Rob Anderson, former MLA for the Wildrose Party, in his office in McDougall Centre in Calgary on July 18.Jude Brocke/The Globe and Mail
Rob Anderson remembers feeling nauseous. His stomach was in knots. He could barely concentrate on the road as he drove home from work as an MLA one evening just before Christmas of 2014.
It was the day he and Danielle Smith led a historic floor-crossing of MLAs from the Wildrose Party to then-premier Jim Prentice’s governing Progressive Conservatives, a move they say was an earnest bid to unite Alberta’s conservative movement. Their detractors saw it as an opportunistic gambit that went against the democratic principles espoused by the protest party.
A vocal cohort in the PC caucus objected to Wildrose leader Ms. Smith and her key lieutenant, Mr. Anderson, being unofficially offered cabinet positions, which were then taken off the table. But the floor-crossing was already in motion, and nine MLAs, including Ms. Smith and Mr. Anderson, still went ahead.
The reaction from both conservatives and the public would be swift and angry in the weeks that followed. On that evening’s drive, “I was just realizing I had made a tremendous error. I knew right away that there was no coming back,” Mr. Anderson, 46, says in an interview.
But Mr. Anderson, once persona non grata, is now back in the thick of Alberta politics, occupying the top or close-to-top spot in Premier Danielle Smith’s office, depending on how you rank him with Chief of Staff Marshall Smith (no relation to the Premier).
Mr. Anderson has known Ms. Smith for more than a decade and helped create the vision for her winning leadership campaign. He also played a prominent role in the May election campaign that saw her United Conservative Party win against Rachel Notley’s Alberta NDP.
He is a lawyer from the right flank of the conservative movement, known for his combative style. The Alberta Premier and Mr. Anderson have similar views and share parallel political paths, especially in their losses and the way they’ve somehow come back. They now have what appears to be a seemingly unbreakable working partnership.
He says he’s not a separatist, but Mr. Anderson is one of the strongest proponents of provincial autonomy measures to ever occupy such a high-ranking position.Jude Brocke/The Globe and Mail
“Rob was her in-the-trenches person,” said Erika Barootes, a former staffer in the Premier’s office who played a key role in the May UCP campaign.
“They speak a similar language,” she says. “They’re a package deal – she has strengths, he has strengths. At the end of the day, she still makes the final call.”
Ms. Smith and Mr. Anderson both say they want to put the pandemic behind them. But he was in step with the Premier during the pandemic, and embraced right-wing, alternative media claims about the potential control of groups such as the World Economic Forum and “unelected leftist globalists.”
He says he’s not a separatist, but Mr. Anderson is one of the strongest proponents of provincial autonomy measures to ever occupy such a high-ranking position. A manifesto he co-wrote informed much of what became of the Sovereignty Act last fall, the controversial and still untested law that purportedly gives the province the power to resist federal laws it deems unconstitutional and harmful to Alberta. Mr. Anderson says “the Premier sanded down the edges” of his plans.
While many Albertans and conservatives would deem his ideas as extreme, they are a continuation – or an offshoot – of the decades-old sentiment that the province needs to provoke a fight to show its displeasure with Ottawa’s policies.
“Both he and Danielle bought in early and bought in deep to the ‘fair deal’ proposition,” says Ted Morton, a former provincial cabinet minister who co-authored the 2001 Firewall letter, also a strategy aimed at building policy barriers around the province to protect it from federal intrusion.
“It’s the next generation taking over.”
The oldest of seven children, Mr. Anderson’s childhood was spent in Sherwood Park, Alta. In his early teens, his family moved from that Edmonton bedroom community to Airdrie, another commuter city just north of Calgary.
“I grew up in a very politically conservative home. And I was probably born to resist the efforts of Trudeaus,” he says.
Mr. Anderson won the PC nomination for Airdrie in 2007, and says what turned it in his favour was support from former premier Ralph Klein, whom he had befriended at his law firm. He “gave me an actual written endorsement that I mailed to every Conservative in the riding.”
In 2009, as an MLA, Mr. Anderson met Ms. Smith when he was sent to try to convince her to come back to the PC party. But instead, she convinced him – after a number of months – that the dynastic Alberta party was too entrenched in top-down decision-making and entitlement to be changed from within. He left the PCs and joined her Wildrose Party in 2010.
“She won the conversation,” he says.
What followed were several dizzying years in the new party, with big highs and lows. Mr. Anderson, who was Official Opposition house leader and finance critic, was known for being particularly scrappy. He fought with the top PC cabinet ministers in the legislature, and on a newly emerging social-media site, Twitter.
“It was a civil war – a family feud,” he says. “I would be the first to say that I was too combative back then. I was quite effective in punching holes in a few premiers back then. But I learned a lot about myself at that time, and there’s a way to be an effective opposition without constantly attacking and constantly trying to bring people down.”
Despite leading in the polls for much of the 2012 provincial election, Wildrose lost the contest to Alison Redford’s PCs.
The oldest of seven children, Mr. Anderson’s childhood was spent in Sherwood Park, Alta.Jude Brocke/The Globe and Mail
The period coincided with another big change: Mr. Anderson left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that he had been raised in. “I had some personal beliefs that convinced me I needed to go a different direction,” he says, still expressing admiration for the Mormon church and its emphasis on public service.
“I put a lot of import on family and parents. I’m also a live-and-let-live guy. I don’t think it matters who you love.”
Both he and Ms. Smith – a libertarian – have long acknowledged the tension that exists in their party between social conservatives, and those with a greater focus on economic issues and provincial autonomy issues. That was a particular strain in the Wildrose Party. By late 2014, the party was still acting effectively as an opposition party in public, but was confused in purpose behind the scenes.
It had lost in a number of key by-elections, and was losing momentum to the PCs, by then led by Mr. Prentice. Today, Mr. Anderson says full honesty about that time is required, calling it a “stupid decision” where he both erred, and was misled by the governing party.
“It was never a promise of a cabinet post. It was more of: ‘We will need to give a cabinet post to the Wildrose for this to be legitimate’ … it was always couched language.”
The floor-crossing set off a chain of events, including the shunning of Ms. Smith and Mr. Anderson by both Wildrose and PC circles.
He didn’t think he would ever be a part of politics again, and he and Ms. Smith didn’t speak for many years. “We both felt that we had let the other down, in one way or another.”
The pandemic changed everything. Mr. Anderson started his Rob Anderson Unfiltered webcast in March, 2020, as the world was shutting down as a result of COVID-19. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was a constant target, and Mr. Anderson declared members of the truckers’ convoy heroes.
His views ventured into other extreme territory. In November, 2020, he called for the decentralization of government power and talked about how Ottawa was using the wealth of western provinces for its own socialist ends. He talked about taking control of police, pensions, natural resources, health care, education and tax collection.
“We do it by collecting all taxes, and remitting to the federal government only what is theirs after first taking back what they stole from us in equalization the prior year,” Mr. Anderson said then.
“It may mean tense times. It may mean civil disobedience, where appropriate. But we have to do this.”
Mr. Anderson, having worked for a number of years at Airdrie law firm Warnock & Associates, supported the merger of the PCs and Wildrose in 2017. (“It was effectively what we were trying to do. Just done the right way.”) But COVID-19 turned him from a fan to a fierce critic of then-premier Jason Kenney, who by many standards was also combative with Ottawa, and tried to lessen the burden of COVID-19 health rules.
“Jason Kenney’s heart was in the right place,” Mr. Anderson says now. But at the end of the day, “I don’t think Ottawa ever thought Jason would push back really hard.”
Through this pandemic era, the two political allies were reunited. Mr. Anderson considered running for the UCP leadership himself, but decided that Ms. Smith was the better politician. He has been a key part of her return and redemption in Alberta politics.
In the long-simmering controversy about what pressure Ms. Smith exerted to have COVID-19 era prosecutions dropped, Mr. Anderson was in charge of trying to find a policy path of amnesty for those charged with non-violent, COVID-related offences, according to the province’s ethics commissioner.
As executive director of the Premier’s office, he has co-ordinated the writing of mandate letters distributed to cabinet ministers this summer – including those that move forward the ideas of an Alberta pension plan and Alberta revenue agency. Those issues are unpopular with the voting public, and were not part of the UCP’s platform during the election campaign. He oversees much of the communications strategy, and makes a point of referring to Ms. Smith as “the boss.”
Political strategist Stephen Carter, who once worked for Ms. Smith’s Wildrose Party, says the Premier has been kind to forgive Mr. Anderson for poor political advice given to her in the past, including in the 2012 election and during the 2014 floor-crossing. And, Mr. Carter adds, “there has been a noted return to crazy town in the mandate letters.”
Mr. Anderson found himself in hot water last month as he tweeted his admiration for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has become favoured by the MAGA community in the United States for his challenges to mainstream public health. The Democratic presidential candidate recently postulated the baseless claim that COVID-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. The Calgary Jewish Federation called on Mr. Anderson to apologize for his Tweet, while Mr. Anderson said he was only praising Mr. Kennedy’s commitment to free speech.
Some conservatives wonder why a senior staffer is spending time arguing with people on social media. “I don’t see a value-add to him being on Twitter,” Ms. Barootes says.
Just weeks before Mr. Kenney announced he would step down last year, an act that would set off the leadership race that Ms. Smith would win, she was still working as a media host. Mr. Anderson was her guest on an especially long episode of her podcast where they both enthusiastically discussed the Free Alberta Strategy he had co-authored.
While Ms. Smith suggested she might prefer the word “autonomy” to discuss provincial rights, neither was she totally opposed to Mr. Anderson’s use of the word “sovereignty.” She described him as one of the smartest policy minds in Alberta. And as she signed off, Ms. Smith said she’d be in touch with him the day after Mr. Kenney’s then-upcoming leadership review.
“We’ll see if we can work together on a strategy,” she said.
That turned out to be an understatement.