That said, anybody who would blame Albertans like Thanos with being fed up ought to take a good, long look at our history in Canada. This is why I majored in history in the first place.
This piece by Jen Gerson in Macleans is well worth reading, but here's a good summary of what's set so many of us off:
$1:
The transformation that took place while it was travelling across the Prairies was so complete that few now remember that the convoy was not some kind of white nationalist uprising. Instead, they recall Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer, who addressed the convoy’s rally in Ottawa, allegedly speaking at the same event as racist alt-right personality Faith Goldy. Never mind that Goldy had showed up uninvited and offered her own rants from a cherry-picker located a block away from the main stage.
I’ve seen a version of this play out in greater or lesser form again and again in reporting from Alberta. From racists rooted out in bars in Brooks, Alta., to the the anti-Semitic ramblings of school teacher Jim Keegstra, whose firing helped form Canada’s hate speech laws, to the anti-semitism within the early Reform Party, to Stephen Harper’s alleged hidden agenda.
Nefarious far-right conspiracies born in the dark heart of oil country, though never quite proven, are assumed.
Yet Alberta isn’t passing legislation like Bill 21, which would bar members of the public service from wearing religious garb. It isn’t calling for a “values test” for new immigrants.
A recent Ipsos poll conducted for Global News found that roughly half of all Canadians entertained racist thoughts they wouldn’t speak in public.
The point isn’t to deny that kooks and racists live in Alberta, nor to litigate which province is most racist, but rather to note that the stereotype serves a particular political function. When a reporter parachutes into cattle country to root out a racist wacknut, the outlier and the anecdote become proof of the corrupt and immoral nature of the province and its political culture as a whole.
I had long chalked this up to habit. Once your province has cultivated a reputation for being a redneck backwater, well, that’s a hard one to break. But it’s a habit that leaves Albertans constantly seeing themselves and their grievances reflected back at them through a profoundly distorted lens.
It doesn’t seem to be enough to perceive Albertans as wrong, or mired in a declining oil-and-gas industry that produces significant greenhouse gas emissions—they must also be bad people.
And what consideration is owed to a pack of hard-luck deplorables?
If you view the province as a collection of regressive hicks whose only claim to wealth is that they were lucky enough to be born on valuable dirt, then it becomes very easy to decimate that wealth. Or, at the very least, to greet the crisis playing out in this province with smug contempt. The oil crash of 2014 and subsequent economic decline becomes a manifestation of divine justice.
The province’s suffering is proper and righteous.
The indifference of the nation is justified.
I will never, ever, ever support separation, but attitudes like this piss me off just as much as they do anyone else in this province, particularly when they're directed at people I consider friends and family.
Hell, I'm as close to a Captain Canada as you'll find on this forum and even I've vented about it.
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