Sheila Gunn-Reid and historian Michael Wagner examine Alberta’s separatist surge, sparked by Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 "screw the West" campaign and the National Energy Program, which slashed oil prices and imposed federal taxes, pushing support from single digits to 20%+. Wagner traces the movement’s roots through Mulroney’s CF-18 betrayal and Reform Party’s failed Triple E Senate push, contrasting Alberta’s dismissed demands with Quebec’s concessions. Premier Danielle Smith’s citizen referendum proposal signals a shift, but Wagner warns decades of ignored grievances—from Harper’s stalled reforms to Trudeau’s election tactics—leave separatism as the only remaining option for Westerners seeking equal representation. [Automatically generated summary]
The rest of the country is discovering the Western separatist movement.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Did you see this clip of Ontario Premier Doug Ford this week?
Look at this.
I forget about political stripes, by the way.
We have a prime minister down there, and he's going to be sitting down, and he's going to give it everything he can.
This is a time to unite the country.
Not people saying, oh, I'm leaving the country or I'm doing this.
I'm doing that.
You know, united we stand, divided, we fall.
He is telling Alberta to calm down, shut up, and just tolerate the inequities of Confederation.
He doesn't understand that he is exactly the problem.
Albertans are done having Ontario politicians tell us to shut up and take it.
That's exactly why there's a Western separatist movement, and that's why there's been a Western separatist movement largely from the beginning of Alberta, but at least for the last several decades.
Joining me today is somebody I would describe as an expert in the history of Western separatism.
What caused it, who caused it, and why it comes and goes, and why this time might be different.
So joining me now is somebody you may know, but I might be introducing him to some of you for the first time, Michael Wagner.
So joining me now is Michael Wagner.
He might be a familiar face to some of you who watched our documentary, Ungovernable.
He's one of the experts we called in for our documentary on the separatist sentiment, whatever that means, here in Alberta.
And Michael, I think, is an expert historian on this movement because a lot of the country is just discovering Western separatism, but it's not new.
It's been around for, well, I think forever, as far as the province goes.
Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show and agreeing to this interview.
Tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into the, I guess for a lot of the country, the newly discovered concept of Western separatism.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Sheila.
Well, as it pertains to our particular topic, what's relevant for me is that I first got involved in politics in the early 1980s when I was a teenager.
There was something about what Pierre Trudeau was doing to Alberta, especially with the National Energy Program, that for the first time I joined a political organization and a political party that was supporting Alberta independence.
And that's what triggered me, something that Trudeau did triggered me and I got involved for the first time.
Now, I didn't stay consistent with it throughout my whole adult life, but I maintained an interest in it.
And when I was researching some other topics during the 1990s and into the 2000s, I saw that there was a lot of material in the Alberta separatist movement.
And I thought that there should be a history of it.
And it should be written by someone who understood it from the inside to give the proper perspective.
So eventually, in 2009, I came out with my first book on Alberta separatism, Alberta Separatism and then and I, which is a history of the movement from the perspective of someone from the inside in the sense that it showed what the movement was about, why people were motivated to do it.
And so, yeah, I'm a writer.
I've got a PhD in political science from the University of Alberta.
Actually, my expertise at university was more education policy in Alberta, but I was always interested in Alberta politics.
And because I had been interested or involved in early separatist movements, I was really interested in continuing to research that and hopefully bring out the real reasons as to why people were involved because there was a lot of criticism of it and a lot of misinformation about it and the people involved.
And so I wanted to have a sympathetic perspective when I wrote the history of it so someone could read that book and understand why people would be involved in it, even if they didn't stay consistent the whole time.
So that's kind of in a nutshell, like why this is pertinent for me as an individual.
I think your experience of not staying consistent the whole time is actually the story of the separatist movement in Alberta.
It ebbs and flows.
People get real revved up, particularly around a Trudeau doing stupid things to Alberta.
And then it sort of recedes when they get some of what they want.
And we'll get into that history a little bit.
But now that I have you, what do you, you know, like you talk about the misinformation around the separatist movement, that they're a bunch of, you know, bucktooth fringe radical yokels, but really that's not the case.
Who makes up the separatist movement, you know, from your observation?
Well, like, it's average Albertans for the most part.
Like it's always been more of a populist movement than an elite movement.
You know, I see stuff in the media saying that this is an astroturf movement.
It's being controlled by some wealthy people in the UCP or something.
That's so false.
Like when you go to the meetings, it's average people, like especially in rural areas, there's farmers and tradesmen and laborers and stuff.
Very, very rarely will you see someone outside of that kind of demographic.
So it's always been a populist movement from the ground up.
Although I would say in the early 80s, there was a lot of oil men involved.
You know, the oil industry was particularly under attack in the 1970s and early 1980s.
And some of those men were willing to go out on a limb, you know, to support it publicly.
And I think they got hurt by it in their careers or in their company.
So nowadays, when the federal government attacks the oil industry, the oil men seem to keep quiet for the most part.
They don't speak out publicly like they used to in the early 80s.
And I think that might be because of the experience of the early 1980s.
And so it's just common Alberta folk that I've seen involved in those meetings.
Like when I go to the meetings for speaking and stuff like that, it's not like there's major leaders, you know, it's just regular people.
Yeah, it feels really grassroots.
I mean, there's really no political organization behind it at this point.
It's just people who have just had enough of the way they're treated within Confederation.
I want to ask you about Premier Daniel Smith's address to the province, because on the outside, looking in, I know she's the premier of the province, and she's, you know, of course, if you're the premier of the province, you are by nature a federalist.
But she did take that approach where she said, these people are not fringe radicals on either side of the debate.
They're your friends.
They're your neighbors.
They've had enough and they have a different viewpoint of how to move forward.
I thought that was something that we haven't quite heard from political leadership in this country.
We saw how Justin Trudeau demonized people who didn't think like him.
And we see right now how former Premier Jason Kenney is running around social media, demonizing the separatist movement.
I think honestly, underestimating Albertan's anger once again, I think he did that once.
But I just wanted to get your comments on Premier Smith's address to the province about allowing Albertans to have a fair shot at a referendum.
Yeah, well, that's a very significant step forward from a historical perspective.
We've never had something like this in terms of the separatist movement.
You know, we've never been this close to a referendum.
And having a premier who's willing to allow citizen initiative to create the referendum, we've never had that before.
And there is right now momentum for that citizen initiative referendum.
So it's quite likely that that will, you know, happen in the next few months or years or so.
And so I think that's very significant for her to say that.
And also for her, as you mentioned, to say that these are just regular people.
Let's not demonize each other.
And I say that for you know people on the other side as well.
Like there's no reason to demonize.
We can rationally talk about these things because they are rational issues about how do we deal with the federal government when we're under attack.
And I did very much like the part of her speech where she listed the various attacks that Alberta has suffered over the last 10 years.
Like she did a very good job of just summarizing why people are angry.
So much of her address I was very favorable towards.
Of course, I'm for independence and she's for federalism or remaining within Canada.
So that's where we would differ.
But much of her address was very positive, I think, and I think it's very helpful for moving us forward in this political situation to the kind of goals that we need to achieve.
Yeah, it doesn't have to melt our entire society down to have these conversations.
And I think that is one of the things that sets us apart as Albertans is that we can engage in this civil discourse with our friends and neighbors without deciding that they are both evil and wrong, as we've seen from the federal government when people say things that they might disagree with.
You know, we've had our prime minister wondering if there should be space in society for people who disagree with him.
Like, what are you going to do to us?
Launch us into the surface of the moon?
Like, what do you live here?
We're from here.
Now, I want to talk to you, Michael, about the history of separatism.
I am in my mid-40s and I cannot, and maybe I am in a bubble.
I'm a rural Albertan farmer, strong ties to the oil patch.
So maybe I'm not the per I am a stereotype.
I get it.
I get it.
But as long as I can remember, separatism has been just in the background and then in the forefront, but all always around.
When did this start?
Well, really, it started under Pierre Trudeau.
Like when we go back to the history of Alberta, there's always been discontent on the prairies with the federal government, like right from the very beginning, like for more than 100 years.
So during the early 20th century, there were lots of reform movements, like farmers' movements.
And during the 20s, the Federal Progressive Party of Canada was the dominant party on the prairies, you know, because people here turned to alternative parties.
They turned away from mainstream parties.
These were ways of dealing with their concerns with Central Canada.
And, you know, that went on throughout much of the 20th century.
But there was no movement for independence until Pierre Trudeau came into power.
So I call him the father of the Alberta separatist movement because he created it through his policies.
Like first with the Official Languages Act, which made French more prominent here than ever before.
Now, that was kind of minor, but that was kind of the trigger for the first few people to create organizations.
But the big change happened in 1973.
There was a war in the Middle East, and the price of oil skyrocketed.
It went from about $3 a barrel to about $12 a barrel in just a few weeks.
So this was the beginning of the energy crisis.
So Pierre Trudeau, because Alberta was going to be raking in so much money from its oil finally, Pierre Trudeau put an export tax on oil so that Alberta's oil exported to the United States, much of that revenue would go to the federal government.
Now, that was unprecedented in Canadian history.
And our Premier, Peter Loughed, called it the biggest rip-off in Confederation history because the federal government was taking money from Alberta's.
This was our resource.
We should be getting the money.
But Trudeau also put a lower price on oil in Canada than the world price.
So whether Alberta sold its oil to the United States or whether we sold the oil within Canada, we were getting much less than what we should have.
So throughout the 1970s, our Premier, Peter LaHed, was fighting with Trudeau over oil pricing.
Alberta was getting pretty good revenue, but a lot of that revenue was going to the federal government that shouldn't have.
And then there was a federal election in 1980 where Pierre Trudeau was coming back.
And during that election campaign, and this is very significant, the Liberals explicitly campaigned against Alberta during that campaign.
It was the most regionally divisive political campaign in Canadian history.
I think it's a very significant precedent, where the famous line from Keith Davey, the Liberal campaign activist, was, screw the West, we'll take the rest.
And that's what they did.
And so, right after they were re-elected with that divisive election, they brought in the National Energy Program.
And that was the biggest trigger of all for the organization of the separatist movement in Alberta.
Like that's when it went big for the really for the root, really big for the first time.
And we ended up with, you know, in 1982, there was a by-election where the Western Canada Concept Party elected one of their members to the Alberta legislature.
He was the first and only separatist ever elected in Western Canada because of that uproar of the national energy program and because of Pierre Trudeau.
Now, after Pierre Trudeau ended up leaving, of course, in 1984 and eventually he's replaced by Brian Mulrooney, and the movement started to die out because we thought, well, all of Alberta's members of parliament were with the Progressive Conservative Party, and Brian Mulroney was a Progressive Conservative Prime Minister, so everything is going to be fine for the West now.
He's going to get rid of the National Energy Program and so on.
But there was a very significant event in 1986.
Canada had bought the CF-18 fighter jets, and those needed to be maintained by particular facilities.
And there were only two cities in Canada with those facilities, Winnipeg and Montreal.
So the government held a competition to see which city would best maintain the CF-18 fighter jets.
So according to the government's criteria, Winnipeg won the contract.
So Mulroney awarded it to Montreal, obviously for political considerations.
So that created a very big uproar in the West, and that led to the creation of the Reform Party of Canada because people were so fed up.
I mean, it was one thing for Trudeau to be beating up on us, but we felt betrayed because we had voted for this guy, Mulroney, and he backstabbed us.
So it led to a very high intensity of discontent with the federal government to the point where the Reform Party was created.
And in 1993, they'd win most of the seats in Alberta and many seats in Western Canada.
And the idea of the Reform Party was the West wants in.
And I really think that is the genuine feeling of most Albertans, even those who right now are supporting independence.
The West has always wanted a voice in the national government.
That's been our complaint right from the very beginning.
They don't listen to us.
The Senate is set up so that we don't have a voice in the national institutions.
And so that's why the Reform Party and others promoted the Triple E Senate, a Senate that would be elected by the people with an equal number of senators from each province and would have effective powers.
Like if we had a Senate like that for Canada, Western voices would be heard in the national government.
Quebec's Seriousness Matters00:07:55
We wouldn't be shut out and we wouldn't feel a need to leave.
But Eastern Canada was not interested in reforming the Senate.
And that was one of the, you know, one of the lessons we learned from the Reform Party is that they don't want the West in.
The people in the East don't want the West in and they don't want to reform our institutions.
But I do think that in our heart of hearts, most Westerners would be happy with the West wants in with a solution like that rather than becoming independent.
But that's not an option to us anymore.
Like we tried that.
You know, the Reform Party shows that Westerners will work very, very hard to make Canada work.
But if we don't get cooperation from people in the East, we can't make Canada work for our, you know, it doesn't benefit us at all.
Like we don't get our voice heard.
So it's kind of like, it's kind of like the separatist movement is the final step.
It's the only other option we have.
We don't have anything else.
We can accept the status quo of the Liberal government beating up on us, or we can go independent.
Like there's no middle ground, although that's what Danielle Smith is trying to reach that middle ground.
Well, good luck to her.
But there's decades of history to show that that's not going to work.
So one of the things about Pierre Trudeau is he's the one who made separatism credible in Alberta.
Before 1980, when surveys were done about support for separatism, the survey results were always single digits, like 4%, 5%, 6% or something like that.
But since 1980, all of the polls that I'm aware of show at least double-digit support.
It might be as low as 15, 16% in the early days, but it's very common, you know, throughout the 90s and more recently to get at least 20% support, even 25 or more percent support for separatism.
So it was Trudeau's government that gave separatism credibility in Alberta, a credibility it never had before.
So that now people talk about it, it's not some kind of wacko idea like going to the moon or something.
It's something that many Albertans are familiar with.
And before 1980, it was not taken seriously at all, even though there were organizations that were going.
It was Trudeau himself with his national energy program that gave credibility to the independence movement and made it a permanent feature of Alberta's political culture.
So I think I might have drifted away from your question here, but I just wanted to give a bit of that history there and explain that we've tried so hard.
The West has tried so hard with Senate reform and political reform and stuff over several decades.
It's not a thing that happened yesterday.
And so this is why people who say we're upset because we lost one election, that is so trivializing what we're really concerned about.
We've had decades and decades of things that have been done to us that's built up frustration.
We have frustration that's built up over several decades.
And it's kind of like that election was the last straw.
You know what I mean?
They don't want us in.
They don't want us.
They don't want a conservative government that would better represent our interests.
And so it's kind of decades of frustration that have been set off by that election loss.
So it's not just the election in itself that has created this current support for independence in Alberta.
Well, and, you know, I remember in the 90s, there was sort of this percolating separatist sentiment.
And then Stephen Harper gets elected.
That whole West wants in, and then we're in, and we get 10 years of strong, stable government.
But now we've ended up right back where we started.
And I think, you know, that really is, for a lot of people who are a little bit longer in the tooth, like me, this has been a catalyst.
Like, look, we tried it your way.
We're fighting in the courts.
We're doing everything we can.
We literally cannot vote any more conservative out here.
We can't give you any more MPs.
There's nothing we can do.
Like, we've got conservative MPs winning with 86% of the vote.
And that's still, it doesn't mean anything at the end of the day in the national government.
We still get stuck with the election being called before the ballots are even, not even done being counting, but before the polling stations are closed in the West.
Absolutely.
Like we, it's been that way for such a long time.
So many federal elections, we've known the results before, you know, our voting stations are closed because the election results are essentially we know what the results are as soon as the Ontario finishes voting.
All it takes is Eastern Canada.
I mean, those are the votes that count the most, Quebec and Ontario.
And so once they finish voting, they tell us what kind of government we're going to end up with.
And so many Westerners have felt frustrated by that.
It shows us that we're not really having a voice in the national government because the government's already elected before they count our votes.
So we don't really count in that sense.
You know what I mean?
And it's part of the frustration that many Westerners have felt for decades that there's no way that we can get our voice heard in the national government.
Now, I want to ask you about the, I don't know what to call it, shutuppery directed at Alberta every time we even muse about separation because Quebec has a federal party dedicated to it.
Everybody takes them seriously.
They're included in the national leaders' debates.
They have a provincial party dedicated to it.
Everybody takes them seriously.
Apparently, they have a veto over what Alberta can and can't do with regard to our oil.
They have an entire culture that is infused with separatism.
They have separatist artists and separatist TV shows.
And Every time we even think about like, hey, maybe we might be okay going it alone, we're just told that it is not doable and that we're crazy people.
And I think it that is one of the glaring inequities of this country.
And it's one of the reasons we want to leave.
It's because we can't even be treated the same way as the other provinces, particularly the other one that, well, at least threatens to go from time to time.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, Quebec's separatism has been taken very seriously, you know, since at least the 1960s, if not before.
And even, you know, Pierre Trudeau, one of his main reasons for getting involved in politics was to help to keep Quebec within Canada by making changes within Canada.
So they're always taken seriously, as you say, and we're not.
We're just considered to be a bunch of wacko radicals.
And all it does is contribute to the frustration that we feel.
Like maybe if they took us seriously and addressed our concerns, maybe we wouldn't feel this way.
You know, it's not like we would necessarily get everything we want within Canada, but how about just like treating us like we're equal citizens?
You know what I mean?
Like certainly Quebecers are treated very well.
And, you know, even, you know, Quebec had two independence referendums and they both failed.
And people say, well, what happens if it fails?
Well, they didn't, you know, it didn't set Quebec back.
When they lost those referendums, they did not lose power in the central government.
It almost made it seem like the federal government would bend over backwards, you know, to cater to them even more than they were before.
So they're taken seriously, even when they lose, even when their referendums are lost, they're taken very seriously.
And the government, the federal government bends over backwards to try and make them feel at home within Canada.
And they won't even take us seriously.
You know, even when we just talk about it or bring up the issues, like I said, even with the Reform Party, that was our MPs had those issues and we're bringing them to Ottawa.
They still wouldn't take them seriously.
And they didn't even take the Reform Party seriously.
You know what I mean?
They didn't get the proper credit that they deserve for the representation of Western interests in Ottawa.
So it doesn't matter what we do.
Like even if we send our best people as members of parliament, we still can't get taken seriously in Ottawa.
Even Stephen Harper, let me just throw this in.
He tried to reform the Senate.
Like as Prime Minister, he would introduce bills into the House of Commons and the Senate to try and bring Senate reform because he did actually believe in that.
But even as Prime Minister, he couldn't get those bills through.
And you think if the Prime Minister of Canada cannot get bills through that will help the West, like who could?
It's just, that's kind of like the end of the road.
That's our top guy.
He can't do it.
Nobody else can do it.
We're just left with one final option, and that is for us to pursue independence.
That's what I believe.
Amazon's Role in Separatism00:04:14
Michael, if people want to learn more about the history of Western separatism, tell people how they can get your book.
I have your book, but I know it's on Amazon, and I think it is required reading for, I think, Albertans who are considering our future going forward, our friends in Saskatchewan who actually seem to be a little bit more separatist than us, but more quiet about it, and the rest of the country so that they can understand why we're so mad and why so many of us just aren't going to take it anymore.
Yeah, so my book that advocates for Alberta independence is called No Other Option, Self-Determination for Alberta, and that's available on Amazon.ca.
So if they search No Other Option or My Name, that should come up.
There's another book previously that I mentioned that came up that I did called Alberta Separatism Then Now, which is actually history.
It's not available on Amazon, but it's available from a small homeschooling business in Alberta called Merchant Ship.
So if you go to merchantship.ca, you'll be able to get Alberta Separatism Then and Now.
And actually, they have my other books there as well.
But if someone just wants no other option, that's available from Amazon.
And so that's easy for them to get there.
Michael, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show and fitting me into your very busy schedule as an expert in Alberta separatism.
You're suddenly very high in demand, and I know we're going to talk again very soon.
Great.
Thanks very much.
It's so good to be on your show.
I always turn over the last portion of the show to you because without you, there's no Rebel News.
If you want to send me an email on the show today, provide to me your viewer feedback.
My email is sheila at rebelnews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you're emailing me.
But I frequently also go looking for viewer comments on the clips that we put up of the show over on YouTube or on Rumble.
So if you are watching us over there or sharing the free version of those clips with your friends, encourage them to leave comments because that helps us get higher in the algorithms.
It puts us in front of more eyeballs.
All right.
So we've got a couple of gun show letters today from the email bag.
Jeff writes to me and says, Doug Ford is a true red liberal and will continually suck up to Carney.
Yeah, we saw that.
If you watched the intro to the show, I showed Doug Ford doing the thing, doing the thing we're all mad about.
An Ontario-based progressive politician telling Western conservatives to shut up and quit being so selfish.
Anyway, one thing that Ford did that really stands out is that he is red, is his strong mayor's legislation.
Yeah, he gave more powers to the cities.
And we know that a lot of the climate alarmism comes out of the cities.
You know, Ottawa has a huge budget for this.
And Ottawa, I mean the city, not Ottawa, the place where the federal government is.
And Calgary has an enormous, like billions of dollars in this stuff.
And so when you give extra powers over to them to just waste money on madness, where's the check on power there?
That really says Doug wants to get rid of our Democratic right to vote in our representatives.
It wouldn't surprise me that the fix was in on our last federal election.
I'm not sure.
You know, I don't know if the fix was in, but I think it was gerrymandered from the beginning, you know, proroguing parliament long enough for the liberals to replace Mark Carney.
Mark Carney then turning his ire to the Americans because he can't campaign on the liberal record, which was his record, and then being anti-Trump and then showing up in the White House to thank Trump for handing him the election and to commend Trump on his leadership when during the campaign, Carney's like, our relationship with the Americans is over as we know it, and maybe we should become Europeans.
Supporting The CTF00:00:58
So like, give me a break.
Something ain't quite right.
And I think a lot of people were had.
But they also should have known better.
Anyways, let's keep going.
I fully support the CTF and what they try to achieve.
So get involved, everyone.
The CTF, that's a Canadian Taxpayers Federation, needs all of us to help them.
Yeah, they are a big reason why we don't have a consumer carbon tax right now is their advocacy on behalf of Canadians and telling Canadians what the carbon tax was actually doing to them, what it meant on your grocery bill, what it meant every time you filled up your car while the liberals were out there saying, oh, no, no, you're going to take back more money than you give us as if as if the government's ever done that.
Well, everybody, that's the show for today.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.