@fssofdeath I think you largely answered your own question . . .
@keithzg
Yeahhhhhhh I see it too now. Jokes aside, this is appaling. They know they're not a state, right?
@fssofdeath Not a state? I dunno, here in Alberta we have a ton of cows, try to base our economy around a love of using and extracting oil, drive giant pickup trucks, cowboy hats don't seem out of place, and our capital city is dramatically more progressive than the rest of the voting area . . . I'm not convinced we *aren't* Texas, yaknow?
You may have a point there. How's the whole Wexit thing going?
@fssofdeath It felt like Wexit rhetoric in Alberta was really heating up for a while, but it hasn't seemed to be in the zeitgeist as much lately, probably because the folks most ardently agitating for Wexit are currently busy complaining about masks. Earlier in the pandemic that wasn't pulling as hard away from Wexit, as of course such things could be foisted on "Trudeau" or "Ottawa" or whatnot, but our premier had finally gotten on board with mask mandates and lockdown restrictions, leaving Wexiters presumably feeling quite betrayed.
Of course that this contemporary resurgence of Wexit in recent years (bolstered as much by the punny coinage as anything else, I reckon; past cycles didn't have any such pithy term from what I recall) has broadly come with an escalation of tensions with B.C., playing out like a really low-states international tit-for-tat, which can't help but raise questions about how likely B.C. would be to join any sort of breakaway republic. And of course that in turn raises questions about how viable an independent Albertan petro-state could be; being landlocked would certainly, uhh, complicate international trade deals.
Not that the sorts of folks who gather en masse in front of Calgary's city hall are likely to let such rotely practical considerations dissuade them, mind you. But I suspect it makes for a calculus that leaves our conservative media punditry less enthusiastic about arguing hard for Wexit, especially when there's the more immediate culture proxy wars to be fought. Presumably if I turned on something like 630 CHED they'd be raving about how mask mandates are a sign of socialism creeping over the border from British Columbia. Luckily for my sanity I am rarely these days exposed to raw AM radio (other than, I suppose, in the most literal sense).
Of course that this contemporary resurgence of Wexit in recent years (bolstered as much by the punny coinage as anything else, I reckon; past cycles didn't have any such pithy term from what I recall) has broadly come with an escalation of tensions with B.C., playing out like a really low-states international tit-for-tat, which can't help but raise questions about how likely B.C. would be to join any sort of breakaway republic. And of course that in turn raises questions about how viable an independent Albertan petro-state could be; being landlocked would certainly, uhh, complicate international trade deals.
Not that the sorts of folks who gather en masse in front of Calgary's city hall are likely to let such rotely practical considerations dissuade them, mind you. But I suspect it makes for a calculus that leaves our conservative media punditry less enthusiastic about arguing hard for Wexit, especially when there's the more immediate culture proxy wars to be fought. Presumably if I turned on something like 630 CHED they'd be raving about how mask mandates are a sign of socialism creeping over the border from British Columbia. Luckily for my sanity I am rarely these days exposed to raw AM radio (other than, I suppose, in the most literal sense).
