Saturday, February 22, 2020

Colby Takes the P*ss Out of the Buffalo Declaration



Even NatPo columnist, Colby Cosh, can't take the Buffalo Declaration seriously.

Alberta or Buffalo? Choose your own adventure? I suppose the revolution is still incomplete in the minds of the authors, too: they have begat a manifesto, but have not quite figured out on whose behalf, precisely, they are speaking. Forgive us, we’re all kind of new at this game of soft nationalism. (Or, rather, at the game of creating a Quebec-style spectrum of nationalisms, ranging from paranoid cranks to grouchy-but-devoted three-quarter federalists.) 
It is definitely a logical problem that so much of the declaration is devoted to the proposition that Alberta is culturally distinct from its neighbours — so much so as to permit the sort of political claims and considerations that would ordinarily pertain to a nation. The East, we are told, is full of the descendants of “bankers, lawyers and other capitalists.” Meanwhile, Alberta was being peopled by the wretched of the Earth. “Settlers like the Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Chinese, and Icelanders immigrated to Alberta because of poverty, overpopulation and unemployment in their homelands. 
... 
It turns out that the people who came from the corners of the Earth to dwell in West Buffalo were sailing into a trap. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren now find themselves once again bled white by a tsardom’s cold and distant bureaucracy. Look at the language, the particular word choices, at the head of the document. “The economic and social challenges faced by Canada,” we are told, “… are the symptom of the colonial power structures from which Alberta and Saskatchewan were born.” Many Buffalonians “are disconnected from, and feel disrespected by, the power class of the Laurentian consensus.” Alberta faces “systemic inequities.” 
...
No wonder the Buffalovskian mental revolution is tricky. To find a hearing outside Buffalo, its factual basis will have to convince — no easy task, and the authors have not been as careful as they ought. (They hint that Alberta is experiencing a suicide epidemic, but rates are still slightly higher in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and many times higher in the rump Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The SNC-Lavalin mess is characterized as interference in “judicial” rather than prosecutorial independence. There’s a complaint about Alberta “access” to the Parliamentary Press Gallery that is flat-out mysterious.)
But perhaps the main task is to train the Buffalo audience in an unfamiliar and unnatural argot of victimhood, one in which injustices are always “systemic” and change must always be “structural” and you get a failing grade if you go a hundred words without mentioning undifferentiated “power.” If you feel “disrespected,” as we Albertans surely often do, you should immediately take that to be evidence of a conspiracy against your ambitions. And if it should occur to you that one of the signatories of the Buffalo Declaration now protesting perpetual Albertan exclusion from government was a minister of the federal Crown 52 months ago, well, maybe that’s your false consciousness talking.

7 comments:

John's aghast said...

'Bisonians' doesn't quite have the same ring to it as does 'Buffalonians'.

The Disaffected Lib said...

I don't know, John. It has a certain ring to it.

Trailblazer said...

The end result is still bullshit!

TB

rumleyfips said...

I keep thinking about Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump.

The Disaffected Lib said...

TB, my sense of decency, minimal as that may be, I still held back from posting a photo of a Bison taking a dump. And who says I show no restraint. I did, however, find just the right one.

the salamander said...

.. oh Deary Me..
that 'old geezer' Rumleyfips strikes awfully close to the uh.. bullseye so to speak
so I intend to award n reward him in the best way possible.. as well as gracious host Mound
who also stalked the planet long before greenhorns, cheechakos n tenderfoots
the likes of Simon d'Montreal conceived the simple idea of being born

Thus I intend to put, no embed.. a tune in all your sage heads
I do hope elders like Lorne and Owen also enjoy my well intended pranking
and choose to ride along.. so hop aboard all ! Turn up the volume
and go full screen.. full tilt boogie.. sidle up & saddle up !
We ride !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Lmkm5EF5E

The Disaffected Lib said...

Jeebus, Sal. That's a wicked video, especially the cougar. Once they pounce they rarely lose.