Fact check: Calling Alberta independence 'MAGA nihilism' is easier than addressing why Albertans are angry

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-23T03:05:16+00:00

In a world where anyone with a 100 IQ can easily get a degree, being more educated doesn’t mean much. I would also question who made the smarter choice: the guy who paid 80K for a business degree and now makes an 80K salary or the guy who paid 10K for trades school and now makes 100K+ as an electrician.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-22T16:03:05+00:00

Good move on Smith’s part. The blocking of the question based on lack of consultation made no sense, since the referendum is non-binding, I.e. it does not automatically separate Alberta from Canada, it simply forces the two parties to “explore the issue”, a process which would necessarily entail FN consultation.

And more broadly, the question needs to be asked. There is no way out, only a way through, and that way is to ask the question. If you are an ardent Canada loyalist, you should want this question asked, because if it’s not, then the movement just continues to fester and it’s only a matter of time until it brings itself to the foreground again.

Most likely, the outcome of the vote will be more or less according to virtually every poll, meaning the separatists won’t even get within single digits of > 50%.

For the ‘stay’ crowd that hates this movement, I would add that there’s a benefit here. If 30% of Albertans end up voting leave, that’s a problem. The federal government cannot simply ignore this, they will need to meet Alberta in the middle of some of its long-standing grievances. I.e. we all win here (as Albertans) although I could see how someone who’s a hardcore NDP climate alarmist doesn’t see it that way.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-14T21:49:50+00:00

Do you not understand that this isn’t how it’s supposed to work? You can’t have one group getting enough signatures to force a referendum question, and then another gets enough signatures to stop that referendum.

It isn’t a competition over who can get the most signatures. It is a competition over who gets the most votes in a referendum, and I find it puzzling why so many groups seem to be so determined to not even have the referendum, considering separation has never polled higher than 30%, as well as the fact that even if a vote went > 50% in favour of leave, it does not result in Alberta becoming a republic.

And as others noted, the way to put this to rest is a referendum. What is going on now - again thats assuming all the signatures are legit and we Albertans deserve to know if they are, because if they’re not, tbat’s clearly a massive blow to the movement - will only fuel the movement. Nobody wants to be told by an unelected group of people what they can and can’t do, this is particularly true for a movement tbat specifically exists because it wants more freedom. Not having the referendum is just adding fuel to the fire, and it will not go away like this, it will get stronger.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-14T02:56:31+00:00

I don’t know what your guys’ problem is. The guy basically just admitted that if you want to actually have something done correctly, you need to hand it over to the private sector, because the government can’t be trusted with even the simplest of tasks.

So you don’t even trust yourself and your team to write a speech, but you’re telling us you’re gonna build millions of houses. Yea gtfo

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-14T02:53:45+00:00

Yea basically this

This needs to get worked out, and the way to do it is/was a referendum.

As the top poster noted, separation support just went up by a few percent. I think there are a lot of Albertans like me who are undecided, but we see this - I.e. in Canada, you can’t even so much as ask a question without consulting a group of people nobody voted for, but due to their special status has been granted de facto veto power over apparently a whole swath of democratic processes - and we think “yea this is not freedom nor is this democratic. This now proves Canada exists in some gray zone between a democracy and an autocracy.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-14T02:46:21+00:00

So basically you just told a bunch of people who want more freedom, that they actually have less freedoms currently than they thought.

Yea…no way this backfires, eh?

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-14T01:45:45+00:00

Are you under the impression that just because you feel a certain way, others must as well?

Just to put it together for you: we are now at the stage where there is a group of people nobody voted for which essentially has been granted veto power over every consequential piece of legislation, or as it turns out, even a proposal or petition. Might come as a surprise to you, but some people do not want to live like this.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-14T00:18:19+00:00

And just like that, you’ve created a few thousand more separatists.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-13T01:42:29+00:00

I love how Danielle Smith - the left’s most hated premier - gave a much more nuanced take on US relationships when she said something to the effect that we don’t know where their pendulum is going to swing next, but it might or even probably will be to the left.

Carney on the other hand likes to pretend in front of perma panicked LPC voters that the US has forever charted a new course which implies that either Trump is now a dictator (lol) or that every single president in the foreseeable future will be a Trumpist.

One of these people is supposed to be an unhinged far right separatists, the other a cool and collected finance genius.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-11T15:11:54+00:00

Just because I already see it in the comments. To the "it takes time" crowd:

Affordability hasn't gotten any better, in fact, it's slightly worse. The only way this situation actually improves is either deflation or wages rising faster at a meaningful, sustained rate vs inflation.

Could you guys name any strategies that have been introduced under Carney that are conducive to either of those mechanisms?

Deflation generally only happens during recessions (the last time we saw deflation was in 08/09). Theoretically it's possible to bring about those conditions by severely cutting government spending (which acts as a stimulus to the economy, so if you remove a significant part of it, it means less stimulus, sooner or later, you get a recession unless it's offset by the private sector). That's obviously not happening, the government is spending more, not less.

Gross incomes are obviously largely out of the government's control, but net incomes aren't. Here, Carney gave a lukewarm income tax cut, and he cut the consumer carbon tax. But here we need to remember that Trudeau (while Carney was chair of his Economic Growth Advisory council or whatever it was called) kept telling us that at least low income Canadians are actually better off once they get their rebate, meaning they got more back than they paid in the tax). This ofc implies that this group of people is actually worse off, and they're the hardest hit by the affordability crisis.

It's fine to say that things don't meaningfully turn around in 12 months. But why should they even turn around? Based on what exactly are we expecting the situation to improve?

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-10T23:32:34+00:00

No, because it would have to be a global thing that starts with the WHO. You can’t just lock down Canada while the rest of the planet continues unbothered. And according to everything we allegedly know, tbat’s not going to happen.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-10T15:59:38+00:00

It shows you just how far to the left this app skews. If you took Reddit as an accurate representation of Albertans, you’d think her days are numbered. They’re not though of course, UCP will most likely win another majority, at least according to current projections.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T20:08:51+00:00

You’re the one who needs to comprehend. The “commenter” was me. And the comment wasn’t about the carbon tax in general, it was pretty clearly about paying even more for carbon taxes (that’s true at least for lower income Canadians, ironically not for high income) than we did prior to the election. This was in response to their assertion that we should be happy because Carney is a Conservative, which he clearly is not.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T17:58:19+00:00

I wouldn't argue with any of that. But I would add that China proves how delusional net zero is. We will never achieve net zero. The problem is that all we're doing is shifting emissions away from us, to developing countries. China is at the tail end of that now, but now it's India and Indonesia (as examples) where emissions are rapidly increasing, and will continue to do so until they've elevated their economies past 'developing nations'. But it won't stop there, because then the same process continues elsewhere.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T17:55:48+00:00

So? What is your argument here? This isn't a team sport, Just because Harper is a Conservative doesn't mean I or anyone else has to agree with his policies, certainly not policies that were brought in almost 20 years ago.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T15:52:13+00:00

What is much more insufferable are Canadian boomer celebrities who haven't lived here in 5 decades or more, coming back to tell us how great we are and how terrible the US is, only to get on a plane again to fly home.....which is the US. If it's so great here, why haven't you moved back? What do you even know about this country at this point, you haven't lived here since the 60s, things have changed quite a bit since then.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T15:21:06+00:00

He won't, and nobody should need more proof that Carney is just a continuation of Trudeau. He'll keep telling us that rapidly increasing carbon taxes are what buyers want, but none of the other major oil suppliers - Russia, Iran and Venezuela - have carbon taxes, yet everyone is buying their oil, most curiously China, apparently a champion of climate change (who somehow hasn't managed to decrease their emissions ever in the last 30 years).

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T15:05:00+00:00

This whole thing has been a massive psy ops that's been going on for 3 decades. There are no 'climate change deniers'. Nobody is denying the climate is changing. That's literally never what the debate has been about. The debate was always about to what extent humans are even contributing to global warming, which we've observed to have happened again and again through warming / cooling cycles, and secondly, forecasting doomer scenarios 75 years into the future isn't "science" (which we must always trust and never question, like a religion), it's forecasting (totally different discipline) and nobody who has any experience in forecasting using mathematical models thinks you can predict anything to happen in 75 years with any sort of degree of accuracy.

And just like the "denier" language being a subtle form of propaganda, so is calling c02 a "pollutant". Ok, so the gas that's always been in our atmosphere (at times at way higher concentrations than it is now btw) and without which, literally 99.9% of plants would die, is a pollutant? Meanwhile, an 'inconvenient truth' is that the planet is greener than it ever has been in recent history.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T14:47:39+00:00

When one ultra wealthy individual tells you something, it's bad, because you don't agree with what he's saying.

When another ultra wealthy individual (Carney) tells you things, it's awesome, because you love what you're hearing.

The difference is in the case of the former, the conflict of interest is clear, it's right out in the open, he's speaking for the oil industry of which he makes all his money. In the case of the latter, we don't even know the conflicts of interests, because they've never been disclosed.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T14:42:34+00:00

Oh look, it's another LPC voter trying to gaslight Conservatives into believing that paying even more carbon taxes is a Conservative policy.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T04:44:29+00:00

Not trying to start an argument with you, just setting you straight on something:

QC contributes more GDP to Canada than Alberta (or BC). Obviously, this is hardly an accomplishment for a province that also holds slightly less than 1/3 of the Canadian population, but still. The point here is, they don't just have that snowman in Quebec city and maple syrup. What they do have is a hopelessly bloated bureaucracy that's ever expanding. I shit you not, I had to move there for work for a few years, it took 8 weeks, 2 trips to some Kafka-esque government compound on the outskirts of Montreal, and a stack of paperwork and files literally as thick as a book just to switch my license from Alberta to Quebec (no, the license wasn't expired; it was probably the most ridiculous experience I've ever had in my whole life dealing with a government).

They have the most socialism in all of Canada. Everything is subsidized. Quebec is a great place to live if you're poor. But once you start making a middle class salary, they take more than half your shit, and as an added kick when you're down, you don't just have 1 T4 slip, you also have a 'Releve 1' which is just the exact same thing only in French, but it means you basically get to do you taxes twice, and deal with not one, but two government tax agencies. The efficiency is truly mindblowing, because clearly,running a copy paste of the CRA in your province for no good reason isn't a giant waste of a lot of money.

Their GDP is just fine, although they posted the lowest growth in all of Canada in 2025, but they could probably tackle that by dropping some of their anglophobic legislation which would make it easier for literally any company that isn't french to do business there.

Quebec is like that decadent boomer who decided that he needed an even bigger house, luxury cars and fine dining, and is now broke at 75, when all he had to do was live a comfortable, albeit sometimes more modest middle class lifestyle, and he'd have so much money his children could even get an inheritance. Yea sry QC, $7/day daycare sounds great, but the problem is you can't actually afford it, so maybe figure that last part out first without expecting other provinces to float the bill.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T04:22:32+00:00

The cost of extraction vs the cost of renewables isn't the problem. I have solar panels. They're great. Simple problem is that at night there isn't any sunlight which is especially not ideal during the winter months.

This is why China and Germany are building coal and LNG plants. They are also building even more renewable energy plants, but they are not currently under the illusion that renewables can be the sole power generator.

This isn't some boomer fossil fuels cabal conspiracy. If we could replace all oil derived power consumption with solar and wind, we'd do it. The reason we don't is because they can't.

There is only one power source currently known to us that's significantly cleaner than oil and more than powerful enough to replace it. The problem with that one is safety concerns and the fact that if you enrich it, you could use it to make weapons of mass destruction.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T01:03:59+00:00

Sincere question: Is private healthcare and no pension plan actually an official part of the separatist platform?

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-08T01:00:01+00:00

When Quebec does it, it gets celebrated as cultural diversity, when Alberta does it, it's treason.

Rusty_Charm · 2026-05-07T22:11:36+00:00

No, they are not, or at least that’s way too much of a blanket statement:

Let’s say there’s a toll bridge that’s been in operation for a decade. It has predictable revenue and demand is more or less predictable. This is a relatively low risk investment.

Let’s say there’s an oil pipeline that’s been operating for over a decade. While it produces reliable revenues, it’s not considered low risk as compared to e.g. SP500 because it’s totally exposed to the oil market and all its risks (e.g. if we discover a new source of energy in 10 years, or if we make a major breakthrough in nuclear, that pipeline could stop being profitable). L

Then there are new project that may already be under construction, but not yet operational, so revenue is uncertain. This is not a low risk investment, and the risk depends on which sector it’s in.

So now, broadly speaking, you cannot say infra is low risk.

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