Hats off to Thomas Lukaszuk and the Forever Canadian campaign for getting Prime Minister Mark Carney to agree to show up at the group’s remain-in-Canada rallies in Calgary and Edmonton tomorrow and Friday.
Mr. Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, is enormously popular right now throughout Canada, including supposedly rebellious Alberta, so that should help sustain the wave of pro-Canadian sentiment that seems to be building in the province as we enter the final days before Premier Danielle Smith’s divisive and stupidly dangerous separation referendum.
Speaking of hats, the Black Hat guys from the separatist crowd won’t be tipping their Seppie Stetsons to Mr. Lukaszuk, the former Progressive Conservative deputy premier who’s been fighting the good fight to keep Alberta in Canada right from the start of Premier Smith’s treason-adjacent MAGA mischief. Anyway, they’re busy right now pivoting to ginning up a false “stop the steal” narrative about the Oct. 19 vote in anticipation of the expected outcome.
Like Mr. Lukaszuk, the Alberta NDP Opposition led by Naheed Nenshi has not been shy about speaking up for Canada since the separatist-dominated United Conservative Party started this subversive nonsense, and NDP volunteers are door-knocking now to get out the vote for Canada. Those facts deserve to be acknowledged and remembered.
Also mentioned in dispatches should be Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Peter Guthrie, the only member of Premier Smith’s cabinet who had the intestinal fortitude to stand up to her party’s corruption and who now sits in the Legislature as the only representative of the pro-Canadian Progressive Tory Party.
Likewise, Heather McPherson, the NDP’s only Alberta MP, has been consistently fierce in and out of Parliament in defence of our country in the face of waves of disinformation and misinformation from the United States and other foreign adversaries of Canadian unity.
Meanwhile – better late than never, one supposes – manifestations of a stay-in-Canada nature by former premiers Alison Redford, Ed Stelmach, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney are suddenly in the news. Ms. Notley and Mr. Kenney appeared before a presumably sympathetic audience at a Canadian Chamber of Commerce event in Alberta’s capital Tuesday. And according to The Globe and Mail, an op-ed by Ms. Redford and Mr. Stelmach, both Conservatives, and Ms. Notley, a New Democrat, will be published in the moribund Calgary Herald sometime this week.
All but Mr. Kenney have been surprisingly quiet on this topic for too long. And Mr. Kenney has a particular axe to grind in that he was run out of his job by the same crowd of separatists and MAGA lunatics (his word, not mine) who replaced him with Premier Smith. Nevertheless, while all have detractors in Alberta, each can help by speaking to loyalists in their political communities.
But let’s not forget that the heavy lifting is being done by Albertans like my neighbours, who have taken back our Maple Leaf Flag from the Convoy crowd, canvassed tirelessly for the Forever Canadian petition, and yesterday, waited stoically in long lineups on the first day of advanced polling.
As for the federal Conservatives, who occupy 34 of Alberta’s 37 seats in Parliament, they are all missing in action. Has anyone heard a peep out of any of them in support of Canada but for the occasional bleat from their leader, the MP pro tempore for Battle River-Crowfoot, appropriately located in the heart of dinosaur country?
The MLAs of the nominally federalist UCP, notwithstanding its internal domination by secessionists, have been even quieter in defence of their country, if that’s possible. This too should be remembered.
Their former leader Mr. Kenney is right that, when the dust settles, the UCP is going to need to decide whether it’s a separatist party or a Canadian party and if it chooses the latter course, someone is going to have to purge the separatists from its ranks.
On a personal note, advance-voting lineups in St. Albert yesterday were long – about an hour and a half through the morning and early afternoon, when I voted – but good natured and resolute despite a chill wind and no place to sit down if you forgot to bring a lawn chair. Elections Alberta staff were capable and professional, keeping the lines moving and ensuring the plethora of ballots went in the right boxes.
What a horrific mess Danielle Smith and the UCP has made. It will be extremely difficult to undo the damage, because it is so bad.
Alberta’s referendum is so different than the one in Quebec some people here seem to want to desperately try copy. There, particularly the first one, was dominated by the elected provincial political leaders of the day. Here the leaders on both sides are not MLAs. Some prominent Pro Canadians like Lukaszuk, Kenney or Notley were elected in the past. The separatists haven’t managed to elect any MLAs. Smith is MIA and her UCP MLAs are mostly conflicted or silent. Accordingly, the official opposition also seems to be in a less prominent role on the federal side.
I feel and am hoping there is a quiet determination to get, what was foolishly imposed on us, over with and begin to move on. I don’t know how that will go for the UCP, but agree with Kenney’s comment. It will need to decide what sort of party it is or wants to be. It will be hard for Smith, who seems to genuinely relish MAGA style division and conflict as a big part of her political style, if Albertans reject it.
I suppose she can try move on by picking fights with municipalities about zoning or something else, but that seems a shadow of debating the future of a country. In any event, I feel what Alberta and the world needs now is a less divisive future and voting in this referendum is the first step towards for us to get there.
One click on the computer, fill the ballot, lick the stamp, drop it in the mail box. That easy, weeks ago!
I wish it were that easy, but for me it was not. I’ve already posted about it but there was a new development on Thanksgiving Day. My ballot finally showed as counted last week, so imagine my surprise when an email appeared in my spam folder telling me that my ID was missing. It told me to email my ID to Elections Alberta at this email address (not the two previous email addresses from EA) so that my ballot could be counted. “No thanks, scammer,” I thought. I phoned the returning office listed on the EA website for my area. They confirmed that my ballot had been counted and sent the email to Edmonton. The email was legit after all, but had been sent to me in error.
This leaves me wondering: Was my ballot really counted? Can they uncount ballots after confirming them? What is going on nearly a month after I mailed my ballot? I guess it’s counted, but I’ll go back to voting at the advance polls next time.
Wow! I sent mine in and followed up tenaciously until it was verified. I am not surprised at your nightmare, and I am with you.
Thank you to everyone who is making the time and taking the effort to vote.
Once again, I urge anyone who submitted a mail-in ballot to check its status by using the link provided in the ballot request confirmation email sent to you by Elections Alberta. You can also phone your local returning office to clarify its status:
https://map.elections.ab.ca/LocMethod.aspx?ROffices=true&MLA=false&EventId=1
If it hasn’t arrived yet, you can vote in person at the advance polls or on October 19. Elections Alberta has live monitoring of who has voted. If your mail-in ballot hadn’t been counted yet, you will be allowed to vote in person; the mail-in ballot will not be counted. If your mail-in ballot has been counted by the time you get to the polls, you won’t be allowed to vote. There is no penalty. Your vote won’t be counted twice. Just show up if you’re not sure, even if you have to wait in line.
I have faced frustrations with the special ballot process. Don’t give up! This vote is the most consequential one in my lifetime. Don’t let it slide.
@abs
I’m working as a record clerk the day of; important caveat – tell an voting officer/record clerk if you are not sure your mail in ballot was counted. Human error does happen.
Yes, it certainly does, from my experience with this polling process.
DJC, for your files………
Voted in Calgary Monday. My riding has two advance poll locations. Arrived about 4:20pm, roughly 75-100 people in front of me. With the requirement of the workers to check ID, rip all ten ballots per individual, initial each one, and then send folks to the booths, took about 60 minutes from the time I arrived until I had voted. Staff were professional and all voters were polite and courteous. I overheard a young lady next to me inquiring as her requested mail in ballot was not mailed in, but her name was already crossed off the list as she was trying to vote in person. The worker called a supervisor over but I don’t know how it was resolved. Based on workload, some of these workers will be tired or burned out by next Monday. If participation rate is really 80+% (here’s hoping for 100% but not everyone likes participating in democracy), with more of those game day voters not having pre-read the questions, Oct. 19 will be a gong show.
Also, ‘Battle-Rover Crowfoot’, Arf, Arf.
Dave: Freudian slip, probably. I still like my coinage, Bottle River-Crawdad better. DJC
In the case of the young lady, she would be signing an Oath of Elector, it’s for that exact situation. She would be allowed to vote.
Consequences might only fall if her mail in ballot is indeed confirmed as having been counted (ie it was mailed & received & counted) BEFORE she voted in person.
It’s a poorly-communicated, giant mess. Even the media are giving incorrect instructions because they don’t understand. I’ve said from the beginning that every step of this process feels like a trap, or should I say entrapment?
In what world should it take nearly three weeks to count a ballot that was mailed early at a post office with another ballot that was counted in two days? Why does a confirmed ballot get uncounted? Obviously Elecetîons Alberta is struggling to keep up, no doubt due to inadequate funding, and yet the government has $4M to waste on an advertising campaign telling the electorate how to vote. If anyone is charged with voting twice, they should argue entrapment. I’ve retained printouts of every communication with Elections Alberta along with notes about names and times. This has been an ordeal, the likes of which I have not witnessed in my lifetime.
That is the desired result, in order to call everything into question if this government doesn’t get the answers they seek. From the ridiculous, 50+ word questions to putting elections officials on a hamster wheel, the whole point is chaos. The premier and her staff are chaos masters. Welcome to October 20.
You’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Dane Lloyd joined Heather McPherson and Corey Hogan on CBC’s The House on Saturday. He must have repeated ‘a stronger Alberta in a United Canada’ at least five times. The solution, of course, in his opinion, is to elect his party in Ottawa. He assured us that Poilievre has been giving speeches. The real issue? The ten lost Trudeau years. Gosh, the farmers in his riding on are paying 12 000 dollars a DAY in diesel he averred. Sure, there’s Canadian flags flying out there, but there are grievances! I know, naturally, that growers are subject to the vagaries of climate change and world markets just like the rest of us and Lloyd didn’t mention output or profit margins . Nonetheless, sounds to me like some rural Albertans are doing just fine in a united Canada, if that’s the scale of their input. Not to mention the diesel producers. Oh right, that’s us too!
DC: “… Mr. Lukaszuk, the former Progressive Conservative deputy premier who’s been fighting the good fight”
Forever Canadian leader Thomas Lukaszuk recently took his message on the road. To the business crowd in Toronto.
Unfortunately, he repeated the same litany of false grievances chanted by the seppies.
“Alberta anti-separatist brings hard message to Central Canada: show a little gratitude” (National Post, Oct 01, 2026)
Gratitude for what?
Decades of belly-aching, playing the victim card, and extortionist politics?
Alberta’s chief export?
Not oil. Disinformation.
“‘It’s time to admit that some of those grievances are real,’ Lukaszuk said. Alberta contributes substantially to Canada as a whole and has legitimate concerns that equalization payments to the provinces give Albertans short shrift. ‘A certain amount of gratitude is not too much to ask.’
“He said the separatist movement is boosted by unequal representation in the Senate, and by the tendency for national elections to be decided before polls even close in the West. Lukaszuk said he has had the deflating experience of hearing CBC declare a majority while he was still waiting in line to vote in Alberta.
“‘To us, it feels like our votes don’t matter,’ he said. It is fodder for separatism, but it also encourages Albertans who are merely frustrated with their place in Canada to vote with the separatists just to send a message.
“‘It’s a message the rest of Canada needs to listen to,’ he said. ‘Please don’t pat us on the head with the promise of a pipeline, thinking that’s enough.’
“Albertan separatism is based on ‘unsubstantiated claims and magical thinking’ and it is hampered by squabbling factions, Lukaszuk said.
“… Lukaszuk said the separatist sentiment falls with Alberta’s economic successes and rises with its failures. He thinks it is driven predominantly by younger men in the oil and gas industry, overleveraged by debt, with limited transferable skills, who are noticing the economy is pivoting on them.”
https://nationalpost.com/news/thomas-lukaszuk-alberta-separatism-speech
Well, which is it?
Either seppie grievances are legit or they are based on “unsubstantiated claims and magical thinking”.
From Gary Mar and Thomas Lukaszuk to Jason Kenney, these former PC politicians insist that Alberta’s grievances are “real.” This constant appeasement talk accomplishes one thing: it legitimizes the separatist movement.
It gives them the ultimate validation: “See? Even the federalists agree with us!”
Lukaszuk’s grievances are either fictional or absurd.
What has got into him, anyway?
Rational Albertans need to stand up and say:
“NO, the seppies and the old PCs do NOT have a point! AND we reject their solution. Stop coddling the grifters! Stop spreading the disinformation!
Although I support his Forever Canadian campaign, I have stopped listening to Thomas’ interviews when his focus has turned to Alberta grievances and his sorry feelings for the separatists. He is, as you mentioned, coddling the grifters.
I find myself in rare agreement with Mr Pounder here. The “Alberta grievances” trope is so pervasive that even the NDP has too often seen fit to repeat it.
As for elections being “decided back East before the polls even close in the West”, this had, in the padt, long been the inevitable result of the intersection between our rep-by-pop electoral system (created, if you recall, by our nation’s first Prime Minister, the sainted-by-conservatives John A Macdonald), in which Québec and Ontario, who have the largest populations, elect a large fraction of MPs … and our geography, and the distribution of the six time zones across Canada.
But while rep-by-pop persists, Elections Canada has in more recent federal elections shifted voting hours in such a way that the gap in polls closing between Atlantic Canada and the West Coast is far narrower, when expressed in GMT.
On top of that, the question of who wins an election, and whether it is a minority or a majority, is now, more often than not, decided in BC. Of course, who wins the most federal seats in “Saskaberta” is never in doubt — the only uncertainty here is whether the Cons make a clean sweep or whether the electoral map is sullied by red or orange patches. But BC is now seriously in play.
Albertans should not be saluting Jason Kenney.
He is a big reason why we are in this mess to begin with.
As premier, Jason Kenney stirred up Albertans’ endless (and mostly baseless) resentments as political leverage against Ottawa for pipelines. He explicitly warned of a national unity crisis, even as he fuelled it with his constant tirades:
“Jason Kenney warns of Alberta separation over Trudeau’s environmental legislation’ (CNO, May 2, 2019)
“Just two days after being sworn in as premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney spoke candidly about separation from Canada as he decried federal environmental legislation as a ‘full frontal attack’ on Alberta’s economic prosperity and a ‘blatant violation of the Constitution.’
Even today, Kenney parrots the same pseudo-grievances recited by Alberta separatists.
●Jason Kenney (X, May 1, 2025): “Albertans have GOOD REASON to be deeply frustrated with Ottawa.”
https://x.com/jkenney/status/1918037439551066414
We would not be here today without him.
Arsonist-in-chief now acting as fire marshal.
With federalist leaders like Kenney, we don’t need enemies.
I totally agree to GP’s assessment of Kenney and his fellow conservatives whose main profession has been complaining against the federal government. Complaining becomes their number one strategy to get elected again and again. Who would these people complain against if Alberta became a country, the immigrants, the Indigenous People, and any ones do not resemble themselves?
Strategy of Tension prevails. The population is driven into the waiting arms of the Carny Banker and his Goldman Sachs handlers. You remember, the people who blew up the global economy way, way, way back in 2008. And they continue to spin the wicked Pewtin tale along with the MAGA bogeyman. At least this time around they’re using Friendly Fascism and haven’t set off bombs to sway the people in the way they did in Northern Ireland, Quebec and Italy. Remember, we’re all in this together. You, me, Daryl Katz, Murray Edwards, Larry Fink, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu and Krusty the Korrupt Klown of Kiev. Elbows up!
I thought “Murphy was an optimist….”
??
My understanding is that Notley and Kenney are acting in sync, to convey a non-partisan message that besides every other reason why separation is a terrible idea, it’s also bad for business. Hence the address to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.
If the vote goes as the polls have predicted, Smith would lose her premiership in days after the referendum. A leader must lead and not bend backward to appease to her minions in order to stay in power.
For once in my life ,I would like to observe a PM that doesn’t present as a “sucker” and shows up for the right things ,and believe me when I say “ I’ve seen a lot of PM suckers “
Surely it won’t be K-boy who purges separatists out of the UCP he invited them into in the first place. He did it when running for the UCP leadership after shotgun-wedding together the shell-shocked partisan-right following its defeat by the NDP in 2015. He did it when campaigning in the 2019 general election by fraternizing with the likes of the far-right Scones of Odium MC. He might have begun inviting radical elements in when running for the ProgCon leadership just so’s he could kill the longest-governing party in Canadian history. Since he probably had his eyes set on the bigger prize of prime minister, he never overtly threatened separatism, but he sure hinted, insinuated, and implied in order to keep the rowdies well fed with red meat.
He probably figured he could control the radicals after using their votes to win power in 2019 —like his mentor Harper would have done—only to find that halfway through the UCP’s very first mandate they had commandeered the party apparatus, ordered a review in which he got 51%, forcing him to step down while remarking that the “lunatics” had taken over the asylum. Maybe he was too busy killing the venerable PC party or organizing Kamikaze candidates to help him win the UCP leadership to notice. Or maybe, as he alluded, the usurpers worked undercover in moonlight.
Separatists installed Danielle Smith as leader and she won the UCP’s first incumbency in 2023—only her second general election campaign. Even as a caretaker premier she was prone to getting into trouble, as her record shows ( obstructionism as elected trustee, 1998-99, got her and the whole Calgary school board decommissioned for an entire term; WR was polled to win in 2012 but lost because she failed to satisfactorily condemn incendiary comments by a WR candidate; in 20143 she betrayed WR voters by crossing the floor to the PCs—and lost her PC riding nomination for the 2015 election).
Soon after acquiring instant premiership she incompetently entertained interfering with a Crown prosecution of a troublemaking street preacher up on charges relating to the Coutts border blockade in 2022, incorrectly assuming she had presidential powers of pardon. She taunted Ottawa with unconstitutional legislation and threats to disobey federal firearms regulations, but she never mentioned much separation, and certainly not a referendum during her 2023 campaign. We know about Smith’s frequent estrangement from the truth so it is purely rhetorical to ask, therefore, where the licence to pursue secession came from.
Separatism has been a fantasy in Alberta for a long time. What separatists call intolerable affronts by Ottawa is actually a pastiche of relatively minor beefs amplified by a collage of claimed outrages that gets more disingenuous over time, having reached full transparency ever since Danielle Smith led the UCP to victory. Prior to the NDP victory the most potent myth starred the National Energy Program imposed in 1980, with Pierre Trudeau cast as the devil. In fact, Premier Lougheed and Prime Minster Trudeau came to an amicable agreement about the distribution of oil revenues within the year and the whole program was repealed by 1985. Grandpa Manning took an esoteric turn about that time with his “Triple-E” Senate and “asymmetrical federalism” couched in thinly-veiled anti-Quebec bigotry as if expecting La Belle Province was really going to separate. By the time he got to test his vision for “Canda,” Lucien Bouchard had fixed it so federal conservatives would never win more than a few seats in Quebec and therefore always struggle to win a majority. His eye-glazing “The-West-Wants-In” was swapped for the jet-ski Alliance whilst the most consequential split since Diefenbaker was tearing apart the three-term Liberals, affording the treacherous amalgam of Harper’s CPC two minorities and a single majority over nine years before conservatives could resume regretting the seats in Quebec which the taint of Reform has put out of their reach to this very day.
The train left the station in 2015; it had two lights on behind: one orange in May and the other red in October. But Alberta conservatives didn’t see red, they saw Trudeau, son of the devil who immediately shut down Harper’s centrepiece Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat, BC, but then offering Big Bitumen a new pipeline to Burnaby, BC—paid for by all Canadians—, in naive hopes it would compensate. Shell-shocked conservatives didn’t see greenbacks, they saw tRump and hitched their wagonload of grievances to MAGA’s, adopting its große Lüge, ad hominem, and blinkered climate-change denial, and adapting it to fit the old ‘Ottawa-is-out-to-get-us’ myth.
JT’s carbon tax further fuelled the blast furnace of conservative anger and helped sustain it for most of a decade during which other Canadians found the tax more or less tolerable. Alberta’s anger shifted more and more on the PM personally. (As wily as his old man, Trudeau fils used his own unpopularity to handcuff CPC leader Poilievre to Donald F tRump and turn them both into skunks at a picnic.)
But as the case for separation was stripped of JT and carbon taxes, and as Canadians learn that far from trying to kill the bitumen industry, the feds have built one pipeline and are set to build another and that the industry was not being killed, it is flourishing and growing, seppies are being pared down themselves, focusing more and more now on their rote federal-equalization complaint which, presumably, will wither too as more light is focused on the spurious claim. Canadians are understanding that the province does not send an equalization cheque to Ottawa, rather high-paid petroleum workers send their income taxes to Ottawa at the same rate as high-paid workers do anywhere in the country, so the caterwauling about not getting back what Alberta claims it puts in is starting to look more like what it is: high-paid Alberta workers want to keep their income taxes for themselves. Not sure how many Maple MAGA would ever see it that way, but most taxpayers should find it unfair that the highest-paid workers in the country should get a tax break that they don’t. Seppies carrying their equalization gripe right into the breach of referendum must mean they’ve given up trying to convince anybody that a provincial pension plan, police force, and immigration authority are good ideas.
Covid definitely cut deeply into the UCP and Kenney’s attempt to control the anti-vax radicals he unwittingly invited in were futile, but the pandemic was politically difficult for every party and government, only worse in Alberta for circumstantial reasons: Covid + tRump + TBA +Danielle Smith. The last two couldn’t survive without the first two—and Covid is gone while tRump is going. Soon it will be time to assess, to take stock of the last eleven years, and ask: what’s next?
IMHO, the UCP, like most nominal “conservative” parties, is irredeemable, a conclusion I came to during Kenney’s ouster: no way to get TBA out when they’re in control of the party. The only solution in general is to create new conservative parties —apparently hard for conservatives to do because they’re conservatives (like, why, with such obvious factionalism in, say, the CPC, the UCP, the BC Conservatives, and the GOP, haven’t they split apart already?) Perhaps because Covid cut into a movement that was already cut by 2015 electoral defeats, the wound was deeper than it might have otherwise been, and now with separatist referenda looming perhaps the attendant divisiveness with finally chop through that last, stubborn ligature that has bundled pseudoCon parties together for the last thirty-odd years.
It’s time the skunks went back under the garden shed for the winter, Scotty.
I get a little sick and tired of these idiots who continually blame the Liberals for the Equalization Payments when it’s a well known fact that had these fake conservatives, Reformers, not deliberately destroyed what Lougheed had created for us we would have nothing to worry about and we would be as rich as Norwegians and Alaskans are.
Of course they aren’t smart enough to understand that it was their Reform Party pal Stephen Harper who increased the equalization payments to Quebec to buy votes and it worked. It gave him a majority government.
You can bet these fools are seniors, it’s them that we see whining about how horrible Ottawa is, just like the Reformers want them to do, isn’t it? They don’t care what these Reformers have done to our children and grandchildren’s future that’s how stupid they are, isn’t it?
Alan: Some recent polling I have seen suggests that those over 65 (seniors, in other words) are more likely to vote to remain in Canada and are opposed to changes in the CPP. DJC
I certainly do agree with you, seniors will vote to stay in Canada. It was mostly seniors we saw yesterday when we voted.
However it doesn’t stop them from ignoring what these Reformers have done to Albertans and whining about what Ottawa has done to us while they continue to vote for the word Conservative. Some of my senior relatives were some of them. They refused to believe how dangerous these Reformers are and some have literally told me they only vote Conservative and don’t believe they have done anything wrong. They always have someone else to blame, just like these Reformers do. As a member of SUN, seniors united now, in 2003 in rural Alberta I had a first class experience with ignorant seniors, who thought Ralph Klein was wonderful and they didn’t care what he had done to us. Having known him since I was 17 and knowing what a jerk he was it was sickening.
This blind stupidity is why the NDP and UCP are neck and neck in the polls, isn’t it?
My feeling about the three main parties: Conservatives tell us “you should do this and our values are the right ones. Follow with us for good money.” In the end, good money stays with those who have good money. NDP says “We should do this and people want this for a fairer society.” The problems are that media and money are controlled by money. Wide access to contributing to social media makes NDP’s appeals heard. Liberals generally speaking are supposed to be in the centre of political spectrum and are regarded as good at managing. But Trudeau’s assumption that we are in this century and therefore things should be done this way had been proved not as pragmatic as is assumed.
I’m curious, are you a senior?
One of my most significant disappointments with this campaign, such as it has been, has been the fractioning of pro-Canada voices. Some of that was by [UCP government] design, the election laws having been torqued in such a way as to make it hard for pro-Canada campaigns to join forces.
But the NDP’s decision to keep at arms’-length from Mr Lukaszuk’s much higher-profile ‘Forever Canadian’ organization was, in my humble opinion, a strategic error.
[Full disclosure: I am a longtime NDP member, and recently became a provincial Constituency Association President].
‘Forever Canadian’ was out of the gate much sooner than anyone else on the federalist side, and their lawn signs far outnumber those of any other federalist campaign, at least in my neck of the woods. They also cross partisan lines, bringing together federalist conservatives, New Democrats, non-NDP progressives, and non-aligned voters, and are united only by their desire to keep Alberta in Canada.
Meanwhile, the NDP in its infinite wisdom (/s) decided to run its own campaign, initially branded as “For Alberta, For Canada”. Its stated rationale was twofold: (1) pro-Canadian voters might be more persuadable to vote for us, and (2) unlike ‘Forever Canadian’ or any of the other groups, as a political party we’d have full access to the voters list to facilitate voter ID and GOTV (Get Out The Vote, for those here who aren’t familiar with this acronym).
Well, rationale #1 may hold water, but we’ll never truly know, because rationale #2 has been blown out of the water by Elections Alberta’s decision not to issue the most recent iteration of the voters list to political parties. So there is no longer any voter ID-driven GOTV possible, since there will be no way to correlate “has voted” information from polling station scrutineers with identified supportive voters identified in voter contact efforts.
My take was always that the NDP should have joined forces with ‘Forever Canadian’, to fight the common enemy: separatism. Set partisanship aside, leave future electoral strategy in the back pocket for another day, and generate good will with non-NDP federalist voters, especially in parts of the province where “NDP” is a dirty word. Have NDP volunteers doorknocking with ‘Forever Canadian’ volunteers. In the big cities, this would have put more federalist volunteers into neighbourhoods. In less NDP-friendly, this would have given often hesitant NDP volunteers the feeling of safety in numbers and invaluable experience.
Instead, they have now rebranded “For Alberta, For Canada” to “Save Canada”, which by the way invalidates all the previous doorstep literature and lawn signs using the older tag line. *sigh*
“Heather McPherson … has been consistently fierce in and out of Parliament”
This bit is evergreen. Keep it in notepad so you can copy and paste again and again. (Yes, I’m biased.)
Hi, Gale. I looked for my fiercest Heather McPherson photo. DJC
So…where are the Alberta CPC MP’s hiding.
I have yet to year word one for our MP. Is he hiding? Something I will not forget when the next federal election come around.
Has the CPC central brain trust given them direction on staying out of this???
Good question. My MP is Chief Opposition Whip Chris Warkentin, which is a post of some prominence in Parliament. But despite his seat (Grande Prairie) being one of the very safest Conservative seats in all of Canada, all we’ve heard from him on this issue is a thundering, deafening silence.
How stupid to start a leave Canada game but then I never gave smith much credit for brains. she got her invite to mara la go so perhaps for her it was worth it. For those in Alberta and the rest of the country, not so much of a good thing. I’ve always believed in that old line, united we stand, divided we fall. There is nothing which will improve Alberta if it were to seperate. Perhaps poverty would increase but that is it. The USA would be knocking on their door and pulling the Greenland routine and the province would look like an American state without Canadian style health care. Personally I’d vote to stay in Canada regardless of whatever was going on just for the health care. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have it and I remember the doctor’s strike in Sask. when their provincial government implemented their plan. Canadians have never been healthier. Dividing up this country is stupid. Quebec has carried on about it for decades but they are still here. Trying to break up our country, in my opinion is treason. Talking about it is fine, freedom of speech but taking action, speaking to foreign countries, i.e. american politicial types, they can rot in hell.
I’ve said everything and more about this stupid fake referendum in the months leading up to it. I suspect the results will be a landslide and that Danielle smith will continue to attempt to gaslight her way out of the consequences until she and her cabinet are thrown in the dustbin of history. Good riddance.
When I voted in advance poling (having to show multiple copies of ID because half the province has been trying to renew their license at the same time) it took less than five minutes, the staff was warm and professional and very helpful ensuring everyone got the ridiculous amount of questions into the appropriate boxes.
I will never ever ever ever ever forget this betrayal. This bird will be reminding people long into the future of Danielle smiths criminal charlatan government of crooks and losers.