Ezra Levant unpacks Alberta’s June 25, 2025, by-election, where UCP’s Tara Sawyer won 61% in Old Didsbury Three Hills while separatist Republicans (17.9%) trailed the NDP, despite 47% of Albertans backing autonomy outright. Sheila Gunn-Reed argues high turnout reflects seriousness about independence, citing Premier Daniel Smith’s recent referendum legislation, but Lauren Gunter blames tactical UCP voting and the Republican Party’s April 2025 launch under Cameron Davies—once a UCP member—whose liberal-style campaign may have alienated voters. Federal policies like pipeline opposition and regional subsidies fuel separatist frustration, while Smith’s Alberta Next panel avoids vote-splitting risks, learning from past blunders like her pension plan misstep. The episode reveals separatism’s growing but strategically stifled momentum amid political maneuvering. [Automatically generated summary]
What do Monday night's Alberta by-election results really mean for Alberta and by extension, the rest of Confederation?
It is June 25th, 2025.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, but you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
The by-election results are in, and if you're watching the attempts to spin it, you think Albertans just voted to smother the baby of Western separation in its crib.
They're gloating, pretending that this was some sort of rejection of Alberta first values.
But let me set the record straight.
What we saw in that by-election in old Didsbury Three Hills was not a referendum on independence.
It was a referendum on the vehicle, not the destination.
Albertans didn't vote against separation.
They voted against vote splitting, against the very real fear of accidentally handing a seat to the NDP.
That's it.
Tactical voting, not ideological surrender.
I mean, let's look at the numbers.
In Edmonton, Strathcona, NDP leader Naheed Nenshi took a whopping 82.3% of the vote, but that writing was never ever in play.
It's a fortress for the socialists.
In Edmonton, Ellersley, the NDP's Gurdej Singh Brar held on, but support dropped from nearly 62% in the general to almost 51% in the by-election.
The UCP made up some ground.
And in old Didsbury Three Hills, a rural stronghold, UCP candidate Tara Sawyer won with 61%, while the separatist challenger from the Republican Party drew nearly 18%.
It's not nothing, but it's not a breakthrough either.
So the electoral map didn't shift.
But the public mood, it sure has.
According to a leger poll, 70% of Albertans say they understand why someone would support separation.
And more than half of Canadians nationwide say they get it too.
That includes 63% of men, 48% of women, and a whopping 77% of conservative voters.
Even 48% of liberal voters admit they understand the motivation, even if they don't agree with it.
Now, here's the real crazy number.
47% of Albertans say they support separation outright.
That's not a sliver.
That's almost half of the province.
And when Premier Daniel Smith says separatists aren't fringe, she's right.
We know she's just tabled legislation to make citizen initiative referendums easier, including ones on independence, because she knows this issue isn't going away.
It's growing.
What this by-election showed us is that people are serious about autonomy still, but they're being strategic about how to get it.
They don't want to throw away a vote on a protest party if it means handing more power to Nenshi or worse, Mark Carney.
People want leverage, not virtue signaling.
They want a movement, not a splinter party.
So, no, this isn't the end of the road by any means for independence.
It's a fork in it.
And now the question isn't if Alberta will push back harder against Confederation.
The only question is how?
Will it be through a political party, a constitutional negotiation, a full-on fight with the feds, or a full-scale referendum that's still taking shape?
But make no mistake, the frustration, the drive for respect, and the fight for Alberta's future, it's alive, it's growing, and it's about to get louder.
Joining me up after the break is Edmonton Sun columnist Lauren Gunter on the results of Monday night's three Alberta by-elections.
Stay with us.
Joining me now is a good friend of the show, Lauren Gunter.
He's a columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
I'm reading his article in the Edmonton Journal right now on the by-elections on Tuesday night here in Alberta.
I wanted Lauren's take on it because it would appear the status quo held.
I don't think there were any surprises last night.
No, I think that's fair.
The NDP won the two ridings that they already had, and the UCP held on to the one riding it had.
And that is a little unusual, of course, in mid-tenure by-elections because people often vote against the government.
But since the two ridings in Edmonton were already held by the opposition, it's easy to vote for the opposition and against the government.
I think the surprise would have been if the separatist Republican Party had done better than it did in Old Didsbury Three Hills, which is right in the central part of the province.
And I think they probably thought they should have done better than they did.
They got 17% of the vote.
They helped take 15% away from the UCP compared to the 2023 general election.
But they finished third.
They finished behind the NDP.
So, yeah, I think you're right when you say the status quo held.
Yeah, I mean, I think a victory.
I don't think anybody who is really serious about what was happening in Old Didsbury Three Hills thought that the Republicans really stood a chance of taking that riding.
But I think it would have been considered a real achievement for them if they had bested the NDP.
And they didn't do that in a riding that historically has elected a separatist MLA.
It has.
So 1982, when it was just called Old Didsbury, Gordon Kessler from the Western Canada concept won that riding right after the National Energy Program was imposed by the federal liberals.
I think that's what's missing this time, is that there wasn't one giant offense by the liberals.
Like nobody out here expects the liberals to build a pipeline.
Nobody out here expects them to get rid of the net zero power grid or the EV mandate or any of the things that are offensive.
But right now, there isn't one thing that people rally around.
In 1982, the NEP had just happened.
There were all sorts of small oil field service companies that were going under already because drilling had fallen off completely.
And so there were a lot of people who were angry and they surprisingly elected Kessler.
Now, there was a general, that was early in 1982.
There was a general election in November of 82 and Kessler lost.
He lost to the PC candidate.
At that point, Peter Lawheed came in with all but, I think, three seats in the legislature.
And so things went back to normal in the general election.
But by-elections, as I was saying before, tend to be protest votes.
And in this case, first of all, the turnout in Old Didsbury Three Hills was crazy.
It was crazy.
It was huge.
It's good.
So last night in the three by-elections together, there were 33,000 votes cast, total in the three.
Almost 16,000 of them, just about half of them in Old Didsbury Three Hills.
So it's not as though the UCP voters in that riding sat home and thought, ah, we got this covered.
And that's another reason that Kessler won in 82, is that the PCs thought they had it in the bag.
They stayed home.
The Western Canada concept people were driven and they came out and they won.
In this case, the UCP, I think what benefits the UCP at the moment is that Smith has been very staunch against Ottawa.
She's been strong against Kearney.
She was even stronger against Trudeau.
And so she gets an awful lot.
She gets a bit of a pass.
She is the person to whom a lot of the discontent with the liberals in Ottawa, that goes to her.
She has done a good job of handling that file and it goes to her.
Until she gives people a reason not to, I think the Republican Party, the Separatist Party is going to have a problem.
I think there are a couple of other problems that the Republicans encountered in this by-election on Monday night.
One is that their leader had been a UCP member until April 24th.
Right.
So that's only two months.
He's been in the Republican Party.
The other is I drove through that riding twice during the by-election, and I kept thinking, why are all these liberal signs up here for?
These big red signs with white lettering.
That's exactly my thoughts, too.
It was his.
It was Cameron Davies, the Republican Party leader.
Those were his signs.
It looked like liberal signs.
And we have just, of course, finished a federal campaign back in April where those red signs were up there for the liberal candidates.
And so I think people were looking at things.
They went this Cameron Davies liberal guy running for.
And I think the other problem that that party has is its name.
The Republican Party of Alberta wasn't really an offensive name until Trump got sworn in again in January.
But when you look at poll after poll after poll, even conservatives in Canada have soured on Trump and the Republicans to some extent.
And so Davies, the leader of the Republican Party of Alberta, the separatist candidate, was running against his own short tenure in the separatist movement.
He was running with really bad signs.
And he was running with a name that doesn't help it.
It might not hurt them big time, but it doesn't do him any favors either.
So I think those were the three things.
And, you know, that riding should be prime for separatists.
It's rural.
It's fairly affluent.
There are three or four major population centers in that riding where there's a lot of ag business or oil business that does really well.
And frankly, people who are rural and, let's say, affluent, but certainly comfortable, tend to be the ones who feel the grievances against Ottawa the most.
And if he can't get those people to come out in large numbers and vote for him, then they have a problem.
17% is what he ended up with last night.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
You can't say, excuse me, you can't say they didn't do well in a very short period of time.
They went from, there was an independent candidate, independence candidate, ran in that riding in 2023 in the general election, got 5% of the vote.
They went from 5% independence to 17% independence.
Don't sneeze at that.
Don't say, oh, now we'd have to worry about those separatists in Alberta.
They couldn't.
No, no, that 17% is still a fair number of people who are angry enough that they were prepared to vote for a separatist party.
It's not as good as the Republican Party and the separatists would have wanted, but it is not something that can just be sloughed off.
Yeah, in 60 days.
I think what we saw last night, and I think maybe this is, and I'm merely speculating, I think it shows in the voter turnout in that writing, is that the memory of a vote split is still very scary for a lot of Albertans.
And I think it was less a referendum on separation in that writing than it was the vehicle to drive the independence movement.
Because I think the, as I've been saying for the last few days, the Venn diagram between independence-minded people and UCP voters is a circle.
And I think a lot of people are scared about the vote splits.
They don't want to risk parking their vote in a similarly conservative party.
And I think they are looking at it and thinking, well, independence, whatever that looks like, whether it's within Canada or as Americans or a sovereign republic, whatever.
I think they think that the party system is the wrong vehicle to achieve those means.
I think you've hit on something there too, in that the Republican Party of Alberta is going to have a problem until it has one proposed solution.
Right.
Until it says, we're going to be an independent country of our own.
We hope to have nice relations with Canada and the United States, but we're going to be an independent Republic of Alberta.
They haven't said that, but if they could say that, or they could say we want sovereignty association, we all remember with great pain what that meant when Quebec demanded sovereignty association, because nobody knew what it meant.
Right.
I don't think they did.
No, I'm pretty sure they did.
And then, or we're going to apply to become the 51st state.
That's another thing that that's another rug that got pulled out from under the separatists on this.
You know, I have talked to people in the past seriously about would we ever leave Confederation?
Would we then ask to become the 51st state?
Why Leave Confederation?00:10:34
What would be the advantages?
What would be the disadvantages?
But after Trump started taunting everybody with that in December and January and since, I've lost my interest in talking to them about 51st state because he's just been a disrespectful jackass.
So they had that problem too, because they have talked about being the 51st state before.
So there's a lot of stuff that worked against separatists that could be like, I can tell you there are two things that the provincial government is really worried about the federal government doing.
One is not approving a pipeline, which I think is a very real possibility.
I actually think that's what they're aiming at.
They keep saying things like, well, you know, maybe we would do a pipeline, but there are no private sector people pushing it now.
Who would?
Yeah, they're going to go to, they're going to do what Trudeau did about LNG, which is to say there's no business case for a new pipeline.
We tried.
It wasn't us getting in the way.
But of course, every impediment that's in the way of a private sector investor coming forward has been put there by the federal liberals over the last 10 years and is still there.
So that's one of the things the provincial government's very worried about.
The other one is that we're worried about a new tax on oil and gas, the proceeds from which will be used to support subsidies for manufacturing industries in Ontario and Quebec.
And when they talk to you about this privately, they say, we don't know that's what they're getting ready to do.
They haven't told us that's what they're getting ready to do.
But that makes sense, right?
We don't vote for them.
Ontario and Quebec vote for them.
So why not do what Pierre Trudeau did back in the 80s and steal money from the West and give it to Central Canada?
So either one of those would be the trigger for a real separatist movement.
What we have now, I think, is 17% of people in a riding that should be favorable to separatists expressing their frustration and anger with Ottawa because the Liberals snatched defeat from the Conservatives' jaws and, you know, are snatched victory from the Conservatives' jaws.
And so I think that's mostly what you got there.
You just got some frustration and anger.
There is no real separatist movement yet.
Yeah.
I just, I don't, I think a lot of people were just apprehensive.
You know, the NDP, that's only six years ago.
And we saw them run up the middle.
And I think based on the voter turnout there, they just didn't even want to risk it.
And it really motivated the UCP voters.
I think you're absolutely right.
And I, even in my column today, said the only way I can ever see the NDP winning the government again is if there's vote splitting on the right, which is what happened in 2015.
Wild Rose and the PCs split the vote almost evenly and allowed an awful lot of new Democrats to win in Calgary and even in five or six, what we would call rural ridings, not really rural.
I mean, they're not small town, egg-centered ridings.
They're mostly ex-urban ridings.
They're just outside Edmonton and Calgary.
But they won enough seats with the vote splitting to become the government.
And when Jason Kenney came back and brought the two conservative parties together, it went right back to what it had been before the 2015 election, which was about 50 to 53% conservative vote and the NDP had around 36 or 37%.
And that will happen again.
It'll happen again and again and again in Alberta, so long as the right doesn't split the vote.
And I know for a fact, as you do too, that that's the thing the UCP are most worried about with the separatist movement is that, you know, people say, oh, Smith is given license to the separatists to get a referendum.
Oh, Smith is being coy with the separatist.
She has got to play that exactly right, or she risks the Republican Party or some other separatist party coming in and scooping up just enough votes to elect the NDP.
Yeah, you peel off 10 or 15% in some of those urban ridings.
And that's an NDP MLA.
And I think that's what the Alberta Next panel is all about.
I'm happy to see it.
The Premier is, as we're recording this on, what's today?
Tuesday.
She's announcing her Alberta Next panel to engage Albertans in what we want her to bring to the table with the federal government.
And I think it's a very smart move Because she's got to keep that 10 or 15 percent within the UCP to hang on to the Calgary, really.
Exactly right.
And, you know, I think she's also learned the order, the timing for doing this sort of stuff from her pension plan idea.
There was nothing wrong with Alberta having its own pension.
From an investment standpoint and a political standpoint, you could make a really strong case that we should take our money away from Ottawa, which dithers it around all over everywhere, and concentrate it in Alberta.
Like maybe if we had our own pensions plan, we could build a pipeline to the East Coast.
The feds couldn't come out and say, oh, there's no one proposing a pipe.
Well, maybe if we had our own pension plan, that pension plan would have put the billions aside to help build that pipeline.
So there were good reasons to have a provincial pension plan.
One of the other ones is that we have such a young population and such an affluent population that we end up, of course, subsidizing pensions for everyone else in the country.
And we don't see a lot of benefit from that.
You don't see Doug Ford in Ontario saying, gee, I'd really like to thank the people of Alberta for helping my city with their pension.
So you don't get any, we don't get any gratitude.
We don't get any political sway out of it.
So I could see a real good, strong reason why there should have been an Alberta pension plan.
But you don't go into that without having softened the ground a lot.
And people, particularly people who are getting to be close to retirement age, were worried that they weren't going to have the money that had been promised them.
CPP is a terrible investment.
If you were putting money aside for your own retirement, you would not give it to the CPP.
Right.
Because your return's about 8% or 9%.
You could get that from the guy down by the stop sign on my street corner who has some idea from reading financial posts what's going on.
So it's not a good investment, but it's solid.
It's there.
You know it's going to be there.
And that was the problem with her pension plan ideas that she came out with this idea.
Oh, isn't this great?
We're going to do this.
And people are saying, whoa, wait a minute.
I don't want to risk my retirement for that.
So I think with this Alberta Next panel, she's going about it the right way.
She hasn't put out a proposal.
She hasn't said, here's what we want to do.
She said, I'm going to appoint these people who love the province and are very knowledgeable people.
They're going to go around.
They're going to listen to you.
They're going to help, you know, have you tell them what's going on.
And then we'll come up with a strategy.
And I think that's a much better way of doing it than they did with the pension plan.
So yeah, I hope she's learned a lesson.
Yeah.
And I think it alleviates some of that response back from the feds, like, oh, we don't even know what Alberta's complaining about.
Well, here's our list of grievances.
We had experts put it together for you.
I wanted to ask you before I let you go.
Nenshi is now in the legislature.
Are they finally going to get the Nenshee bounce now that he's there?
No.
I don't think so.
No, neither do I.
I think he's in a lot of faith in it before he got elected as the NDP leader.
I mean, I remember him as mayor of Calgary.
He, in his own mind, was always the smartest person in every room he was ever in.
He's arrogant.
He's urban.
He's lefty.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess they're going to keep Edmonton.
I think they'll probably win most of the 20 seats here.
There was some chance in Edmonton Ellersley last night.
A lot of the Entrail readers were saying, well, maybe the UCP will win this one because the UCP candidate had been the MLA from there until 2015.
Right.
But in the end, the NDP candidate won handily.
They didn't trounce the UCP, but they won a very strong mandate.
So I think the NDP will win all 20 Edmonton seats again, or however many they are by that time with redistribution.
But no, the battleground will be Calgary.
And it surprises me that the NDP up here think that Ninci can win down there because he used to be the mayor of Calgary.
It was very unpopular when he left as mayor of Calgary.
And maybe people's memories are short.
I don't know.
But I know.
And I think Nenshi has he has very thin skin.
He's a very prickly individual.
He will get up in there and he's going to get needled back by Smith, who's actually very good on her feet in the legislature.
And he's not going to like it.
So, no, I don't think they're going to get a big Ninci bounce.
They might come up in the polls a little bit because it's better to have them inside the house than out in the outhouse.
I'm not sure about that.
But, you know, eventually I think he's going to wear people.
He's going to wear people thin, you know.
Yeah, I think he's going to remind everybody why he left office in Calgary as the mayor, as unpopular as he was really quickly.
I think he is just a deeply irritating person.
He And His Wife Couldn't Be Further Apart00:03:46
The more you are, yes, that too.
Lauren, thanks so much for your time.
Refresh us how people can find your work.
You can go to EdmontonJournal.com or EdmontonSun.com.
I'm now in both of the papers.
And you just Google Lauren Gunter and it almost always gets to where it's supposed to go.
You get some people from the other side of the spectrum who have their own comments.
Yeah, exactly.
But even those are fun to read.
Absolutely.
Lauren, thanks so much for coming on the show.
We'll have you back on again very soon.
You bet.
Thanks.
Stay with us.
More up next after the break.
As you know, Ezra turns over the last portion of the show to you at home, because without you, there's no Rebel News.
So we better care what you have to say about the work that we do here.
So let's get into it.
On Mark Carney's trip to the G7 in Kananascus, where he and his wife took two separate enormous SUVs to go to the exact same place.
It's a video I did after I got home from Kananascus and re-examined the tape as though I was watching the Kennedy assassination to make sure I was right about what I saw.
I got a lot of feedback.
And that was a very popular video, by the way, online.
All required writes, one destination, two SUVs, zero cent of others.
There, I fixed it for you.
Yeah, my video was zero self-awareness.
Jet Rod writes, why aren't they electric SUVs?
Oh, the unreliable stuff, that's for us.
Of course.
Paulette 2359 says, they didn't walk down the plane steps together.
He walked in front of her to greet the members, didn't acknowledge her or give her a hug or a kiss, just walked away to separate gas-guzzling vehicles.
Not like Pierre and Anna, always holding hands.
And he shows Anna so much respect, just like he would do if he was our prime minister.
That was one thing that I noticed when Carney not just came down the steps from the challenger onto the tarmac in Calgary when he was going to Cananascus to the G7.
He and his wife couldn't be further apart from each other.
You could drive an electric vehicle between the two of them.
They don't exactly give off warm vibes between the two of them.
But he, it's just bad male manners.
Maybe I am somebody who believes that chivalry isn't quite dead, although I believe modern feminist is doing its best to axe murder it.
But a husband or a boyfriend or, you know, even a son, you're supposed to sort of walk beside the woman and especially husband.
He just sort of left her in the dust.
It's just very weird.
And yes, in stark contrast to Pierre Polyev and his wife Anna, those two seem like the loving, most closest couple.
And of course, we don't know the inner workings of their family, but good lord, they at least put on a good show that they are a couple that actually loves each other.
You know, when Mark Carney got to Cananascus, he ran up to greet the leaders and do that weird, like posing bow thing.
And his wife was probably 10 feet behind him.
SUV Separation Mystery00:00:46
She could have wiped right out.
And he wouldn't have even heard her fall because he was so far ahead of her.
It's just the weirdest, craziest things.
And yeah, climate zealots, you and I have to get taxed on our SUVs because our SUVs are damaging the climate, don't you know?
And these two can jump into separate SUVs to go to the exact same function.
And don't send me letters.
She is not important to the continuity of government.
She's not like the vice president.
They can travel in the same vehicle together for security reasons, for sure.