It was the first of two days in Alberta for Mark Carney in advance of the Alberta referendum, where he spent the day in Calgary doing a bunch of glad-handing in places across the city, including an Indian restaurant and the University of Calgary in advance of his appearance at the Forever Canadian rally. What was most notable was that Carney did tell the attendees of one of his events to “Vote no to the nine,” as a reference to the noxious nine other referendum questions, which include attempting to manufacture consent for further racist scapegoating of immigrants, and to try and get a faux “mandate” to pursue constitutional changes, even though the question on trying to insist on provincial paramountcy of laws under the constitution would actually make it harder to build interprovincial pipelines.
There has never been an "open borders" policy in this country, and she knows it. She was demanding more immigrants until it became convenient to scapegoat those immigrants for the very failures of her government in housing and healthcare. She's just bald-faced lying for her own political benefit.
— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-10-16T01:36:15.030Z
Danielle Smith got pissy about Carney’s “No to the nine” statement, and insisted that Carney just doesn’t understand the horrors of the supposed “open-border policy” of Justin Trudeau, which is one hundred percent abject horseshit. There were never open borders, and premiers like Smith decided it was suddenly acceptable to scapegoat immigrants for their failures to properly fund healthcare and education or build housing, or in the case of Ontario especially, to crack down on their scam strip mall colleges, so that’s what they did. Never mind that Smith just two years before was writing to Trudeau to demand more immigrants for their economic growth—the tides turned (thanks in part to a poisoned information ecosystem and far-right actors), so suddenly it was “immigrants bad.” It’s frankly disgusting that this narrative goes unchallenged (and no, both-sidesing is not challenging scapegoating).
Meanwhile, the Star wrote about the “Christian” push for Alberta separatism, but couldn’t bring themselves to write that this is not “Christianity,” it’s Christian nationalism. The most galling part is that it named an American who is part of the Christian nationalism movement in that country as though it’s separate and distinct when in fact, it’s the very same movement in Alberta. And I cannot stress this enough—Alberta separatism is a white nationalist and Christian nationalist project. There is nothing to be cute about, or to try and downplay—it’s explicitly the roots of the movement, and the animating discourse throughout it (including why Smith is going hard on her scapegoating). Legacy media shouldn’t soft-pedal this because it needs to be called out for what it is.
My Latest:
My column points out that with separatism at low levels of support in Alberta and Quebec, the problem is not national unity, but populist politicians exploiting division.