Danielle Smith's proposed referendum features nine questions designed to seed separatist ideas rather than establish a genuine mandate, with a petition by former MLA Thomas Luke Kasich already securing over 440,000 signatures against the government's unverified claims. The hosts critique non-constitutional proposals on immigration and voting as divisive wedge issues mirroring U.S. rhetoric, while dismissing constitutional questions about abolishing the Senate or overriding federal laws as nonsensical within a federal system. Ultimately, this strategy acts as a "smokescreen" to exploit grievances and justify future sovereignty pushes, proving that threatening separation is not a good faith method for constitutional dialogue. [Automatically generated summary]
So, yeah, yeah, we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with Patrick.
Hi.
My friend and person who helps me do these episodes.
I don't have an official title for you.
Do you want a title?
No, I like the kind of loose introduction.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
I'll come up with a new one each time.
Sure.
Yeah, yeah.
Throwing out random little bits of history.
I'd be like, the guy who, no.
The guy who once did this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait.
No crime.
Yeah.
Nothing actionable.
Yeah.
So before we start, I want to let people know that if they have any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear on this podcast, then they can send an email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And yeah, no other preamble.
I don't have, I think they call it housekeeping when people have like in a podcast, they do, I don't really have any of that stuff.
We don't have housekeeping.
No.
No.
Might need to branch out into housekeeping.
But then it's like added elements of engagement too, right?
So if people start writing in, you know.
Yeah.
If there's someone who puts in a question or a comment or whatever, and I think it's interesting, yeah, I'll throw that in.
But until that happens.
Yeah.
I want to talk today about more Alberta separatist stuff.
Most particularly the fact that there's been talk about a referendum.
There is.
Okay.
So we had to sort this out.
So it's confusing for people who aren't like keeping strict track of all of the things.
There's stuff.
So you'll have a referendum.
You'll be triggered.
You'll be forced to do a referendum in Canada if there's a petition that has a large enough number of signatures, right?
And the signatures have to be verified as being residents of the province in which you're doing it, or if it's a national one, they just have to be Canadian.
So there is a petition going around right now that's trying to force a vote about separation from Canada, for Alberta to separate from Canada.
They don't yet have enough signatures.
And this is despite the fact that the number of signatures was reduced by, I think, almost a third.
They only need about, I think it's just a little over a third, like 40% or something of the number they used to need. to have to trigger a specific question on a referendum.
But the Daniel Smith government reduced that number and they still haven't reached it.
Now, there's another petition.
So this is, we have two petitions here, right?
So a different petition started from a former Alberta MLA member of the Legislative Assembly named, his name was Thomas Luke, Thomas Luke Kasich, I think his name is.
I only saw it one time.
But he is a former member of the, I think he's now still a member of the NDP party, but he began a petition to sort of reject separatism.
I don't know the wording on the petition, but it's meant to put a question to have a referendum to vote to stay rather than to leave or something like that.
I haven't read it.
That's weird.
He got, he started not, I think just a little before the separatism petition started.
And long ago, like months ago already, he already got to 440,000, I think, signatories.
And he stopped getting more.
He brought them into the commission you got to bring them into and they verify them all and they're all good or whatever.
And it's a stamped referendum and nothing's been done with it.
And the other one has until May 1st to get enough.
And I think the number they need to get to is something like 190,000.
But they haven't got there yet.
I think I don't know what their number is.
They keep saying what numbers they have and they keep bragging about how many signatures they're getting per day, which I think the last brag I heard was at 10,000 per day.
And I was like, well, 10,000 per day, you would have been done a long time ago.
Yeah.
Like that would only take 19 days.
Yeah.
Like what I know how to do math.
It's fine.
You would have been done within three weeks.
They've been at it for months.
They're not at the right number yet.
So they're still working on it.
They're trying to find everyone they can.
There's daily drama among people on Twitter who are going through this every day.
But they're working on it.
Everyone kind of feels they'll get the number by May 1st.
Just for permission to ask the question on this.
This will force the government of Alberta to have a referendum that includes the question of do you want Alberta to separate from Canada.
This was, I mean, we saw this.
There's been two referendums of this in Canada regarding Quebec, right?
There was one in, I think it was in the 80s.
And then there was one in 95 or 96 or something like that.
I remember watching it vividly.
That one was really, really close to half.
It was something like 48.5% said that they would separate or something.
It was really, really close.
But it failed.
So Quebec is still part of Canada.
And as such, Albertans are angry about it.
Most of Alberta separatism is related to Quebec.
Almost all the rhetoric around it is related to Quebec stuff.
It's about Quebec got to do this.
So why don't we get to do it?
Quebec gets to do some other thing.
So why don't we get to do that other thing?
It's so revolving around Quebec ought to do something and we didn't get to do it.
So we want to do it now.
It's like what a child would do if their sibling got something and they didn't get to do it.
Yeah.
Sorry.
That's how I read it.
Convince me that I'm wrong.
I won't be able to convince you about it.
No, I'm not fluent on it.
I'm saying this to people who listen to the podcast.
Convince me that I'm wrong about that.
If you feel that I'm doing your movement wrong by misunderstanding it by my take, feel free to tell me where I'm getting this wrong.
Well, I'm just outing myself as like, you know, someone who wants to prove you wrong on anything, but I just, I don't have the goods this time.
Wow.
That was easy.
I'll roll you over and scratch your belly.
Wow.
Okay.
So now to confuse it, we have two petitions to push referendum questions.
And then we had a few weeks ago, Danielle Smith announcing that there will be a referendum and she has nine questions on it.
Like this is like a social studies test, this thing.
Like usually a referendum is like one question or two questions or something, right?
Yeah, a very core key issue.
The wording on them is always argued over in advance of exactly what wording there is and how confusing it is or how clear it needs to be and all this stuff is, you know, lawyers who become politicians who are arguably the worst people we know all work out what this wording should be on these referendums.
And that's what we get.
But this is nine questions.
So the first question that comes up when as soon as you see a government asking you, we need the public's input on nine individual things.
The first question that comes up is, why don't you just have an election and claim that these things are your platform?
And then the voters can vote on whether they want a government that has these issues as its platform.
Why do you want to ask the people midway through your term about these nine things that are seemingly pressing issues?
Right.
So let's go through the questions.
Let's have a look at them and see if we can see what's really happening here.
Well, right before we do that, is there some other legal process?
Like, let's say before we understand what the changes are that are being presented, is there another legal process that she could have or should have followed to have these same effects?
Like, say, like you said, if they campaign on that, on the promises of everything contained in these referendum motions, what then?
Because isn't she already basically in power to be able to enact or what gap is this referendum closing for her, I guess?
Well, we're going to get into that because I don't think like referendums typically are not like people in recent memory refer to the Brexit referendum.
The Brexit referendum was in a different country.
It had a binding part of it.
It was as soon as you got over, I don't know what the percentage was, as soon as there was more than a certain percentage of people voting for Brexit, the government was mandated to do the people's bidding and leave the EU.
And so that's exactly what happened in the Brexit referendum that happened, you know, 2017 or whatever it was.
Special Group Referendums00:12:09
But these are non-binding referendums, as far as I can tell.
None of them are binding.
Even the one in Quebec in 95 or 96 or whatever was not a binding referendum.
If it had been over 50% instead of 48.5% or whatever, it wouldn't have bound that, it wouldn't have, you know, they wouldn't have just drawn the borders up right away and said, okay, yep, we're out.
You know, like the government had already come up with a method, a system, like a process for a province leaving because this had already been talked about for quite a long time in Quebec about Quebec leaving.
So they hammered out a process for what it would look like for a province to leave, what steps would have to occur and all this stuff.
And so that they worked that out.
and that process is still in place for alberta if alberta decides it's you know if right now it doesn't look like a referendum on this issue will garner nearly the kind of support that this has in quebec Right now, it's looking somewhere between like 25 to 30% would vote to leave Canada if it were just held like today.
But even if, you know, something changed, you know, some drastic world event changed and Alberta said, yeah, you know, we're out, you know, and 80% of them voted to leave, they'd still have to go through this process, right?
And there's a bunch of steps and there's other provinces that get their say and there's money that's got to change hands because believe it or not, when Quebec was wanting to leave originally, people in Alberta were like, yeah, what about all this money that they owe or whatever?
And so there was, there's debts to be settled.
There's all kinds of things that have to happen.
It's like a divorce.
Well, yeah, yeah.
There's, there's like a, yeah, there's like a, yeah.
So I think I was looking at these and I was, at first I was thinking, well, maybe we should just pick a couple and kind of dive deep on them.
But then I changed my mind on that and I decided that I want to, I want to look at the questions in their totality.
I think that's more instructive to what's really happening.
And it's a better conversation.
It's more, it's a more interesting discussion.
Okay.
So there's nine questions and they're, they've been sort of divided.
I think this must be an informal division, but they're they're divided into two sections.
One is referred to as non-constitutional questions and the other is constitutional questions.
And the difference just is exactly what it means.
The constitutional questions have to do with proposed changes to the Canadian Constitution.
But you will notice, first of all, that there is a pattern to these questions.
All of the questions either start with or contain after a clause the phrase, do you support the government of Alberta verb noun adjective?
Like, do you support the government of Alberta to do this, to do that, to do, right?
They're all worded this exact way, which I think feels a little already giving something of a theme going on here.
So, but as we go through it, people will hear that.
And then we'll also talk about other things that are common amongst these questions and what else might be really happening as we look.
I try to read between the lines here.
So there's five questions.
Patrick, because I already talk a lot on this podcast, why don't I take the odd numbered questions and then you read the even numbered questions and then it's like a social studies class, I can show you.
Yeah.
All right.
So first question.
Do you support the government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?
All right.
Second question.
All right.
Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially funded social support programs?
Okay.
That is in a different order than the one I have, but it's okay.
I'll just do one that hasn't been done.
Okay.
Do you support the government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially funded programs such as healthcare, education, and other social services?
Next.
And yeah, the next question is, assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their families' use of health care and education systems?
And the fifth question, do you support the government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or citizenship card, to vote in an Alberta provincial election?
So we're just going to look at those five first, and then we'll go to the constitutional ones after.
All right.
So first take, Patrick, just kind of, you know, you have the five questions, the first five kind of in your head.
What's your first take on all of them as a whole?
What do you think?
Like, to me, it sounds like they're trying to raise some sort of bar on participating for the in the, sorry, participating in the benefits, like, you know, the stuff like healthcare and education is definitely immigrant focus.
So I think that they're trying to filter against immigrants using Alberta resources, just from a glance.
Yeah, I mean, these are all sort of laden with a theme of economic anxiety, right?
It has a pulling their own weight kind of feel to it.
It's some of us have earned all this pile of wealth we have and others haven't.
They're just a bunch of freeloaders who just showed up.
Why should we share our wealth?
Yeah.
And so it feels like the overall theme to me is like giving the idea that the people who are in Alberta now have a special status or might gain a special status or might assert a special status in granting the government to do all these things.
And I think that's, I mean, to me, this looks like tiptoeing toward sovereignty.
What do you think?
What do you think of that?
I'm not really sure how to apply a lens or filter to that because, I mean, the contrast in my mind is people who don't live there yet, right?
To assert the dominance of the people that live there now.
I don't know.
For me, that seems a little bit just the natural state of any sort of question that you pose to a populace.
Yeah, but the idea being put in all these is that, you know, yes, you're going to get health care.
You're going to vote in elections.
You're going to, you know, your children are going to go to school and there's going to be social services.
But do you think everyone deserves them?
I mean, that's the general theme that we're getting here.
Do you think that other people who just showed up should have to do more things before they can be included in the special group?
And you're the special group, Alberta and Albertans.
Do you think these other people deserve to be part of that special group?
And I think that theme itself is It feels, first of all, it feels exactly like what's happening in the U.S. right now as far as how the people on the right in the U.S. look towards immigration.
These questions would sort of are like a soft version of that, but they do have that same flavor.
And I think that I think it's dangerous to do, to let the government to move further on a lot of this stuff.
But another thing I will say is, and I need to do, it's time to do a shout out to a podcast here.
For anyone who's wants to get a lot more details on Alberta politics, it's been a topic lately and it's been in more and more U.S. circles even.
It's been a topic.
If anyone is interested in getting a lot more details, there's a weekly podcast called The Breakdown.
Now, The Breakdown is a common name for podcasts.
There's quite a few.
So this guy had to name his The Breakdown with Nate Pike.
And that's the actual name.
I just call it The Breakdown because there's only one of those I listen to.
But if you're searching for it, you'll have to look for the one that's with Nate Pike.
He's a guy from Calgary.
And it's a good podcast.
It's long.
Every week they do between like two to four hours kind of thing, but they do a lot of detail on the Alberta politics, the movements of individual MLAs.
They'll have a lot of clips on this stuff.
And they, I haven't heard an episode from them where they go over these questions, but they tackle a lot of the things that Daniel Smith has said related to this and debunk some of the lies that are related to it.
And a lot of these things are that they're sort of asking the people of Alberta to give them.
They don't even need to ask for these things.
For the most part, these things are not an issue.
People who just show up like if you're from another country, doesn't matter which, and you just show up to Canada.
People Just Show Up00:04:05
You fly to Calgary and you uh declare, I am, I need asylum from wherever I ran from.
Uh um, give me things.
Now the the Alberta government will probably give you a, you know housing, but it won't be like a house, it'll be like a hotel room and it'll be temporary right they'll, you know, the government of Canada will say okay well, there's a better place, and it'll be in Ontario or something.
And I mean, you might not be in Alberta for long, you might move to Bc, you might go to Saskatchewan, like there might be some other place where they they bring you, but like oh you, you didn't have a plan when you showed up.
Like okay well, you know you're here.
Now you don't.
You know you can't go back to the nation you you went from, because we are decent people and won't send you back to whatever terrible place you came from.
If it really is a terrible place, if it's not a uh, not a asylum that we recognize, if it's like you know, i'm running from uh, a bad tax bracket in Britain, we'll be like yeah dude look, here's a flight back there like that's, that's not what this asylum thing is for.
Um, but if you showed up and you're you know, as i've met people in Alberta who who did this you showed up as a, as a, a person who showed up to work in the oil field you will still have to live in Alberta sometime before you become a permanent resident.
And be upon.
Becoming a permanent resident is when you get to access most of the social services that are available.
Um, your children do get to get educated.
Like, if you show up with a family, like it doesn't make any sense to me to say yeah, we need you to have stayed here so much time to be a permanent resident and only then can your children go to school.
That seems a little bit like what are we really doing here?
But dividing all these things up into uh, you should only have like what feels like an underlying theme in these questions that I get from Other conversations with people who sort of feel this way.
And this is why I think it's one of the themes that often comes up: why should I have to pay tax money for things for services that I don't use?
That's a common thing that comes up.
It's almost like a libertarian sort of an idea.
And we don't know is not a strong libertarian movement in Canada, although if it was going to occur anywhere, it would be in Alberta.
But there are people that this question makes sense to.
To me, it does not.
If I don't have any children of my own, I am still okay with my taxes going to fund schools because I don't want to be surrounded by ignorant people.
Right.
If I start a business and I want to hire people, I want those people to have some basic level of education.
And having paid money into the government that they use in turn to provide schools will provide me a potential pool of employees that have that basic level of education.
And that's a thing that, you know, not everyone starts a business that could do that.
But if you ever did, you would want that.
And also in that line, you'd want health care for your employees so they show up healthy and ready to work.
And that you don't have to have to fork over for them if you need them to be healthy.
Yeah.
It's a boon to industry to have health care provided by the government.
This is a thing that's been mentioned sometimes in the conversations in the U.S., but they still haven't sort of caught on.
Yeah.
Also, I want to, I have never needed a hospital.
Healthcare for All Employees00:06:20
Well, actually, that's a lie.
One time I needed a hospital.
One night of my life, I needed a hospital.
But the rest of my life, I've been illness free.
I still like that my money goes to pay for hospitals, not just because I might need one in the future, but also because of anyone else I know that might need to get medical care.
They just get it.
They just go and get it.
And that's it.
And if someone shows up here and they need their appendix taken out, I don't want to be part of the society that says, yeah, that's real shit luck.
I guess you're going to have to wait till your permanent residence status, you know, comes up in however many months before you can get that appendix taken out because it's probably going to kill you in the next two days.
So, yeah.
Geez.
Pardon me.
Geez, I just think that I think that all of these are working on a theme that are meant to meant to appeal to selfishness in exchange for hospitality.
And I think that's a thing that should be part of this conversation.
I think it should be mentioned in general.
And yeah, what do you think?
Well, you know, looking at each of these motions a little more closely, I mean, they give rise to questions for me that, you know, like, why, why have a motion saying giving the government of Alberta increased control over immigration only for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels?
Like, I don't know how you really qualify that.
It just sounds like this already is assuming that it's too much.
So we're already saying decrease rather than to say even some sort of objective neutral language.
And then if they really believed that it was past sustainable levels, well, then whatever it is, you know, it should just be for taking increased control if they were going to make that motion.
And then throwing on that little bit of red meat at the end of that motion to say giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities.
Well, just reading that, I already think Albertans are getting ripped off on having first priority on new employment opportunities.
Yeah, it implies that this, you're not getting that now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, whether or not that's that's the case, if you are prioritizing economic anything, you want positions filled.
Right.
And so there, if there's some other sort of protection that needs to be offered to Albertans due to immigration, I don't know.
I don't know that they're giving it any sort of clear presentation.
Like one can only wonder, you know, and then after that, the next one is like Alberta approved immigration.
Well, I think Alberta is going to have a fair way of approving that immigration where it sounds like, you know, like, well, now that it's the option to approve it, it's like, you know, it's going to be a bunch of red stamping until, you know, there's just the immigrants that they want.
That's right.
And then, you know, I don't, I don't know, like a lot of this is going to prey on my ignorance just as I look at it, but requiring all individuals with non-permanent legal immigration status.
So I yeah, it's already a lot of implications in here about There's probably a lot of illegal immigrants who are stealing things from you, sucking on the social support network.
And by the way, that last question also probably voting illegally and, you know, preventing proper control of democracy because they shouldn't be because we're not checking the, you know, for a passport or birth certificate for anyone.
Yeah, it's this to me, these questions are meant to put ideas in people's heads rather than ask actual questions about what people want.
This is more of a way to insert wedge issues than it is to establish a mandate.
And that's, that's what I think is really happening here.
That's why there's so many of them.
That's why they're worded the way they're worded.
That's, yeah, this is a campaign thing that's happening here that's meant to cause division.
So we should get to the constitutional questions.
What do you think?
So I, yeah, but one, one question, like, do you know what the difference is between like it sounds like there's legal immigrants who are permanent and legal immigrants who are non-permanent?
And I, I, I don't, I'm not sure if what that differentiation is.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So these questions are also really crazily worded.
And if you're really trying to parse them, unless you're really, really up on, you know, how immigration works, you're not going to understand, you know, a non-permanent legal immigration status.
Yeah.
So, and I'm not any kind of real professional at this, but I know a little.
I know that when people come to Canada, they have to declare whether they plan to stay or whether they plan to visit, right?
Crossing Borders Easily00:10:10
There's tourism.
We have tourism comes here.
People visit for a few weeks at a time.
And then, you know, and they bring up, they come from some other place.
They have a passport when they show up.
It's possible to show up without a passport, but that would be really strange because you're generally not even getting on a flight unless you have a passport.
So the route that you take to come here without a passport would be really strange.
You could cross the U.S.-Canada border so easily.
So much of it is just farmland.
There's not even a fence.
There's farms that exist on both sides of the border and they have, you know, like cows that graze because the cows don't need passports and they just, you know, graze on one side or the other.
And yeah, it's possible to cross that way.
It's not a common way to cross because it's very circuitous.
I mean, if someone was going to come, I don't know, like, I don't know, from Central America up through all the way through like Mexico and then get into the United States.
And then they decided that they're also going to go to Canada.
They already went through like probably a few countries and then also Mexico.
Like Mexico is not a small country.
It took that much time.
And then you're going to go through the United States as well.
Like just to get here?
You've got to be determined.
Yeah.
And most people, once they see the weather in the warmer places in southern U.S. and they think about the weather in Canada, yeah, we don't get a lot of people trying to come up that way.
Unless there's some kind of a, you know, a humanitarian crisis in the U.S., we're unlikely to get, you know, refugees or something across the border.
Like it's, it's just not a thing that happens enough that we would worry about.
I think it happens, but I think a lot of the people who do, who cross that border in an illicit fashion are trying to move drugs.
I think they're drug mules.
Yeah.
I have a quick question too before the constitutionals.
It's just that last one about the requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
Like, isn't, I don't know, I hear a lot about the issues around ID requirements for voting.
I don't really, that's one thing I don't find controversial.
I feel like everybody should be providing some proof of eligibility if you have a process that rests on ironclad legitimacy, like will of the people stuff.
But the other side of that for me too is like, I don't know anybody who would care so much about voting that they wouldn't have this stuff like their ID in tow anyway.
Right.
Like, yeah.
Having ID generally for everyone is a thing that happens more often in Canada than the United States.
We get flooded with a lot of misinformation from the United States about this.
There are people who are less likely to have things like ID.
Older people sometimes don't have it in some parts of the U.S.
And getting it is also sometimes a problem.
They have mobility issues.
So a lot of the arguments around that are valid for them.
It's on the same issue here.
Yeah.
So they're not as valid for us.
Yeah.
Do you think this is a way for her to rope in that kind of American sentiment?
It definitely is.
That's exactly what it is.
It's an attempt to latch onto the arguments that are had in the U.S. and are being reverberated here to get some of that sentiment because most of the separatist sentiment is also related to a pro-Trump movement.
It's the overlap is nearly a full circle on the Venn diagram.
So, yeah, it definitely is.
It's just another wedge.
Like if we had need to show ID in Canada, it wouldn't be that big a deal because we've worked really hard to get everyone ID already.
Yeah.
Cool.
So yeah.
Moving on.
Let's hit some of these constitutional questions here.
Do you support the government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to have provincial governments, not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial king's bench and appeal courts?
And the next question is, do you support the government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to abolish the unelected federal Senate?
Yeah.
Do you support the government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution?
They're all the same to allow provinces to opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction, such as health care, education, and social services, without a province losing any of the associated federal funding for use in its social programs.
And then the final question is, do you support the government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province's laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws when the province's laws and federal laws conflict laws?
Yeah.
These are meant to imply that Alberta has been, I mean, I'm saying this because I'm familiar with some of the other rhetoric that's been said surrounding this for several years now, but they're meant to imply that Alberta has been unfairly restrained in its ability to govern itself.
And that theme is meant to is a like inextricable part of, sorry, intrinsic part of the separatist movement is built on this idea that things aren't working as we exist in Canada.
We need to separate in order to do all the things we need to do in order to live a comfortable life.
Like the interface with the federal government is broken.
Yeah, that the federal government is interfering and doing things that are against Albertan's interest and all of this stuff.
Yeah, because they'll say they won't let us build a pipeline for starters.
They won't let them.
The federal government won't let them, Patrick.
Okay.
Why won't the federal government let them?
Except that the federal government bought one for them within the last decade.
The Trans Mountain pipeline, the Trans Mountain pipeline needed to get upgraded, and the BC government was trying to prevent it from being upgraded.
It was in existence since the 60s.
And then the pipeline company that was going to do it was in talks to do this.
And then they were blocked by the BC government.
And then there was some problems.
And so the federal government under Trudeau said, okay, we'll just buy it.
We'll buy the pipeline and then we'll handle all the legal stuff to make it go through.
And then it will get built.
And it did.
It did exactly all those things.
The legal challenges got removed.
The pipeline got expanded.
It is now almost three times the capacity as it was before it began.
And as of now, Alberta is able to move nearly three times the amount of oil out of that pipeline as they did before Trudeau was ever prime minister.
And they didn't thank him.
Instead, they said, why won't you let us build any pipelines?
Feels a little bit like a disconnect between reality and the rhetoric, right?
But this has always been the case, that they think that Canada is holding them back, is preventing them from doing things, is demanding that they reduce carbon emissions.
And this is going to unfairly affect their one business, even though they have more than one business in Alberta.
They claim they only have one business.
And then when we talk about why maybe they should diversify, they say, why do you want us to give up all this oil money?
That's been my, I mean, I don't live there anymore, but I did live there for 16 years.
That was kind of the running theme for a lot of people, especially in the oil field, was why should we give up all this money?
Political Decisions in Court00:15:57
Okay.
But Daniel Smith also says some very confusing things about all of these issues, all of these same ones.
For example, just a few years ago, she mentioned that she wanted Alberta to drastically increase the number of people it had, primarily through immigration.
I can't remember the number that she wanted to get to, but she had some crazy number like to get to like 15 million people or something by 2050.
And I mean, that's like, at the time, it would be more than triple what it was in the province.
They've just recently passed the 5 million mark.
But now, apparently, having all those extra people there is some kind of a burden on the taxpayer in Alberta, and they need to find a way to reduce it so that it can do the thing, which I don't know.
Maybe she just changed her mind.
Maybe she, you know, a more cynical person would say that she invited way too many in and did that on purpose so that she could then later complain about it.
I don't know if I'm quite that cynical.
I don't trust any politicians, but I also don't think that they're, you know, seeing far enough ahead to have worked that plan out.
I think this is just the grievance of the moment that works for her.
So that's why it comes up.
But so can we kind of just quickly go point or motion by motion?
The first one, what like selecting justices for the king's bench and appeal courts?
Yeah, but for the provincial king's bench and appeal courts.
So is that, is there, has that ever been an issue before because federal government appointed judges provinces?
There's three levels of judge judiciary in every province.
There's just the judges, the kind of general judges.
Then there's the one step above that is the appeal court.
And I think there's several.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there's several appeals courts in each province, except for very small provinces.
And then there's the king's bench, which is the provincial version of like a supreme court.
Okay.
Like a provincial supreme court.
And the sticking point here is that the province, whenever there is vacancies on the judicial bench, the main judicial bench, the premier of the province at the time and the government, the provincial government directly assigns judges to those.
They select them and then they put them on the bench.
And then the appeal court and the king's bench court are selected by the federal government.
However, the federal government selects by agreement, they select from recommendations made by a seven-person panel.
And the seven-person panel is made up primarily of judges from Alberta.
Like we're talking like members of the Bar Association and this sort of thing, right?
I mean, this is where it's made up.
So you already have significant input into who these are.
It would be like it used to be a problem in Canada when we had our governor general was always a British person.
This was always like a job you get, you know, the king would give to a friend of his.
Oh, I like you, but I don't like you that much.
So go live in Canada and you get to be the governor general of Canada.
This is how we got like, you know, Earl Gray, who made the Gray Cup and Earl, you know, the Earl of Stanley made the Stanley Cup.
These guys were lower British lords who were favored by the king, but not so favored that they wanted them around all the time, moved them out to Canada.
They got to be, you know.
But after a while, we got to pick our own.
And even still, the king of England still appoints the governor general.
But since the, I think it's sometime in the 60s when this change began, they've picked a Canadian person that the prime minister recommends.
Right.
Someone a little more representative and invested in Canadian interests.
Right.
And of course, the governor general doesn't have a great deal of like executive power.
Right.
But they do technically have full veto power over every bill.
They have to sign every bill.
Every bill is signed in by, and that's the hand of the king, right?
This is the person who's instead of the king.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If anything ever happened in Britain, we'd get that guy coming in claiming asylum.
You know, I don't like the tax rate they have for me in Britain.
So does Daniel Smith have any kind of instance where that convention of the federal government taking heed to that provincial committee, like any wild deviation, or is this just kind of like no, she just doesn't mention it so that she can say, oh, Trudeau, he really screwed us on all these judges that made decisions that we don't like.
Which, if you've been paying attention, is so remarkably similar to the U.S. complaints about the Supreme Court of the United States when they make decisions or any other level of a they first look to who well who appointed that judge.
Was that a Clinton appointee?
Right.
I know why.
Talk about who appoints.
Oh, that one was a Bush appointee.
Oh, I know why they decided that way.
Yeah.
For sure.
This is again feeding on the reverberation, the echo from the United States and all of the divisive rhetoric there.
These are all related to the divisions that are happening south the border.
We don't ever really hear that stuff up here, though.
I don't ever hear about like whatever partisan appointee to decisions that I hear.
Or maybe I'm just not paying attention.
And King's Bench in Alberta?
Yeah, no.
No, they're also much better about making decisions in a non-political manner, following the law.
There's a thing that goes along with this rhetoric that is used to justify asking this question is a statistic that was put out that something, it's usually said something like 80% of judges in Alberta that were appointed by the federal government were appointed or gave money to the Liberal Party of Canada.
But it's not really true as these things go.
I mean, I just listened to the breakdown where Nate Pike went through all these numbers.
Of the judges who contributed to political parties, a large percentage contributed to the Liberal Party.
But only like 19% or something of the total judges contributed to any party at all.
So something like only like 15% or something of them contributed to the Liberal Party.
Right.
So it's meant to convey this much more.
Yes, to make it look like they bought their way in or whatever.
And it's like, well, not really.
Also true is that judges in Canada are not meant to make political donations.
So all of the, it's, it's worded such, the, the rhetoric is worded such that it makes it look like the judges are still making donations, but these were donations that were made before they ever became judges.
And they stopped making donations once they became judges.
Right.
So, right.
And so some clever journalist at the, I think it was a Toronto Sun or something, took a look at the list of political nation donations to the political parties in Alberta and looked at the judicial appointments in Alberta over the last, whatever, 15 years and did his own math by the same thing.
And he came up with all kinds of numbers of what percentage of them gave money to the UCP, the United Conservative Party, which is Daniel Smith's party.
And of course, it was a much higher percentage than what it was for the appointees from Trudeau giving to the Liberal Party.
It was just, it was like, okay, well, if we're going to judge that way, shouldn't we also judge these other judges that way?
Or is that unfair?
Yeah.
Like they were not judges before they were judges.
And when they weren't judges, yeah, they might have gave to political parties.
But unless you say that they weren't following the law and they made decisions, like that's the real, the real issue.
And if they, if they weren't, then you should be able to point out the discrepancy between what they said and what the law is.
But there's never, never is that pointed out or even attempted to point out.
It's always just they only made that decision because they were appointed by Trudeau.
And we don't get to appoint all those.
We want the power to do that.
We want to, you know, this won't work if we have to live under the strain of this Canadian roof any longer.
I'm an angry teenager.
I'm going to go join the circus.
Right.
So then the next motion about the unelected federal senate, what's the deal with the Senate?
The federal senate is unelected.
It is, they are appointed by, I believe they're appointed by the governor general.
But they are appointed, again, there's a panel, and I don't know the exact makeup of the panel, but it used to undoubtedly used to all be people from Ontario, but it's no longer all people from Ontario now.
But they have a panel and they work on making recommendations for who should be in the Senate.
And oftentimes this is, it's a lifetime appointment.
So they try to pick people of prominence.
And lately, in the last couple of decades, I think they've tried to pick people who are less involved with political parties, but are still, you know, so more like journalists kind of thing will get this as a as a nod at the end of their careers kind of thing.
Sorry, there's like a lot of dust on my polysaw texts.
What does the Senate even do?
So the Senate has to approve bills.
Okay.
So they have the same, like, as much as the U.S. would like to say that their system is totally different than the British system.
It's actually really important.
They have two houses.
The U.S.
So in the history of this, it's a sort of interesting history.
When they went to make a democracy in Britain, they want to have a representative democracy.
They want to have ridings.
They want to have a representative from each riding would come in.
And so they came up with this system.
And then the problem was that they had all these lords that they couldn't find a way to disenfranchise.
So in Britain, they have a house of lords.
They have the parliament and they have the house of lords.
And the parliament will make the bills as a legislative branch.
And then the house of lords gets veto power over the bills.
They get to say, and then they also kind of give some input or whatever.
They're like, you know, we're going to say no, but we're going to say no because of this particular thing.
If we can get this changed to something more reasonable, whatever.
And then they work with them to get it done.
And this is sort of, and so Canada, when we got ours, we didn't have any lords and we didn't really want them.
So we came up with a senate.
It's not a word we came up with, obviously.
It's been a use since Roman times.
Romans had a Senate, whatever.
But we styled ours after the British.
Lords were like a lifetime appointment.
So ours are like a lifetime appointment.
You're appointed to become senator and you get to be that for life.
But I think I haven't looked into it, but I think a lot of them retire, right?
They don't just live till they die.
Like it's not like the Supreme Court of the United States where they hold on to power with their little clutches till they're, you know, rotting husks.
I think a lot of them just, you know, want to go fishing for their last few years and they, you know.
So if I had to encapsulate the idea, would it be fair to say then like Parliament, all of our elected representatives, they're there to capture and articulate the will of the people.
And then the Senate is to is there to make sure that the will of the people as captured always fits within the legality of our government?
No, I think the wording that's used is they are the House of that's meant to take, and I think this is a quote, sober second look.
Okay.
Yeah, implying, of course, that the first look was not sober.
Right.
And of course, in Canadian history, they weren't always sober in the Senate either.
Like, right.
But that's the actual wording is that they're meant to make a sober second look.
And this is modeled directly after the House of Lords, which is meant to kind of do the same thing, although I think they don't use the same wording.
And of course, in the United States, it's also the exact same thing.
They don't appoint them.
They're not appointed for life.
They're elected.
But the Senate has veto power over the bills and they do the same thing.
If you want to get this passed, we need to change this because this is not going to fly.
And yeah, it's the same.
It's performing the same function.
It divides the legislative branch into two, one that's creating the things and one that's approving them.
And that's, it's the same function.
It seems a little bureaucratic then.
Oh, yeah.
A lot of bureaucracy.
There's a couple little details that are different between them, but they're essentially in their heart of hearts, they're doing the same job.
The Senate in the U.S., the Senate in Canada, and the House of Lords in Britain.
And the U.S. will, I'm sure I'm going to get roasted about this as soon as people in the U.S. hear it.
No, it's so different.
It's so incredibly different.
It's way different.
Okay, man.
If you want to tell yourself that, if that's what helps you sleep at night, it's, yeah.
But also not, because they're also ridings.
All the members of Congress are also doing ridings.
You're not calling it that, but that's what they are.
Constitutional Amendments Debate00:11:46
So should we consider the value then of abolishing an unelected Senate if that unelected Senate, I mean, do we need a sober second look?
Isn't that what opposition parties are for to bring about any possible opposition in discussion in parliament?
Like, do we need, does, does, has Senate ever saved the day?
I think it has.
In history, yeah, it has.
I don't have the specific examples.
Sure.
But yeah, they've kicked things back.
I think in recent years, there's been more talk of this.
So the Senate has done a better job of like not just phoning it in in the last few decades.
But also, I mean, that might not be because they're worried about keeping their cushy job for life.
They might also, you know, just be a more serious group of people than they used to be.
And they're just taking it more seriously now.
I don't know.
So what's the point of this question on a referendum, though?
Because this is saying, do you support the government of Alberta working with other willing provinces?
I mean, that's not making any assumption about how many other provinces are willing and what would they accomplish even if they work towards that.
Like, what's preventing them now from working with other or I mean, what does working with even mean?
That to me just sounds like disgusting.
No, that's what I mean is that all of these questions, they're not meant to empower the government with a mandate to do anything.
They're meant to seed the ideas into the public's minds that all of these things are a problem and that there is a solution if we just separate.
See, that's a useful reminder for you to give me because I keep looking at these and going like, this is the question by itself.
This is all smokescreen.
And in so many of these cases, there's either like, there's no need for any change to have to happen because there's already wording in place for like how our immigration system works and how our judicial system works and all the rest of it.
Or there's like the ID question, it'd be like, well, go ahead.
It wouldn't hardly change anything at all.
It's right.
This is just a boogeyman wedge issue that you're meant to try to conjure in the minds of the audience that's going to vote in the referendum that this is a big problem.
Oh, we have all these problems and we have to fix them.
Yeah.
Meant to be really enticing to people who see a conspicuous issue emerging out of the South.
By the way, it really makes it egregious because the purpose for having a petition for a referendum is so that the government isn't only puts money into that kind of thing if a significant portion of the population is asking a question about it.
But, you know, we, sorry, I just got a text and I'm, I just got distracted.
But now she's going to have a different referendum, spend the money anyway, even without a petition.
It's not going to happen like at an election, like that's another thing.
Is you?
You can have an elect uh, a referendum, attached to an election and it doesn't cost that much extra money because you're just adding a couple extra pieces of paper.
It takes just a little bit more time in the voting booth um, but again, usually it's just one or two questions, it's not like nine.
No, where you're gonna feel it's.
This is gonna feel for a lot of people like it's a social studies test, like for real, and most people are gonna be like you, their, their poli-sci textbooks are gathering dust and they didn't pick them up before they went to do the referendum, vote on it, and they're not gonna exactly remember all the bits and pieces of why the king's bench and appeals courts are uh, appointed by the federal government and and whether there's a panel or not,
and like they're not going to know all that stuff.
And so this is only going to cause far more issues.
is going to cause people who thought there was a problem or an inkling of a problem to think there's a much bigger problem.
And it's going to cause people who weren't thinking about this at all to start questioning it in a just-asking-questions way and going to get all the wrong answers.
Like, this is meant to, like, as a way to, as a placeholder for if they don't get enough signatures to force an actual separation.
vote, to put a put a foot in the door to maybe do one at another time, or to uh um, elicit in the public more uh uh, feeling like there's more need for it, and along with that will be all the rhetoric that she puts out in press conferences and on radio programs and all this sort of thing.
Yeah, it definitely sounds like the heat is being turned up.
Yeah yeah, it's getting turned up for sure.
Do you uh need to go over these last ones, you think, or do we just start wrapping up?
Uh, I think we could uh, I think we could start wrapping up.
I think it's just like you said, you know it.
That reminder too, about the lens, about what this is framing because yes, you said, it's not giving the province anything very special in terms of a power To deal with a need that's emerging or present now.
It's just a lot of like, you know, every time I, like you said, that little boilerplate beginning about government of Canada working with other governments of other willing provinces, what everything where that word working appears really is you're just talking about talking because there's no actual coalesced will of other provinces to then say, oh, now we're actually going to challenge something about the constitution.
You can talk to whoever you want in other provinces without having a referendum mandate from the people.
This just wants to bring it to the fore that, oh, we're definitely targeting these.
And having it be like a whole referendum for it will lead a lot of people who weren't paying any attention to think these are all a really big deal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also, that last question about having the province's laws supersede the federal laws.
That can never happen as long as you're in a federal system.
Yeah.
It just can't.
It's just not possible.
But it's a way to get people on board to say, well, it could if we left.
It could if these are our federal laws.
Yeah.
Suck it.
It's like it's like at the gas station.
You know, now we're saying that the register inside is trumping the pump outside.
Right.
Yeah.
I know this thought you only spent $25 on fuel, but my register in here says it's $30, so pay it.
Just reverse.
That's funny.
Yeah.
So as just as a little bit of a wrap-up here, I will say that threatening to separate is not a good faith method of beginning conversations about constitutional amendments.
And before Alberta can be trusted to be posing constitutional questions with an honest look at making the entire country better, they need to demonstrate a willingness to stay with the country they claim to want to improve.
Like saying that you're doing this for the benefit of all of Canada would be disingenuous if you're not really planning to stay anyway.
I think that the separation question needs to be fully sorted out before we start talking about constitutional amendments.
For real.
This can't be used as a gun to the head to, if we don't get our constitutional amendments, we're going to blow the thing up.
And also, how much sense does it make to start making amendments to a constitution of a nation that you're kind of gunning to not be a part of anymore?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
Like just pose the question.
If you have the guts and you think you have the support, just go straight for the throat and say, let's separate.
Right.
But the fact that that question isn't on this means that either there's going to be a 10th question once the petition comes in or they're just using this to seed the plant the seeds for a wider separation movement, more popular separation movement on down the line.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I could see that.
These nine questions, just their presence is something that is going to put a little bit of wind in the sails of trying to get that petition to the point where it becomes that 10th question.
And you'd see these nine questions drop off at that point.
Yeah.
So is there an opportunity for them to modify or simplify or even strike some of these questions from the proposed?
Or is this all have to go through all at once?
I'm not sure exactly the process.
I'm sure that they want to like, if you're going to have a referendum and have it be useful as a question, you want your questions to be clear and understandable.
And ideally, you also want them to be known in advance so that people have some chance to think about them before they go and vote on them.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, changing them around, striking questions, all that stuff, those are things that would happen if you're not that interested in the answers, which it's possible that she's not interested in the answers.
She just wants people to see these questions and think that they're a big problem.
So maybe that already answers itself.
We'll see how this goes.
This referendum, I think, is meant for October.
There's a date set at, pretty sure it's in October.
And if there's a petition that shows up with enough signatures by May 1st, then I'm sure they'll put that on here.
We'll have something new to talk about.
I have a list.
I already have a list of things to talk about.
So we'll get there.
All right.
Okay.
Well, this is very informative for me.
Hopeful Insights00:01:13
I hope you're not.
Good.
I hope it'll be informative for some other people too.
Yeah.
And maybe even some people who aren't from Canada and care a little bit about what's going on in Alberta.
Some people have hazarded to uh, you know, throw opinions out there about Alberta and what will happen or what they think won't happen.
But um, and are you willing to entertain?
Oh, hello kitty?
Yeah, are you?
Uh, are you willing to entertain questions from people outside of Canada?
Or uh yeah comments, and if they want to do that uh, if they're good faith questions, if they're obvious, obvious troll questions then uh, I will treat them as such because uh, i'm Canadian but i'm not obligated to be polite to trolls.
That's sorry, not that.
And so where do they write into?
They send that email to Truthunrestricted at gmail.com and uh, for youtube, only watchers.
You get a view of a kitten passing in front of my mouth.
Yeah, So, but that's I have outro music as well as intro music.