Danielle Smith promises Alberta separation referendum if signatures warrant
Danielle Smith promises Alberta separation referendum if signatures warrant | Globalnews.ca
What a great distraction from her ongoing scandals.
Anyone in Alberta who thinks separating will help Alberta is an idiot. If you join the US, you'll be Puerto Rico Norte, exploited for resources and excluded from the Union. If you think Trump will honor any deal he makes I don't even know what to say to you.
If you go it alone you'll be a landlocked nation of 4 million, with absolutely no leverage against the two big economies surrounding you.
Hell, even if they do this referendum and it fails, you've lost your negotiating leverage with Canada because we'll all see how it's an empty threat.
Quebec is clear eyed enough to see now is not the time to talk about separation.
While as stupid as separation is when the biggest Albertan customer is already gouging the province in oil prices, I really think it's the scandals we should really be concentrating on.
This is all just a distraction, and Albertans need to call for a public inquiry on all the corruption allegations, the healthcare scandal, her bribery charges, etc. A ten second search and the number of scandals and allegations regarding this person is staggering and makes Doug Ford look like he's just stealing cookies from the public in comparison.
Albertans should use the lowered threshold to get referendums to get a referendum on exiling Danielle Smith.
Or at least demanding she resign. I bet there's more support for that than for separation. You should all do it.
Nenshi is waiting in the wings for that election.
We're working on it.
We should set her on an ice flow and see how climate change treats it/her
American here. If you're an Albertan, and you really think you'll get a better deal down here, then I have a bridge to sell you, and a ticket to CECOT.
Elbows up, my friends and neighbors to the north. The stupidity is being exported.
Gods I'm so sick of these clowns acting as people with jobs when what they really do is shout nonsense and waste taxpayer's money.
I don't know why it's called a seperation when they'd clearly be joining America. I'm having a hard time fathoming how this isn't treason with the thinnest veil ever.
I am not a lawyer, but by my understanding, treason's pretty narrowly defined as being involved in armed insurrection, assisting the enemy in time of war, or passing official secrets to an enemy country. If Smith has done anything like that, she's managed to keep it very quiet. If she has, at any time, advocated the use of force to drive the federal government out of Alberta, she may have committed a different (also very serious) crime, sedition. I'm sure there are people trying to figure that out right now.
If she hasn't done any of that, she's in the same position as Quebec separatist politicians back in the day: stupid, misguided, and trying to harm the country, but technically not treasonous.
In the event she did hold a referendum and not enough of the remaining sane Albertans turned out to vote in it, the federal government would be best served by quietly dragging its feet on the messy proceedings required to let them leave (while pointedly going through the motions of setting up temporary border checkpoints), bombarding the population with propaganda, and hope that by the time Smith's term ends, buyer's remorse has made things swing the other way.
If signatures warrant? That’s hilarious. She’d do it if it got less than 1% of the population to sign.
1% sounds about right given who benefits from the kinds of policies she advicates for 🤷
“To be clear from the outset, our government will not be putting a vote on separation from Canada on the referendum ballot,” Smith said on Monday.
“However, if there is a successful citizen-led referendum petition that is able to gather the requisite number of signatures requesting such a question to be put on a referendum, our government will respect the democratic process and include that question on the 2026 provincial referendum ballot, as well.”
...and if they can't get the required number of signatures, they'll just keep lowering the requirements until they do. "With respect to the citizen-led democratic process", of course.
We won’t won’t pursue a referendum on separation unless…?😳
Part of me wants to get it over with so we can answer the referendum with 95% telling her to go swivel, and hopefully put this nonsense to bed once and for all.
The other part of me dreads what shenanigans she'd get up to trying to distort that number.
Just a warning from a Brit: that's what we thought would happen with the Brexit referendum, but then we fucked it up.
The opinion polls for Brexit were a lot closer to 50/50 than Alberta separatism is.
I understand but I wouldn't trust this either. She's shown she'll go to extreme lengths to get what she/the far right wants and it's a lot easier to push that at a provincial level than at a federal one, I think.
In the case of a referendum I'd be far more worried about the well funded right-wing disinformation apparatus that will kick it's grift into high gear.
Brexit was heavily influenced by the same machinery, except it's grown more sophisticated since that time.
We couldn't even vote to do away with daylight savings time...NO ONE WANTS DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME BUT ALBERTANS VOTES TO KEEP IT. Zero faith in Albertans to make the right call on this.
If she linked getting rid of daylight savings time with separatism I would be seriously conflicted when casting my ballot.
I'm of the opinion, that if the wrong actions are taken, we're in the opening stage of what is essentially another Crimean Crisis.
and the Crimean Crisis directley led to full scale war less than 10 years later
Because what everyone wants right now is to return to the polls….
There seems to be a degree of confidence here that they wouldn't choose to leave. Don't be so sure. BC and Saskatchewan may vary a bit politically, but Alberta (with the exception of the two urban centres) has pretty much solidly been in the camp of "fuck the rest of the country, we got ours" for as far back as I can remember... and I'm 46.
They can't actually leave. The lands are indigenous and have not been ceded to the province or the crown. There are treaties allowing the crown to use them (in this case, as the province of Alberta), but basically it's as though I've got a tenant in a bedroom saying he's going to keep the bedroom, stop paying rent, and he owns it now.
hé, I'm in Québec, I'd need a nice ride in buses with thousands of others Canadians to tell Alberta we love them!
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/the-week-that-was
This has a nice prediction on Canada 1/3 down the page, where they will use this crisis to push an energy corridor east.
Obviously a 25% tariff on steel and manufacturing in Canada is a death knell for the east, and only a 10% tariff on oil puts Alberta in a favorable position. Which pit provinces against one another, ensuring Carney would win, and would be favorable to push a pipeline for LNG. To ultimately defund Russia.
Carney is in a meeting right now and they are praising each other like crazy. Its quite absurd actually given how Trudeau was treated.