Sure, Albertans voted against a separation referendum. They also voted to decimate the rights of migrants!!!
https://rachelgilmore.substack.com/p/sure-albertans-voted-against-a-separationOpen linkView original on lemmy.caSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.cahttps://rachelgilmore.substack.com/p/sure-albertans-voted-against-a-separationOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca
30 replies
If you happen to be white you are definitely an immigrant or born from them.
how Christian of them
In terms of actual concrete action, I forsee nothing will be done about the other 9 questions. However, the 50-some percent yes questions will be a convenient basis for Danielle Marlaina Smith to continue with the "blame Ottawa for our problems" game.
Maybe we need to start considering that Ottawa is a large part of Alberta's problems, I mean, Ottawa keeps on giving the UCP exactly what it asks for. Things might be better if Alberta if Ottawa actually treated the province the way the conservatives claim they do.
Ottawa has been Alberta's problem for 80 years, no matter who's in power in either.
I hate this framing so much. The nine questions were intentionally designed to appear rational to the average person at first glance and were improperly presented to voters by the very nature of their framing.
It's NINE QUESTIONS. The Forever Canadian campaign solely focussed on Question 10, other campaigns focussing on the other nine questions as well had a MASSIVE uphill climb for educating voters on those questions and why they were either deceiving or generally poor choices, WHILE having much less reach. Had voters been properly educated on these questions and had Question 10 not acted as a cover for the importance of the other nine, I'm 100% certain the votes wouldn't have swayed the same way they did.
But hey, let's just go ahead and keep framing Albertans as everything bad in the book, not include nuance, and then somehow claim that you're in favour of unity when you get clicks off an inflammatory title against people who live here, while burying the facts of the wording of the questions over twenty paragraphs deep in your article. It's also so rich of Rachel Gilmore to go ahead and say this blanket statement as if she isn't publishing this story on a platform infamous for making a profit in platforming white nationalists and neo-nazis.
AKA dogwhistles.
Yeah, exactly that.
You know what a dogwhistle is, right? By it's very definition the significance isn't understood by the average person. I see your other comments and know what you're trying to imply.
You're trying to frame things in a way that makes it seem as if most people understood the dogwhistle, where in that case, it wouldn't be a dogwhistle anymore if it were true. You're literally trying to make a point, but proving yourself wrong in trying to make said point.
Once again, nuance magically doesn't exist when it comes to Alberta.
Temporary Albertan here. There isn’t a lot of love for immigrants here… It’s Canada’s Texas.
"Temporary Albertan here"
Congrats, I've been here all my life, and I know plenty of people that are the opposite way. There's literally multiple non-profits to support immigrants both in Edmonton and Calgary, and while yes, you get the asshole here and there that's generally racist, people are more frustrated at things like the LMIA program than they truly are at immigrants.
BC here. It's the same here in the interior. Vancouver area is going to be another story as white folk seem to be the minority in places.
Are you suggesting that a significant portion of the people who voted for racism, didn't understand the questions, or thought they were answering yes to questions they didn't understand?
Which is it, is Alberta proudly racist or is Alberta stupid as fuck?
Jesus Christ. Tell us you don't actually know what the questions were without telling us directly.
I find this hilarious that people throw people here in no-win situations constantly where when you're not being labelled as both simultaneously, you have to choose one or the other.
Like I'm not over here calling Ontarians a bunch of idiots for electing Doug Ford, Nova Scotians for Tim Houston, or British Columbians for the polling Conservatives are having there, and yet because "it's Alberta" it's justified to blanket insult people here constantly.
You're blatantly ignoring context in order to score cheap and easy points online because "Alberta bad" is easy and popular. People are rightfully frustrated that they can't find a job and that the federal government is doing nothing about blatant LMIA abuse by companies for entry-level positions or positions that they can't fill because of blatant underpaying wages. They're frustrated that they see news stories of international students using food banks to cut their costs, and aren't provided proper context by the media at large of the federal government's failing to properly inform those students of what it costs to get by here. The questions were also clearly framed to make things sound rational.
Being misled is not the same as being outright stupid, and if you want to go ahead and claim that it is, then I fundamentally disagree with you. All these cheap insults do is fan people's thoughts of western alienation in a time where we're supposed to be unifying.
Edit: Rob to Doug, oop
They voted for racism, full stop. If they thought they were voting for not-racism, they are not smart. One or the other is true.
If you had read the actual questions, you'd understand that they were all of the form "if you feel disenfranchised by immigration, do you support Alberta seizing or colluding with other provinces to usurp power from the federal gov?"
By answering the x/y questions about power shifting, the negative connotations are entirely borne by the respondents.
You saying "Alberta is racist, full stop", not only are you painting with a broad brush, you're feeding into exactly what the UCP want when they intentionally worded the questions the way they did.
"Nuance doesn't exist, I am very smart, unlike those stupid Albertans"
I said Alberta is racist - you are the one who introduced the idea that they did so because they were too dumb to understand what they were voting for. I'm not saying they're stupid, I'm saying they're racist, and are on the record as such.
Despite my slight slip-up, I feel I've made my point that this line of thinking lacks critical thought.
Cheers.
I think yall have a massive racism problem that has just been brought to the surface, like a boil for the rest of the world to see on our nation's face. If you want be angry at someone, be angry at the racists who showed up, and the "good" people who could not be arsed.
But make no mistake, you have humiliated us all. Fuckin' Alberta.
They are still racists, but they are our racists.
So, while I get that these will likely be abused given Smith's general approach, I think gilmore's take is wonky/missing some data. It's also failing to read the room for many locals...
Mark Miller was the immigration minister for a long time, and was the one largely responsible for the huge immigration spike post covid that sent prices/rents skyrocketing again, and triggered massive affordability issues. He was in the press constantly saying Canada needs as much immigration as it can get, and that narratives about immigrants causing strain / issues for locals were fake news. Then, he got put on to the housing file, and suddenly he did an about face: high levels of immigration were causing issues, so the federal government needed to cap it. Housing/Rent prices have been coming down ever since immigration got capped by the Federal government -- Vancouver just reported that housing prices are down another 4% yoy since last sept.
Infrastructure such as housing and medical services are under provincial jurisdiction, but immigration is under federal, generally (Quebec gets special treatment, which allows many 'backdoor' entries where the immigrant goes through Quebec, then immediately resettles elsewhere). Canada's population grows/shrinks almost entirely based on immigration. In order to plan for capacity on provincially regulated/controlled critical infrastructure, you need a predictable population growth pattern. Further, when growth is entirely via immigration, you need time for those new immigrants to acclimatize and 'get settled' into professional positions / fields of work, and for them to adopt Canadian cultural values.
The fed allowing a massive influx of immigrants DID fuck up govt services and their ability to function. Our own AG noted that our immigration fraud investigators couldn't come close to keeping up with the reports of student visa fraud -- 2000 cases investigated per year, for 75000 cases reported. Hell, I work with a bunch of immigrants, some fairly recent, and I've heard a bunch of them say things like "We thought we'd be able to afford a home, but things went crazy" and "We thought we'd be able to get medical care/a family doctor, but the wait times are years out. We may aswell go back home to get treated".
Gilmore's daft for pretending like provinces wanting more control over this area isn't a valid concern.
Let's blame immigrants for the fact that rich people have been using housing as investment objects for decades. So much easier than facing the facts about Capitalism.
Blindly blaming immigrants is wrong / prejudiced. Discussing the damage / problems caused by shitty immigration policies isn't. You're toe'ing an ideological line that's ridiculous, counter productive and doesn't advance the conversation at all.
Blindly faulting "the rich" is just as prejudiced as blindly faulting immigrants. 'The rich' in this case are older immigrants, and non-first gen locals, who bought homes when they were cheap / immigration policies were more sound. Locals who had invested in a second rental unit for a second income stream, because they had some capital from early-entry to the housing market / familial ties to people who'd gotten that chance, did so because our immigration policies made it practically the only sound investment in Canada. Even if you reallly really really want to blame those "rich people", their actions were still resulting from our shitty approach to immigration / population growth. So it's STILL appropriate to discuss changing immigration policies.
That gets added to a note that our population growth is entirely based on immigration levels. So if our housing-construction is lagging behind our population growth by so much that housing prices go crazy, immigration levels / policies are CLEARLY part of the issue. There's an imbalance in the scales.
And as for facts, again, the facts say that when our approach to immigration did an about-face under Trudeau's liberals, housing prices followed suit. That's a fact. Changing immigration policies impacts housing, and impacts other social services. Those are facts, I'm facing them, so what am I supposed to do now? Ignore them, re-label regular middle class Canadians as "the rich", and blindly blame that group of people, instead of blaming immigrants (which isn't what I did before, since I was highlighting policies/approaches to immigration). Yea, no thanks.
Regular middle-class Canadians are the ones that voted for racism the other day.
Moreover, the question in your mind should be why and how our systems have all become so threadbare and lacking in any amount of resilience. Hint: "finding efficiencies".
But mostly, housing-as-investment-vehicle is straight up evil. There are empty apartments and houses sufficient to give everyone a place to live right now in most large cities. Government could be spending Billions on new, non-commercial public housing right now, and we know they could because they're handing that over to Venture Capitalists instead.
Housing is a problem for damn sure, but it's not the immigrants to blame. Nice try, but from a Middle Class Canadian who pays less than $500 per month for his mortgage while his friends live in warzones and pay three times as much for the privilege, you need to stop and look at Capitalism. Over time, you will see this more and more clearly, as your racist approach fails to make society any better, and in fact things just get worse and worse as long as you recommit yourselves to the dead future.
Branding people who vote for changes in immigration policy as racist is wrong, and blaming an amorphous "rich" group of people is bigotry. Calling me a racist for discussing this topic / expressing sound, fact-based views, is not convincing in the slightest.
I see no point to you highlighting your personal position, nor in your lame personal attacks. You say I should look at facts, I state a bunch of facts. Now you pivot and say "no no, you need to look at a broad stroke big picture that's based on ideologies and theoretical stuff". So we're doing personal attacks and moving goal posts here, neato.
"Decimate" literally means only 10%, so that means they have like 90% of their rights still, right? ... Right???
/s ;-)
Go check a dictionary. That was the original meaning of the word. Over time it has come to mean drastically reduce in number.
What exactly does this bit mean to you?
https://i.imgur.com/aDywN5o.png
To me, it was intended as an indicator that the post is intended for humorous purposes, so the rest of the post should be interpreted in that light.