Separatists - Page 2

Oh please, some of you big talkers out there have expressed sympathy for Alberta separatism before.

As a Quebecker, I can't say I have ever been able to quite understand how so many other Canadians can hate on Quebec so much, but now I do. I understand because, even though I have never set foot in Alberta, and even though every Albertan I know personally is really cool (and I know a lot of them), I just can't fucking stand the idea of the place.

The cowboy shit, the hostile conservatism, the repugnant lack environmental stewardship and most of all (all the other stuff I can forgive, but most of all...) the utterly disgusting nouveau-riche arrogance. Go ahead, whore your oil out to the Yanks all you want. We'll see how hot you are in 30 years when the oil (and the water) runs dry.

Quebec may not have oil, but we have hydroelectricity which, in the long run, will ensure much more economic and environmental health than what you're doing will. In 30 years, Alberta will be back where it was before the boom: on the receiving end of equalisation. Then we'll see how keen you are to separate.

Canada is Canada, simple. With Quebec, and with Alberta.
Be freakin proud of it!

A member of Harper's team stated on the radio to-day when asked about separatist ideas in Alberta, replied there hasn't been and there is not separatist sentiment in Alberta. He said that a few years ago it was at 5%... must have all been from mtbr's family

Most of the seperatist feeling that I encounter, and occasionally feel, is born of frustraion, pure and simple. Basically, what it comes down to is that we getr ignored, screwed with, or demonized by the liberals and NDP because they know we're not likely to vote for them and they don't really need our votes anyways if they can lock up the east. ANd then when the consevatives get power, they take our votes for granted, and we again get ignored or screwed in the their attempts to win over the eastern voters they need.

A working senate would probably do a lot to allieviate the frustration, but since we're the only ones who care about that it's not gonna happen anytime soon.

That said, most of the seperatist talk you hear is most likely a cynical attempt to scare Ottawa into taking us a little more seriously. It's been working for Quebec for years, so why not us?

Immigration policy, language, and minority rights
The Reform Party advocated an immigration policy based solely on the economic needs of Canada.[7] Reform's early policy proposals for immigration were seen as highly controversial in Canada including a policy pamphlet called Blue Sheet that was issued in mid-1991 stating that Reformers opposed "any immigration based on race or creed or designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada".[8] The statement was considered too controversial and subsequent Reform Party policy documents did not declare any similar concern for a radical alteration of the ethnic make-up of Canada.[9] However this controversy and others raised the question over whether Reform was intolerant to non-white people and whether the party harboured racist members.[10] Subsequent repeated accounts of xenophobic and racist statements by individual Reform party supporters and members spread this concern, though the party itself continuously denied that it supported such views.[11] In the 1993 federal election, Reform continued to demand reductions in immigration and argued that too many "bogus" refugees were being accepted by Canada, a view that new immigrants especially from the Third World were overstraining Canada's social safety net, were defrauding social welfare, and committed a disproportionately large number of crimes.[12]

The Reform Party declared its opposition to existing government-funded and sponsored bilingualism and multiculturalism.[13] Reformers claimed that efforts to create a bilingual country had not worked and that language policy should be a provincial issue. Reformers criticized government-sponsored multiculturalism for creating a "hyphenated Canadian" identity, rather than a single Canadian identity.[14]

By 1997, the Reform Party attempted to shed the negative public outlook on the party's views on immigration and minority rights by selecting multiple ethnic minority candidates to run as Reform Party candidates in the 1997 federal election. As a result, multiple minorities became Reform Party members of parliament including Rahim Jaffer, who became Canada's first Muslim member of parliament; Gurmant Grewal an Indo-Canadian who immigrated to Canada six years earlier in 1991; and Inky Mark, a Chinese-Canadian.

So not too hard to figure out where harper gets his lying, cheating autocratic ways..

That's not racism, so much as common sense stated in a non-politically correct way, for the most part.

AS for individuals making racist statements... sure. I don't doubt that there were racists in the party. Don't doubt that there still are. Don't doubt that they're in every party( money and minorities, anyone?). The reason it got so much attention with the reformers was a combination of

a) amatuerism - they were basically a bunch pf people who were fed up with the current political landscape, not professional politicians. They didn't have internal discipline or vetting processes of the older more established parties.

b) right-wing party - thought the party never espoused the views of those kind of people they were the closest, so naturally they attracted more than their fair share of loons. If anyone ever starts paying attention to the green party I'm sure they'll be a few controversial statements of the "bomb the tarsands" type, but I promise not to judge the rest of the party based on the loons they attract.