Alberta, Natural Resources, and the Rest of Canada

Politics & Elections
684

How about them? Everyone has the right to peaceful protest. It was the courts that convicted the protestors – not some right-wing chimera of “evil government” – with hundreds of charges related to violating court orders, public mischief, long-term business disruption. public safety violations, and many other offenses. Many were jailed, and rightly so, because they engaged in criminal behaviour, and certainly not because they were “protesting”.

Which is why I added “and their objections satisfactorily addressed”.

This is a lot of distorted bullshit. The Clarity Act, as its name implies, was passed because the Quebec referendum question was deemed too ambiguous. The Alberta referendum question is perfectly clear, and also manifestly illegal.

And as much as I oppose Quebec separatists, their primary motivation is the preservation of their unique culture. Alberta doesn’t even have that feeble justification. The only motivation behind it is the delusion that in an independent Alberta, every resident would be incredibly wealthy based on oil and gas revenues, a rapidly declining resource that would soon leave Alberta as a third-rate banana republic, except without the climate to even grow bananas.

685

What are you talking about? It is entirely legal. According to the court, the process of consultation wasn’t followed, not that the question being asked is illegal. The clarity act itself says a clear question needs to be asked. That was based on the Supreme Courts decision in 1998. A clear question was being asked based entirely on that requirement. In fact, the entire process is legal other than the new requirements activist courts are placing on it now. And when they are met, or overturned, the legal process can proceed.

But I’ll tell you why they are difficult to be met. What consultation should the government of Alberta do with FN? Nothing has been determined, nothing has even been voted on. How can a consultation happen when the party doing the consulting has explicitly said they don’t agree with separation? People have repeatedly claimed that Smith is a separatist. If so and if the competing petition required a consultation, do you want her doing it on its behalf? And what does a vote on staying in Canada mean? A new deal, the status quo, what?

686

And Quebec passed Bill 99 as a counter to it.

687

Perhaps the UCP government shouldn’t have changed provincial laws (one of the MANY almost monthly changes the UCP did to routinely shield this special interest group of extremists) to explicitly allow approval of binding referendums with disregard to constitutional obligations.

The province should’ve met all it’s requirements before approving the “stay free” collection process. This is why treaty holders took “Stay Free”, and the provincial and federal governments to court immediately when collection was given the “OK” by the province.

Now we hear Smith going on and on attacking the Judiciary itself as undemocratic and subservient to her own powers, which is yet another step into complete fascist territory. But nothing really matters anymore to the UCP. Black is White, War is Peace, Private is Public Health Care. Has been for awhile now.

Here’s to all the Albertans who have spent the past day rallying in protest.

688

Yes, yes, we get it. You don’t like it when people exercise their democratic rights to petition their government when they differ from your opinion. Why not just say that?

689

I believe you might be misinterpreting what was said there. As he said no such thing.

What it appears is being said is:

We don’t like it when governments change the rules mid-stream to make it easier for separatists to collect signatures (lower the threshold, increase the time to collect)

We don’t like it when governments change the rules to hobble the ability of the folks who oversee these petitions to investigate credible reports of the largest data breach in Canadian history.

We don’t like it when representatives of government downplay this data breach, wherein the voter information of everyone in the province was given to a separatist group, who then shared it with literally hundreds of volunteers collecting signatures. No, it’s not “just like a phone book”, like the useful idiots keep repeating.

We don’t like it when the government delays a committee to decide what to do with a certified citizen’s initiative to stay in Canada. And then releases a press release about the decision of this committee while it’s still in session before they even vote. Does not sound very democratic.

We don’t like the constant repetition of the Premier that “700,000 people want a referendum” when this is obvious bullshit, given that 400,000 of them wanted the legislature to put this to bed last year, and of the 300,000 others, we have no idea how many of these signatures are legitimate; The figure is simply the claim of the separatists who stole the voter database and sent all these names to their volunteers.

You see, these are things we don’t like, rather than the straw man you constructed above.

690

Even if you’re agnostic on the issue of Albertan independence, we don’t like laws that are unconstitutional, and we don’t like politicians who don’t respect an independent judiciary.

691

And yet you continue to vote for such governments at the federal level. So don’t tell me this isn’t partisan. EP raised a whole number of issues above that I agree with that, on their own are concerning and should be dealt with, but are a distraction from why many Albertans want to leave.

692

Huh? That is a truly amazing take on the last two posts!

693

Here’s a summary of the key players in the Alberta Independence movement:

Mitch Sylvestre is the CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project, an organization focused on promoting Alberta sovereignty.

He was the proponent for the independence referendum petition.

He’s a proponent of many conspiracy theories, including:
“The New World Order is after white Christianity by the looks of it, it seems to me. They’re trying to replace us.”

He believes King Charles is out to kill him.

He thinks that The Handmaids Tale is an instruction booklet: “Our constitution, it says that you’re going to have to be born in Alberta to become a citizen,” he told the crowd at one event I attended. “So we’re going to have to get those girls making more babies.”

And of course, the covid rules drove him around the bend when it affected his personal business.:

He was never political before 2020.

“What changed?”

“COVID!” he said. “They shut me down and Canadian Tire and Walmart stayed open. That’s what did it.”

Jeff Rath is a Calgary-based lawyer and co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project.
In October 2022, a judge ordered costs of $235,000 against Rath and an associate for missing deadlines for affidavits, making redundant arguments and filing frivolous applications while acting for the Sturgeon Lake Cree.

An anti-vaxxer and covid denier, Rath used his standing as a lawyer and threatened criminal charges against members of the federal and provincial government for promoting Covid vaccines.

Rath has met several times with US officials to discuss getting American support for Alberta independence. He has claimed after these meetings that “U.S. officials are very enthusiastic about Alberta becoming an independent country.”
He has also claimed that U.S. officials have offered to provide a $500-billion loan to assist Alberta’s transition to a sovereign state and that the Americans promised to immediately recognize the province’s independence if the APP wins the referendum vote.

David Parker - leader of The Centurion Project, the separatist group at the center of the massive data breach of Alberta voter data. This group got the data illegally, and shared it with hundreds of volunteer canvassers with instructions to add names of friends, family and neighbours to the petition. The connections of the Centurion Project with Republican operatives to the south has raised some concern.

He has previous fines of over $120,000 for previous breaches of the Elections Act, which he refuses to pay.

He has refused to cooperate with the ensuing investigation by the RCMP, and has by some accounts fled the country.

He’s a dual citizen of Canada/USA.

Key quote from Parker: “Nothing is more laughable to me than the idea that Canadians think we are going to wait for them to tell us whether independence is ‘legal’ or not. We have America backing us, you fools.”

694

Also a group in the Netherlands :thinking: that has produced 20 youtube videos (garnering 40 million views) promoting Alberta separation and US annexation.

695

I would love to know who is paying these Netherlands youtubers. I have a guess.
Follow the money.

696

Brookfield?

697

Russia more likely

698

Indeed. Investigations have shown that Alberta separatism is supported covertly by Russia, and overtly and shamelessly by the Trump regime.

A year ago, weeks after the Carney Liberals won the last federal election, the website albertaseparatist.com sprang up, accompanied by similarly named TikTok and YouTube accounts.

Article headlines included “The case for sovereignty over statehood” and “Ottawa’s piggy bank wakes up” — but these sites don’t appear to have come from anywhere in Alberta.

Rather, researchers discovered the now defunct website and social media accounts likely came from a Russian covert influence network known as Storm-1516, known for making fictional websites that target audiences in various countries. And here, it targeted Canada and Alberta.

Both Russian and pro-Trump U.S. actors are amplifying and spreading misinformation about Alberta separatism in the hope of fraying Canadian unity and sowing distrust in key institutions and authorities, warns a new report released Wednesday.
Russia and U.S. amplifying Alberta separatist narratives to stoke division, distrust: report | CBC News

As for the Netherlands YouTube channels promoting Alberta separatism, it appears to be a related gang of criminals and a few profiteers, some of them unaware of what they’ve been sucked into as “voice actors”. YouTube has already taken down some of those channels as blatantly deceitful.

Seems that almost everything related to Alberta separatism seems to be linked to lies, criminality, and sordid corruption. But is anyone surprised?

699

CBC article about the Canadian citizenship status for new Alberta citizens. I say if you want Albertan citizenship, you renounce your Canadian citizenship.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-separation-passports-canadian-citizenship-9.7220110

700

Wow. I hope this was an attempt at a joke.

Because (for those that don’t know), PM Carney’s previous connection with the company Brookfield is one of those far right talking points that gets brought up in Every. Single. Political. Discussion. one tries to have with a conspiracy theory peddling person who used to hate Trudeau with the passion of a thousand burning suns, and then immediately hated Carney even though they did not know who he was last year.

701

I don’t know how they would solve that one. There would be 100s of thousands of people that voted to stay within Canada that could not afford to just pickup and move to another province. The majority of children born in the new country would also be descendants of Canadian citizens.

702

I think this is the tough one. If it was me negotiating, people would have the right to keep their Canadian citizenship as long as they didn’t take up Albertan citizenship even if they chose to remain physically in Alberta. If they choose Albertan citizenship, they lose Canadian citizenship along with the right of any descendants to claim automatic citizenship. If the descendants want to immigrate to Canada they can apply like any other potential immigrant.

It’s up to Alberta if they have reciprocal policy, but I wouldn’t have any say in that.

If Alberta wants a divorce, there is a price that must be paid.

703

My conspiracy theory doesn’t hold water, even though their is no doubt Carney worked for them and holds shares with them, but your Russian conspiracy theory, with no evidence at all, is supposedly valid.

When will you admit that Albertans have legitimate grievances and, rather than denigrate people for trying to fix them, address those?