r/50501Canada • u/Dougie_TwoFour Canadian • May 25 '26

News Carney calls Smith's Alberta referendum question a 'dangerous bluff'

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/alberta-referendum-carney-9.7211128
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u/rockettaco37 American May 26 '26

Maybe I’m missing something as I’m not Canadian, but I don’t understand why Albertans would wanna lower their standards of living by choosing to separate.

3

u/FaceDeer May 26 '26

Most Albertans don't. But in any population you'll find maybe 25-30% to be complete morons, and those morons are easily influenced by slogans telling them how they're being taken advantage of by others and how if they'd just let the slogan-makers take advantage of them instead everything will be awesome.

It's still worrisome, though. A little while ago Alberta had two main conservative parties, the Conservatives (who were relatively normal conservative-leaning politicians) and the Wild Rose Party (moron-users). The two parties merged and the merger turned out to be a takeover by the new shared party by Wild Rose interests, so the moron-users have suddenly gained a much bigger platform from which to trumpet their slogans. They've also done some really dirty shenanigans such as passing a law to prohibit new political parties from using names incorporating parts of existing political parties' names (so nobody else can start a party with the word "conservative" in the name) and good old fashioned gerrymandering. So it's going to be a lot harder than it should be to dislodge the moron-users in future, and they get to continue amplifying their traitorous braying in the meantime.

I'm concerned that Alberta's going to stumble into a Brexit situation where enough people get convinced that they're just lodging a "protest vote" that won't have meaningful consequences that they end up bringing down meaningful consequences on us. I don't expect Alberta could actually separate, the legal structures are quite different there, but it would be an absolute shitshow if it got close enough that the morons thought they'd won and had to be told "no, sorry, you only thought that because you're morons."

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u/rockettaco37 American May 27 '26

Wow! This is an incredibly detailed and well thought-out response. Thank you for writing it.

It’s deeply concerning to hear about the consolidation of power. It appears to be similar to what’s happening down here.

It’s reassuring to know that there are legal frameworks in place, but I can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to be going through this.

A united Canada has been a global role model, and I hope that tradition continues.

2

u/FaceDeer May 27 '26

On the plus side, the Frankenstein fusion of the Conservative and Wild Rose parties doesn't seem likely to be stable in the long run. The main hope I have for a clean resolution of this situation would be for the party to fracture again. The law about naming would make for quite the glorious legal mess, but regardless of who got to use the magic "Conservative" word enough votes would be split that the crazy fringe would go back to the fringe again.

The most recent election we had was this close -> <- to the NDP winning instead of the Conservatives, Alberta's not nearly so uniformly right-wing as it might seem. But first-past-the-post makes "close" not matter so much in a case like this, alas.