I found this when I went to Stony Brook University earlier this month for their cherry blossom festival.

Anyone else got this email I'm assuming this a scam of some sort?

Tomorrow. Canada will see one of its wildest elections in recent memory, tomorrow. Even for an American dominated sub I’m surprised it’s fallen this far under the radar. In short, it’s very important, very divisive and very, very close.
Alberta is a really unique case because politically speaking, it’s so far removed from the rest of the country. Alberta separatism, while still fringe, is finding more and more popular support over there. Conservative votes are so concentrated in Alberta and in the rest of the rural prairies that the CPC actually won the federal popular vote in both 2019 and 2021 despite losing badly to the Liberals in terms of seats, which are what actually matter. Nearly every one of their regional stereotypes hinges on how right wing they are. Alberta is built different.
To show why this is I’m going to go over the political history of the province and what has lead up to now.
ALBERTA LORE
It is the people who govern, or at least we say. And it goes without saying who has governed Alberta for the past 80 years. Like the western United States and the other prairie provinces, Alberta started out as a stronghold of progressive populism, but in 1935 the right wing populist Social Credit party took power from the left-wing agrarians, and held it uninterrupted until 1971 when they lost to the Progressive Conservatives, who would govern for even longer. Alberta has only changed governments 5 times in its history.
This kind of de facto one party system can only exist for a reason, and the reason was oil. The oil boom began at the tail end of the Socred days. The urbanization that oil caused is what brought the PC’s into power, and the insane amount of wealth that oil conjured is what kept them there eternally.
And I do mean insane. During oil booms, literally anyone could find an oil rig job paying six figures; hamlets became small cities and small cities became metropolises of over a million people. Take Calgary, the biggest city in the province. It is more sprawling than a well planned city, yet it’s ranked the third most livable in the world, chiefly because of how much rainbow fucking monopoly money it sees. So Alberta had no qualms with becoming a petrostate - why would they? They became one of the richest places on earth.
The PC’s were far from radical; they threw their billions at public works, and they weren’t particularly conservative socially. They never really made anyone mad. Sparing 1993 (when they still kept their 50% + 1), the PC’s never faced any real opposition from the left, right, or centre, top, or bottom. Remember, we are talking about decades.
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This is 1975, but this isn't anything special. They all looked like this in the early PC era.
This did change, though. Think back to whatever the Tea Party was in the US; what it stood for, what ignited it, what kept it burning. As the PC leadership grew stale and moldy, straying from “true conservatism” by deficiting hard and lobbing vast sums of money back at the oil industry, the hard right went “fuck it” and left. In 2008, The Alberta Alliance, which had exactly one representative, merged with the Wildrose party (named for Alberta's designated flower), which had exactly zero, to create a real conservative alternative.
They ultimately failed to build any real sort of momentum in the 2008 provincial election. Their leader and sole MLA, Paul Hinman, lost re-election and stepped down. In their 2009 leadership election, lobbyist Danielle Smith took his place. Now Alberta was deep into the Great Recession, and the party was genuinely optimistic now, because PC premier Ed Stelmach’s popularity was tanking among the right. In a Calgary by-election that year, Paul Hinman ran and won in a seat that had been held by the PC’s since 1969. This was a W that gave the Wildrose party the momentum and legitimacy that they desperately needed.
Every 30 or 40 years, we get tired of the government that’s in power and we sweep them out and we look to a new alternative. I think we have an opportunity to catch one of those historic waves.
- Danielle Smith, upon being named Wildrose Alliance leader. I straight up ripped this shit from wiki but it encapsulates it all better than anything else I could write.
In 2011, the ever more unpopular Ed Stelmach resigned and was replaced by scandal-plagued Alison Redford. There was another election to come in 2012, and Wildrose was leading. Looking at every poll taken right up until election day, the Progressive Conservative hegemony seemed to be coming to an end. Then came the casting of the ballots, and the results were a fat fucking almost-nothingburger for Danielle Smith (who definitely wasn’t free of controversy herself). Her party was largely confined to the province’s southern rural areas - god-fearing, gun-toting and ram-ranching even by Alberta standards. The PC’s were down from 72 to 61 seats in the assembly while Wildrose, still the official opposition, was 10 points behind them in the PV and only won 17. Many of those seats came from the re-election of former PC MLAs who crossed the floor during Stelbach’s term.
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2012. If polls were right, most of this would have been green and Danielle Smith would be in charge a decade earlier.
In 2014, the PC dynasty became the longest lasting in Albertan history. Also in 2014, Alison Redford resigned from the premiership with an 18% approval rating, being succeeded by cabinet minister Jim Prentice. The walls were falling in for the party, but as fate would have it, they were for the Wildrose party, too. Ten of their 17 MLAs, including Danielle Smith, defected to the PC Party citing concerns with Danielle Smith and her leadership. In 2015, when Prentice’s poll numbers actually looked okay for the first time in a while, he called an election. In short, a momentous fuck up.
Both the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose party (now led by Brian Jean) were stuck in an endless cycle of chimpanzeenian shit flinging, and they divided the dominant right wing vote almost perfectly in half. Neither of them would win. Neither would the Alberta Liberal Party, the only non-conservative party with any legitimacy. Nay, after the 2015 election the majority in the legislative assembly was held by Rachel Notley’s social-democratic Alberta New Democratic Party. The NDP They, by virtue of being left of centre in Alberta, had been a meme party until the day they weren’t. They swept the capital city of Edmonton and (with an insane amount of protest voting and vote splitting, as they only got 40%) picked up dozens of seats in Calgary and the rurals. Needless to say, a big deal this was.
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2015. Without near-perfect Wildrose/PC vote splitting, most of those Calgary and northern seats would not be orange.
The PC party, Alberta's forever governors, had been relegated to the humiliating time out corner of third place. The Wildrose party became the official oppositing to the ANDP's governing majority. Notley and her party got adjusted to the position as well as they could have; oil prices were collapsing and the time, so her government put an intense focus on public works and on desperately needed diversification of what was basically resembled a Gulf State economy. She governed as a competent centrist, shying away from anything that could be seen as anti-capitalist or environmentalist. Alberta's NDP government openly clashed with neighbouring British Columbia's NDP government over the Trans-mountain pipeline, which shipped oil from the sands and wells in Alberta across the Rockies to ports in greater Vancouver. In American terms, she was a Blue Dog. She understood what she needed to do to win in her province.
Regardless of what she did, though, she was not in any position to win. In 2017, the Progressive Conservatives elected Calgary MLA Jason Kenney as they leader, who ran with the intent of uniting the two right wing parties. This had happened on the federal level in 2003, and it led to Calgary's Stephen Harper being Prime Minister for over a decade after a long period of Liberal rule. Kenney did exactly that, and won the leadership contest of the new United Conservative Party with a wide majority.
This was all happening while Justin Trudeau's federal Liberal government, which had just recently buried Harper in a landslide, was suffering enormous backlash in western Canada, mostly due to policies like his carbon tax, but also due to being Fr*nch and secretly Fidel's son. The 2019 federal election was fought largely on the environment and Greta Thunberg, and the federal Conservatives won unprecedented margins in the prairies, nearing 90% of the vote in some rural Alberta and Saskatchewan seats. The 2019 Albertan general election happened months before "how dare you", but it was much the same. Notley put up as much of a fight as she could, but the UCP still swept and won the PV by over 20 points.
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2019, a 20 point UCP landslide. If the federal NDP did this well Jagmeet would be PM.
It seemed as though 2015-2019 was just an aberration, and the newly formed UCP would govern for another half century until the next Wildrose saga. Kenney was governing exactly how a leader of a PC-Wildrose merger party would be expected to govern, and he wasn't facing much opposition from the centre right or the far right. Then COVID hit. Compared to most other premiers in the country and most other countries on earth, Kenney imposed moderate restrictions: a public health emergency and a vaccine passport. He tried to promote staying home, wearing masks, and getting vaccinated. He did this, however, while travelling out of province for the holidays. Decidedly not a good look.
The former Wildrose wing of the party was pissed, to say the least. Over the span of 2021, he faced a barrage of attacks from hard right rural MPs in his own party, and bled continuously more support to QAnon-adjacent Alberta independence splinter parties. By now, the NDP had a considerable lead in provincial polls. In September of that year, his own party agreed to hold a no-confidence vote against him in the following spring due to him refusal to resign or abolish all COVID restrictions. He won that no-confidence motion with 51% percent of the vote, but resigned anyway in disgrace. It was Over.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
Running to replace him were hard right Brian Jean, hard right Todd Loewen, hard right Travis Toews, and of course, hard right Danielle Smith, who pretty narrowly beat Toews. A display of where the UPC was already heading, any moderates were more or less irrelevant in the race. Danielle Smith, once the undisputed leader of Alberta's Wildrose far right, was now its premier. And for the most part, she spends her days comparing vaccinated people to nazis (she half assed an apology to be fair) and whining about the WEF. I can fairly confidently say that she's insane, at least by Canadian standards if not by those of America. (I can give more examples of goofy shit she's uttered but I want to sleep right now).
Have I mentioned that Alberta has a slight conservative tilt? You could definitely tell if you looked at opinion polls, where the UCP now has a very slight edge over the NDP despite Rachel Notley clearly distancing herself from the left, feuding with the federal New Democratic Party. I honestly believe that there's a large percentage of people in Alberta, maybe even close to 50%, who will start violently convulsing if they're forced to check a ballot for a left-leaning party. People who genuinely, truly believe that Notley is a tyrant and a communist.
This brings us to now. A dead heat election between the UCP and NDP, uncannily similar to the 2020 presidential. The polarization and Americanization of our politics is rearing its ugly head. It's tearing so many families apart. These kinds of elections, be it Notley vs. Smith, Trump vs. Biden, Hobbs vs. Lake, all have this kind of desperate vibe. I'm sure you can feel it. You notice the desperation in the air if you went to Alberta anytime in the past couple months. I know a few people in Alberta, and I can almost sense it emanating from them.
I've heard quite a few anecdotes about lifelong conservatives with, like, Margaret Thatcher figurines in jars, who are voting for their local NDP candidates this time around because they look at the present UCP and see only an imported brand of lunacy. There's another side, I'm sure, but I won't pretend to see it. I have no idea how this will pan out, and I don't know if I want to know. I'm typing this around midnight because this shit is just wild. It should not be like this. But this is how it is, and only time will tell what happens next.