This week has been a whirlwind in politics, especially in Alberta. On Thursday, the Premier of Alberta announced what I can only call a farce of a referendum on separating Alberta from Canada. Then the next day, Premier Smith started talking about rewriting S35 of The Constitution.
The referendum question Smith proposes is annoying in its obfuscating language, and I think Albertans should be incredibly angry about it. The question reads:
“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”
Reasonably intelligent readers should have already noticed this isn't a "yes/no" kind of question, it's actually two conflicting questions slammed together. Rumour has it this will be a "select option A or option B" thing on the ballot, but that is still misleading and disingenuous because the second option actively contemplates separation, while simultaneously trying very hard not to look like it does.
Most infuriating to this writer is Ms. Smith's attempt to be "oh-so-reasonable" - claiming that 700,000 Albertans have expressed "a desire to have this debate". This is painfully false. People who signed the Forever Canadian petition weren't asking for a debate with the separatists - they were demanding that our politicians - the UCP in particular - come clean about where they stand.
As for the alleged 300,000 signatures on the separatist petition, the fact that the separatists had illegal access to the Voter List database from Elections Alberta for at least 2 months before the end of the signature gathering period, and they declared 177,000 signatures (the minimum threshold) around late March, and then added some 123,000 signatures in April, makes me very suspicious that more than half of the signatures on that petition are fraudulent. Until such times as a detailed verification takes place, verifying every single signature, this petition should be considered suspect.
Regardless of that, one only needs look at the actions of the UCP under Smith to come to the conclusion that this is now a separatist party. They have rewritten the rules to benefit the separatists multiple times, and then when the whole voter list thing blew up, the UCP was disturbingly silent about what amounts to the largest doxxing in history.
Make no mistake about it, Smith has been either a willing accomplice to the separatists or a puppet firmly under their control. Now she is going to thrust Alberta into a lengthy, unnecessary debate over separation and "western alienation" grievance politics.
How did we get here?
Fundamentally, we got here because of the way in which the UCP was formed in the first place. After the NDP won an election in 2015, Jason Kenney and Stephen Harper decided to play a "Unite The Right" game in Alberta, much like the one that created the CPC in the early 2000s and led to 9 years of CPC government under Stephen Harper.
This was engineered by Jason Kenney who did most of the legwork to drag the PCAA and WRP parties together. It was, in many ways the prototype for what we have seen happen since. Kenney convinced the PCAA members to pick him as their leader, did a similar thing with the WRP, and then triggered a merger of the two parties to form the UCP. He then ran in a leadership race for the new party that was ... to put it kindly ... dodgy. (It has never sat well with me that one of his first actions when in power was to dismantle the Elections Alberta divisions that were investigating his leadership race)
Kenney's rise to power was, in essence an example of an engineered takeover. The membership of the parties were told that he was going to unify them, and that would ensure the continuation of the conservative domination of Alberta governance. Kenney's goals were likely considerably more prosaic than those of Smith - I have always believed that the goal was for Kenney to ride the UCP to power, govern for a few years and move to take over the CPC as an "experienced, reasonable leader".
The Kenney government tried to keep a public distance from the "Yellow Vest Movement" which eventually turned into the 2019 "United We Roll" convoy to Ottawa, although there is certainly good reason to suspect that the UCP was quietly providing backchannel support to the protestors, as Kenney had actively courted various extremist and malcontent groups in forming the "coalition" that would become the UCP.
Then came COVID, and the fallout of that. In particular the blockade of the Coutts border crossing, and the so-called "Freedom Convoy". I'm not going to legitimize either protest here, my point is that the UCP had the opportunity to call these people out, and chose not to. Kenney could have used his Critical Infrastructure Defence act to go after the blockade legally. He did not - leading many people to suspect that the underlying intent of the legislation was fundamentally to intimidate First Nations protestors who had blocked railways and various pipeline projects at different points.
However, the hardline separatists and conspiracy theorists in the UCP decided that they didn't like Kenney's attempts to walk a line between a broader public that was rightly concerned about COVID and the "Freedom Convoy" demands that were based on the idea that COVID was just a "bad flu" resulted in a movement within the UCP to oust Kenney.
The "Take Back Alberta" movement was not a "persuade Alberta to change" movement, it was a movement to seize control over the UCP from within and use that control to push Kenney out as party leader. In 2023, they did just that and installed Danielle Smith as leader, simultaneously taking control of the party executive positions. As if pivoting on a dime, the party started legislating on matters that weren't even talked about during the election.
In the last year, the Take Back Alberta movement shifted to being openly separatist, and the Alberta Prosperity Project joined hands with them, effectively turning the UCP into a separatist party without so much as a "by your leave" to the electorate. Now, we have a party that has spent the last year or so pandering to the separatists, making it easier for them at every turn, and turning a blind eye to overt corruption.
But somehow, we're supposed to believe that there's a legitimate discussion to be had here? No, there really isn't. The separatist temper tantrum isn't worth the paper it's written on. Their complaints are a stew of ginned up grievances, some older than most of the separatists themselves, and whatever other complaints they have decided to add in as fresh fodder. Smith telling us that "the separatists have legitimate grievances" is an insult to our intelligence.
The real solution here is for the UCP to declare itself a separatist party and then run openly on that platform in an election. Right now, they have no mandate whatsoever from the voters for what they are doing. Parties that radically change ideological paths between elections owe it to the voters to actually declare their intentions and run on them. The UCP doesn't have a mandate to tear Canada apart.
No comments:
Post a Comment