If you’re going to be all “ra ra Canada” then please at least know what you’re talking about.

Comments like this make it very evident you don’t.

Wow, I’m so glad that we’re giving businesses a cheap out by having them import workers that have no worker’s rights instead of forcing them to negotiate pay and conditions with Canadians.

Beyond livid at this.

I’m not going to lie, this frustrates me.

I had just gotten a job and out of homelessness when COVID hit, and it was heartbreaking that because I had just started my job at Walmart only a few months prior, I was ineligible for CERB.

So a bunch of people who were ineligible, signed up anyways, and then later cried about needing to repay it now get a get out of jail free card?

Like you decided rules don’t apply to you and that honesty wasn’t the best policy. Why is the government giving these people free money when people like me who played by the rules and actually needed help get nothing?

YOU HAVE THE POWER TO BE HIS FRIEND

Guys, you don’t understand! Trump = bad so this = good!

Wow. Legitimately thanks for clarifying, I actually really appreciate it.

So you’re blaming the voters who went Green rather than the party that should be reading the room and shifting to where the voters are if they want their votes?

Despite my slight slip-up, I feel I’ve made my point that this line of thinking lacks critical thought.

Cheers.

“Nuance doesn’t exist, I am very smart, unlike those stupid Albertans”

I find this hilarious that people throw people here in no-win situations constantly where when you’re not being labelled as both simultaneously, you have to choose one or the other.

Like I’m not over here calling Ontarians a bunch of idiots for electing Rob Ford, Nova Scotians for Tim Houston, or British Columbians for the polling Conservatives are having there, and yet because “it’s Alberta” it’s justified to blanket insult people here constantly.

You’re blatantly ignoring context in order to score cheap and easy points online because “Alberta bad” is easy and popular. People are rightfully frustrated that they can’t find a job and that the federal government is doing nothing about blatant LMIA abuse by companies for entry-level positions or positions that they can’t fill because of blatant underpaying wages. They’re frustrated that they see news stories of international students using food banks to cut their costs, and aren’t provided proper context by the media at large of the federal government’s failing to properly inform those students of what it costs to get by here. The questions were also clearly framed to make things sound rational.

Being misled is not the same as being outright stupid, and if you want to go ahead and claim that it is, then I fundamentally disagree with you. All these cheap insults do is fan people’s thoughts of western alienation in a time where we’re supposed to be unifying.

“Temporary Albertan here”

Congrats, I’ve been here all my life, and I know plenty of people that are the opposite way. There’s literally multiple non-profits to support immigrants both in Edmonton and Calgary, and while yes, you get the asshole here and there that’s generally racist, people are more frustrated at things like the LMIA program than they truly are at immigrants.

That’s genuinely crazy, I swear it wasn’t that long ago that Moe had a firm grip on power there.

I hate this framing so much. The nine questions were intentionally designed to appear rational to the average person at first glance and were improperly framed by the very nature of their framing.

It’s NINE QUESTIONS. The Forever Canadian campaign solely focussed on Question 10, other campaigns focussing on the other nine questions as well had a MASSIVE uphill climb for educating voters on those questions and why they were either deceiving or generally poor choices, WHILE having much less reach. Had voters been properly educated on these questions and had Question 10 not acted as a cover for the importance of the other nine, I’m 100% certain the votes wouldn’t have swayed the same way it did.

But hey, let’s just go ahead and keep framing Albertans as everything bad in the book, not include nuance, and then somehow claim that you’re in favour of unity when you get clicks off an inflammatory title against people who live here, while burying the facts of the wording of the questions over twenty paragraphs deep in your article. It’s also so rich of Rachel Gilmore to go ahead and say this blanket statement as if she isn’t publishing this story on a platform infamous for making a profit in platforming white nationalists and neo-nazis.

Reminded of how Rockstar abandoned the Vancouver division.

You know posts like this annoy the hell out of me because people with this mindset put identity before character, and I really hate when that is somebody’s list of priorities.

Before coming out as trans, people ditched me when I was mentally unwell. I’d done more than enough to prove the kind of character I have, but say one stupid blanket statement about women in a severe depressive episode, and people treat me as a dangerous man. This despite the fact that I’ve been open about how the women in my life to that point had either abused me, severely betrayed my trust, or both.

Then I come out as trans and suddenly now the full context of what happened then is understood by others? It’s frustrating as hell and makes me feel extremely tokenised. Like wow guys, feels fantastic that I’m being judged by how I identify and not by the merit of my actions or the circumstances I’ve grown from.

Reminder a lot of these questions are either presented in a way that’s complete word salad, or appears rational to the layman on first glance.

The curve in educating voters was steep for these questions, and that was by design. I wouldn’t blame voters for voting yes because they either aren’t educated on the implications and impact on questions that appear rational at first (questions 1-5), rely on people’s ignorance entirely (question 6), or were presented in the most unclear way imaginable (question 9).

Question 7’s Yes lead makes sense because there’s people across the spectrum that dislike the unelected nature of the senate and want it abolished as such, and question 8’s No lead can be attributed to the phrasing making sense to the average person despite maybe needing a second read.

For people whose main takeaway from this is that the other nine questions won out, I really need to remind people that the main question here was question 10 (the remain, or start the separation referendum question), and that if you weren’t deeply politically engaged, a lot of the other questions would confuse the hell out of you on first glance.

The immigration questions won out between 15 to 20 points. Compared to 51 points for question 10, that’s not a lot. Question 10 was so much of the draw that poll workers like myself were mandated to count those votes first. The average person isn’t as educated on the other questions as question 10, and as such, people often don’t know why the immigration questions are bad while thinking they’re completely reasonable on first glance.

Question 3 for example, there’s been an influx of international students using food bank resources. The average person looks at that and says “why are you here if you can’t support yourself” and gets frustrated with the students rather than the government for giving those students a false benchmark for financial stability. Others know of Temporary Foreign Workers taking a bunch of entry-level jobs and while they rightfully blame the government on that front, they wrongfully blame the workers instead of corporations that abuse both their rights as workers and the Labour Market Impact Assessment. A person not deeply involved in politics would look at a question 3 and say “yeah, makes sense considering current circumstances” until you explain to them why that’s bad.

Alberta’s Voice ran the “kNOw the nine”, the campaign that took off Forever Canadian. The reach the campaigns had wildly differed, and the education needed for the former was a steep uphill climb. That was intentional by the UCP, and I genuinely think that if people were more properly educated about these things and if the education needed wasn’t so steep, that these results would be different.

A number of the questions had confusing wording, if you’re a voter whose main concern was question 10, then for half the other questions you’re basically left wondering what the hell they’re talking about if you’re not a voter that’s deeply engaged.

And people said this would be like Brexit.

We could also work towards doing without them entirely.

All other thoughts aside, it honestly baffles me that people look at the cost of a vehicle and decide that it’s a smart financial decision in today’s economy, especially with these gas prices.