Are We Really Doing This?

Alberta Referendum and Separation - Final.

Are We Really Doing This?

Alberta Referendum and Separation - Final.

The Only Person Who Can Answer These Questions Is You.

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Before we get into it, I want to take a moment.

To everyone who has read through this series, shared it, pushed back on it, or sent me a message at some ungodly hour because something landed differently than you expected, thank you. Genuinely. I’ve read more of your responses than I’ve been able to reply to and I’ve taken more of your criticisms on board than you probably realize.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be penning this with my usual YakkStack spice and most likely lace it with a lot of profanity and personal expression but this one’s too important for that, so I’m keeping it straight.

I also want to extend a personal thank you to two people who have been in my corner not just through this series but through the last couple of years of my work. Brian and Camilla, you know what you’ve done and you just may not know how much it’s meant. I don’t have the words for it, so I’ll just say this, this series exists in part because of you and I hope it does the work we hoped it would.

Now let’s finish this.

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This is the final piece in the series.

And I want to start by saying something that might surprise you coming from someone who’s spent the last several days laying out the case for why Premier Smith’s nine referendum questions are a deliberate, sequenced and strategically brilliant pathway toward the most significant democratic decision this province has ever faced.

I can’t tell you how to vote.

Nobody can.

Not me, the Premier, not a political party, not a rally crowd chanting in unison, not a legacy media outlet with an editorial agenda and not a federal government that has spent the better part of a decade demonstrating exactly how little Alberta’s democratic will matters to them.

The only person who can answer these nine questions honestly is you. And the only way you get to an honest answer is by walking yourself through your own life and asking whether what you’ve actually experienced lines up with what you’re being asked to affirm.

That’s what this series was meant for.

Not to push you in any direction. To help you find out where you already are and make some sense of the referendum and the questions being asked.

In sales, there’s a principle that the best professionals live by - ISM.

I am Sold Myself.

A proper sales professional doesn’t drench somebody with a firehose of information and expect them to come out the other side convinced. They ask questions. They listen. They help the person in front of them arrive at a conclusion through their own reasoning, their own experience, their own values.

Because a conclusion you reach yourself is one you’ll defend. A conclusion someone handed you is one you’ll abandon the moment someone pushes back.

We covered the mechanics of this in Part 1 with the retail analogy. Forty years of sales training exist because “Can I help you find something?” almost always gets “No thanks, just looking.” The automatic shutdown. The trained reflex.

We covered the psychological architecture of it in Part 4 when we walked through how COVID compliance was built one survey at a time, small affirmations accumulating into larger permissions, until the majority of Canadians had walked themselves to a destination they never consciously chose.

Same architecture. Different destination.

This time, the destination is yours to choose. And the questions that follow aren’t designed to tell you what to think. They’re designed to help remind you of what you already know.

Before you go through these questions alone, consider something.

Talk to your kids. Ask them what their classroom is actually like. How many students are in it. How much time the teacher spends on them specifically versus managing the room. Whether the pace of learning feels right or whether it’s been slowed down by factors nobody at the school board wants to say out loud.

Talk to your mother, your grandmother, your father. Ask them how long it takes to get in to see their doctor. Whether they’re on any waiting lists for procedures. Whether they feel like the healthcare system they paid into their entire working lives is still there for them when they need it, or whether it feels like it’s running on fumes.

Talk to the young people in your family. Ask them about rent. About entry-level or summer jobs. About whether they feel like the city they grew up in is still a place they can build a life, or whether it’s starting to feel like something that’s slipping out of reach.

This referendum is not an abstract policy exercise. It is the largest set of decisions that Albertans may ever be asked to make. It deserves the respect of being answered from real experience, not from whatever talking point your social media feed decided to show you this morning.

Now let’s go through the questions.

Question 1: Immigration Control.

Before you get to the referendum question, spend a moment here and I’d ask you to do the same with all of the questions that follow.

• Do you think Alberta should have a meaningful say in who comes here to fill Alberta jobs?

• Should your community grow at a pace that matches housing, hospitals, schools and jobs, or should the province simply absorb whatever intake level Ottawa sets and manage the consequences on its own?

• Should families already here have a fighting chance in the job market before demand gets pushed higher by intake levels the province had no hand in setting?

Now ask yourself honestly whether your own experience, your neighborhood, your kids’ school, your search for a family doctor, your sense of whether the city you live in is keeping up or falling behind, points toward yes or no on this.

The Referendum Question: Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?

Question 2: Service Eligibility.

• Should taxpayer-funded programs go first to the people who actually pay taxes here?

• Should programs built for Albertans stay available to Albertans, not for people passing through?

• Should provincial funding serve the people who’ve been contributing to it before it serves people who haven’t yet?

Think about the last time you or someone you care about needed a provincially funded service. Whether it was there when you needed it. Whether the wait was reasonable. Whether the system felt like it was designed for the people funding it, or whether it felt stretched past the point of what it was built to handle.

The Referendum Question: Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?

Question 3: Residency Requirements.

• Should people contribute to a community before drawing from it?

• Is it reasonable to ask that someone live and work in Alberta for at least twelve months before qualifying for provincial social support programs?

• Is it fair that someone who has built a life and paid taxes here for years waits behind someone who arrived last week?

This isn’t a question about whether newcomers deserve support. It’s a question about whether the sequencing makes sense. Whether contribution should come before benefit. Whether that principle, which most Albertans already apply to their own lives without thinking about it, should apply to the system they fund.

The Referendum Question: Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially funded social support programs?

Question 4: Fees for Non-Permanent Residents.

• Should non-permanent residents help share the cost of systems they use but won’t fund long-term through taxes?

• If someone is here temporarily, should the people who are here permanently and funding the system indefinitely subsidize their access to it without any contribution at all?

• Is a reasonable fee for public healthcare and education an unreasonable ask of people who aren’t yet permanent members of the community those systems were built to serve?

Fair contribution is a principle most Albertans already live by every single day. The question just makes it explicit in policy.

The Referendum Question: Assuming that all citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the healthcare and education systems?

Question 5: Proof of Citizenship to Vote.

• Should citizens decide who governs a province?

• Is confirming voter eligibility an unreasonable ask when we show ID to buy beer, board a plane, or pick up a prescription?

• Do elections mean something if there’s no standard for confirming who’s actually casting the ballots?

This one doesn’t require much more than that. Elections are the foundation of everything else on this list. If the foundation isn’t solid, nothing built on top of it is either.

The Referendum Question: Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or citizenship card, to be eligible to vote in a provincial election?

Question 6: Abolishing the Senate.

• Can you name a single senator you actually voted for?

• Should legislation affecting every Albertan be reviewed by people Albertans cannot remove, who serve until age 75 because a prime minister Albertans didn’t vote for decided they should?

• When Trudeau appointed Liberal senators for Alberta despite the results of our actual senator elections, what did that tell you about how much your democratic preferences matter to Ottawa?

You’re not being asked to attack personalities here. You’re being asked to look at the architecture and decide whether it represents you.

The Referendum Question: Working with other provinces to abolish the Senate.

Question 7: Provincial Appointment of Superior Court Judges.

• Should Alberta’s courts reflect the values of Alberta’s communities?

• Should the judges shaping laws that affect your daily life be chosen by premiers Albertans vote for, rather than prime ministers Albertans have consistently rejected?

• When sentencing decisions produce outcomes that would never apply to a Canadian citizen in the same circumstances and the courts producing those decisions were shaped by governments you never supported, do you have any democratic mechanism to challenge that?

Nobody wants political courts. They want accountable ones. Right now, the accountability runs in one direction only.

The Referendum Question: Allowing provinces to appoint their own superior court judges (seizing judge-selection duties from Ottawa).

Question 8: Opting Out of Federal Programs Without Losing Funding.

• If Alberta generates the taxes, should Alberta have a say in how that money is spent in Alberta communities?

• Should a municipality that democratically set its own zoning priorities lose its housing funding because it won’t accept Ottawa’s blanket rezoning ideology?

• Should saying no to a bad federal program mean forfeiting your own province’s money?

Sean Fraser used the Housing Accelerator Fund as a leash. Steven Guilbeault ignored desperately needed maintenance in Jasper, a national park under federal jurisdiction, that burned to the ground. A young Calgary firefighter lost his life. $1.23 billion in damage. The carbon tax kept climbing. And the federal government’s position was that Alberta should be grateful for the partnership.

Quebec has operated with opt-out provisions for decades. It’s not radical. It’s what a functional federation is supposed to look like.

The Referendum Question: Opting out of federal programs without losing funding (e.g., similar to Quebec’s model).

Question 9: Provincial Laws Taking Priority in Shared Jurisdiction.

• Should the government closest to the people make the final call when Ottawa overreaches into areas of shared authority?

• Should federal legislation override the decisions of Alberta’s own law enforcement when Alberta’s boots are the ones on the ground doing the work?

• When the federal gun buyback program was rejected by police forces and provincial governments across western Canada because it targeted law-abiding rural Albertans instead of the criminal networks actually driving gun violence, who should have had the final word?

People don’t want wars between governments. They want clarity and coherence. Provincial priority in shared jurisdiction provides it.

The Referendum Question: Giving provincial laws priority over federal ones in areas of shared jurisdiction.

Now Ask Yourself the Real Question.

You’ve walked through all nine.

You’ve thought about your kids’ classroom, your grandmother’s wait time, your young family member’s rent, your own experience with the systems you’ve paid into and the government that’s been managing them on your behalf.

You haven’t been pushed. You haven’t been argued into anything. You’ve simply been asked to measure what you know against what you’re being asked to affirm.

Now ask yourself honestly - on each of these nine questions, where did your own experience point you?

If you found yourself saying yes, and then yes again, and then yes again, then something is forming. Not because I built it for you. Because your own life built it.

And if you couldn’t sell yourself on any of these questions, then keep digging. Have more conversations. Ask more people. Do more research. A decision this significant deserves that effort.

Because this is the largest set of decisions any Albertan may ever be asked to make. Nine questions that are really one question, building from the practical to the structural to the foundational, each one adding to the weight of the answer that follows.

And that answer leads here.

The Tenth Question.

Behind all nine questions sits the one that has been unresolved since 61.7% of Albertans voted yes in 2021 and Ottawa responded with crickets.

If Alberta’s democratic will doesn’t change anything inside this federation, what actually does?

That’s where the tenth question begins.

Not in anger, not in impulse, but at the end of nine honest conversations about agency, accountability and jurisdiction that you walked through on your own terms, measured against your own life.

Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?

After nine yeses built from your own experience, your own values and your own honest assessment of what this province has tried and what it has received in return, that question doesn’t feel like a leap.

It feels like the only natural conclusion.

You’ve done the reading. You’ve had the conversations. You’ve walked the path.

Now you are ready.

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Please share this with your friends, family and community, not out of anger or hostility, but out of true sincerity. This is a big decision that we are all facing together and it deserves genuine time and honest reflection, not responses driven by malice or ill intent.

This series was produced free of charge, made possible by the incredible paid subscribers of YakkStack. I know they’d want it that way.

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Previous pieces in this series:

Part 1: 9 Question Referendum - Plus Independence. Is a Brilliant Strategy:

Part 2: Lost in the Translation:

Part 3: The Referendum Questions Are a Contract:

Part 4: Pandemic By the Polls:

Part 5: The First Five Referendum Questions Aren’t About Immigration. They’re About You:

Part 6: They Ignored 61.7% of Albertans. Questions 6 Through 9 Are the Response: