SCmSTR comments on Alberta votes to stay in Canada, CBC News projects

Alberta votes to stay in Canada, CBC News projects (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 1 day ago* by NotSteve_@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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Albertans have voted to remain in Canada, CBC News projects, rejecting the proposal to begin the separation process.
Early results in the province's referendum show more than three-quarters of votes in favour of staying part of the country.
Supporters at the Forever Canadian watch party broke into cheers and waved Canadian flags when they saw the first results on a screen.

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[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago (15 children)

American and your border neighbor here, this is news to me. Can somebody explain to me what's going on? Because this is the first I've heard about this.. is Alberta trying to secede from Canada?? What? Why? I'm not super familiar with your politics. Thanks, ahead of time.

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[–] tottle@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Our former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was very proactive when it came to climate change. Alberta's biggest industry is oil and gas, so this pissed them off because they weren't making as much money as they could have been. Their oil and gas sectors also make a lot of money for the country and they are upset that some of it gets sent to Ottawa and redistributed. And Alberta doesn't have much say in federal elections because their population pales in comparison to Ontario and Quebec, who have more voting power to reflect that.

So the separatists gathered enough signatures to have a referendum but the courts ruled that down because it violates the agreements the government has with First Nations. So the premier changed it by making it a referendum to have a referendum, which bypassed this legal restriction.

The separatists groups have been collaborating with the Trump administration, who are backing the separatist side of the campaign which has caused a lot of anger here in Canada.

The separatist side is very unpopular, even within Alberta, and this is widely considered to be a waste of time and resources. But Alberta has very permissive laws around direct democracy, so the threshold for triggering a referendum on any topic is quite low, you just need a relatively small number of signatures.

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[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 6 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

You left off how the premier lowered the threshold for them to have the vote.

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[–] tottle@lemmy.ca 5 points 23 hours ago

Yeah that's important information too. She made changes to direct democracy laws so that fewer signatures are required to trigger a province-wide referendum on a given topic. Presumably this was to appeal to the separatists in her support base

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[–] Leviathan@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

I'd put a bigger emphasis on how much of a role the American right-wing christofascist propaganda machine has played. Paid Nazi propagandists like Joe Rogan have been stoking these flames for nearly a decade now.

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[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

Thanks, this offers a lot of context to Americans, who are are too swamped with the nonsense in our own country, to follow the nonsense going on in other countries.

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[–] tottle@lemmy.ca 1 point 21 hours ago

I mean, Americans never really paid attention to us even when they didn't have shit going down. Back in the 90s/2000s a we had a whole TV series making fun of this

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[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

Ya, theres an unhappy bunch that have been getting help from your current government to try and separate from Canada, amplified by Russian misinformation campaigns.

This was a vote to see if there should be a binding referendum.

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[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today -1 points 1 day ago

If MAGA is their primary support, then you've got nothing to worry about. MAGA fucks up EVERYTHING they touch, and they fucked this up, too.

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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago

Our Conservative Party keeps losing because they pick untenable and unpopular leaders.

Alberta is a very conservative province.

The Premier of Alberta decided to hold a referendum to have a referendum to separate because risking our country while another tries to annex us is a good idea for scoring political points and trying to get leverage.

This was pitched as a protest vote like brexit, with a large large dose of foreign interference from the United States.

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago (5 children)

No, Alberta isn't trying to seceed. Our quisling premier tried rabble-rousing with a referendum on whether to have a referendum to try to seceed and the separatists got crushed at the polls.

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[–] 1egg4u@lemmy.ca 1 point 23 hours ago (4 children)

The other 9 questions were the lede being buried by the seperation headlines and they all got a yes vote. This went as they intended. We are fucked.

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

The other 9 questions are just as stupid, they just didn't get as much press. Most of them were worded so poorly that they could be interpreted however you liked and most of those interpretations aren't constitutional, so it's a meaningless result.

And all of this was a non-binding referendum anyway. The government can do whatever it wants with the results, as it always could.

We're not "fucked", we're just sick of this waste of time and money.

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[–] 1egg4u@lemmy.ca 1 point 22 hours ago (2 children)

I think we are fucked because to me this indicates this province is continuing to vote with 0 information on gut feeling and bigotry which means we are staring down the barrel of more of this kind of politics in the future

Alberta basically just showed canada they are fine with the UCP and likely to vote them in again... we are fucked

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 point 22 hours ago (1 child)

I think we are fucked because to me this indicates this province is continuing to vote with 0 information on gut feeling and bigotry which means we are staring down the barrel of more of this kind of politics in the future

Welcome to democracy. The worst form of government aside from all the others.

Where do you expect to find a place where the people vote on a basis other than gut feeling?

Alberta basically just showed canada they are fine with the UCP and likely to vote them in again

Do you have a basis for this other than gut feeling? Current projections on 388 have the UCP ahead by a single seat, and of course that's based on polling that came out before the referendum. I think calling a UCP victory in the next election "likely" is not supported by the data.

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[–] 1egg4u@lemmy.ca 1 point 19 hours ago*

Ive lived here for long enough to know that those polls showing an NDP lead mean nothing. Alberta is absolutely everything it gets accused of being and I have 20 years in this shithole of never being proven wrong minus the ONE time people tried voting differently and I STILL HEAR BITCHING about those 4 years like it was ever worse than 40 years of conservative mismanagement

"Democracy" just determined immigrants here should be a secondary class of citizen and be denied access to services. Alberta deserves what it will get.

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