SAINTS PRESERVE US

W(h)ither Alberta?

Oh, for Christ’s sake. What now?

Alberta premier Danielle Smith last week announced a provincial referendum about holding another referendum. Their subjects are secession. Should Alberta exit the Canadian federation, cede its place in a wealthy G7 country imperfect as every other member of the club?

Smith’s United Conservative Party is a big top operation. The circus analogy is not unwarranted. The blue and white pavilion with its rodeo dirt floor harbours fiscal and social conservatives, special interest groups, “lake of fire” evangelicals and a lunatic fringe who fret about gun laws, chemtrails and replacement theory. Alberta separatists constitute a fifth column within the UCP. They have infiltrated the party, riding associations, Smith’s caucus and ministerial staff. This is all well and good except that separation (or its chicken game threat) was not a UCP platform plank during the last provincial election. Voters may have wished to have been informed. Elections are not raffles, hastily scribbled policy slips drawn from a cowboy hat.

Compare Alberta’s UPC to Quebec’s separatist Parti Quebecois. The PQ does not obfuscate its agenda. The electorate is aware of what is always on the table should it grant the party the privilege of governing. The PQ’s argument is a complaint of distinction, a different nation trapped within a larger one. Very Balkan. The UCP’s fifth column whinge is, in this sense, meritless. Both groups, eastern and western, revel in victimhood and they share words like “oppression” and “humiliation.” Their common enemy is Ottawa. Perception is everything.

Confident and competent governments should just tick along like a home furnace in the dead of winter. It does its job, no fuss, nothing to notice or worry about. Sound policies address the issues of the day. Really good governments may even look beyond the fortunes of the party and the election cycle. Incompetent governments distract from the pressing unaddressed issues of the day by conjuring political phantoms and foo fighters only to botch their needless solutions. Smith leads a party and a government devoid of a single core competency.

Smith is a proponent of “direct democracy.” Referenda circumvent the democratic system. The pro argument is that the people are heard at a pitch beyond the tenor of their legislative assembly member. As Brexit has shown, the people know. Here in Alberta’s capital city, casual morning bus stop conversation always touches on the linguistic nuances of the British North America Act and Statute of Westminster. And federal transfer payments and the fucking hockey team. Madam Premier covers it all on her weekly radio call-in show, unconstitutional plastic straws, encroaching bicycle lanes and everything.

Smith is one of those politicians who transform engaged citizens into cynics. She is a party-jumper and a floor-crosser. Her Quebec counterpart is former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard, once a trusted consigliere of former Tory PM Brian Mulroney’s. Shiny objects, brass rings, are so alluring to political magpies. The penultimate prize, heading a province but not the country, demands backroom politicking: patronizing, pandering and promising.

One suspects Smith is more DENSA than MENSA. She would play Russian roulette with five bullets in the chamber of a six-shooter. The bold timidity of staging a referendum about a referendum to appease the backrows within the circumference of the UCP circus tent suggests some midnight parsing of an AI-generated overview of Machiavellian machinations although dithering and symbolic dog-whistle bones may preclude updating her C.V.

UCP president Rob Smith, no relation to the Banshee of Invermectin, has been quoted in the press as saying the Party has to official stance on a potential Albertastan. The UCP does not stand for anything apparently, ill-conceived and uninformed direct democracy excepted. He was confident that a majority of its members will vote for separation.

The immediate goal of Alberta’s separatists is a Czechoslovakian-style “Velvet Divorce” delivered at Amazon Prime speed. That will never happen. And should this disparate menagerie of malcontents present however unlikely as a unified bloc, the ultimate goal is full admission in to the corrupt and decaying empire south of the Medicine Line (it is easier to move bitumen north-south sans the irksome formalities of international borders). Perhaps they would settle for becoming a US territory, Guam North.

The future is unwritten and often surprising. But the likely outcome of this divisive and nonsensical ploy is the disintegration of the UCP as a viable political entity. And that will be on Smith’s watch. And that will be a good thing for forward-thinking, progressive Albertans.

            

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! My latest novel Sunset Oasis Confidential is available in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Collect the set!