Sneaky Alberta Politicians
Alberta Sovereignty Act leaves a bad tase.
Politics has always been full of shenanigans. More so with the MAGA movement in the US and the extremism embracing the “right” parties around the world lately. Alberta, Canada has seen some of this extremist mentality creep into its local politics.
Recently the Premier of Alberta — Jason Kenny — announced he was resigning because he did not have a big enough percentage of the votes in the leadership race for his party (The “United Conservative Party” or UCP.) Publicly he indicated he felt he did not have the mandate needed to do the job effectively. This resulted in a new leadership race for the UCP.
Danielle Smith from Calgary won that leadership race but did not hold an elected seat. She then ran for the by-election in Brooks, Alberta and won. (Disclaimer — I do not have a complete understanding of this by-election process and my opinion here could change with more education on the matter.)
This brings us to the first couple of sore point for me:
- Danielle Smith became Premier of Alberta by nature of a party leadership vote. The UCP has approximately 124,000 members (according to Wikipedia) and I think that swelled to 200,000+ members just prior to the leadership vote. Alberta has a population of approx 4.5 million residents. Doing the quick maths…
