No one wants this, but she’s doing it anyway.
I told the police (MHPS) I would put up a post this weekend to provide some context. This shouldn’t take long.The story is obviously fictional. If you didn’t get that right away, there are two explanations: > Some people never read anything. They are unable to recognize an obviously fictional story because they have no experience reading any stories. This is unfortunate, but it’s not my fault.> Some Separatists and other trolls recognized that the story is fictional, but took the opportunity to make noise on the internet because that’s how they contribute to Separatism. I’m not responsible for their noise, they are.
///The following things are real:Minneapolis happened. That was real. If you don’t know about Renee Good, Liam Ramos or Alex Pretti, that’s unfortunate. But those things really happened, and they were done by a leader (Trump) who can’t stop talking about immigrants.ICE is real. They rounded up brown people and deported them without due process. At worst, ICE just shot them. This is real.Trump built much of his campaign on anti-immigrant messaging. He said Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. That wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter: the point was to get elected by making white people focus on the otherness of brown people, and calling it an immigration debate.It worked. That’s why Danielle Smith is doing it now.
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Last week, Danielle Smith had a budget to release. The budget wasn’t going to be popular: big deficit, significant tax increases, expanding debt for years to come. It’s the sort of budget the Right would usually criticize the Left for.This budget would open Danielle Smith to criticism from the Right. That would be bad for her, because Danielle Smith still has no wins. Danielle and the UCP have sucked at everything: Education? Health Care? Energy policy? Orphan wells; wind; solar; coal? Privatization? Trans issues? Financial management? Municipal relations? US relations? Ottawa, Ottawa, Ottawa, blah blah blah? No wins anywhere. The UCP has drive, but it is incompetent.Except for Separatism. Danielle’s one success has been to hand over her party, the UCP, to Separatists. Do you wonder why we aren’t having a provincial election in which there’s a big-tent conservative party and a big-tent progressive party and a handful of fringe parties (greens, separatists, communists, etc.)?Can you imagine how much oxygen the Separatists would be drawing right now if they had to pursue their goals as a stand-alone party? They’re a tiny group; they would struggle for any attention at all. So Why is Separatism such a big issue now? Because Danielle Smith gave the Separatists her party: she gave them the UCP. There’s a good chance you helped her, and now you regret it.Danielle Smith benefits from chaos, from flood-the-zone messaging. It benefits her when our heads are spinning from trans kids to teachers’ strikes, from coal mines to ER wait times, from federal judges to pipelines, from CPP to library books. It looks like she’s fighting everywhere, doing something. But she’s not getting anything done. She’s shadow-boxing, making noise, and wasting a ton of our money doing it.That is why two days before announcing a budget that a fiscal conservative would be embarrassed about, she jumped out from behind a curtain and went “Ta da! Guess what, Alberta! Haitian people are eating your pets! Let’s spend the next 8 months talking about what a bummer brown people are, then have a referendum on what to do about it.”It worked for Trump. Is it going to work for Danielle Smith?
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Can you remember a month or two ago when the Separatist message was that Alberta would be the 3rd richest country on Earth? Where did that message go?All of a sudden we can’t afford health or education. Big deficit, growing debt, tax increases on the way.Is this a problem for Separatists? No problem. Separation doesn’t have to be about economics. It can be about “immigration”. For Danielle and the Separatists, leaving Canada is an end unto itself: it doesn’t need a reason - they just want it because they want it. If they have to round up ten or twenty thousand colored folks to get your vote, so be it.
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In the spring of 2022 I posted my first photo of a button that said “Not Danielle”. That day I got two phone calls at the bakery from South Asian men (India/Pakistani accents). Both of them demanded to know the point of the post. I told them, and they told me they would never shop at my bakery again.After last week, do you think they still support her?
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When a MHPS officer finishes work for the day, they go home; here, in Medicine Hat, where they live. Our cops are not other from us, they are us.ICE is not local. ICE can roll in by the busload, plug into local cops’ computers, and start rounding up brown people. ICE wears masks. ICE shoots people in the head. ICE doesn’t get charged for any violent act. ICE is immune. They get back on their buses and vanish, unnamed, untraceable, unaccountable.Danielle Smith is creating a new police force in Alberta. It will be formally called the Alberta Sheriffs Police Service. In my story, I predict that the public will generally call them ICE. Nobody in Alberta wants this; support for a new police service is non-existent.It doesn’t matter: Danielle Smith’s budget allocates $30 million to the new force to get admin and recruitment going this year, and millions more to grow the force in coming years. No one wants this, but she’s doing it anyway.
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These three things are happening at the same time:1.Trump’s newly-created ICE forces are terrorizing American cities, hurting, deporting, and killing people, and using Immigration as an excuse.2. Danielle Smith is creating a new police force that no one asked for.3. Danielle Smith just launched an anti-immigrant campaign, giving herself the next 8 months to generate hate (within you) against immigrants, followed by a referendum on immigration.This is real.///My story is timely, relevant and important. It is violent. It is dystopian. It is fiction. It hits close to home, and it is a warning. If it bothered you, it was supposed to.I have sat in theatres in past years as people with microphones thanked me for donuts, and I endured the cheers and applause of community members who thought McBride’s was just a wonderful example of a caring and generous local business.And I have sat through such announcements that more recently fell flat on the floor - crickets. It’s ok, I know I’ve hit a lot of triggers. The bakery is spending all its social capital these days. By next winter, I hope, we will get things back to normal. All we have to do is Stop Electing Fascists.And read more books. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
