Danielle Smith says court 'skewed' to Liberal donors, but UCP picks have political ties just as often

Smith’s UCP has increasingly consolidated power, it’s core comprising of monied separatists, and American Oil and Gas interests.

With the UCP party apparatus captured, and the Alberta Legislature arguably in a spiral, Smith presses the attack on the Judicial Branch of government. She intends to break the other branches in order to avoid accountability for corruption.

In “Danielle Smith says court ‘skewed’ to Liberal donors, but UCP picks have political ties just as often”, by Jason Markusoff, Smith and the UCP are caught playing word games with the public. Again, using her history in legacy media, and crafting clickbait statements for headlines, she’s cynically pinging sonar for how much public attention is directed at her.

Premier Danielle Smith wielded a striking figure earlier this month to make her case for giving her province more say in how the federal government picks upper court judges for Alberta.

“Especially since 80 per cent of the judges or so have been demonstrated to have Liberal party donations, I don’t know why anyone would think that the process we have right now is free of politics,” she told reporters.

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This is in line with a 2023 investigation by the National Post and the Investigative Journalism Foundation. It found that while 76.3 per cent of the federally appointed judges who made donations have given to the governing Liberals, only 18.3 per cent of the 1,308 judicial and tribunal appointees examined had given to anybody at all.

This means that nationally, 14 per cent of those federal appointees gave to the Liberal party before getting picked.