SAINTS PRESERVE US
L’Affaire Alberta
One problem with the digital transmission of correspondence is that sometimes people who aren’t supposed to read it can. The current White House administration can attest to this. The cause is usually user error shared exponentially and which is very different from predicated active snooping like steaming opening envelopes. Funny what you come across on social media.
Recently I read through the registration form for the Alberta USA Movement, a “flash mob cookout” to be held on a ranch near Camrose, AB which is southeast of Edmonton, less than an hour’s speed limit drive. The e-mail document could be a fake, but given the state of Alberta these days, unlikely. Regulations specified that Canadian flags were verboten! US ones only! A minor quibble like that could prove irksome to unvaccinated Trucker Convoy veterans who co-opted the Canadian flag as a symbol of protest.
Camrose is one of those Alberta towns whose reason for existing is now a little distant, hazy. It is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, so it’s five years older than the province. It was a regional railway hub when regional railways existed. It’s all services now: education, health and retail for locals and surrounding ranches and farms. It’s main street, Main Street, has been designated historic, quaint and eclectic. There’s a refurbished art deco movie theatre, a hotel with a tavern, and a Chinese restaurant. There’s always a Chinese restaurant. Main Street began to wither in the 70s when developers erected a mall just outside of town on Highway 13. The mall began to wither when developers erected stand-alone big box retailers beside it and on the other side of 13. Camrose is The Last Picture Show, Winesburg, Ohio and Hal Ketchum’s despairingly catchy “Small Town Saturday Night”: ...you know the world must be flat, 'cause when people leave town they never come back...
Annexation by a convulsing superpower will fix everything. This mentality makes the separatism movement in Alberta very different from that of Quebec’s. Quebec’s separatists demand solitude. Alberta’s secessionists crave some sort of Christian Mingle hook up as comforting as a mom tending to a scrape with a Q-Tip dab of Mercurochrome, a Band-Aid and a kiss. The way things weren’t but could’ve been. In that other god they trust because the only way forward is backward, leveraging complaints and inflating grudges.
Meanwhile, the “Elbows Up!” federal election campaign is underway. It’s proving to be the most memorable one in my years as an eligible voter because the main issues supersede traditional internal bickering. The very nation is being threatened by a friend and ally. Trust has been broken. So much so that even Quebec is exhibiting signs of Canadian nationalism. It’s strictly a two-party race and I suspect the result will be a Conservative or Liberal majority government. Majority governments are rare birds of late. Black is white, up is down.
Closer to home, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith spent the weekend in Florida where she attended a Prager University Foundation gala. Prager, a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, is as scholastic as Trump University. She also revealed to Breitbart News (Hello Steve Bannon! How was prison? A healthier stint than Jeffrey Epstein’s I’ll bet!) that a Canadian Conservative government would be more aligned with the views of the current White House administration (I since understand der Trumpenfuhrer is jury-rigging a mechanism for an unconstitutional third term). Her intended “Midas Touch” endorsement which might prove the “Kiss of Death” to the Conservative campaign. Reading the room in a closed United Conservative Party town hall meeting in a Camrose motel banquet facility is a little different from having a middle finger on the Canadian pulse.
Premier Smith, advocate for and author of the “Alberta Sovereignty Act” and slave to her simplistic populist ideology (the “Calgary School” to political scientists), is destined to be remembered as either a heroic diplomat, think Chamberlain in Munich (that worked), or something akin to one of the more salacious footnotes in the Starr Report which went rather deep probing President Clinton’s daily dalliances with a smitten White House intern (Hi Monica!).
Now, the time has come for me to get my drag rags on and perform as a Spice Girl for Premier Smith: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want! I’m speculating now, but I think Premier Smith wished to attend that Camrose cookout. Tricky optics, though. I think the elephant in the Alberta government’s cabinet room is Republican. I think this province’s government has a covert agenda that’s as dirty as a coal mine or an abandoned oil well. I think it’s time for this government to come clean.
Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.