Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has made multiple attempts at challenging the norm in Canadian politics.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

Every so often a Canadian politician comes along and decides he or she is ready to challenge the orthodoxy. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, who insisted that universal, publicly funded medical care was possible in Canada, despite strong opposition from health care providers, which culminated in a doctors’ strike.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was NDP MP Svend Robinson, who introduced a private member’s bill to legalize same-sex marriage years before it would actually become law (he was also the first openly gay MP). And roughly 10 years ago, it was then-Conservative leadership hopeful Maxime Bernier, who centred his candidacy on a pledge to scrap Canada’s supply management system for milk, eggs and poultry. Mr. Bernier lost the leadership because of it.

There are many more examples of efforts to cull sacred cows. Some were enormously successful in broadening the Overton window of acceptable opinion; Mr. Douglas’s notion of universal, publicly funded health care morphed from a radical idea to a defining feature central to the current Canadian identity. Others, such as Mr. Bernier’s attempt on the life of the supply management system, failed miserably, and in turn, served as a cautionary tale of what can happen if that sacred cow dodges the knife and survives: it rises like a phoenix – immortal, powerful........

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