Danielle Smith: When “Inclusion” Becomes Conditional and Kids Become Collateral
There are moments in politics when a leader doesn’t just reveal their priorities—they expose their instincts. And in her recent remarks about removing a child from school under the guise of “regulation” and concerns about inclusion, Danielle Smith did exactly that.
Because strip away the sanitized language, and what’s left is a deeply unsettling idea: that a child’s place in a public classroom is negotiable—subject to political framing, ideological discomfort, or bureaucratic convenience.
That’s not leadership. That’s a warning sign.
“Inclusion,” Rewritten to Mean the Opposite
For years, inclusion in education has meant one simple thing: no child gets pushed out because they are different.
Smith’s framing flips that on its head.
By suggesting that inclusion may require “regulation”—and worse, that removal of a child could be a solution—she’s not defending balance. She’s redefining inclusion into something conditional, something that can be withheld.
And once inclusion becomes conditional, it stops being inclusion at all.
It becomes permission.
Permission for exclusion. Permission for segregation. Permission for systems to quietly decide which kids are too complicated, too controversial, or too inconvenient to accommodate.
The Quiet Endorsement of Exclusion
You don’t “remove” a child from a school unless you’ve already decided they are the problem.
Not the environment.
Not the policies.
Not the adults who failed to create a functional space.
The child.
That’s the logic embedded in this kind of rhetoric—and it’s a logic with a long, ugly history.
Because once you normalize the idea that some students can be pushed out for the sake of others, you’ve opened the door to a system where belonging is conditional and exclusion is policy.
The Hypocrisy Is the Point
Smith’s political brand leans heavily on opposition to “government overreach.” Yet here we are—watching her government inch toward legitimizing interference in the most personal aspects of a child’s education and identity.
You can’t have it both ways.
You don’t get to rail against state control while simultaneously endorsing frameworks that allow the state—or institutions under its influence—to decide which children fit.
That’s not smaller government. That’s selective control.
And it raises a critical question: who gets protected, and who gets pushed out?
Manufacturing Conflict, Then Governing Through It
Across Alberta, the United Conservative Party has increasingly leaned into cultural flashpoints—education, identity, healthcare—not to resolve them, but to weaponize them.
The playbook is familiar:
Amplify a perceived conflict
Frame it as a crisis
Introduce “common sense” solutions that quietly erode protections
Removing a child from a classroom under the banner of “regulation” fits perfectly into that pattern. It sounds pragmatic. It sounds reasonable.
Until you ask the obvious question: reasonable for who?
The Human Cost They Don’t Talk About
What gets lost in all of this is the reality inside classrooms.
Kids aren’t policy abstractions. They’re not talking points.
They’re human beings navigating identity, belonging, and development in real time.
When leaders start floating the idea that some of those kids might need to be removed for the system to function, the message is unmistakable:
You are the problem.
Your presence is negotiable.
Your place here is not guaranteed.
That message doesn’t just shape policy—it shapes lives.
This Is the Line
Every government faces pressure to balance competing interests. That’s not new.
What is new—and dangerous—is the willingness to resolve that tension by sidelining the very people public institutions are supposed to protect.
If inclusion can be “regulated” to the point where a child is removed, then inclusion is no longer a principle.
It’s a privilege.
And once a government starts deciding who deserves that privilege, it has already crossed a line it won’t easily walk back.
Video courtesy of The Breakdown
It’s distressing how Smith panders to her patrons at the exclusion of the balance of the province. You know the 4.95 million of us.
So I’m left to question now her upbringing. How does one arrive at such a careless, unempathetic place in life. How devoid of love and emotion is her world?
Hey Mr and Mrs Smith, what the hell did you do to your daughter?
I never though I would agree with Danielle Smith about anything, but I agree with her on this issue. At the moment, when a single child is throwing a desk or biting other children, for example, what happens is that the whole class is evacuated, leaving the disruptive child alone. Clearly, the child throwing the desk needs some sort of “remedial” support to protect both himself and other children. The current “inclusion-at-all-costs” is helping neither the child himself nor his peers in the same classroom. This is not a question of blaming the child for behaviour he may not be able to help. Taking the child out of the classroom and providing him with individual help is the only practical solution. If any of you can think of a better solution, then I would like to hear it.