Danny Hozack, chairman of the Economic Education Association of Alberta, hosts the seventh annual Freedom Talk Conference (Oct 15–16) in Red Deer, debating Western separation—options like independence or U.S. annexation—while addressing federal policies: $620B net contributions from Alberta, carbon taxes, pipeline blockades, and equalization. Skeptical of mainstream media, he argues a referendum could force change, with Trudeau’s 2019 re-election as a key separatist catalyst, urging conservatives to engage locally to counter perceived leftist dominance. Alberta’s future hinges on direct action against federal overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
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A lot of people want Albertans to just shut up about separation.
But one man in his conference refuses to abide all the scolding.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Alberta's Future Ideas00:13:10
Albertans everywhere can't stop talking about separation.
It is literally all we talk about.
We want to talk about what a new deal looks like for us.
And there are a lot of ideas on the table right now.
Is it complete separation as in being a new country?
Is it renegotiated equalization?
Does it mean just collecting our own taxes and running our own pension plan?
Or is it something more drastic, like joining the United States as a full state or maybe just becoming a territory?
There are a lot of questions to be answered in the coming months about Alberta's future and our relationship with Canada and the rest of Confederation.
But our self-appointed moral and intellectual superiors, if they had their way, we wouldn't even be allowed to ask the questions, let alone get some answers for ourselves.
But that's not stopping my friend, Danny Hozack.
He is the chairman of the Economic Education Association of Alberta.
He's based near Lloyd Minster.
And this weekend, he's hosting his seventh annual Freedom Talk Conference.
It's a two-day event.
Now, each year, the conference, as the title alludes to, discusses issues of freedom.
Last year, the topic was education.
This year, they are discussing the pros and cons of staying within Canada.
And Danny is bringing in some very smart people from both sides of the debate to have the debate.
So joining me now in an interview we recorded yesterday morning is Danny Hozak from his farm near Lloyd Minster.
And please bear with us because you have two farmers using Skype from their respective middle of nowhere locations.
So sometimes our Skype connection gets a little laggy.
Joining me now is my friend and fellow farmer, Danny Hozak from the Economic Education Association.
Danny, thank you so much for joining me.
I wanted to talk to you today because you host these amazing conferences every single year.
I think this year is the seventh.
Why don't you talk a little bit about your upcoming conference?
It's actually coming up this weekend, so the 15th and 16th.
Yes, thank you very much for having me on.
We really appreciate the publicity that we get from you and the rebel, and we really do appreciate that.
And yes, this is our seventh conference.
It's called Meeting the Challenge of Western Separation or Meeting the Unity Challenge, depending on how you want to look at it.
We're trying to be impartial in the discussion.
We've got some people that are going to be making the case for separation.
We have some people that are going to be defending federalism.
And then we have a third part of our conference, which is actually irrespective of whether you have one country or whether you have two, like there are some issues that you have to deal with, which we call that forging a stronger relationship with neighbors, meaning America, meaning the First Nations, meaning other provinces, maybe the Northwest Territory.
So it's sort of broken down into three different categories.
Yeah, and I'm interested in the speakers that you have.
You have speakers from all over the country.
You have our friend Andrew Lawton, who's coming.
You've got John Robson, who's a perennial favorite at your conferences.
But you also have people like Prem Singh, who's ready to pull the shoot on Canada.
Prem from Alberta can't wait.
She's a very outspoken lady.
But you also have people like Patrick Moore, Michelle Sterling, the guys from CFACT, which I think is a great get to come up to Canada to talk to us.
That's a really big speaker for you to bring up.
And the reason I bring up the people who are going to talk about the environmental movement, I think in large part, the failure to address the foreign meddling in our economic system, in our system of government, in our electoral system has fueled so much separatist sentiment in Alberta because it is the thing that led to the pipelines being blocked.
And for so many people, that's their number one issue on why they want to leave the country.
You're absolutely right.
And as you know, like two conferences ago, our conference was Meeting the Climate Change Challenge, which we talked about a lot of the meddling by foreign factors, by the foreign groups.
But Mark Morano is coming, and I think this is one of the most interesting things that we're going to be talking about at the conference.
I think he's one of the most quoted conservatives in America.
He's going to be talking about indoctrination versus education.
And the point he's going to make, and we agree with, is that the left have done a better job of indoctrinating our kids and our students and our voters than the right have done of educating them.
The right, you know, it's my opinion, they thought they would be all right just because they were right.
But quite frankly, we're seeing in this whole world of indoctrination and misinformation and fake news, I think the conservative movement is going to have to do a better job of making their case to everyone, starting from the schools to the voters to even to the energy industry.
And quite frankly, if we want things to recover in Alberta, we're going to have to go and make our case to foreign investors again.
And one of the things Patrick Moore told us at our conference last year was, you can say what you like about getting rid of Rachel Notley, but that foreign investors will not be coming back to invest in our energy industry till we withdraw our commitment to the Paris Agreement, till we start making it, you know, Alberta an investor-friendly environment again.
You know, that's a fantastic point.
And it's something I've actually talked to Mark Moreno about at United Nations conferences.
I think last year in Poland, we talked about this.
The way that Donald Trump is dealing with the Paris Accord, he's mocking it.
He treats it like the piece of outlandish fiction that it really is, as opposed to taking it as though it's this document that's going to save the world the way Catherine McKenna does.
And that is really, I think, to some extent what is fueling the lack of investor confidence in Canada.
Why would you invest in, for example, southern Saskatchewan that shares the Bakken oil field with North Dakota when you can just go to North Dakota where there's a completely different investment climate and a completely different sentiment from the federal government about carbon emissions and regulations?
You're absolutely right.
And I mean, and I think this is this is at the, this is at the core of everything that's wrong in our country today.
And I don't necessarily blame the left as much as I blame some of our people on the right for not fighting back against it.
And one of the things we're going to suggest is we need to go back to first principles.
As you know, I used to be on the Alberta Beef Producers.
It was called the Alberta Cattle Commission when I was there.
And we always said sound science plus sound economics leads to sound public policy.
Sometimes it's not politically correct to say it, but I mean, it's still, it was true then and it's true now.
We have to go back to sound science, sound economics.
If you were a manager of a $100 billion pension fund in Hong Kong or Tokyo or one of the world's financial centers, and you said, well, you know, let's just go and invest in Alberta and take a chance that they really won't, that they won't meet their Paris commitments, that they won't persecute us, that they won't persecute consumers of fossil fuels.
Let's take a chance on that.
Well, quite frankly, if you suggested that, you'd be going home in a taxi, as unfortunately, a lot of our oil field workers are, because they wouldn't tolerate it at all.
So I think we have to be realistic and say, look, let's go back to square one on this.
And that's what Patrick Moore is going to talk about.
He's going to talk about how a few dedicated, loyal, focused people can literally change the course of history, quite frankly, which he has already done several times in his lifetime.
You know, and just going back to the remarks you made about Mark Morano, he's so right.
And I talk to William Macbeth from Safe Calgary about this quite a bit.
And it is how conservatives have forgotten that it is our school boards and our municipal politics who are the farm teams for our provincial and federal politics.
And it's time we got involved there to nip the problem in the bud, to talk about conservative principles at that level before these big spending ideas are normalized at the provincial level and the federal level.
We have to get involved much sooner.
And, you know, we are conservatives, so we're busy with jobs and life and taking care of our own families because that's what we like to do.
But we have to start getting involved a lot sooner to change the conversation before it gets too loud for us to get involved.
William Macbeth is one of my favorite young men, and he's absolutely right.
And I want to put a plug in for him and the Modern Miracle Network, which I think you know, Michael Binion.
He's been doing a good job of trying to get all of us groups to work together to get this message out.
But we were on a call about three months ago, and one of the people said, yeah, well, the left are, you know, they're months ahead of us in this.
And I said, well, actually, they're not months ahead of us.
They're about 100 years ahead of us.
If you Google Regina Manifesto, they talked about this, that, you know, there was some socialists who wanted to create a socialist utopia in the West.
And I mean, the war had just got over, so there wasn't a lot of public sentiment for that at the time.
But they said, well, if we're going to do that, we'll have to infiltrate the school boards.
We'll have to infiltrate the education system.
We'll have to infiltrate the bureaucracy and the public service and the political parties.
And quite frankly, like when they elected Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau, my guess is they were checking off a couple of the last boxes on their 100-year list.
But in any event, that's what we're up against, and we have to start fighting back against it.
And we need to work together to do that.
Yeah, and that's why I really like your conferences is because they are a place where people can discuss these ideas and then walk away with the tools and the arguments to take out into the rest of the world.
And that's why I really like this conference is because you are, unlike so much of what's going on in society at large right now, presenting both sides of the argument, allowing everybody to have the discussion and make up their own minds with the information before them.
And really, we see none of that, especially in the mainstream media.
It's just one idea, there's one acceptable opinion, and that's the only thing that you're going to hear about.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And one of the reasons we've been so successful is we're sort of small enough that we fly under the radar.
You may well be getting us onto the radar here.
But anyway, we'll take our chances.
We'll take our chances on that.
But in any event, some of the bigger groups are afraid of their investors.
They're afraid of the lobby group.
They're afraid of the mainstream media attacking them.
And so we've had amazing success at attracting speakers who want to come to some place where they can express their opinion in an accepting environment where we say, look, we may not agree with you, but we want you to come and tell us what you think so that we can hopefully understand this and so we have a better understanding.
I think we all know like the art of war has meet lots of times.
Like you have to understand their position as well as we understand ours.
And that's what we're trying to do is bring a group of people together, some of whom are quite adamantly committed to separation, some of whom believe passionately in defending federalism.
We want to be in the same room and talk respectfully about, okay, well, this is their concerns.
What are you, you know, what are you going to do to deal with these concerns?
So it's been working quite well for us.
And this is the timing of this, as you know, is it couldn't be much better.
Isn't that the truth?
Now, you are also addressing things that people in the mainstream media and people sort of, you know, it's pretty funny how this whole swath of liberals who treated the word nationalism and nationalist as though it were sort of interchangeable with neo-Nazi, all of a sudden becoming staunch nationalists and staunch federalists when Alberta is musing about leaving Confederation.
But you are addressing some things that they are saying that separatists haven't really considered.
For example, you've considered, you have actually a part of your conference that specifically deals with First Nations and Indigenous issues with separation and federalism.
Of course, that's one of those issues, like whether you have one country or whether you have two, if you're having a conference about the future and you don't include talking about our relationship with the First Nations, well, you're not really having a conference about the future.
You're just talking about some things that you're hoping somebody will do.
So that's what we intend to do.
Challenges of Separation Vote00:10:25
I'm sorry to say that Ellis Ross on the agenda says invited, not confirmed.
And I talked to them on Wednesday or Thursday and they'd got over two of the three hurdles they had to go over.
They had a couple more questions and they phoned back late Friday and said they couldn't make it.
And I assume one of the hurdles was an elected person speaking outside of their province at a conference that had separation on the agenda.
But we're going to have a really good panel on how we're, Ken Coates is well known for his thoughts on, well, at least he's well respected for his thoughts on dealing with the First Nation.
And John Robson did quite a bit of work with it in days gone by with the Reform Party.
And we're going to have a really good discussion, a really good honest discussion about like where we go from here.
Everybody agrees something should be done with the Indian Act.
And then they have a meeting and everybody gets arguing and that's the end of the meeting.
And then it just goes on for another few years and nobody's done anything about it.
So that's another one where we absolutely intend to address that.
The other thing, just while I'm, if you want to call it, like the other thing that bugs me when you talk about our leftist friends, I see some professor on the news the other night saying, well, they could never separate.
Like they couldn't do that.
There's no way they can do that.
And I thought to myself, you know, they're the same people who mock our tar sands.
You know what I mean?
I mean, you know, they're mocking us by calling us tar sands.
But quite frankly, if it was left up to them, it still would be tar sands.
It was tar sands for two billion years or two million years, and it still would be if it was left up to them.
But fortunately, it wasn't.
Like some young entrepreneurs from somewhere in the West, with I say with their young wife and their old halftime, went to Fort McMurray and figured out how to get tar out of sand.
And now it's one of the miracles of the modern world, thanks to Alberta's ingenuity.
And so, like, you know, like I say, I'm trying to be impartial, but don't tell Alberta what they can't do.
No, and I was talking to William about this the other day on the show.
It was pretty demoralizing, I think, for a lot of Albertans to, and a lot of the people in the West to see.
And I think they took it personally.
I know I did a little bit, and I don't like to take anything in politics personally.
When you see the entire West go blue, except for the crazy part of BC and east of Winnipeg, when you see that go red, it's pretty demoralizing to know, to come to the realization that despite our best efforts, despite how much we really want to stay in Canada, I think a lot of people are reluctant separatists.
The rest of the country just doesn't care, I guess, to some extent.
Or they think that we're just going to take it and they'll vote their way and we'll vote ours.
And I think to some extent, this separatist movement, whatever it turns out to be, whether it's, you know, a new deal in Confederation or whether we leave or we join the United States or we become a territory or whatever, I think it is a reinvigoration of that can-do attitude.
You know, like Justin Trudeau's father said, just watch me.
Well, let's steal a little page from him and say, just watch us.
We'll decide our own fate.
And, you know, the East who underestimates us, you know, they really shouldn't because we turned a forbidding land into the breadbasket of the country and the economic engine for so long.
You're absolutely right.
And to me, there's several ways of dealing with this, but I think all fair-minded people agree that the status quo is not, it has to go.
I think a lot of the people in the East don't realize that we've contributed $620 billion over the last 30 years, that more than we've more than we've got back.
And sure, there's lots of challenges to separation.
If you think, yeah, well, that's quite a challenge.
That would cost us about a billion dollars.
You know, it's okay.
Well, we've got 611 left, you know what I mean?
Over the next 30 years.
And well, that's quite a challenge.
And somebody said to me the other day, well, you know, you'd even have to worry about securing your borders.
And I said, well, don't worry about securing our borders.
We're the only rat-free jurisdiction in the world.
We'll put the rat patrol in charge of our borders.
Like, we'll be all right.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
It's that can-do spirit.
Like, I don't know how we got the rats out of Alberta, but we did.
And no one else has been able to do it.
So, yeah, it's that can-do spirit.
Just watch us.
Yes.
Yeah, just watch us.
And that's another thing I wanted to make a point about.
And I wanted to ask you about there.
The other thing that is sort of the elephant in the room.
Actually, I think you have a session called that.
Yes, you do.
That's that, yes.
With the Alberta Taxpayers Federation.
But people are saying, well, what about the, What about your pension plan?
What are you going to do?
You actually brought in a speaker, Bill Tufts, who's a pension expert, to talk about what happens if Alberta decides to leave the Canadian pension plan and go our own way.
You're absolutely right.
Because we're younger and generally speaking, the wages are higher here, so we contribute more to the Canada pension plan.
If we had our own pension plan, like it would be a lot more sustainable than the Canadian pension plan.
I mean, so that's another thing where the $20 billion a year that we send down east, well, you start putting it into your own pension plan, you know, in a few years you've got rid of your debt.
In a few years, you've topped up the Alberta pension plan.
You know what I mean?
So those are all challenges that are not insurmountable.
And again, when you look at it, I saw Lauren Gunter on, I think it was the interview with Ezra saying, you know, when Quebec was talking about leaving, like, you know, some of them truly wanted to go, but at the back of their mind, there was always sort of that nagging, well, what do we do for the $20 billion a year that they've been sending from the West?
There was always sort of hanging over their thoughts.
But we're the other side of that coin.
When someone is saying, well, this will be difficult to do or that'll be difficult to do.
You say, well, that's true, but we'll have $20 billion a year extra to deal with it.
So, I mean, you know, I think we can figure out a way to sort that out.
Now, having said that, I mean, one of the reasons that we need out of this Paris Agreement is we're not going to have the $20 billion a year, you know, to send anyone or use ourselves until we make a commitment to the world's energy investors that sort of encourages them to come back here.
Some of my friends who have been, you know, like in government said, you know, they were talking to world investors and they said, you know, you're not even on the short list anymore.
You're not even on the long list anymore.
Like, so we need to make a lot of changes in Alberta before world investors.
I mean, it's sort of happier times for us now that Jason's got elected.
Of course, it's disappointing that Justin got elected.
But still, we're a long ways from happier times for the world, for the energy people.
And we need to all be well aware of that.
And, you know, hopefully a lot of people will come to our conference and help us talk about where we go from here.
Yeah, I mean, there's really only so much that Jason Kenney can do to spur investment back to Alberta when you have this behemoth of the federal government willing to impose a carbon tax on all the provinces who have elected governments to refuse one.
That sends a pretty harsh signal to the rest of the world.
When you look at that, when you look at the no pipeline bill, when you look at the no tanker ban and all those things, like if I were a world's energy investor, like I wouldn't come back just the first time Jason won or the first time Andrew Scheer won, because you think, well, there's no point in us moving billions of dollars there and then the left wins again and then our money is locked in Alberta.
So we're an election or two away from happier times for the investment community.
And I mean, at this point in time, we're not even heading that way, let alone.
So we have a lot of challenges ahead of us.
We really do.
Yeah, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Jason Kenney's equalization referendum.
He's scheduled at a couple years off.
I don't think Alberta can wait to steal a phrase from my friend Prem Singh.
That's very far away.
And that's not just to deal with equalization.
That's just to have the referendum to have the discussion about equalization.
That's scheduled so far off.
I think it's too far off.
We need to act right now.
Well, there's two things about that.
For one thing, I don't understand why we have to vote unanimously in Alberta to have the rest of the country treat us fairly.
I sort of was under the impression they should treat us fairly just because we were part of the country.
But having said that, if we have to vote to get them to treat us fairly, well, like what I would like to see, let's have the vote before Christmas and let's start monitoring sometime after Christmas whether they're actually treating us fairly.
Quite frankly, maybe it's good in generating public support for the issue or whatever.
But to me, it's like the kids on the playground saying, well, if we all vote and then we, you know, 80% of us say, you know, the bully shouldn't bully us, well, then we'll just tell him and he'll stop bullying us.
You know, not likely.
You know, mostly what a bully needs is a quite frankly, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about this on the TV or not, but they're supposed to, what they understand is a punch in the nose.
And I mean, to me, the rest of Canada needs a wake-up call.
And that's what we're having at our conference.
We're talking about, okay, I mean, some people want to fix it.
Some people want to leave, but we want to have it sorted out sooner rather than later.
I've seen over the last 24 hours, I've seen suggestions that we should have not a vote on equalization, but a vote on separation.
Some people want to do it in May.
Some people want to do it next year.
Some people want to do it in two years.
But that's one of the things we're going to talk about at the end of our conference is we're going to say, look, I had a medical.
I have to get a medical now every year.
And my doctor who's even older than me, you know, patted me on my somewhat protruding stomach and said, Danny, too much talk and not enough action.
And I mean, quite frankly, I think that's what we're getting in a lot of these things is too much talk and not enough action.
And so I think what we need to do is schedule a vote on separation.
And then the separatists can go away from our conference and they can make their case to Alberta voters on how they would deal with those challenges.
The people who believe in federalism can go away and say, look, the clock is ticking.
They're going to be voting, let's just say a year from now.
So if we want to fix the equalization, if we want to fix corporate welfare, if we want to get rid of the tanker ban and the no pipeline bills, we need to get it done before the day they vote, or they may well be dealing with us from a separate country.
Schedule A Vote00:03:21
Now, Danny, I could talk to you all day.
I really could.
I would enjoy it.
But I want to give you a chance to tell everybody how they can, if space is still available, get access to the conference and how they can find out what's going on at the Economic Freedom Association of Alberta.
Well, they can go to our website, which is freedomtalk.ca, and there's a that we're a pretty low-cost outfit.
We're all volunteers, but it just says register and it takes you to the donate button, which you can either donate with PayPal if you have a PayPal count, or you can donate by credit card.
And there's a note there that says a $200 donation will be considered a registration in the conference.
You know, we're conservative because we said you can donate $200 or more.
Like we always leave the option open.
I'm hoping Bernie Sanders will register.
I think he always likes to pay more.
You know what I mean?
But in any event, that's what you can do.
And so you can follow us at freedomtalk.ca.
And there's a place there where you can sign up for our newsletter.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Danny Hozak for updates.
But again, and like I say, if you don't like dealing with the, if you don't like dealing with the internet and PayPal and credit cards and all that stuff, they can send me an email or they can call me and we can deal with them.
They can just meet us at the door and give us a check if they like to.
So yes, registration is between 8 and 9 next Friday morning.
We're at the, it used to be the Capri, now it's the Cambridge, which is on 3310 50th Avenue in Red Deer.
They've been very gracious to us.
We've already outstripped the room that we had booked.
So they've moved us into the big event center.
Thank you very much, Cambridge Hotel.
And then they will just curtain off.
As you know, I think it'll hold 1,000 people.
We're hoping to have 300, maybe 400, but they're going to curtain it off so we have a nice room.
So they've been very, very gracious to us to sort of make space available for us.
So thank you.
Thanks for the visit.
And I think that's about it.
Yeah, you bet, Danny.
Hopefully I'll Make it down on Red Hier for at least one of the days.
That would be great.
We'll look forward to seeing you and we'll hopefully talk to you then, okay?
You got it.
Talk soon.
care i've said it before and i will say it again whatever happens with alberta's relationship with the rest of canada it's going to be decided by albertans
Having our fate and our futures controlled by elitist people thousands of miles away, people who resent our best resource despite its contribution to the economic growth of this great country, ended October 21st, 2019.
That was the breaking point.
The re-election of Justin Trudeau by the rest of the country, in spite of the pain he has inflicted on us in the West these last four years.
Things are changing, and our political class, both conservative and liberal, are going to do everything they can to stop the paradigm from changing.
So beware.
Things are going to get a little western out there.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next weekend.