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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14h

…with the governments that actually get elected, not some grave threat to the constitutional order. 3. Even more pragmatically, I have no desire to hand Danielle Smith a political win, or to strengthen Alberta’s hand against the federal government, and I have a great desire to hand her a loss.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14h

2. As a purely pragmatic matter, Alberta’s provincial governments tend to be more conservative than federal governments, so, per my earlier point, this change would likely result in more conservative-minded judges, which I would not like. But that’s purely an issue of my philosophical alignment…

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14h

Liberal governments do the opposite. As long as, post-appointment, the judges retain their independence from the government, that’s normal and unproblematic. So why did I vote no? 1. This is never happening. It is not a realistic proposal. Wasting time on it is dumb.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14h

Beyond that, people who say that moving appointment powers to the provinces risks politicizing what is now a purely merit-based process are, frankly, wrong. Judging is not value neutral. Conservative governments appoint more conservative-minded judges who make more conservative rulings.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14h

But that an office is, at one particular moment, occupied by a dangerous demagogue is hardly an argument for structural change, except perhaps as a last resort. What if the Prime Minister was a dangerous demagogue? In that case, would it be time to transfer more powers to the provinces?

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14h

I voted no on this question and think that you should too. But in principle, I don’t think the question of which order of government appoints section 96 judges matters very much. The arguments from the quoted scholars mostly revolve around Danielle Smith being a dangerous demagogue, which she is.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I don’t think I ever knew about it—somebody want to fill me in? Perusing her Twitter, there are definitely conservative-y vibes, but the only explicitly political post I’ve seen is lamenting SCOTUS’s ruling in Dobbs, so…not particularly conservative.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I can’t remember for sure, but I think that when I posted this (about Stephen Miller) I may have thought that I was joking, but…

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Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 14/10/2026

oh we're actually all going to die

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Sounds like you’ve had some extremely well-rested seasons over the years.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

The Oilers, reading Ryan’s skeets mid-game for some reason: “*Anything*?”

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

You realize, of course, that the non-“cling to a two-goal lead” option they choose is likely to be “cough up two quick goals”.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Ron Howard voiceover: “It isn’t.”

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Thank you! And yeah, that’s the possibility I was getting at—the legislature can do whatever it wants with municipalities, but perhaps this exceeded the legal jurisdiction of the executive.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

As a general proposition, though, municipalities are completely subordinate to the province. They literally exist at the pleasure of the province. But maybe the government tried to do something here that could only be properly done by the legislature?

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I said earlier that this wasn’t a fight that City Council could win, but I’m not especially well-versed in the relevant law, so maybe there’s some merit to this. I hope so.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Not the main point, but not a lawyer—a sporting goods store proprietor/operator. You may be thinking of Jeffrey Rath.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

(I’m using a narrow definition of “municipality”, here—counties don’t, uh, count. But hamlets do, somehow.)

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Another fun prediction game is “Guess the population of the largest municipality to have a majority vote for separation”. I’d initially pegged it at 10,000 (didn’t have any specific municipality in mind), but I increasingly think it will be much lower.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I assume he invoked this as an argument for why Republicans must not lose the upcoming midterm elections.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I did not realize this, but definitely significant.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I don’t believe this, in large part because I think Danielle Smith believes that questions 1 through 9 will pass resoundingly (no idea whether she’s right, honestly), and she doesn’t want anything undermining that.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Yeah, the part that I left out is that Elections Alberta has given little confidence in its ability to handle any other aspect of this referendum, so I’m not sure why prognosticating turnout should be different. And of course understaffing could suppress turnout further, as people avoid long lines.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The margin may well be closer than the polls suggest, but only if turnout is low, in which case it will be a function of that low turnout.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

That’s fair, but also leads into another reason I don’t expect huge turnout: a referendum on whether to have a referendum is unlikely to be perceived as existentially important. And FWIW, to the extent that the sides feel that it’s closer than the polling suggests, I think they’re wrong.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Having said that, 1995 turnout in Québec was 93.5% and, while there are many many reasons to expect it to be lower here, that does mean that a lot of people who’d never voted before and never would again voted in it.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Agreed. And there’s no indication that it’s a close race, which is something else that usually drives turnout, and media coverage has, to my eye, actually been less intense than for a typical general election.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

(I have no predictions on the other nine, beyond that the margin between the yes vote on the most popular of them and the yes vote on the least popular of them will be less than 3%.)

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I still don’t believe this. My prediction is 60%. But I’ll be delighted if Elections Alberta is correct (not least because that will result in the separatists getting a thoroughly deserved thrashing).

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bort @crushbort.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

there’s a scene in lincoln right before the vote on the 13th amendment where he gets a call that his son’s been hit by a car

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

It is of course well-known that “Fairytale of New York” is the most romantic song ever written, but is Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Sayin’” the least?

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The only clue in her Wikipedia article, which is as much research as I’m going to do, is that she’s an outspoken Christian, which could cause a person to jump to some conclusions, but so is James Talarico.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I know approximately zero things about Ella Langley, but my probably baseless impression is that she’s a lot like Sydney Sweeney in that she has no particularly well-developed politics but has unfortunately for her been adopted as a standard-bearer by the worst people in the world.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

She won a Grammy for an album whose dominant theme was that small-town life is kind of shitty, in a genre in which such sentiments are basically sacrilegious.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

She grabbed my attention from the first time I heard “Merry Go Round”, during a brief foray of mine into country radio almost fifteen years ago. Kacey Musgraves is so fucking cool. (Tweet is real; I checked.)

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It’s been a good start, but if the Oilers are actually Cup contenders, then it had fucking better have been. (And yeah, that -15 team fairly dominated us in the playoffs last year, so this isn’t nothing. It’s just not that much.)

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Laura Bassett @lebassett.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It tracks that this is his definition of consent

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

As soon as the degree of lawlessness you will accept is subject to political calculations, you’ve lost.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

For the same reason, I think they should have done it already—only difference between doing it now and doing it after the mid-terms is which chamber it fails in. You need to say, as loudly and clearly as you can, that it is intolerable to have an administration that does this shit.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Yeah, I have no idea whether doing it improves or worsens the chance of the Democrats retaking the White House in 2028. But impeachment is a moral imperative—you just can’t have a constitutional democracy if you don’t do the one thing the Constitution lets you do in the face of this.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Anyway, I don’t foreclose the possibility that they’re just completely wrong on the law—they tend to be good at that—but that’s not my first guess as to what’s happening.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Like, if they make you stop filming, notwithstanding your legal right to film? That’s a win. And if they keep filming and they’re caught on video trying to dissuade you from exercising your rights? Well, let’s just say that accountability for that tends to be a bit limited.

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Steve Smith @edmlawyersteve.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I strongly suspect that cops who try to bully people into turning off their cameras (happens in Canada though, as with most Bad Things In Policing, it’s worse in the States) do it not because they don’t know the law, but because they think they can successfully bully people notwithstanding the law.

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