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https://unifixion.substack.com/p/political-boundaries-are-no...
What would happen if a landlocked town within Alberta wants to rejoin Canada- how would you handle that?
All the Oil Sands land is treaty land, so First Nations get it if we leave.
Nice NED propaganda.
Unless you get everyone with a stake on board, which is hard, and accept it will take a long while to unwind, it's irresponsible. And if you aren't willing to do that work, just pack your bags and leave.
Claimed identity isn't a suicide pact and consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed.
AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development. The justifications for those policies (whether you agree with them or not) matter less than the fact they're being imposed from a condition of moral hazard.
Hence, the people of AB might vote to ban the people of ON/QC from imposing their laws; that's what separation is and why it happens.
Not only that, but the Feds typically use their outsized tax revenue from Alberta to “invest” in Quebec to buy votes via propping up unviable businesses, subsidies, outsized proportion of public sector jobs, and federal spending in general.
I find it sort of fascinating because people really do have a fanaticism about this that they don't have for other political artifacts. Nationalism is a powerful force. And people will special-plead themselves silly arguing why one group should be given self-determinism and others shouldn't, including invoking federal laws, untestable predictions about future events, etc. But when it comes to other politics, they revert back to a globalist position.
On the flip side, separatists are often driven by nationalistic interests as well - look at Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries as fantastic examples of this.
"Alberta to hold fall referendum on whether to have binding referendum on separating from Canada" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-separation-r...
https://xcancel.com/DonBraid/status/1187052993788559360
This is about more than just money though.
Politically the west is underrepresented and the cultural difference between the West and the rest of Canada is very significant - unless you ask folks from Ontario who have never been to AB. In my opinion, Canada is too geographically and culturally diverse for a central government to have so much power.
Huh? 37% of the eligible voters, much less the population, voted yes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_U...
If you only have 45% of your population votes, regardless of reason, you aren't actually getting the public opinion.
One of the "separatist" leaders is hiding from the law in Texas. He can stay there.
If there was any legitimacy in this process, the petition that got 150% of the votes in less time would have been addressed first rather than this sham, likely fake one, run by bad actors provably funded by foreign entities.
We've seen some interesting cases of this, in Spain and in the Donbas of the last years.
I think the outcome of people voting against it is a great outcome. You have the freedom. You paid for the vote (its expensive) and "they" did not win. Hurray for unity at the highest level.
"Voting with your feet" is an option available to almost everyone except North Koreans.
When you leave you cut all important ties to the polity, you surrender your ability to participate in democratic processes and you revoke control over yourself and your property. It’s the nearest thing to direct violence you can do without crossing that line
Regardless, "voting with your feet" is an individual action. Voting at home is a collective one, representing the will of not just you but the people from the place that you come from and were born into. Only one of those reflects the ideals of democracy, if that's really the ideal being strived for
I'm not at all sure if voting to splice a country should be a thing you can do, maybe there is more merit in some international right to a proportional vote on something (no FPTP system) so you get better representation of all opinions, but simply saying "you can always go somewhere else" seems a bit too simple
Democracy hasn't been hardened against social media and I'd prefer not to be another failed experiment like Brexit where we allow for foreign money to intentionally damage society.
Yes it feels wrong for the US to be giving money to influencers to influence the vote, but it's not like those voters are being coerced. In their opinion, Alberta would be better as a separate country.
Whether that opinion is enlightened or not has no bearing on it being democratic or not.
Which one is that?
One of the separatist leaders was found guilty of misappropriating more than 1.3 million CAD from his elderly aunt and uncle’s bank accounts:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/dennis-modry-misappropriated-...
~465,000 legally verified signatories to the federalist petition to declare Alberta permanently part of Canada
~360,000 status First Nations persons within Alberta
~330,000 legally unverified signatories to the separatist petition to hold a referendum to separate from Canada
First Nations have successfully argued in court that as consultations with them are required by the Canadian Constitution, no such consultations had even been suggested by separatists.
Apart from the fact that the Alberta population is ~4 million, it is difficult to see how separatists can figure they'd win a referendum to separate.
We've unfortunately been putting up with these leaders doing this sort of thing too long and let the rural part of this province dictate far too much.
FWIW, I even bought myself a membership to try and do at least a small part to prevent this a decade ago, but that was impossible. People have truely lost their minds here and it's bizarre to talk to people that were once rational.
> First Nations have successfully argued in court that as consultations with them are required by the Canadian Constitution, no such consultations had even been suggested by separatists.
IMHO as an outside observer, if the current question is 'should we commence the legal process to have a binding referrendum', having consultations now is inappropriate. They would be part of the process to have a binding referrendum and so they must either be done or not after the results of this referrendum.
This month, one judge ruled that you also can't have a referrendum to start the process to have a referrendum on seccession. It seems there is time for appeals before the election in October.
Assuming the full bench affirms this ruling, I guess the next step for the petitioner would be to have a referrendum to start the process to have a referrendum to start the process to have a final referrendum?
If the government is unwilling to start the process itself; it seems that there's no way for citizen referrendum to force the issue? Seperately, I agree it seems unlikely for the referrendum to pass if the government is unwilling to start the process by itself, but politics isn't always clear.
Isn't the important number not the total population, but the number of people who show up to vote?
I'm very open to tribal sovereignty in deciding what whether to remain in in Canada, but that should apply to tribal territory, not holding the majority of the population of the territory hostage.
They are part of Canada.
Treaties 6, 7, and 8 clearly ceded indigenous lands to the Crown, and the Indian Act spells out the relationship between First Nations and Canada. Further, the Constitution Act, 1982, contains Section 25 of the Charter Of Rights And Freedoms articulating ''Aboriginal And Treaty Rights''
/sarcasm
To be fair, the failure is on the UK governance itself, not on Brexit. Other major EU economies like France and Germany have seen similar economic trajectories since 2020 as the post-Brexit UK, despite them still being in the EU. The post-2020 Covid and Ukraine crisis are difficult to isolate from Brexit to know if it's just Brexit alone or the world economic situation fucking everyone regardless since then.
Sure, Brexit probably didn't help, but looking at where Germany is now, I feel like UK handled the cold-turkey exit from the union far better than anyone expected.
This is complicated by the fact that First Nations themselves are highly stratified. They receive billions in dollars from the federal government with zero oversight so corruption is rampant.
So what happens if a majority of First Nations people want to separate but the chiefs in charge of a particular band don't?
It's like the pipeline issue in British Columbia... Bands and their elected officials voted to allow pipelines, then some "hereditary chiefs" associated with environmentalist groups convinced courts that their opinion carries the same weight as elected chiefs and the court blocked pipeline projects.
In Canada there's layers of un-elected government officials and activist judges who seem more concerned with getting federal funding (aka. kickbacks aka. bribes) than any sort of democratic notions.
Citation needed. Good luck
Does "activist judge" mean the same thing in Canada that it does in the United States: "Any judge who rules against my position?"
Also:
dismalaf
Name checks out.
It seems you're implying something here that is comically ridiculous. Like some sort of crocodile-tear for natives who are unheard, but thankfully you've got their back.
Natives overwhelmingly reject both Quebec and Alberta separatism. Quebec is old news so I'll ignore that, so instead lets stick to Alberta.
The Alberta separatism movement (~30%, which is about the same as the MAGA base in the US, and they are largely interchangeable and driven by the same racism and stupidity, and the MAGA base is hugely the reason this is all happening, grotesquely interfering in Canada) is overwhelmingly filled with right-wing, racist, backwards hicks. The idea of being dragged along with the goals of those people is utterly orthogonal to the best interest of natives, for blatantly obvious reasons.
>Bands and their elected officials voted to allow pipelines, then some "hereditary chiefs" associated with environmentalist groups convinced courts that their opinion carries the same weight as elected chiefs and the court blocked pipeline projects
You mean the pipeline that is currently fully built and operating at triple capacity? THAT pipeline? Or the many other pipelines that have been built, where resource extraction is higher than it has been in history?
Or maybe you're talking about the coast to coast pipeline that would have been built under the national energy program that Alberta not only rejected, but they use as the basis of their rage to this day (while simultaneously bashing their fists about not having a coast to coast pipeline).
The result is that the details of how complex those problems are get ignored or their impact is represented in a diminished way.
In this case currency, debt, indigenous rights/claims and existing legislation are some examples of what is being glossed over and ignored.
For currency, The Maldives, with a relatively small population and tiny GDP has their own currency. What is the difficulty in currency? Ignoring the fact that AB would probably just use the greenback.
All of these of these issues are surmountable.
Does not mean "easy". It means they can be overcome.
If they opted to go with the USD, they'd have to trade all their CAD - which will undoubtedly take a huge hit if they separated.
I still think that separatists would say that Alberta doesn't have to deal with a share of the debt and that would be a sticking point.
51st state with the USD absorbing the excess productivity however? It comes down to the negotiations. Right now, huge Albertan budget surpluses get sent to Ottawa to be spent outside of Alberta (largely as a carrot to inhibit other independence movements), which is what motivates the Albertan independence movement. Any Albertans would hope the US to be more egalitarian.
However, the US might put them over a barrel and make similar revenue flows a condition of joining, which would be the smart play for Washington (possibly with some tariff and travel restrictions sticks if they don't). If the 47 admin is bankrolling the content farms producing this independence movement (as Orban was the Daily Wire) then the US has all upsides.
Canada fractured and easier to loot and Alberta entirely undefended from looting. Somehow, I expect that the only Canadians recognising this attack surface are a few bureaucrats too low down in Ottawa to get their voices out and that the parties will just try to fight the anti-independence tactics in the culture war moralising style of the now-departed Freeland, which is a decade out of date and powerless to sway the Albertans.
.
Generalising away from just Canada, one of the great weaknesses of liberal parties worldwide is electoralism. They cannot look at the electorate they have over their desire for the electorate they'd prefer they had. To paraphrase PG, if you don't ditch people who prefer being right to winning you'll deserve the outcome they produce for you.
Is Alberta taxed at a higher rate than other provinces? Nothing in the top few hits on Google indicates this to be the case.
And I'm not sure how the US would be different - all states pay the same federal income tax rates, whether that's individual or business income.
The eastern part of BC would want to join AB in leaving but that topic is totaly squashed in BC public discourse and media. Privately is a different story.
It's like the eastern part of Oregon and their relationship to Portland as a good US comparable.
She was openly going around all standard democratic and diplomatic protocols and holding private meetings with the American executive in Florida.
That is not part of democracy, unless you are simply calling it the corrupted part.
It doesn’t need to be. 10% of the population being able to put major policies to a referendum is a bit silly.
I think it's fantastic, actually. If the US had such a mechanism in place, we'd get term limits passed in a jiffy! In the absence of such a mechanism, the political class can simply refuse to act on popular measures. And while 10% might seem like a small number, the time, effort, and organization required to get 1/10th of the entire population to sign on for such a measure is actually a huge undertaking.
Legally, leaving required an Act of Parliament. To hold a binding referendum, they would have had to pass an Act that says "here are the exact details of how we'll leave the EU, coming into force if the referendum passes".
But that would have required them to figure out all the exact details of what it means to leave the EU, and they didn't bother - they just held the referendum and assumed they could figure out the details later if Leave won, which they didn't expect would happen.
We all saw how well that worked out.
> there was sufficient political capital to push it through without a follow up vote.
This seriously overstates how smoothly things went between 23/6/2016 and 31/1/2020
EDIT: oh, there is a process. thats the Clarity Act. This seems extremely surprising - I've never heard of this sort of thing before with any other country.
It's a little surprising - even as a Canadian - if you're unfamiliar with Canadian politics/history/civics, but Canada is more loosely held together than most other countries, including the US. And a comparison with the US is instructive, because Canada's founders were unifying the country the wake of the US Civil War and were working very much in response to it: there was a fear that the US would turn imperial in an exercise of national unity and begin trying to snatch up the rest of the continent from the British and a belief that the British wouldn't care to defend them, which was arguably the primary motivation for Confederation: to form a unified front against American expansionism. And the Fathers of Confederation had seen how horrible the Civil War was and wanted to prevent that sort of thing from occurring, so the provinces - like in the US, formerly independent colonies - were given more power than the States, with the separation of powers clearly and rigidly defined.
The Clarity Act itself wasn't part of Confederation, but that's the cultural legacy that informs it: a civilized process allowing provinces to separate without bloodshed is just about as fundamentally Canadian as anything.
So it can be argued that the Clarity Act is a way to legislate friction to defederation.
Of course Quebec (and like Albertan) separatists hold that all this is moot and that they can self-govern as they wish following a referendum. Others look at the "no-deal" Brexit as a template.
If it really came down to it, i think it would be the supreme court that decides.
(Cue the "AB is nothing", "AB has no culture", folks that don't have a clue what they are talking about).
Does there need to be a legal process? If Albertans are willing to fight a war over it then all they need to do is declare that they don't recognize Ottawa's authority anymore and then go about trying to get other countries to recognize their independence.
And they aren't first pushing becoming a token raped resource of the US, because that is massively unpopular. Instead they're pushing a magical "super Canadians within Canada but also not beholden to those libs and I get to pardon people" middle ground.
This is all so comically transparent and obvious.
Oh and fun fact -- a "Forever Canada" petition gained far more signatures, far quicker (and without people stealing election lists or faking signatures). Smith's UCP stalled and sat on it, but then raced to follow the "democratic will" of the tiny subset of Albertans that are calling for separation.
I understand that Albertan Canadians stick with leaders like UCP because that's their only conservative choice, but this is going to turn out incredibly poorly for you. Even this stupid question is purposefully ambiguous enough that any answer can be construed as "yes, leave".
I googled the Clarity Act and it appears to be recently-passed US (not Canadian) legislation about regulating cryptocurrencies or something. What's its relevance here?
I am not Canadian and know nothing about Canadian politics. Someone please enlighten me.
A second petition by "Stay Free Alberta" asked the government to hold a referendum on separating. However, it was blocked by a judge because a previously ruling basically said that separating would violate treaty rights of Indigenous peoples in Alberta. It's also fraught with controversy as the individuals running the petition were able to (likely illegally) obtain the voter rolls for every Albertan. They used it to build an online tool to track their progress. There is speculation (without evidence since the signatures on the petition is not public) that they simply used it to fill out the petition for people they knew. There are pieces of evidence that point to this being a possibility, for example, a Stay Free Alberta leader claimed that in some communities, nearly 98% of residents signed the petition. These are generally right leaning communities, however, getting 98% of people in a community to do a single thing would be incredibly hard.
Exactly. Albertans are scratching their heads, wondering what on earth Premier Smith is trying to accomplish. Utterly ridiculous ''solution'' to some internal problems within her party, I'm guessing.
TLDW: There are some Dutch guys hiring Americans to pretend to be Canadians to put out YouTube slop videos to make money via AdSense on the political-idiot-doomer niche on YouTube (and at least 1 is selling a "make quick money" guide to the scheme). Whether they're just a grifting pyramid or if there are other sources of income driving it is not made clear. Though they insist its entertainment and not paid-for political motivated content (note had they admitted that they'd be in breach of various laws and ToS')
The real issue is that these platforms have commoditized rumor in a way that gets around our cultural taboos about the practice.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/05/20/investigations/a...
This is clear foriegn political interfierence. It's like mini-brexit. We have a weak, incompitent leader in Alberta who is giving in to her right-wing base so she can stay in power. It's David Cameron all over again.
Russia and its proxies ran an active measures campaign in the UK. If the US government isn’t doing something similar, the toxic soup of the maga-sphere definitely is.
Genuinely debatable. The total economic destruction of Brexit has been far higher than anything Alberta would suffer. And geopolitically, Alberta wouldn’t take itself off the table the way the English have basically rendered the UK irrelevant.
And better than anywhere in Europe for Tech with Deepmind and Ineffable Intelligence there.
It still shares many of the same mistakes as Europe though - e.g. now having to buy Russian oil and gas again instead of using the North Sea oil, not expanding nuclear power, rampant welfare and council housing corruption, etc.
> The addresses of around 2,000 Albertans
> Lorne Gibson, former Election Commissioner at Elections Alberta: “The data is worth probably millions of dollars. It's probably worth at least $3 million.” “It’s the largest data breach in Canada. I haven’t heard of anything that surpasses that scale,” he added.
Not gonna lie, the Commissioner’s remarks and the general tone wouldn’t be out of place in a South Park episode about Canada, hah.
This feels familiar.
> Smith acknowledged some of those concerns on Thursday, arguing that the federal government has tried to "move towards a more centralised American-style system" and is infringing on provincial jurisdiction.
Ah interesting. I always thought US is rather decentralized with each state with its own government and laws and such. But I guess that's when compared with individual European countries, not Canada.
Then, I wonder if they would like to still have a king https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada as a new country, or would they drop that as well? If they want to drop that, that faction could lean into the current US current protest movement and put up "No Kings" signs and hold rallies and such. It would be good enough for a chuckle at least.
Maybe before being president was a daily ego boost in taking over the news
I guess this makes sense, since the traitor/seditionist and freedom-fighter/revolutionary labels are entirely dependant on your affiliation with the associated country. But a lot of Americans have strong negative reactions to this idea, or the idea of Brexit, but almost certainly support their own founding fathers who were likewise traitors to the British Empire.
It did come up. It's referenced in the Supreme Court of Canada case on secession. https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1643/in...
"Consistent with this long tradition of respect for minorities, which is at least as old as Canada itself, the framers of the Constitution Act, 1982 included in s. 35 explicit protection for existing aboriginal and treaty rights, and in s. 25, a non-derogation clause in favour of the rights of aboriginal peoples. The "promise" of s. 35, as it was termed in R. v. Sparrow, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1075, at p. 1083, recognized not only the ancient occupation of land by aboriginal peoples, but their contribution to the building of Canada, and the special commitments made to them by successive governments. The protection of these rights, so recently and arduously achieved, whether looked at in their own right or as part of the larger concern with minorities, reflects an important underlying constitutional value."
This is not a concern in Quebec, because the overwhelming majority of it is ceded land.
If ducks had two wheels, they'd be bicycles, and if there was anything in common between the two provinces, you might have a point.
The treaties were made in perpetuity, and if you are going to not hold up the crown's end of the promises, the FN's side - giving the crown and Alberta governance over the land - needs to be reverted as well.
Contracts require both sides to adhere to them.
you might want to do some amount of research before accusing the french ...
who by far out of the colonial powers had the best relationship with indigenous people in north america, and whos relationships created a new culture blending french and indigenous cultures together into the Metis,
... of genocide.
You might think this if the only language you can read is English.
- Singapore (Malaysia) 1965
- Montenegro (Serbia) 2006
- Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) 1993
- Iceland (Denmark) 1944
However, these are rare as most secession events are violent. Establishing a new country typically requires a revolution, and there is more support for that broadly in Canada for various reasons than any single province. The Alberta referendum is a polite signal and a test.
The boomer generation and it's broadly left politics is dying off, meaning that the LPC and NDP need to replenish their electoral support to stay in power. It is uncontroversial that they have been doing this using radical immigration policies and throwing money away, particularly via the abuse of definitions of "temporary," and "asylum." Political interference by both India (exporting their independence problem) and China (creating a resource vassal) is undeniable at this point. Canadians with a stake in the country are quite reasonably concerned that their society is being demolished and replaced.
Will they revolt, and could it succeed? It depends on whether they get US sponsorship or not. The more interesting question than the Alberta theater is whether Canada revolts and establishes a republic, or whether it gets annexed by the US or the EU. Alberta is just a canary for these other scenarios, imo.
Trace it back a bit, and you'll find that there's nothing to this that isn't driven by the Department of State.
Whether it's a good idea is a different question. I doubt most Albertans want to be independent. I also think being a landlocked country with a resource economy means that you will always be subject to outside control, whether that be parliament in Ottawa or corporate offices in Dallas. It remains unclear if being independent will solve the issue of Alberta being land-locked.
especially when theres a matching culture in texas, and there's constant travel back and forth between the two, both for the oil-men and the cowboys
It's not a thing.
Hatred or criticism of Toronto and Ontario at large is a thing. But that's a thing everywhere. It's a fundamental part of the Canadian identity.
if age is a disqualifying factor, hating on toronto cant be a fundamental part of the canadian identity
>now Canadians will get a taste of their own medicine courtesy of the Trump admin.
Ah so no, you're just in the higher end of the sinking canoe laughing at the people who are drowning.
Whether Palestinians have a national identity or not, driving them out of their homes at gunpoint and settling in is a war crime.
Albertans, while obviously the most disadvantaged and persecuted Canadians in recorded history, have not yet had anyone commiting genocide or war crimes against them.
Um what?
the separatists are the people that heard trump say that, and said YES PLEASE
Most Canadians who are upset with the status quo are leaving or have already left. Last year saw a record amount of Canadians move to the US.
The referendum? Or calling for imprisoning people for wrongthink?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/analysis-alberta-sepa...
The U.S., as you very well know, has a long history of influencing foreign separatist movements for its own benefit. It even has overt organizations like the NED, which had a DOGE defunding theater but is still funded and deleted its detailed activities from its website. There are many other ways of funneling influencer money.
When the Soviet Union did similar things to the U.S., that activity was called "treason", as you also very well know.
The really galling thing here is that as an American you would absolutely never tolerate a country like, say, China, supporting, both monetarily and otherwise, a group agitating for California to leave the union. You'd all call that treason loudly and proudly, but now that your country is doing it to someone else suddenly we have to slow-roll this.
On a per capita basis, 50x more Canadians move to the US than the other way round.
It's more than just a thing.
Anyone can claim refugee status. That doesn’t make them refugees.
Being a refugee requires showing persecution that one can’t find relief for within the country’s own system [1]. Given Canada has a functioning court system, the second part of the definition is failed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...
Nobody thought there was any realistic chance of the UK leaving the EU either...
Likewise, you could say that NYC and LA should singularly secede from America by that same logic.
It doesn't track. There is no legal precedent. Alberta as an entity did not exist beyond Canada.
Legal precedent doesn't really matter here. If Alberta wants to leave and they're willing to fight a war over it, then that's up to them. USA already went through this once.
U.S.A. ''life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness''
Canada ''peace, order, and good government''
Those are fundamental to the identity of each nation's people. Are they core beliefs of the majority of their citizens? Probably. Are Canadians ready to fight a civil war over Alberta separatism? Not at this point, even slightly.
Oil & gas fields, and wells, are distributed over much of Alberta.
https://static.aer.ca/prd/documents/catalog/Map90_Oil_Gas_Fi...
without doubt there is a main concentration around Lloydminister though, and the developed oil sands at least are all in one place
kinda red deer ish? west of the queen e?
the actual oil industry and workers are either in the cities, or from out of province, and work seasonally-ish on the oil fields. dunno if its true anymore, but there used to be a joke that it was all newfies, who'd work just long enough to get unemployment, then head back home til it runs out, then around again.
Neither group has any particular incentive to have alberta be independent, nor a US state. The businesses might want to replace the newfies and albertans with more predictable undocumented latino labour, but they dont have experience in how to do that or hide say, injuries, from the government.
that said, a vote still isnt a bad thing - itll shower alberta with federal attention to get things alberta wants, like pipelines east, west, and north, and Id love to have the alberta grid connected to newfie hydro, rather than having quebec sell newfie power to americans