A while ago, someone shared stories that happened during the golden days of Alberta, with the help of the oil sands. While not perfect and under a lot of abuse, able-bodied people could find a job and build a family with a modest life.
This “progress” was happening all over the world, not only in Alberta. But it was enough to cement the position of the conservative parties that hold the power for almost 100 years there, in special PC that hold control of the province for long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Alberta_general_elections There is a nostalgia effect for people that lived there during those times.
PC eventually merged into UCP to make sure they would keep a majority in elections. I remember some people at the time not so happy they were joining the “crazies” but thought it was a necessary evil.
If you check the electorate map, you will see that some districts have almost half of the people than others, but the gerrymandering is not as bad as in USA. From there you will see the major cities rarely vote for conservatives from the past forever. And if you are in lemmy for a while, you might have seen some posts from Fair Vote Canada that while the UCP gets most seats, they do not get the majority of votes.
Back to cities and eroding the electorate. Destroying the education and healthcare is just a way to filter out people that do not vote for them. COVID and other diseases run rampant because they think it will hurt the cities more than their electorate.
If you searched top universities in 2016, Calgary and Edmonton would often appear on top 5 of some fields. We would send people to get training in Edmonton foreseeing the machine learning boom, as they were ahead of the curve and very affordable. In 2019 the province made it hard for many industries that were not oil, what lead to an exodus. It was common to some companies move from AB and BC, but this only got my attention when a friend moved to Montreal. I always heard about Quebec taxes, but I never thought some company would move there from Alberta, but it appears that Quebec offers huge tax rebates and investments if you fit some criteria. So a bunch of young folks, that never witnessed the “golden age” moved to other provinces too.
And of course, there is a lot of propaganda, but at this day and age is very easy to confirm those stuffs. Well, except when that province government makes the access to information harder.
tl;dr: it is not majority, it is a mix of district mapping, poor/unsecure electorate systems, and pushing away dissidents and smart people.
This electorate district shenanigans are not new, they did stuff like that with Toronto not so long ago. That is why more modern democracies have measures to combat this kind of thing. (also one of the reasons people are asking for the back of proportional representation).
A while ago, someone shared stories that happened during the golden days of Alberta, with the help of the oil sands. While not perfect and under a lot of abuse, able-bodied people could find a job and build a family with a modest life.
This “progress” was happening all over the world, not only in Alberta. But it was enough to cement the position of the conservative parties that hold the power for almost 100 years there, in special PC that hold control of the province for long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Alberta_general_elections There is a nostalgia effect for people that lived there during those times.
Alberta used to be ahead of the curve, in 1920 they had proportional representation, but later the party in power realized they could have even more power if they ended PR. But they shot their foot with that, that is when Social Credit lost to PC. https://fairvoteedmonton.com/2025/06/17/alberta-had-proportional-representation-whyd-we-give-it-up/
PC eventually merged into UCP to make sure they would keep a majority in elections. I remember some people at the time not so happy they were joining the “crazies” but thought it was a necessary evil.
If you check the electorate map, you will see that some districts have almost half of the people than others, but the gerrymandering is not as bad as in USA. From there you will see the major cities rarely vote for conservatives from the past forever. And if you are in lemmy for a while, you might have seen some posts from Fair Vote Canada that while the UCP gets most seats, they do not get the majority of votes.
Back to cities and eroding the electorate. Destroying the education and healthcare is just a way to filter out people that do not vote for them. COVID and other diseases run rampant because they think it will hurt the cities more than their electorate.
If you searched top universities in 2016, Calgary and Edmonton would often appear on top 5 of some fields. We would send people to get training in Edmonton foreseeing the machine learning boom, as they were ahead of the curve and very affordable. In 2019 the province made it hard for many industries that were not oil, what lead to an exodus. It was common to some companies move from AB and BC, but this only got my attention when a friend moved to Montreal. I always heard about Quebec taxes, but I never thought some company would move there from Alberta, but it appears that Quebec offers huge tax rebates and investments if you fit some criteria. So a bunch of young folks, that never witnessed the “golden age” moved to other provinces too.
And of course, there is a lot of propaganda, but at this day and age is very easy to confirm those stuffs. Well, except when that province government makes the access to information harder.
tl;dr: it is not majority, it is a mix of district mapping, poor/unsecure electorate systems, and pushing away dissidents and smart people.
This electorate district shenanigans are not new, they did stuff like that with Toronto not so long ago. That is why more modern democracies have measures to combat this kind of thing. (also one of the reasons people are asking for the back of proportional representation).