The Drunk in the Flowerbed
This is the last in my series of articles on Alberta’s great separatist adventure: an extraordinary waste of money, political oxygen and everyone’s time that ended with roughly three quarters of Albertans deciding that destroying Canada probably wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Except I may have been watching the wrong story.
While everyone—including me—was staring at the spectacle of separation, Albertans were voting on nine other questions. Eight passed. Taken together, they offer a rather different picture: immigration restrictions, “Albertans first,” limits on access to public services, greater provincial power and a steadily deepening hostility toward Ottawa.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. What if the loud, ridiculous separatist campaign was, intentionally or otherwise, the perfect false flag? Put the drunk in the flowerbed where everyone can see him, while the sober people get on with business around the kitchen table.
In my latest for CounterPunch, I look at what Alberta actually voted for, the strange marriage of Christian nationalism and nativism, and what happens when MAGA crosses the Canadian border wearing cowboy boots.
The separatists lost spectacularly.
The ideas behind them may not have.
