a time when Canada is threatened by a U.S. trade war.
The new Liberal leader and his party haven’t publicly said she shouldn’t venture stateside; in fact, they might appreciate some of her rhetoric, given that they’ve made a partisan ad out of her remarks in a U.S. interview that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is “in sync” with President Donald Trump’s direction.
Smith, undeterred by something the Carney Liberals haven’t said (though the Alberta NDP has), headed down to Florida for another U.S. speaking engagement.
She said she’s “going into the lion’s den to change the hearts and minds of the very Americans that we need on Canada’s side to avoid a trade war.” And on Thursday night, Smith added, she’ll speak “this time through the second-largest podcaster in the world” — Ben Shapiro.
Getting on the already tariff-wary Shapiro’s popular conservative podcast could be considered a coup in Canada’s persuasion campaign with Trump and his “make America great again” (MAGA) allies.
But that’s not what Smith’s doing down in Florida.
She’ll appear alongside the commentator at a $1,500 US-a-ticket gala fundraiser for Prager University Foundation. It’s not an accredited university, but the self-described “world’s leading conservative non-profit” that pumps out educational videos and other materials designed to combat “woke themes and anti-American sentiment” in schools.
The premier will appear on a podcast, too, though one far less popular than Shapiro’s. It’s hosted by Marissa Streit, the CEO of PragerU.
It’s actually only a few weeks after another Canadian voice appeared on Streit’s Real Talk podcast — Tom MacDonald, a rapper originally from Mission, B.C., dubbed by Rolling Stone as a “MAGA rap kingpin.”
Her first question to the expat, delivered with a laugh: “Should Canada be the 51st state?”
MacDonald sighed; he’s no “elbows up” patriot. “Well, I wish it would be, but I doubt it’s going to happen.”
As their chat proceeded, Streit compared Canada to communist Cuba. “Now I think of Canadians as refugees. There are so many of you who come here and don’t want to go back and horror stories. It’s just hard to believe because you speak English in Canada! You’re supposed to be normal!”
(Emigration, or people leaving Canada, has risen lately, but the pace of immigration and population growth have become a bigger challenge.)
MacDonald, whose most popular song was one he performed with hip-hop neophyte Shapiro, agreed with Streit about his former country. “I would much rather be dealing with communism in a warm climate than in Canada, because it’s cold and communist now and that sucks.”
This is the sort of lion’s den-cum-gala ballroom that Danielle Smith is wading into in these speaking events, which a premier’s spokesperson says will likely be posted online by PragerU in the coming days.
Smith’s partner at the PragerU fundraiser has repeated Trump’s taunts about taking over Canada as the 51st state. But in Shapiro and Smith, that gala will feature onstage two conservatives with similar views about the economy-damaging tariffs.
And that’s not all the two agree on.
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In a video posted early in March, Shapiro echoed two controversial things Smith said in that recent Breitbart News interview: that the trade war boosting Liberals’ electoral hopes means that Trump tariffs are “things that ensure that they remain in power” — and that Poilievre will align more with Trump conservatives.
“Are you going to get more from Canada with Pierre Poilievre as the prime minister than you’re going to get from Mark Carney?” Shapiro asked. “The answer is yes.”
It’s not clear what benefits Smith will be able to extract for Alberta and Canada from these events, and this taxpayer-funded trip with an entourage of four premier’s aides.
However, we can use the U.S. non-profit’s records for a sense of what benefits her presence can bring to PragerU.
According to public filings, its East Coast gala grossed $777,000 in 2023 and $1.2 million in 2022.
Given the approach and pedigree of PragerU, it’s an easy bet that this will be a solidly right-leaning crowd that Smith is addressing in Florida.
Founded in 2009 by conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, the outlet has long produced informational videos about topics ranging from finances and history to abortion and the Middle East, all with an aim toward “changing minds” of young viewers.
There’s one about Canadian health care, in which “Marcel” does his own research and persuades his dad to pay for stomach cancer treatment in a U.S. hospital instead of waiting at home.
It has branched into making free cartoon videos and lesson plans for school classrooms to incorporate into curriculum. PragerU Kids materials have been sanctioned by nine states, including Montana, Idaho, Texas and Florida, often with controversy in its wake.
“Their aim is actually quite in line with the MAGA aim, which is to return the U.S. to what they see as normal moral values,” said Adrienne McCarthy, a Kansas State University researcher who has studied PragerU’s content and practices.
She said the group has become adept at producing slick, high-quality videos stocked with right-leaning messages on renewable energy or taxation (including one last year on trade that’s decidedly anti-tariff, a classically conservative position).
“They are outwardly facing trying to appear normal and appeal to general society,” she said. “But what they’re letting in is overlapping with far-right ideology.”
A headline on an MSNBC blog flatly called PragerU a “propaganda outlet.”
PragerU videos have been criticized for how they characterized the history of American slavery.
YouTube has applied “restricted mode” to several PragerU videos, and in 2020 removed some videos about transgender issues from the channel for violating hate speech rules.
PragerU denounced YouTube’s moves as censorship and fought unsuccessfully against the Google-owned app in court.
What will these conservative lions hear when a Canadian premier wades into their fundraising den? As her determined statement in the legislature conveyed, Danielle Smith knows that Albertans and Canadians might be even keener this time to listen in.
