Happy Independence Day. May Canada long remain independent of the United States, the wishes of the United Conservative Party, its MAGA supporters, and the current president of the United States notwithstanding.
Just a week ago, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith launched her “Alberta Next” project, which is supposed to ask Albertans what issues should be put to them next year in a series of sovereignty referenda. One of the questions we Albertans were asked to consider voting on is whether we should have an Alberta provincial police force to replace the apparently too-Canadian RCMP.
Then, at a news conference the day before yesterday, Ms. Smith announced that despite the opposition to this idea by a majority of Albertans, her government was going ahead and setting up a provincial police force right now. They’ve even hired a chief. So what’s the point of the Alberta Next project, one wonders, if the government’s going to put the cart before the horsemen, as it were?
The post below first appeared in this space on April 19, 2024. Despite the dramatic changes south of what used to be known as the Longest Undefended Border in the World, some things obviously haven’t changed all that much on this side of the Medicine Line.
This being the Fourth of July and all, it seemed like an ideal time to review that rumour that the UCP would like to call their new politicized police force the Alberta Rangers as they struggle remake our province in the image of the soon-to-be-Impoverished States of America, one big beautiful bill at a time.
Planned provincial police to be called Alberta Rangers?
Did a little birdie just chirp in my ear that the United Conservative Government has already picked out a name for the new provincial police force it claims it hasn’t yet decided whether or not to set up?
It wasn’t a tweet, merely a chirp, but I must say it had the warble of truth.
Brace yourselves for the Alberta Rangers.
This, presumably would be a bit of cowboy cosplay intended to extend the faux cultural distinctiveness of Wild Rose Country by making it seem less like a Canadian province and more like the state, formerly the republic, of Texas, a part of the United States that Alberta hardly resembles at all.
In reality, what Texas resembles is Canada. It has more than 30 million people without even having to count unauthorized immigrants, plenty of tidewater, a grownup economy that involves more than resource extraction, and a rough split between progressive-minded and conservative folk (Republican for the time being but with demographics inexorably marching toward a Democratic Party majority).
The U.S. state that Alberta actually resembles is Oklahoma, a landlocked oilpatch in flyover country that can advertise lower house prices than most states. Even so, a case could be made that the Sooner State has a more diverse economy than Alberta’s, what with the aircraft industry and the world’s largest per-capita prison-industrial complex.
That’s one thing about OK that the UCP presumably aspires to imitate. In 2018, 1,079 of every 100,000 adult residents of “the World’s Prison Capital” were in jail, a higher incarceration rate than any actual country on the planet!
But I digress.
About those Texas Rangers, they have an undeservedly good reputation thanks to televised fairy tales like Walker, Texas Ranger, a 1990s TV crime series wherein a slightly pre-geriatric fifty-something Chuck Norris used wheezy karate moves like roundhouse cowboy-boot kicks to round up and lasso pretend bad guys.
The reality is somewhat worse, and one suspects the UCP knows this, which should make us more uncomfortable with the Ranger idea, if indeed my little avian friend has chirped accurate data.
As reviewer Michael Sandlin put it in the Texas Observer in 2018, by the late 19th Century the Rangers had become “a state-sponsored terror squad directed to secure white racial hegemony along the Texas-Mexico border.”
In 2022, Reform Austin noted that the “near-mythical law enforcement agency that is often portrayed as a tough, elite unit of crime fighters” had more recently “shown that they may be little more than a political catspaw as well as incompetent at their jobs.”
Well, at least this would be on-brand for the UCP and its intention to create an Alberta police force to replace and historically erase the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which it once complained in a news release (since removed from the government’s website) was “overly bureaucratic” and “unable and unwilling to confront activists.” That pairing suggests that in the eyes of the UCP the Mounties are too focused on due process and fundamental rights and not willing enough just to wade in and crack the heads of citizens who oppose UCP policies.
Getting back to Texas, Reform Austin cited a 2021 New York Times exposé that revealed how the Rangers’ investigations of accusations against other police agencies often “fell short of basic standards.”
According the to the New York Times story, its reporters “identified 29 cases the Rangers had investigated since 2015 in which a person stopped breathing after struggling with local authorities. None of those inquiries led prosecutors to charge anyone in law enforcement.”
Also on brand for the UCP, I’d say.
One good thing about the real Texas Rangers is that there aren’t very many of them of them – fewer than 200 according to several websites, all of which give slightly different numbers.
That, at least, is something the UCP perhaps ought to imitate, although not the fact that you can literally count the number of female Rangers on the fingers of one hand.
If I’ve got the UCP reasoning wrong, and they actually want to name the provincial police force after a football team, they should call it the Alberta Stampeders. Obviously, they’re not going to go for the Elks. Too woke!
Either way, forming an Alberta police force is a bad idea. Calling it the Rangers is a really bad idea. Which means that’s almost certainly what the UCP intends to do.
When they do, remember where you heard it first. And hang onto your CPP!