@emmettmacfarlane.com:
At the conference I attended this weekend there were a lot of panels on Alberta, the referendum, separatism, etc. To be clear, there were very sober, thoughtful experts, and my takeaway was this:
What’s happening in Alberta is even more batshit than I ever thought. Danielle Smith is a dangerous psychopath, and the AB separatist movement largely exists because COVID broke far-right brains, and is led by Christo-fascist religious white nationalists, relying on dark money.
I’m not saying others didn’t know this. I’m not saying at different points I didn’t think aspects of these things. I’m saying the overwhelming evidence is THAT stark.
This isn’t nuanced, it’s nefarious. Evil grievance politics.
@ryanhumphrey.bsky.social:
Referendums are inherently toxic in a representative democracy. Rather than being a democratic relief valve, they undercut the legitimacy of the representative structure.
Opposing Alberta separatism is inconvenient for many Conservatives by Dale Smith, , Routine Proceedings
In find myself extremely annoyed with Conservatives who are whining that they’re accused of not helping enough with the Remain side in the upcoming Alberta referendum, because they’re not helping. And why aren’t they helping? There are a number of reasons. One of them is that they don’t want to alienate the separatists, who are also in their voter base. Remember that their electoral strategy has been to court the far-right (and yes, the separatists are far-right), including adopting their language and pandering hard to them, rather than courting the political centre.
Another reason is that they can’t stop using the same lies that the separatists use in order to attack the Liberals, many of those being around the so-called “strangling” of development, which is and always has been bullshit.
Their resources have been constrained by the world price of oil, especially after it collapsed in 1981, and again in 2014. In both cases, they blamed a Trudeau (even though Stephen Harper was in power in 2014), but the effect is the same.
Finally, the Conservatives are sympathetic to the cry-baby nature of the separatist threat, that it’s more about there being a Liberal government federally.
FFS! Carney is a con man and a fraud working to destroy Canada and our environment and climate, serving mostly American military and the rich. He’s more conservative that Harper and Mulroney combined, and his MPs (including the Con floor crossers) are happily con now. The fucking lying traitorous private data stealing and abusive racist separatists know that.Many Albertans have developed a warped view of democracy because they have lived in what is essentially a one-party state for most of their livesand have been heavily and terribly progagandized by the hate-filled tall tales in the bible and promoted endlessly in school, church, and play, and they cannot fathom that it’s legitimate if a party other than the Conservatives governs, and so they throw these tantrums. So, when Dane Lloyd says “They don’t have a problem with Canada. They have a problem with Ottawa,” what he is effectively saying is that they have a problem with Liberals, so by “fixing that,” they mean Conservatives need to be in power. It’s all bullshit and they’re not helping the Remain side so long as they continue to lie and treat this like an excuse to score partisan points.
Meanwhile, separatist leaders are trying to trot out the line about voting for “Option 2” (meaning a “binding referendum”) as a means of giving Alberta “leverage” against the federal government, which is also a big lie. You don’t announce you are doing something to gain leverage, because that announces that you actually have none, and you know that these lying shitbags will then say “Look at all of the people who voted for separation, we need to continue the process” even though they have absolutely no democratic legitimacy to do so (and the fact that referendums are elite-driven fuckery). Do not give them the excuse—and that especially means not boycotting this referendum out of protest. Danielle Smith is trying to burn democracy to the ground in the province for her own benefit, and that means it’s all hands on deck to stomp this whole thing down.
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My Latest:
My column looks at the ways in which Danielle Smith is trying to engineer a crisis of confidence in democracy in the province as she sabotages Elections Alberta.Hanky Panky Gordon McClure isn’t trustworthy in my view and I think he’s working with Smith to destroy Canada.
My Loonie Politics Quick Take looks at the return of Parliament for the fall sitting.
@canadiancynic.bsky.social:
I was about to post this very thing … it doesn’t matter how this referendum turns out, Albertans will find some way to play the victim and things will get even uglier.
@anniegirl.bsky.social:
Can’t overstate just how bad the outcome is going to be in the aftermath. People will not be safe. #ableg #abpoli
After the referendum, Alberta will be angrier, more divided, more radicalized, and a worse place to invest
And the fucking separatists lie too much to ever trust, like their leader Smith
@sherrimcgrath.bsky.social:
Smith could have actually accomplished things but instead she has simply made everything worse.That’s her job for Nazi USA – break Canada, destroy Canada, give Alberta’s resources to the Orange Pedos.
@wallykibler.bsky.social:
Yo be fair, Alberta did elect convoy insurrection supporters to run the provinceFor the most part, rural Albertans, who control the vote, are hate-filled, intentionally ignorant and proud of it, racist, religiously brainwashed, misogynistic, anti safe water, anti safe air, anti safe food, anti public health, anti environment (god will fix all bullshit), anti Canada, pro Nazi USA, pro kid rape, pro American polluter. I found Albertans to be horridly racist and misogynistic and stupid from day one when I moved here. I love the big sky, so I stay but with Musk interfering in elections and bragging about it, I doubt there will ever be another honest election in Alberta, USA, or Canada.
This should be the expected outcome when your leaders don’t respect the will of the majority but coddle the fringe minority
A reminder there is warrant for Bauder’s arrest after he failed to appear in an Ottawa court
Damn, Smith’s fake smile is fucking hideous and vomit inducing, especially because of how evil and sadistic she is.
After the referendum, Alberta will be angrier, more divided, more radicalized, and a worse place to invest, Whatever happens on Oct. 19, the Premier Danielle Smith will have left Alberta a worse place than it was before by David Climenhaga, Sept 23, 2026, Alberta Politics
Whatever happens on Oct. 19, the United Conservative Party of Premier Danielle Smith will have left Alberta a worse place than it was before the 10 referenda scheduled to be voted on that day.
After the ballots have been counted, Alberta will be angrier, more divided, more radicalized, and not incidentally a worse place to invest money than it was before.
A “yes” vote in the separation referendum will set the stage for another, supposedly legally binding separation vote – in 2027, before a provincial election, according to the premier. So the anger, division and uncertainty will continue and intensify if that happens.
But since no one can be confident that a “no” vote will not be followed by the separatist-dominated UCP imposing another separation referendum anyway, the anger, division and uncertainty is also likely to continue no matter what transpires.
Regardless of which side actually wins the Oct. 19 separation referendum, the other side will distrust the process that led to it and furiously doubt the result – and not without sound reasons.
At the heart of this still unfolding disaster wrought by Premier Smith and her political advisors is Elections Alberta, the agency that oversees Alberta elections, by-elections and referenda. The supposedly “independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly” is in a state of near-collapse, barely capable of overseeing a normal election let alone Premier Smith’s chaotic experiment in stage-managed sham “citizen initiative” referenda.and, then there’s sleazy McClure
Elections Alberta is underfunded, understaffed, and having difficulty finding sufficient election day employees. It is internally divided and beset by rapid legislative and regulatory flip-flops enacted by the UCP Government seemingly to enable the separation campaign or keep the secession pot boiling as a negotiation tactic with Ottawa. It is further burdened by the UCP’s MAGA-influenced policy that all 10 wordy and complicated ballots must be counted by hand within 48 hours.
As a result, the agency can no longer be trusted by citizens, regardless of their views on separation, to be able to run the vote in ways that electors can feel confident is fair and neutral.I haven’t trusted EA since little religious terrorist David Parker stole our private voter data, lied about it, abused it, then fled to USA, with McClure doing nothing.
In a column published the Sept. 17, Postmedia political columnist Don Braid labelled Elections Alberta “the agency that can’t count straight.” Now it’s about to be “swamped with millions of referendum votes,” he observed, in what may turn out to be the biggest election turnout in Alberta history.Intentionally breaking elections, which is what Smittie and McClure are doing, is Nazi shit.
“The government has a right to pose a question, but none whatever to claim this is ‘direct democracy.,’” Mr. Braid wrote in that column. “The result is a vast UCP opinion poll that will cost taxpayers up to $130 million.”
The same day, Edmonton-based author and national security scholar Patrick Lennox published a Substack column stating bluntly that Elections Alberta “is no longer serving the public, but has rather been captured by the far right UCP government and is doing its bidding regardless of the rules.”That’s for sure. I bet Smittie coached bestie religious terrorist Parker to steal the voter data and give it to Nazi USA, who likely sold it to the abusive lying thieving tech billionaires, Musk included. Anyone who trusts McClure, Smith and or EA, needs a new brain.
Mr. Lennox – author of Alberta Separatism: Foreign Interference, and Canada’s Survival in a Revolutionary Age, which is scheduled to be released next week – makes a convincing case, cataloguing the series of “head-scratching snafus” that illustrate the disordered state of Elections Alberta as the referenda, now less than a month away, nears.
- Changes in Citizen Initiative laws by the government to make it easier for a separatist referendum petition to be approved, followed by more changes to make it harder for anyone else to get a petition approved.
- Changes to the law by the UCP to get around a court ruling that declared the wording of a separatist group’s petition to be unconstitutional.
- Special-ballot packages sent to voters with out-of-date information threatening $50,000 fines and two years in prison for citizens who use the ballots in accordance with current law. Whoops, just scratch that part out, says Elections Alberta. Many will not take the chance and won’t vote.
- The largest data breach in Canadian history, the notorious leak of a voters list containing the personal information of all 2.9 million Alberta registered voters.
- Defiant separatist groups that refuse to hand over financial records to the agency as required by law, and will likely to get away with it.
- Allegations from within the agency that suggest government intervention kept Corb Lund’s Water Not Coal petition from being approved.
- Resignations and firings of long-time Elections Alberta employees, some of them attacking the validity of the petition-validation process.
More recently, there has been that bizarre cabinet order that lists of electors must now list no electors, presumably to make it impossible for election scrutineers to do their jobs.
Plus, of course, there is the $4 million poured by the UCP into a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign to get voters to support the “noxious nine” referenda designed to incite division and subvert Confederation.
Smith and her UCP are nowhere near smart enough to create such an evil plan to destroy Canada and make it easier for Trump to invade and steal our resources. I believe, Herrs Harper, Carney and Kevin Roberts of the Nazi Heritage Fdn are involved.
“It is clear that conducting this unprecedented plebiscitary experiment is so far beyond the capacity of Elections Alberta that it would be misfeasance to carry on with the vote,” Mr. Lennox wrote, citing the agency’s own admission in its previous annual report that it lacked the resources to conduct the complicated balloting properly.
As Alberta journalist Jodi MacPherson summarized the state of affairs at Elections Alberta succinctly on her Substack:
“Alberta’s October referendum is an absolute train wreck, a dumpster fire, a dog’s breakfast, a political juggernaut, a recipe for disaster — choose your favourite expression. It’s bad.”
Ms. MacPherson wrote that on Sept. 3. Nothing has gotten any better since.
This mess leaves Alberta’s separatist minority with no confidence. Steeped in MAGA paranoia and conspiracy theories as their movement is, Premier Smith’s obvious effort to play both ends against the middle, so that she can emerge as the winner no matter what happens, leaves them convinced that despite the evidence the system is stacked against them.
There’s no comfort for the rest of us either. The UCP has obviously had its thumb on the scale to benefit the separatist campaign since the beginning of this saga. It would be naïve to assume that they’ll start to behave themselves now.
Together, this clearly ads up to a sound reason to postpone or scrap this referendum.
Mr. Lennox called on Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure to take the bull by the horns. “Elections Alberta must admit to being compromised both in terms of basic matters of HR, and facilities, and oversight and governance, but now due to this recent set of revelations, that its integrity has been compromised in a very serious way which puts our democracy at risk.”
“Elections Alberta must take a step back and admit it needs time to repair itself and its reputation, and to prepare for this unprecedented and unwanted democratic experiment it is being forced to conduct by the far right government in power,” he concluded.
The UCP, obviously, will allow no such thing.
Albertans and Canadians are going to have to live with this disaster for a long time after Oct. 19.
***
Patricia Poohkay:
I just want the traitorous, evil, corrupt, vile bitch and her separatist cult GONE! I don’t care how. Charges, RCMP investigation that moves her out – JUST GONE! As always: STOP DANIELLE SMITH! While we’re at it: STOP ALL AI DATA CENTRES! If she’s pushing it. If she’s giving the green light, no process, no oversight, to Kevin O’Leary, it’s going to be the biggest horror show to Albertans, our economy, the environment, the swallowing up of all potable water from the headwaters to Hudson’s Bay. Well, and the AI pushers are running into serious trouble identifying any profitability, having to borrow money to finance their schemes. I’m pretty sure there are people out there who are able to describe this all a whole lot better than me. My comment to them is – HAVE AT IT! With my thanks!
Bill:
As usual a good analysis of what has happened. If I may present a layperson view of this Referenda situation. First, it is a sham. On the questions re the immigration “issue”, there is no issue, it is rage baiting and promoting racist style treatment of new comers. It is essentially a fabrication. Smith has already “costed” the penalty for being a new comer. she said $1900 should do it. Not sure if that is per person or family. So she will do it regardless. As for the ‘Constitutional’ “issues” she will again do exactly what those questions say. Why? Because all the Provinces can do those things she wants a mandate to pursue. Perhaps the only one the provinces can do is take Federal money for a Federal Program and not implement that program or use the monies for a substantially similar program. So in the reality of how this government works, Either a yes or no will result in the UCP and Smith doing exactly what they want to do.Look at the feeble Nazi ignoring the results of the daylight savings time referendum a few years ago. The UCP do what they fucking want, breaking the law, and violating charter rights of many.
As to The BIG ONE. A vote to stay does not automatically mean Smith will be a loyal Canadian citizen. A vote to seek another referendum will result in a push by Smith to “quickly act” as she has already announced and is already making arrangements through planning. Either way the numbers fall, do not forget that Smith said in public that ” I will decide what the numbers mean after the vote.” That is why there are no numbers attached to the results. We do not knowi if she will accept 50% plus one to be a mandate or 60% is needed. WE know she fiddles the numbers to suit. Only a few more than 200,000 signatureswhich I believe the separatists did not get legally, aided by Hanky Panky Elections Alberta were needed to force Question 10, but she added in the Forever Canadian’s more than 400,000 to make it sound like a petition to stay was asking for a vote. So I am sure she will move forward with said “binding” referendum on Oct. 20.
As to Elections Alberta being compromised, YES but I would suggest not by their own doing. Any board or institution tha tis to operate a ‘ARMS LENGTH’ is controlled by the government of the day, through regulation and law. The UCP has systematically changed the regulations, financing and indeed the laws to make Elections Alberta essentially powerless. Other than the Coal petition, everything else that EA is supposed to do has been watered down or destroyed not by EA’s actions but by the actions of the Premier and the UCP Cabinet orders in council for the most part. That is essentially government by fiat, or a more modern term, EXECUTIVE ORDER, signed with a magic marker.Nazis, like Trump.
I am convinced of my view because of the Premier’s actions not her words. Regardless, my special ballot has arrived and will be filled in Nuen to the NINE and YES to Canada.
@lovejackpearl.bsky.social:
Learn from us.Religion and hate created MAGA fucked up everything. And it’s never going to be the same.
@tkrause.bsky.social:
sadly a lot of Albertans, including our premier, are essentially MAGA. They don’t call it Texas of the north for no reason.
@lovejackpearl.bsky.social:
It’s sad. I don’t ever see the fault-lines and wounds reparing and healing in my lifetime.
Just as I know I will never see a female president of the US.
@dukie00.bsky.social:
I don’t know the story/background on this, but; I’d suspect Musk and friends (probably Putin) are behind all of these anti-immigrant movements in the world.And Herr Hideous Harper and his vile Nazi IDU, global cabal of racist haters, and Herr Carney, racist pal of racist Harper
Governments need to clarify how far freedom of speech goes. Do they allow it to destroy them like America did?
I hope not.
@grantmountieofanna.bsky.social:
25 Con Traitors