Where there’s smoke, the martyred American president John F. Kennedy famously and accurately observed, there’s often a smoke-making machine.
Whatever can be said about the accuracy of the notorious Angus Reid Institute poll that purports to show 36 per cent of Albertans would like to separate from Canada – a percentage that defies credulity no matter how much a majority of Albertans hate having a Liberal government in Ottawa – smoke-making machines are working overtime nowadays to ensure we know all about it.
ARI is as respectable as any mainstream pollster, so I suppose we have to assume they’re picking up on something real, even if it’s only that the commitment to democracy is so shallow among a significant segment of Alberta’s population that they’re willing to contemplate destroying one of the most successful countries in world history because their team lost an election they expected to win.
Still, even given the conservative movement’s national temper tantrum, it’s hard to believe that even 10 per cent of Albertans, let alone 36 per cent, would think it’s a good idea to risk our Canadian rights, pensions, passports, bank accounts, health care and freedom to travel for the satisfaction of owning the Libs. Perhaps the sample of 790 adult Albertans ARI spoke to last week wasn’t quite as random as the pollster thinks.
Be that as it may, I am prepared to stand corrected if more polls show the same thing. But whatever happened, the poll’s results certainly benefit the operators of the various smoke-making machines who hope to persuade Albertans and other Western Canadians that being part of a landlocked petro-republic, or worse a United States edging steadily toward a civil war, is somehow in their best interests.
Hard to believe anyone in full possession of their faculties would fall for that, but persuading people to do things that aren’t in their own interests are why we have disinformation campaigns.
The United Conservative Party Government led by Premier Danielle Smith certainly has plenty of good reasons to start generating some smoke.
Ms. Smith has claimed repeatedly she’s just a Canadian patriot who feels an obligation to make it easy for the province’s separatists to vote to leave the country. She talks constantly about how powerful the urge to separate from Canada is now that Canadians have democratically chosen another Liberal federal government in Ottawa – and the ARI poll has become an effective talking point for her.
“I would say it’s 30 per cent to 40 per cent of Albertans right now,” she told a simpatico Postmedia columnist of her estimate of the percentage who would like the province to leave Canada. “That’s a pretty high number.”
Well, as the columnist in question chirped in response, that’s a pretty high number indeed.
Of course, the smoke from the ARI poll is sure to distract Albertans from the UCP’s awful recent performance, including its Corrupt Care Scandal, its negligence leading to the ongoing measles epidemic, its assault on public health care, and its efforts to bring dark money back into election financing.
Moreover, Ms. Smith and her allies are indulging in another form of behaviour typical of supporters of Conservative parties that have just lost an election – to wit, warning the winners that they’d better abandon their election platform and adopt the losing party’s or terrible things will happen. We have seen this before, hilariously, right here in Alberta.
But Ms. Smith has added something new. Instead of merely predicting disaster if the winner doesn’t immediately adopt the policies of the loser, she vows to ensure it happens!
Again, though, this is another reason for the bad losers at the UCP to crank up their smoke-making machine.
Finally, there’s the UCP strategy of using a “citizen-generated” separation referendum to get the extremist base of the UCP out to vote in municipal elections this fall to unseat progressive councillors in Calgary and Edmonton – still more justification for fake smoke.
The Postmedia column mentioned above sympathetically noted Premier Smith’s “steady 47-per-cent approval rating.” This appears to be a reference to another Angus Reid poll, published in March, that showed Ms. Smith’s approval rating at 46 per cent, unchanged from a similar poll by the same pollster a year earlier.
However, Ms. Smith’s popularity relative to other premiers between the two samples has changed dramatically, for what it’s worth, from being tied as the second most popular premier to “the second least popular premier in March, ahead of Quebec’s Francois Legault.”
Notwithstanding rumours of a recent private poll suggesting an election now would see the NDP all but wiped out, one interpretation of the ARI poll’s conclusion “a majority of those who voted for the UCP in Alberta’s last provincial election say they would vote to leave, whether definitely, or leaning that way” could be that no one is left supporting the UCP except the nuts.
That’s probably too much to hope for. Still, according to ARI, “nearly all past Alberta NDP voters say they would vote to stay.” This, at least, makes sense.
Ironically, the fringy Republican Party of Alberta, which should be feared by the UCP for its potential to poach from its extremist base, also stands to benefit from the smoke the government is making.
Anecdotally, the RPA is said to be running aggressive telephone and door-to-door canvassing efforts throughout the province.
That can’t be cheap, although someone out there might find it worth the expense to push the UCP into even more extreme positions – just as Ms. Smith’s former Wildrose Party was financed to push the now-defunct Progressive Conservative Party farther to the right.
The RPA, interestingly, is led by Cameron Davies, whose last high-profile appearance in Alberta politics came during the 2017 UCP leadership campaign, in which he was a campaign manager for candidate Jeff Callaway, who came to be known as the “Kamikaze candidate.”