Danielle Smith is willing to risk breaking up Canada to prevent the breakup of her political party.
While folks in Alberta and Saskatchewan have real problems, Smith is threatening to break up a country over a plastic fork. C'mon, man. Get serious.
I had almost finished writing this article about Danielle Smith’s disgraceful and groundless threats as the Premier of Alberta to create an “unprecedented national unity crisis,” when I read that Smith, during question period in the Alberta Legislature, explained that she was doing it to prevent a new political party from starting.
Smith responded, “If there isn’t an outlet, it creates a new party.”
I was astounded, because Smith had said the same thing to me when I spoke to her at the Council of the Federation (COF), held in Winnipeg in the spring of 2023.
It was actually an enjoyable, and friendly discussion, where we talked about elections. Smith had said exactly the same thing: “If you don’t keep rural Alberta happy, they start their own political party.”
I mean, what does it say about Smith as Premier that she is willing to risk destabilizing the entire country and possibly breaking it apart, because if her own political party breaks apart, she can’t get re-elected?
The same is true of Pierre Poilievre, Andrew Scheer and the other Conservatives. They are catering to a radical minority at the expense of a majority, because they are trying to keep their own political parties from splitting apart.
I will deal with the debunking Smith’s blatantly deceptive claims about the “attacks” on Alberta’s economy, and pipelines, which are widely shared by the Conservatives, Poilievre, the Fraser Institute and various other paid propagandists and the media that treat them as credible.
But first …
Danielle Smith’s Motive of Personal Political Self-Preservation
In 2023 I was the Leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party and there was an event in Winnipeg, Manitoba for the Council of the Federation (COF), an ostensibly non-partisan event.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford demonstrated quite clearly that the idea that COF was non partisan is a charade, by endorsing Manitoba’s PC Premier from the stage, to a crowd of Manitoba dignitaries invited by the government that was footing the bill. I briefly spoke with BC Premier David Eby, who mentioned that the meetings had been equally partisan.
I approached Smith and introduced myself, and mentioned that my late father, a Liberal, had been an outspoken opponent of the National Energy Program. He had spoken at the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce in the 1970s, and they had given him a flight of jars that contained the different phases of the manufacture of synthetic crude - oilsands in the first jar, synthetic crude in the last, and various by-products (like sulphur) between. It’s still around.
Smith and I talked about elections, and Smith said that the UCP had been able to win because the third party get about ten per cent. She said the same would likely apply in Manitoba.
That was when she said, “If you don’t keep rural Alberta happy, they start their own political party.”
This is true. In the 1980s, the Reform Party under Preston Manning broke away from the Federal PCs before they united again as the Canadian Reform-Alliance Party (which they changed to Canadian Alliance after they realized the acronym was CRAP. True story).
I think it explains what is happening right now.
The problem for Conservative parties is that they are being increasingly held hostage by the radical wing. In Alberta, Smith was rescued in her last leadership review by a lunatic fringe, which is represented on the federal scene by “Mad” Max Bernier, the PPC.
It’s not that they are worried about people with those views starting their own party and getting elected. They are already elected, and they are in Smith’s party. It’s that if the radical fringe leaves to start their own party, the Conservatives and the UCP won’t win elections any more. Neither will the PPC - but the more moderate parties will be able to win instead.
A couple of months ago I spent a very entertaining 30 minutes on a MAGA TikTok live, where a group of Trump enthusiasts were joined by a Canadian hardcore Trump fan. He argued that only Bernier and the PPC were the real deal, and that Poilievre and his supporter Jordan Peterson were both lightweights and phonies. Hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
In 2019, Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives considered Maxime Bernier and his PPC party to be such a threat that they hired a company called Daisy, run by Warren Kinsella. Kinsella presented himself as a “Liberal” even when he was running a campaign that involved creating a fake anti-racism group with a social media presence that targeted Maxime Bernier’s PPC candidates for past racist statements, in a way that was intended to make the Conservative Party look more moderate.
The great fear among Conservatives is that this will fracture - again - as it did with the PCs and Wildrose, or with the PPC and Conservative.
I suspect that both Smith and Poilievre are being dragged further rightward and keep trying to placate and please people who either are radical, or have been radicalized through desperation and disinformation - all by their own policies and propaganda.
Smith, and Conservative Leaders Poilievre and Scheer have made repeated dogwhistle references to discredited and often dangerous conspiracy theories around vaccinations, immigration, and global cabals.
While the 2019 convoy was notionally about pipelines and the carbon tax, Yellow Vest groups also referred to conspiracy theories that suggested that a “global migration pact” - an agreement to try to get countries to coordinate on refugees- would mean that people who criticized Islam could go to jail.
This conspiracy theory was one of several referenced by Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer as well as now-Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Danielle Smith: UN Migration Pact part of the plan to extinguish Canadian identity - Calgary | Globalnews.ca"When Trudeau told the New York Times that Canada was 'the first post-national state,' I wasn't sure what he meant," writes radio host and blogger Danielle Smith. "But I never thought it would mean ex…
Canada’s immigration policies must not be dictated by UN migration pact: Scheer - National | Globalnews.ca Andrew Scheer is criticizing Justin Trudeau's plan to sign a UN migration pact, saying Canada's immigration policies should not be dictated by an international agreement.
It has to be said that this is tapping into a foundational Western Canadian political tradition.
When former Leader of the Reform Party Preston Manning wrote his op-ed he blamed “identity politics” of the last ten years on the Liberals.
Preston Manning’s father was Ernest Manning, a Social Credit Premier of a province that forcibly sterilized thousands of people, because based on pseudoscientific assumptions about people being “subnormal”, that were absolutely based on identity. Both Ukrainians and Indigenous women were overrepresented in the people who were sterilized when Preston Manning’s father was Premier of Alberta.
It has to be said, that we are hearing today in the paranoid conspiracies being winked at and repeated by Andrew Scheer, and Danielle Smith, and Pierre Poilievre, are echoes of old propaganda and conspiracy theories steeped in religious and racial hatred that weren’t true then, and they aren’t true now.
Social Credit politicians repeated anti-semitic conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - the idea that Jews secretly run the world. They were all generally from branches of protestantism, heavily influenced by U.S. evangelical denominations that despised Catholicism and Catholics. Many were Orangeman and in Saskatchewan, many were in the Canadian KKK.
They scapegoated and terrorized immigrants, especially Jews, Catholics, Ukrainians, French, and despised Quebec for its connection to Catholicism. The KKK published anti-Catholic hate material in its own newspaper.
Today, when people refer to “globalists” “George Soros”, WEF, or central banks, these are all the same old anti-semitic dogwhistles.
These appeal directly to some long-running conspiracies that have a very unpleasant and prominent histories in Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC under extreme right Social Credit and other politicians.
Social Creditors promoted blatantly anti-semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as did Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman who was involved with Social Credit and the CCF in the 1930s in Saskatchewan, and used to travel to Edmonton to meet with Ernest Manning, Preston Manning’s father, who was Premier of Alberta.
The Canadian KKK, which in 1928 had 25,000 members in Saskatchewan, and helped the Progressive Party and the Conservative Party topple the Saskatchewan Government of anti-KKK Liberal Jimmy Gardiner in the election of 1929. They did so with a campaign of terror (burning crosses in over 100 communities across Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the late 1920s) and claims that all their troubles were due to Catholics, Immigrants, Jews, alcohol, and corruption. They railed against the influence of Catholic Quebec.
Social Credit’s decades-long rule over Alberta was broken with the election of Peter Lougheed, who is generally remembered as more of a statesman.
It turns out that Lougheed’s win was driven in part by the support of Peter Savaryn, an immigrant from Ukraine. In 1976, he was unanimously elected President of the Alberta Progressive Conservative party, was Chancellor of the University of Alberta from 1982 to 1986 and a recipient of the Order of Canada. He was also a former member of the Nazi Waffen SS. Savaryn did not disclose his war record when he emigrated to Canada in 1949. He was born in the city of Buczacz, the same city as Simon Wiesenthal where, by 1945, “the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police.”
This part of Canadian history has been thoroughly whitewashed.
In Martin Robin's Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada 1920-1940 he cites a truly chilling passage:
“Klan membership lists were filled with the names of Tory supporters, and their meetings attended and harangued by party activists. According to Dr Walter D. Cowan, the Klan treasurer, Regina Conservative elected for Long Lake to the House of Commons in the general election of 1930, and columnist for the Regina Standard, the Klan was 'the most complete political organization ever known' in the West. 'Every organizer in it is a Tory,' he wrote R.B. Bennett. 'It cost over a thousand dollars a week to pay them. I know it for I pay them. And I never pay a Grit. Smile when you hear anything about this organization and keep silent.”
In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the political culture of Western Canada was being forged and new political parties came into being that are now national parties, and parties that have governed provinces for decades - Conservatives, Progressive Conservatives, the CCF, the NDP and Social Credit.
KKK organizers were involved in electing Members of Parliament for the CCF and Conservatives, as well as at the provincial level, and none of these parties want their electoral triumphs to be associated with the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 1930s, Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett was told that the KKK had elected some of his MPs. In 1929, future Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was a candidate when the KKK was openly collaborating to elect his party. M.J. Coldwell, who was a National Leader of the CCF, was a Progressive when that party was also collaborating with the KKK in the 1929 election. CCF Premier and first National Leader of the NDP, Tommy Douglas, was first elected MP with support from the Dan C Grant, KKK organizer for Western Canada, and an endorsement from the Social Credit Premier of Alberta.
These stale and dusty old bigotries and conspiracy theories are today passed off today as justified “Western Alienation”.
The reality of Western Canada is that it because throughout our history, entire provinces economies have been dependent on a single commodity. In the early years, it was wheat, which fetched top price, enriching everyone along the value chain, from farmhands to grain barons. Then, that crashed with the Depression. Then we’ve have a series of oil booms and oil crashes, because reliance only on oil makes for a manic-depressive economy.
That’s the reality. If you want to understand, Canada’s economy since the 1970s, you need to remember one thing: It’s the price of oil, stupid. Well, maybe two things: the price of oil is set globally, and is manipulated by OPEC+, a cartel.
Alberta and Danielle Smith’s Case for Separation is Delusional and Divorced From Reality. Here is Why.
I’ve read Danielle Smith’s list of demands for enhanced Alberta sovereignty within Canada. There is no case, whatsoever for Alberta either to separate or to receive enhanced powers under Canada’s constitution.
Smith has delivered an ultimatum with nine demands. Not a single one of these demands, either by themselves or together, are a justification for threatening to provoke “an unprecedented national unity crisis.”
“I provided a specific list of demands the next Prime Minister, regardless of who that is, must address within the first six months of their term to avoid an unprecedented national unity crisis. This includes:
Guaranteeing Alberta full access to unfettered oil and gas corridors to the north, east, and west
Repealing Bill C-69 (aka. “no new pipelines act”)
Lifting the tanker ban off the B.C. coast
Eliminating the oil and gas emissions cap, which is a production cap
Scrapping the so-called Clean Electricity Regulations
Ending the prohibition on single use plastics
Abandoning the net-zero car mandate
Returning oversight of the industrial carbon tax to the provinces
Halting the federal censorship of energy companies”
I’ll start where this needs to: First Nations leaders like AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse and First Nations Chiefs from Alberta have already made it clear that this is a non-starter.
Alberta is Treaty Land - all of it, and Canada’s treaties with First Nations were there before Alberta was. The Maritime Provinces, Quebec and Ontario all existed as governments prior to Confederation, prior to partnering up for the purpose of forming Canada. Manitoba negotiated its entry into Canada, but Alberta and Saskatchewan were carved out of existing Canadian territory.
Not only are these demands ludicrous, Smith’s arguments blatantly dishonest and contradicted by the facts and historical events. The idea that energy in Canada has been throttled by the federal government is pure political fiction, and instead of addressing the real cause, Smith’s case invents new ones. This is also true of Conservative Party talking points generally in the recent election.
Yes, the people of Alberta and Saskatchewan and other provinces have economic grievances - the people, not their governments.
Those grievances are directly due to global economic shocks or manipulations and collusion by foreign players, and sometimes the Alberta Government or the previous Federal Conservative government are responsible for the very failures and policies they decry.
There is an entire screed - a laundry list of grievances which really is, as the they say in the UK, “A load of old cobblers”.
For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa - supported by their New Democrat allies - have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta’s free economy - and in effect - against the future and livelihoods of our people.
In fact, as this article from February 2023 shows, 2022 was the most profitable year in the history of Canada’s oilpatch.
From a CBC report August, 2022:
This is biblical, what's happening- Canoe Financial's Rafi Tahmazian
"Suncor, CNRL, Cenovus — wow. Big, big windfall," said Rafi Tahmazian, a senior portfolio manager at Canoe Financial in Calgary.
"Imagine a bank machine that's broken and it's spitting out $100 bills and there's not enough people to pick them up and there's $100 bills gathering on the ground. This is how profitable these businesses are right now," he said.
Why are people in Alberta and Saskatchewan still angry? Because those massive, historic profits were not used to expand production or hire more people. The money went to shareholders and bondholders instead.
Smith then goes on to say
“anti-energy, anti-agriculture and anti-resource development policies have scared away global investment to the tune of over a half a trillion dollars - driving those investments and jobs out of Alberta and Canada to much more attractive investment climates in the United States, Asia and the Middle East.”
This is all just a colossal, blatant lie, but it’s been repeated so many times, for so long, at such volume, that the people telling it may believe it at this point.
How Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump Caused “Canada’s Lost Decade”
All the conservatives talking about “Canada’s lost decade” are deliberately ignoring one of the biggest economic price shocks in Canadian history, which was the 2014 collapse in the price of oil. It wasn’t a technology shock. It was a deliberate act of financial warfare by Saudi Arabia - an oil price war launched in a deliberate effort to bankrupt the North American industry, in which the Trump Administration has been a willing partner.
To ignore this event is to ignore one of the single most consequential events in the oil market in the last 20 years.
A 70% drop in the global price of oil, one of the largest in modern history, and as far as Smith’s UCP and Canada’s Conservatives would have you believe, this event never happened.
It was a deliberate effort by Saudi Arabia to flood the market with oil to drive down the price.
That’s why projects were cancelled. That’s why it was hard to build pipelines.
This graphic, from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, (CAPP) tells several different and important stories about Canada’s economy over the last 70 years - including explaining our politics right up to this moment.
For example: people are wringing their hands about Capital investment dropping, along with Canadian productivity. The chart with grey and red bars explains why, and it has everything to do with the price of oil plunging in 2014.
It is absolutely unbelievable that this even has to be pointed out, because it is so incredibly self-evident. Because an entire conservative media ecosystem - including economists and think-tanks - have been talking about government policy and the economy as if this event did not occur.
This is why this nonsense report argument by the “Canadian Energy Centre” crafted by the usual suspects from the Fraser Institute, is hopelessly inaccurate. Imagine writing about the change in investment in oil between 2009 and 2017 in Canada and not mentioning that the price of oil dropped 70%.
The facts and evidence about an OPEC-driven oil price war should not be a partisan issue. It is a plain matter of fact.
However, Saudi Arabia did not always act alone: In his first term, US President Donald Trump routinely pushed for low oil prices, and pressured Iran, Saudi Arabia and others to produce even more oil. In 2020, Trump threatened to withdraw military aid to Saudi Arabia unless they increased production and dropped prices. The result was lower prices and more punishment for the North American oil industry, with Canada hurting more.
It resulted in U.S. refinery closures. When OPEC drops its prices, it makes U.S. and Canadian oil less competitive - which has an impact on refineries profitability.
This report on the U.S. losing refinery capacity illustrates the problem.
First, it is possible to make billions of dollars as a company, but to lose money consistently in an individual refinery. We have seen this happen a lot with East Coast refiners that didn’t have access to cheaper oil from the U.S. shale boom. They had to continue to procure crude oil on the international markets, and that put them at a competitive disadvantage.
Instead of acknowledging that undeniable reality, as well the direct economic impact, Canadians have been treated to a multi-year sustained propaganda campaign. It was the central premise of the Conservative Party’s campaign and was repeated endlessly by Pierre Poilievre, the Fraser Institute and other think-tanks.
It’s all shamefully dishonest. Why are we putting up with these blatant lies?
How Conservatives Blew it On Pipelines
The nonsense about being anti-energy and anti-pipeline is also beyond ridiculous. In their eight years in power, the Conservatives couldn’t built get pipelines built.
Alberta’s oil is sold at a discount to the U.S., because of the reverse of a captive market: pipelines to the U.S. are a captive seller. When Canada can get its oil to the global market, they get a higher global price.
This was, in fact addressed when the Federal government decided to buy and double the TransMountain pipeline, which immediately started paying dividends to Alberta producers with greater capacity and higher prices for their oil, where they are less dependent on the U.S. as a customer. In fact, that is the point of any and all oil pipelines in Canada that are not U.S. bound. They are about oil producers getting a higher price.
For this decision, the Trudeau Liberals were pilloried by Canada’s supposed party of the left, the NDP, with the slogan “You bought a pipeline.”
Am I surprised that that Canada’s supposedly social democratic party would dump on nationalizing a piece of important strategic infrastructure? No, I am not.
When you point out that Transmountain was built by the Federal Government, people still complain that it cost too much or the private sector should have done it.
This reminds me of the old Borscht Belt joke. Two old ladies have been served a grim dinner and are looking displeased.
“Ugh, this food is terrible,” one says.
“I know!” says her friend. “And the portions - so small!”
In 2016, the Northern Gateway pipeline approval was overturned by a Federal Court in Canada, but it was not because of onerous regulation: it was because of the incompetence of the Federal Conservative Government in consulting with First Nations.
“The judges found the federal government had not met that standard.
"The inadequacies — more than just a handful and more than mere imperfections — left entire subjects of central interest to the affected First Nations, sometimes subjects affecting their subsistence and well-being, entirely ignored," the ruling says.
"Many impacts of the project — some identified in the Report of the Joint Review Panel, some not — were left undisclosed, undiscussed and unconsidered."
This was a continuing problem.
I wrote about the Keystone XL pipeline. There were two separate articles suggesting that the reason it didn’t get built was because the issue was mishandled by people who most wanted it built - U.S. Republicans and Canadian Conservatives under Stephen Harper.
This basic approach is grating: basically, acting like pushy selfish a-holes who make it clear they don’t want the rules to apply to them.
Smith Harper, and many of those around him who were tied to the oil industry, are stuck in the mentality that environmentalists and climate change activists were basically cranks and a threat to their own business.
In Alberta, the oil industry so dominated politics and politicians - in a province that had single-party rule for over 40 years - that there was never any need to compromise. To some extent, perhaps they believed their own PR.
So instead of making efforts to be conciliatory, or make environmentally friendly gestures that could have balanced oil development and pipelines, and provided the Obama administration with a fig leaf of “sustainable development” the Conservatives withdrew from Kyoto, put a thumb on the scale of pipeline approvals in favour of development, and gutted environmental regulations that had been in place since 1867, and forbade anyone working for the federal government from talking about climate change.
This ran completely against advice that Obama and the Americans had given Harper.
“Obama and the State Department had offered Harper some advice – toning down Canada’s aggressive Washington lobbying would let the regulatory process play itself out without the appearance of unseemly outside pressure… Instead of toning it down, Harper chose to make Keystone a “bilateral irritant” that Obama couldn’t ignore, according to these insiders. Two months before Obama’s heads up call, Harper, during a swing through New York, called approval of Keystone a “no brainer” – a zinger aimed at challenging the judgment of Keystone opponents while goading Obama into action. He hasn’t hesitated to repeat similar digs.”
Harper also said, during a visit in New York, that he “wouldn’t take no for an answer.” That was in September, and in October, the Republican Congress was gearing up for a shutdown of government.
One of the conditions of lifting the shutdown was approval of the Keystone XL pipeline - but the shutdown failed.
Shortly after the 2012 election, John Podesta was invited to speak at a board meeting of the American Petroleum Institute.
Taking advantage of the unique opportunity to address his political opponents, Podesta told the oilmen that Republicans had made a “horrible error” in how they handled the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
Podesta argued that Keystone XL had been “rolling toward approval” before the G.O.P. put pressure on Obama. Their forceful efforts to get it approved, he argued, had backfired spectacularly on A.P.I.
“The Republicans did the President a humongous favor by forcing a decision that he could only say no to, which was in fact their intention,” he told me, recapping his remarks at A.P.I. “They wanted to force him to say no, so they could campaign against him. And they spent a ton of fucking money in 2012 running advertising against [Democratic] members and against the President on this question, to no effect. All they did was put off the decision long enough so that you could mount a serious campaign against it.”
As I reported in September, in an article about the billionaire anti-Keystone activist Tom Steyer, Podesta helped organize that campaign.
“I told them that changed the odds from a virtual certainty—ninety-five to five—that he’d approve it, to probably fifty-one to forty-nine that he would not approve it,” Podesta said. “And so the blood drained from their heads! I probably said that for effect. I probably didn’t quite believe what I was saying. It probably actually had been reduced to sixty-forty that he’d approve it. But I think now it’s a fifty-fifty proposition.”
It’s important to understand that this kind of manipulative political game is played by political parties all the time. It has nothing to do with governing or getting anything done at all. It is purely for the purpose of generating content that can be used for campaigning.
There are also active, prolonged campaigns crafted to manipulate the mass of public opinion, or to try to wage “lawfare”.
Provinces Are Not States, and Lies about the Law
Here, I will make a point that, again, is blindingly obvious: Canada’s constitution, history, traditions, political institutions and laws are different than the United States.
Many of the arguments and complaints about Canada’s gun laws and intrusions of the federal government into provincial jurisdiction are imported from the U.S. The entire idea that Alberta is being oppressed by the federal government is an American “States Rights” type argument where provincial Premiers like Scott Moe and Danielle Smith seem to think they have powers they do not have, including the power to ignore federal laws. They do not.
It also started with the Social Credit government of Bible Bill Aberhart, a radio evangelist who swept into power in a party that was seen by some as fascist. They tried to print their own money (which is illegal), lowered the bar for forced sterilization, and tried to pass a law saying that the media could only print what was true, and the government would decide what that would be. The Edmonton Journal refused, and was awarded the Pulitzer prize, and the when the Alberta government lost at the Supreme Court, it was a landmark precedent defending free speech in Canada.
There has always been an American influence on Alberta. Many Reform Party MPs were born in the U.S. Andrew Scheer’s father is American.
In Canada, it is a statement of fact and law established in the federal Canadian Criminal Code since its inception. There is no right to bear arms in Canada: having firearms is a privilege, not a right. The only nuance on this if for Indigenous people and their hunting rights.
A lot of the talking points and rhetoric around firearms is imported directly from the U.S. I remember in the 1970s, people expressing genuine concern about the amount of violence in films and TV, and while school shootings happened, there were far more rare. The US used to have far more effective gun control, and by no coincidence, far fewer gun deaths. Today, there is a continuous slaughter of innocents in U.S. schools to the degree that it has been normalized.
This propaganda is also directly related to current efforts to have commonsense gun control in Canada. As with environmental regulations, the Harper Conservatives legalized huge numbers of weapons, including weapons that very clearly only have a military use.
For example, a sniper rifle that fired .50 calibre rounds that could go through the side of a light armored vehicle 1 km away, was rendered legal to buy.
So, the Liberals were restoring gun control that had been eliminated.
The decision to dismantle a federal long gun registry in 2012 resulted in a flood of 2-million weapons into Canada:
Firearms flooded into Canada after (former prime minister) Stephen Harper’s Conservative government dismantled the federal long gun registry in 2012 .
Nearly two million rifles, shotguns and handguns were imported for retail sale across the country over just five years, federal records show.
The surge in firearms, with a total import value of $751 million, rose 79 per cent over the number of firearm imports from the start of 2007 to the end of 2011, customs information held by Statistics Canada reveals.
The data going back to 1988 shows that even by 2007, firearms imports that were growing steadily after a steep dive when the Liberal government (of former prime minister Jean Chretien) implemented the long-gun registry in 1995, began to increase sharply after Harper and his Conservatives won their second minority government in 2008.
The other is that there has been an active campaign by the so-called “Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms” (JCCF), a Canadian “Lawfare” project that makes outlandish legal claims accusing the federal government of infringing rights, only for the cases to fall flat. The JCCF played a significant role in advising the Freedom Convoy, but in case after case where they claimed people’s rights were violated, the courts disagreed, and consistently found that public health orders were legal and constitutional.
In fact, two of their lawyers and leaders got in deep trouble when they hired a private investigator to follow a Manitoba judge who was hearing their case.
If you’re wondering if that is both unethical and illegal, the answer is yes, it is.
The JCCF were representing Manitoba churches who challenged public health orders. The case was being heard before Justice Glenn Joyal, and it was discovered a private investigator had been following him - and that the founder and president of the JCCF - a lawyer, John Carpay, had hired the PI.
As a result, Carpay is facing criminal charges of obstruction of justice and intimidation of a justice system participant. In addition, in August, 2023, Carpay and his fellow lawyer, Jay Cameron, were barred for life from practising law in the province of Manitoba.
They also lost their cases: Manitoba’s Court of Appeal agreed with the findings of lower courts, that public health orders are not a violation of people’s rights, because they are being applied to everyone equally.
Desperation and Division & Canadian Separation
Having said all that about the leadership and the propaganda around Alberta and Saskatchewan, I don’t believe in punishing people for their leaders’ bad decisions.
There had been a lot of very painful economic suffering in the oil patch because of the oil crash and market manipulations by OPEC.
We need to recognize that these provinces have had to endure modern Depression conditions, because Canada has experienced three massive economic shocks - none of them the fault of even a single Canadian politician - because they all hit Canada from outside: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the 2014 Oil Price Crash, the 2020 Pandemic.
As I have written, there is a direct connection between increased tribalism and conflict after the economy falls apart, especially after what we would term a “financial crisis”, which is much worse than a recession.
A recession is like a slowing or dip in the economy when more businesses are going broke and people are being laid off. A financial crisis is like a giant debt bomb going off: lots of institutions and people go bankrupt at once, because all of a sudden, people can’t keep meeting the really big payments. So banks can go broke, as well. It’s more like what we have heard about as a “Depression”.
I’ve also written about how that is exactly what happens when governments practiced austerity, as the German Social Democrats did after 1929, leading to the election of the Nazis, as well as Japanese Nationalism in the 1930s.
Austerity leads to extremism, and it does not work.
In Canada, separatist movements in Western Canada and Quebec are not just driven by “culture and values,” though culture and values drive division and conflict.
These movements happen in the aftermath of unresolved financial downturns. In the late 1960s, there was a market downturn and sustained levels of unemployment in Quebec, that fuelled Quebec nationalism in the lead-up to the October Crisis. The 1980 referendum followed the economic chaos of the 1970s.
The Reform Party was founded in the 1980s as a response to the crash in the price of oil in that decade, and the 1995 Quebec referendum, likewise, happened after Canada experienced a housing crash in the late 80s and early 90s.
While people talk as if people have always been this way, it is very clear that the mass experience of sustained economic distress radicalizes people.
Canada’s unity crisis is being driven by years where the private economy has been battered by global economic storm after global economic storm. While the Global Financial Crisis was, in a sense, inadvertent, the 2014 oil price crash was a deliberate act of financial warfare, crafted by Saudi Arabia and OPEC to disrupt and damage economic competitors in the US and Canada, as well as deliberately destabilizing countries that liberal democracies.
We should be talking about that. Not made up stuff.
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Wow! Just wow! What a tremendous amount of history you have written about in this article. I have a feeling that I will be spending my weekend looking up all the different aspects of Canadian and world political and economic history that you have mentioned. Can I just say… As a teacher… There is no way that the sound bites that TV or radio news can come close to this level of journalism. People need to read, read, read! Thought provoking, intriguing and important! Thank you!
The quote, “Let those Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” attributed to former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed was actually made by former Alberta premier Ralph Klein, who also said after some bank robbers were caught, all with Eastern addresses, “Send those Eastern creeps and bums back where they belong.”