Alberta is Canada's weakest link in the rise of neofascism

I am so fuckin stressed about Alberta. Since 2023 I've been tracking the variables, weighing the probabilities, assessing the risks... my intuition demanded it at the time and continues to scream "GET THEM OUT". I left the province last summer and I want my family and friends to leave very badly. Now that Trump's regime has crossed the line of murdering its own citizens (as if all the other offences weren't already horrific enough) and Canada's MAGA-aligned politicians (specifically Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith) have not only not blinked, but applauded the regimes policies while dutifully working to apply them at home, the anxiety is constant, and it's utterly exhausting.

The signals have been building for a while. When Israel attacked Gaza in the fall of 2023 I immediately sounded alarms in my circles. The insane propaganda of it all combined with Western leaders' complete apathy for the devastating human suffering, coolly allowing a genocide to unfold, tut-tutting and even proudly announcing their Zionist alignments... it rewrote something in my brain. The West, as I knew it, was a lie. The ugliness of The West was something I had cynically assumed through most of my adulthood, but to see the grotesqueness of it so starkly, and to watch world leaders either sympathetically condone it through bizarre doublespeak, ignore it, or watch helplessly as Western Imperialists told everyone else "fuck you we do what we want"...

Another clear signal was the fact that after the Jan 6th insurrection and all the crimes surrounding it, Trump was never convicted. For anything. The Dems and Liberal media made strong promises and vowed justice would be served, and then... nothing. Worse than nothing, Trump was entered back into the running for the 2024 election. All of that should have been impossible, but the very fact that it was happening and no one in power had shit to say about it was enough to tell me two things: 1) The Western ruling class had gone malignant, and 2) Neofascism was the answer to the collapse of capitalism, and it was coming for us.

So I started tracking the political shifts of colonized countries around the globe, and it became clear Western fascism was more or less moving as one entity. I had no proof beyond my own digging, and I knew that if I tried to explain the threat to anyone I would sound like another conspiratorial kook. But it was happening, and people with more authority than me have since proved it.

And then there's the fact that the Alberta government was seized by a coup of Separatists in 2022, ousting the terrible Jason Kenney for the even more terrible Danielle Smith, both oil lobbyists of course, but Smith was placed in power exclusively to represent the interests of a Christian Nationalist/MAGA alliance that was actively in the process of indoctrinating rural Albertans, and has since obliterated the democratic functions of the provincial legislature.

And my god, the propaganda. The mis/disinformation. The silos. The noise. Working in communications, I was floored by the nonexistent media literacy I was witnessing. Nevermind that a Republican-owned media conglomerate called Postmedia owned/owns assets and brands (newspapers and news websites) in literally every town and city in Alberta (and most of Ontario, and every daily and most weeklies in Atlantic Canada, plus every national news entity), and news contending with or criticizing the fossil fuel industry not only did not exist, but was loudly shouted down by the cult of "I ♡ Oil & Gas", which was well-supplied with a high-quality line of merchandise that was plastered across businesses, vehicles, softball uniforms... anywhere the message could be. A merchandise style that looked oddly similar to the "Fuck Trudeau" merch that magically flooded t-shirt sites immediately after Covid-19 started, which, after the election, seamlessly transitioned to "Fuck Carney". Honestly, I give it six months before we see a sparkly new line of "Fuck Canada" t-shirts and ball caps.

And the Southern Alberta drought that had been steadily getting worse for a decade, with no publicized education on why or how to conserve water and adapt, because of course that would eventually point back to the oil guys, and we couldn't have that. Not when every major institution, including arts & culture, was heavily funded by the oil and gas industry.

Anyway, the writing was on the wall. The writing's been on the wall for a while, and our online social spaces have been trying to scribble it out. Like jesus you want to talk about "distractions"? How about reels?? Zuckerberg's 2015 data used to justify pivoting to videos and reels, which signalled to all other platforms to either follow or be left behind, was proven to be false. In 2016 Facebook admitted to artificially inflating the numbers by as high as 150%-900%. Tech companies were locking into biometric data collection, as snapchat filters and aging apps enchanted users and convinced content creators and marketers "everyone loves reels, video is the way!".

"Two months later, Facebook disclosed additional discrepancies in audience metrics. In October 2018, a California federal court unsealed the text of a class action lawsuit filed by advertisers against Facebook, alleging that Facebook had known since 2015 that its viewership numbers were highly inflated, that internal records showed it "was far from an honest mistake", that Facebook waited over a year before taking action to disclose or fix the problem, citing internal communications that "somehow there was no progress on the task for the year" and decisions to "obfuscate the fact that we screwed up the math."" [Wikipedia]

I'm bouncing around a bit, I'm sorry. I'm all worked up. But hey since we're talking about 2015 so much, let's review what else was going on in The West:

In Canada:

• PEI election won by Liberals
• Alberta election won by NDP
• Federal election won by Liberals and Conservative leader Stephen Harper, a prominent neofascist, was booted
• Newfoundland and Labrador election won by Liberals

In the U.S.:

• Obama was president
• Affirmative consent became law
• Bans on same-sex marriage were deemed unconstitutional - they argued about this for the rest of the year, with the Supreme Court eventually ruling in favour
• Yemen ousted the U.S.
• Marijuana was legalized in Alaska, then Washington D.C., then Delaware, then Oregon
• A Moscow-based security software company discovered the U.S.'s National Security Agency had been slipping spyware into hard drives made by top tech manufacturers and distributing them to 30 different countries. No biggie!
• Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat
• California experienced a severe drought
• Net neutrality was put into law
• Hillary Clinton entered the 2016 presidential race
• The Supreme Court supported regulations on campaign financing (which was a rare occasion, I wonder why)
• The American Psychological Association is revealed to have played a significant role in torture research during Bush's "war on terror"
• BUT THE EMAILS
• Obama passed the USA FREEDOM ACT wherein phone companies were given permission to collect Americans' phone metadata for the NSA
• Trump announced his run for the 2016 presidential election
• Big BP oil spill
• First measles death since 2003
• Sandra Bland was murdered
• Kaepernick took a knee
• Lots of big wildfires and bad floods
• The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed overwhelmingly, which granted companies immunity from lawsuits for sharing personal data with the government for surveillance
• Multiple stories came out proving the oil & gas industry knew burning fossil fuels caused climate change and had known since the 1970s, and had been funding deniers for years
• Many mass shootings

In the U.K.:

Admittedly I don't know enough about U.K. politics to pick out every significant event, but at a glance:

• The concept of televised political debates caused a kerfuffle
• Inflation fell to 0%
• Supreme Court ruled gov't must take immediate action to decrease air pollution
• Conservative Party won outright majority in general election
• Lots of sex scandals among the royals and other famous men
• Anti-capitalist March led to three cops getting hurt
• Lots of hackers
• MPs approved an IVF technique that creates babies from three people (???)
• Voting rights of MPs from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were restricted
• Lots of terrorist attacks, shootings, stabbings, heists, arson and vehicle/airplane crashes
• MPs debate whether Trump should be banned from the UK after an online petition received an excess of 100,000 signatures
• U.K.'s first airstrike over Syria

If I were to name underlying "themes of The West in 2015", they would be:

1. The climate was getting really fucky and all signs pointed to the fossil fuel industry.
2. Gen X (neoliberal) men were starting to take power from their conservative boomer (neofascist) dads. Neoliberal men wanted to smoke weed and give minorities rights, their conservative dads hated that.
3. They all agreed on tech surveillance and bombing the Middle East, though. BECAUSE THE ECONOMY.
4. Harper was pissed about losing and refocused his energy on the IDU, an international information-sharing network for neofascists in positions of power.

Anyway, ten years later, here we are. Completely at the mercy of white boomer men, easily the most entitled and privileged generation in history, unable to confront their own mortality, who would rather pull it all down than imagine the world carrying on without them.

Canada's angriest white boomer man is Stephen Harper, but the angriest white boomer man of all is Trump. Well, maybe that's not true. Putin is probably the angriest white boomer man. Trump is the wicked boomer of the West (Harper is his back-up), Putin is the wicked boomer of the East.

But what I'm getting to is: I'm really worried about Alberta. Just this week Carney publicly signalled economic and security alliance with China and sent military support to Greenland. Canada is openly in defiance of Trump now. And we've sided with his de facto enemy state, no less.

And how might Trump retaliate? Where is our weakest link? The answer is too obvious. Alberta. A province so deeply propagandized they'll have factions gleefully waiting at the gates, absolutely giddy at the thought of the hammer finally falling on all those goddamn libs and lefties. Less a separation, more a voluntary occupation. And with modern surveillance capabilities beyond what anyone's yet experienced.

A year ago I saw this exact looming risk and immediately felt crazy for it. I knew it would sound too extreme to everyone else, and maybe it still does. But the risk was higher than I could cope with. My anxiety was eating me alive, and the options available to me were grim. On top of that, as the reality of my daughter's graduation got closer, I realized that losing her monthly child tax benefits would mean I'd be short almost $600/month in a city with no jobs for teenagers and even fewer for senior communications roles. I would need a substantial promotion to survive, and my options were to wait for an eventual leadership role in nonprofit, a senior role in government communications, or go corporate, and all of those paths killed my soul. And as a solo, widowed mom of teens, my options for finding romance in a city jam-packed with oil-obsessed capitalists were dire (I mean look at me. A typical Calgary conservative man's reaction to all this goes straight to "crazy").

But I had a successful, though dormant, flower business, and I had equity. So I packed up my family, sold the house, and moved to a province with a more affordable cost of living, small, well-knit communities, less vulnerability to climate disasters (hurricanes yes, but I'm on the slightly more protected side of the island, for whatever that's worth) and resources largely insignificant to world powers (unless the world suddenly runs on potatoes).

I literally got as far away from MAGA as I could, and farther from risks associated with capitalist collapse to boot. I had never been to this Coast, let alone this island and city. I bought my house sight unseen. I don't know anybody here. When the island isn't full of tourists, it's blue collar multi-generational farmers and fishers with a healthy distrust of government. There's a noticeable kookiness here – people show more emotion in public, they move in chatty little packs, and there are tons of retired creatives and cottage folk. And judging by all the outdated business info on Google maps, no one is particularly interested in big tech. Waves of tourism keeps the local economy afloat, and in the winter the island calls snow days if they wake up and the ploughs aren't out yet, which I'm very on board with.

And my kids are safe. They get to have silly teenager jobs, their college and university options (if for the experience than nothing else) are in picturesque, historical cities, they get rowdy beach parties and cheaper flights to Europe. We're surrounded by open beaches, gardeners, and the air quality index is consistently between 1 and 2 – which is the best! I'm giving my kids a slower life in a beautiful place where they can cut their paths from a place of security.

I'm not outlining all of this to scare my family and friends back home, or to say "nyeh nyeh I got out!", I just desperately want them to hear me:

YOU HAVE A CHOICE. You can decide what the next thirty years of your life will look like. Your life is not obligated to a province. You don't owe Alberta anything. You are a Canadian and all of Canada is your home. Explore it! Have an adventure! Your time is precious!

You can take a moderate but controllable risk and relocate somewhere safer, or you can take a much greater risk and ride out what's looking more and more like a terrible time. I'm begging you to please consider that you have a choice, and please understand that the more time passes, the harder acting on that choice will become. Please.