Maverick Party

I don't know.

I'm just throwing that out there because we had the Maverick party, right? It came through and it was like a whimper in the night.

Well, no, no, it came through and then they had a leadership election and the guy who was elected as leader promptly got in his car, went home, turned off his phone and ignored everybody until it disappeared.

Well, I think the reason he turned off his phone was people were calling him and saying, like, you idiot, we tried that 35 years ago.

We don't want to hear from you again.

Yeah, but that's not the position he ran on when he was going for leader.

He didn't run on a platform of, if you can select me as your next leader of the Maverick Party, I promise to turn my phone all the way off.

i'm just wondering if

But there are other people on the ground, the grassroots activist movement within the Conservative Party of Canada, who also tell me that this is also causing some friction.

I remember in 2021, there was that movement, the Wexit movement, play on Brexit, and the Maverick Party, it came out of that.

And I remember sitting down with one of their candidates in southwest Saskatchewan on an election road trip, because that was a riding where they had targeted at least a pretty decent showing.

And in the end, that party didn't do very well in many ridings that they contested, but that was a different context, right? And that was Saskatchewan, not Alberta, but...

And you see the founding of the sort of Wexit movement.

And there's the Maverick Party that's founded as sort of a... modern version of the reform party although it never really gets any traction and in 2019 this all kind of comes to a head and you've the first convoy on ottawa people tend to forget about it a little bit but we have months of protests the yellow vest protests are all over calgary and edmonton They're protesting environmental legislation.

They're protesting immigration.

They're protesting the import of oil from sort of Gulf dictatorships and things like that.

And the Wexit campaign, it basically wanted Alberta to separate from Canada.

It later became the Maverick Party, but that fizzled out last year.

Uh, speaking of things that, um, fizzled out-

[laughs]

I really appreciate it.

um so a little bit of context as i said the referendum is scheduled for monday october 19th which is two weeks from today i should say that we're recording this on monday october 5th which is the date of the quebec election uh from which it's quite possible that a uh the victor uh in the election could well be the uh party quebecois again we will see uh but two weeks from today albertans go to the polls to vote in a referendum And the first thing I wanted to ask you, Jason, is there is not just one question on the ballot.

There's actually a question about separatism, which is getting all of the attention and maybe in Alberta, but certainly outside of Alberta.

That's the only question that many people think is on the ballot.

I never quite understood the theory, the strategy of giving a backup plan to the separatists, a question that they, by forcing a vote on separation, they did that.

And they got the requisite signatures under the old thresholds, which was like 400,000.

So what happened was First Nations signed went to court to say, you can't proceed, you can't move towards separation, you can't even have a vote on this, without first discharging the Section 35 obligation of the Crown to consult First Nations, because what you're proposing to do is to change our counterparty in the three big Alberta treaties of the 1870s from the Federal Crown to the Alberta Crown, presumably the Republic of Alberta Crown, in the future.

And you can't reassign our counterparty without our consent, which I think is a pretty sensible position.