Post referendum: Albertans give their take on results, ‘does that surprise me?’

In the days post referendum, CityNews hit the streets to gauge how Albertans feel about the results.

As indicated in a number of polls leading up to the vote, a large majority of residents province-wide voted in favour of Alberta remaining a province of Canada.

“I’m very happy with the outcome and every person that lives in Alberta that is a proud Canadian should be happy,” one man told CityNews in Calgary.

Voter turnout was significantly higher for the separation question as opposed to the other nine.

“Does that surprise me? Yeah if you’re there I don’t understand why you wouldn’t vote anyways. I certainly voted for all ten,” says another resident.

Some question why Albertans would take the time to vote on one question but not the rest, while others may provide context on why that was the case.

“I couldn’t quite understand all the questions anyhow. Took me and my wife probably half an hour to figure out which box to check on some of them.”

Another Albertan says she was planning to only vote on the tenth question, which concerned separation, but ended up checking off some others as well.

“You can’t understand what they’re actually meaning. So .. we sat there and read them through and tried to make sense of them, and some of them did. Number one thing that comes up .. is the Senate thing, that’s ridiculous. That senators are appointed by their friends.”

The power to appoint individuals to the Senate is vested in the Governor General. But as per constitutional convention, the Governor General summons individuals to the Senate on the advice of the Prime Minister.

Returning to the streets, some are disappointed by what the results may mean for immigrants in Alberta.

“These are people who come to Alberta, who work, who pay taxes. They absolutely should be able to access the resources that we have. I think its disappointing to see a lot of people in our communities supporting the idea of taking services away from these people.”

Overall the residents CityNews spoke to were quite pleased to put an end to separation talk, and hope the results from the rest of the questions will help Alberta prosper.

“There (are) nine other questions that are tracking towards maybe giving her a purpose to have further conversations with Ottawa.”

“Not surprising,” says another resident, “I mean some of those questions were pretty ‘slam dunkish’.”

“Hope that the federal government gets (a) sort of a kick in the pants and says we need to treat Alberta with a little more respect.”