dailynewsnblog
Habs lose
Oh dear.
Maybe it just isn’t meant to be this year for the Canadiens. But you’re still a hell of a team.
#Habs Lane Hutson: “it seemed like the only guy who showed up was Doby [Jakub Dobeš]. We were just not good enough, didn’t answer the bell. The good news is we get another chance to answer the bell.”
— Priyanta Emrith (@habsinhighheels.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 9:09 PM
Oh, so THAT explains it!
Moving on to the news, David Moscrop has coined the term “shotgun federalism” to describe what is happening now.
Canada is a tough country to govern. In a sprawling, decentralized federation, relationships between the national and provincial governments are tricky to navigate during the best of times and between the best of minds. Each province has its own challenges, desires, imperatives, and peculiarities. Provincial cultures are not the same. A varied distribution of natural resources and industries further complicates matters since the interests of the provinces depend on who’s got what and to whom they’re selling it. Language differences — and not just between French and English — matter, too. Indigenous Peoples and nations, who are often forgotten or ignored, have their own needs and rights within both federal and provincial contexts.
We rarely live in the best of times, and we’re rarely led by the best of minds. So, right off the bat, we’re in trouble. But we try….
We’ve had cooperative federalism and competitive federalism. We’ve had asymmetrical federalism, fiscal federalism, and executive federalism. These varieties blend together, mixing on the fly. …
…Today, the country is practicing shotgun federalism. …With the Carney ministry offering Alberta concessions on the industrial carbon price and a pipeline in the hopes of, let’s say, ah, nation-building and keeping the family together, the feds got in return exactly what you’d think: nothing.
… David Eby’s government has started to wonder what it would have to do to get the attention of the feds and a fair bargain for itself. If Alberta was going to act up to get what it wants, why shouldn’t B.C.? …Down the road to the east, the Parti Québécois has a serious shot at winning the upcoming election in la belle province. The party is promising a vote on separation if it wins. …
Shotgun federalism is the art of walking around with a loaded gun in your mouth and hoping it doesn’t go off by accident. Each province wants a good deal within the federation, which is to say each province wants what it wants and doesn’t much care what the others get, unless the others get something good that they don’t. When a province decides it’s not getting a fair deal, it might elect to act up in the hopes that the tantrum will yield results.
The thing about walking around with a shotgun in your mouth is that it might go off. Or else some crazy bastard might decide to pull the trigger on principle. It’s no way to run a country. …
The solution to shotgun federalism is to put the gun down and talk. Call me an optimist, I guess. But I think it can be done. …
Here’s the kind of talk that I think might help, maybe we should call it “Elbows Up for Canada”.
Wab Kineau is leading the way:
From the Mayor of Banff
From historian Craig Baird
We’re going to have to highlight these moments whenever we find them, because I think everyone is going to get very tired of talking about Alberta separatism before October.
Except our news media, of course.
They will be obsessed with it. There’s nothing they like better than horserace journalism – endless pointless speculative stories about who’s winning or losing and by how much. Avi Lewis makes the point that there isn’t going to be an actual referendum, no matter how the October vote goes:
The news media will try to get a “quote” to hang their stories around . They won’t appreciate Carney’s “my answer is my answer” conclusion here
Canadians need to understand that Alberta separatists aren’t just another boring political party. In the Toronto Star, columnist Justin Ling reminds us about the nutty history of Danielle Smith and the Alberta separatists who are her base [gift link]:
…Now, Smith swears she is “trying to find the solutions” and says she will campaign to remain in the country. Good for her. But this is a mess exclusively of her making — and she absolutely should not be leading the “Remain” campaign.
Smith has always been a populist-libertarian, but she morphed into something altogether different during the pandemic. Convinced that Canada was sliding into autocracy, she came to see her home province as the only sane and safe place.
She detailed her shift on a private, paywalled social media community; in her newsletter; on her podcast; and in townhalls and events held across the province.
A prime example is her “Alberta First Initiative,” a manifesto for how Alberta could become “the bitcoin mining hub of the world,” delivered at a cryptocurrency conference in 2022.
She imagined a society where any and everything — wages, taxes, oil and gas royalties — could be paid for by bitcoin, instead of the Canadian dollar. The province would greenlight as many data centres to mine bitcoin as possible. All the province would need to do, she wrote, is build “eight 500 MW natural gas power plants … in each region of the province and turned them into bitcoin mining hubs.”
Why? Because “central banks are bankrupt. It is only a matter of time before they collapse,” Smith wrote, citing a talk from billionaire pro-Trump oligarch Peter Thiel.
It’s all economic quackery, of course. Smith’s is just a modern take on those who want to return to paying for goods and services with gold coins.
“This is what Alberta sovereignty can look like,” she proclaimed. “He who holds the gold makes the rules.”
That is the vision of Alberta Smith was selling to her growing base of fans, frustrated with the federal government — or at least her caricature of it.
“Albertans are looking for something bold and Ottawa is an oppressive force we can’t seem to escape,” Smith wrote.
A lot of her verbiage is like this. The status quo is “dependence and bondage.” Canada is “one of the most oppressive regimes in the world” and “a nation of one-man rule,” under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Ottawa has become “so hostile toward Alberta,” and such an “existential threat,” that “I don’t want them to make the decisions on anything to do with us anymore.”
In the near term, as COVID lockdowns continued, she argued this would mean internal exile, akin to living in the USSR….
Its no wonder this is where the Convoy originated, the truckers who thought they could overthrow Trudeau.
We also need to remember where the financing is coming from. Here is Andrew Coyne
I am disheartened to realize that some in the news media seem to think its all just business as usual. For example, like this Globe and Mail headline on Wednesday
This type of “gotcha!” headline isn’t helpful. Quite obviously, Carney was talking about the Alberta Referendum Lite. But of course he didn’t explicitly exclude Quebec in his remarks, so the Globe and Mail pounced…
….On Tuesday, Mr. Carney said the Clarity Act, which was passed after the 1995 Quebec referendum, will not apply to Alberta’s planned sovereignty vote. The law says the House of Commons must weigh in on the clarity of a referendum question and that a “clear majority” of the population must vote for separation to start negotiations on secession.
Mr. Carney said Alberta’s referendum does not trigger the act because the question will ask voters whether Alberta should remain in Canada, or start the legal process to hold a binding, second referendum on separation.But in an answer to questions from a Bloc Québécois MP, Mr. Carney also said that a “clear majority,” which is not explicitly defined in the Clarity Act, “is not 50 per cent plus one.”
On Wednesday, Quebec’s major political parties were united in their condemnation. …
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, however, Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal minister who tabled the Clarity Act, said it’s “absurd” to think a simple majority is enough for a province to separate. “Nobody with common sense would propose to negotiate such a huge, huge change as secession” with such a slim margin, he said.
The Prime Minister “did not make a mistake,” Mr. Dion said. “He would have made a mistake to say otherwise.”…
I think we need to stop the “gotcha” games and ask all our news media and commentators to tell us if they support sovereign and united Canada or not.
For example, this is what The Line says:
…we don’t think any of our readers will be surprised to learn that The Line is staunchly Team Federalist.
We do think that ought to be said explicitly and openly. Separatists have created numerous independent media outlets to promote their cause. That’s fine. We don’t find them particularly compelling, but they’re perfectly entitled to state their case.
As are we. We at The Line are not obligated to be dispassionate on the matter of embarking on a process that may lead to a process to break up the country. Nobody is so obligated, in fact. Whatever anger or frustrations Albertans have toward Ottawa — and we’ve been covering many of those for many years — separatism is simply not a productive solution to any of those problems. In short, we think it’s a grift that is attempting to channel genuine frustration and outrage toward enriching and benefitting a small number of people who are engaging in a pointless fantasy exercise that can only lead to division and damage for the province and good people within it.
We staked our publication on rejecting bullshit, whether that bullshit is coming from the left or the right. We have a duty to be fair. “Fairness” does not extend toward treating the separatist cause as an intellectually valid position worthy of equal weight and consideration. Separatism is bullshit. Plain and simple. It’s a suicidal response to a series of, ultimately, policy disagreements between Alberta and the rest of Canada. The notion that any of these disputes rise to the level of oppression or abuse, or in any way justify a serious call to leave the country, simply doesn’t pass muster with us.
You can disagree with us if you like, and we know some of you will, but that’s where we stand. And it’s where we stand openly.
There is simply no real future for an independent statelet of five million people; we think there are useful ways to channel frustration and grievance toward a Canada that works for Alberta, and an Alberta that works for Canada. We’ll be talking more about that tomorrow.
In the meantime, we’re pleased to disclose that co-founder Jen Gerson will be working with the Vote to Stay campaign in whatever capacity her skills can be utilized. The group will be a third-party advertiser in the coming vote, however, Gerson’s role is not a paid position — the people working on this campaign are doing this for the good of the country. If you are an Albertan who wishes to sign up, volunteer, or donate money that will be put toward advertising and organizational efforts, we’d be happy to have you.
This is what Black Cloud Six says
…I have no time or sympathy for Alberta separatists. Indeed, I regard the entire movement as one that is assisted in no small part by Russian and American disinformation campaigns, with the former government-sponsored and the latter nurtured in the MAGA-verse. The separatists are guilty of misleading supporters, spreading disinformation, and indulging in delusional magical thinking to wave away any roadblocks to what I believe is, for at least some of its leading voices, the real objective: eventual absorption into the United States.
With that out of the way, this article will focus on one of the major roadblocks facing separatists, one barely acknowledged in the midst of a sea of utterly delusional thinking: defence — a major issue that they wave away with the jauntiness that only a true believer can muster. Except that should they get what they want, defence will instantly become a major — if not the major — issue, much more so than equalization, pipelines, pensions, or the economics of separation. Having spent much of my career inside the machinery of defence planning, I find this particular bit of magical thinking almost breathtaking….
This whole article is well worth reading.
Finally, Bob Rae describes the stakes for Canada:
…Canadians are not only facing a wave of tactical populism from a rogue American president, we are facing it at home as well. Appeasing it at home makes as little sense as does appeasing the predatory hegemons once again bedeviling humanity.
We are at an especially challenging moment. We have to recognize that the rights and freedoms we take for granted in Canada are actually shared by different governments — federal, provincial, Indigenous — as well as by each of us as individuals.
…the real task of leadership is not just counting heads. It is turning heads. Faced with the lying machines in our hands, our task today is to counter with truth. Polls change. Heads turn. Truth matters…
Elbows up, Canada.
