Here's something you can do in Alberta on October 19. You can walk into a school gym, take a pencil and answer ten questions about your own province. Ten. Immigration, health care fees, who picks the judges, the Senate, federal money. Real questions, written down, on paper, in a booth. It does not involve saving a country, but it is the most democracy anyone has offered this province since 1915.
And Naheeed Nenshi has made a video to ease the burden of such an onerous task for you.
“We’ve been working hard on saving Canada, but a lot of Albertans don’t know that when you go to vote, there will be nine other questions on the ballot. Five of them are broadly anti-immigration questions. Four of them are blatantly unconstitutional. They are an evil plot. Danielle Smith doesn’t care about what’s written on those questions. What she wants is the opportunity to have even more fights. She knows the courts are gonna turn them back. She knows Ottawa and the other provinces are going to say no. She just wants the right to say, ‘Albertans want this,’ and everyone else says no, to keep the separatist fire going. So I’m gonna make it easy for you. On October 19th, or at the advance polls after Thanksgiving, vote option one on question 10. That is, Alberta should remain in Canada. On the other nine questions, just vote a straight no. That’s how we send a message to Danielle Smith. That is how we save Canada.”
Forty seconds. That is the runtime. Forty seconds to save Canada, which is about the time it takes to microwave a jumbo burrito. Nenshi opens with “We’ve been working hard on saving Canada.” Working hard. On saving Canada. In 1995 it meant a rally in Montreal with a hundred thousand people and a flag the size of a hockey rink. In 2026 it means a ring light, a fleece, and forty seconds before the algorithm loses interest. The man has a website called Save Canada, the sort of name you give a thing when you want to be thanked for it later.
Saving Canada is a phrase with a résumé. Isaac Brock saved Canada and got a monument fifty-six metres tall on Queenston Heights and a university with his name on the diplomas. Tecumseh saved Canada and got a town, a monument, a landlocked ship, and a line in every textbook the future professor Nenshi might have learned in school. Laura Secord saved Canada by walking thirty-two kilometres through the bush to warn a lieutenant, and got a monument, a school, and a box of chocolates at every airport in the country. Nenshi walked from a desk to a ring light or to a box of chocolates. Nobody is naming a university after that. Nobody is carving it in granite.
Then he tells you that “a lot of Albertans don’t know” there are nine other questions on the ballot. Maybe. And then, having identified the problem as ignorance, he spends the remaining thirty-five seconds protecting it. He does not read a single question in the video. Not one. He does not tell you what the questions say. He tells you what they are, which is different, and it is different the way a used-car sales listing is different from the car.
Naheeed says five of them are “broadly anti-immigration.” Broadly. That word is doing the lifting equivalent of three Nenshis. Question 5 asks whether you should show proof of citizenship, a passport or a birth certificate, to vote in an Alberta provincial election. Who has a passport? Citizens. Who is asked to show it? Citizens. Nenshi has found an anti-immigrant passport. This is a breakthrough. Somewhere in a drawer in Red Deer, a little blue book with a maple leaf on it quietly hates newcomers, and nobody knows but Naheeed.
Then Question 1, which asks whether Alberta should have more control over immigration. Anti-immigration, Nenshi says. Here is a fun fact for the man who has been running a province’s second party for two years. Quebec has controlled the selection of its own economic immigrants since 1991. Ottawa signed it. Ottawa pays for it. It is called the Canada-Quebec Accord, and it has been in force for thirty-five years without anyone in the Nenshi household calling the federal police. Alberta asks for the same thing, and it is a plot (But not just any plot).
An evil plot. Evil. Say it out loud and listen to yourself. Who talks like that? Cartoon characters talk like that, and the villain toons who fight them. Televangelists talk like that, right before they drop the toll-free number. Professional wrestlers talk like that, loudly into a microphone, wearing tights.
This is a country where the strongest word a politician will use about an opponent is “disappointed.” We have “concerning.” We have “not the direction I would have chosen.” We have “I think Albertans deserve better,” said with the head annoyingly tilted to one side. Evil qualified like that is a foreign import, and it did not come through the Canada-Quebec Accord. It is not easy to take someone who talks like that seriously. Villains used to have lairs. This one has a website with the actual questions.
Which brings us to the four questions Nenshi calls “blatantly unconstitutional.” Blatantly. Not subtly. Not arguably. Blatantly, as in, a child could see it. So let us not be the children he wishes us to be for a minute and look.
Question 8 asks whether Alberta should be able to opt out of federal programs in provincial jurisdiction without losing the money. Sounds radical. Sounds like something you would need a bunker for. Yet, it is the Meech Lake Accord. Word for word, practically. Nineteen eighty-seven vintage. Every premier in Canada signed it, including Alberta’s. Brian Mulroney signed it. The federal Liberals under John Turner backed it. The federal NDP, under Ed Broadbent, backed it. And Quebec didn't wait for anyone to sign anything. Quebec opted out of the Canada Pension Plan in 1965 and built its own. Quebec took tax points instead of federal programs for sixty years. Quebec got its own side deal on health care in 2004 and on childcare after that.
The principle is so unconstitutional that it is in the Constitution: section 40 says a province that opts out of specific amendments gets compensated. Alberta asks for what Quebec has, and a former professor of public policy at Mount Royal University looks into the camera and says the courts will turn it back. Which courts? The ones that have been watching Quebec do it since the Beatles were together?
Question 6: give provinces a say in picking judges. Meech gave the provinces the lists for the Supreme Court. Question 7: abolish the Senate. Unanimity required, the Supreme Court said in 2014, which is the Court telling you how to do it lawfully, which is a strange thing for an unconstitutional idea to come with. Also, and this is particularly illustrative of the ignorance at play, abolishing the Senate was federal NDP policy for a decade. Jack Layton ran on it. Was he evil? Tom Mulcair ran on it. Was he evil? No credible politician would suggest such things. It was constitutional the whole time Nenshi’s party wanted it, but it magically became blatantly unconstitutional the moment Danielle Smith wrote it down? Legal doctrines do not do that. Mood rings do that. Here, Nenshi seems to be wearing more of those than Comrade Rosario Murillo.
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The mechanics of what is happening here are beautiful. A man with two degrees, a professorship, three terms as mayor of a city of a million and a half people, and a briefing staff, stands in front of a camera and tells you that Quebec’s standing arrangements are the equivalent of an evil plot against Canada. Meech Lake happened in 1987. It was on the news every night for three years. It was in the textbooks. So we are left with two possibilities. Either the whole thing slipped past a future professor of public policy, in which case the province should be told, gently, and someone should check on the textbook. Or it did not slip past him, in which case the video is about you.
Because that is the whole play. Naheeed does not need you to agree with him. He needs you not to look. The video is forty seconds long because forty seconds is shorter than the ballot. If you read the ballot, the video stops working. If you read the ballot, you might ask questions. That is why it does not read the ballot to you. It is a video against reading, made by a man who has probably read a great deal, for people he hopes have not.
And then the sentence that gives the game away. “So I’m gonna make it easy for you.” Easy. For you. Listen to the tone. That is the voice of a man loosening the lid on a jar because he decided you cannot. That is the fellow at the restaurant who orders for the whole table and then asks if everybody is happy. It’s Nenshi mansplaining at its best. Ten questions was too many. You might strain something. So he's boiled the ballot down to one word: No, and he would like you to say it nine times, like a man teaching a parrot.
Vote Option 1 on Question 10, and then, on the other nine, “just vote a straight no.” Just. Do not trouble yourself. The Alberta Neo-Democrat grown-ups have looked at it. Nine questions, nine No’s, off you go, here is a sticker. This is what a leader thinks of you: that you are a person who can be told how to fill in a form by a man who will not tell you what is on the form. Leaders do not do that. Hall monitors do that, and this one has a political party.
Notice what you have not heard in forty seconds. You have not heard whether he thinks immigration is too high. Whether people here on a temporary permit should pay something for the hospital. Who should pick the judges. Whether the Senate should exist. Whether Ottawa should be running programs in provincial jurisdiction. Nothing. Zero policy. He has a position on one thing: you should have no positions on nine things. Try it at home. Next budget, do not read it; vote No on every line. See how the roads do.
Then there is the existential part; Camus would be proud. The part that got the whole production its title. Question 10. Alberta in or Alberta out. Nenshi says Option 1, stay. Danielle Smith says she is campaigning to stay. The one he calls evil agrees with him. She is on the same side. The premier, the officious opposition, and seventy per cent of the province all seem to agree, but a man has made a video to tell them, urgently, to save them, as if they were about to drive off a cliff they've already parked beside. A lifeguard does a swan dive into the wading pool. The supposedly existential question (about whether to have a referendum) has no opponent in the room. So he borrows its weight and hangs it on the other nine, the ones he will not describe, and calls the package “saving Canada.”
What kind of a person do you need to be to present yourself as a saviour; what kind of a person do you need to be to believe he is?
Canada will be there on the morning of October 20, whichever box you tick. Even the Senate, should you read Question 7, will still be there! He would rather you did not.
And, it is worth repeating, the premier who supposedly hatched the evil plot is on the same side as him on the only question he says matters. Think about that. The villain and the saviour agree on the ending. They disagree about whether you should be allowed to read the middle. He is uniting the province by explaining that half of it is in on something, and he is saving Canada from a country that has already voted to keep itself. That’s a 21st-century woke saviour.
So here is your instruction from this publication, and it is the only one you will get. Be a radical. Subvert the promotion of ignorance. Read the ballot. Read all ten questions. Takes five minutes, longer than the video, which is the point.
Then, be more subversive still and vote however you like. If you read them, you will have done more research than the Nenshi video, and you will have done it in a school gym with a pencil in your hand.
Nobody will call you evil. Nobody will call you at all. That is what a secret ballot is for, and it is the one thing on October 19 that Nenshi has made no video about.
You had me laughing out loud! but really, the idiocracy of it should have me crying.
Fantastic - Judging from this, Nenshi would make a good south of the border politician.