Danielle Smith’s separatist push in Alberta stems from rural conservatives’ resentment over federal income tax contributions—$10B+ annually—claiming funds disproportionately benefit Quebec while stifling oil exports, despite recent wins like the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. Her demands, including port access and equalization abolition, face skepticism: BC’s coastal rejection of Northern Gateway shows separatism’s impracticality, while Alberta’s own internal divisions (e.g., abandoned wells vs. progressive north) could mirror Quebec’s economic decline from past rhetoric. Trump’s tariffs and separatists’ ideological alignment with him risk turning Alberta into a U.S.-dependent territory like Puerto Rico, undermining its economic future amid global climate shifts that threaten oil demand. Addressing grievances may not placate extremists, but separation offers no real solution—just more instability. [Automatically generated summary]
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Hi everyone, buddy.
Good to see you again.
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And as always, there's never anything else to do.
We just get straight in the topic here.
So we want to talk about the case against separation.
And not just separation in general, like specifically Western Canadian separation.
Well, Alberta separation.
Let's call it what it is.
Well, yeah, it centers.
There are people in BC that are into this movement.
There are some, but they don't number as strong, nearly as strong as at Alberta.
It's an Alberta-centered idea and movement.
And they imagine that BC will go along with them.
And I think eventually they're going to they're going to get disappointed there.
But yeah.
So we'll set this up.
Albertans feel like their needs aren't being met.
That they have no representation on the federal level.
And that they want something, that when they want something, it becomes incumbent upon the liberal federal governments to deny them.
Albertans dream of a day when they no longer must labor under the yoke of socialist governments who consider things like indigenous land claims, environmental concerns, and climate change ahead of their booming oil economy.
All of those other considerations are invisible chains holding them back.
It's not unlike the way a lot of individual workers think of those pesky safety rules that just make the day take longer.
True story.
They are illusory ties that only hold back the Alberta economy.
And also, only if Albertans believe in them.
If Albertans want to be more successful, they can simply wish themselves free of all those concerns and move on without needing to bother with Ottawa anymore, right?
So here we are with the idea that they might separate.
So what brought this on like right now?
This idea is not really new.
It's been bubbling for a while, but like right now in this moment, it came to be like a serious thing.
So well, because of the federal election that we just had and the way that it worked.
Right.
Right.
So Pierre Polyev and the Conservative Party of Canada were solidly leading in the polls in December of 2024, just six months ago.
Like really, really solidly leading.
Everyone in Alberta thought they were going to get a cookie at the next election.
Then Trudeau stepped down.
Trump took office and started talking about Canada as a 51st state.
And Carney became the new prime minister.
And all of that changed everything about the way the election was going to go.
And very quickly, Alberta was very suddenly no longer getting a cookie.
And now they want to make the rest of Canada pay for denying them their cookie.
So this is a great way to pick a fight, Spencer.
Oh, I'm ready.
You couldn't have chosen more charged language for that.
I am ready.
So it feels only a little petty to describe the discontent of Albertans in such light terms.
Yeah.
But let's be clear what we're talking about.
One of Alberta's primary disputes is the fact that they contribute so much more per person to the federal income tax pool.
And all Canada does is give that money to Quebec and prevent Albertans from making even more money.
That's right.
This incredibly profitable business I'm engaged in isn't quite as profitable or lucrative as maybe it could be.
How dare they prevent us from making the full pile of money?
Now I want to separate.
But Albertans who throw out separatist rhetoric need to answer a couple questions.
Like, how is this different than selling out your country for money?
I believe there's a biblical tale that includes 30 silver coins that might get referenced at some point in this process.
Are separatists ready for that?
So in this episode, we're going to go through some questions and some argument tactics that might be used when the need arises to discuss separatism.
Unfortunately, this isn't going away anytime soon.
If you're a Canadian in Western Canada, you will find yourself in discussion at some point with a co-worker, an old friend from high school on Facebook, or a family member at the Thanksgiving dinner table who begins to speak more boldly about ideas that last year they may have been less eager to discuss.
Many people will diplomatically change the topic or make a joke and move on.
But as I said, this won't go away as easily as it has in previous discussions.
So here we are making the case against Western Canadian separatism.
So first, any additional comments on the intro here, Jeff?
Well, like I said, pretty charged language, bud.
Oh, I'm ready.
I'm ready.
I've already issued a call on Facebook for anyone who is a Western Canadian separatist and feels strongly enough to come on the podcast and I will put them on and I will go on YouTube and they can make their case.
But they're making it against me.
And so far, either no one's listening or everyone knows what it's like to argue with me already.
So we'll see.
Most working class Albertans wouldn't consider their livelihood or the bread that feeds their family to be a cookie.
Like, yes, I agree.
The oil business is terribly profitable, right?
And how dare they prevent us from making even more money?
But you need to understand and appreciate that the big buckets of money are not being made by your average working class Albertans.
Well, yeah, that's also a thing they need to think about is that most of this benefits companies, not individuals.
And they see big bites taken out of their paycheck and tax and the whole transfer payment issue and everything else, and they blame government for the reason why their share of the pie isn't larger, when they should be blaming the speculative oil industry that is taking the primary resource out of their province and not paying them enough for it.
Well, that's down to the fee structure, the royalty structure for those.
Alberta governments keep reducing royalties to please the companies to keep them.
I think they're giving it away right now.
What's the price of oil at right now?
I don't know.
It dipped fairly recently.
I haven't tracked the price.
I know that OPEC is jittering about some stuff.
And of course, as many things that happen, the global price is determined by OPEC, and many of the individual members of OPEC don't follow the agreements from the meetings that they agree to.
They'll produce more than they need, and then it'll come out later that they produced more than they agreed upon.
And it's this whole thing.
But it's slightly lower than it was recently.
That's what I've heard.
But it's not low.
It's definitely not low.
But the overall volume is also generally rising all the time.
It's not dipping.
There's been a few moments where it dipped, like at COVID.
But overall, it's as high as it's ever been, generally speaking.
Yeah, like the thrust of my argument is like oil is a boom and bust sine wave of an industry.
Like that commodity is terribly difficult to pin down.
It waxes and wanes in value constantly.
And when it's down, which happens fairly frequently on relatively predictable cycles, the people of Alberta get next to nothing for the product that's being extracted from their province.
And that's not the federal government's fault for overtaxing them.
No.
That is not the fault of Mark Carney.
That is not the fault of Quebec.
That is the fault of the province of Alberta for making a bad deal with oil companies.
Yeah.
True.
So the first question, when you are face to face with someone who's angrily determined that separatism is the way to go, you need to realize that not all of them actually want to separate, first of all.
Some of them just want to rattle chains.
So you need to just ask them, what would the world look like if they got everything they wanted?
So some of them will just say, it'll look like this, and I'll show a map of, you know, Canada that's, you know, a separate color than Alberta or whatever.
Some of them will show you a map where Alberta's part of U.S. or whatever, but that'll tell you something, right?
That'll tell you where they are, what they're really thinking.
Some of them will just have a list of things that they want.
And a lot of those I've found from the discussions I've had so far, they're not very well informed.
They tend to not understand how a lot of things work and are working on fantasy.
They're basically being fed a lot of divisionist rhetoric by people they see online, you know, online news sources and that sort of thing that are definitely looking to cash in on a new trend.
And so, you know, you'll get all kinds of things here.
Like One of the more interesting ones, although still out there, was that someone I knew said that they wanted to renegotiate confederation as though that, you know, because they thought that there's, you know, and I guarantee this person hasn't read the documents of confederation because they felt somewhere in there there's something that's not fair.
Ottawa, like Ontario always seems to be the one, the deciding factor in the election.
But that's because Ontario has 39% of the population.
Well, this is like Alberta's gripe over lack of representation is really just a provincially scaled gripe of the rural Canadian attitude towards representation.
Coast to coast, coast to coast, rural Canadians, people who live in smaller towns and out in the sticks, are generally more conservative, generally vote conservative, and generally feel underrepresented because they live in sparsely populated ridings, there are huge landmasses that are served by the same headcount of representatives as much smaller, more densely packed urban areas.
And they feel that urban liberal leaning urban voters unfairly control government.
Well, yeah, because there's more of them.
There's more of them.
It's supposed to be about rule for the majority.
So if we have more people living in cities, those people will be making more decisions towards the greater good.
Yeah.
And we see a lot of these sort of meme maps of people who show the amount of conservative and liberal ridings on a map.
And it's all.
Oh, I love that.
I love that.
In this case, of course.
Huge swaths of blue, great tracts of land.
Direct contrast, I think we said in a previous podcast to the U.S. In the U.S., of course, blue is liberal and red is conservative.
In Canada, it's the exact opposite.
Red is liberal and blue is conservative.
And it's just all red across the map.
And of course, almost all of Ontario even is red.
Because the greater Ontario, the greater Toronto area itself has something like almost half of the population of Ontario, the province.
It's just like right.
And like the province of BC that was almost split half and half, but it's entirely right on the map because all the blue ridings are in Vancouver.
Yeah.
And in other city centers like Kelowna and Victoria that are, you know, the riding itself is very, very small in the rest of the area.
But acres don't vote.
Hectares don't vote.
It's people that vote.
So you like we have ridings.
This is pointed out.
I listened to a podcast called The Numbers with these two Canadians who go through different polls and that sort of thing.
And they point out that there's several ridings throughout the prairies that are larger than each larger than multiple European countries.
We have ridings, individual ridings that only have like 100,000 people or maybe less that are like larger than the nation of Germany.
It's just, you know, just how it is.
And some of those ridings don't even have year-round roads that lead to each town.
Some of them have winter access roads only that are ice roads only.
And in the in-between season, when it's, you know, too wet and not cold enough to freeze, they have airplane access only.
And so that's Alberta, the rest of the country is.
They are the small town, the rural population, the rural conservative population that just wants to be left the fuck alone with as little government reach into their pocket and their lives as possible, feeling underrepresented because more people live in cities than live in the country and more people live in Quebec and Ontario than live in Alberta.
Yeah.
So what I try to point out is that it might be possible.
Like Carney is a hard-centrist.
In fact, he's almost leaning right in most things.
Oh, yeah.
You know, Albertans might get everything they possibly could want from a Mark Carney prime ministership.
He's very pro-business.
He looks like he's going to green light as many of these things that are going to stoke the economy as possible, especially right now.
Yeah, I saw an article online just today that was talking about how they were in the process of moving legislation that would axe or greatly truncate the review process for projects that carry a national interest, which I can only assume means we're going to skip environmental review and talking to First Nations before we build the next pipeline.
Yeah, I don't know how well that's going to go over.
No, me neither.
But like, this is my point, though, right?
It's like he's a liberal.
From where Alberta is sitting, he's the Antichrist.
And yet he's pushing legislation that is directly in line with what they would want from their federal government.
You wouldn't believe the number of fuck Carney bumper stickers that have already been printed and they're hoping they can sell.
Oh, yeah.
And they're going to put them right on top of their fuck Trudeau stickers.
Yeah.
Like that's that's a cottage industry in Alberta.
But we'll see.
I mean, if they made a checklist of just the things they want and they were, you know, blind about the name of the person that's in the office, they might get all of those things from Mark Carney.
Actually, looking more likely that they will than that they won't.
But it's possible that they're not looking for those specific things.
They're looking for something else.
They're looking for some kind of political change, no matter the cost, which is dangerous.
That's really an extremist view, that it doesn't matter what you're going to get.
It doesn't matter what material things you're going to have.
It doesn't matter what else is going on.
You just want the thing to fall.
And that's...
Well, how much of the Alberta population do you honestly believe is in that extremist camp?
Because, again, I'm hardly an authority on this.
I live in BC.
Other than you and a handful of our other friends and a couple of family members I have in Alberta, I know very few people in Alberta.
I rarely visit it.
But it seems to me from where I'm sitting in my armchair on the coast that the bulk of Albertans, like you say, feel slighted.
But I feel like they would be placated if they were, you know, say the equalization payment thing got axed or like drastically thumb on the scale in Alberta's favor.
So they feel satisfied that Quebec's getting screwed if pipelines to ports continued to get built.
And we must emphasize continued because like we did, like Trudeau actually pushed a pipeline through to BC.
Like Alberta got more port access under the last liberal government and nobody talks about it.
Yeah, the media doesn't like to talk about the completed expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
It was a big deal when Trudeau purchased it with federal funds that everyone across the country kicked into to buy the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline and then fight with the province of BC to get it expanded.
It is now nearly triple the capacity that it was before.
And that has been in operation for a year now.
And they don't, it's like it escaped the Alberta brain.
No one talks about it.
No one mentions the Trans Mountain pipeline.
It's like they think that it doesn't exist maybe.
I don't know.
But polls on this issue, it's difficult to compare multiple different polls because they all ask separate questions.
And some of them have like gradations on the answer kind of thing, right?
But it does seem over the past month that the numbers are edging slightly upward from, you know, around the 37 mark to maybe the 41 mark for a separation.
And it looks like, I don't know exactly what the numbers are for separation and becoming part of the states.
Which is what's going to happen.
Like, let's be real.
That number was 25%.
There's no way Alberta survives as its own sovereign nation.
No.
Like, they'll be their own nation for like two weeks, and then they will be the 51st state.
Yeah.
It's it's not feasible.
I mean, all the money that they think they'll save by not paying a federal government will have to go to their new federal government, which will be located in Edmonton rather than Ottawa.
And that money, well, it'll, you know, they'll have to pay for all the things that the federal government is providing now, including defense, right?
Because why wouldn't Canada just march the troops right in there and take it back?
Yeah.
Why wouldn't we have a civil war over this and be like, yeah, but you got no, you have no armament?
Like, sucker.
I don't know what to tell you.
Like, why wouldn't we do that?
What would stop us?
Our goodwill?
I feel like this isn't a path we should be pursuing.
Sure.
But that's a thing that that's a question they have to answer.
Is that, yeah, I mean, if they're going to be part of the, or, you know, friends with the United States, the United States is going to want them to be kicking into all the defense too, just the same as they want Canada to.
You know, they imagine it's going to be so much better.
Okay, so let's move on.
The next question that you need to ask this, you know, advice to someone who has to fight with an ornery separatist is what would you want to see happen if you don't get everything you want?
So this is a sort of a measure of sort of how extreme they are.
If it's just disgruntlement and waiting for a new chance to have another referendum or whatever, you know, I mean, that's a thing.
But if it's more like, no, it's going to have to be radical change, revolution.
I mean, this is, you know, people have to reassess some of the people they know.
I mean, that's where we're headed.
This is a thing that happened in Quebec.
Quebec had two referendums, one in 1984 and one in 95, 95.
And both of them, I think the one in 84 most, because it was unexpected at the time, and they were kind of a little more prepared for the one in 95 as to what this was going to be like.
But this divided families.
There was a lot of bad blood.
It was a lot of people like, why don't you care for my issues when you vote on this thing?
The referendum in 95 was razor thin.
It was non-binding, but it was razor thin.
I remember it was something like 50.8% to 49.2% or something.
It was really, really close.
Yeah, and I remember that because there was a great deal of debate and jockeying for position on how to count the referendum success.
And the separatists, of course, were like, well, the margin of success is 50 plus one.
Like if half the population plus one person votes in favor of separating, then we're separating.
That's all it takes.
And of course, the nationalists were like, no, we need to be at least two-thirds or something like that.
And then the vote comes out and it's effectively 50 plus one to stick around.
Kind of ironic.
Well, it was a lot closer than a lot of people thought it was going to be before they started that process, I'll tell you that.
But the numbers right now, I mean, what you're seeing right now in Alberta is more media talking about this, more media talking about it in a favorable way, more people who were on the fence saying, yeah, why not kind of thing.
And I'll tell you that it would be hard to find many people who actually have oilfield jobs who will say that they are staying in Canada if it goes that way.
Like that's in my experience, being in line trucks for hours at a time where people start saying all kinds of crazy stuff.
Generally, the mood was when that conversation came up was it would be better to be with the U.S.
And like I say, not just separating, but being actually within the boundary of the U.S. Which is from where I'm sitting, just a terrifyingly ignorant position.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
I always try to find common ground with my opponent.
You want to empathize with them or at least try and understand their position.
I just, I can't understand the intellectual position of I think it would be better to live in the United States than live in Canada.
Yeah.
And like, that's for the very, very simple reason of health care.
Oh, yeah, that's a big one.
It's a huge one.
Not a big one.
The only one as far as where I'm sitting.
Well, I mean, now there's also the rising specter of a lack of availability of abortions.
Yeah.
And how some states have very callously denied, you know, procedures that would definitely save lives.
Yeah.
In one case, keeping a woman whose brain is dead alive for the purpose for, you know, what will be months, if that even works.
Just to carry a fetus to term.
Yeah.
Anyways, we probably shouldn't go down this derivative, the dark and nasty U.S. air quotes healthcare system.
Yeah, but many of these same people think all the rules in the states would be great, especially the gun rules, right?
I mean, that's a big one for them.
Too bad we can't have all the guns we want.
It's right.
But it's important to realize that some people who are talking about this loudly are doing it for political theater only.
And I suspect that Danielle Smith herself, the Premier of Alberta, is doing this solely for political theater.
And she might build a Gollum that turns on her.
It's difficult to say.
There were several politicians in Quebec who experienced a similar thing when this happened.
They thought they could just become popular and become important politicians on a wave of doing this, and then it got out of control.
But some people are doing this because they think they'll get more things from it.
It gives them a better negotiating position.
And these people generally think that Quebec does the same thing, that Quebec, you know, twiddles a finger over the grenade of separation in order to get more, you know, a better deal of some kind.
Yeah.
And Alberta thinks it's their turn, right?
That's where some people are in this process.
And it's important to know that if you have to deal with someone who's in this spot, it's silly to say that.
Daniel Smith herself has sort of said that, which a lot of people point out is really silly because it really takes the air out of the thought that she actually wants to separate, right?
But it's possible that some people think, you know, who want to separate think she's willingly lying just to allow all the things to happen and that they get to really separate with her, you know, carrying as a quarterback, bringing the play up the field, right?
And that's a similar thought to what has happened in the States, where people cynically vote for Republican politicians in the States, feeling strongly that those politicians were lying openly about the things that they were saying and that, oh, it will all look different once they're in office and it'll all work out to my advantage.
And some of them have already learned that it doesn't work that way.
But anyway, the next question that we need to get to is why do you think you'll get any of the things you claim you want by separating?
How will separation give Alberta any additional leverage to achieve any of its supposed goals, its stated goals?
That's an important question.
We kind of touched on this earlier, but it's at the point now, right?
You know, they say they're going to want port access in the East to sell these precious resources to Europe.
Right.
And there was a pipeline proposed that was going to go through Quebec, and Quebec said no.
Okay.
But if you separate, you still won't get that.
Yeah.
Yeah, they've got even less reason to give that.
Yeah.
There was a pipeline proposed through Northern BC, the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
It was going to be for gas, but it was going to go to an LNG plant.
And there was this big plan, but it failed for two reasons.
First is that the company that was proposing it said that they didn't see a business case.
But also, they weren't doing any negotiation at all with any of the Aboriginal groups that the pipeline definitely had to move through the lands of.
And they weren't doing any of that work.
So it's like they were dangling the possibility and then saving money by not doing any of the work, knowing that it was never going to happen.
Well, I think they were hoping that the Canadian federal government would just sort of step in and steamroll the deals for them.
And of course, no, that's not how the Canadian federal government deals with First Nations.
Yeah, not anymore.
They used to.
Not anymore.
Someday maybe we'll go through a list of things that happened that the Indigenous groups didn't want to have happen.
But not today.
That's too long a list.
Yeah.
I don't have it in front of me.
But yeah, they're not, you know, this idea of separation is not going to get them what they want.
You know, BC already fought tooth and nail to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline from getting upgraded.
And it didn't even need to go through any new territory.
It had existing root.
And it just had more pipes that were thrown in alongside the old ones.
The old ones were upgraded and it increased the capacity, as we said.
Alberta, the Albertans conveniently forgot that it's there.
And because they definitely don't want to thank Trudeau for anything.
But I mean, the fact that they're not the least bit, you know, like if we think this is political theater for them to get a greater negotiation for things, what makes anyone think they'll be grateful for any of the things they get from such negotiation when they haven't been the least bit thankful for any of the things they've got so far?
Like the Trans Mountain Pipeline Project upgrade being green lit and, you know, overruled, essentially.
Right.
What do you think?
Well, yeah, I don't think we can chew much more out of this.
I mean, it's a pretty simple point.
Like, there's a great deal of denial around the required to maintain the most extreme separatist Albertan views, right?
You tell me, like, how commonly discussed, acknowledged, is, discussed or acknowledged or thanked is the expansion of the pipeline.
I've heard nothing.
Never mentioned.
It's like it's not even there.
Like even like at the shop level, no one brings it up.
No one mentions it.
No one.
The Albertans got duly angry when BC didn't want it to happen, but said pretty much nothing when Trudeau bought it.
They kind of thought it was some kind of weird ploy or something to do, you know, screw them over once again.
And then never heard of it again.
The news outlets in Alberta never mention it.
They never mentioned that it was completed.
If they did mention it, it was buried in a newspaper somewhere and no one reads that page, right?
You know, they want extra pipeline capacity so bad, you'd think this would make the front page of the newspaper for quite a long time every time, you know, every time there was a new part that was completed.
But no, not at all.
Not even a little bit.
Nope.
Dropped off the map completely.
It's like they don't even know that it's there, like I said.
So, you know, it makes an excellent point is like, you know, how what would be enough?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Would there ever be a point where there's enough?
Like, I think the first question that you brought up out of this whole long list of questions is the most important one to drill down to the heart of where an Albertan stands on the separation spectrum is what would you want to see happen if you could get, what would the world look like if you got everything you wanted?
Like, what do you want out of the federal government?
Yeah.
What do you as an Albertan, what does the province of Alberta want to feel valued as a member of Canada and interested in sticking around?
Because if it's this vague esoteric chip on our provincial shoulder, like you can't put a salve on that.
You can never placate that.
That's a slight.
You can never fix a slight.
Yeah, they want the ability to choose the prime minister.
Yeah.
That's the thing they're not saying that they would agree with if it was said to them.
They want the ability to choose the prime minister.
I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
Keep growing your industries, I guess.
Create more jobs.
Bring more people into your province.
I mean, there have been a large number of people from a lot of places in Canada that moved to Alberta.
It has grown in population fairly quickly compared to some other places in Canada.
But it hasn't grown fast enough to overtake the larger provinces.
It just hasn't.
Another 50 years.
Maybe it will.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But I don't know.
So we're going to move to the next question because it's one of my favorites.
I've noticed that there is a strong overlap between the people who want to separate and make noises about cheering for separation and the people who make cheering noises when Trump does something, particularly when Trump does something that would upset Trudeau or Mark Carney.
If he owns the libs.
Right, right.
When he does something that they think is against the, you know, the liberal prime minister, they cheer.
And I ask them, and there's several people on Facebook that I have just done this to, why are you cheering for Trump?
Like, this is a strange situation where you have, you are part of a country and yeah, maybe you didn't vote for this prime minister, but he's your prime minister.
And he, I mean, this prime minister hasn't done anything yet that's, you know, totally screwed you over.
He might yet, who knows?
But he also might give you everything you want, as we, as we said earlier.
But he's also your duly elected prime minister of your sovereign nation.
Yeah.
And Trump is the psychotic leader of an imperialist nation.
This would be like a Ukrainian cheering for fucking Putin.
Yeah, yeah, really.
For real.
Because he's said many times that he wants Canada to be the 51st state.
This used to be just a joke that we'd hear from every once in a while, from people who had no idea, would barely be able to point out Canada on a map.
But would point out, well, since we have this border here, why don't you just get rid of this thing and be the 51st state?
Ha ha.
Good joke.
Moving on.
But yeah, why?
Why would you cheer for that?
Like, like, and that's a, you know, people might not like having to ask that question, but that's a good question to ask.
Why do you cheer for Trump?
Especially when Trump is saying things in the context that that's working against your interest.
Like, like we had a situation where he was putting on tariffs on Canada and Canadians were cheering for them.
Like, why are you cheering for Trump in that situation?
Like, he's working to reduce the ability to sell products that will natively affect our economy.
Yeah, if you're not building houses, chances are your industry sells to U.S. markets, so terrorists will screw you over.
Yeah.
Like, why would you cheer for Trump in that situation?
That's a very strange condition under which anyone in Canada should cheer for Trump.
Well, yeah, but that's also, I think, sort of a symptom of our at the risk of sounding totally unintentionally intellectual, our Western cultural hegemony.
Like Canada and the United States, our media, our entertainment, our popular culture, like it all blends together, right?
Like Canadians do have a separate and distinct identity, but there is a great deal of bleed of American culture north of the border because their media dominates our airwaves.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, it's the reason why we have control laws.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that a lot of people who fall into the like hard right political camp don't really see borders.
They look for any champion they can find who's a righty.
Yeah.
Right.
Which is scary.
Which is really scary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They see it as an ideological thing rather than a hometown thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And right now that's the right-leaning populist to the south of us.
So we put together a couple counter-arguments here, or at least I did.
Jeff didn't do anything for this.
Oh, I'm such a bagged lunch here.
I'm totally alone.
He's a freeloader.
Absolutely.
I'm prepared.
Yep.
Okay.
Just so we got that straight.
It's on the record.
So we touched on this briefly, but we're going to go over it a little more pointedly right now.
If we give Alberta what it wants, whenever it makes noises about separation, then what would stop them from continuing to do it again and again to get more and more things?
If we're to believe that Albertans have a list of grievances, and if we placate those grievances, they'll be satisfied.
What's going to make us think that they'll appreciate it?
Like Danielle Smith is premier now, and she's doing this presumably with a list of, well, not presumably with a list of demands.
She published a list of demands.
And if we give her all those things, and then she's premier for a while and she goes away and there's another premier in 10 years, what's to stop that premier from saying, hey, I didn't get a political win from this.
We need another political win.
We should go back to that pool.
It worked really well.
We should make more noises about separation because I need my piece of this.
What do you think?
What should we is there?
Is there any reason to do this?
Well, I think we beat this one down pretty hard already before.
No, beat it down harder, Jeff.
Harder.
Rub their nose against it.
Like I said, it depends on who you're dealing with because I think I'm hopeful that there is the majority of this separatist movement in Alberta would be placated by another pipeline.
Like I think an eastern pipeline's coming, honestly.
Like this legislation that's coming through and all the talk that we're hearing, my gut tells me that Carney's probably going to ram a pipeline out east.
And he's either going to make Quebec take it or he's going to make Ontario take it.
But if he made Quebec take it.
Well, they'd both have to take it, right?
Yeah, but like if he forced it through Quebec, that would be, I think, a win that would placate a great number of Albertans.
I think The purely phallic imagery would populate political cartoons four weeks after the announcement, I'm sure.
Alberta would just love to lay one great big long thong of a pipeline right across Quebec.
And I think that would placate a lot of them.
But like, you're also dealing, like we said, with some ideological extremists who, yeah, would never be placated by anything, no matter how much we give them.
And part of that is because their gripe is based on a slight, which you can never mend.
And part of it is because they're being manipulated by media forces and interests that want to make sure they always stay angry about that because it makes them easier to control.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Right.
Like, there's a reason why the media didn't say anything about the pipeline being finished.
Yeah.
Because that's not news that's going to inflame an Albertan.
There was no points to be made from that in Alberta.
Exactly.
Yay, the pipeline was finished.
Trudeau gave you everything you wanted.
No, that doesn't.
That wouldn't sell any newspapers.
so yeah I think Carney's going to take an honest swing at trying to play Kate Alberta but But I don't know how successful it's going to be because a great deal of this movement is basically objectively the behavior of a spoiled child that's just going to keep throwing tantrums every time it doesn't get what it wants.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So that's how you, you know, how many people think it's a good idea to keep giving their child a cookie every time it screams.
So next, some separatist rhetoric claims that BC will be somehow forced to separate with Alberta because with Alberta gone, BC will have its trade with the rest of Canada completely cut off, right?
Number one, wrong.
We have several routes around you, but number two, we also sit on a coast.
Access to trade is not a concern for the province of British Columbia.
No, no, I mean, there is a little bit of a point here because all those railroads that go from BC to Ontario, they go right through Alberta.
To try to divert those north through all that muskeg would be adding days to the trip and years to the development.
And it would take us like five years to get around that.
I mean, I mean, the grand scope of a nation, five years isn't all that much, but I mean, it would be an inconvenience.
The other route is south through the U.S., right?
Which right now is not a great route.
I don't know.
It would be inconvenient.
It would be very inconvenient.
But what they're saying here is, what they're really saying here is that this would screw over BC and that they're okay doing that to totally screw over BC and the rest of Canada.
Like, that's what they're really saying.
And like, how much of just a dick move is that?
Like, how happy should they be for that?
And why should BC and the people in it look at that and say, that's who I want to be in a new nation with?
Oh, yeah, exactly.
Like, it's, it's like, it's, it's a tremendously ignorant position to take, right?
Yeah.
To simultaneously engage in Schouten Freud joy over screwing over another province by cutting them off from trade and forcing them into a position where they have to join you.
Are you Donald fucking Trump?
Like, are you interested in the fantasy of a neighboring province coming to you, begging on hands and knees to join your nation?
Back the fuck off, man.
We're part of Canada.
Yeah.
Like, I just, I don't understand.
I personally have trouble believing that anybody holds that standpoint, truly.
Anybody holds the standpoint that they're happy that it would screw over BC?
And then simultaneously believe that BC would willingly enter into nationhood with Alberta after Alberta put us in the position by separating from Canada.
Well, fuck BC, but also BC would come and join us.
No, no.
I think there are people who think this way.
I think this is, they see it as a thumbscrew ultimatum and that BC will see sense.
This is sort of in the conversations, in the conversations in line trucks where this has sort of happened.
That's generally the way it goes.
I try to stay silent in those conversations.
Just like, I don't want to make excessive generalizations, Spence, but like conversations in line trucks, you're not exactly speaking with.
Nope, I'm not.
Right.
No, no.
But I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense and it wouldn't work, but most of this plan wouldn't work.
And a lot of them are enthusiastic about it anyway.
Yeah, true.
Like, this is, I mean, we're trying to back a crazy person away from a ledge when we try to convince people not to do this.
That's the point.
Yeah.
So the next counter argument, which I have not prepared, Jeff, because I didn't think of it early enough, but it's an argument that was used a lot when Quebec was talking about separating.
So, of course, it works here just as well, which is that if Canada is divisible in this way, then so is Alberta.
What makes anyone think that a deal couldn't be made with just the southern part of Alberta to stay with Canada?
And just, you know, if you're really going to landlock Alberta, taking away the southern part that no longer, in a lot of cases, hardly has any oil and gas.
The city-state of Grand Prairie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Grand Prairie to from Grand Prairie to Edmonton to Lloyd Minster and up as one province and as far south as Red Deer.
And then, you know, left-leaning Calgary, along with, I mean, there's a definitely case being made there.
A lot of that territory right now is strongly conservative, but, you know, a very large portion of the abandoned wells are in that southern part of Alberta.
The wells that the people who are meant to be looking after this oil field business have sort of let shirk for several decades.
And now almost, you know, there was at one time over 100,000 wells that were, you know, not abandoned properly or at all.
A lot of that problem is in southern Alberta.
It's a place that's just, you know, been sort of neglected.
And to a lot of the farmers in southern Alberta, it's just a bunch of wellheads and fields that they still have to mow around and they're no longer getting paid to have it there.
And they're just kind of pissed about it.
And also, I mean, if this is about separating the area that's making the money, in quotes, from the area that's just sucking all the money away, then the same case could be made about northern Alberta versus southern Alberta.
I mean, why are you going to support, you know, college town in Lethbridge, right?
All those arts students there.
What do we need arts college for?
Like, arts doesn't do anything.
It's not going to help the oil field.
Like, what's that even for?
That's just extra money that's not needed that we could save to do other things with.
That's just extra tax dollars that don't need to be spent.
Like, why does the University of Calgary have all those arts courses?
For the same reason, like, you know, we don't need that.
That can go away.
Why does any of that stuff that we help to, you know, why does all that agriculture get all those tax breaks?
They're just a bunch of freeloaders who aren't paying enough tax in that case, right?
Like, that, you know, Alberta has a lot of tax breaks for people who work in agriculture for a very good reason because we want them to keep making food.
It's a shit job.
Like, they need something to keep them in this business that feeds everyone.
But, I mean, if you're really going to separate it into the haves and have-nots, you know, there's a case to be made that, yeah, you know, separate that thing.
You know, they have two separate issues going on there.
Why wouldn't we want to divide it up and carve our own piece of the newly made state of Alberta and carve it up and have a peace come back?
Like, Albertans haven't thought about that.
They think that Alberta is totally not going to separate itself, but Canada can be separated.
What do you think of that?
I think I think every extremist thinks that they're part of a vast.
Everyone loves my idea.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Unstable genius.
Well, I mean, this was one of the arguments that was fairly effective in Quebec, as I understand most of those discussions, which was that, you know, there were entire regions that didn't really want to separate, right?
And, you know, why shouldn't Quebec just divide itself up and some portion of it leave?
Which was really going to suck for Quebec because all the cities were going to stay with Canada.
Especially Montreal, which would be much more difficult for the rest of Quebec to survive even without Montreal there.
So the last thing I want to say about this in sort of wrapping up is that we make these arguments.
Yeah, we want Alberta to stay, but we want Alberta to stay because it would be better for Alberta and Albertans.
It would be drastically terrible for Alberta and Albertans for them to separate and under any condition to separate and become their own landlocked country or to become the 51st state.
That would be OBC.
Yeah, for friends and relatives of mine.
It's the same reason why we want Alberta.
I mean, most of the crux of the argument about and the discontent with Alberta is centered around climate and climate change.
You know, the rest of Canada would love for Alberta to start working on developing some other industries because we see a world in the future where we use other sources of energy that don't contribute to as much carbon as the energy sources we have now.
And that maybe by doing that, maybe we can avoid real catastrophe, right?
And on the road to doing that, those oil jobs are going to go away.
Like if the rest of the world, if the rest of the world, like India and China and eventually many other nations moved away from needing oil and coal and all these other things, those jobs in Alberta, like the pipeline to the West Coast, would also be totally useless.
Right?
Like it would be gone, right?
Like the only reason to think that the oil few, the that oil has a future is because the U.S. hasn't gotten on board with a climate change agenda to really solve this thing.
But if the biggest market, along with the other ones that are becoming very, very big, if it changed and said, okay, we're really going to do this now, we're going to stop using all these products that put more carbon in the air, then Alberta would really be screwed, right?
Like they should use their money that they have now from all this oil money to work on other things that they could do to still have an economy and jobs when we get to a point where the demand for oil is going to go down if we are going to be successful with climate change.
Yeah, they're really going to be missing the equalization payments if they separate.
Oh yeah, they're going to need those equalization payments at that point.
Oh yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
And I just remembered another counter argument that we have to wedge in here at the end, which is that not the only factor for Quebec, but a factor for Quebec that was notable was that all the talk about separation really affected the amount of investment in a lot of the businesses and things that happened there, which negatively affected their economy, right?
It wasn't the only thing that has negatively affected their economy, but it is a factor in something.
And when you want your economy to go with all the positive factors, and as few negative as possible, that's one more negative on the list that's notable enough that you could measure the input.
I don't know exactly what, you know, economists go through this stuff and mention them in articles, but they don't have, you know, it's hard to say that the Quebec economy would be 20% better if this didn't happen.
It's hard to say that exactly.
But they generally say, no, this definitely influenced decisions about investments in businesses in Quebec because international businesses especially didn't know what the status of the situation would be.
They didn't know which set of rules they would have.
Would they be Canadian rules?
Would they be a whole new set of rules?
It were just for Quebec, right?
What kind of export rules would there be?
All that uncertainty led to fewer investment dollars in Quebec.
And not just international businesses, but like even Canadian businesses were less likely to investigate, to invest, not investigate, invest in things in Quebec because of this.
And the same thing is starting to happen in Alberta already with this very loud noises about separation is that some companies, international oil companies maybe, are saying, yeah, okay, well, I was going to expand this project, but now I don't know if I want to because maybe I expand it and then I won't be able to use that pipeline to BC that I'm already using for a lot of my product.
Because Alberta separates BC sticks with Canada and says get stuffed.
Yeah.
And they just shut it down because they say we didn't want this pipeline anyway.
Or starts charging exorbitant royalties.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like, you know, so that's already starting with some ventures in Alberta.
And maybe they go through with it, maybe they don't.
But this is a question for Albertans.
Do you want to create all this uncertainty that could negatively affect your economy?
Or do you think you can just spin that into how dare they make us do this separation that negatively affected our country?
That sounds more likely, actually.
That sounds more likely.
I've already had some people say things like, we're not the ones causing the problem.
You're making us do all this bad stuff.
So, you know, you're the real problem.
Oh, yeah.
No, man.
You know, you're the one advocating for change, and the change would be bad.
So you're the one that's causing the problem.
I'm sorry.
That's just how logic works.
Yeah.
So any final thoughts, Jeff?
Well, the whole thing, to be honest, makes me very sad.
I don't really see the gambit succeeding in any meaningful way.
I'm hopeful that once Kearney makes a few significant gestures, like an Eastern pipeline and perhaps some tax relief, that that might take enough wind out of the sails of the separatist movement that this goes away where it belongs to the dustbin of history.
But in the interim, it's a pretty scary time.
And I never thought I would find myself in a position where I had to argue for, argue in favor of maintaining Canadian sovereignty and Canadian unity.
It just, yeah, boggles the mind.
I will admit, Jeff, that when I was much younger, a much younger man and less wise, I made similar noises about Western Canadian separatism.
18 and 19-year-old me was all for it as a young man looking to make change in the world at any cost.
Absolutely.
That would be tremendous.
That would be great.
But, you know, I hadn't seen very much of the world yet.
I didn't have a wider view.
I grew older and wiser.
And yeah, I think it would be a remarkably terrible idea if it went that way for any collection of provinces that did it.
You know, even Quebec.
It would be a slow slide to becoming whatever the U.S. wanted them to be.
Whether it was a state or whether it was, you know, just a lone nation that was so dependent on the U.S. for everything in its market that a state or a Puerto Rico.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
A territory that doesn't even get to represent itself.
Yeah.
So with that, we're not going to have any more uncomfortable silences.
We're going to, we're going to sign off right here, Jeff.
Right here.
It's done.
All right.
Over.
I don't want to hear any more of this separation crap because we solved it right here.
No, I'm kidding.
There's going to be more.
I know it.
That number is still creeping up in effectiveness.
So until it starts creeping down and gets to a number that's manageable, this drum will have to be beat.