CHARBONNEAU – Alberta referendum gives oxygen to wild-eyed populists

Not all of them were separatists at heart.

 Of the 24.7 per cent, only about 40 per cent of those actually support independent statehood according to an Angus Reid survey. The remainders were split between populist, “grievance-driven” voters and those who were motivated by a tactical desire to pressure the federal government rather than a true wish to leave Canada.

 The populists are in a perpetually agitated state in which separatism is a passing phase. They will soon move on to other hot-button issues.

 Populists are emboldened by what they imagine is their influence for the separation movement. At their core, they are guided by conspiracy theories whipped up by influencers.

Researchers estimate that Russian bot farms and content farms produced 40,000 items per month, about 80% of foreign-influence output, starting in July and leading up to the vote on October 19.

The bots remind me of the Jewel Wasp. The female wasp stings a cockroach directly in its brain which completely removes its free will or motivation to run away. Instead of paralyzing it completely, the venom leaves the cockroach’s walking muscles fully functional. The wasp clips the cockroach’s antennae and simply leads it backward to a burrow like a dog on a leash to be eaten.

Security experts note that Russia’s operations rarely invent new political movements; instead, they hijack existing domestic grievances.

Tyler Dawson, Edmonton-based editor for The Globe and Mail, has watched the hijacking of the United Conservative Party by what I call freedom convoyers.

“The people involved in the separatist movement, or who identify as separatists, are not all committed separatists. This has not been a lifelong commitment for all of them. Certainly, those people do exist – they toiled in lonely fields for decades and showed a certain amount of admirable perseverance. But many came to it recently, as a natural next step after joining the Yellow Vest protests against federal energy and immigration policy, or after coming to believe that Canada had strayed too far from its values during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are, in other words, transient in their views and political passions.”

“Transient” is too generous a word to characterize the mind controlled populists who are led by unseen forces to get in their trucks and cars and drive to Ottawa on some misguided issue-of-the-day.

The cull of diseased ostrich in Edgewood, British Columbia, was an example of the kind of thing populists can get behind. Here was the federal government, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, trying to kill a bunch of cute birds.

Then there are echoes of the COVID pandemic in which populists claimed mind control, not by Russian bots, but by evil vaccines. Following an avian flu (H5N1) outbreak that killed 69 birds, the owners argued that the surviving ostriches were healthy, displayed natural immunity.

Stay tuned for the next big populist cause.