Danielle Smith’s referendum questions push right-wing policies intended to divide and weaken Canada

Through commission and omission, the final four questions we must deal with on October 19 aim to support a provincial march into federal jurisdiction – say no to all nine! The post Danielle Smith’s referendum questions push right-wing policies intended to divide and weaken Canada appeared first on rabble.ca .

On Wednesday we considered the five tendentious questions about immigration that Danielle Smith’s Government intends to put on a ballot on Oct. 19, 2026. I recommended in that post that voters say No to all of those questions, which are often deceptively worded and are clearly intended to prepare the ground for an attack on immigrants of non-European descent and non-Christian beliefs. Today, let’s look at the four “constitutional” questions, which are designed to advance a grab-bag of policy goals pulled straight from the wish list of far-right politicians throughout the nations of the industrialized West.

In some cases, like the “immigration” questions previously considered, they too are deceptively worded to sound more reasonable than they are in fact intended to be. In other cases, the deception is achieved through omission, rather than commission. The Questions on the Canadian Constitution Each of the remaining four questions begins as follows: “Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to ... ”

Some Canadian Conservatives have long dreamed of a situation in which there would be enough Conservative majorities in Parliament and provincial legislatures to gut the 1982 Canadian Constitution and remake our country in the image of the United States. Today, of course, there are some Canadian provinces run by governments with a similar ideology to the UCP’s that would support a provincial march into federal jurisdiction as suggested by the Smith Government’s four “constitutional” questions. But the purpose – and the likely result – would not be to make Canada stronger.

The goal, it is said here, is to make the country ungovernable, and thereby weaker. This would not serve the interests of Canadian citizens, including Albertans, but it might work for some of the groups and people funding the UCP and its separatist campaign in this province, and the Americanization of Canada in every part of the country. Who funds these campaigns is a topic for another day, but it is worth keeping in mind that not all of them are Canadians, or operating from within our country.

Moreover, it might work for neoliberal ideologues who see the democratic nation state as a potential impediment to “economic freedom,” which means economic feudalism for most of us. It is an irony that conservative political parties and advocacy shops that so effectively pilloried former prime minister Justin Trudeau for musing about Canada becoming a “postnational state” are the force striving most mightily to move us into a state of powerless postnationality. So, keeping in mind the preface above, let’s consider the four “constitutional” questions: 6. Have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeal courts?

The UCP has already clearly demonstrated willingness to channel the Trump Administration’s inclination to ignore rule of law and due process. This is a blatant attempt to create the conditions for the UCP to rule in perpetuity, assuming it would be able to do so with the help of a politicized judiciary functioning like the Supreme Court of the United States. As we can see from some of the rulings of the Court of Appeal of Alberta, the provincial judiciary is clearly not entirely made up of “activist judges” determined to thwart the plans of the Alberta Government at every turn.

So if the current system ain’t broken, even from a conservative perspective, any attempt to “fix it” engineered by this crowd is likely to make it far worse. The Smith Government knows, of course, that the federal government will never allow provinces to appoint judges to the superior courts, that is, the courts of King’s Bench and Appeal. Not even a Conservative federal government dominated by that party’s Alberta caucus would do that.

So a secondary goal of this question is to create the conditions for a constitutional crisis, which