Looking at his bio I can tell why: https://archive.is/wip/93QKN

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto and currently lives in Ottawa.

That's like having someone from Albany, educated in NYC and living in DC writing about Texas politics.

Here's the distance from Windsor, Toronto & Ottawa to Calgary: 28 h 6 min (3035 km) 31 h 29 min (3402 km) 34 h 52 min (3483 km)

Danielle Smith is about as conservative as your late 90s to early 2000s liberal was conservative.

If you're wondering about the Nazi thing: http://web.archive.org/web/20230510023758/https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/hannaford-smith-had-nothing-for-which-to-apologise/article_d69fc3fe-eeb6-11ed-ad0f-3b0be9b92391.html

Here’s what she actually said. Here also is the context, which has been hardly reported at all.

In a 90-minute conversation as a guest on a financial services podcast during the fall of 2021, Smith and host Andrew Ruhland talked about the meaning of Remembrance Day. Ruhland called Remembrance Day more important than Canada Day. He then launched into a prolonged lament, that in the face of the heavy-handed response to COVID-19 by Canadian governments at all levels, ordinary Canadians had surrendered the freedoms that were the legacy to them of Canada’s veterans.

Smith agreed, taking note that her host was not wearing a poppy. “I see you’re not wearing a poppy either. They’ve ruined it (Remembrance Day) for me this year. The political leaders standing on their soapbox, pretending that they care about all the things you just talked about. Pretending they understand the sacrifice and not understanding that their actions are exactly the actions that our brave men and women are standing against.”

And what actions would those be? The actions of governments that long for control. Smith goes on to mention an episode of the Netflix series, How to Become a Tyrant, that examines how Adolf Hitler was able to use his peculiar talents of deception to mislead an entire generation of Germans into an authoritarian society that left no room for individual responsibility or conscience, one with a designated in-group and — to the horror of the Jews — a designated out-group upon which the self-righteous could vent their ‘righteous anger.’

“I don’t know if you've had a chance to watch the Netflix series How to Become a Tyrant, but it starts with Hitler in the first episode and it's absolutely appalling and shocking. And one academic says — they must have filmed this before COVID — so many people say that they would not have succumbed to the charms of the tyrants, somebody telling them that they have all the answers... and this academic said, 'I guarantee they would.'”