Trump trolls Canada with his 51st state comment, and instead of a nation of self-confident hard working truck drivers that spit up their beer in a fit of laughter, the Canadian electorate gets all insecure butt hurt and wee weed up and votes for continued decline of their nation... which adds to the risk that Canada will eventually need to be bailed out by the US.
Perhaps secession might be the best for both sides. It would force Ontario and the eastern provinces to engage with reality for the first time in decades.
I agree we should move to ranked choice ballots, but i don't believe it would have the effect you think. Outside alberta, most of the ridings won by conservatives would have been beaten by the combined vote of liberal and NDP. Ranked choice voting would ensure the cons never have another government. Conservatives are, and have almost always been, the minority in Canada. We're a progressive country, by and large.
I haven't looked into the details but you may be right. That's said, my goal is not to give conservatives power but to make federal elections more representative of the actual votes. Faith in the federal government is important.
The way to address the conservative leanings of the West is to give the provinces more power. I want both of these solutions employed.
Lol, i can't wait until we start selling all our American debt along with Japan and the EU, and devalue your dollar. That'll be fun.
America is falling apart, Canada is doing just fine. We just elected a competent adult to the PMs office, the only way i could be happier with the outcome is if we'd had a full majority gov formed, but c'est la vie.
Canadian culture doesn't depend on who we pay federal taxes to. The only culture that would be lost is the Laurentian elites culture, and they do not deserve it's protection
I appreciate the patriotism in this piece. My one disagreement is that the country is not broken. It’s very much divided and opportunities are becoming scarce. These divides are much more numerous than people would know
I’m from Ontario but have recently exited the country. Coming from the conservative movement, I understand that it’s a coalition and that each region has its own issues and concerns. In order to keep a nation intact there needs to be some negotiating and compromise. To be fair, Ontario really doesn’t care for equalization. With that said the regional east west divide isn’t the only issue. If Alberta separates and thinks that will fix their problems, they have another thing coming.
I agree that it is divided. However, when has it not been? The last election in which one party won more than 50% of the vote was in 1984 in which Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative Party won 50.03% of the vote. Geography and demographics means that different people have different problems, needs, and priorities. This isn't helped by the media and people on social media stirring things up to get views.
I also agree that there are many problems. We shall see if Carney does a better job than Trudeau. It's hard to imagine him doing worse.
Absolutely. The media (including social media) are fuelling the division. Social media has been both a gift and a cusre. On the one hand it informs more people in a shorter time span. On the other hand, we can't control how the newly informed people will digest or interpret the information. We have also adopted some Americanized discourse particularly on the mariginal right (see PPC) and the mainstream left (see Liberal party campaigns) which is likely a result of the media.
Wrong. Canada is beyond broken. We deserve every trial and tribulation marching our way. And I will be first in line, pointing to boomers when it is asked who should be liquidated first. Covid wasn’t nearly deadly enough.
You realize your euphemism “liquidated” means murdered. You mention pointing out boomers to be murdered. So you want others to murder your political opponents, but you either can’t muster the courage or the agency to commit said murders with your own hands.
Folks can be liquidated without it resulting in death, which is way more fun. I wouldn’t think of giving boomers the free release of death. I want them stripped of everything they own and left to rot in dystopian, socialist senior citizen warehouses fueled by Soviet apocalyptic nightmares, BUT given heroic healthcare to ensure that they live til they’re 120. I want them to suffer just as their greed and selfishness has caused the suffering of millennials and gen z. They deserve no less. They are disgusting and repugnant.
Ok, you’re not a murderer, but You would gleefully, sadistically strip the property from and beggar a group of people based on their age. But keep them alive to torture them in their poverty.
A real peach of a Day Zero Khymer Rouge yoot with a Kalashnikov and a pocket full of blue bags in a killing field.
Not based on age, but for being the demographic responsible for ruining our country with their greed and laziness. For ruining the security of homeownership by treating their own houses as an investment and blocking any market correction or neighborhood development out of fear of losing their nest egg. What do we do with thieves and fraudsters? we send them to prison. Everyone’s chickens must come home to roost. My Gen, Gen X will have to pay our own piper too. But our sins are self inflicted and nowhere near as vile as what the boomers have done.
I sympathise with you position. Your generation has been shafted. Apart from regulatory costs, which are excessive in Canada, they've failed to implement Texas-style libertarian land reforms.
Government can play a role- by getting out of the way for the most part, but also by improving transport infrastructure, especially short-range rail. The worst types are those who argue against suburban sprawl- if they want people to live in horrible high density urban housing they should go live in it themselves, and give their single family home to a couple looking to start a family.
High density urban housing isn't the answer- the evidence shows it's an amplifier for social ills, but duplexes and other modest intermediate housing, with no more than six sets of occupants per building, can be a part of the solution.
It's best to preserve access to green spaces in cities though. Research shows it's an important factor in childhood cognitive development, independent of other multivariate factors.
I live in the UK. We're comparable to you and on a similarly dire economic course due to net zero insanity. In America, a while back there were a spate of articles arguing that the Great Migration was reversing- primarily because of housing costs and because liberals and progressives care too much about other causes or a have a too ideological mindset in terms of the types of housing they are willing to rule out.
Boomer conservatives are not to blame, but boomer liberals and progressives are most definitely to blame. People should come first.
Median house prices in Houston are $300-350K USD- about half of what you would pay in the Greater Toronto area.
"You can lead a voter to the polls, but you can’t make him think." Fixed that for you: You can't make him think the way YOU think he should. If you want people to vote for other than the Liberals, offer us a better alterrnative. It's not enough to not be the incumbents. I wish the Conservatives had offered a credible alternative. Before the Liberals dumped Trudeau I was all set to not vote, or hold my nose and vote Conservative. How hard would it have been for them to find a leader who didn't come off like a Grade Four tattletale?
Consider the alternative for much of his time as opposition leader. It made him appear better than he was. I was dismayed at his shallow juvenile aggressiveness.
I don't understand your contention that Poilievre comes "off like a Grade Four tattletale." How so? Though I have significant differences with him, I have talked to him in person (on a beach outside of Thunder Bay while he was running for leadership) and cannot understand this intense dislike that so many seem to have for him, especially in contrast to Carney—a literal Goldman-Sachs alum, two-time central banker, with three passports, whose policies and beliefs differ little from Trudeau's, having written an entire book, Values, advocating for ever higher carbon taxes, no pipelines and a technocratic control of our lives (among other things). Yet Poilievre is somehow the one who is objectionable, despite him having been right about the threat of inflation and having argued for years for policies that the Liberals used to make fun of but have since embraced (e.g. ending the consumer carbon tax, using federal power to pressure provinces and municipalities to build more homes, lower immigration levels). It's utterly irrational, yet has sadly worked well to allow the Liberals to win a minority government despite their manifest failures over the past ten years.
Let me jump in here. I'm a conservative and would almost always vote for them. I find Pierre entirely off-putting, and it's always been this way. Keep in mind, he's been an MP since he was 25. If you work for a living, that's red flag number one. Next is his smarm. On a scale of ten, he's an eleven. Think of the apple incident. This may have jazzed up his base, but with the people he needed to win votes from, it was a huge turn-off. Add to this his general nastiness. I get that politics is a dog-eat-dog world, but Pierre seems to revel in any opportunity to get in the muck. He's hardwired for this. All of this turns off women, and I think it was an important factor in turning off enough boomer conservative men. Pierre and team worked so hard to soften his edges in the past six months, but what's described above was long ago baked into the cake.
Had Trump not factored in, I think he would have won, so I won't declare what's above was the reason he lost the election, but it was a factor, particularly in places like Toronto and Vancouver.
Finally, again, as a conservative, I was terribly disappointed by how un-conservative the CPC's election campaign was. They were going to spend as much or more than the Trudeau Liberals. I was a CPC supporter and prepared to set my quibbles about Pierre's personality aside, but when I saw their platform, I was aghast. To call it conservative light would be generous. And if I had to guess, the most recent election will only serve to make them more red in their political persuasions.
I can't bring myself to vote for Maxime and the PPC. They're politically inept, and their policies will never resonate in Canada. I guess I'm now lost politically.
I doubt it is possible to get elected in Canada by stating you're going to cut "free" services (or defund the CBC or cut the bureaucracy). The strategy has to be get elected and then be fiscally conservative.
Ideological purity is a great why to win moral victories while losing the election.
First, I very much appreciate your temperate and detailed reply. Let me unpack the ways in which I find Poilievre problematic. What I know of Poilievre is from sound bites in Parliament, and Conservative political messaging. Too many snappy comebacks, too many contemptuous dismissals. Eatiing an apple in someone's face? Not even adult. And too much of his discourse is around money ('knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.')
Carney I don't know anything about except that he's managed two terms as a central banker with two different states without seriously stepping in anything, which seems to indicate a certain degree of discipline and rationality. The carbon tax might not be the best means to slow down global warming, but where's the better one? I'm a pensioner with an 81-year-old husband. I didn't think we were going to survive the first West Coast heat dome. I'm pretty sure we won't survive a subsequent one. When I see people blowing global warming off in favour of economic growth, the subtext I see is ''Why don't you just die?' And I prioritize biological survival ahead of economic opportunity. Wouldn't you?
So you don't care a out policy, only vibes, and tepid ones at that.
You don't understand it yet, but your attitude is why Canada is fucked, easily manipulatable timid people who are happy to be fleeced, so long as the criminals are polite about it
More precisely, I believe that a person's (or an organization's) essential quality is evident in everything they do, from policy to 'vibes,' and callous egotism in 'vibes' is a good indicator of what to expect in policy.
Thankfully, Carney already sold Canadas gold reserves a few years back, so we don't have another reserve he can sell, which will be great during a deficit when inflation starts to ramp up again.
Hope you own a house, inflation proof assets are tight RN
Canada sold off almost all of its official gold reserves over a period of several decades, with the most significant actions occurring under both Liberal and Conservative governments. However, the final phase of the sell-off happened under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Timeline of Canada's Gold Reserve Sell-Off:
1970s–1990s: Canada began reducing its gold holdings steadily. During this time, successive governments (both Liberal and Progressive Conservative) sold large portions of the gold reserves, favoring more liquid financial instruments.
Early 2000s: The pace of sales continued under Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, citing reasons such as the volatility and low return of gold compared to other assets.
2015–2016: The final significant sale of gold occurred during Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. By early 2016, Canada had virtually zero gold reserves, with the Department of Finance confirming that only small amounts of gold coins or bars remained for program purposes.
Reasons Cited:
Canada’s Department of Finance stated that gold was no longer viewed as a core part of the country's official reserves.
Preference for assets that are more liquid and yield income, such as foreign exchange and government securities.
Outcome:
As of now, Canada is unique among G7 nations in holding essentially no official gold reserves.
The severe pain route is indeed what is happening. Perhaps that is what is needed. Or perhaps Canada is so broken that joining America might be the solution.
I think things will move very fast from this point.
Canada, the UK and most of the EU nations are well on their way to suppressing free speech much like Russia, Iran and China. The question we in the US must ask ourselves is how long before we realize that we can no longer be allies with those that don’t share our love of freedom.
I was in the process of replying when I saw the insult.
You're banned. Forever.
Substack recommends that an explanation be provided whenever someone is banned so here it is:
You're an infant. Likely not a very bright one given your need to resort to insults. Substack has 50 million users. I need you like I need a hole in the head.
I once stated that I have cried my last tear for this country. Though I have not been perfect in carrying it out, it is still there, hiding in my sorrow.
Obviously I have not given up yet. I suspect that those supporting the separatism movements are a vocal minority. However, if the federal government doesn't start addressing the West's very reasonable concerns that minority will continue to grow.
My green is lean and my coin is spent,
I ain’t busted but I’m badly bent - King Biscuit Boy.
Trump trolls Canada with his 51st state comment, and instead of a nation of self-confident hard working truck drivers that spit up their beer in a fit of laughter, the Canadian electorate gets all insecure butt hurt and wee weed up and votes for continued decline of their nation... which adds to the risk that Canada will eventually need to be bailed out by the US.
Perhaps secession might be the best for both sides. It would force Ontario and the eastern provinces to engage with reality for the first time in decades.
Despite what separatists would have you believe, balkanizing the country would make us worse off not better.
The economics of joining the US is worthy of debate but then not everything is about $$$, culture matters too.
I agree we should move to ranked choice ballots, but i don't believe it would have the effect you think. Outside alberta, most of the ridings won by conservatives would have been beaten by the combined vote of liberal and NDP. Ranked choice voting would ensure the cons never have another government. Conservatives are, and have almost always been, the minority in Canada. We're a progressive country, by and large.
I haven't looked into the details but you may be right. That's said, my goal is not to give conservatives power but to make federal elections more representative of the actual votes. Faith in the federal government is important.
The way to address the conservative leanings of the West is to give the provinces more power. I want both of these solutions employed.
Thanks for the comment Sam!
Lol, i can't wait until we start selling all our American debt along with Japan and the EU, and devalue your dollar. That'll be fun.
America is falling apart, Canada is doing just fine. We just elected a competent adult to the PMs office, the only way i could be happier with the outcome is if we'd had a full majority gov formed, but c'est la vie.
I just banned you forever. The system recommends I leave a reply explaining why. So here it is:
I reviewed your activity on other sites and have come to the inescapable conclusion that you're a troll and a jackass (ya, that's repetitive).
Congratulations, you're the first person I've ever banned. Enjoy your sad and pathetic life.
Canada is broken…
Good read!
Thank you!
Canadian culture doesn't depend on who we pay federal taxes to. The only culture that would be lost is the Laurentian elites culture, and they do not deserve it's protection
I appreciate the patriotism in this piece. My one disagreement is that the country is not broken. It’s very much divided and opportunities are becoming scarce. These divides are much more numerous than people would know
I’m from Ontario but have recently exited the country. Coming from the conservative movement, I understand that it’s a coalition and that each region has its own issues and concerns. In order to keep a nation intact there needs to be some negotiating and compromise. To be fair, Ontario really doesn’t care for equalization. With that said the regional east west divide isn’t the only issue. If Alberta separates and thinks that will fix their problems, they have another thing coming.
The divides, IMO, include:
Boomer vs youth
Rural vs urban
Suburban vs City
West vs East
Quebec energy vs Western Energy
It’s about to be a crazy couple of years
I agree that it is divided. However, when has it not been? The last election in which one party won more than 50% of the vote was in 1984 in which Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative Party won 50.03% of the vote. Geography and demographics means that different people have different problems, needs, and priorities. This isn't helped by the media and people on social media stirring things up to get views.
I also agree that there are many problems. We shall see if Carney does a better job than Trudeau. It's hard to imagine him doing worse.
Thanks for the comment Noam!
Absolutely. The media (including social media) are fuelling the division. Social media has been both a gift and a cusre. On the one hand it informs more people in a shorter time span. On the other hand, we can't control how the newly informed people will digest or interpret the information. We have also adopted some Americanized discourse particularly on the mariginal right (see PPC) and the mainstream left (see Liberal party campaigns) which is likely a result of the media.
Thought provoking piece, nonetheless!
Thank you!
Canada is doomed
Well argued.
Thank you!
Wrong. Canada is beyond broken. We deserve every trial and tribulation marching our way. And I will be first in line, pointing to boomers when it is asked who should be liquidated first. Covid wasn’t nearly deadly enough.
A friendly reminder to not let hate consume you.
https://hoisttheblackflag.substack.com/p/the-face-of-hate?r=26wsm2
You realize your euphemism “liquidated” means murdered. You mention pointing out boomers to be murdered. So you want others to murder your political opponents, but you either can’t muster the courage or the agency to commit said murders with your own hands.
You are an effete coward.
Folks can be liquidated without it resulting in death, which is way more fun. I wouldn’t think of giving boomers the free release of death. I want them stripped of everything they own and left to rot in dystopian, socialist senior citizen warehouses fueled by Soviet apocalyptic nightmares, BUT given heroic healthcare to ensure that they live til they’re 120. I want them to suffer just as their greed and selfishness has caused the suffering of millennials and gen z. They deserve no less. They are disgusting and repugnant.
Ok, you’re not a murderer, but You would gleefully, sadistically strip the property from and beggar a group of people based on their age. But keep them alive to torture them in their poverty.
A real peach of a Day Zero Khymer Rouge yoot with a Kalashnikov and a pocket full of blue bags in a killing field.
Not based on age, but for being the demographic responsible for ruining our country with their greed and laziness. For ruining the security of homeownership by treating their own houses as an investment and blocking any market correction or neighborhood development out of fear of losing their nest egg. What do we do with thieves and fraudsters? we send them to prison. Everyone’s chickens must come home to roost. My Gen, Gen X will have to pay our own piper too. But our sins are self inflicted and nowhere near as vile as what the boomers have done.
I sympathise with you position. Your generation has been shafted. Apart from regulatory costs, which are excessive in Canada, they've failed to implement Texas-style libertarian land reforms.
Government can play a role- by getting out of the way for the most part, but also by improving transport infrastructure, especially short-range rail. The worst types are those who argue against suburban sprawl- if they want people to live in horrible high density urban housing they should go live in it themselves, and give their single family home to a couple looking to start a family.
High density urban housing isn't the answer- the evidence shows it's an amplifier for social ills, but duplexes and other modest intermediate housing, with no more than six sets of occupants per building, can be a part of the solution.
It's best to preserve access to green spaces in cities though. Research shows it's an important factor in childhood cognitive development, independent of other multivariate factors.
I live in the UK. We're comparable to you and on a similarly dire economic course due to net zero insanity. In America, a while back there were a spate of articles arguing that the Great Migration was reversing- primarily because of housing costs and because liberals and progressives care too much about other causes or a have a too ideological mindset in terms of the types of housing they are willing to rule out.
Boomer conservatives are not to blame, but boomer liberals and progressives are most definitely to blame. People should come first.
Median house prices in Houston are $300-350K USD- about half of what you would pay in the Greater Toronto area.
"You can lead a voter to the polls, but you can’t make him think." Fixed that for you: You can't make him think the way YOU think he should. If you want people to vote for other than the Liberals, offer us a better alterrnative. It's not enough to not be the incumbents. I wish the Conservatives had offered a credible alternative. Before the Liberals dumped Trudeau I was all set to not vote, or hold my nose and vote Conservative. How hard would it have been for them to find a leader who didn't come off like a Grade Four tattletale?
Are you talking about his job as opposition leader? Who is popular hold in down that job for years? Obviously he resonated with 42% of the voters.
Consider the alternative for much of his time as opposition leader. It made him appear better than he was. I was dismayed at his shallow juvenile aggressiveness.
I don't understand your contention that Poilievre comes "off like a Grade Four tattletale." How so? Though I have significant differences with him, I have talked to him in person (on a beach outside of Thunder Bay while he was running for leadership) and cannot understand this intense dislike that so many seem to have for him, especially in contrast to Carney—a literal Goldman-Sachs alum, two-time central banker, with three passports, whose policies and beliefs differ little from Trudeau's, having written an entire book, Values, advocating for ever higher carbon taxes, no pipelines and a technocratic control of our lives (among other things). Yet Poilievre is somehow the one who is objectionable, despite him having been right about the threat of inflation and having argued for years for policies that the Liberals used to make fun of but have since embraced (e.g. ending the consumer carbon tax, using federal power to pressure provinces and municipalities to build more homes, lower immigration levels). It's utterly irrational, yet has sadly worked well to allow the Liberals to win a minority government despite their manifest failures over the past ten years.
Let me jump in here. I'm a conservative and would almost always vote for them. I find Pierre entirely off-putting, and it's always been this way. Keep in mind, he's been an MP since he was 25. If you work for a living, that's red flag number one. Next is his smarm. On a scale of ten, he's an eleven. Think of the apple incident. This may have jazzed up his base, but with the people he needed to win votes from, it was a huge turn-off. Add to this his general nastiness. I get that politics is a dog-eat-dog world, but Pierre seems to revel in any opportunity to get in the muck. He's hardwired for this. All of this turns off women, and I think it was an important factor in turning off enough boomer conservative men. Pierre and team worked so hard to soften his edges in the past six months, but what's described above was long ago baked into the cake.
Had Trump not factored in, I think he would have won, so I won't declare what's above was the reason he lost the election, but it was a factor, particularly in places like Toronto and Vancouver.
Finally, again, as a conservative, I was terribly disappointed by how un-conservative the CPC's election campaign was. They were going to spend as much or more than the Trudeau Liberals. I was a CPC supporter and prepared to set my quibbles about Pierre's personality aside, but when I saw their platform, I was aghast. To call it conservative light would be generous. And if I had to guess, the most recent election will only serve to make them more red in their political persuasions.
I can't bring myself to vote for Maxime and the PPC. They're politically inept, and their policies will never resonate in Canada. I guess I'm now lost politically.
I doubt it is possible to get elected in Canada by stating you're going to cut "free" services (or defund the CBC or cut the bureaucracy). The strategy has to be get elected and then be fiscally conservative.
Ideological purity is a great why to win moral victories while losing the election.
First, I very much appreciate your temperate and detailed reply. Let me unpack the ways in which I find Poilievre problematic. What I know of Poilievre is from sound bites in Parliament, and Conservative political messaging. Too many snappy comebacks, too many contemptuous dismissals. Eatiing an apple in someone's face? Not even adult. And too much of his discourse is around money ('knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.')
Carney I don't know anything about except that he's managed two terms as a central banker with two different states without seriously stepping in anything, which seems to indicate a certain degree of discipline and rationality. The carbon tax might not be the best means to slow down global warming, but where's the better one? I'm a pensioner with an 81-year-old husband. I didn't think we were going to survive the first West Coast heat dome. I'm pretty sure we won't survive a subsequent one. When I see people blowing global warming off in favour of economic growth, the subtext I see is ''Why don't you just die?' And I prioritize biological survival ahead of economic opportunity. Wouldn't you?
If their policies worked, we would have seen a difference by now.
So you don't care a out policy, only vibes, and tepid ones at that.
You don't understand it yet, but your attitude is why Canada is fucked, easily manipulatable timid people who are happy to be fleeced, so long as the criminals are polite about it
More precisely, I believe that a person's (or an organization's) essential quality is evident in everything they do, from policy to 'vibes,' and callous egotism in 'vibes' is a good indicator of what to expect in policy.
I'm old fashioned. I look at their results.
Thankfully, Carney already sold Canadas gold reserves a few years back, so we don't have another reserve he can sell, which will be great during a deficit when inflation starts to ramp up again.
Hope you own a house, inflation proof assets are tight RN
Per ChatGPT:
Canada sold off almost all of its official gold reserves over a period of several decades, with the most significant actions occurring under both Liberal and Conservative governments. However, the final phase of the sell-off happened under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Timeline of Canada's Gold Reserve Sell-Off:
1970s–1990s: Canada began reducing its gold holdings steadily. During this time, successive governments (both Liberal and Progressive Conservative) sold large portions of the gold reserves, favoring more liquid financial instruments.
Early 2000s: The pace of sales continued under Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, citing reasons such as the volatility and low return of gold compared to other assets.
2015–2016: The final significant sale of gold occurred during Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. By early 2016, Canada had virtually zero gold reserves, with the Department of Finance confirming that only small amounts of gold coins or bars remained for program purposes.
Reasons Cited:
Canada’s Department of Finance stated that gold was no longer viewed as a core part of the country's official reserves.
Preference for assets that are more liquid and yield income, such as foreign exchange and government securities.
Outcome:
As of now, Canada is unique among G7 nations in holding essentially no official gold reserves.
There is nothing Canada can do to slow down global warming, it is a horrible waste of resources to attempt to do so.
So in this situation, what ISN'T a horrible waste of of resources?
Probably just give it back to the taxed individuals. I trust taxpayers to make prudent decisions in alignment with their values about their own money.
The severe pain route is indeed what is happening. Perhaps that is what is needed. Or perhaps Canada is so broken that joining America might be the solution.
I think things will move very fast from this point.
Canada, the UK and most of the EU nations are well on their way to suppressing free speech much like Russia, Iran and China. The question we in the US must ask ourselves is how long before we realize that we can no longer be allies with those that don’t share our love of freedom.
I live in Canada. Does anything I've written give you the idea that I'm afraid what I say will result in me being punished?
I was in the process of replying when I saw the insult.
You're banned. Forever.
Substack recommends that an explanation be provided whenever someone is banned so here it is:
You're an infant. Likely not a very bright one given your need to resort to insults. Substack has 50 million users. I need you like I need a hole in the head.
I once stated that I have cried my last tear for this country. Though I have not been perfect in carrying it out, it is still there, hiding in my sorrow.
Obviously I have not given up yet. I suspect that those supporting the separatism movements are a vocal minority. However, if the federal government doesn't start addressing the West's very reasonable concerns that minority will continue to grow.
Thanks for the comment Ian!