Ezra Levant examines Alberta’s abrupt COVID policy reversal—dropping lockdowns, asymptomatic testing, and jailing pastors like James Coates (35 days) for defiance—while critics, including Globe and Mail columnists and "TV doctors," demand stricter controls. He ties this to systemic federal exploitation, citing failed pipelines (Northern Gateway, Transmountain) and Moment of Truth, a book by Flanagan, Morton, and Mintz, advocating separatism or Alberta-only reforms if Kenney’s equalization referendum fails. The episode questions whether Alberta can resist central pressure like Florida under DeSantis, warning that its future hinges on defying both Ottawa’s overreach and media-driven compliance narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I look at Alberta, which has decided it's done with COVID.
It's not going to have the obsessive press conferences talking about cases.
It's not going to give tests to people who have no symptoms.
It's not going to mandatory quarantines for people with the sniffles.
It's going to treat it as an endemic disease like the flu.
Well needless to say that has created outrage from the public health class, the lockdownists.
Do you think they'll be able to hold the line?
That's the topic for today's show.
I'll get to that in a second, but first let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus, eight bucks a month, half the price of Netflix, twice the fun.
You get My Daily Show plus Sheila Gunread, David Menzies, and Andrew Chapatos, and the satisfaction of knowing that you're helping to keep Rebel News strong.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Alberta has gone from normal to crazy back to almost normal again, and the CBC wants them to flip back to crazy.
It's August 2nd, and this is the Azure Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is the government about why I'm publishing is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Alberta's Lockdown Lift00:12:16
For the longest time, Alberta did not do the lockdown insanity.
It just resisted.
I think a lot of the lockdownism in the United States was partisan.
It was from the Democrats, which, you know, they love the public health deep state.
They love control.
They love crises.
They don't really care about small businesses or individual liberty.
And they also love the idea of public sector teachers' unions getting paid but not having to go to school.
But mainly, the lockdown was a way of hurting Donald Trump, who was cruising to a re-election before COVID-19.
Not only did the man-made recession and crisis hurt him, a lot of fear, but of course the excuse to have mail-in ballots, as Joel Pollack told us, that was what lost it for Trump, the legal changes to voting rules mid-campaign.
Anyways, in Canada, I think Alberta sympathized the most with Republican sentiments, whereas, say, Toronto really wishes it were New York and mimics New York's politics and tastes like an, I don't know, 11-year-old girl might watch her mom putting on makeup and copycat.
It's sad really how much of Toronto's political identity, at least on certain things, is so seamlessly built around an inferiority complex about New York.
I mean, how many people in Toronto read the New York Times thinking they're like honorary New Yorkers for doing so, who watch Saturday Night Live as their political humor?
It's sort of pitiful.
I say that as a Torontonian.
So, of course, the Toronto, Ontario cool kids wanted to copy the hard lockdowns and that whole aesthetic of New York and other blue states in the U.S.
But Calgary isn't part of that Cool Kids Club.
Alberta is different.
It didn't go mad.
Alberta and British Columbia, to an extent, and Saskatchewan, to an extent, they just weren't part of the Cool Kids Club, so they didn't feel like they had to copy that.
Until one day, Alberta just utterly collapsed and became insanely locked down.
And there was no justification for it.
Hospitals were never overwhelmed, never even close.
Cases went up, but what does that mean?
What's a case?
It's not someone being sick.
It's not a hospital or an ICU visitor or a ventilator or whatever.
Suddenly, Alberta swung from the most sane to the most crazy, and it was evident that even Alberta's ruling class didn't believe what they were doing.
So many cabinet ministers and MLAs and even Premier Jason Kenney's own chief of staff all just went on holiday over at Christmas when they had just told everyone else to avoid unnecessary travel.
Some of them did that fake thing where they posed for Christmas photos pretending to be in Alberta and then published them later when they were actually in Vegas or Hawaii.
So they were all caught and it made Albertans so mad.
And just at the moment when they were being locked down hard, the ruling class was out partying.
It wasn't that Albertans think traveling is a sin.
No, Albertans believed that other than the lockdown cultists and the NDP and the media party and the public health deep state, I think Normal Albertans knew the lockdown was BS.
And they knew that Kenny knew.
And then to see that the rules were being implemented but not followed by the rulemakers, that was too much.
And Kenny dug in at first.
He argued that traveling was good for the economy or whatever he said, which no one disagreed with.
They weren't anti-travel.
They just note the hypocrisy, the double standard.
One law for the little people who are locked down, one law for the rulers.
And when that happened again this spring with one of the strictest lockdowns in the country and Kenny and his abominable health minister Tyler Chandro were having that boozy party at the Sky Palace literally looking down at regular people like ants barking out lockdown orders while they themselves break the lockdown rules.
Well that just cemented the whole thing as a fraud and hypocrisy.
They didn't get it then either did they?
I mean this clip says it all.
You know it's the first time I've heard of Mr. Speaker I can assure the member that Jameson's is it's a nice Irish whiskey but it's not it's not the finest.
It's a budget liquor Mr. Speaker.
If your answer to a question about breaking the lockdown in a palatial private lounge is to say that a $50 bottle of whiskey is economy whiskey as if that answers the underlying grievance instead of proving it that suggests that in fact you have been too long at the Sky Palace.
And indeed they have.
They have been insulated.
They've never met real people.
That's anti-gathering rules, social distancing.
The media didn't hold them to account other than to demand more lockdowns.
Same with the NDP opposition.
They were all living in a weird world of public health echo chambers.
So I think it was genuinely a shock for them when actual citizens had the first chance to talk to their politicians this month for July 1st when they spoke back.
I think that these politicians were in such an insulated bubble, they genuinely thought they were beloved that everyone supported the lockdown.
Arrest Chandra now!
You're going to jail!
What do you got to say, Chandro, for your war crimes?
What do you got to say?
Crimes against humanity, medical coercion.
Make my kids cry.
You made a lot of kids cry, buddy.
You're a murderer.
Alberta's Minister of Health, Tyler Chandro, holding on to his son as protesters surrounded him and his family during Canada Day celebrations in Calgary.
The protesters yelling insults and directing some of the abuse towards Chandro's children.
I'm sorry, buddy, but your father is a war criminal.
Now, I don't agree with talking to his kid, but I absolutely believe in the right of citizens to heckle politicians at public events.
It's in our Constitution, you might recall.
So Alberta's lockdown was truly one of the worst.
Giant stores like Walmart or Costco were allowed to stay open, liquor stores and cannabis stores allowed to stay open.
And they were limited only with a percentage of their fire code capacity, so something like, let's say, 20% of their normal capacity.
Measured as a percent, though, you see.
But only churches and other houses of worship had absolute fixed number limits, no matter how large the building.
15 people.
Even for big cathedrals, massive megachurches, 15 people total.
10 for a funeral.
What?
Five of the theater rolls outdoors.
Huh?
That makes no sense.
But it was not about science or health.
The NHL was allowed to play and practice hockey and go to restaurants with their whole entourage while kids' sports were canceled.
The Bachelorette was allowed to film a whole show in Jasper.
No social distancing, to say the least.
But churches were penalized.
You can't go to a funeral at a church.
It was outrageous.
It was the worst in the country.
Four pastors were sent to prison, James Coates of Edmonton for 35 days, Tim Stevens of Calgary, Arthur Pavlovsky of Calgary, his brother David Pavlovsky.
The worst, Alberta went from the lightest lockdown to the most authoritarian.
No reason either.
The worst of the bullying.
The worst of the anti-Christian bias.
The worst enforcement, the stupidest.
But that's not really Alberta, is it?
There was a mini-revolt of the caucus.
after the Christian, sorry, after the Christmas vacation business.
Cabinet ministers were sacked, which is pretty dramatic.
The Premier's own chief of staff was sacked, pretty dramatic.
And then another revolt after the Sky Palace, when the lockdown was denounced by more than a dozen MLAs, too many for the government to fire them all.
And you know, I think our rebel news, journalism, and activism really helped focus the issue.
Certainly the NDP and the media party didn't.
So I think it was as much for reasons of political fatigue as any health statistics that on July 1st, Alberta lifted the lockdown on gatherings, including churches.
And just late last week, Alberta made final changes that relegated COVID-19 to the same status of any other endemic disease, like the flu.
It's just always around.
And use your wits and common sense, but there's not going to be this whole cottage industry built around it anymore.
No more panic porn press conferences, no more BS scaremongering about this variant or that number of cases, all of which is deliberately unintelligible, deliberately designed not to be understood, but merely to be feared.
So as of a couple days ago, there's no more testing for people who have no symptoms.
Why would you test someone without a symptom?
It was always iffy that PCR tests were notoriously false, giving false positives, didn't have any medical meaning, no mandatory quarantine anymore.
There isn't for the flu.
No mask mandates, no school closures.
Life is normal now.
Because you know what?
It is normal.
The abominable, sorry, the abnormal part in terms of health issues.
The lockdown was the abnormal part.
Now, I have to mention that Alberta's health bureaucrats are still prosecuting Arthur and David Pavlovsky.
That's not normal.
Tyler Chandra wants to throw them back in prison for 21 days because they won't apologize.
Seriously, the use of that word in their legal documents filed at court.
You can see that at savearthor.com.
They want to throw him back in prison for 21 days because he won't say sorry.
But other than that bizarre petty vengeance and bullying by Tyler Chandra against Arthur and his brother, other than that, Alberta today is the same pretty much as Alberta before the lockdowns, at least in terms of the law.
Well, that can't be allowed.
I mean, as this American panic porn expert says, it's like Florida North.
I now crown Alberta as the new Florida of Canada.
Get a positive COVID-19 test.
No need to isolate, says new horrible rules by heinously irresponsible medical health officer.
Yeah, Florida's pretty terrible.
The freest and healthiest and best state in the union, especially when you consider how many seniors live there.
By the way, this doctor, Eric Fagelding, he's not a medical doctor, but he pretends to be one on Twitter.
Here's an actual MD.
When Alberta going full Florida, with Alberta going full Florida on COVID measures, there's now three distinct approaches in Canada to containing the virus.
How do we protect the rest of the country from the mistakes of the let it rip crowd?
How do we ensure we can keep numbers down and open schools safely?
You know he's an expert and you should trust him about Alberta because he lives in Toronto and according to this map, he thinks Alberta and BC are the same place and that locking down millions of people in Ontario and destroying lives and jobs and families and ruining school and childhood, that's being careful, he says.
Pretty sure that doctor hasn't lost a day's pay in the last 18 months.
Calgary Socialist Mayor thinks it's insane.
He loves masks.
Not for health reasons.
I mean, Nahid Menshu, I used to know well when we were in school together.
He's always been physically sort of the same as me.
He weighs about an eighth of a ton, as I like to say.
So you know he deeply cares about health.
And you know his mask will probably take care of all his problems.
No, he just likes the social control.
Here's Chudeau's National Post.
They get $140,000 a week from him.
The bad news is you have COVID.
The good news is you're in Alberta.
I think that's meant as an insult, but it's actually true.
Here's the stats for those in Alberta that Colby Kosh put together.
100% recovery rate for anyone young at all.
99.5% recovery for pretty much anyone under 60.
So most people, yeah, if you get COVID in those age groups, you're almost certainly going to be fine.
In Ontario, they treat you as a leper.
In Alberta, you can use your judgment like you would for the flu, which happens to kill thousands of people a year, but for which we let people live their lives.
You know, some TV doctors who are worried they will no longer be reality TV stars anymore and their careers as celebrities are coming to a close, they're furious.
Removal of Alberta's remaining COVID-19 protocols sparks uprage among physicians.
Oh, well, man.
A group of doctors plan to gather at the Medoogal Center in Calgary over the noon hour on Friday to voice concerns about Alberta dropping mandatory health measures for COVID-19.
Yeah, COVID fear porn is over.
TV doctors hardest hit, I guess.
Now I support these doctors having their freedom of speech and giving their political advice.
I would invite them to run for office as part of a lockdown party.
Maybe that's just another way of saying the NDP.
But if they want to be doctors, be doctors.
Give advice to their patients.
I'm not their patient.
They're not doctors to the whole province.
If they want to be legislators, run for office.
I encourage it, I really do.
Let's finally put these lockdown ideas to a public test.
Vaccinated but Masked Up?00:06:22
You know what's the giveaway?
That this isn't about health.
But it's about political control.
You know what tipped me off?
It's all they talk about, rules, lockdowns, bullying.
It's like those classic mask enforcer cell phone videos we see.
They never run up to someone without a mask and say, put your mask on, you'll get sick.
Or even, put your mask on, I'll get sick.
They never say that.
Have you ever seen that?
I never have.
They always make the argument about authority.
Put your mask on.
That's the rule.
Or more honestly, put your mask on.
If I have to, you do too.
And that was all obedience conditioning, these masks.
Obedience conditioning for the vaccines.
Look at this from the Globe and Mail.
It's time to get tough with vaccine resistors.
Can you imagine talking that way about any other medical condition, any other experimental drug?
I am tired of this gentle persuasion business.
We continue to patter to a group who in many cases is simply too lazy to sign up to get a shot.
Yeah, that's it.
Laziness.
This from a journalist for a living, calling someone else lazy?
Or they continue to embrace crackpot conspiracy theories and misinformation being spread on social media.
We patiently hope that they will wake up and see the light one day.
Meanwhile, their recalcitrant affects the rest of us.
those crackpots with their misinformation gee why don't they oh people should not be walking around with masks Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater.
Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better.
Masks are protective.
But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.
There has not been any indication that putting a mask on and wearing a mask for a considerable period of time has any deleterious effects.
There are unintended consequences.
People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
And can you get some schmutz sort of staying inside there?
Of course.
You do not need to wear a mask indoors if in fact you've been vaccinated.
Good that you're vaccinated, but in a situation where you have people indoors, particularly crowded, you should wear a mask.
So even if you are vaccinated, you should wear a mask.
If in fact you are vaccinated, fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you do not need to wear a mask, outdoors or indoors.
When the children go out into the community, you want them to continue to wear masks.
You know, if you look at children outside, particularly when they're with the family walking down the street, playing a game or what have you, don't have to wear a mask.
The pediatric, the Academy of Pediatric, actually makes that recommendation that children should be wearing masks from two years old onward.
And you're asking now, if your child is a member of your household, can you walk outdoors with your child without a mask?
According to that chart, the answer is yes.
But the child can't, not to beat it to death.
Yes, yes.
Because now the CDC says, I mean, I think I've got this right.
One mask is better than zero masks.
Two masks is better than one mask.
But you don't have to have double masks.
Is that right?
I mean, it became clear that cloth coverings that you didn't have to buy in a store that you could make yourself were adequate.
And then you want it to fit better.
So one of the ways you could do it if you would like to is put a cloth mask over, which actually here and here and here, where you could get leakage in, is much better contained.
Are you a double masker, Dr. Fauci?
Look like you are.
It's time governments in this country get tough.
We need vaccine mandates and we need them now.
He's so butch.
Never pretend that the media believes in your civil rights.
They don't.
They only believe in your civil rights, well, for their pet causes, not for you.
People who refuse to get vaccinated should not have the same privileges as the rest of us.
They should not be able to sit in restaurants or bars.
They should not be able to work out in gyms.
They definitely should not be able to work in long-term care homes or hospitals.
Get ready for about 40% of the nurses to quit.
Hey, anything else, by the way, should fat people or people who drink or cheesecake or have a certain kind of sex, should they also be banned from public places?
And can we demand them to tell us their private information?
Can I get a list of all the bad things that are nobody's business that I can demand to ask strangers and ban them from things?
And this newspaper guy wants to ban people from a restaurant.
He's neither the customer nor the restaurant, but he just wants to really ban things.
Imagine these people pretending they ever cared about the Charter of Rights.
In the meantime, we continue to get down on bended knee and plead with people to get vaccinated.
Not for a second do they ever think they could be wrong, hey?
That there could be a reason why people don't want to get vaxed, whether they have natural immunity from recovering from COVID already or whether they're so young the vax is a greater threat to their health and the disease.
Or if they have a religious objection or if they just want to wait a bit before taking experimental drug, maybe they want to get pregnant, maybe they're pregnant already, they don't want to take these meds.
In fact, wouldn't you say the harder and more extreme the shouting, the sneering, the condescension, the more doubt they'll sow?
If you have a position, an idea, are you more persuaded to change it from a bully who's calling you names like the Globe is and threatening you, or from someone who can appeal to your underlying concerns and say, I know what you're worried about.
Can I give you some information?
I couldn't imagine a worse vaccine salesman than these people.
Stay with us for more.
Well, the whole world has been on pause for 18 months or so, it seems.
The only thing that people have been talking about is COVID.
Not so much the virus, but the lockdown and the lockdownism, how it's changed so much of our lives, where once masks were optional, now you're a double masker, or you hate grandma, now you're a double vaxxer, or you hate grandma.
Now I hear triple vaccine is in vogue, even though it doesn't help.
Vaccine passports are on the way.
Prime Minister's Ambition00:14:50
We saw signs the other day popping up in airports across Canada for separate segregated lines, depending on your private medical details.
I don't think we're going to be out of it anytime soon.
But as the panic, I think, is replaced in some people's minds with skepticism and hesitation to believe the public health deep state, other issues are re-emerging.
And we see, for example, how Alberta, once again, gets the short end of the stick.
The latest insult was Justin Trudeau appointing a liberal patronage appointment to the Senate on behalf of Albertans, mere months away from when that province has scheduled a province-wide Senate election.
Let me say that again.
Although appointing senators is the prerogative of the federal government, the government of Alberta has for decades now held Senate elections.
Trudeau, seeing that, went ahead and basically said, I don't care about your election.
I'm going to appoint my patronage appointee.
And what are you going to even do about it?
That's a really good question, isn't it?
Because when the question is put to Quebec, what are you going to do about it?
They have an answer.
A perpetual revolutionary party called the Bloc Québécois and its provincial wing, the Partique Croix.
And if you doubt them, well, they've held to referenda.
What can Alberta do to be treated seriously and not just laughed at?
Well, the new book has some of the answers.
The book is called Moment of Truth, How to Think About Alberta's Future.
And I really like the cover.
It's a signpost with different signs.
Go it alone.
51st State.
Let them freeze.
Roll over.
Pipelines are bust.
Build firewall.
It's edited by Jack Mintz, Ted Morton, and Dr. Tom Flanagan, who joins us now via Skype from Calgary.
Dr. Tom, great to see you again.
You were one of my professors when I went to the University of Calgary many years ago.
The things we talked about back then, Western alienation, the Reform Party, are things we would talk about now.
COVID has drowned them out, but all those same issues, those systemic issues, those problems with Confederation, none of them have been fixed, have they?
No, and that's really disappointing because it seemed that our generation was making a lot of progress on that with the foundation of the Reform Party and eventually getting to the point of a national party which could run the government.
And we did make progress in that period of time, but it's all been pretty much lost.
And, you know, the Senate is just one example of an Alberta idea which has now been rejected by the Eastern establishment.
But lots of other things to the development of the Alberta energy industry has been blockaded by Liberal government.
You can go down the line of reforms that have been proposed in Alberta.
And, you know, they appeared to work temporarily, but in the longer term, they've been beaten back.
And that's the setting for this book.
You know, where do we go now?
What are the options for Alberta?
Yeah.
I mean, the Senate election, in many ways, is the least important.
It's just symbolic.
I mean, the election itself was non-binding, really.
Trudeau could appoint anyone he wants under the Constitution, but just the ease and casualness with which he stuffed that seat in the middle of a campaign, I think, shows the temperature.
I mean, if a guy can kill the Northern Gateway pipeline, the Transmountain Pipeline, the Energy East pipeline, if he can kill multi-billion dollar projects and throw tens of thousands of people out of work, obviously he'll think nothing of a symbolic slight.
Because, like, seriously, what are you going to do about it?
And let me put that to you.
What could Alberta possibly do if it got really mad?
Well, that's right.
And we canvass some of the possibilities in the book.
And of course, one possibility is an outright separatist movement.
I guess the editors of the book and most of the authors are not really ready for that, although a couple of the authors, this is a collection of essays, and a couple of the authors do assume a separatist viewpoint.
But I guess most of us are willing to try some tactics that haven't yet been tried.
One is the upcoming referendum on equalization.
It's been talked about for 20 years or more, ever since the publication of the so-called firewall letter, but hasn't actually been tried.
Well, it will be tried this fall.
There's a Supreme Court decision which says that if a province requests constitutional discussion on something, other provinces in Ottawa are bound to at least come to the table and discuss it.
So that's the point of the referendum on equalization, is to provoke a constitutional discussion, showing how unfair this program is to Alberta and demanding some change into it.
Now, will it succeed?
I don't know, but at least it's a step forward that hasn't been tried yet.
Another step that could be considered would be creation of Alberta-only programs like Alberta Pension Plan, which again is a good idea that goes back to the firewall letter.
There are some good economic arguments in favor of it, but COVID has made everybody kind of afraid of everything.
And so COVID has really dampened our timetable, I would say.
But those are the kind of ideas that you'll find in the book: what can we do?
Founding a Western party didn't work out.
Well, it worked for a while.
I'd say it was great while it lasted.
But in the longer run, it's been kind of swallowed up by the system.
Yeah.
Well, I'm really impressed by the quality of authors and scholars who have written these essays.
Like it's a compendium of views.
I mean, Preston Manning writes the first essay.
Ted Morton's in there.
Donald Savois, Derek Bernie, Barry Cooper, David Bergerson.
These are not wild-eyed, you know, populist rabble-rousers.
I mean, maybe they are.
Maybe they would call themselves that as a point of pride.
I don't say that as an insult, but I mean, these are PhDs.
These are nationally known economists.
These are people who have been around for decades and have had.
So, I mean, maybe you'd call yourself a wild-eyed man, and maybe a couple others were.
But putting kidding aside, this is a serious treatment.
I think this is the first serious treatment of what happens if it doesn't work.
And I think this perhaps normalizes a conversation where separatism has to be an option.
The reason I say that is if there's no or-else, you'll never win a negotiation.
I mean, Donald Trump had many flaws, but one of his great strengths is he knew how to negotiate.
And the first thing you have to be able to do is walk away from the table, walk away from a bad deal.
There has to be an or else.
And I don't think Alberta has ever had the or else.
There was very briefly, Peter Lawheed toyed with maybe turning off the taps.
But I don't even know if the East would care anymore.
I don't know.
I'm excited about this book, but it's only a very first step, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
And yeah, thank you for pointing out the quality of the contributors.
I think Jack Mintz, the book was his idea, and he recruited many of the contributors.
You know, Jack has now become, I would say, the leading economic commentator in Canada today on our public policy.
And some of the other people are absolutely top drawer, like Derek Burney.
You know, Derek was ambassador to the United States.
He was chief of staff for the prime minister, for prime minister Mulroney.
I mean, this is a guy who really knows his way around government.
And Derek has a striking statement in his chapter.
He says, you know, if Alberta continues to be kicked around as it is now, separatism is a completely understandable response.
These are my words, not his, but that's the sentiment of it.
So, yeah, these are some top-flight people in this book and very serious thinkers.
So where will it go?
As I say, you're right.
It's the first step, and that's the way we envisioned it, is to give people something to think about, put some ideas on the table.
We are writers and scholars.
We obviously aren't going to do this ourselves.
Our role is to bring ideas to the surface, but see what political leaders can come up with.
Your point about having a threat, I think it's important.
And one disappointment for me was the way that Jason Kenney, the Premier of Alberta, was a good friend that I support.
But he's gone out of his way to repeatedly say that separatism is not an option.
We won't even talk about it.
And I think that takes away the threat right at the beginning.
And I think you do need that threat, even if you don't talk about it all the time.
I think you need it in the background.
So anyway, we're at the very early stages here, and COVID has scrambled everything.
But I believe we will get back more or less to normal eventually.
And these issues are going to come back because this is a perennial problem for Alberta of being exploited by Eastern Canada.
It's all actually very simple when you come right down to it.
The votes are in Eastern Canada.
The resource wealth is in Alberta.
To some extent, other Western provinces.
It's a very big temptation for politicians to cater to the votes and appropriate the resource wealth and can be a winning political strategy for long periods of time until sometimes the effects become so bad that it has to be suspended.
But it keeps coming back because it works.
So Donald Savois and his, you know, he's one of the top political scientists in Canada, perhaps considered the leading expert on Canadian political institutions.
He's from the Maritimes, not a Westerner, but he's got a powerful analysis in that book of how Canadian political institutions are systematically rigged to favor population majorities in Central Canada.
The book's called Moment of Truth, How to Think About Alberta's Future.
I like this line on the back.
Part brainstorm, part blueprint, and part rallying cry.
I think that's true.
You know, I'm glad you mentioned Jason Kenney, and I've known him for ages too.
We were part of the snack pack together who went out with President Manning.
I mean, Manning, he rose in response to the first wave of Western separatism.
I think some folks forget that the Separatist Party actually elected an MLA in Alberta in a by-election.
Preston Manning said, no, no, the West wants in.
It was his counterpoint to separatists.
Say, no, no, let's reform it.
We want to stay in.
Let's be the do-gooders.
Let's be so naively idealistic and our sheer good faith will win over the kleptocrats out east and will accomplish through love what these separatists can't do through ferocity.
I don't think that succeeded.
Stephen Harper, I think, ameliorated a lot of these problems just by being less hostile to the West and making it more Western friendly.
He was helped by a few other things, including, I don't know, strong oil prices.
He just didn't get in the way.
But here's the thing about Jason Kenney.
I think, and I mean, I like the guy too, although I think he's been heavy-handed during the lockdown.
I think he wants to run for prime minister.
I think he wants perhaps to be re-elected as Alberta Premier.
He's still young, very early 50s.
Finish up Alberta well.
He's at a disastrous year and a half.
And then run for federal office.
And so everything he's saying and doing in Alberta as regards the federal government, I think part of his brain is thinking, how will this sound in five years when I'm running to be prime minister?
So I can't say anything that would even have a whiff of separatism or even alienation or even so I think that he's not fully dedicated to the present task of representing Alberta or the West because he's got his eye on that main chance later when Aaron O'Toole fails.
Will he come in and take that job?
That's my hunch.
That's my hunch.
I have no basis for that other than speculation.
Well, you may be right.
You know, I don't have any information on Jason's mind, so I can't say, but it's certainly a plausible explanation.
But, you know, I've worked for politicians for a long time associated with them, and so I don't expect perfection.
I just look for some movement in the direction that I think is necessary.
And we can criticize what Jason has done, but he is, in fact, holding the referendum on equalization, which is a, or can be, a first step towards Alberta's self-assertion.
So I'm willing to, you know, take that in good faith and see what comes from that.
Now, I am a little concerned that up to this point, the government hasn't really made much of a case in the public mind for why it's holding this referendum.
They've allowed opponents to define it thus far.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard talking heads say this referendum is pointless because equalization is a matter of federal legislation, which is true, but that's only the beginning of the story.
It's based in the Constitution.
There's possibility for discussing the terms of it and so on.
But the government hasn't been very aggressive in utilizing this opportunity.
So we're going to have to see what happens.
It's an opportunity, and what will the government make of it?
I hope they make something.
Can't say for sure until we see it.
I'm not going to ask you to predict the future, but if you're going to ask you to tell our viewers, if you wouldn't mind answering this, which you think is the best future.
So not which you predict will be done.
Best Option Within Canada00:06:35
But if Alberta wanted to move away from the word no, no pipeline, no oil sands, no freedom, no, no, no.
And if it wanted to, I don't know, to borrow a phrase, have some self-determination, do you think staying in Canada and making the case like Preston Manning did, if that's option one?
Option two, trying to become the 51st state, maybe set off against Puerto Rico, add two more stars, one Republican, one Democrat to the flag.
Or option three, trying to be some sort of independent country.
Which of those three alternatives do you think would allow Albertans to live their best life, as the kids say?
Staying in Canada, trying to reform it, joining America as a 51st state, or trying some sort of independence Well, you asked what would be the best option for Alberta, not what I think will happen necessarily, but what would be the best?
Well, the best option, I think, pretty clearly would be remaining in Canada, which has many, many great assets and virtues and assuming our proper role in Canada and getting a government which is not constantly trying to block us.
Now, we thought that might be possible for a while.
Can that be done?
I guess as a step towards that, some of us are proposing these, you might call independent, independent, what's the right word, autonomism, I guess is the word we use.
We're proposing these autonomous alternatives that make Alberta more self-reliant but still within Confederation.
There are big, huge problems involved in trying to join the United States.
You know, I'm not sure that we'd be welcome as long as the Democrats are in power.
And the problems in the United States, I would say, at least as big as those in Canada.
And as being a sovereign state, well, yeah, it has a certain attraction, but we would be landlocked.
And so we would still have big transit problems to work out.
We're worried about our access to tidewater and so forth.
Well, that doesn't go away just with the Declaration of Sovereignty.
So the ideal solution would be a better version of Canada, which recognizes Alberta's ambitions and doesn't treat Alberta just as a golden goose.
Can we achieve that?
I don't know.
The record is depressing.
I have to say that many of the authors, sort of of my generation, people who are now in their 70s and spent many, many years working for the reform of Canada in various political movements, whether it was a Reform Party or the Canadian Alliance, the Conservative Party of Canada, or some of the provincial parties, other national parties.
We were all kind of rowing the same way and thought we had made progress and seeing it all undone in the last few years, it's been very, very depressing.
And that's the mood behind this book.
Ten years ago or even five years ago, we wouldn't have written the book this way.
But we've seen so much lost since 2015 with the blockade, obstruction of pipelines and attacks on our basic industries.
So that's the mood behind this book.
But for me, still reform of Canada would be the best outcome.
Others say, look, Tom, you're just naive.
It can't be done.
And they're turning in a more separatist direction.
And I respect that.
And maybe that could be the spur to some meaningful negotiations if Jay Hill can get some results with his Maverick Party and make it seem like a real force.
That might lead to some change too.
I mean, you're absolutely right when you said about Quebec that all their political gains, which are enormous, have been made with the threat of separatism in the background.
There's always cereal.
To improve things within Canada, the template of Quebec shows you need to have a credible threat to leave Canada.
I suppose it's like a bad marriage.
The threat to leave, the threat of a divorce, might focus the mind of the other party to improve the marriage itself.
I'm trying to use an analogy.
You know, Dr. Tom, I was just thinking, when I first met you at the University of Calgary, I was a teenager, and these same issues were being described.
I am 49 now, and I'm not sure what progress has been made on these files.
The book is called Moment of Truth, How to Think About Alberta's Future.
We'll have a link below this video that you can click to get a copy.
Great to see you again, and I look forward to meeting up perhaps next time I'm in Calgary.
Thanks for your time today.
Okay, Ezra, thanks for having me on.
Our pleasure.
There you have it, Dr. Tom Flanagan, who was one of the editors of the book, Moment of Truth.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Well, that's our show for today.
What do you think?
Do you think Alberta will be able to resist the squawking from the fancy people, the official people, the public health deep state?
Or do you think they'll flip-flop again?
They used to be the best province, then they became the worst.
Now, except for their persistent hounding of some dissidents like the Pavlovskys, they're the best province again.
Do you think they'll be able to resist the pressure from the Globe and Mail and the CBC and all these TV doctors?
I wonder.
I think it'll be a fascinating test.
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, had a lot of resistance in the beginning, but he held firm and he's reaped not only the public policy success, a healthy state with a booming economy, but the political success and people respect him.
It'll be very interesting to see if the Alberta government can resist the peer pressure.
That's our show for today until tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.