The literart force of planned comprehension failure
I have been too hard on "Albertan culture." I discovered a novel and quite fascinating literary style that has been developed by our very own. The idea is to create a phrase that is meaningless when read with a high level of comprehension, but carries a specific meaning to a low comprehension reading. It's really quite an interesting style of prose. Let's look at an example
"Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?"
Do you support the Government of Alberta - Some people drop off here. Those people typically say yes to this question.
Do you support the Government of alberta taking increased control over immigration - again, the ones who lose the thread here also vote yes.
Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increasted control ... immigration ... economic migration ... Albertans first... - This represents a broken reading level, and again the people with this reading level vote yes.
Basically, the questions are designed not to be more readable to higher reading levels, but to be less coherent the more you can actually synthesize the entire question and its context. Of course, if you can parse this question in its entirety within the context of the Canadian constitution and laws it is utterly meaningless. The alberta government can't increase control of immigration in such a way as to prioritize Albertans and this referrendum question doesn't offer any mechanisms to do that.
So when voted on, it gets a "yes" but even if someone wanted to work in good faith to actually implement them, they cannot be implemented by anyone, much less the Federal government.
It's like a slam-poetry ring oscellator. Amazing work.