Lava flowing from a volcanic eruption in Spain’s Canary Islands reached the Atlantic Ocean yesterday, raising fears among scientists who study geophysical and geochemical phenomena of dangerous explosions and toxic gases.
Meanwhile, in the Canadian province of Alberta, political scientists were tracking a major bozo eruption in the small city of Airdrie, a bedroom community in the northern reaches of the metropolitan Calgary area.
No actual physical destruction has yet been observed, but the morning announcement by a group of dissident right-wing members of the provincial Legislature of something they called the “Free Alberta Strategy” is likely to be yet another threat to the survival of the province’s United Conservative Party premier, Jason Kenney, already in trouble as a result of his dangerously incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hot mess – which a CBC reporter rather too respectfully termed an initiative – seems to be the inspiration of former Wildrose and Progressive Conservative Airdrie MLA Rob Anderson. Apparently the two-time floor crosser, pretty well persona non grata in Alberta politics since he joined the mass defection to the PCs led by then Wildrose leader Danielle Smith back in December 2014, sees this half-baked separatist scheme as his ticket back into public life.
Mr. Anderson will almost certainly be disappointed. Still, as Winston Churchill famously observed after rejoining the British Conservative Party in 1923, “anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”
“The Free Alberta Strategy is a strategic plan for Alberta to assert its sovereignty, offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against this province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed Canada,” Mr. Anderson wrote in a column on a right-wing website published by Derek Fildebrandt, another former Wildrose and UCP MLA with no love lost for Premier Kenney.
The wacky “strategy,” which basically consists right now of a website with data-capture and fund-raising capabilities, plus a fanciful list of proposed laws, claims to be provide a roadmap “to make Alberta a sovereign jurisdiction within Canada.”
Particularly troubling should be the fact both the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker of the Alberta Legislature took part in a Facebook Live news conference – Speaker Nathan Cooper supposedly as a mere observer, and Deputy Speaker Angela Pitt, now the UCP MLA for Airdrie, as an acknowledged supporter.
Ms. Pitt made news by responding to a reporter’s query about whether she had any confidence in Premier Kenney by bluntly stating, “The answer to that question is no, I don’t. And I don’t think my constituents do either.”
She seemed to be daring Mr. Kenney to kick her out of the UCP Caucus. As for Mr. Cooper, who is thought to have his eye on Mr. Kenney’s job, he might not mind being removed as Speaker all that much.
Not coincidentally, two former members of the UCP’s unofficial but influential COVID-denial caucus, Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes and Central Peace-Notley MLA Todd Loewen, also participated in the event. A third, Red Deer-South MLA Jason Stephan, still part of the UCP, also took part.
Mr. Barnes and Mr. Loewen were booted from the UCP in May for statements that undermined Mr. Kenney’s leadership. Last year, Ms. Pitt was advocating that Alberta become an autonomous region like South Tyrol, the German-speaking Italian province that didn’t get rolled into the German Reich along with next-door Austria in 1938 because the leaders of Germany and Italy at the time were somewhat simpatico.
It doesn’t take a constitutional lawyer to see that Mr. Anderson’s notion Alberta can just ignore the Canadian Constitution and the courts to establish itself as a sovereign entity is a whack-a-doodle load of Freemen-on-the-Land quackery.
Still, if you’d like the opinion of a constitutional lawyer, here’s one: “This the dumbest thing that I have read in a long time (and that’s a feat in AB),” tweeted University of Calgary law professor Martin Z. Olszynski soon after the news conference. “The flagship proposal (AB Sovereignty Act) is unconstitutional on its face while the attack on Canada’s judiciary – and federal judges especially – shd render any #ableg MLA support disqualifying.”
“This is the kind of dumbfuckery that will be unleashed if the #equalization referendum goes the way these clowns want,” Mr. Olszynski added in another tweet.
This situation presents Mr. Kenney with another difficulty: It’s hard to see how Mr. Cooper can remain as Speaker, now that he’s blessed this crackpot separatist scheme with his presence, or how Ms. Pitt can continue to sit as a UCP MLA after calling out the premier.
If he doesn’t skid them, and soon, it will be strong evidence he is no longer in control of his caucus.
Mr. Kenney couldn’t have been pleased the dissidents chose to try to upstage him hours before he had a big news conference scheduled in an effort to recover from his mishandling of the COVID epidemic. His declaration last June that the province was “open for good” and on the verge of the “best summer ever,” is now widely seen as contributing directly to its current catastrophic health care crisis.
In the event, he announced Alberta would use its almost certainly unconstitutional Critical Infrastructure Defence Act to ban all demonstrations outside Alberta hospitals, supposedly to protect staff, patients and families at Alberta health-care facilities from anti-vaccine protesters.
Since anti-vaccination protests outside Alberta hospitals haven’t amounted to much, this is thought by many to be an effort to use the divisions over COVID policies as an excuse to ban picket lines outside hospitals at a time several public-sector health care unions are in difficult negotiations for new collective agreements.
As for doing what’s really needed to get COVID-19 under control and save the collapsing health care system – implementing a strict circuit-breaker lockdown – Mr. Kenney indicated he has no intention of doing that.
It does indeed take something to re-rat. However, Mr. Anderson, like Kenney is no Churchill. Of course, in this case Kenney is more constant in his loyalty, perhaps because it is mainly to himself. At least he will not rat or re-rat in this ongoing drama for he is the leader. I suspect here he gets to play the role of another famous Englishman instead, a modern day Conservative version of Captain Blythe.
Also, the besieged Kenney can surely still count and having kicked out two MLA’s already must know it only takes a few more to form or join a party, so he is quickly running out of bullets here. The public disavowal of confidence by Ms. Pitt today was surely meant to force Kenney to do something, either kick her out or finally lay down his weapon.
If things continue at this rate, the end game may come fairly soon. It would not be surprising if Kenney does not make it to the leadership review or even the Ides of March.
However, one likely difference with Captain Blythe is he did eventually make it home and the tide turned against the mutineers. I can’t see Kenney getting a warm welcome back in his real home of Ottawa by the CPC any time soon, after all his Alberta misadventures.
Interesting comparison, in that Captain Bligh (of “Bounty” fame, for I assume that’s who you mean) performed an astonishing feat of navigation in a small, overcrowded boat to get home (demonstrating a level of competence in his chosen field that is well beyond that of anyone in Kenney’s cabinet).
Bligh was also later entrusted with the Governorship of New South Wales (or maybe it was still called Botany Bay back then), which I certainly hope does not have any parallels to Kenney’s career. That episode (the Governorship) ended in tears and another mutiny of a sort (the Rum rebellion).
What else can you expect from these pretend conservatives and Reformers? They are incapable of telling the truth, and they are good at fooling Albertans with the lies they spew. Had we continued to get the oil royalty rates Peter Lougheed was getting, as well as the tax rates he was getting, we wouldn’t be in this horrific mess. We lost $575 billion from getting substandard oil royalty rates, and we lost at least $150 billion more from the worst tax policies. Add to this Albertans being burdened with a gigantic cost of $260 billion for cleaning up the damage done by oil companies in Alberta, caused by Ralph Klein’s negligence, and the constant waste of money on the priciest shenanigans for decades, under these pretend conservatives and Reformers in Alberta. Alberta hasn’t sent any money to the nation’s capital, Ottawa, and also never sent any money to any other provinces in the country. These pretend conservatives and Reformers want us to believe that lie, to make up for their gross fiscal negligence. Peter Lougheed stated that you can’t trust these Reformers. He sure was right about that.
The lunacy from Alberta just keeps getting more impressive.
While Premier Crying & Screaming Midget is patting himself on the back for protecting health care workers from anti-everything protests, by making every hospital a protest-free zone, of which there have been few over a number of weeks, the view of the more conceptual thinkers see Kenney’s action as a means of thwarting healthcare workers potential strike action. In other words, Kenney intends to use the cops to break their union picket actions. We’ll see how that one goes.
In the meantime, a band of UCP/Wildrose dimwits have decided to declare Alberta “independent” of Ottawa and the rest of Canada. While the comment describing this as “dumbf*ckery” is right on the money, it describes something considerably more insidious.
In times of crisis, the lunatics come out of the woodwork and attempt to seize influence. Since the abortive palace revolt against Kenney was halted because it would have been an open ballot, these Buffalo enthusiasts have decided to make their presence known by other means. Thus, a spectacular bozo blowup.
Kenney may don his Capt. Canada cape and pretend he’s defending Canada from the enemies within, it cannot be denied gave this initiative life with his useless equalization referendum. Once a bumbling dumb arse, always a bumbling dumb arse.
PMJT can’t believe Alberta’s insanity or his luck. Now, he gets an even bigger boot to kick Erin O’Toole with, showing everyone who voted for the CPC they are Alberta-style idiots. Trudeau announces Ottawa’s willingness to support Alberta and then says “WTF?” with the next. Who gets to be the better Capt. Canada now?
Now that Trudeau and the LPC are enjoying a strong tailwind following the end of the diplomatic crisis with China, he can turn to using what little political capital he has left to return to promenance on the national stage.
Looks like the UCP’s dumbf•ckery just handed Trudeau a fantastic second chance.
Meanwhile for distraction we have the exciting news that the war room has bought four week’s worth of billboards in Times Square promoting Alberta’s ‘friendlier oil’ – New Yorkers will surely be in awe – and can participate in a loaded referendum question phrased to garner support for making a change to year-round daylight savings time. This foolish premier doesn’t seem to understand that people do not appreciate being treated as simpletons. His grip on his caucus is going the way of his grip on reality.
Good god! I thought that there was supposed to be an urban rural divide in Alberta between modern man and neandtherthal. According to both you and my brother in Calgary that’s supposed to be the case. Airdrie isn’t rural … All I know is, down my really rural NS way of upbringing to which another sibling returned after 40 years in BC three years ago, two families (of two generations, one Alberta born) headed by people we knew in school have returned “home” for good from Alberta this month. Apparently the nightmare was too much. I’ll know more from these Titanic survivors when I go down there for Thanksgiving.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on the internet, and various experts are now saying is the human condition, you can’t convince deniers of anything even if you proffer up actual facts. It just causes the denier to become even more convinced they’re right and more entrenched in whatever nonsense they believe. In that case, Alberta is destined to have oafs like Cooper, Pitt, Barnes, Loewen, Stephan and Anderson wandering around in ever-decreasing circles for years to come, barking like rabid animals at the moon, claiming Canada is fleecing them, and that Covid ain’t nuthin’.
Is kenney much better? The premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, a doctor himself, offered to send the same team of docs and nurses he sent to Ontario to help in Alberta. “No thanks, we got the beds, maybe we’ll need you by third week of October in Fort Mac,” is the gist of kenney’s idiotic response:
https://news19.net/featured/alberta-premier-jason-kenney-refused-covid-19-help-from-n-l-premier/
“…oafs like Cooper, Pitt, Barnes, Loewen, Stephane and Anderson wandering around in ever-decreasing circles for years to come, barking like rabid animals at the moon…”
Ms. Pitt can offer a more civilized approach. Her affinity for South Tyrol could include that country’s love for Alpine yodelling. She could convince her fellow separatists that they could amplify their message by forming a sextette, yodelling their way across Canada, convincing Canadians by musical entertainment the merits of Alberta separation. People coast to coast would be spellbound. And the happy songsters would be spared the indignity of barking like rabid animals at the moon. Unless the audience cries for an encore.
Only the coyotes are listening to the squawks and screeches of the UCPians.
Like the wasps, a few more nights of cooler weather and they will be gone to till spring.
Welcome to October.
I wonder how many of Ms. Pitt’s constituents have confidence in HER. Airdrie is not some rural backwater filled with residents residents willing to be suckered into this kind of clap-trap.
In addition to the hot mess that Kenney’s incompetence and mismanagement of the Covid pandemic has caused, he has also created breeding conditions favorable to extremophiles – whacky political opportunists who can survive only in extreme conditions of acidity, toxic atmospheres, and pressures. No doubt these political equivalents of giant tube worms have been encouraged by the referendum on equalization. But, they have also been encouraged by the UCPs desire to pull AB out of the CPP and, more importantly, to establish its own police force. For, as has been pointed out in this column and other places, a provincial police force could be used to selectively enforce federal law. What better way to assert sovereignty?
As for Kenney’s and Madu’s announcement yesterday that they would use the Critical Infrastructure Defense Act to criminalize demonstrations at hospitals, this was another disappointment. Like people who convinced they are going to win the lottery, I foolishly hope that every time Kenney calls a news conference he is going to present a sound plan for getting us out of this mess or, even better, announce his retirement. I am likely to remain disappointed for a long time.
Radicalization is a real concern in the Canadian body politic
“South Tyrol…German Reich”
I’ll forgive the hyperbole because I agree this is “dumbfuckery” but kinda close to Godwin’s Law.
Still current separatist group Sourh Tyrolese Freedom is quoted in their local parliament as saying they “shouldn’t be dragged down” with the rest of Italy. Or are they just upset by Rome dictating hunting season rules? https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/italy-s-mason-dixon-line-euro-crisis-fuels-south-tyrolean-separatist-dreams-a-819430.html
Oh, what tangled web they weave…Then there’s this little gem:
“Mr. Kenney told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday that Alberta has contacted American health care facilities, and that it has identified some that may be able to take on the province’s COVID-19 patients, if needed.”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-divided-ucp-members-again-challenge-jason-kenneys-leadership/
So while the premier turned down an offer of help from Newfoundland (whose premier is an orthopedic surgeon, which presumably puts him in Kenney’s “bad” camp), and is still negotiating with the federal government because the help they offered is not enough in his mind, he looks to places in a foreign country, like the overwhelmed state of Idaho? So separation and joining the U.S. is the solution to Alberta’s growing pile of corpses?
What is the definition of insanity? Is it 18 dead in a single day, or 29? Will it be when Kenney decides to build ossuaries under the streets?
In case anyone was wondering, I did check out the loading dock at the nearest hospital yesterday, and found no reefer trucks. It was a good day, if you consider mass death a good day, or maybe they bring them in under cover of darkness?
Insanity is redefined at 34 deaths from Covid in a single day during this grievously unnecessary fourth wave, but why stop there?
And still the UCP keeps pushing the point that vaccinated urbanites are not being punished by having all their hospitals filled with unvaccinated rural Covid patients, thereby eliminating hospital treatment for everything else.
The new health minister fails to realize just how efficient Alberta’s public health system really is. We have never needed this many ICU beds before, thanks to public healthcare and its focus on preventing serious illness.
I should note that the volcano on La Palma has killed no one. Why? People listened to scientists who sounded the alarm. That’s why.
Sometimes I wonder if I am in Zimbabwe when it was under Mugabe. Only there the circus was as bad.
UCP self-destruct timer is ticking down faster than ever. This is one result of Kenney sucking up to the lunatic-separatist fringe during the 2019 election campaign. (Have to admit, though–I’m becoming a fan of Martin Olszynski. The second quote by him is perfect!)
Short-term prediction: Kenney will try to downplay this caucus rebellion. He wilts when someone pushes him back. Shortly there will be another marathon caucus meeting, but Kenney won’t be able to reverse the current damage.
Medium-term prediction: the “Free Alberta” caucus will gain members, threatening the UCP government with open revolt. I don’t think they’ll officially break from the Kenney loyalists (a.k.a. suck-ups) but FA opposition within the UCP caucus will hamstring Kenney and the cabinet.
The chaotic non-response to the Covid crisis will get worse.
The only positive aspect I see is that the UCP will finish themselves off as a political force. Individual members will doubtless retain enough support (mostly rural) to elect a few MLAs in 2023; but Notley’s NDP have now become the government-in-waiting.
As with certain Canary Islands volcanoes, destabilization of government comes before the collapse? Imagery much appreciated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard
Most embarassing news comment of the day, from today’s Globe and Mail: “The issue of Alberta’s role in confederation is a top-three issue for constituents of Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills” according to Legislative Assembly speaker Nathan Cooper.
Seems there’s new digital signage in Times Square for a new musical that opening on Broadway …
The Dreams of Jason Kenney…The Musical
featuring the hit songs …
What’s With That War Room?
Just Say No … All the Time…to Everything…All the Time
Next Year … in Ottawa (Jason Kenney’s Coming Home)
and the mighty smash hit …
Alberta’s Got All of Hell for a House (God’s Got a Sense of Humour)
This just in: Broadway production of Aladdin cancelled due to Covid.
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/reopening-aladdin-broadway-halted-covid-19-cases-80316362
It’s all beginning to look a bit surreal. Beyond dumdf*ckery, in fact. Meantime Premier Stumble N’ Fumble has left open a serious vector of transmission for COVID in schools by not requiring mask use from Grade 4 on up. This leaves families wide open to COVID. Nice going Kenney and Friends Of Kenney.
I thought I had it covered in my previous post: “How more embarrassingly, incompetent and dysfunctional can a party be than Jason Kenney’s UCP.” But Olszynski’s “dumbfuckery” nailed it. Where can I get the t-shirt?
So should Trudeau put a hold on the Canadian owned TMX pipeline which is now being laid between Hope and Chilliwack? Be interesting to see what agreement can be made with the Free Strategy of Albertas representatives?
The mindset of characters like Rob Anderson are thus…
I am free
I am independent
Your rights end where mine begin
Get over it
Oh yeah! Go f*ck yourself
Get over it
This is the mindset that it common among extraordinary brain trusts, like the freemen and the Three Percenters. They oppose all forms of good governance, order, and decent social values that serve the common good. They live in a constant state of victimhood, which it pretty rich because overwhelming number of them are white Christians and upper-middle class to upper class. In other words, all their problems are first-world problems.
Now Rob Anderson has, in his political career, crossed the floor between like-minded parties twice. Apart from his extensive academic and professional background, he is an opportunistic loon. I guess he will not be happy until he becomes a founding father of an Alberta free-state. (AKA. Fifth Reich. Or maybe Gilead)
In any case, if this is Alberta’s bid to become as crazy as Texas, and attract all the freeDUMB loving crazies from Canada to move there, then I have no problem with that.
Then, then can all cough on each other’s anti-Vaxxed selves and usher in the COVID 19 ‘ninth wave’ of infection and die off by natural selection.
All stupid people die because they are stupid. Darwin be Praised!!
Totally agree – you can’t fix stupid. The UCP playbook is “Dumfuckery for Dummies”.
Wild rose lost their credibility when Daniel smith walked over to pc. She was close to being elected but her move to pc made her look like a money grubbing politition. Rather than a passionette intelligent conservative. A viable alternative to pc party.
In Alberta, it appears the best way to get herd immunity…………….is to cull the herd
Get ready for Albertans to be drubbed in a bucket of gin just in time for the Thanksgiving Covid spike the Referendum will do its utmost to distract from and obscure. Fragments of the Alberta right are already picking sides and while it’s most obviously a concern for the premier which one gets dumbfucked better, the fact that both Speaker and Spare are participating in a potential parliamentary confidence-busting schism, the matter is squarely in the Lieutenant Governor’s bailiwick: The Honourable Salma Lakhani should be rightly concerned that the combination of expulsions from the governing UCP caucus and continuing challenges to Kenny’s leadership from within and without might impair the party’s ability to pass legislation, a premise— which might force K-Boy to agree—that invites Her Honour to intervene with a good, stiff broom. “Well, we’d probably only agree on one thing anyway/ That’s what the hell is happening here?…Like boots or hearts, oh, when they start/ they really fall apart.”
The “Free Alberta Strategy”—an unabashed plagiarism of “Liberate Michigan” —is now new and improved with two scoops of juniper berries to perfume the gagging overproof of its evil spirit. Thus inebriated, imbibers are too dumbfucked to notice that Alberta already is sovereign within Canada, but happy to take for granted the benefits all provinces enjoy of their federation—just so long’s Free Albertans don’t have to pay for things like strategic security, integrated infrastructure, trade, currency and bank stability, and rule of Common Law. I suppose Free Alberta expects Canada to pay the Wild Rose province to remain in the federation. Otherwise the “Strategy” sounds “wacky”, indeed: a declaration of independence in other words— like war is politics by other means.
But Canadian provinces confederated to the Constitution cannot and will not make such an exception for Alberta—nor for any of their other co-federates, for that matter, so the Free Alberta mission statement may either be taken as a declaration of Alberta’s intent to secede from Canada completely or be dismissed out-of-hand like the separatist Parti Québécois’ “sovereignty association”. That was a concept tested in two Referenda, the first expressly using the term, the second inquiring about an even more fuzzy notion of “separation”, two exercises germane to fuzzy notions of Alberta independence because they led ultimately to the Clarity Act which provides the mechanism for any province to separate from Canada—provided, that is, citizens of the subject province are fully informed of its intent to secede and the terms to be negotiated with the other ten sovereignties in the federation (governments of the nine remaining provinces and the feds) before casting their referendum vote.
A unilateral declaration of independence wouldn’t be recognized by any other nation and invite direct intervention by the feds which already have areas of interest in the province in the form of Canadian Forces bases, national parks, bureaucratic properties and field offices, Indian Reserves and attendant Crown Treaties that foreign governments would recognize as legitimate. But the tenets of dumbfuckery probably don’t recognize moot, anyway. Thus we must review a rabbit hole one more time as if it hadn’t been done already on a number of occasions.
Assuming Alberta successfully achieved independence by way of the mechanisms that exist (leaving aside, for the moment, that this step wouldn’t be easy), we then have to wonder how, alone, it could pay for its administration and defence. Relieving the “burdens” the feds allegedly cost Albertans doesn’t add up to the costs of independence expected. The bitumen mining and smelting industry upon which the separatists underwrite the prospective country’s prosperity would need to market its product, and would only make the jurisdiction go broke faster than it has in the warm cradle of the Canadian federation—and that’s with the pipeline Canadians so generously bought for Alberta. The market out there is poor and, landlocked, there would be no way to get diluted bitumen across interceding jurisdictions without negotiating terms with foreign Canadian or American governments: as an independent nation, Alberta would not enjoy the rights of Canadian provinces —particularly the right any province has to ship its products unfettered across other provinces’ territories. But since it’s a dream anyway, We might as well consider other possibilities beckoning.
Alberta could join other secessionist jurisdictions which form a contiguous land-bridge to tidewater. Plainly that wouldn’t be any Canadian provinces unless they too seceded from Canada—not impossible, just really unlikely (BC to the Pacific, Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Hudson’s Bay). Getting the requisite American states to secede from the USA, say, the three states connecting to the Lakehead at Duluth, Minnesota, or the three connecting to the Pacific at Seattle, Washington, is totally not on: the US has no mechanism for state secession —not after the Civil War made it taboo.
That leaves confederation to the USA—which, being a federation like Canada, would also place certain burdens on its new state of Alberta, which is antithetical to Free Alberta’s premises for separation.
Finally, the contiguous path to the Arctic Ocean could only work if the Northwest Territories also seceded and joined an independent Alberta: but, not being a sovereign province, the NWT has no mechanism by which to secede from Canada.
I counted about sixty permutations of possibilities to solve the landlock problem. Geographically, joint-secession with BC would be the easiest route, but not so much politically or constitutionally. But, to be fair, at least BC already has a small but ever-present Cascadia movement which depends on an equally fanciful confederation of Canadian and American jurisdictions seceding from their respective federations. Cascadia (variously, California, Oregon, Washington, BC, Alaska and Yukon) doesn’t need Alberta economically and would probably prefer to exact terms from it as a foreign jurisdiction (say, to allow an Alberta pipeline through Cascadia to tidewater) rather than accord it rights as a member of Cascadia.
So, to sum up: given Free Alberta’s ostensible and implied goals are multi-moot-wacky-dumbfuckery, one must make of it something else in purpose. Alls I can think of right now is distraction from the horrible mess the UCP has gotten Alberta into. Now why would anybody want to do that?
Surely Jason Kenney does not want any new restrictions prior to the municipal elections that curiously coincide with his predicted peak of the fourth wave. After all, there are several Trojan horses in waiting. Once the Kenney candidates are safely installed on October 18, then the restrictions can proceed.
Imagine, civic elections at the peak of the fourth wave of Covid! It makes the federal election look super-duper-cautious in comparison. This is what we do here in Alberta: wait until mid-October for peak deaths, then keep families apart over what is sometimes their last Christmas. It’s akin to twisting the knife twice.
Of course, Kenney’s hand could be forced in this matter, by whom I don’t to know — deus ex machina?
I wonder, with all of this fumbling and bumbling and all the wrong decisions of Jason Kenney, what goes through the mind of Jason Kenney’s mother…..
Another 34 covid related deaths in Alberta over the past 24 hours according to AHS.
And these MLA’s are actually trying to get media attention by raising the foolish issue of Alberta sovereignty. Anything for a headline. Preparing now to distance themselves from Kenney and from the UCP in the next election.
Shows us where their priorities lie….not with the health and well being of their fellow Albertans during this UCP inflicted health crisis.
Interesting that we do not hear Alberta MP’s saying anything about ALberta’s UCP induced health crisis. Let alone criticizing Jason Kenney.
Not even a peep from the biggest screamer of them all…Michelle Rempel Garner. Wonder what she thinks of the health mess that we are in.
Perhaps she is not getting Alberta news in Oklahoma.
Not one peep…..she is not even blaming it all on Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
Here’s a thought for the upcoming referendum, a.k.a. distraction tactic, on daylight saving time. Pretty much everyone agrees the spring and fall clock-adjusting ritual is worse than useless. The time change leaves everyone tired and out of sorts. Kenney’s answer is to offer either the unacceptable status quo, or an even worse alternative of year-round daylight saving time.
However, experts who understand how our bodies react to time of sunrise–sorry, can’t provide a link, but I recall a CBC report by someone who said getting up hours before sunrise in winter would make us all even more tired and cranky than the current unacceptable system.
So, a modest proposal to send Kenney a message. 1) vote for Duncan Kinney for senator in waiting. 2) Spoil the referendum ballot by scratching out “permanent daylight saving time” and pencil in “permanent mountain standard time.” Spoiled ballots are counted in elections, so hopefully they’ll be counted here as well.
Curious, isn’t it, that Kenney wants to align us to Saskatchewan time, and now these separatists pop up just weeks ahead of the vote? It’s Kenney vs. Kenney, as the puppet master behind the curtain pulls all the strings. Separate, align ourselves with Saskatchewan, and send Covid patients to the U.S. to establish a precedent for U.S. corporate authority over our health.
Question: was Kenney taking direction from the International Democratic Union overlords on his 23-day (two weeks in Central Standard Time) “holiday”? He didn’t look well-rested when he returned.
“make Alberta a sovereign jurisdiction within Canada” … like declaring certain federal laws not applicable within Alberta?
OK, at what point does this become tantamount to treason? Or, more likely, sedition?
Criminal Code of Canada, section 61:
Every one who
(a) speaks seditious words,
(b) publishes a seditious libel, or
(c) is a party to a seditious conspiracy,
is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
Why aren’t these whackadoodles prosecuted?