Social media exploded yesterday with criticism that the six “surveys” on the so-called Next Alberta Panel’s slick website are an exercise in manufacturing consent, to use Noam Chomsky’s now familiar phrase.
Having read all the survey questions and watched to the irritating propaganda videos that anyone wanting to answer their questions must sit through first, I would go further. These “surveys” are push polls with zero validity as a measure of public opinion and consent baked in.
If you participate, the only answers you can give will in most cases imply your agreement with Premier Danielle Smith’s plans for getting rid of the Canada Pension Plan, dumping the RCMP, forcing constitutional change on the rest of Canada, ending equalization and federal transfers, ending federal-provincial co-operation on tax collection, and refusing to welcome immigrants to Canada that we don’t want for whatever reason to move here.
Even if respondents aren’t sucked in by the crude propaganda in the videos – all sweetly delivered in the dulcet tones of a sprightly female narrator, presumably human – they are given no opportunity to express their own views, or say anything negative.
The United Conservative Party brain trust presumably learned that lesson with its 2023 pension plan “engagement” survey, the results of which the Smith Government suppressed for nearly two years because two-thirds of the respondents opposed being forced out of the Canada Pension Plan and a lot of them offered their opinions in scathing terms. Only 10 per cent were in favour of an Alberta pension plan.
The results were finally released a week ago thanks to FOIP request and appeal to the Information Commissioner by Postmedia journalists.
Premier Smith and the UCP have never given up on this project, though – the potential grift is just too big – and they’ve been trying to build consent ever since through constituency meetings organized by their separatist allies and now this Next Alberta push poll. By the sound of several recent legitimate public opinion polls they may have had some success.
The little Next Alberta pension survey asks only three questions.
As Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan pointed out on social media, for some reason this question “fails to mention that the discrepancy is due to fact that we have more workers than retirees. Every Canadian contributes at the same rate and gets the same benefits.”
And what if you see no potential benefit to this scheme whatsoever, and reject the premise of each proffered answer?
Go ahead, pick one! We’ve already picked an answer!
Answers to all surveys are multiple choice, as shown in the example above. In every case, the selections are designed to boost the government’s argument. There is no place to say what you really think.
To participate, you are required to give your name and postal code, but the system appears to be easy to game. But even if it isn’t, that doesn’t really matter as the purpose obviously is to build consent for a plan that is already fully developed. I would be shocked if the referendum questions these surveys have been designed to justify are not already drafted.
Needless to say, such a questionnaire has zero credibility or validity.
As for the introductory videos, some are better than others, but all are propagandistic and intentionally misleading. In the blithely delivered effort to boost an Alberta pension plan, for example, the CPP is described as suffering from “bloated” management and accused of being increasingly focused on “on emissions reductions and DEI concerns,” with investment decisions made by people who live in Ottawa and Toronto. (Actually, as I recall, the previous CEO of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. lived in Toronto as well, but whatever.)
“The CPP exit rules aren’t clear in the federal legislation, and Ottawa is notoriously anti-Alberta with its decisions,” the anonymous narrator complains – in case the DEI reference didn’t rile up the UCP base, presumably. “So the size of the lump sum Alberta is offered could be lower than it should be.”
Whether this turns out to be an effective propaganda tool, of course, remains to be seen.
NOTE: I am a believer that it’s easier to recognize and understand propaganda if you can read it in print and parse what is actually being said. Accordingly, I have created an accurate transcript of the Next Alberta pension survey introductory video, which can be downloaded and shared here. Over the next few days I will try to post transcripts of the other five videos as well.
Transcript of the Next Alberta pension survey introductory video