What are we actually seeing here, though?

So...

David Cameron ran on an election platform that specifically said, if you vote for my party, the Conservative Party, we will have a referendum on whether we remain or leave the European Union.

Very explicit.

He didn't expect to be elected.

He didn't expect to get a majority government.

He did.

Help us understand, what does that tell us?

This potentially leaves a contested state on the American border sort of open right for the picking.

That's right.

That's exactly it.

I mean, that's the context, right? And I think as well, you have to understand that the people who are leading this separatist charge are not elected to anything.

They have no standing in our society as Canadians.

They're independent citizens.

No one elected them to do anything.

No.

It's a story as you see it.

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't really foresee the vote going in the Brexit kind of a direction.

I don't see it going, you know, to a place where all of a sudden all of these closet separatists come out and lo and behold, it's actually 51% of the population that wants to separate.

I mean, the polls don't suggest that that's remotely possible.

People are pretty dug in on both sides of the issue.

About 18% of the population is hardened separatists.

The rest of us are Canadians and we want nothing to do with separation.

Let's get into

At what point? Can you, can you actually take us to the minute when you realized, "No, actually, this is the right word to describe this"?

Well, I'd heard it thrown around.

For example, the former Albertan premier used, uh, Jason Kenney used, in relation to Jeffrey Rath, who is one of the people who admitted to plotting with the American administration, um, a post-referendum Alberta.

Kenney called him a treasonous kook, and I thought that was just Kenney being Kenney.

I thought that was just kind of rhetorical and incendiary intentionally.

Other podcasters used the term.

Ryan Jespersen, who's a podcaster in Edmonton, he said something like, "You know, in other countries, tomfoolery like this would get you strung up for treason." And again, I thought that might be going too far, largely because I was relatively fresh out of the RCMP's federal policing program, and I had gone and considered the criminal code definition and felt that there was no chance that a charge of, of, of, a criminal charge of treason could stick in this instance.

Can you just explain this paradox of tolerance?

So, so where do you think the lines have been crossed?

In a couple of ways, right? I mean, I think obviously the comparison with the PQ and what's happening in Quebec is often made, right? We're, w- we're, you know, we're sort of are we, are we double standarding this, right? Um, but the PQ, as you know, was formed 60 years ago as a separatist party.

If you vote for the PQ in Quebec, there's a chance that you're gonna get a referendum.

There's a chance that you're gonna become an independent country.

That's the idea when you vote for the PQ.

The UCP, on the other hand, as you know, wasn't formed in that way, right? So to, to kind of push the envelope as they've done since the Carney Liberals won the 45th general election and to try to, you know, really drive us down a path towards this secession referendum is incredibly dangerous at this particular moment in our history when we are at a f- in a form of warfare with the United States.

The United States has made absolutely no bones about their desire to, to annex us.

What's the, the strongest evidence in your book, or what have you seen, uh, like, with your informed eye and your experience, um, that this is a, a coordinated threat to Canada? Like, you, you talk about y- it's, it's in the subheading, it's in the subtitle, "Canada's survival in a revolutionary age." Take us into it.

Hmm.

Like we are in a form of war with our once most valued and treasured neighbor.

Um, and they are targeting us.

They're looking at us as a opportunity for annexation, and especially Alberta, rich as we are in oil and gas reserves, uh, and critical minerals.

The far-right faction of, of the American government right now is, is entertaining some extraordinarily radical ideas about territorial expansion.

Their national security strategy is very explicit about this.

They're talking about hemispheric dominance.

Hmm.

What would that foreign interference look like on the ground? How would we as non-experts be able to spot it? What would the signs be to look for?

Well, I mean, I think a lot of it happens in the online space, obviously.

We live in a very fragmented information environment, and there are multiple different forums, mainly social media channels that Russians have historically exploited to contaminate the information ecosystem of a country during a vote like this, during a campaign like this.

During Brexit, a third of the information that was flowing around about the referendum was generated by russian bots uh by the internet research agency so we know as well now that these these a number of social media channels have become inverted meaning that more um more of the traffic on them is is bots than in humans so i mean they're they're i mean it's it's it's very right for that kind of amplification of of narratives that get Canadians to question the very idea of the country, that get Albertans to turn on one another, that, you know, I think inspire hatred and racism and further division and discord in our society.

And then also just, you know, I think we start to think about, you know, whether or not the process is rigged from the beginning, right? And in one way or another.

So I think that's really, really dangerous because it gets us to question the integrity of our democratic institutions.

We live, Max, as you know, in a representative democracy.

What can the federal government do? What tools does it have at its disposal, both in terms of dealing with the short term threat, you know, now to October 19th and the longer term threat of this being a persistent issue of, you know, us being bombarded by the Russians, by the Chinese, but also increasingly by the Americans with misinformation?

Do you think that both of these governments passing it on to the federal authorities can make a difference in the threat we're seeing?

I don't know.

I guess we'll see.

I mean, I, I think it's a, a very brand-new process that we're trying out on the fly.

I mean, you have to understand that, like, we've been dealing with foreign interference in a serious way in Canada for over a decade.

Um, the last three general federal elections have been, you know, a- an evolution of a process that's been very, you know, uh, controlled and, uh, scripted and protocoled and planned at the federal level with this, the entire security intelligence community and PCO and the federal government.

There is a plan in place.

Is, is anywhere handling this well? Uh, I'm curious what you can tell me about the situation in Finland, where they've had to deal with Russian misinformation for a long time.

Sure

... because what I, one of the things that I fundamentally believe after stu- studying this very intensively over the last three months is that we've made a fundamental error in judgment.

We've made a fundamental error in analysis about this separatist movement, because we've treated it instinctively as a form of grievance politics.

The last 10 years we've kind of, you know, we've all kind of been en- engaged in a form of grievance politics, one form of it or another, and we've come to sort of default to that as, "Okay, well, we have to just let these guys say their piece, hear them out.

If they're, if they feel aggrieved, they must be aggrieved These folks are not aggrieved members of our society who wanna make our society better.

They are conspiracy theorists who wanna break our country.

There's a fundamental difference there.

But when you have a poisoned information system, when you have a public that is being weaponized by their own leadership, isn't that just the, the, the most refined form of poison?

What do you think it is ultimately that these US officials might be interested in here when it comes to the separatism movement? Just if you could boil it down.

I think they are interested in seeing Canada, which is now sort of the, the one beacon of liberal democracy in North America, divided and fractured.

I think they see this as a way to make Trump's vision of Canada becoming the fifty-first state a reality.

And, you know, I think that, you know, the more the temperature is turned up when it comes to all of the, as you said, I mean, as the, the researcher from McGill found, you know, this is what happened in Brexit, right? I mean, Brexit, the leave side started at something like thirty or forty percent favorability.

Steve Bannon played a very important role in Brexit.

People need to realize that.

Um, and he is laser-focused on this situation as far as I'm concerned right here in Canada.

Are we tracking and tracing them? Like, do you think that Canada is prepared for this moment, that we have the infrastructure and the, the people ready to do this?