What we do know is that the United Conservative Party Government led by Premier Danielle Smith yesterday launched a propaganda blitz that will use all Albertans’ tax contributions to persuade voters to vote Yes next fall on a series of ballot questions on constitutional and immigration questions.
The government’s news release framed the announcement merely as the introduction of a slick website containing “relevant information on these important issues.” Clearly, though, it is far more than that, and not just because the site repeatedly urges voters to “Stand for a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.”
Just what, though, has intentionally been made less clear.
Whatever it is, considerable thought, time and expense has been put into this subversive campaign to undermine the Canadian federation in the minds of Alberta voters and it is likely that the website rolled out yesterday by Ms. Smith and Justice Minister Mickey Amery is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Notwithstanding this, media coverage of the announcement and news conference mostly failed to challenge Premier Smith’s narrative. The Globe and Mail struck a mildly critical tone behind its paywall – terming the propaganda effort a “lobbying campaign,” which is a little closer to the truth than the CBC’s “information campaign” and Postmedia’s similarly non-committal phrasing.
Of the nine questions to be placed on the Oct. 19 ballot by the government – which are technically non-binding plebiscites and not referenda – the news release claims they “come out of the Alberta Next Panel’s recommendations following extensive consultations with Albertans, subject-matter experts and policy makers from across the province as part of the Alberta Next town hall process.”
While not quite a bald-faced lie, this is heavy spin.
The purpose of last summer’s Alberta Next Panel was clearly to manipulate town hall participants into supporting these recommendations, plus others such as setting up an Alberta Pension Plan and sending the RCMP packing in favour of a political police force run by the UCP.
As noted at the time, the results were less than impressive. Despite packing Alberta Next town halls with UCP supporters and insulting people who didn’t want to talk about Premier Smith’s hobbyhorses, it turned out Albertans were decidedly less unenthusiastic about some of the things the government most wanted – especially the Alberta police force and the pension grab.
The UCP strategic brain trust seems to have gone ahead with the nine questions on immigration and constitutional change because in the former case they appealed to the party base and in the latter they have the potential to provoke the national constitutional crisis that is at the heart of the so-called Free Alberta Strategy co-authored by the premier’s chief of staff and former Wildrose Party sidekick, Rob Anderson.
The wordy questions have been drafted to make a Yes vote palatable, especially to low information voters. Ms. Smith admitted as much in her news conference, saying, “we think we’ve done that initial culling of the questions to make sure that we found the ones that are likely to get majority support, but I’m asking them so that I can get a mandate. And if I don’t get a mandate, then we’ll have to address what we do at that time.” (Emphasis added.)
In other words, with the UCP, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, as Ms. Smith demonstrated earlier this week with her “Alberta Time” announcement, which ignores a not-so-long-ago referendum result she didn’t like.
The immigration questions scapegoat new Canadians for causing problems that are the result of 40 years of neoliberal policy at all levels of government in Canada.
As for the other questions, in which the government purports to be merely asking permission to work for constitutional change with “other willing provinces,” they are unlikely to be acceptable to voters in many parts of Canada. So, at best, this will provide the separation-leaning UCP Caucus an excuse to complain that Canada never listens to us, and so surely therefore the West Wants Out.
Of course, as Deirdre Mitchell MacLean correctly observed in her Women of ABPoli Substack yesterday, “the UCP doesn’t need ‘a mandate’ to work with other provinces to change the constitution.” Nor, according to the talking points at the time, was it the intention of the province’s “citizen initiative” legislation to serve as a platform for government initiatives that ought to be debated in the elected Legislature.
So, at worst, these questions will become part of a shameless effort to shove sovereignty-association, outright separation, or U.S. annexation down the throats of Albertans and other Canadians if the UCP doesn’t get its way from the vote results.
Meanwhile, the openly separatist petition campaign to get an unconstitutional question calling for Alberta’s immediate outright departure from Canada on the same ballot may or may not, depending on which rumour you listen to, have the close to 178,000 signatures it requires by May 2 when it must be turned in to Elections Alberta.
Ms. Smith and the UCP have been doing whatever they can to get that question on the ballot with the other nine.
With Trumpian echoes worthy of a starry-eyed visitor to Mar-a-Lago, Ms. Smith also told the news conference: “We’re going to be out actively persuading the public that this is the direction we want to go, but we want an endorsement from them, and so I think people need to understand exactly what it is we’re asking, and they’ll give us direction.”
More mischief is likely to be generated by long waits for the results the plebiscite after voting on Oct. 19, since the UCP insists on using paper ballots and each referendum will require a separate ballot box in every polling place. Can’t wait to see how that pans out.
Meanwhile, as expected, the foreign funded misinformation and disinformation social media campaign is continuing to pick up steam online. Whether this involves co-operation of the UCP and Alberta separatist groups with MAGA Republicans in the United States or state actors in other countries that would like to destabilize Canada is impossible to know just yet.
But the CBC reported yesterday that three individuals in the Netherlands are behind the network of YouTube channels that hired actors to create reams of slopaganda supporting Alberta separatism. This kind of thing is bound to just keep getting worse as Oct. 19 nears.
