Danielle Smith’s official message kept changing yesterday – what the heck was that about? 

The problem in Alberta seems to be too many unattended garden rakes.

FYEO. Many years ago I was golfing at Montebello. A sudden down-pour backed up the front duo with myself. I was surprised to meet Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his friend Jean Allard. I asked Monsieur Chrétien if he had a plan for a possible yes win in 1995, he looked up pondering an answer when his friend shook his head. He looked at me and said “We thought of the Romans” he smiled, we exchanged polite banter. His friend was happy with the ambiguous response. The sun came out, we returned to golf.

No one could have known the ace of history in my pocket. My love of all history.
When the Romans conquered a region they would raise a local legion. What many don’t know is they always moved the newly raised and Rome trained legion to another conquered region, Legion Britania to Iberia, Dacian to Britania. Dacia is the current Romania so devastated by the Romans after an uprising even their name and civilisation is forgotten to time.

I made some discreet phone calls to my military friends and found out the Princess Pats were flying to Quebec for training and the Royal 22nd to Alberta.

I am sorry this must be keep under the sheets. Common knowledge would only help Quebec and Alberta seperatists and could be used to dishonour CANADA.

Nepo baby Sam Blackett is the son of former Alberta PC cabinet member Lindsay Blackett.

Moaners, groaners, or boners, it’s hard to tell, but tendentiously thumb-nailing titular formality has to be one of them. Danielle seems to have an endless supply; the latest, like rewording of a civic Land Acknowledgment, is tantamount to titling a legislative Act something like, “The Sovereign Alberta Act Within A [Sorta] Country That Likes To Call Alberta A Federate [Or Whatever]”.

The winds have changed for the “No-Planet-B” people who’ve been taking this inexhaustibility on their back foot since sunny days stopped shining on topless mountains and varicose pipelines started spreading in every direction of dreamland. Still, the attitude often betrays itself as desperately defensive—just before the karma runs over the dogma.

The old Russian attitude underpinned Stalin’s extermination of the Soviet Union’s experienced military officers because, naturally, he presumed them to be endlessly replaceable—just when ascendant Nazi Germany prepared to invade the ancient Russ homeland and he needed them most. D’oh! The Soviets availed Russian vastness to retreat beyond the invader’s reach, and its insurmountable supply of resources to achieve the fastest industrialization in history and, of course, waves of soldiers who might as well been shot at the front by the foe rather than by the friend in the rear.

My WWII-vet dad used to say, “We never woulda won without the Rooskies,” as he called the Soviets. Yes, it was impressive, but 20 million Soviet citizens perished, and untold millions more, post-War, as slave labourers or those accused of collaboration when the Red Army retook Nazi occupied territory—the “golden age” Putin rationalizes as recoverable using the same old Russian attitude of inexhaustibility, even at the cost of a thousand soldiers a day to maintain the stasis of the Donbas and the murder of Ukrainian school children. The Munchkin of Moscow seems to be saying, “You might as well surrender cuz I can do this forever, comrade.”

War-suckertary Pete Hogsbreath has been similarly hollowing out experienced personnel from the US armed forces, not because tRump fears his own crew might take him out, as Stalin did, but rather that they probably wouldn’t obey his orders if they were, you know, too illegal. No more portly middle-aged generals poring over maps in the Pentagon: no, sirree!—a hundred push-ups on command, even it takes a caulking-tube-full of testosterone to do it. And no more military women: no, ma’am! Male hormone might be fine for them on the cannon-foddered front or the Olympics, but Stalin would have definitely prohibited battle-scarred amazons hanging about in the Kremlin. Double that risk for the Orange sex offender.

Naturally tRump’s attitude of inexhaustibility is paid for with ill-gotten money and “leverage.” He imagines he’ll never run out of is his ability to get away with it at no cost to himself—not that his schematic ignorance of history ignores the galling proportions of human suffering: he simply doesn’t care. Rather he’s confident that his transaction-by-transaction, tactical approach to everything is as inexhaustible as the reputed power of the USA, when in fact it rests entirely on his glee in snatching whatever it is he needs to stopgap the bulging economic and strategic embolism he is blithely preparing for his own country. What does he care whether a civil liability is $5 million or $85 million? Somebody else is going to pay for it.

Both Stalin and tRump’s motivations were in response to serious trouble when their nations were/are being tested to the very limit. The counter narrative to that vulnerability was/is of course to act as if invulnerable, as if there is no limit to their capacity to respond, parry, and prevail. The attitude of inexhaustibility can only be sustained by corruption and treachery; it exhausts itself —as Afghanistan did to the Stalin’s USSR and Iran is doing to tRump’s USA.

Danielle Smith fancies she draws from an abyssal well, the threat of secession from Canada. She might even believe her own reasoning—her dismissal of court orders and treaties, of Canada Strong teamwork, and her ‘friendship’ with the Orange Diaper Baby; certainly many of her supporters do. But even that is underpinned by an attitude of physical inexhaustibility—that of the bitumen sands.

For those who believe or would have us believe that the resource is inexhaustible, the atmosphere is a limitless storehouse of carbon-pollution. For those who understand that no resource is inexhaustible, the prospect is rather “virtually endless,” even though the vast majority of the sandy deposit is not feasibly accessible with today’s technology. But more-modest estimates of accessibility, being in range of a few centuries at current rates of extraction and technological capability, are easily spun as virtually endless. Whence the “crime” of leaving it in the ground, thence the alleged enmity of Treaty First Nations, the Crown and Sasquatch. The Manning Doctrine is that the threat is as infinite as the resource.

That kind of resort indicates that Danielle and Big-Bitumen are feeling as threatened as Stalin on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, and of tRump on the eve of his third impeachment—threatened by limitation just like capitalism was of socialism when it reared its millions of hard-hatted heads from the mines, mills, and factories for the good of us all— that threat to infinite growth that extended a different invisible hand-up than Adam Smith ever articulated.

Remind that in Ronald Wright’s Short History of Progress progressiveness is an illusion of inexhaustibility that succeeds only until it hits the limit of growth. Limitless progress is still proffered and believed because society has never before run out of planet. The fact that humankind is scouring the ocean floor for “critical” minerals and planning industrialization of the Moon and Mars oughta be a hunt. As we used to say at Franklin Camp: Earth First!—we’ll log the other planets later. Franklin, btw, was once the biggest logging camp on the West Coast; it was abandoned and torn down decades ago.