Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

People underestimate the anger that has festered in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and parts of BC due to Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program [0]. It caused a severe recession across western Canada back in the 80s and 90s leading to the Reform Party movement, Social Credit movement (a proto-MAGA movement), and the BC Liberals (a reform party splinter that uses the Liberal name, and all the liberals got pushed into the BC NDP as a result), and that resentment has festered.

Secession is a pipe dream, but do not underestimate the anger and conservatism in Western Canada outside of Greater Vancouver, Nanaimo, Victoria, Kelwona, and a couple other islands of liberalism in a sea of conservatism - there's no cultural or social difference between Abbotsford and Bellingham (edit: whitcom county, did not realize Bellingham gentrified), or Lethbridge and Great Falls. Western Canada's resource-driven economy also plays a major role in this because for a lot of Canadians it's their only shot at middle class salaries and life.

At least Carney grew up in Alberta during that era, so he can probably avoid the misteps that Justin Trudeau and his father did when dealing with Western Canada.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_Program

While I agree with your general statement here, are you saying that Abbotsford and Bellingham are both conservative towns? Greater Whatcom county, certainly, but Bellingham is a very liberal city.

Political leaning aside I agree that Western BC and Western WA are nigh identical culturally. Can't speak for anything further east as I don't live there.

I mean Whatcom county!

Bellingham may have changed over the past few years - last time I spent a significant amount of time there was in the 2000s.

At least on the BC side, other than Nanaimo, the others haven't really shifted from conservative to liberal.

Sounds like the same pattern as the USA. The non-scientific wing of the environmental movement gutted industries across the interior, and in the end all we did was move fossil fuel burning and pollution overseas in exchange for poverty and resentment. (In fact, we probably burn more carbon by manufacturing overseas and then burning a ton of bunker diesel to ship it here on container ships.)

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

As you can see these policies did nothing.

Seems to be slowing a bit, probably due to technological improvement. In the end there is only one thing that will reduce CO2 emissions: technologies for generating energy from non-fossil sources that are competitive with fossil fuels. Solar and wind are getting there.

If fossil fuels are still cheaper than other sources, then they will be burned somewhere and energy intensive industries will flock to wherever has the cheapest energy (and labor). The only way to stop this would be a global scale agreement to curtail fossil fuel use, and developing nations would never agree to this.

>As you can see these policies did nothing.

Yea, if we didn't reduce energy usage in the US the global average would be far higher than it is now. Those factories would have moved out of the US anyway due to labor costs, and higher energy costs. Efficiency in energy production lowers costs. You're probably not old enough to remember how damned bad pollution in the US used to be.

Burning bunker fuel on large ships is insanely efficient per km traveled. Mostly because the amount of material on said ships is staggering.

Also, we've raised those countries overseas out of poverty. We are talking about billions of people. World wide CO2 usage increased because more of the world walked away from farming dirt and is now producing useful economic product.

Let's not forget the Salmon Arm salute :-)

Heh. That was a bit before my time, but I spent a couple years in a rust (wood?) belt town in BC as a kid, and the anger and resentment was palpable even then.

The kind of populist anti-business and anti-establishment anger I saw amongst the post-Reform and post-Social Credit guys was the exact same as that which I saw among MAGA all the way back in 2015.

I think Canadians (in reality Ontarians and Quebeckers - but not like they could read English anyhow /s) really underestimate the MAGA style populist alt-right trend.

Stuff like Rebel News was always in the water back west.

It's the exact same type of right-wing I see across NorCal (real NorCal starts north of Yuba), Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana.

The Quebecois alt-right is deep in the FN and Zemmour pipeline as well.

"alt-right" is a much smaller group than you think it is.

It wouldn't be accurate at all to paint the BC Liberals as a reform party splinter group. While the party was half taken over by conservatives, rats fleeing their own sinking ship, the reality is that the party up until the last leader Falcon was always lead by individuals with strong Federal Liberal party ties. It's always been a right of centre Liberal party and was clearly even more right wing given its big tent coalition status with Fed Conservatives but labelling it as some sort of Reform Party western grievance party is absolutely a step too far.

The boring reality is that the BC NDP occupied all the space on the left and so the only viable space for the Liberals was more right of centre. Should be noted, not at all an unusual space for a Liberal to be. When the conservative Social Credit party imploded the BC Liberals took them on and it became a defacto two party system with the BC Liberals on the right.

The previous leader Clark kicked the can on a Fed Liberal leadership and we can see already from the actions of Carney that the right of centre Fed Liberals are alive and well.

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Rural Canada was fairly poor back in the day, but being poor doesn't mean you are gullible or some "aw shucks" ingnoramus.

For someone with a partial high school education an Oil job was the only job that would afford them the kind of salary a UT or McGill grad could demand in Toronto or Montreal back in the day.

As such, attacking the ONG industry feels like an attack on livelihoods for a lot of people.

If you turn a culture war into a class war, us liberals and progressives cannot win.

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What kind of drugs?

Alberta has been particularly hit hard by the opioid crisis.

> Either way their victim complex is preyed upon by an industry that has been working to undermine Canadian unity for decades.

I thought we were taking about Alberta, not Quebec.

Please don't perpetuate regional flamewar, or any flamewar, on HN. It just makes things worse.

(Your comment would be fine without that first bit.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough! If you can edit/remove the first part I'd appreciate it!

Ok I've done that and thanks for the kind response!

I'll autocollapse this subthread since it's no longer relevant.

It's also worth mentioning the influence of insular religious groups in Alberta. Hutterites, Mennonites, Doukhobors, and Mormons moved to Alberta to escape oppression/oversight and their presence has had a lasting impact on the culture and political structure of Alberta.

Please don't do regional flamewar on HN, such as putting down populations.

Like national flamewar and religious flamewar, it's a circle of hell we want to avoid here. You can make your substantive points without it, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Name-calling and putdowns are not facts, they're emotional expressions.

They don't give information about the topic, but about the identity of the author—specifically, what that person identifies against.

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