Part III: the separatist campaign has begun

Yes, this picture is cut from the world rat map. Alberta is a place where we constantly strive for success, not throw our hands up in defeat. This is just one visual of how our commitment to finding real solutions has paid off.

In what I’d hoped would be the final installment of a three-part series (part I and II here) detailing the separatist speaking event held in Brooks on May 17, I feel a final analysis to help pull them all together is warranted. Essentially, it’s what I would have written without breaking them up to begin with, but since I like to cite my sources, it works better to have them in writing first.

These two speakers took a more political aspect to the question of separation than the ones before, who focused more on this history of grievances — not that it doesn’t come up, there’s just a greater focus on the politics.

Having heard all the speakers, now, I’d say Cory Morgan is probably best positioned to bring the movement past the already initiated, but I think he would have a fight on his hands because those who have been working on this for 20 years or more (as in, the ones who started in their fifties) have gamed this out in their favour, and they’re pretty set in their ways, I think.

You’ll see.

Cory Morgan, author, host and columnist at the Western Standard

Mr. Morgan began with a snippet from the Globe and Mail, that described western separatism as “primitive and confused, groping for a platform and in search of a leader.”

“It’s sort of true,” he said. “But the bigger issue is that this headline is from December 1980. 45 years. If we have a headline from 45 years ago that matches the circumstances of today, we’re doing something terribly wrong.”

On that, we agree but for very different reasons, I’m sure.

He recalls how the political party he founded in early 2000, Western Independence, was “trounced” by Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservatives in 2001. The party then “blew up” due to party infighting.

“It’s hard to keep us all together,” he said with a laugh. “It’s great to see so many in the same room and no one’s fought yet.”

“I look at the 2023 election (in Alberta); we had five independence-minded parties running in that. If you add the vote of all five of those parties together, it totals 0.8 per cent. We had some good people running and they made some very good points, but when you smack your face on the wall again and again, it’s time to re-evaluate your strategy; the party approach isn’t working.”

“So, let’s learn from our mistakes; we will have a referendum. Premier Smith has given us the means. It gives us something more simple and attainable. So long as we’re always focused on a ‘yes’ vote, we don’t have to get along with each other, we just have to focus on getting to ‘yes’.”

It’s kind of fascinating to listen to someone admit people with this bent cannot get along well enough to run a political party together, without wondering if maybe they also shouldn’t be trusted to try and run a country together, either. That’s just mucking up the dream with pesky details, though.

“If we look at recent history: Brexit. The attitudes are pretty similar. At the beginning, the Prime Minister was so confident ‘let them have it, just let them vote on it — they’ll get their 20 per cent, it’ll be out of the way and it’ll be done'.’ And the academics and the pundits said (paraphrased, I’m sure) ‘the unwashed, just let them have their thing — it won’t happen.’ Boy, were they in for a shock.”

“Because the movement developed beneath them, it developed despite them. That’s what grassroots is about; it’s bypassing the establishment.”

Actually, this is what manipulation is about. Would the citizens of the U.K. have voted to leave if they’d not been lied to about how much money they would save by not being part of the E.U.? All those promises of hundreds of millions to support healthcare never materialized, and neither will they here with the plan these guys have.

These guys are already ahead; Albertans have been told for decades that they’d have so much money if only they didn’t have to be part of this bigger place called Canada. If we didn’t have to listen to Ottawa (or Brussels, as it was for Brexit), they’d have so much money for healthcare!

There are some great comments from people on the eve of the Brexit vote. “We can make our own laws now. We have control of our government again.” Except, they never lost that as part of the E.U.. What they got from Brexit was a loss of trade, an economic crisis, and the inability to travel freely in the rest of Europe as a member-citizen. But I digress.

“The establishment (in the U.K.) has a different attitude today than before they faced an independence referendum,” Mr. Morgan says.

Yeah — the people really showed “the establishment”; they showed them that people will vote for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if they’re just repeatedly assured that it really exists.

“People in here are old enough to remember the 90’s. Remember the attitude towards Quebec when that referendum was being held. They sent busloads of people out to Quebec groveling and begging. ‘Please don’t leave us, Quebec, please, we love you. We’ll buy more poutine, we’ll send more transfer payments. We’ll even cheer the Habs. Whatever it takes, please stay.’ Well, what are they saying today? They’re saying ‘you selfish jerks in Alberta shouldn’t even hold a referendum; how dare you. You don’t even have the right to talk about it.’”

Ah, yes. Can’t forget to plug that “the east” thinks much less of people in Alberta.

“The people out front (of the building where the event was being held), did you notice what they’re protesting? They’re protesting Bill 54; they aren’t protesting independence, they’re protesting our right and our ability to have a vote on it. They don’t want us to even be able to mark that ballot. They’re anti-freedom, they’re anti-choice. Because they’re scared. They’re challenging the ability to even get it. Some of them know that this could turn into Brexit that this could expand and grow and lead to that positive vote.”

Fact check: true. Considering the U.K. government is now groveling back to the E.U. to try to negotiate their way back in, it’s a costly mistake that not everyone thinks it’s a good idea to repeat.

“But we’re not there yet. Naheed Nenshi — he may be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. He knows that the best way to kill this thing would be to hold it in two months, have it fail and then he’ll make Premier Smith wear it and run on it in the next election. But he’s terrified if we run this in a year from now after we get our act together.”

Yes. We all know that this “movement” needs time to convince Albertans that the wrongs they’re holding onto from 50 to 150 years ago should matter to people who were born in the 1990s.

“Media types have a role, academics have a role, but if you’re turning a person’s view, people who are on the fence, people who are thinking about it; it’s your family members, your co-workers, the person sitting next to you at the hockey game, it’s the guy you’re sharing a beer with at the pub. One-on-one conversations, that’s what turns people over. All the rest is important but for a true grassroots movement, it’s one-on-one. But you have to be tactical about it.”

“I could be crabby about hearing the same questions over and over again but I have to stop that because these people are genuinely concerned about the answers. ‘How are you going to make it through when you’re land-locked?’ People are always asking that one. Yes, we’d be like Switzerland, but with oil,” he said with a shudder for comedic effect.

“Emotions are real, too, and a person’s connection to the concept of Canada is strong. We have to make that case to them that Canada won’t end when a province becomes independent — just the contract will,” he said.

“You have to be tactical. It takes planning. You can’t get in somebody’s face, particularly when it’s emotional. If somebody gets in your face about something you feel connected (to), and says ‘you gotta stop doing that’, most of us, we’re Albertans, and so are the other ones — they’re going to dig their heels in and tell you to get stuffed. Then you’re not accomplishing what you want to.”

“We want to think ‘how can I get more people to a ‘yes’ vote today?’ Whether it’s on social media, at the bar — you don’t have to wrap your life around it — but we think of leaders and parties and they come and go; if it’s a network of individuals, and one group splits, the network is still there and another group will fill the void. Unorganized individuals all moving in the same direction are much more difficult to stop. What’s scarier? One hornet or a bunch of ants? A hornet is scarier but you’ll never stop those ants.”

“We’ve got to use our time as effectively as possible. The Alberta Prosperity Project is the most organized. If someone asks you a question, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. Say, ‘let’s have a coffee next week and I’ll have the answer by then.’ Don’t make it up; people hate a BSer. We need trust. People need to know this person isn’t trying to feed them a line, they’re genuinely trying to do something good,” Mr. Morgan concluded.

Danny Hozack, President, Wildrose Loyalty Coalition

“I like the idea of the 51st state, but I don’t want to be a 51st state with the rest of Canada in it. We need to have our own country first. I’d also like to thank Quebec because the citizens of Quebec asked how they could separate and they got the Clarity Act. You can be sure that if Alberta would have asked, they never would have done that.”

Oof. That is not what happened. The federal government sent a reference question to the Supreme Court of Canada after the 1995 referendum and Quebec actually refused to participate. The feds had to appoint someone on Quebec’s behalf to argue (as best they could) what they thought Quebec’s case would be. The resulting decision from the SCC is what was used to create the Clarity Act.

There is no definition of what a “clear majority” of votes would be for any province, though Mr. Hozack has made the assumption that it would be 50 per cent plus one for Quebec and “as high as 66 per cent for Alberta“. When you’re talking about forcing someone to give up their citizenship, or even their home, a “clear majority”, in my opinion, would be way higher than even that.

He then goes on to talk about how in the 1990’s, the liberals won a majority with less than 50 per cent of the vote, which apparently means that disgruntled Albertans should be able to wipe out their neighbour’s citizenship, home value, maybe even their jobs, with 50 per cent plus one, a number Stephen Harper’s conservative party never reached, even with their majority.

I know they believe the National Energy Program wiped out people’s homes, rather than a global oil glut, so, it’s possible this does make sense to them — revenge is best served against digested lies, after all.

“Besides thanking Quebec, I’d like to thank Premier Smith for actually saying she would have a referendum,” he added.

“We have to put our differences behind us. We all need to work together to defend each other as this all unfolds because you can be sure there’s a lot of vested interests, including some of our federal conservatives, who do not want to see this happen. There will be backlash against the people who are promoting separatism like we haven’t seen in many of our lifetimes.”

He advocated for people who support independence to become informed enough on the issues that others care about so they can have these conversations and make their case well.

“I think we’re all going to have to make it a line item in our budgeting of time, and in our line item of resources; we’re fighting an establishment. We are a volunteer army fighting an establishment that’s fighting us with our money,” he said.

“When Danielle says she’s not really in favour of independence but wants a sovereign province; to me, that’s as stupid as saying my wife got the house in my divorce but she’s made a deal that said my new wife and I can live in the granny suite as long as I pay the mortgage. To me, what she’s talking about is insane — a sovereign province in a united country isn’t going to work.”

Mr. Hozack is also upset that after Albertans voted to unilaterally change federal policy, Jason Kenney wasn’t miraculously in the position to make it happen. Of course, trying to convince these folks that it’s not how government works is a waste of time.

He said that he saw Martin Armstrong, a guy who has a fair record of predicting economic crises, in Calgary recently and that he predicted Alberta would be an independent country within the next few years. He is not, as Mr. Hozack described him, a “prognosticator of sorts”, he claims to have built a model that measures the likelihood of economic turmoil.

He was able to predict the 1987 market crash, as well as the 1989 crash in Japan. Michael Burry was able to predict the 2007 housing crash, too; by reading up on what the banks had started throwing into bonds. He wasn’t a “prognosticator”, he was simply someone who became curious and went looking for answers.

“How many times have the Liberals won an election by promising to attack our oil industry and our agriculture,” he asked. “This is the third time in my life that the Trudeau government has threatened our dreams.”

“I don’t like big government and if you had three or four provinces together, someone would want to form a federal government, so I think it’s better to just have three or four small countries. Then, when we’re going to Washington to sell beef and oil, we could call SK and say ‘do you want to come along to sell potash, and we can share the room bill?’”

…

Mr. Hozack brought up the average age of the speakers, if that is not now glaringly apparent.

From the Q and A

“Some people say why not merge all the independence parties together? Well, Danielle Smith and Jim Prentice tried that and did it benefit anyone in this room? No. Jason Kenney brought the PCs back to life again and gave us the United Conservatives; and then he kicked all the wildrosers out. I’m not keen to do that again. Let’s worry about the referendum first and then we’ll worry about who gets to the top after,” Mr. Hozack said in response to a question from the audience on the top five reasons to vote for independence (emphasis mine).

“This is Wildrose policy: if we vote to leave, First Nations will have to have another vote because they’re on Crown land inside our country. And if they have a vote and they can decide to stay on Crown land inside our country, that’ll be their choice. And if they vote to come with us, we’ll put a price on their land if that’s $100 billion and the rest of the country doesn’t have to agree but we agree that Canada owes us $650 billion to a trillion dollars, but let’s just say it’s $650 billion, so we’ll tell Canada they don’t owe us $650 billion, they only owe us $550 billion and we’re keeping the crown land. Then we’ll say to the reserves, they can come with us and if they do, they can either run it like a Hutterite colony, or they can take the land and divide it by the number of people on reserve, and they’ll get an ownership certificate and I think they’ll be quite excited because they’ll be citizens like us living on their own land,” Mr. Hozack added.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that wasn’t drafted by anyone to be affected by the “policy”.

“We’ve drafted an interim constitution so on day one after a successful referendum, when the provincial govt becomes a sovereign government, they can use that. We would move from being a province in a country in the commonwealth to being a country within the commonwealth. There are 36 countries within that that are constitutional republics, so in this decision-making as to what form of governance, we could become a constitutional republic like the U.S., but the interim constitution we’re proposing, there’s an extra level of accountability built in and we feel good about it,” Dr. Modry said without adding details.

Things started to fall apart on numbers:

Byfield: regardless of the talks, Danielle Smith said that the (CPP) contributions will be the same or lower, guaranteed. Benefits will be the same or higher, guaranteed. That’s from the premier.

Hozack: the fact is they will be better off. We send $60 billion to Ottawa. They owe us. If you bring the jobs back to Alberta, there’s ten billion in job creation and like Teck Frontier spent $1.7 billion and what a great boost it would be to the Alberta economy. And if we brought all those jobs back to Alberta, the police and administration, it would be a $10 billion mega-project every year. It costs $450 million for the RCMP in Alberta but Alberta was already paying some of it and we’d be better to have it here. Just tell the RCMP that contract is over and whatever they think is left owing, we’ll take if off the $650 billion Canada owes us. It will be as much or more than anything you’re getting and if you won’t take my word for it, you can take Dennis’ and Vince’s.

Modry: we give $9 billion to Ottawa for CPP and get back $6 billion. If you add the amount that we’ve contributed in the last few years, that should be more. Every year, we give $60 billion and get back $27, but what if we had that other $33? Then we get more. Everyone is Canadian but you can also become “Albertan” like dual citizenship. If one person wants to remain Canadian and pay taxes as a citizen, they can, and another person who wants to be Albertan is going to pay way less.

Yet, somehow, that $33 billion will still exist for “Alberta citizens”.

…

I think that’s enough hooey for today. If anyone wants to spend a few hours with it on their own, here’s the Facebook link.

Having listened to all of them, I’m going to let that all marinate for a bit and start fresh on the analysis tomorrow. There’s a reason I only briefly check in with these groups; it hurts the brain.

Happy Friday!

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