UCP reported planning to vote on publicly acknowledging separatist program – but not until after separation referendum! 

Its time for the UCP to disavow separatism or change its name to the USP (United Separatist Party). If they can’t, I suppose its fair if we just start calling them that until they clarify otherwise.

As for the MLA’s on the separatist list, they should also be clear where they stand and it is fair to continue to ask each of them until they are. Perhaps we can put them on a list with pictures called suspected separatists. If they are clear about where they stand, of course they can be taken off.

This is a very serious matter. Our government may have been taken over by those aiding, encouraging separatism and who are not even being up front about it. We should not allow their bs and nonsense about a sovereign Alberta in a united Canada fool us. Their glib pretzel like wording and logic is not a satisfactory answer to where they actually stand.

It is easy for the 16% of Alberta voters to move to the USA right now. Nothing is stopping them. The truth is they are not about separating, they are about scamming money from ignorant rubes, which Alberta is chock full of.

It is a pivotal time for Albertans no doubt. Whereas those who are separatists and curry the favour of MAGA and should be held accountable for their seditious behaviour and therefore face time in jail; never to happen in sleepy Canada and Alberta. Like Americans we are sleepwalking, having discussions about the demise of Canada as though this is normal conversation, to our peril. Thank you David, for posting this article that clearly states the dangerous “waters” we are facing. So, from one tax paying citizen I offer the following:
It is with grave weight that I fret over whether Alberta will separate and spend millions of dollars trying to make this happen. Where to move should Alberta separate and why should I have to move – I always said that I would never stay in Nazi Germany if I lived during WWII. Apologists will say “Is it really that bad?” just like they have throughout history in spite of the evidence of people dying. Here in Alberta people who need medical services are dying, but death means nothing to conservatives/UCP/MAGA unless it is their own death one wonders. “What is the worst that can happen?” Laughable that I am made to feel like an outlier being supportive of Canada, it is just like 1984 re: Orwell. Of course financial ruin is of great concern but the separatists will spout their financial fantasy and when people do have to live on the street because of UCP/conservative/MAGA malfeasance, they will not take any responsibility. I cannot support criminals, racists, pedophiles, and the like. People who do so, including Smith and her minions, are world destroying murderers and worse! Alas, right now it seems completely hopeless since the autocratic fascists are in power, so we the people are in jeopardy, in danger, and I for one do not appreciate the danger the UCP/MAGA people have deliberately fostered. Families are at odds with one another, neighbours, friends – this is not a safe environment except for the screaming separatists and their horde-like supporters. The anguish I share is real. MAGA/UCP/conservatives are shameless, morally bankrupt, pathetic, death causing reprobates and yet they will not stop and no one can stop the carnage. Words do not suffice and action opposed to this epoch is too timid to make any significant difference.

I’ve participated in six Referenda because I live in BC. And, because I lived in Quebec part-time around its 1st Referendum—the “sovereignty association” one in 1980 (I was not eligible to vote in it), I watched with keen interest from the West Coast the 1995 Referendum—the one which asked for permission to negotiate secession with the government of Canada. (I’ll spare you the details; suffice to say Quebec’s Referenda have little to compare with Alberta’s situation—just trust me on that.)

People don’t generally like referenda, not all of them articulately but, I’d hazard, mostly because they (and I) consider them a tactic governing parties resort to in order to shirk the more complex political method of debate, compromise, and cooperation in favour of a safer dodge, and because most people instinctively know that referenda are often very divisive. It might sound old-fashioned nowadays, but intentionally pitting neighbour against neighbour, children against parents, and siblings against each other is considered—or used to be, anyway (I can’t tell anymore) the lowest, worst kind of politics, disgusting and repellent. I often wondered if that’s the reason most people tend to ignore referenda —the natural exception being the very vocal and determined sponsors, usually of the “yes”-whatever-it-is side—, and why a referendum seems to sneak up on them, to rush their choice, indulge their rashness or, for some not-inconsiderable minority, to dismiss completely as a rigged affair serving a government’s ulterior motive.

There’s something diabolical about a government referring a hot controversy to the electorate because the hotter it is, the more likely the issue is almost evenly split—meaning any referendum with a simple-majority threshold could result in a near tie and exacerbate the already-boiling issue by adding accusations by both sides that the vote was rigged by the other, or that one side was unfairly favoured by the way the question was put or when the exercise was held or how the other side’s campaign was funded or what voting system was used—accusations not necessarily unwarranted since although governments want to evade being blamed for deciding one way or the other in a close-run controversy, they can’t resist the temptation to bias the result in their partisan favour. We should be wary of a government that proposes a referendum, and perhaps doubly so of a government which acquiesces to “the people’s” demands to have one.

Anticipating this kind of charge, BC Liberal premier Gordon Campbell insulated his government from the 2005 “STV”—or electoral-system—Referendum with a “Citizens’ Assembly” supposed to make an unbiased choice of an alternative system to pit against First-Past-the-Post (the Campbell-appointed “moderator” had written a book extolling the Single-Transferable-Vote system, a type of proportional representation, while the randomly-selected assembly of bumpkins, feted on a province-wide junket of hearings, were guided towards their final choice: surprise, surprise!—STV it was!); then Campbell imposed a supermajority threshold of 60%; and, finally, he provided a half-million dollars to each of the “yes” and “no” side’s campaigns. Aside from STV looking like it was preordained, Campbell could reasonably reckon that the supermajority threshold would supercharge pro-reppers to campaign harder than their FPtP opponents for whom, he probably reckoned, the 60% threshold would make more complacent. Giving each side an equal amount of campaign finding cleverly appeared fair and balanced, however, the effect was a bandwagon parade of loud, general-election-style hoopla which, as Campbell correctly predicted, was availed much more enthusiastically by the “yes”-STV side than it was by the much more complacent FPtP side, and proved to be unethically designed and vetted to dupe uniformed/misinformed voters to support the change option. The result fell just short of the threshold: 57.69%

Pro-reppers naturally went wild with indignation (just a warning, my Alberta friends), so close, but no cigar. To indulge the conspiracy theory that Campbell wanted pro-rep in order to preclude ever electing majority governments which might reverse his many sabotages to public enterprises (which we couldn’t know until the BC Liberals were toppled in 2017), he decided to hold an identical Referendum just four years later, replete with equal funding for the opposing propaganda campaigns.

The result was telling: only 39.o9% approved STV—probably because voters had four years to quietly reconsider STV without all the noisy, misleading hoopla of the government-funded campaign. It was in fact always easy to fact-check pro-rep propaganda; we may surmise that when some voters took the time to do that during the tranquil inter-Referendum period, they found they’d been misled about pro-rep in STV-1.0 and switched to the “no” side in STV-2.0. We also note that the turnout fell from 61.5% to 55.1% and might conclude that FPtP proponents had become less complacent (IMHO, pro-reppers actually redoubled their own effort in STV 2.0) or that a larger share of voters were repelled by the prospect of another Referendum. Of course Pro-reppers caterwauled for a while, subsequent analyses determining that they were a small minority of highly educated, well organized, and very vocal faction, but most citizens were simply relieved.

Indeed, once the darling of ballot cookies that governments could bribe voters with, electoral-systems referenda have slowly become a dead letter after being exercised in several provinces over the past two decades (all rejecting pro-rep). The NDP has given it wide berth even though it is party policy (officially, Mixed-Member-Plurality, FPtP/pro-rep). In the 2021 federal election, only the Greens campaigned for switching to pro-rep, and its leader, Annamie Paul, lost her own seat—in fact, came in last-place. Politicians are rightly wary of referenda—and especially of pro-rep ones of which voters are rightly tired.

We shouldn’t wonder if the UCP government is all-in on the secession gambit: whereas Campbell was all about stealth (eventually his undoing), Danielle Smith is too glib to affect such finesse—besides, there’s already enough evidence to condemn her and the UCP for playing footsie with separatists and she’s too gormless by half to pull off Campbell-like stealth anyhow (Gordo once bragged how his Scottish ancestors massacred mine by this using his favourite tactic).

My first BC Referendum was an overt partisan ploy: the dying Socred dynasty (38 years with a 3-year NDP break, ‘72-‘75) put two questions on the 1991 general election ballot thinking voters would respond favourably. They did—just not how the Socreds wanted: 80.9% of voters approved “Recall”, and 83.0% approved “Citizens’ Initiative.” Turnout was slightly less than for the general election which was 64.0%. However, the Socreds were soundly thrashed and, over the next ten years of NDP governance, evaporated completely. There might be a lesson for Danielle Smith—like, she might just think it a good idea to put the separation question on the next general election ballot—thinking, of course, that it would be favourable for her party (like, not really getting the 2nd part of the lesson).

Insofar as many want to insert Aboriginal treaty rights into the secession debate, they might consider that the 2002 BC Treaty Referendum was so very divisive that half the mail-in ballots were burned on a raft in Victoria’s Inner Harbour in front of the Legislative Assembly in protest of the Referendum’s bigoted portent, and Campbell himself was forced to recant and apologize when he realized the resulting confirmation of the fact that indigenous people were outnumbered 92-to-8 by non-indigenous citizens could not reverse the 1997 SCoC “Delgamuukw” decision overturning BC’s 127-year position that the sovereign claims of all BC First Nations were extinguished by the act of confederation to Canada in 1871 (each FN was always constitutionally guaranteed a treaty by way of negotiation). As far’s Alberta is concerned, the UCP should be aware that the matter of treaties is fraught with deep, historical, constitutional and legal complexities —maybe not a ‘can-of-worms’ situation like in BC where there are very few treaties as yet, but more like a can of milk opened upside down on a commercial fishing boat (which, I was told, is a very bad and unlucky thing one never wants to do—unless one is a really good swimmer).

Once again, Gordo supplies a lesson that a premier ought to be careful with referenda , even if confident that chi can manipulate them as easily as they can be. Thinking himself invincible after winning a 3rd-term in 2009, he imposed a Harmonized Sales Tax which he’d promised not to do on campaign: ultimately it was his undoing, but before his caucus fired him a Citizens’ Initiative —the “Anti-HST Petition”—passed the 10% threshold in all of BC’s then-85 ridings requiring him to act. Instead of simply rescinding the HSTin the Assembly, he chose the Referendum route (a book could be written about this crazy episode) and, under his successor, Christy Clark, the matter was voted on in 2011. It turned out to be one of the least divisive Referenda BC ever had: the HST was soundly defeated, apparently crossing BC’s usual bifurcated party lines and, deliciously, made world history: it was the 1st and only time a legislated tax was rescinded by force of popular measure in over 800 years of Westminster parliamentary history; jurisprudence in any Common Law nation may now admit this precedent to trial proceedings. (I dunno—makes me kinda proud, I guess…)

Electoral-systems make up most of the examples of government, or partisan interference in referenda, a fact we probably can’t hope to expunge, but one that might affect how we vote, if we do, and how we speak out against this chickenshit shirking of responsibility or manipulating ulterior motives. It can get pretty blatant: making good on its 2017 campaign promise to hold an electoral-systems Referendum, the new NDP cabinet designed the ballot and picked the alternatives to FPtP—which was a complete conflict of interest that should have never happened. Keep your eyes peeled and ears pricked, my Alberta compatriots, whenever your government intervenes with your supposedly arm’s-length, independent, impartial, nonpartisan electoral office. Even if one approves of such interference, just remember that setting such a dangerous precedent for the sake of something desirable today could turn around and bite for some demand that one doesn’t like tomorrow.

Finally, I don’t understand why the facts regarding whatever overt or euphemistic promotion of secession aren’t immediately and relentlessly rejoined: there is no legal constitutional way to secede from Canada—no matter if a referendum approved it, even if it complied 100% with the federal Clarity Act—even if the approval were unanimous. And even though Canada is quite accommodating about the issue of secession where most other nations are not (it’s no small irony that there is no mechanism for a state to secede from the country of which Alberta separatists want to become the 51st state), making clear what referenda questions must say, and getting a SCoC reference opinion about how secession could be legalized (by amending the Constitution to say all eleven sovereign parliaments in Canada must ratify the secession), spurning these efforts will be even less endearing to the ROC(+Q) than incessant whining that highest-paid citizens in the wealthiest province in the country for whom Canadians bought a $34 billon pipeline to the Coast are being unfairly victimized by Canada. (Contrast with the number of new Quebecophiles born of the 1980 and 1995 Referenda.)

Remember, it’s only the haters—the small minority of Albertans—who fancy they can unilaterally secede on the strength of a referendum that is legally moot without a constitutional amendment. Whatever the outcome of whatever way this gets sorted, it will require negotiations with your neighbours. Any other scenario is either a dream or a nightmare.

Be well, my Alberta friends!

Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
I am very concerned that many Albertans will be bamboozled into believing that separation would be a viable way to proceed. The U S will immediately ensure that Alberta become a vassal state, either as part of the U S empire in fact or as an independent entity in name only. You have to wonder what the inducement is for Danielle Smith to be so enamoured of the US> I would suppose that it is the promise of wealth and, to a lesser degree, power. She fails to see the obvious that Donald Trump and his cabal, or whoever succeeds Donald Trump ?Ivanka Trump? will quickly discard her after providing a her with a little money. In the meantime, Canada will be injured. I have to think that she is traitorous at heart, whether or not she meets the legal definition. I would surmise she, quite possibly, is abetting foreign interference. ?Security of Information Act? In any event, she is most unsuitable to be an elected Member of the Legislature Assembly and, particularly, to be the premier of Alberta, the province she seeks to destroy along with the Canada.

Further, if the separatist liars and deceivers cannot even truthfully present the simplest of facts why would they be trusted or believed concerning anything else of greater importance? See for example at about the 5:50 time stamp where Mitch Sylvestre talks of “carbon capping the biggest industry in the country”.

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-13-cross-country-checkup/clip/16196775-alberta-separatism-how-real-threat

1. Is the oil and gas industry the biggest in Canada? No it is not. The service sector is, at about 70%. The service sector is also the largest employer. Oil and gas is approximately 7.7% of GDP.

The problem which has been recognized for centuries is that, ” . . . the greatest liar has his believers and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect . . . ” ; where; any lie violates an implicit promise or guarantee that what one says is true.

Finally, the separatist blackmail is unvarnished and unambiguous, that is: if the rest of Canada does not vote in a Conservative Federal government with a much celebrated and over hyped chosen creep as leader, then the final solution is to use the separatist threat as both a cudgel and means of extortion. See and listen to the following in its entirety:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-13-cross-country-checkup/clip/16196776-ask-me-anything-jason-kenney-alberta-separatism

These are surely not adults, they are the worst examples of undisciplined imbecile children seeking power and influence at any cost.

What a rogues gallery, a real den of thieves and treasonous snakes we have here in alberta. Sitting cabinet members that literally want to destroy both the province and the country. If you’re reading this, this bird despises you, this bird will not forget about your treason either.