‘So they can own us’
Recently: Is dictatorship winning? Adam Przeworski on the puzzle of the world’s richer, angrier voters. (Open-access, in partnership with the Marlborough House Foundation—see our editor’s note here.)
Today: The premier behind Monday’s secession referendum raises a beer, sings the national anthem, and campaigns to remain. … &c.
For members—from the weekend despatch: Nearly 6,000 teenagers have been through French police custody in three weeks, and the revolt keeps spreading. Who’s really behind it?
+ New music from Marina Herlop …
A keg in Red Deer
On Friday, in a brewery in Red Deer, halfway between Calgary and Edmonton, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, tapped a keg and sang “O Canada.” Across the street, a protester with an Alberta flag paced back and forth. Smith called the referendum, though she wants Alberta to stay in Canada. In Calgary the night before, Carney told about 5,000 people that “some outside our borders are working to break us so they can own us.” He and Smith agree on the separation question, the last of 10 on the ballot, and disagree on the other nine, about immigration, judges, and abolishing the Senate.
A vote to hold a vote
The separation question gives voters two choices: Alberta stays a province, or its government starts the constitutional process toward a binding referendum on leaving. What’s Monday’s vote for? Carney warned that it comes at “the worst possible time.” Keith Wilson, a co-chair of the campaign to leave, brushes that off—“The worst timing for this, why?”—and the separatists see the vote as leverage in bargaining with the federal government. Quebec’s separatists, who won that province’s election on October 5, made the opposite call. In August, their leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, promised no referendum while Donald Trump is the president of the United States: The question “must not be hijacked by the upheavals of American politics.”
‘Texas North’
Here in The Signal, Parker Donham discussed Alberta’s political culture in February 2022, while truckers protesting vaccine rules blocked a border crossing into the United States. “We Canadians tend to think of Alberta as a Texas North,” he said, and he put support for Trump-style populism among conservative voters there at about 50 percent. If Canadians could vote in American elections, though, Parker says, Trump “wouldn’t get 10 percent.” Now Daniel Béland, a political scientist at McGill University in Montreal, calls Carney’s popularity in Alberta “highly unusual” for a Liberal prime minister—putting it down to a “Trump effect”: The American president’s trade war and musings about annexing Canada have rallied Canadians around Carney—remarkably, Albertans included. … See “Fury road.”
À la prochaine fois
On May 20, 1980, Quebec voted on a question that stopped short of independence. The separatist government of its premier, René Lévesque, asked for “the mandate to negotiate” a new agreement with the rest of Canada, in which Quebec would make its own laws and levy its own taxes, and promised that any change would need approval in another referendum. Almost 60 percent of voters said no. Lévesque told his supporters: “If I have understood you correctly, you are telling me, ‘until the next time.’” Quebec voted again in 1995, and the no side won by 54,288 votes out of more than 4.6 million.
Meanwhile
Trump waives the Russia sanctions Congress named for Senator Lindsey Graham, days before they’d take effect. … Ebola reaches an eighth province in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the outbreak has now killed more than 4,000 nationwide. … Albanian police detain 160 after three nights of protests against Prime Minister Edi Rama and a resort linked to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a reserve full of flamingos. … China’s ambassador to the Philippines, Jing Quan, says China “may easily win” a confrontation at sea but won’t use force; President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. says that “sounds very much like a threat.” … & Astronomers find the first star to look green to a human eye, tinted by debris from planets in its system.
Thoughts? concierge@thesgnl.com.
Gulf royals have moved billions into global football. Now what?
Read Shadow Play, a new, limited-run print magazine from The Signal.
On sale now in the U.S. and select markets globally.
The weekend despatch
The usual suspects
Developments
- Nearly 6,000 teenagers have been through French police custody in three weeks, and the revolt keeps spreading. Who’s really behind it?
Feature
- Is dictatorship winning? Adam Przeworski on the puzzle of the world’s richer, angrier voters.
Books
- What does “equality” actually mean? Teresa M. Bejan, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism.
Music
- Who is Marina Herlop?
- & New tracks from her, Jess Williamson, Ebbb, Failure, & Carly Rae Jepsen.
+ Weather report
- A loose cluster of clouds east of Guam becomes a typhoon in two days—and it’s still growing …
Strengthen The Signal.
Become a member, keep your bearings, navigate your world.
Music
‘Flor de los precipicios’
Marina Herlop makes music that crosses between classical and the avant-garde. On the opening track of her new album, Dja Dja, flute-like tones rise with her voice like birds at first light, and the arrangement keeps opening out until it’s nearly orchestral. She sings in Spanish and Catalan, and in a language of her own.
Who is Marina Herlop?
