The Referendum Nobody Wanted

At 6:45 tonight, Premier Smith is going to take to the airwaves to announce that Alberta is going to have the saddest referendum ever. The referendum nobody wanted.

The separatists don’t want this referendum, because the question doesn’t meet the requirements of the Clarity Act. Even if 50% of voters say “no” to the question “Do you agree that Alberta should stay in Canada?” the federal parliament would not accept the outcome as being “clear.”

The federalists don’t want this referendum. Sure, they signed the Forever Canada petition, but that was only in an effort to block the separatist question. So getting their question on the ballot in October feels like a loss, not a win.

Everybody else in the province, I suspect, would like the separatists and federalists to just shut up already, so they could go about their lives.1

So who wants this sad orphan referendum? Possibly Donald Trump, who can use it to poke at Canada on days when he loses interest in Greenland, Cuba, and Iran. Some bot farmers in Moscow, perhaps.

But Premier Smith has backed herself into a corner, so she will go on TV tonight to tell Albertans that 700,000 of them have signed petitions calling for a referendum (glossing over the fact that you wouldn’t want to put a random subset of that 700K in a room together, because it could get ugly).

And so it is that we are going to spend the next five months going through the motions of an orphan referendum, because it’s consequential enough that it can’t be ignored, but not truly consequential.