2025-05-02 20:05:18

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Unsure whom to blame for Monday’s federal election loss by Pierre Poilievre and his Trumpified Conservative Party of Canada, the online Canadian MAGAsphere seemed headed for a full meltdown, klaxons blaring, for a while yesterday. A mass psychotic breakdown on the hellsite previously known Twitter saw conservatives not only screeching at their long list of usual suspects like woke liberals, cultural Marxists and the WEF, but turning their fury on any of their own who might have shown signs of willingness to try to work with Prime Minister Mark Carney. Doug Ford, get down here for your beating! Here in Wild Rose Country, meanwhile, almost everybody seemed to have received a phone call from the mysteriously but apparently generously funded Republican Party of Alberta wondering if any of us would like to sign onto the separation referendum being facilitated by Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP). If they didn’t get one of those calls, presumably they heard from the Alberta Prosperity Project, another merry band of separatist nuts who dream of Alberta becoming a land-locked petrorepublic. Smith, of course, pretends this has nothing to do with her, she’s as good a Canadian as you could imagine, and a committed democrat who just wants to make it easier for Albertans to vote on stuff that appeals to them, which is what her Election Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, also known as Bill 54, is all about. “I’m not going to prejudge what citizens are going to do for a petition,” she told reporters yesterday. Yeah, right. “If hockey teams were like Alberta conservatives,” explained Edmonton’s indispensable Mimi Williams on X, “they would threaten to leave the NHL if they didn’t win the Stanley Cup.” Premier Smith and her loyal cabinet did their bit to keep the mass tantrum roiling by opening the spigots and flooding the zone, as they say down in Trumplandia, as Smith’s political Valhalla will soon be known. At one news conference, her voice husky with anger, or a reasonable facsimile, she vowed to go to court to stop Ottawa from implementing its net-zero electricity regulations. “Our government will not accept unconstitutional net-zero regulations that leave Albertans vulnerable to blackouts in the middle of summer and winter when they need electricity the most,” she barked. And what about the spring and fall? At another newser, her health minister explained how the destruction of Alberta Health Services (AHS) is proceeding apace. “The proposed changes will help us continue to improve the health care system for all Albertans,” said Adrianna LaGrange of Bill 55, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025. Of course, the chaotic changes that will see AHS broken into five separate bureaucratic silos make little sense and will do nothing to improve the health care system, except perhaps for the operators of private surgical clinics and still-public hospitals – which appear be being set up to be run by private corporations, and maybe sold off to them. The separate agencies, each with their own expensive management bureaucracies, are called Primary Care Alberta, Acute Care Alberta, Continuing Care Alberta, Recovery Alberta, and AHS, the latter being yet another bureaucracy to rule them all, I guess. The latest announcement describes how all front-line public health services – “communicable disease control, immunizations, newborn screening and health promotion” – will be transferred out of AHS to the new Primary Care Alberta silo. That makes zero sense, as is plain to see. When the bill is passed, which it will be, all medical officers of health and public health inspectors who now work for AHS will become direct employees of the government – where their work will for all practical purposes be overseen directly by elected politicians. To say that bodes ill would be an understatement, given the conspiratorial anti-vaccine sentiments rife in Smith’s cabinet and caucus. Indeed, arguably there is some risk public health as a concept and public good will simply cease to exist in Alberta under the UCP. Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, yesterday afternoon The Globe and Mail reported that, to quote the headline on the story, “Alberta Justice Minister has personal relationship with man whose businesses are tied to AHS investigation.” “Alberta’s Justice Minister is a long-time friend and relative through marriage of a man whose companies’ business dealings with the province’s health authority are now part of multiple investigations,” the newspaper’s Carrie Tait reported. “Mickey Amery, who also serves as the ruling United Conservative Party’s deputy house leader, confirmed his relationship to Sam Mraiche, whose businesses are tied to a lawsuit and multiple investigations, including by the RCMP and the provincial Auditor-General.” Is that everything? Well, it would be easy to miss something important in this gush of anger, conflict, needless restructuring, and disturbing allegations. But I think that was about it for May 1. Oh, wait. Speaking of Alberta separatists, only 10 or so showed up for a scheduled demonstration in front of the Legislature yesterday morning. Leastways, I counted 10 protesters, plus two reporters and two camera operators desperately trying to spin a story out of that non-event. After eight of them wandered off, that left four journos and two protesters to try to figure out what to do with themselves. This, I would suggest, tells more about the real interest in Alberta in such foolishness than all the cloudy emanations of the UCP’s bot-driven separatist smoke machine are intended to make us think. As none other than Jason Kenney, Alberta’s first UCP premier, sharply observed yesterday, “Memo to all the tough-talking Western/Alberta separatist keyboard warriors: In 2021 you had a real life Western separatist party running against *Justin Trudeau,* and all you could muster was 29 candidates from the absurdly named Maverick (formerly Wexit) Party, who collectively won 35,000 votes. … That’s 0.21% of votes cast.” A larger separatist demonstration is said to be planned for Saturday at the very moment NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi will be addressing his party’s convention a few blocks away. I wonder which event will attract the larger crowd?