I’d love for you to explain the substantive difference between the real and unreal manipulation. In what way is the specific lobbying campaign by fossil fuels in Alberta distinct from any lobbying for extraction in Canada? There is no disentangling fossil fuel lobbying in Alberta from settler-colonialism within the federal state of Canada or Canadian culture because these are all elements in a commonly imperialistic, capitalistic, and colonial system. You have misunderstood my criticism of capitalism as something oriented around individual capitalists as though I am talking about some especially naughty people and not recognizing that property-owners share fundamental interests because of what this system is and how it reproduces. In what way are Albertans “fooled” but Canadians who defend property ownership for mining corporations, tech corporations, food distributors, and landlords are not? Neoliberalism was dominant in Canada for decades before Trump even ran the first time (no, before 2016). Even further, why is this presumption made that the literal wealth that these companies have at their disposal is itself unrelated to the Canadian state or its interests? Quite literally, the wealth that it controls is both dependent on and contributive to the resources that these companies have access to in the first place when it is widely invested in this among every other extractive industry. Canada harbours half of the world’s mining corporations, and you think that’s what, unrelated to the separatist movement? Not in the interest of US hegemony? Why?

It has been intensely frustrating to have Canadians realize for the first time in their lives that they’re in an empire, and to have their response be reactionary nationalism rooted in neoliberal politics. You have any idea how many Canadians who did not give a shit about how they related to US imperialism until Trump was reelected have mansplained my own country to me in the past year? Tell me about the “real world differences and history,” then.

(This is also, btw, not my argument. I’m applying basic understandings of feminist, structuralist and decolonial scholarship on capitalism and settler-colonialism that you’d see in other work that is derived from arguments formed by scholars like Patrick Wolfe and Ann Laura Stoler. This is how people who analyze this system with the desire for change make sense of developments like Albertan seperatism.)

That’s what I figured.

And then racism; what a guy. I’m sure they never trick you bud, lol. Won’t be reading anything else from you.

Shilling is when you criticize the thing says HeroicBillyBishop.

Oh, is it a little askew? Please, correct me. How have you learned about fascism, liberalism, and capitalism? Which scholars have influenced your understanding of this system?

Refer to other comment, bootlicker.

I love that you read all of this and thought, “this person is big into imperialism.” I’m glad you threw a little homophobia on top of that, very illustrative of my point on Canadian culture.

Refer to my other comment in this thread, but no, this is not “manipulation” any more than any form of capitalist and liberal reaffirmations are manipulative. They are in that this system socializes people to hold capitalistic values, and so these people make choices that are consistent with those values (which are always to their detriment, not only at this point), but to call this the result of “outside actors” is deeply dismissive of the fundamental elements in Canadian culture and its way of life. Carney has openly supported the expansion of fossil fuel industry in Canada, is he some Russian spy? I doubt any more than any neoliberal is.

You’re too focused on responsibility and punishment. Reality doesn’t care, we have what we have to work with. Albertans are deeply influenced by the fossil fuel industry in the same way Canadians are not only deeply influenced, but dominated by the interests of capital and extractive settler-colonialism. Nothing is different here from Canadians wanting to seperate from US imperialism only now that there is a perception that they are “uniquely picked on and punished,” despite this state’s complicity in that brutal violence. Our entire standard of living and way of life is built through that violence, and guess what, it was to everyone’s detriment and that itself is only acknowledged now that we deal with the inevitable decay of that system and the environmental/economic turmoil that it has wrought. It’s not like Canadians have responded to this threat by acting in solidarity with colonized people in the global south or demanding systemic change. Instead, they have strengthened ties with other imperialistic and capitalistic powers. Go figure.

This comment suggests that these people are being “tricked” into believing something they don’t. Canada is not “falling” any more than it ever has, because it has always existed to do what these movements intend to do, which is to extract and generate profit. None of this would be effective if there was actually a popular opposition to liberalism and fascism in Canada, but the culture is already conducive to those ideologies because it is a settler-colonial state built according to their imperatives. If the trick is meant to be that these people are voting against their best interests, then like, what are the Oil Sands then? Some genuine benefit? What about all the other ways in which Canada reproduces and violently defends a system that works to the detriment of all but the wealthiest and most privileged in society? Carney is a neoliberal and has unsurprisingly used the advantage of this moment to expand state investment in private capital, is he a Russian plant?

Many settlers choose fascism because they would rather secure privilege in a failing system than risk their security by committing to meaningful and substantial change. The reality is that these movements are an inevitable consequence of capitalist systems as their extractive pursuit of profit begins to disrupt the hierarchy within the metropole. Middle class Canadians are hurting more than any of us can remember, as short as that memory may be, and they have readily embraced racist, ableist, and classist policies that target vulnerable groups as solutions to problems inherent to capitalism, like housing and employment insecurity. Canada is not being “corrupted” by foreign actors, these groups are capitalizing on preexisting conditions in Canada, and because Canada has always been like this, those empowered by this hegemony readily comply and profit themselves.

Oh yeah, all the way back in 2015? It is certainly promoted through US social media algorithms and both the US and Russia intervene in politics through bots that the pro-fascism algorithms privilege. But like, this is by no means a new development because of raising tensions with the US. How are there so many people who don’t remember the fallout of Trudeau’s first term? It coincided with a general rise in fascist values and rhetoric promoted through social media algorithms.

People out west are correctly identifying that the electoral system devalues their votes, and that the neoliberal state will not support them materially if there is any deviation from capitalist economic imperatives (such as providing expansion of education, employment, and medical welfare programs in the event of a decline in fossil fuel, mining, and forestry employment). Because most of them are also settlers, they are going to gravitate toward more liberal and fascist rhetoric and policy because they still want to remain privileged in this system. It wouldn’t work so easily if it wasn’t already here.

Okay, and? Like, the CBC isn’t exactly the height of journalism, but it does seem like this is trying to portray some kind of substantial decline in recent years. The cost of living plus rent has increased by 6.1% as of the start of 2026 (before the increase in oil prices and its reverberating effects). People are moving around Canada more because they can’t fucking afford to live here, so of course the prices in the most expensive places has changed. The cost of that has also been shifted to other parts of the country, it didn’t just decline. Many higher-demand, affordable units in Nova Scotia are up 18%. In Ontario, tenants rights were decreased to the point that you now have to pay your landlord to see them in court for non-payment hearings, and the grace period between non-payment and eviction was cut in half.

All of this and Liberals are still only considering neoliberal policies in response to the dire state of things here. This is not good fucking news, a general and marginal decrease in rent is not enough and has cost so much more than other options.

That’d be correct

Yeah but like, when something isn’t enough, people criticize it.

I think that the conclusion here is, “there’s basically no privacy left in the modern world,” speaks to the tech literacy crisis more than it does to the expanse and fortitude of surveillance infrastructure. Like, yes, there is an incredible lack of state regulation to limit the scope of data collection, but that doesn’t mean that this is unavoidable.

There are measures you can take to secure your home network against data collection and telemetry such as buying a managed, wired router and using wireless access points, as well as hosting a DNS so that you can better regulate the data that enters and exits your network. Your phone is definitely more difficult to prevent collection from by merit of the restrictive design of most operating systems and the fact that they literally transmit your location to function, but Android devices can take measures like installing GrapheneOS, which helps to severely limit the ability of apps to transmit that data without your knowledge. Even beyond that, phones themselves are not super expensive and performance has plateaued for about half a decade now (used devices are relatively cheap), so, you do not need to use a single device for everything and can disperse your usage data in a way that also works to obscure your identity. As you said, the information you provide to social media can be controlled by users, and their penetration into other services you use and its access to your user data in browsers can be limited similarly.

There certainly is still privacy in 2026, but the state benefits from making it as difficult as possible to restrict, and so there is now a skillset to ensure a level of privacy that was not required before. Our system feeds on precarity, so this is not even close to a new phenomenon. Think about the need to develop driving skills, finance literacy, workplace etiquette, consumer caution, knowledge on your rights, the fact that you do need a cellular device to participate in this system without punishment or that much of what I mentioned above requires some sort of income to execute effectively. All of these are consequences in the same way that the need to develop privacy skills are.

It is strange how under-discussed the senate reform has been over the past decade.

Lmao, oh, are they? Wow, I mean, at least the totally-not-white-supremacist-genocidal-settler-state Canada made it all the way to 2026 without white supremacy entering its media and politics.

I really hope someone writes a book about how selective Canadians have been about what constitutes imperialism. Alberta seperatism gained traction over ten years ago and can be attributed to US social media algos promoting fascism as much as it can be to the inherent inequities in Canada’s election system, extractivist economy, and settler-colonialism. It would be extremely difficult to argue that Canada has had any single election at any level without US intervention in some way over the past decade.

Is this a joke?

You can do whatever you want bud, just don’t come around me pretending that you give a shit about anything having to do with helping people.

That these are two equivalencies in your settler-brain is exactly what I am criticizing.

How you took “Canada is imperialist and imperialism is bad” as “I want Canada to exist but just spend money how I like” is something I can only take graciously if I attribute it to a genuine deficiency in your language and knowledge on these topics. “We don’t disagree that Canada should be pursuing a more activist role in the world, like it does for Ukrain and Cuba [lol],” yes, we do. I do not want Canada to fucking exist, I do not want Canada to colonize, “international law” does not apply to imperialists who have power over the institutions of “international law,” like the US (in large part because of Canadian subordination to the US). “Activism” does not apply here in any other way than as some lib-brained nonsense to moralize the different vectors of Canadian control as something distinct from settler-colonialism and imperialism. You do fucking care about morals, you just accept that yours are universally correct and should be what is enforced globally; wonder where you learned to think like that. If this violence isn’t fundamentally wrong on a moral basis for you, stop talking about, seriously.

Ukrainians are being attacked by Russia, which, unsurprisingly, is not as powerful as the EU and the US, which are exclusively responsible for the genocide against Palestinians; along with their significantly – overwhelmingly – longer list of targets for genocide. I wonder why Ukrainians were able to flee into Europe and Canada, but it is a “refugee crisis” when it is anyone fleeing from Euro-American imperialism, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Btw, yeah, I don’t fucking care if Nazis in Ukraine are “fighting for their country,” and you shouldn’t either if you knew a fucking thing about how Europe and the US opportunistically support more fascistic, oppressive groups in the countries they “save” from oppression. You a big Taliban supporter are you? Al-Qaeda? Nationalist Popular Front? You mentioned Cuba, have you ever learned why there is a communist state in Cuba? Maybe take a look, this shit is not new.

You have taken for granted all of the values that have been taught to you, and believe that whatever is good must be good. If you actually care about people resisting oppression, you wouldn’t take the Canadian state at face value when they say the money they spend is going toward that. When I point out that Canada does not and will never support vulnerable groups in these other countries, I’m not doing so to advocate for its support, but to demonstrate that it does not and to spur you to question what is distinct about these instances. That isn’t because they’re doing it wrong, it’s because I know that if they’re sending money, it is exactly to prevent any challenge to this hegemony.