Jen Gerson: Saddle up, Alberta. We're referendum-ing

The UCP has become a party of snivelling, weak little thieves who operate by night.

By: Jen Gerson

So I guess we’re doing this, eh?

I mean, of course Alberta is holding a secession referendum. It’s Alberta; the province that consistently exhibits the inverse of one of Paul Wells’ most-famed Rule of Politics. To wit: “1: For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.”

Okay, well. Yeehaw, I guess. Alberta hits different.

I suppose I’ll be doomed to die here — everywhere else would be boring by comparison.

For those who have not yet been fully read in: In a speech on Thursday that can only be described as a rhetorical onion of bad faith and gaslighting, Smith called for a secession referendum based on Forever Canadian leader Thomas Lukaszuk’s successful petition, which was intended to rally support of federalists ahead of an expected pro-secession petition. Lukaszuk’s question proceeded to the legislature, while the separatist Stay Free Alberta attempt was subsequently quashed in the courts.

Smith will continue to appeal that ruling and in order to stay ahead of the judicial process will now hold a non-binding secession vote in October based on the successful federalist petition. Except the actual question won’t be based on Lukaszuk’s exact wording, but will rather be something both novel and maybe able to pass judicial review.

The imminent question now to be posed to us reads: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

So we’ll have a referendum on having another binding referendum. This, as far as I can tell, will please neither federalists nor separatists. It will increase the odds that an initial vote to leave Canada will pass if voters regard it as a harmless protest exercise; this will thus ensure that secession remains a live feature of Alberta politics for the foreseeable future.

Yes, I know this is confusing.

The trick is just don’t think about it too much. If you haven’t been following since at least March, you’ll never get fully caught up now. Just feel it out. If you get the sense that you are swimming in the surreality of an episode of Veep, you probably have it about right.

I can’t even give you ordinary political analysis, anymore. We just have to imagine that we’re all trapped in an improbable soap opera we can’t shut off, hostage to terrible over-actors whose intentions and actions only make sense to those of us who have been religiously following every B-rate plot twist for years. I’m waiting for a demonic talking puppet named Timmy to roll into town on the back of a Ford F150 driven by a malevolent witch who casts love spells and curses in order to triangulate a never-ending high school drama populated by bored corporate memo takers and Calgary School dorks who decided politics was the highest and best use of their short time on this God-given earth.

They could have started a soup kitchen, or taken up diamond painting from those kits they sell at Michael’s, but nah. It’s this.

So here we are. Staring down the barrel of a referendum that has a higher chance of securing a thin majority than anyone seems to realize, even if it is very unlikely to lead to a legal separation of the province. Either way, simply holding the vote opens the whole country up to an unpredictable cauldron of economic and political consequences, in addition to God-knows what foreign interference. It’s so goddamn crazy, the plot would get rejected for a one-man YouTube shorts series.

And all of this because Danielle Smith is beholden to an emboldened and committed political base of separatists that has threatened to blow up her leadership and her party if she doesn’t hold a secession vote. Meanwhile, the moderates in caucus are proving to be something less than profiles in moral courage. Only two, Matt Jones and Nate Horner, noted opponents of holding a vote, seem willing to speak up, and both of them resigned on Wednesday. Everyone else is either cowed, indifferent, or a separatist too lacking in integrity to say so outright in public.

The UCP has become a party of snivelling, weak little thieves who operate by night.

So here we are, about five months away from a vote that threatens the foundation of the country in the middle of a hostile renegotiation of our major trade agreement with America, with the referendum date set just weeks before the U.S. midterms.

“But let the people vote! This is about democracy!” cry the bad faith actors in my X feed.

To which I respond: No. It absolutely fucking isn’t.

Danielle Smith didn’t run the last election on lowering the threshold of the Citizens Initiative Act, easing the path for separatists to hold a secession referendum. She won the last election on tax issues and symbolic gestures like promises of a "Sovereignty Act.” Her party isn’t a separatist party.

If, during the last election, I had warned that a vote for Danielle Smith would lead to a vote to separate inside her first term, people would have cast me as a deranged lamestream media lunatic.

Democracy requires our elected officials tell us what they actually believe and what they plan to do before putting those beliefs into action.

Our democracy demands that a separatist party declare itself as such before it is elected to power.

Democracy demands that such a party defend itself in a debate during a writ period; that it be honest with voters about both the benefits and the risks of holding a secession referendum.

Democracy is not a bunch of the most cowardly people on Earth putting an existential vote on the table without demonstrating even the minimum moral integrity to defend that very vote. This isn’t democracy. This is an abuse of process. I hope that every UCP MLA knows that this will haunt them — every single one of them — for the rest of their careers. We will never forget your names.

What our leaders are allowing here is a betrayal of trust of ordinary voters.

This is the consequence of more than 20 years of dysfunctional conservative politics in this province. For generations, conservatives here have played a game of regional grievance, portraying the province’s resource sector as forever victimized by Ottawa and other provinces like B.C. and Quebec. And, boy-o, the rest of Canada has played right back, making economic expansion near impossible and demonstrating contempt and indifference for the province that keeps the bills paid and the GDP afloat.

It’s a terminal cycle that pits region against region for the benefit of those who seek to rule by division and outrage.

Separatism is the inevitable outcome of that strategy left unchained, feral, and unfed in the yard. It is fuelled by very legitimate frustrations and grievances — but also by grandiosity, fantasy, and nihilism.

This is not an organic grassroots movement.

With a few exceptions, separatist leaders aren’t just ordinary people. They’re conservative elites who play themselves off as grassroots victims of that toxic dynamic between oil country and The Rest; they’re wealthy lawyers, local business bosses, political power brokers, academic enablers, and media gatekeepers. They operate by exploiting the alienated, the frustrated, the angry, and the insane in order to inch themselves one rung further up a sinking chain.

And this incestuous little crew, regardless of how the vote goes, they are going to make out like bandits. Let me tell you, none of these separatists leaders or their enablers care one whit what happens to house prices or the Albertan economy or the enmity or hatred that will be fomented as a result of the chaos they are courting.

These local elites have given no consideration to the risks or impacts of foreign interference. They have no serious plan for what happens if a referendum vote succeeds — or fails. They don’t give a shit. They’ll get theirs — the connections they’re building, the profile they’ll build, the email lists they’re creating, the money they’ll raise through crowdfunding. All of it will roll right next into the next cause, and the one after that. Yeehaw.

These people are children poisoned by cynicism and self-regard running an ugly little grift and ordinary Albertans will foot the bill in the long run.

And they can do this because our elected leaders have let them do it. They’ve allowed themselves to become beholden to this crew. They pander to them, in fact.

Alberta and Canada both have let ourselves be ruled by a political class that plays power in a system without consequences. Canada should be Easy Mode on the global stage, and the provinces really shouldn’t be struggling quite this hard to balance a budget and keep health care and education in line.

But people get bored with that, I guess, and when you operate in a region in which everything turns out mostly okay most of the time, the result is a sheep-like leadership class that’s bred to be numb and dumb. We’ve lost the pain and fear signals that warn of imminent and serious danger.

I moved to Calgary in 2010 and began covering this province’s politics shortly thereafter. One of the first arguments I was exposed to — and one I thought was brilliant at the time — was Preston Manning’s treatise on populism. If you’ve been around, you’ll have heard versions of it rehashed by all our major conservative leaders.

It goes something like this: that Alberta is a populist province in which the frustrations of the people inevitably begin to build underground like the pressure of gas building in a well. The trick of the politician here is to tap that well. Vent it at the right angle and depth, and the winning leader can harness incredible human energy to be directed to productive political ends — like the Reform Party.

Tap too deep and the well explodes.

This sounds compelling except for one obvious problem.

There is no way to know how deep to tap the well. Giving vent to justified problems and grievances is a necessary work of democracy. But there’s a line between easing pressure and adding to it, and there’s no scientific or objective benchmark that can tell a leader when he’s crossed that threshold.

Further, once you tap that well, there will always be the temptation to return to it, digging ever deeper, taking greater risks every time in search of a dwindling and volatile human resource.

There’s no way to know ahead of a catastrophe that you’ve gone too far this time, found the moment you’ve hit something too deep and dangerous to step back from. Some pits open to a darkness that no one can control. Conservatives are the ones who are supposed to be not-so naive to this fact of human nature. They are the ones who ought to know how terrible we can be to one another once we strip away rules, norms, values, and institutional safeguards. And yet.

Alberta has always been run by people convinced they’re strategic geniuses because they keep getting elected as conservatives in Alberta. Rather than cultivate humility, discernment, and intellectual ballast, this has given them a high degree of confidence that they know what they’re doing. The well has never blown before. It won’t blow this time, either.

Maybe.

Maybe.

But what I see here are people who are tactically smart and strategically blind. Each tactically brilliant move compounds upon the next until the outcome is, inevitably, a show of spectacular chaos. This is why no conservative premier has managed to complete his or her term since Ralph Klein.

I know that Danielle Smith lives with that knowledge very deep in her heart. And I think she’d do just about anything to prove the exception — apparently up to and including risking the catastrophic consequences of a secession referendum that has little chance of being legally successful but will still involve unknown economic impacts while turning neighbour against neighbour, tempting the darker gods of the deep.

And that’s before I begin to lay into the Americans.

Earlier this week, Press Progress published a report linking U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra to something called 10XVotes, an app that has been heavily promoted and hailed by MAGA political activists and influencers. It just so happens to be the same app used by the Centurion Project, led by David Parker.

If you follow The Line, you’ll already be somewhat familiar with this project and individual; several weeks ago, we contributed to the scoop that revealed that Parker had populated this app with data that was allegedly obtained improperly, using the voter file containing the personal information of 2.9 million Albertans.

For what my opinion is worth, I don’t think the story proves that Hoekstra is the puppet master pulling the strings behind Alberta separatism. This is a local movement fuelled by local people and longstanding issues and grievances with the Canadian government. Separatism has been a cyclical fact of Alberta politics for as long as I’ve lived here, and at least a generation before.

But this iteration is different; it has more power, organization, and legitimacy than in any other time past— and I believe that part of the reason for that is the influence of the MAGA movement. What the Press Progress report shows me is that MAGA is loud, but the actual networks that underpin it are small, self-dealing, and transnational. This movement shares intellectual threads, influencers, tactics, and, as we can see now, technology.

It’s no secret that Parker has cultivated these connections — he has bragged about it quite openly on social media.

In addition to this, Alberta separatism is clearly motivated by something more ephemeral; the idea that a successful vote will lead not to generational negotiations for independence under the aegis of the byzantine demands of the Clarity Act, but rather something more direct: unilateral recognition by a U.S. president who is unpredictable enough to uncork centuries of America’s most repressed imperial ambitions. Sea to shining sea to shining sea to shining sea to shining sea.

And clearly, there are at least some factions within the broader MAGA movement who do covet, if not outright annexation, then at least enough destabilization to serve U.S. trade interests — or perhaps, just the sheer pleasure of sticking it to the moralistic Woke Canadians for the lulz. Hell, I can’t even argue we don’t deserve it, just a little.

Conservatives have noted that Alberta separation had no foothold under Conservative prime ministers like Stephen Harper. This is correct, but I’ll add that this movement also saw no hope under more normal American presidents.

For what it’s worth, I happen to think that the effective impact of foreign interference is mostly overstated. Sure, we’ve seen evidence of bots, slopaganda, and low-level fuckery and trolling from MAGA influencers. None of this amounts to an organized conspiracy.

It doesn’t have to. We are courting yet another risk, one that our local chucklehead elites are ill equipped to navigate. We’ve drilled through bedrock now, and we have no idea just how deep this vein goes, nor how much damage can be done if the people we’ve entrusted to the controls have overestimated themselves.

I guess we’re now all doomed to find out.

Yeehaw.

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