Tag: Canadian Politics

  • Independence Fantasies, Colonial Truths

    Independence Fantasies, Colonial Truths

    Alberta wants to leave. Again. And this time, it’s louder than usual.

    Calls for Western separatism—what some are now trying to brand as a serious referendum campaign—are gaining traction. Politicians are testing the waters. The Premier hasn’t ruled it out. And, predictably, they’re invoking Quebec’s sovereignty movements as a model.

    But let me be clear from the outset: I’m not defending Canada. I’m not clinging to the federation. I don’t believe states are worth saving—not this one, not any of them. I’m not interested in sovereignty narratives that just redraw the same borders with different colours. I’m an abolitionist. And as a Black queer person raised in Quebec, I know firsthand how nation-building is so often just empire with better PR.

    That’s exactly why Alberta’s separatist posturing doesn’t read as radical to me. It reads as settler revanchism—masked in the language of resistance.

    Yes, Quebec’s independence movements have been violent, colonial, anti-Black, and shot through with contradictions. But they emerged from something real: a distinct cultural, linguistic, and historical formation shaped by centuries of attempted assimilation. That doesn’t absolve them. But it contextualizes them.

    Alberta has no such context.

    There’s no endangered language. No collective memory of being colonized by the Canadian state. No suppressed literature or forbidden faith. What there is, is capital. Oil. Guns. White grievance. And an economy built on extraction and entitlement.

    What Alberta wants to separate from isn’t oppression—it’s accountability.

    This isn’t a fight for freedom. It’s a tantrum from a province that’s never been told no. A province that has long enjoyed disproportionate political power, federal subsidies, and a privileged place in the settler imagination. And now, as the climate crisis accelerates and global scrutiny mounts, Alberta doesn’t want to change. It wants to opt out.

    It’s not seeking liberation. It’s demanding exemption.

    And when Alberta reaches for Quebec as its excuse—as its supposed precedent—it exposes something deeper. It shows how shallow this separatism really is. Because for all of Quebec’s failings, there is a cultural infrastructure here: a language, a kinship system, a literature of struggle (even if that struggle has too often excluded Black and Indigenous people). Alberta has none of that. Just the myth of rugged individualism and the fantasy of permanent control.

    This is not decolonization. This is a colony refusing to share.

    Alberta separatism borrows the postures of liberation movements to double down on domination. It mimics the rhetoric of resistance while clinging to the very systems that are killing us. And that’s what makes it so dangerous: it masquerades as anti-state politics while defending everything the state was built to protect—white wealth, settler power, and the right to extract without consequence.

    As someone who has lived through Quebec’s nationalism and survived the Canadian state’s violences, I don’t mistake any of this for freedom. I’ve seen what nationhood does to those of us who don’t fit its image. I’ve watched how state-building chews up the very people it claims to uplift. I’ve learned that not all exits lead somewhere better.

    Abolition isn’t about preserving Canada. But it’s not about celebrating every departure from it, either. Especially not the ones led by those who already have everything and just want more.

    So no—I won’t romanticize Alberta’s separatist dreams. I won’t let them smuggle white supremacy into the conversation under the banner of autonomy. I won’t let them use Quebec as cover while erasing the very people Quebec has tried to silence.

    Alberta isn’t trying to escape oppression. It’s trying to protect it.

    And some of us are done pretending not to notice.

  • After the Election: No Victory, No Salvation, Only the Work Ahead

    After the Election: No Victory, No Salvation, Only the Work Ahead

    Yesterday’s election unfolded the way it always does in a decaying settler state: desperate, fragmented, unmoored from any real possibility of change.
    Mark Carney won a minority government.
    Not because he inspired anyone.
    Not because he offered a vision of something better.
    But because fear of collapse keeps people clinging to the wreckage.
    Carney’s victory is a victory for capital, for managed decline. He will govern not with transformation, but with technocratic violence, offering competence while administering crisis. He represents an empire trying to manage its own decay without ever questioning the structures that brought it to this point.

    The NDP, meanwhile, collapsed into near-irrelevance.
    Not by accident.
    They spent years softening their demands, trimming the edges off movements that once demanded real justice, chasing approval from the very systems that were built to contain and destroy them.
    By the time they realized who they had abandoned, it was too late.
    The base that built the NDP—racialized, working-class, Indigenous, disabled, queer communities—has already moved on.
    Many of us have stopped looking to electoral politics for salvation.
    We learned long ago that there is no ballot box for liberation.

    And then there’s Poilievre.
    His personal defeat is not a victory.
    He lost his seat but grew the Conservative base.
    He played with the fire of white rage, conspiracy, and open fascism, and those flames are not going out.
    They will find new leaders, more dangerous ones.
    The centre did not hold. It barely even tried.
    What we are seeing is not a reversal of right-wing momentum. It is its acceleration, even in the absence of the man who helped bring it to this point.

    Taken together, tonight’s results confirm what many of us already knew.
    Canada, as a project, is dying.
    Not with a rupture that could birth something new, but through a long, grinding erosion that tightens its violence while pretending to offer stability.
    There is no vision here. No future being built.
    Only a managed decline, administered by people too invested in the structures of extraction, policing, and dispossession to imagine anything different.

    For Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, and trans communities, this election does not change the terrain.
    The state was never our protector.
    It was never ours to reclaim.
    There was never a version of this country where we were meant to survive with dignity.
    That’s not pessimism. It’s clarity.

    The task ahead is the same as it has always been.
    To build outside of the crumbling systems.
    To invest in abolitionist infrastructures: mutual aid, communal care, survival networks that are not dependent on the permission of the state.
    To protect each other when the safety nets fail, because they were never designed to catch us in the first place.
    To refuse despair, not because we are hopeful about the system, but because we are committed to each other beyond it.

    Carney’s victory is hollow.
    Poilievre’s downfall is dangerous in disguise.
    The NDP’s disappearance is a cautionary tale about what happens when you sell your soul for electoral respectability.

    But our survival has never depended on who wins elections.
    It has always depended on how fiercely we remember who we are to each other.
    How fiercely we build in the cracks they cannot seal.
    How boldly we refuse to accept the limits they place on what we can imagine.

    No ballot was going to save us last night.
    No parliament will save us today.
    Our future will not be built in the halls of power.
    It will be built in kitchens, basements, parks, community centres.
    It will be built in memory, in movement, in revolt, in care.

    No victory.
    No salvation.
    Only us.
    Only everything we still have to build, together.