The goal here is to fail.
Pulling out of the pension plan is a bad idea. They know this. But by ludicrously inflating the amount they claim they’re due, when the feds inevitably checks their figures and gives them a fraction of that amount, the UCP can then blame the failure of the whole endeavour on the feds “cheating” them out of the whole amount.
The goal is to generate a new engine for endless outrage against the federal government, because this is literally the only thing that motivates Albertan voters at this point. The UCP has no solutions to offer beyond being performatively angry at someone else.
There is a consistent pattern of people that are exceedingly stretching the social fabric on what is acceptable behaviour.
I won’t say these people are on the right of the political spectrum, or members of the conservative party.
What I will say is that when you find these people I can almost guarantee you they are on the right or vote conservative.
A growing segment of the population have turned into generally insufferable shitheads and because the rest of us are generally the type to not want to rock a boat, we end up having to work with these shitheads.
They’re using the system against us and it’s frustrating.
Indeed. It seems the reason people are becoming vulnerable to such manipulation is because civil discourse has deteriorated. Manipulative politicians, concentrated media perspective, outdated educational models, lack of information sharing from academia to the general public, increasing isolation and segregation within communities, all of these factors (and probably more) play a role in cultivating and weaponizing ignorance among a population.
All of us need to talk about the real reasons why more and more politicians are corrupted; why we only get a limited-range, highly-curated point of view and overly-simplified bullet points (which all make it easy to mislead people), instead of actual policy debate in the media; and why when there IS a specific policy discussion, increasing numbers of people lack so much context that they can be flat out lied to and manipulated, just like that. These people aren’t losing intelligence (though they might be shutting it off for a while so it looks like it). Their reality is being disconnected from everyone else’s outside of their perspective, to an extent that makes it self-reinforcing (but not necessarily impossible to deconstruct).
I don’t think anybody overtly did it in this topic, but I keep seeing and hearing people blaming individuals for succumbing to society-wide problems that might need society-wide interventions. Recently, I can’t remember where, but I saw someone make an interesting case that left or moderate people shunning or cutting off right-wing family members and friends is fuelling this as well. (Note: they just meant people who frustrate or annoy you a lot and not those who also would actively harm your mental health-- such people absolutely should be avoided for health reasons.)
We need some individualism and some collectivism for a society to work, much like there should be within a functional family. An extreme of either one without the other would be intolerable for the vast majority. Obviously even with a mix, there can be disagreements on where we should be more individualistic/collectivist and what the overall balance should be (or if it even needs to stay the same).
*edits for grammar/readability
Yeah, it’s the Facebook model of politics; when Outrage is the single emotion that generates the most engagement, Outrage becomes the first Go-To in the playbook for anything they want to do. It’s an awful methodology but as long as voters keep buying into the Outrage cycle they’re going to keep using it
Rather than the most engagement, it’s starting to become the emotion that creates any engagement at all.
Political apathy has gotten pretty ingrained in the democratic world, let alone here in Canada. And frankly, I can’t blame anybody when it feels like even going out to the polls is a lose-lose situation. Not a single viable candidate you really want to back means that why should you even bother to show up to vote? No matter who gets in the seat, they’ll screw over the majority of the population and hold back any of the real change that’s needed to actually fix any of the prevalent problems that hurt not only the regular folk, but the economy, health, safety, and any number of other things that make a good and prosperous country.
This isn’t China, yet why does it sometimes feel like the upper echelons are growing to more and more resemble the CCP? Or the oligarchy of Russia?
They claim they are owed the money they put in + what it earned as an investment - what Albertan’s collected.
They ignore that not all that money was invested, it was used for the intended purpose of paying pensions. They also ignore that not everyone who earned/payed in in Alberta retired there. How are they going to pay the pension of everyone who worked in Alberta during their career but retired to another province?
If every province used the same math to demand their share of the money there would be a massive hole in the budget. Their numbers do not add up.
Their math just makes no sense. How do they think they deserve half when Ontario and Quebec have triple their GDP together
Dream on, Yanks
“muh equalization payments” probably
Say muh name lol
