Alberta Referendum: Question 2

Nation, let's keep the good times rolling with a look at Question 2 in the UCP's $134,000,000 attempt to push through Stephen Miller's wet dreams as policy under the guise of a "democratic mandate".

Question 2: Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta­ approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?

Essentially: Do you approve of the government forcing certain immigrants - we'll figure out which ones later - to pay out-of-pocket for health care, education, and social services?

I vote NO. And here's why:

We're being asked - again - to give carte blanche for a potentially brutal and - frankly - un-Albertan - policy to be implemented against groups without "Alberta approved immigration status". What in the seven hells is an "Alberta approved immigration status"? We'll figure that out later. TRUST us. Just give us the mandate, and we'll blame you for telling us to do it when it goes wrong.

That ambiguity, in and of itself, is enough reason to shred this question. But let's look a little deeper at what the implementation looks like:

A temporary foreign worker, let's call him "Stefan", who has permission to work in Canada but isn't deemed "skilled labour", comes to Brooks to work at the local WalMart as a merchandiser - stocking shelves for minimum wage. Now, as recently as yesterday, Danielle Smith has opined that low-skill jobs should be filled by Alberta youth. So, we're looking for a 16 year-old Albertan in Brooks who wants to work 10 pm to 6 am.

Stefan is 45. He met another TFW while he was here, and they have a 4 year-old son who was born while his mother was back in Jamaica in between work permits.

Stefan and his partner make minimum wage. They've been paying taxes on their earnings in Alberta off-and-on for 5 years. The Leader of the UCP feels they should each pay $1900 per year to have access to Alberta's public healthcare system. They work with 18 year-olds who were born in Brooks who are on their first real job and started paying taxes last month. Those 18 year-olds get all the healthcare they need, because they had the good fortune to pass through a Canadian birth canal on their way into the world.

Stefan's son should be starting school next year. The Leader of the UCP feels that Stefan should pay cash to get his kid into a publicly-funded school. Stefan doesn't have the money - cost of living and the $3800 in health premiums for he and his partner mean they aren't even breaking even. So Alberta - one of the richest jurisdictions in the world - lets the kid stay home, without an education, because his parents were born in the wrong place.

When my ancestors came to Alberta 120 years ago, they were farmers. They spoke German. They were encouraged to come west and populate the new province by the Canadian Government, and over the ensuing 12 decades I'd like to think they and their descendants have done their share and then some... but when they got here, they were dirt poor. They needed help. Help from the government, and help from neighours. Eventually, they started to get their feet under them, and became net contributors to their community. Their story is not unlike the story of Alberta itself, which (lest we forget) only started becoming a net contributor to Canada's economy in the mid 1960's. 

That's right, "Bootstraps Guy" - we were on the dole, eating government cheese and living off the charity of other provinces, until Leduc Well #1 really started paying off.

If the other provinces had insisted in 1905 that Alberta pay cash for things like defence and the railroad, because we hadn't been paying into Confederation, we would have failed as a province.

Now that we have the good fortune to be able to live high on the hog, let's not forget where we were. And let's not consign an entire group of people - exact details to be determined later around a cabinet table - to a life of forced poverty based not on what they've actually contributed in taxes, but on where they were born. 

Question Two: NO.

Alberta Referendum: Question 1

Nation, in the interest of giving my dozens of devoted followers - who have been chomping at the bit for the past ten years for more Enlightened Savage content - a chance to discuss the referendum questions around the Thanksgiving table, I'll be going over the referendum questions one at a time in this space.

First up, Question 1: Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?

So, obviously we need to address the elephant in the room: Immigration. 

More specifically, the UCP's efforts to blame their policy shortcomings on immigration, as though immigration is somehow a) something new, and b) something that only Alberta is dealing with.

This question is asking for carte blanche to decrease immigration, using the economy as a justification. 

I vote NO. And here's why:

Giving the UCP carte blanche for ANYTHING is a risky bet, because this party takes a mandate for ANYTHING as a mandate for EVERYTHING. Didn't campaign on that specific policy? Doesn't matter - we won the election, so most Albertans support whatever we come up with. We see it over and over with the replacement of the RCMP, the Alberta Pension Plan, Coal Mining on the Eastern Slopes, the 47-and-counting overhauls of the health system, stripping of rights away from teachers - they feel, in their bones, as though they're entitled to do ALL of these things, because Albertans "gave them a mandate".

Let's not ignore the obvious flaw with this proposal on its face: It's just not doable in any reasonable way. Let's say you've got a construction worker with a small family who wants to move from Regina to Medicine Hat to find work, and he's originally from El Salvador. Does he need to apply for permission from the Government of Alberta before renting an apartment in the Hat? Or does his foreman need to check his immigration status before handing him the hammer? What about my cousin in Saskatoon? If we need him to come out and work on the farm, does he need to ask the UCP if he's allowed to run a combine in Alberta? 

Using the provided justification - that our social services and economy are overburdened with all these "newcomers" who haven't been paying into Alberta's provincial treasury - then this question should be universally applicable whether the person is coming from Fredericton or Burkina Faso. "We would *never* discriminate against our fellow Canadians!" cries the party that came up with "Alberta is Calling", literally BEGGING Canadians to move here. Fine. So then you admit your issue isn't with the lack of payment into the provincial treasury. So what is it?

What separates the "undesirable" immigrant to Alberta from the "desirable" one, if not their economic contribution?

Skills? Then we shouldn't let in burger-flippers from Kelowna. But we will. So again: what is it?

Values? Faith? Race? If you're a conservative Christian from Ivory Coast are you okay? What about a rabble-rousing, far-left socialist best-selling author from Portland? What about an ultra-conservative Imam from Toronto, who became a Canadian Citizen in 2006? 

I have LESS than zero interest in letting the same people who decided to buy off-brand Turkish tylenot or who championed the Best Summer Ever make decisions about who belongs in Alberta and who doesn't. 

In 1990, Soviet Political Officer Vasili Borodin famously mused on living in the free west: "I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?"

No papers, Vasili. State to State.

Even in 1990.

The UCP can't be trusted with this power.

Question One: NO.

Don't Split the Vote!

In Alberta, it's a phrase as common in political campaigns as "hard-working Albertans" or "Laurentian Elites": "Don't split the vote".

What it really means is "please don't make me have to work for this: I'm lazy and I'm entitled to win."

It almost always comes from those on the right - not because the right has a monopoly on laziness, but just because no one on the left in Alberta is crazy enough to feel entitled to anything other than an ass-whipping at the ballot box.

What makes it such a pernicious phrase in Alberta, though, is the attitude that it projects: "I am owed this victory, because I am a conservative". As though being a conservative - actual policy ideas and suggestions on how to improve things be damned - is the only thing you need to do to be owed a victory.

In many parts of the province, that's not entirely incorrect. Which is why the attitude persists.

We first started hearing whining in these parts about "splitting the vote" when the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative Parties were fighting for the hearts and minds of right-leaning voters, allowing the NDP to swoop in from out of almost nowhere and form government. Immediately, the self-styled high foreheads in the conservative camps decided that the NDP victory wasn't a result of an electorate tired of an arrogant, out-of-touch and scandal-plagued governing party in their fourth decade of virtually unchecked power and an opposition right-wing party that had just seen most of its MLAs - and its leader - move over to the government benches a few months before, still mired in the muck of a "Lake of Fire" bozo eruption from the previous election. 

No, no.

The problem was that the voters had too many options. The conservative vote was being split, and the NDP had won an illegitimate victory. Gulags for free market thinkers and entrepreneurs couldn't be far behind.

In on his white horse - or blue truck - rode the great saviour of Alberta's conservative movement, Jason Kenney, to end the vote splitting and save us from the orange horde. Kenney won the leadership of the PCs, who - after more than 40 years in power - were panicked by their sudden lack of access to power, and willing to roll over for anyone who could get them back to the promised land and get the donations flowing again. He then merged the party with the Wildrose, creating the United Conservative Party. And lo and behold, in the next election, the UCP won a healthy majority government.

Granted, the UCP MLAs and core volunteers ran the gamut from closeted Red Tories to proud neo-conservative Trump supporters, and that's going to create some fault lines in your party, but that would be up to someone else to manage in the future. Far sooner, it turned out, than Jason and his team had anticipated. 

The bottom line was: going from two strong conservative options on the ballot to one conservative option resulted in a win. So, the theorem was proved after one experiment: It MUST have been the vote splitting! It couldn't have been the Sky Palace or the private jets or the Lake of Fire or that Rachel Notley was actually an intelligent politician and hard campaigner. No - it was the math. The problem was never US, the conservatives - it was the voters. They got confused. Poor, stupid voters.

The UCP codified this "logic" into law recently, barring any new political party from using words in their names like Conservative, Liberal, Green,Wildrose, Reform, Democratic, Independence, Communist, Pro-life, Republican, Solidarity, or Advantage: because those stupid, easily-confused voters might deny conservatives their rightful win at the ballot box if they accidentally voted for the wrong shade of blue lawn sign.

Fast-forward to today's by-election in Calgary-Shaw, and we see the same tactic, being used by one of its most devoted practitioners. The UCP is polling at 55% in the riding, and the vote-split they're worried about is with the "Progressive Tory Party", polling at 3%. 

Photo cropped, but Craig knows who he is.

Now, none of us knows how many people are going to come out to vote in this by-election, but it's generally pretty safe to say, it will be far fewer than in the most recent general election, when 25,000 voters came out (63% of eligible voters).

What this means is: there are 14,500 eligible voters who didn't get off the couch. They are COMPLETELY up for grabs. You just need to throw your obviously VASTLY superior ideas in front of them, they'll grab their coat and handbag and go cast a vote for you.

So why don't you go target them? Why not try to win their hearts and minds?

Nah. Looks too similar to hard work. I'm not looking to work hard - I'm looking to win a seat as an MLA and cash that nice, big cheque. So I'll just chase the 3% who might vote Progressive Tory, for fear the riding might "accidentally" elect an NDP MLA who, as an opposition member in a majority legislature, would have the power to shut down the energy sector, turn our children gay, and destroy our very way of life... or something.

Make no mistake, Nation: Mike Derry is going to be the next MLA for Calgary-Shaw. That was decided the moment they finished counting ballots in the UCP nomination meeting.

But if his party keeps sticking to their mantra about vote splitting, and the arrogant presumption from whence it springs, they're going to end up exactly where the old Progressive Conservatives did in late 2014: wondering why the polls won't get any better, facing challenges from within and from without, and hoping like hell they can hold on.