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Yes, its related. In Canada provinces can create carbon pricing schemes, but if they dont, the Federal government imposes a 'backstop' carbon tax. The revenues of that tax get rebated to people per capita, creating a 'climate UBI' of a few hundred bucks. The incidence of that tax falls hardest on rural people who drive the most since in practice the tax is implemented as a tax on gas and various ways of heating homes. The crisis started when the Liberal government removed the carbon tax from home heating oil which is only used in a handful of provinces which vote liberal as a vote buying maneuver. Sounds uncharitable, but a minister came on TV and said that if other provinces wanted carve outs like that they should elect more liberals.
In response, the conservative government of Saskatchewan -- one of our most right-wing provinces -- promised to nullify the carbon tax by refusing to collect it. Its still a live issue, as the nullification starts Jan 1.
This is emblematic of another thing our government loves to do: alienate its conservative citizens. The danger is that many of those people are highly geographically concentrated on the prairies. And the support is overwhelming. In much of the rural west, the Liberals get about 15% of the vote compared to conservatives with 65%. This sort of thing is partly why I think we underestimate the likelihood that western provinces leave in the next few decades.
If they leave, where do they go? Try to join the US? Create the Dominion of Based Canada?
A smarter US would be trying to get them to join the US.
They would contaminate us with their policies. Our politics would be to some degree merged with theirs.
Assimilation only happens on US terms. It would quickly overwhelm Canada and bring it in line with US politics.
Most of the distasteful shit (from my perspective anyway - anti-migrant Canadians must hate both parties since I came over in Harper's time...) is Liberal stuff they can get away with because there's no GOP and governmental splits. That changes in the US system.
People keep wrongly thinking the Republican party will be vanquished forever as a contender for president and having a majority of congress if only Texas would drift a bit bluer. The thinking goes that any year now they will be a permanent minority in terms of national elected officials.
If we let large portions of Canada into the US, then eventually they will get to vote for Congressional representatives and president. Then the Republican party will be vanquished forever. Or until they realign in such a way as to capture around half the national level power. Which I characterize as being contaminated by Canadian politics.
Western Canada is HEAVILY covservative, and the most immediate impact would be all the Blue canadians move to blue state for bureaucracy jobs and tons of Red Americans move north for Resource extraction jobs
I thought BC was majority social democrats NDP. They aren't about to vote Republican.
But googling a bit I seem to have been off base claiming Alberta would be blue. They might side with Republicans. News headlines are a bit comical about their "hard right turn", etc. Such scary language.
Yukon is surprisingly liberal. As an American I naively wouldn't have guessed.
But maybe I deeply misunderstand Canada. Which I really might. Please no one take my American clicking around on Google as serious understanding of Canadian politics.
No, you're right. At least, as of the 2020 election, Alberta would vote as liberal as New York & Rhode Island in polling done during the 2020 election.
https://www.thewrit.ca/p/how-canada-would-vote-in-a-us-election
Now, maybe that's shifted a lot, but I doubt it. The thing isn't how liberal the rest of the world is, but how right-wing US Republicans are, even compared to even other right-leaning parties in the rest of the developed world.
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