Page two and I still haven't brought up the star of the show, the original Drama Queen of Confederation: Nova Scotia. Seperatism isn't a Quebec invention, Nova Scotia was the originator. There were no Confederation elections in Nova Scotia and no sooner had it joined Confederation than it elected 36 of 38 MLA's as Anti-Confederates and 18 of 19 federal MP's, also as Anti-Confederates led by Joseph Howe, the elections being in 1867.
They were countered by Macdonald increasing the federal subsidy to Nova Scotia to equal that of New Brunswick, by cutting tariffs and by enticing Joseph Howe to enter the Macdonald Cabinet. London also intervened to say that it would not let Nova Scotia out of the BNA Act.
But the blueprint had been made: separation threats are a highly useful political tactic to attract federal attention and financial consideration. I strongly suspect that the modern Alberta seperatist movement is closer to the Nova Scotia model than to the Quebec version,
I strongly suspect that the modern Alberta seperatist movement is closer to the Nova Scotia model than to the Quebec version
I used to own a collection of academic essays about early-80s western separatism, and one of them was by a sovereigntist PoliSci prof from Quebec, who spent a few weeks in Alberta delivering himself of some first-hand research into the subject. My own phrasing of his thesis would be that whereas Quebec sovereigntists have a sense of grievance rooted in historical destiny, western separatism just seemed like lashing-out over a few isolated economic issues.
The only passage I can recall even semi-verbatim is his contrast of an actual slogan of 1960s' Quebec sovereigntists with his suggested parody-slogan for the 1980s western crowd...
QUEBEC 1960s: Give us an inch, and we'll take a mile!
ALBERTA 1980s: If you don't give us an inch, we'll take a mile!
That being said, Peter Lougheed coasted on the same general resentments that the separatists did, and arguably utilized the same sorta strategic ambiguity that Levesque did in coasting on the resentment of outright independentistes, with the difference being that Lougheed was probably claiming to be stopping the separatists by asking Ottawa to cede some of their demands, ie. "You better kill the NEP, or you'll be dealing with the REAL crazies!"
Nick Taylor, the folksy Alberta Liberal leader in the 1980s went to address a separatist meeting for the lulz, and informed the crowd that they were being used as pawns by Lougheed. I gather they didn't like hearing that, but I suspect he enjoyed telling it to them.
If Alberta actually does put the separation question to a referndum, it triggers the Clarity Act which means the House of Commons has to vote on the question.
I will take a vacation day to sit in the House of Commons galleries when that vote happens because I want to see the looks on the Bloc Quebecois' MP's faces when they vote on that question.
If Alberta actually does put the separation question to a referndum, it triggers the Clarity Act which means the House of Commons has to vote on the question.
I will take a vacation day to sit in the House of Commons galleries when that vote happens because I want to see the looks on the Bloc Quebecois' MP's faces when they vote on that question.
I think the Bloc would, passively but still consciously, vote in a way that also happened to align 100% with the interests of Alberta sovereigntists, without suffering much sense of embarrassment in the process.
The PQ leader was asked a few months back about Alberta separatism, and was pretty casual in replying that he didn't really see the rationale for it, but it was ultimately up to Albertans to decide.
In the Albertan camp, the more thoughtful of the sovereigntists long ago cut off any senses of sympathy or alliance with Anglo Montreal(once dubbed "Pierre Trudeau's ideal of what English Canadians can be"), and the few references I've seen to them in the relevant editorializing are hostile. Suffice to say, the Bloc etc probably wouldn't mind having that general tendency of western-Canadian thought acquiring more influence over how the feds manage language and culture issues with the provinces.
(See Chantal Hebert's French Kiss for further exploration of reasons why Quebec sovereigntists would be overall comfortable with a harperite approach to federalism.)
The PQ leader was asked a few months back about Alberta separatism, and was pretty casual in replying that he didn't really see the rationale for it, but it was ultimately up to Albertans to decide.
For the record, his statement was pretty much an encapsulation of the detached bemusement of that Quebec sovereigntist prof I quoted above. Something like "It seems kind of strange to build your national identity around resource squabbles, but oh well, it's not for me to say."
He also expressed himself hopeful that Quebec would get the honour of being the first to hold a referendum, but he obviously knows that's nothing he has any influence over.
If Alberta actually does put the separation question to a referndum, it triggers the Clarity Act which means the House of Commons has to vote on the question.
I will take a vacation day to sit in the House of Commons galleries when that vote happens because I want to see the looks on the Bloc Quebecois' MP's faces when they vote on that question.
Alberta's fall referendum question has been released, and by the recent standards of its genre(basically, Quebec 80 and 95) I'd actually say it's fairly clear.
However...
Whereas I think this thread has served its purpose of satisfying @Gramps49's laudable curiousity about the existence of the movement in question, and whereas the doings of that movement are likely to play a substantial role in overall Canadian politics for at least the next few months:
May I suggest that this thread be locked, or otherwise abandoned, and discussion of Alberta separatism be held primarily on the Canada's Political Landscape thread? I'll await the opinion of other participants and moderators before I decide where to put my next post.
A propos of the larger constitutional issues implied by this thread and a few of the referenced characters...
I've recently started reading a 1999 book by a "freelance writer" named Paul Romney(American, I think), published by University Of Toronto Press, entitled:
GETTING IT WRONG
Subtitle:
How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperiled Confederation
I'm reading it both chapter-by-chapter and via the index. As far as I can glean, the thesis is something like...
Donald Creighton poisoned the mind of Canadian nationalists against the glorious decentralizing Reform tradition of William Lyon Mackenzie and Oliver Mowat, culminating in the disgraceful humiliation of Quebec at the hands of Pierre Trudeau in 1982.
A review I scanned of the book criticizes Romney's case as "circumstantial evidence", and from what I've seen so far, he does tend to posit somewhat tenuous connections. At one point in the intro, he suggests that the derision among creightonized intellectuals for Mackenzie King's occultic interests was utilized to attack his policies, but my experience has always been that's something mostly discussed as a quirky factoid by apolitical types, who know little else about King.
I like having a separate separatism thread. Seems linguistically fitting. The latest is Alberta appears to be headed for a referendum on whether or not to have a referendum while the Federal government may be examining the Clarity Act.
According to the Alberta government, the question on the ballot will be written and formatted in this manner:
OPTION A: Alberta should remain a province in Canada.
OPTION B: The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.
As mentioned earlier, what struck me initially about this was the, umm, clarity of it. I think most people here are familiar with the usual style of sales-pitch the PQ has gotten onto it's own sovereigntist ballots, 1980 being the most mockingly rhapsodized. But Alberta' question actually uses the phrase "separate from Canada" to describe the desired scenario of that side.
Upon further examination, I also note that the two choices are not precise opposites, because it is in fact possible to believe eg. that Alberta should hold a binding referendum on separating, but want the separatist option to lose. Granted, there are probably not many federalists who have any sort of principled commitment to holding a referendum, so it's not like anyone's being forced to choose between two cherished policies. But still.
The wording of the question seems to be to ensure compliance with the latest court ruling, but I did wonder if making the question sound more tentative might make the proposal more likely to succeed - people who think they’re not voting to leave Canada, only voting to talk about leaving Canada. But interestingly 338Canada is saying support is actually decreasing and attributing it to the explicit “separate from Canada” wording.
338Canada is saying support is actually decreasing and attributing it to the explicit “separate from Canada” wording.
I know Quebec sovereigntists who go livid if someone refers to their position as "separatist". So yeah, there does seem to be a sense that it is an unpalatable framing of the option.
Assuming that Danielle Smith is basically just "Rene Levesque, but with less tolerance for the possibility of outright independence"(*), she might like the idea of giving the separatists their referendum, but rigging the question with biased wording designed to repel people away from the separatist option.
(*) For non-geeks...
The consensus on Levesque seems to be that he was just a premier who wanted the greatest degree of autonomy possible for Quebec, including independence if possible, but was willing to settle for less in deference to political reality, the beau risque of 1984 being the culmination of this jesuitical scheming.
Robert Bourassa could be credibly placed adjacent to Levesque on the relevant spectrum, also trying to grab as much power as he could for Quebec, but more commited to the survival of Confederation. He gave several interviews in the 1990s in which he seemed to imply that he would like Canada to decentralize itself into the delorsian ideal that the EU at the time was supposedly centralizing itself into.
I wouldn't let Scotland bring it up, I'm not changing my position here. For non-Canadians: if you make that argument, you admit your case is incredibly weak and failing. See Devo-Max.
I wouldn't let Scotland bring it up, I'm not changing my position here. For non-Canadians: if you make that argument, you admit your case is incredibly weak and failing. See Devo-Max.
You mean you would be against Alberta separatists asking for or being offered something akin to Levesque's "sovereignty-association"?
For myself, I always thought that sovereigntist opposition to the Clarity Act was self-incriminating, because they were basically admitting that they could only win with a softball question.
Exactly. It is the sort of thing tbe Clarity Act was designed to prevent.
I am beginning to envy our sibling Australia. Western Australia had a successful separation referendum in 1933. Canberra simply ignored them and the problem went away.
I am beginning to envy our sibling Australia. Western Australia had a successful separation referendum in 1933. Canberra simply ignored them and the problem went away.
I assume that referendum was just advisory, not binding?
Perth acted on its own behalf as the government of Western Australia and they wanted London to repeal the Australian Constitution (it had been enacted BNA style but was always self-amendable) and restore their autonomy where the only superior they had was London.
Very much what Nova Scotia tried to do, even the terminology is identical.
Perth acted on its own behalf as the government of Western Australia and they wanted London to repeal the Australian Constitution (it had been enacted BNA style but was always self-amendable) and restore their autonomy where the only superior they had was London.
Very much what Nova Scotia tried to do, even the terminology is identical.
The PQ leader was asked a few months back about Alberta separatism, and was pretty casual in replying that he didn't really see the rationale for it, but it was ultimately up to Albertans to decide.
In the Albertan camp, the more thoughtful of the sovereigntists long ago cut off any senses of sympathy or alliance with Anglo Montreal(once dubbed "Pierre Trudeau's ideal of what English Canadians can be"), and the few references I've seen to them in the relevant editorializing are hostile. Suffice to say, the Bloc etc probably wouldn't mind having that general tendency of western-Canadian thought acquiring more influence over how the feds manage language and culture issues with the provinces.
Plamondon has now attacked Carney for calling the Alberta referendum "dangerous" and "a bluff", and said that Smith is "just doing her job" by "consulting" the people.
Times like this, I think back to every conversation I've had with some fresh-faced left-wing quebboo who assured me that supporting sovereignty for Quebec in no way entails supporting the same for all the rednecks in Alberta, because the two situations are entirely different.
Left-wing Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has suggested in Smith's presence that the referendum be postponed so they don't interfere with "building some pipelines".
A few months back I saw a Report On Business interview with Kinew in which he said economic partnership with Alberta(which would presumably involve resource-extraction in one way or another) was a big part of his economic vision for Manitoba, so I suspect he does sincerely regard himself as sharing a general parameter of interests with Smith.
Smith fired back with something like "Well, if you want more pipelines, talk to your federal leader about that". Good sound-bite, and while I'm tempted to say that Carney's majority obliterates the relevance of Avi Lewis to any outcome on the pipeline front, the razor-thin nature of that majority, even before taking Guilbeault's departure into account, might mitigate any tendency toward ill-advised dismissiveness.
Tangential to the issue of federal vs. provincial NDP disagreements...
While I do have a fairly clear and continuous memory of the early 1980s constitutional debates, I can't quite recall what the federal NDP's position on Section 33 was. IOW I don't know how much of a heretic Allan Blakeney woulda been regarded by the federal party.
(The constitution at the time was probably one of those issues, along with the related bilingualism and biculturalism issues, that the Liberals basically owned, and the NDP was reduced to saying "Yeah, that's okay, fits our principles, why not", even though it's not something they would have neccessarily come up with by themselves, and was not of particular interest to their traditional base. That, and Trudeau's majority, might account for what I remember as a lack of focus on the federal NDP's position.
I did once come across an old issue of early-80s Canadian Forum with an anti-Charter editorial by Norman Penner[Communist, never NDP AFAIK], in which he said the feds can't he trusted to protect rights, because eg. in the 1930s they had used their power to strike down "important banking legislation in Alberta". I think his statement was incomplete to the point of deception by not saying anything else about the legislation in question, which, had it gone forward, would have given Alberta the economic powers of an independent country.)
The latest poll has Alberta Liberals 99% in favour of remaining, NDP 96%, and the UCP split 48%-48%. Eric Grenier and Philippe Fournier are rightly suggesting that the referendum is an internal battle in the UCP.
The latest poll has Alberta Liberals 99% in favour of remaining, NDP 96%, and the UCP split 48%-48%. Eric Grenier and Philippe Fournier are rightly suggesting that the referendum is an internal battle in the UCP.
I wouldn't read much significance into the Liberal numbers there, given that in the last election the UCP and the NDP together accounted for over 96% of the vote.
But yeah. There aren't likely too many supporters of separation outside of the people who already identifies as UCP. Even Jason Kenney thinks separation is crackpot, and not to mention is pissed off about his name appearing in the separatists' data leak.
Naheed Nenshi at the next Alberta Election: "We won't have any separation referendums! Lend us your vote!"
Full Disclosure: I hold my nose for Nenshi as an NDPer.
Me too. I always thought of him more as a casually progressive New Urbanist darling, and was actually surprised when he first announced he wanted to be NDP leader(*).
I assume part of the rationale for making him leader was that he'd have a base in Calgary, but, so far, his only electoral test at the provincial level has been winning an Edmonton seat in what is probably the most left-wing constituency in the province.
(*) That said, seeing as how we've already had a federal leader who had previously gone on record as praising Margaret Thatcher's attack on the public sector...
Carney says he's not gonna reply to Trump's latest 51st State taunts.
Yeah. Good idea. Even assuming the most machiavellian implications, ie. Trump's message is "You won't have to worry about CUSMA if you become a state" with the hope that weakens Canadians' commitment to their own independence, the scheme can only work if Canadians' allow themselves to be sold on the offer, in which case Carney would need to re-focus his nationalist campaign inwardly against domestic disloyalty, not outwardly against Yankee seducers. Best just to focus directly on the issues surrounding CUSMA.
The website of the Alberta Prosperity Project apparently assures Albertans that...
...unless the laws are changed, you will probably keep your Canadian passport and citizenship in an independent Alberta. Not only that, but you will have a new Alberta citizenship and passport - you will have more options, not less.
The article also quotes some legal scholars to the effect that the APP's claims might not be total psychedelia(eg. 2025 law expands Canadian citizenship based on ancestry), but still. When an independence movement considers it prudent to clarify that their followers will still hold citizenship in the hated metropolitan, it's kinda hard to take them seriously.
The website of the Alberta Prosperity Project apparently assures Albertans that...
...unless the laws are changed, you will probably keep your Canadian passport and citizenship in an independent Alberta. Not only that, but you will have a new Alberta citizenship and passport - you will have more options, not less.
The article also quotes some legal scholars to the effect that the APP's claims might not be total psychedelia(eg. 2025 law expands Canadian citizenship based on ancestry), but still. When an independence movement considers it prudent to clarify that their followers will still hold citizenship in the hated metropolitan, it's kinda hard to take them seriously.
No, it's dreaming in technicolor and we begin, again, the slow slide towards everything Quebec said and did 1977 - 1995. Scotland did the same thing. Sorry Old Sod, but Devo Max was entirely uncreative.
Any bill recognizing independence would by consequence cancel the Canadian citizenship of a newly-independent Alberta. The UK and France did this very thing to the myriad of colonies they recognized as independent.
No, it's dreaming in technicolor and we begin, again, the slow slide towards everything Quebec said and did 1977 - 1995.
Fortunately, Alberta lacks the neccessary sense of cherished continuity and romantic humiliation that permeates Quebec nationalism, for the current eruption to continue unabated for a twenty-year period. IMO, anyway.
The more scholarly of the western-alienation ideologues(eg. the father and son who wrote that 1967 realignment manifesto) sometimes liked to list off the historical forebears of their movement, with the standard pantheon being...
- Riel and his rebels
- Progressives/Farmers
- Social Credit
- the CFF
And that's usually where it stopped, if it got that far. I can understand how those factions might all be classified as the same according to certain overarching geo-economic taxonomies(continentalist, reformist, albeit with a shift toward economic nationalism in the "long history" of the CCF), but you're not gonna get the admirers of Ernest...
"western Canadians in this party will never accept a French Catholic leader"
...Manning to sit around singing folk-guitar hymns to the man who dreamed of establishing a French-speaking indigenous ultramontane republic on the prairie, barked on by every dog in Quebec.
You can pretty much do the same thing with any two compared factions on that list. And with the partial exception of post-1948 Alberta Social Credit, they all had economic platforms that would in one way or another be viewed as horrific heresy by the neoliberal randoids who populate the successor movements today.
So, as far as I can tell, the allegation isn't that some centralized actor(eg. Alberta separatist leadership) is using these fake posts to rally support for their cause, just that individual content creators are ripping off other content creators, in order to somehow make money for themselves personally?
If so, apart from possible copyright violations, I really don't see much of an issue here. Bob in Calgary posts a photo from a separatist rally he attended, then Nieta in Indonesia re-posts it on her Facebook page, to siphon off monetization from Bob. It's still the same photo, having roughly the same propagandistic value as the original.
The "media consultant" in the UK opines that these overseas posters "may actually not care about Canadian politics at all". Yeah, and I hear some of the announcers who narrate ads on TV don't actually use the products they're promoting.
Thinking about it, if there is any sorta violation of economic morality taking place in this content-swiping, the perpetrators are mostly bedside entrepreneurs of the global south, with the victims being reactionary political insurgents of the global north. In all likelihood, the former are not deliberately undermining the latter on ideological grounds, but speaking as an anti-separatist Canadian, I am somewhat inclined to cheer for the rip-off artists on this one(*).
(*) Especially if what the content-swipers are doing is not actually illegal. I don't know anything about how Facebook works, but my impression is that, while this might be unlawful according to their in-house rules, the worst that'll happen to you is you'll get kicked off Facebook. At the very least, it strikes me as the sorta thing that any reasonably aware Facebooker would foresee as a possibility when posting their content for public viewing.
War of words between the UCP govt. and indigenous leaders. The Assembly of Treaty Chiefs passed resolutions saying Smith and Co. are guilty of "treason", Smith's top-aide replying that the Chiefs' rhetoric is worthy of a
"3rd world banana republic",
and they should look after their own communities instead of attacking the government, and I just saw a photo Nenshi at a press conference with various indigenous leaders.
The hidden phrase above is common enough among intra-settler polemics("Duplessis ran Quebec like a..."), but is still one I think should be avoided when criticizing racialized indigenous people. As for any overspill into the larger electoral realm, I think most settlers on either side of the referendum will make their decision based largely on other issues, with the pro-Canada team cheering on the indigenous fight partly because many of them are pro-indigenous to begin with, but mostly because they want the separatists to fail and that's also the outcome desired by most indigenous people and fought for by their leadership and activists.
Just saw a recent photo of some Alberta separatists at a rally with t-shirts reading...
FREE ALBERTA FIND OUT
Colour-coding in the original.
I get that they're reversing the meaning of the slogan, ie. once you free Alberta, you'll find out how great things are gonna be. But if this gets replicated just as the acronym, they're gonna get laughed at by anyone who knows the appropriated meme.
Indeed they are. In fact, when I read your recreation of the shirts while scrolling, before I had read the rest of the post, I thought the shirts were part of an antiseparatist movement.
Comments
1866, assuming that's the same one @Sober Preacher's Kid's was referencing?
Thanks.
They were countered by Macdonald increasing the federal subsidy to Nova Scotia to equal that of New Brunswick, by cutting tariffs and by enticing Joseph Howe to enter the Macdonald Cabinet. London also intervened to say that it would not let Nova Scotia out of the BNA Act.
But the blueprint had been made: separation threats are a highly useful political tactic to attract federal attention and financial consideration. I strongly suspect that the modern Alberta seperatist movement is closer to the Nova Scotia model than to the Quebec version,
Sorry Quebec, but you were late to the party.
I used to own a collection of academic essays about early-80s western separatism, and one of them was by a sovereigntist PoliSci prof from Quebec, who spent a few weeks in Alberta delivering himself of some first-hand research into the subject. My own phrasing of his thesis would be that whereas Quebec sovereigntists have a sense of grievance rooted in historical destiny, western separatism just seemed like lashing-out over a few isolated economic issues.
The only passage I can recall even semi-verbatim is his contrast of an actual slogan of 1960s' Quebec sovereigntists with his suggested parody-slogan for the 1980s western crowd...
QUEBEC 1960s: Give us an inch, and we'll take a mile!
ALBERTA 1980s: If you don't give us an inch, we'll take a mile!
That being said, Peter Lougheed coasted on the same general resentments that the separatists did, and arguably utilized the same sorta strategic ambiguity that Levesque did in coasting on the resentment of outright independentistes, with the difference being that Lougheed was probably claiming to be stopping the separatists by asking Ottawa to cede some of their demands, ie. "You better kill the NEP, or you'll be dealing with the REAL crazies!"
Nick Taylor, the folksy Alberta Liberal leader in the 1980s went to address a separatist meeting for the lulz, and informed the crowd that they were being used as pawns by Lougheed. I gather they didn't like hearing that, but I suspect he enjoyed telling it to them.
I will take a vacation day to sit in the House of Commons galleries when that vote happens because I want to see the looks on the Bloc Quebecois' MP's faces when they vote on that question.
I think the Bloc would, passively but still consciously, vote in a way that also happened to align 100% with the interests of Alberta sovereigntists, without suffering much sense of embarrassment in the process.
The PQ leader was asked a few months back about Alberta separatism, and was pretty casual in replying that he didn't really see the rationale for it, but it was ultimately up to Albertans to decide.
In the Albertan camp, the more thoughtful of the sovereigntists long ago cut off any senses of sympathy or alliance with Anglo Montreal(once dubbed "Pierre Trudeau's ideal of what English Canadians can be"), and the few references I've seen to them in the relevant editorializing are hostile. Suffice to say, the Bloc etc probably wouldn't mind having that general tendency of western-Canadian thought acquiring more influence over how the feds manage language and culture issues with the provinces.
(See Chantal Hebert's French Kiss for further exploration of reasons why Quebec sovereigntists would be overall comfortable with a harperite approach to federalism.)
For the record, his statement was pretty much an encapsulation of the detached bemusement of that Quebec sovereigntist prof I quoted above. Something like "It seems kind of strange to build your national identity around resource squabbles, but oh well, it's not for me to say."
He also expressed himself hopeful that Quebec would get the honour of being the first to hold a referendum, but he obviously knows that's nothing he has any influence over.
Alberta's fall referendum question has been released, and by the recent standards of its genre(basically, Quebec 80 and 95) I'd actually say it's fairly clear.
However...
Whereas I think this thread has served its purpose of satisfying @Gramps49's laudable curiousity about the existence of the movement in question, and whereas the doings of that movement are likely to play a substantial role in overall Canadian politics for at least the next few months:
May I suggest that this thread be locked, or otherwise abandoned, and discussion of Alberta separatism be held primarily on the Canada's Political Landscape thread? I'll await the opinion of other participants and moderators before I decide where to put my next post.
I've recently started reading a 1999 book by a "freelance writer" named Paul Romney(American, I think), published by University Of Toronto Press, entitled:
Subtitle:
I'm reading it both chapter-by-chapter and via the index. As far as I can glean, the thesis is something like...
A review I scanned of the book criticizes Romney's case as "circumstantial evidence", and from what I've seen so far, he does tend to posit somewhat tenuous connections. At one point in the intro, he suggests that the derision among creightonized intellectuals for Mackenzie King's occultic interests was utilized to attack his policies, but my experience has always been that's something mostly discussed as a quirky factoid by apolitical types, who know little else about King.
An interesting read so far, in any case.
As mentioned earlier, what struck me initially about this was the, umm, clarity of it. I think most people here are familiar with the usual style of sales-pitch the PQ has gotten onto it's own sovereigntist ballots, 1980 being the most mockingly rhapsodized. But Alberta' question actually uses the phrase "separate from Canada" to describe the desired scenario of that side.
Upon further examination, I also note that the two choices are not precise opposites, because it is in fact possible to believe eg. that Alberta should hold a binding referendum on separating, but want the separatist option to lose. Granted, there are probably not many federalists who have any sort of principled commitment to holding a referendum, so it's not like anyone's being forced to choose between two cherished policies. But still.
I know Quebec sovereigntists who go livid if someone refers to their position as "separatist". So yeah, there does seem to be a sense that it is an unpalatable framing of the option.
Assuming that Danielle Smith is basically just "Rene Levesque, but with less tolerance for the possibility of outright independence"(*), she might like the idea of giving the separatists their referendum, but rigging the question with biased wording designed to repel people away from the separatist option.
(*) For non-geeks...
The consensus on Levesque seems to be that he was just a premier who wanted the greatest degree of autonomy possible for Quebec, including independence if possible, but was willing to settle for less in deference to political reality, the beau risque of 1984 being the culmination of this jesuitical scheming.
Robert Bourassa could be credibly placed adjacent to Levesque on the relevant spectrum, also trying to grab as much power as he could for Quebec, but more commited to the survival of Confederation. He gave several interviews in the 1990s in which he seemed to imply that he would like Canada to decentralize itself into the delorsian ideal that the EU at the time was supposedly centralizing itself into.
I wouldn't let Scotland bring it up, I'm not changing my position here. For non-Canadians: if you make that argument, you admit your case is incredibly weak and failing. See Devo-Max.
You mean you would be against Alberta separatists asking for or being offered something akin to Levesque's "sovereignty-association"?
For myself, I always thought that sovereigntist opposition to the Clarity Act was self-incriminating, because they were basically admitting that they could only win with a softball question.
I am beginning to envy our sibling Australia. Western Australia had a successful separation referendum in 1933. Canberra simply ignored them and the problem went away.
I assume that referendum was just advisory, not binding?
I've just been skimming the wiki article on this. On whose behalf was Perth acting, and what were they asking London to repeal?
Very much what Nova Scotia tried to do, even the terminology is identical.
Thanks.
Plamondon has now attacked Carney for calling the Alberta referendum "dangerous" and "a bluff", and said that Smith is "just doing her job" by "consulting" the people.
Times like this, I think back to every conversation I've had with some fresh-faced left-wing quebboo who assured me that supporting sovereignty for Quebec in no way entails supporting the same for all the rednecks in Alberta, because the two situations are entirely different.
A few months back I saw a Report On Business interview with Kinew in which he said economic partnership with Alberta(which would presumably involve resource-extraction in one way or another) was a big part of his economic vision for Manitoba, so I suspect he does sincerely regard himself as sharing a general parameter of interests with Smith.
Smith fired back with something like "Well, if you want more pipelines, talk to your federal leader about that". Good sound-bite, and while I'm tempted to say that Carney's majority obliterates the relevance of Avi Lewis to any outcome on the pipeline front, the razor-thin nature of that majority, even before taking Guilbeault's departure into account, might mitigate any tendency toward ill-advised dismissiveness.
By calling that sarcasm, you mean that NDP premiers do, in fact, feel loyalty to the Federal Party?
Thanks.
While I do have a fairly clear and continuous memory of the early 1980s constitutional debates, I can't quite recall what the federal NDP's position on Section 33 was. IOW I don't know how much of a heretic Allan Blakeney woulda been regarded by the federal party.
(The constitution at the time was probably one of those issues, along with the related bilingualism and biculturalism issues, that the Liberals basically owned, and the NDP was reduced to saying "Yeah, that's okay, fits our principles, why not", even though it's not something they would have neccessarily come up with by themselves, and was not of particular interest to their traditional base. That, and Trudeau's majority, might account for what I remember as a lack of focus on the federal NDP's position.
I did once come across an old issue of early-80s Canadian Forum with an anti-Charter editorial by Norman Penner[Communist, never NDP AFAIK], in which he said the feds can't he trusted to protect rights, because eg. in the 1930s they had used their power to strike down "important banking legislation in Alberta". I think his statement was incomplete to the point of deception by not saying anything else about the legislation in question, which, had it gone forward, would have given Alberta the economic powers of an independent country.)
I wouldn't read much significance into the Liberal numbers there, given that in the last election the UCP and the NDP together accounted for over 96% of the vote.
But yeah. There aren't likely too many supporters of separation outside of the people who already identifies as UCP. Even Jason Kenney thinks separation is crackpot, and not to mention is pissed off about his name appearing in the separatists' data leak.
Full Disclosure: I hold my nose for Nenshi as an NDPer.
Me too. I always thought of him more as a casually progressive New Urbanist darling, and was actually surprised when he first announced he wanted to be NDP leader(*).
I assume part of the rationale for making him leader was that he'd have a base in Calgary, but, so far, his only electoral test at the provincial level has been winning an Edmonton seat in what is probably the most left-wing constituency in the province.
(*) That said, seeing as how we've already had a federal leader who had previously gone on record as praising Margaret Thatcher's attack on the public sector...
Yeah. Good idea. Even assuming the most machiavellian implications, ie. Trump's message is "You won't have to worry about CUSMA if you become a state" with the hope that weakens Canadians' commitment to their own independence, the scheme can only work if Canadians' allow themselves to be sold on the offer, in which case Carney would need to re-focus his nationalist campaign inwardly against domestic disloyalty, not outwardly against Yankee seducers. Best just to focus directly on the issues surrounding CUSMA.
The website of the Alberta Prosperity Project apparently assures Albertans that...
The article also quotes some legal scholars to the effect that the APP's claims might not be total psychedelia(eg. 2025 law expands Canadian citizenship based on ancestry), but still. When an independence movement considers it prudent to clarify that their followers will still hold citizenship in the hated metropolitan, it's kinda hard to take them seriously.
No, it's dreaming in technicolor and we begin, again, the slow slide towards everything Quebec said and did 1977 - 1995. Scotland did the same thing. Sorry Old Sod, but Devo Max was entirely uncreative.
Any bill recognizing independence would by consequence cancel the Canadian citizenship of a newly-independent Alberta. The UK and France did this very thing to the myriad of colonies they recognized as independent.
Fortunately, Alberta lacks the neccessary sense of cherished continuity and romantic humiliation that permeates Quebec nationalism, for the current eruption to continue unabated for a twenty-year period. IMO, anyway.
The more scholarly of the western-alienation ideologues(eg. the father and son who wrote that 1967 realignment manifesto) sometimes liked to list off the historical forebears of their movement, with the standard pantheon being...
- Riel and his rebels
- Progressives/Farmers
- Social Credit
- the CFF
And that's usually where it stopped, if it got that far. I can understand how those factions might all be classified as the same according to certain overarching geo-economic taxonomies(continentalist, reformist, albeit with a shift toward economic nationalism in the "long history" of the CCF), but you're not gonna get the admirers of Ernest...
...Manning to sit around singing folk-guitar hymns to the man who dreamed of establishing a French-speaking indigenous ultramontane republic on the prairie, barked on by every dog in Quebec.
You can pretty much do the same thing with any two compared factions on that list. And with the partial exception of post-1948 Alberta Social Credit, they all had economic platforms that would in one way or another be viewed as horrific heresy by the neoliberal randoids who populate the successor movements today.
So, as far as I can tell, the allegation isn't that some centralized actor(eg. Alberta separatist leadership) is using these fake posts to rally support for their cause, just that individual content creators are ripping off other content creators, in order to somehow make money for themselves personally?
If so, apart from possible copyright violations, I really don't see much of an issue here. Bob in Calgary posts a photo from a separatist rally he attended, then Nieta in Indonesia re-posts it on her Facebook page, to siphon off monetization from Bob. It's still the same photo, having roughly the same propagandistic value as the original.
The "media consultant" in the UK opines that these overseas posters "may actually not care about Canadian politics at all". Yeah, and I hear some of the announcers who narrate ads on TV don't actually use the products they're promoting.
(*) Especially if what the content-swipers are doing is not actually illegal. I don't know anything about how Facebook works, but my impression is that, while this might be unlawful according to their in-house rules, the worst that'll happen to you is you'll get kicked off Facebook. At the very least, it strikes me as the sorta thing that any reasonably aware Facebooker would foresee as a possibility when posting their content for public viewing.
The hidden phrase above is common enough among intra-settler polemics("Duplessis ran Quebec like a..."), but is still one I think should be avoided when criticizing racialized indigenous people. As for any overspill into the larger electoral realm, I think most settlers on either side of the referendum will make their decision based largely on other issues, with the pro-Canada team cheering on the indigenous fight partly because many of them are pro-indigenous to begin with, but mostly because they want the separatists to fail and that's also the outcome desired by most indigenous people and fought for by their leadership and activists.
FREE
ALBERTA
FIND
OUT
Colour-coding in the original.
I get that they're reversing the meaning of the slogan, ie. once you free Alberta, you'll find out how great things are gonna be. But if this gets replicated just as the acronym, they're gonna get laughed at by anyone who knows the appropriated meme.