Listen, I’m not going to tell them to get bent for doing the only sane thing they’ve ever done, but I’m not throwing them a welcome-to-the-family party either. The lesser evil is still evil and I will continue to avoid so much as letting my shadow darken their doorway.

The tyranny of the ignorant is still tyranny, Ergo all systems are tyrannical and suck, yours included.

How Ironic given you’re arguing nonsense in circles about imagined strawmen.

No one argued they don’t have rights. I don’t see anyone in this entire thread making that argument. What ghost are you shadow boxing with?

Minors have full citizen rights, but until they reach age of majority, certain rights are held in trust by their presumptive guardians, who are empowered to limit and guide the exercise of said rights until they are considered fully competent citizens. Schools assume temporary guardianship while a student is in their care, which means they have the latitude to determine what is and isn’t an appropriate exercise of a minor’s rights. “Suspended” might be a bit of an exaggeration but the OP is roughly correct.

… I vote for the world killing asteroid.

Please, tell me more about what my values are. While you’re busy making generalizations about other people, pay more attention to the conservatives undermining your own province, because we aren’t the only province getting targeted, we were just the low hanging fruit.

I said 25 years ago it doubled in 10 years. We’re not talking about the same time period.

It’s pretty close to 50/50 population wise. A little over half are right wing mostly in the sticks. A little under half are left-ish, mostly in the cities. But yes, basically anyone who couldn’t hold down a job anywhere else was told to grab a shovel and head to Alberta to dig for oil. And they came, by the millions. They bought up the cheap houses in all the little whistle-stop towns and then headed off to work the rigs. We leaned a bit right before they came, but not this far right. Even most of the farmers find them extreme.

The American oil barons promoted American style culture and a disdain for Albertan history and cultures. Most of the rig pigs and truckers didn’t know any better, they weren’t from around here. Now 25-30% of the province doesn’t even identify as Canadian.

Don’t misread me, it was never a haven for critical thinkers, but we had one of the finest public education systems in North America for nearly 30 years once. You wouldn’t know it now. Our public health system was a miracle for how low our population density was. It’s still not as bad as some of the truly dystopian parts of the US, but it’s certainly a struggle compared to some provinces. The racism and xenophobia always existed, but it was never this widespread, and it certainly wasn’t this open. All our independent news orgs are now wholly owned by American hedge funds.

There’s some bright spots though. The arts are still widely celebrated here. Calgary and Edmonton have more stage theatres than you’d find in many cities twice their size, and music festivals are everywhere. Arguably we have more diverse food culture here than most places in North America too. The urban centres are actually pretty cosmopolitan and friendly. If you stick to the urban metro-areas and the national and provincial parks, it’s still beautiful.

And the political situation isn’t as hopeless as some people make it out to be. We’re outnumbered, but just barely.

Read it again. Your recency bias is showing. They flooded out west long before there were any ad campaigns.

Well, I mean if you stick to the coast it’s fine. You get into the interior it may as well be Alberta.

Please, no. Please? This is how we got into this mess in the first place. We were slightly more conservative than the Canadian average 25 years ago and then all the rest of the country dumped their social rejects on us. Our population doubled in like 10 years and now we have Danielle Smith running the province. Please, I’m begging you, stop sending every failed Ontario washout to Alberta.

Why are we building infrastructure for using expensive and dirty fuel?

China is already looking at peak consumption before the end of the decade. That’s a small window.

Standard abuser playbook.

Right, but we could have done that 20 years ago, and we didn’t. Why? Because the cost of the infrastructure to do it is more than the discount we are forced to take from the Americans. The question is are we going to be signing up for a permanent national penalty in the form of debt on a bad investment that doesn’t pan out long term. And are we doing it for the sake of people who are wishfully thinking a few new pipes will solve all Alberta’s problems, but aren’t actually going to see any benefits from it, because the profits all end up in American pockets regardless?

The vast majority of Albertans don’t even know that the pipeline projects are moving forward. Why? Because it’s so far from their daily life it doesn’t make an actual difference to their lived experience. It’s an Article of Faith that Ontario hates us because oil, and there’s literally no policy on earth that’s going to change that, because it’s not grounded in reality, it’s grounded in the Mythological idea of what Alberta is that we were all raised on. It’s identity politics. And there’s no way to inject a counter narrative because the only sources of media out here are owned by American Hedge Funds with a vested interest in keeping us in a state of perpetual civil unrest.

The problem is, those “Important” Albertans don’t really control their hounds as well as they think they do. To use a pop-culture reference, I feel like they’re going to end up sharing Ramsey Bolton’s fate, and unfortunately the rest of us are on the menu with them.

Yeah, but the thing is, reality has this weird habit of giving you just enough rope to hang yourself with, and then snapping the noose closed when you actually do it. The tax man for the idiot tax takes his sweet time getting there, but he doesn’t suffer excuses when he arrives.

Which is fair, and I get that. It’s a complicated question of just how critical it is for our future success and prosperity though. He’s making a gamble that this is the best use of resources and political capital and it’s either going to prove very smart, or it’s going to be a boat anchor on our economy for decades and the chance of either is a coin flip.

Not policy. The problem has to do with the media ecosystem in Alberta. We are saturated in pro-American/Oil-boss propaganda and while just under half of us recognize it for what it is, over half don’t. Policy isn’t going to change anything, because over half of us don’t know or care what the policy actually is, what laws, programs, and actions are actually out there, or have any idea how to find out if we wanted to.

It’s not a policy problem, it’s a messaging problem and a community problem.