Ezra Levant argues Alberta’s independence movement—now backed by urban and business leaders like Calgary’s elite—is no longer just rural, with 33% to 40% support surpassing combined NDP/Liberal backing. Frustrated by dismissive media (e.g., Andrew Coyne’s "shut up, comma" Globe and Mail column) and Mark Carney’s alleged mockery of Premier Danielle Smith, Levant frames secession as a conservative push to reclaim self-determination from Ottawa, citing precedents like Yugoslavia’s breakup or Czechoslovakia’s partition. A referendum within a year could draw global attention, with Trump’s potential endorsement or economic incentives (like trade deals) either fueling or complicating the effort, though Albertans prefer independence over U.S. annexation. Federal Conservatives and corporate leaders may privately support it but fear public backlash, mirroring past separatist struggles where establishment opposition failed to stop momentum. [Automatically generated summary]
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Tonight, a visit to the Western Standard offices in Calgary to talk about Alberta independence.
It's May 14th, and this is the Estra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
Well, we're very interested in Alberta.
I was born and raised in Alberta, although, you know, I've been in Toronto for more than a decade.
I can no longer call myself an Albertan in exile, although my heart feels pretty Albertan.
But in Alberta, I think the carriers of the torch, the keepers of the flame of what it means to be Albertan and what Alberta-ness is, if you're Alberta-ish, I'm making up words, are our friends at Western Standard.
And I have a little bit of history with that name because 15, 20 years ago, there was the Western Standard Print magazine.
Derek Fildebrandt and his team have revived that old name and have built something big.
I think most of our viewers know you, Derek.
But give us one minute on the Western Standard New Media Corporation.
Just give us a lay of the land.
Well, the remnants of Western Standard Old Media Corporation, they're actually hanging on the wall.
We've got the magazine covers right behind us down the hall there.
But in 2019, we brought the Western Standard back as an online publication really to fill the vacuum in independent media in the West, particularly Alberta and Saskatchewan.
But we've branched out in large measure of BC now.
And we've got our headquarters here in downtown Calgary with full-time offices in Edmonton, Regina, Vancouver, and we've got dozens of freelancers hither and yon between Victoria and Ottawa.
Oh, all the way out in Ottawa.
And we've got a few Eastern bastards on the payroll.
Well, you've got to keep an eye on Ottawa because that's where, unfortunately, a lot of the decisions in Canada are made, even though our Constitution would grant a lot of powers to the provinces through the power of the purse as in just buying their way in or bullying their way in.
Ottawa runs a lot of things that the framers of our Constitution never intended.
Well, you know, that's one reason we're trying to, we're going to get a reporter back on Parliament Hill, I think, in fairly short order.
But, you know, we today's Western Standard, the Western Standard that you ran in your day and the Alberta Report that predated that really had the mission of carrying the torch of the Western cause.
Our style guide has West capitalized for good reason because we see it as a very clear political and social and economic identity.
And it's, you know, it's taken many forms over the years.
And it's evolved.
You've been able to see it evolve through the pages of the Alberta Report, the old Western Standard and the new Western Standard.
And I think where we're coming to today is a culmination of all of that.
You know, I engaged in some self-harm on the way over.
I read a column in the Globe and Mail by Andrew Coyne basically saying, basically saying, hey, Albertans, you have no right to complain.
We shouldn't indulge you.
You know, I could sum it up with, shut up, comma, he explained.
And I knew this would happen.
When Quebec says, we're hard done by our rights aren't being respected.
We're not the masters of our own house.
The rest of the country, or at least as represented in Ottawa, bends over backwards.
Hey, you want three seats out of nine on the Supreme Court, even though that's disproportionate?
You got it.
You want bilingualism across the whole country?
You got it.
Even though they don't have it at home.
Yeah.
And I mean, forget about it, talking about just plain old cash.
I think we're about to see the most astonishing demonization of Alberta ever, of any province ever.
And I even saw it with Mark Carney in one of his campaign stops.
He sort of ridiculed Danielle, Danielle Smith, the Premier, in a way he would never do with any other premier of any stripe.
I think there's a casual, easy default hate the West.
It's the dog you can kick.
It's the group you can mock in Canada and not worry about it.
I feel like a storm is coming.
Yeah, I mean, going to the globe column you're talking about from COIN, it's esplaning.
You know, they're explaining to the West how the West should feel.
Although the main audience is actually the East, you know, most global breeders are going to be in the East explaining, it's meant to be telling the West how it is, but it's really meant to be consumed by Easterners.
And it's obviously patronizing.
You know, what was astonishing to me there was also saying, first, you have no really big, maybe you've got some little gripes, and we could talk about that.
You know, I'm sure one election could fix it all.
But more astonishing was you don't actually have a right to leave.
In fact, why does anyone have a right to break up a country?
To which I thought, well, people in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire might beg to differ.
I mean, we have a pretty universally recognized, at least on paper, right in the world to self-determination of a geographically concentrated people.
That's how we get nation states out of the old empires and things like that.
And many Albertans now want to exercise that right.
Just as I do believe Quebecers have that right.
I guess the question is, and maybe fairly in both cases, is this a negotiating tactic or is this for real?
And many in Quebec genuinely are on the independent side.
Others use it as so-called profitable.
Like a good cop, bad cop.
Yeah, yeah, use it as leverage.
Some in Alberta want to use it as leverage.
I think that's a failing strategy.
If we're going to do, if we're going to play the independence game, we play it to win because we want to be an independent country.
You know, to separate sounds like something would move, like you would sort of cut out a chunk of geography and move it.
Everything would remain the same, the buildings, the roads, the people.
It would just be the final deciders on certain constitutional matters.
Instead of living in Ottawa and coming from Quebec and Ontario, they would live in Alberta.
I mean, all manners of provincial jurisdiction would remain within Alberta, of course.
And what else is there?
There's foreign affairs, there's coins and stamps and passports.
The change on the ground, you would wake up the next morning in Alberta, it would still look the same.
The courts would be there.
Maybe the laws would be slightly amended.
They would only take Ontario rulings as persuasive, not binding, let's say.
Like, I just think everyone would get up the next day if there was a separate.
And other than the apoplexy in the media political class, actually, not a ton would change in an everyday way, other than suddenly the province would find itself a lot richer and perhaps in control of certain out-of-control policies.
I don't think it would be as terrifying as the boogeyman scare tactics suggest.
Yeah, I think, you know, trying to find, there's no exact apples to apples comparison, but it would be perhaps similar to the partition of Czechoslovakia into Chechia and Slovakia, which was actually fairly amicable.
Oh, yeah.
And they're still where they were.
You know, they can still go back and forth.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, but the EU, actually, perhaps there's even less border than there was.
Perhaps it's semi-analogous without red coats and blue coats firing at each other to what happened with the American Revolution, where it was an inherently conservative revolution in the sense that they weren't trying to build some brave new utopia.
They were trying to reassert ancient rights that they had seen as taken away from them.
So when the Americans achieved independence from the British crown, they largely, you know, they designed a new form of government, but largely kept most of their social and legal institutions intact because it was an inherently conservative revolution.
It wasn't a liberal revolution like 1848.
It wasn't a socialist revolution like 1917.
It was about trying to reassert something that they believed they had always had.
And I think that's, you know, I think that's at the heart of the independence movement in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
I have started to wrestle with the question of are we in a technically revolutionary period?
I mean, the term revolution is hard to pin down.
Have you ever listened to the Revolutions podcast?
No.
It's a really good one.
Yeah, it's a very good one.
And, you know, what we consider to be a revolution is difficult to pin down.
I think if we do achieve independence, then retroactively we get to call this a revolutionary period.
If we don't, then perhaps not.
But in Alberta and Saskatchewan, there is something very different happening right now.
And it's, you know, no one's talking about a radically new form of government.
It's just largely, in large measure, keeping our form of government, keeping most of our institutions, but decentralizing them from a distant imperial government in Ottawa and repatriating them, to borrow a term from the first Trudeau, repatriating the Constitution to a local level.
Yeah.
You know, I'm not as familiar with American constitutional texts as I am with our own.
But in the Declaration of Independence, I think they talk about a distant and partisan king or something, someone far away across the ocean ruling things in the colonies.
And that in itself was a quarrel.
I mean, well, Ottawa is not much further from Calgary than Boston was from London.
Oh, isn't that?
So we should keep that in mind.
Hey, I want to talk to you about something that I'm still, like a lot of Canadians, I think, turning over in my mind.
Six months ago, I thought we were going to have a majority government with Pierre Polyev.
And some of the things he proposed, I think, would have lowered the temperature in Alberta the same way Stephen Harper's victory did over a decade ago.
That didn't happen.
And I think it's pretty universally acknowledged it didn't happen because of the United States and in particular Donald Trump.
You could say it was over the tariffs or the 51st state narrative, but I really think that he caused a shift that led to Mark Hearney being prime minister.
And I don't understand why he did that.
I don't even know if he understands why.
I don't know if he even meant to do it.
He seems to be taking credit for it.
Here's my point.
If there's an independence referendum next year, and I think there will be, I think Donald Trump could kill it in a word if he said, oh, good, we're going to devour you.
Because I think Albertans would want to be the masters of their own house, to borrow the Quebec language.
Sovereignty Association might be an outcome, to borrow another Quebec term.
But I think with a flick of his tail, mighty President Trump, the same way he effectively chose our prime minister, could, I think, sink the independence movement.
I don't think he could make it, because if he endorsed it, people would oppose it.
Almost anything he does, I think, could sink it.
Am I too worried about that?
Yes and no.
Yeah, you know, I mean, he's tried to take credit for putting Carney in after.
I get the impression that's more ex post facto, where he's just that happened.
And, you know, it's Trump smack talking as Trump does.
I mean, look, if Trump said, yeah, we want Alberta as our 51st state, I think that would harm the cause of any constitutional change significantly.
Independence always pulls significantly higher than joining the United States.
But there are other options that could be realistically considered.
One is economic union and kind of incentives that might come with that.
If Trump, I don't think Albertans want to be a part of the United States at this time.
It's just not a mainstream opinion.
Much as the legacy media and Eastern media claim this is a fringe movement, it's at the lowest in polls at 33%.
Some polls have it in the low 40s.
That's significantly higher than the NDP and liberals get in Alberta combined.
So if that's a fringe movement, then being a leftist is a fringe movement in Alberta.
It's a large minority movement that I think has the potential to win.
It's not standing to win yet.
But if Trump were to say, well, if Albertans decide they want to be their own country, I'm willing to offer economic union with current, if you wanted to kind of maybe make that happen, offer currency exchange.
When West Germany absorbed East Germany, they did a one-for-one Deutschmark to whatever East German Commemark was called.
And that was very expensive because they were absorbing a much larger entity relative to themselves.
That was like one to four in currency.
The Canadian dollar, as bad as it is, isn't as bad.
You'd have a lot of Torontonians sneaking in and saying, I'm an Albertan.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think if he was being subtle, and one thing Trump is not known for is being subtle.
But if he wanted to see something like this, he would put some reasonable measures towards economic union, not political union, but economic union in the window.
I mean, our main commodity, oil and gas, are already sold in American dollars.
Our economy runs north-south, not east-west.
So that kind of thing could make sense.
If Trump wanted to hasten something like that, he could make some moderate measures like that that could incentivize it.
If he wants to kill it, he could either say he's against it or he could say he's for it.
Both of those, any intervention from him that is that plain, which tends to be his style, I think would hurt him.
Yeah, I think you're right.
You know, I would say, just in terms of Trump involvement, he does present a unique opportunity for this to succeed after the fact.
Pressure Points00:08:56
You know, ideally, this goes through a Clarity Act process that is legal, constitutional.
The first two parts of the Clarity Act are that it has to be a clear question and a clear majority.
And I'm in agreement on that.
After that, it gets murkier.
You have a conflict between the Clarity Act and then the universal right to self-determination of a geographically concentrated people.
And, you know, so we would need to negotiate with Ottawa and the other nine provinces and have a virtual unanimity of them.
And in the meantime, they can put 100 poison pills in it, making it impossible to leave.
As Coyne was saying in his Globe column just this morning, meaning Alberta will never get to leave because no one will ever agree to let them go.
What matters then is not some Kumbaya agreement that we'll never get with Ottawa and the other provinces.
What matters is international recognition.
And if we obtain recognition from the United States, well, that is independence on that day.
Yeah.
You know, there's about 30 odd, I forget the exact number of Conservative MPs from Alberta every time.
And Saskatchewan goes largely conservative too.
If Alberta were to leave to become independent or some other arrangement, it's quite sure that the Conservative Party of Canada would never win again in terms of, like if you took away 30 seats from them and if Saskatchewan left too, the Conservative Party of Canada is expressly a federalist party.
So I think it's going to be very interesting in the next 18 months to see what the federal conservatives, including the Alberta members of the federal conservatives, say about all this.
Because some of them will be sympathetic in their hearts.
But if the federal party gets tagged as being separatist or separatist-friendly, that could harm the federal conservatives in eastern central Atlantic Canada.
Well, first, I actually don't think it would mean that the Conservatives never win a post-Alberta or post-Alberta at Saskatchewan independence federal election again.
The political landscape simply reorients itself.
It'll orient to be like the old progressive Conservative Party, pre-reform party, that is more Eastern-based.
It would be further left.
Doug Ford.
I was just going to say.
I mean, it would be just more of a Doug Ford-style federal conservative party that I, you know, like, look in Eastern Canada, the Atlantic Canada.
You know, there's so-called conservative parties that went out there.
They're scarcely conservative in most cases, a few exceptions.
So I do think the landscape just adopts and shifts itself.
I mean, if Quebec left, that doesn't mean the Liberals would never form government again.
The Liberals would just have to admit to it.
But to your point about the Conservatives here, yeah, a lot of them are going to be torn.
Their careers tell them, shut up at least.
Just avoid the topic.
Because in a lot of their hearts, a lot of these guys are Alberta Patriots and Saskatchewan Patriots.
It's almost like the Trucker Convoy in that it was in their hearts, but the former leader, Aaron O'Toole, said, you can't express that.
You can't meet with them.
Remember, and the party was so adamant, they defenestrated O'Toole.
It was quite something.
I think there's going to be some of that same tension here.
You're going to have, especially on the rural side, there's going to be rural parts of Alberta where separatism is 60%.
I think this is different.
That was differences of opinion on a policy and social issue.
This is a fundamentally constitutional national identity issue.
The Conservative Party of Canada, by definition, has to be a pan-Canadian federalist party.
By definition, the Alberta UCP is different.
It is an Alberta party.
Smith is trying to walk a fine line, allowing both it to be a home for conservative federalists.
and the independence movement, which is difficult.
Federally, I don't see the same room.
I think conservative MPs who want to speak their mind, stay true to themselves on this, who, and many of them are genuine Federalists.
It's not a problem for that.
But the Alberta MPs federally, they have to sit outside the Conservative Party.
And that is unfortunate, but you can't leave, you can't form a new country without forming new parties.
I think that there's going to be that stress within the federal conservatives, but also, like I'm just looking out the window of your boardroom here, and I see the towers of downtown Calgary.
There are many corporations that are national in scope.
Calgary is a large, interconnected city.
It's connected with the world financially, et cetera.
And I think that there'll be similar pressure on the business community, that anyone who has a position of leadership will be told, don't endorse such a radical extremist anti-Canadian movement.
And I think there's going to be some real pressure on people not to express their feelings, their political views, or be canceled by.
I mean, I understand in politics, ideas are what the party's about.
So they have to have, you know, these are the four corners of what we believe.
And if you don't believe them, you're in the wrong party.
But what about leaders of national or international companies?
What about people who have, like if there was a sports star from the Calgary Flames or the Edmonton Oilers who came out for separatism, I think that the league would smash them.
I think that anyone who has a vulnerability to Central Canadian group think narrative control would be smashed.
Well, there's going to be a lot of pressure for that.
But I mean, the independence movement, you know, Sabio said, you know, it's like a wave coming into the beach and goes out, but it comes a little bit closer every time.
Others compare it more to a well flare, whatever your metaphor.
This one is different.
This one is radically different than everyone before.
You know, without meaning to, you know, denigrate previous waves of it, of which I've been a part, so I have to denigrate myself if that's the case.
This is not just a couple of cranks on the prairies ranting about the Eastern bastards.
You know, the one square kilometer around where we're sitting here in downtown Calgary, you would not believe the words I've heard come out of the mouths of senior business leaders.
This is not a crank on the ranch movement anymore.
But they're saying that to you privately.
When I look around, I mean.
There is some fear yet of speaking.
I'll put it this way.
Some of them, a lot of them are there now, ready to vote yes in the privacy of the ballot box.
Many of them are now at the point where they will openly say, and it's not just in private to me, they'll openly say where they are on independence, but they're not yet prepared to go stand at a podium or write a column about it in a public setting.
But they're there.
And this is bringing credibility.
I expect it'll probably bring funding.
The federalist side will be infinitely funded by governments and just I mean, you can have a law, you can have elections, Alberta, try and enforce it, but try stopping the internet.
I think you're going to have every political activist in Canada.
You're going to have international activists.
You're going to have anti-oil activists.
You might have foreign countries with some stake in it.
I don't know.
I mean, OPEC would probably want Alberta to stay shackled within Canada.
I don't know what China would say.
I don't know what, and of course, we don't know what America's deep state would say.
They probably wouldn't mind getting their hands on the oil.
And maybe they think that independence is a halfway step.
I think it would be a free-for-all.
And everyone in the world would pay their attention to it for a month.
Yeah, I'm concerned about foreign actors on both sides.
And by foreign actors, I'm also including Ottawa.
I'm including Ottawa as a foreign power in this.
Really, anyone, you know, Pacific Coast to Winnipeg or Flanflan, it's a debate for everyone within there.
If you're outside of that, you know, north-south, sorry, if you're south of it, west of that or east of that, I'd like it to stay out.
I'm not sure.
I'm quite sure, actually, it's not possible to do that.
There's going to be, there are so many agendas involved on both sides.
Brexit and Beyond: A Chance?00:02:35
And in the age of social media, how do you even know?
It's impossible to regulate.
I mean, you can do your best to not make it so blatant, but do we really think that the People's Republic of China doesn't have its ways or that the CIA doesn't have its ways or CISIS?
I mean, if you and I aren't on a list already, we're not doing something right.
Well, listen, I've really enjoyed this good chat, and you've put some things in my mind that I'm going to think about some more.
Let me throw you one last question.
It's about Brexit.
About a decade ago, the United Kingdom, they had a conservative prime minister who said, all right, you separatists, I'm going to throw you a bone.
Let's give you your chance, blow off some steam.
We're going to have a referendum and I'll show you.
No one supports you.
Look at me.
I'm so democratic.
And what do you know?
The people shocked the establishment.
Everyone was against Brexit.
All the banks, all the media, all the political parties, except for Nigel Farage's UKIP.
And it happened.
And I think there's a chance of it happening here.
And Danielle Smith is sort of in that interesting place where she's going to host the referendum, if not necessarily champion the exit.
What hasn't happened yet that you think might happen?
Will a leader emerge?
Will something happen preemptively?
Will Mark Carney surprise us all and be more attentive to the West?
I don't think his cabinet suggests.
Help me see into the future a little bit because I don't know what to look for.
Well, Brexit's not the only great example.
We have one much closer to home, the Charlottetown Accord.
The Charlottetown Accord, just like Brexit, had unanimous support on one side, and that was to ratify the constitutional changes of the Charlottetown Accord.
The Conservatives supported it.
The Liberals supported it.
The NDP supported it.
Labor unions supported it.
The banks, industry, everybody.
CEOs would take out ads.
Everybody who was invited to a cocktail party anywhere in this country supported it.
The only opponents were the Bloc of Equois and the Partiqué and the Reform Party, a complete opposite.
And they oppose it for radically different reasons, but they oppose it from different sides.
And it was defeated nearly everywhere outside of Ontario.
Of course, Ontario.
Ontario, loyal, she remains, will do what she's told.
But, you know, so like Brexit, you had all the institutions and civil society and business, all the different parties lined up on one side.
It's not necessarily going to work out that kind of Cinderella story here.
Hopefully We Don't Need Washington00:02:06
But today predicting, I think we have a one in three chance.
And that's not bad.
I mean, it's better than the zero chance we've had for the last 100 odd years in Alberta.
The movement's going to take new leadership to step up.
People have been stepping up so far, and much of it's been positive.
But we're going to need our Nigel Farage.
We're going to need our Preston Manning, our George Washington.
Pick your historical figure.
No, hopefully not at George Washington, because that means we're shooting.
So hopefully we don't need Washington.
But, you know, I'm pretty cautiously optimistic that because this is not purely just the rural heartland of Alberta anymore, it's got people with some real financial and industrial skin in the game who now want to see this happen.
I'm cautiously optimistic we're going to see new leadership emerge to lead this in a way that is credible, that is not going to scare people living in the two big cities of Alberta.
And I don't discount Saskatchewan being a part of this.
British Columbia, I wanted to be a part of it, but I don't think they're not going to be the first man on the beach.
They're coming in the second wave.
I don't think they're, I mean, the interior of BC is a different creature from the lower mainland and the lower island.
It could come someday, but they're not going to be on the beach first.
But I think our brothers in Saskatchewan feel what we have.
And who knows?
Maybe the leader will be Alberta, one Saskatchewan.
Maybe there's someone who can leave both at the same time.
Great to catch up with you.
Congratulations on the Western Standard.
Thank you very much.
There he is, Derek Feldebrand.
Well, that's our show for today.
I'll be back in Toronto tomorrow.
And I'll try not to east splame things too much.
On behalf of all of us at Rebel News, you at home.