He kinda “disenfranchised” himself by not getting it in the mail on time if he knew he was going to be away. He’s still able to vote in advance or day of Lots of valid criticisms of the way EA has handled things, but not exercising a special power so one person can drop off their ballot ain’t one.

Alberta operates a nomination program for immigration and immigration itself is a shared fed/prov power, so it's not like Alberta is powerless on the issue.

Cheeky answer 😉: It actually started at 9. It became 10 when the government added their version of the "Stay in Canada" question. (no, really)

I know you don't get to pick your headlines, but it's wild to me that the CBC wants to do GoA's advertising for them, even though they're throwing $4m at this thing. Even the govt isn't explicitly saying "yes to the nine".

Like, lets not kid ourselves around the timing of these shenanigans.

“voter data that was locked down following a major data breach” Come on man. Don’t regurgitate the government’s flawed framing. March 31, 2026 - Jen Gerson reports voter list breach to EA September 17, 2026 - Order in Council to restrict voters list (after Calgary-Shaw byelection loss)

Also try not to throw your phone at a wall when you get to “the premier just made an embarrassing gaffe calling this referendum” I get I’m not the target audience, but wow. Just wow.

I’d be interested to hear what Chris says about the timeline. If you get a chance, could you also ask about account selection? MEO defines a universe of 114 “influencers” before calculating that 8:1 ratio, but groups like Alberta’s Voice, Vote to Stay and Together–No! emerged months into the period.

That gives established separatist accounts a huge head start, then compares their accumulated engagement against campaigns that only became active much later.

There’s also a timeframe problem. Their headline numbers measure engagement going all the way back to January 1, 2025, long before there was an actual referendum campaign and before organized federalist campaigns really existed.

I’d also be interested in how much of that engagement comes from unique Albertans versus repeat users, non-Albertans, bots or other inauthentic activity.

The report shows that problem: separatist content dominates the online conversation even though separatism is a minority position in Alberta. So “4x the engagement” may say Rise of Alberta is very successful in that echo chamber, but it doesn’t tell us much about its influence over actual voters.

I think there are some reasonable critiques of the MEO’s report, namely that engagement is not the same thing as influence, and X is an especially distorted place to measure either. A small, motivated group can generate enormous "engagement" without representing much broader public opinion at all.