So does this pose a problem for the province in terms of moving forward with such a rural and urban split?

It does to some extent.

There are other ways in which the rural-urban divide in Alberta has been shown in the past.

When you look at a regular provincial election, for example, the NDP wins Edmonton, the UCP wins rural and small-town Alberta, and then they fight it out over Calgary.

Rural Alberta has always been a bit out of step with the rest of the province politically.

I do think that there is there is the possibility.

I mean, I don't have a good deal of evidence to back this up, but I do think there's the possibility that people in rural Alberta feel like they had a really strong perspective on this and they were sort of crushed by a more numerous group of urban elites, which, again, I don't think would be totally healthy.

Tyler, what do you see as her biggest challenge moving forward from this vote?

Where does this independence movement in Alberta, where does it come from and what drives it?

Well, it actually dates back quite a long ways, probably more than a century.

Even before Alberta became a province in Canada, there was this sense that the national federal government in Ottawa was this faraway, uncaring, tyrannical government.

And that attitude has persisted and sort of ebbed and flowed over time.

And then in the 1980s, in response to some specific policies that targeted the oil sector in Alberta...

There's this big upswing in sentiment, what we call Western alienation or Alberta alienation that led to the birth of some separatist parties that had some okay showings in elections, although they never won any seats in the provincial legislature.

But that's all ancient history.

Has this trade war and the deteriorating relationship with the US, has that rallied a sense of nationalism in Canada? Yeah.

So how is the separatist movement responding to Prime Minister Carney?

Yeah.

this accord that he signed with Daniel Smith last November that includes a new West Coast pipeline.

As you say, he got rid of the carbon tax.

There were changes to the oil sands emissions cap.

There were changes to the clean electricity regulations.

So he's really worked quite hard to change the relationship between Alberta and So you think, why are why are we doing this now? And it's a really good question, because why are we doing this now? And I think it is partly that people just simply don't trust that Carney is any different from Trudeau.

Do you feel like this moment was inevitable?

D- Can, can you understand his, his position there?

Yeah, I can understand the position, and I, I think it's one that is shared by many people across the country.

I, I, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, so the treason question I'm, I'm not, you know, super well-placed to answer.

But my understanding is that, you know, we, we do have very specific, narrow definitions of treason, and my understanding is that this sort of thing does not fall under the umbrella of, of treason.

And, you know, at the risk of sounding like I'm defending Alberta separatists, um, y- the Quebec sovereignty movement is sort of tolerated and accepted as, as part of mainstream political culture in Canada.

And I, I think that it is in some ways treated differently than the Alberta separatist movement.

And so, you know, if we're, if we're gonna tolerate and accept a, a sovereigntist movement in one part of the country, I, I don't think it's completely beyond the bounds of reasonable debate to have a sovereigntist conversation elsewhere in the country.

What, what's your answer to Derek?

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, sure, there's all kinds of things that Alberta could do to get power similar to Quebec.

We could stand up our own pension plan even without separating, right? We could get our own police force even without separating.

But these are not ideas that are particularly possible.

What is the word I'm looking for? I'm completely blanking so early in the morning.

Popular.

And the option is, OK, so do we amplify that is what we're talking about.

Mm

... that, I think, rather conclusively over the past year and a half.

Um, what I would expect from them campaigning for an independent Alberta was some loyalty towards Albertans.

Um, and, and Kerry and Grant and, um, Nathan's story, I think shows that r- rather than standing up for Alberta, they're, were in Washington, some of them anyways, trying to find a way to sort of subordinate Alberta to Washington, selling out some of our natural resources and our land to the Americans in exchange for support to co- become an independent country.

Um, but this is, this is independence of a fallacious sort if it's-

Yeah

... separatist movement.

There's no main political party where, that would have, you know, a leader who everyone would kind of turn to for, for, you know, the, the sort of movement's response on any given issues or thought on any given issue.

What are you seeing? What are your thoughts around that?

Well, the thing for the Federalists, the pro-Canada side, is that they've had the polling on their side pretty much the entire time.

At the absolute best showing for the separatists, they've got about 30% support in the polls, which means the Federalists have somewhere in the region of 70%, if you ignore the 3-4% of people who are undecided.

That, I think, has... engendered a certain amount of like they've been kind of relaxed but they say oh the polling looks really good for us you know we don't need to be that worried about it we don't need to be out there with the same urgency um and you can kind of see that in some sort of hard numbers on this you know there there's fundraising out there that people who are campaigning on this referendum need to register with elections alberta they need to disclose their donations the separatists have actually gotten considerably more in terms of donations from the public than the Federalists have, right? So this sort of suggests there's a little bit of a lack of urgency, I think, on the Federalist side of the ledger, although that does seem to be changing.

There's been some get-out-the-vote efforts.

The Conservative Party of Canada has announced its campaign for this.

The winds, I do think, seem to be shifting a little bit in the last week or two.

Why is that? Why does it keep coming back?

Dawson studied the early days of Alberta as a part of the book.

I really went back to the beginning and started there, you know, in the 19th century when Alberta was not even a province yet, part of the Northwest Territories, the objections that some of the people out here had vis-a-vis the government in Ottawa, and there's this real echo that kind of runs through history of concern over resource control and immigration and resource development and things like that, and you can find some things that were written, you know, in the late 19th century, early 20th century, that you could pick up a newspaper today and read a columnist and they would be saying sort of the same thing.

Would you tell us a little bit about the National Energy Program and how that looms large in Alberta?

The National Energy Program was a, a federal policy that was developed by Pierre Trudeau's Liberal Party in the late 1970s.

And it ran from 1980 till 1985, when it was dismantled, finally, completely, by the Mulroney government.

Pieces of it had gone away before that.

But the, the gist of it was that Canadian oil, Alberta oil, was gonna be sold to the rest of the country for below market value, because this is, of course, the result of the 1979 revolution in Iran.

This created sort of a cascading energy crisis around the world.

Tyler, what's your sense of that dynamic and how it might frankly sort of influence Canada's response to this trade dispute, you know, within the context of a referendum?

Well, I think that the federal government needs to be conscious of the fact that there is, and I'm sure they are conscious of this, that there is a referendum happening.

You know, they, as I sort of said earlier, I mean, they can't probably put something like an export tasks on oil and gas.

Um, So they're having to calculate, triangulate a little bit around this issue and not do anything that is going to, you know, too dramatically swing the scales in Alberta.

I think that's probably number one.

And I think Richard's completely right that the Danielle Smith has to play to her base a little bit on this.

You know, there's some relatively consistent polling that shows, you know, half, a little more than half of members of the United Conservative Party are conservative.

How is that division problematic for the referendum campaign for either side?

What stands out for you from the BC perspective?

Well, look, if you strip away a year of political gamesmanship, um, BC essentially got the deal I think we all knew it was gonna get, which was here's a bunch of cash, and in return, just stop fighting the idea of this pipeline.

And, uh, you know, Premier David Eby knows very well, because he was the attorney general in BC that tried to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline, that BC doesn't have a hope of doing that.

You heard that in his comments there.

So what he's trying to do was really push the federal government and the Alberta government to a southern route.

He was successful in doing that and locking in the, uh, continued ban, uh, on, uh, oil tankers on the north coast, and that was really mostly the win for the BC government.

I think the prime minister knew that the north coast route wasn't gonna work.

How does this play then for Danielle Smith in the context of the separatism debate?

¿Esta es la más alta que hemos visto de apoyo para la soberanía de Alberta o han habido puntos más altos en el pasado cuando la gente le gustó la idea?

Esa es una buena pregunta.

Sabes, no hay grandes datos de votos de los años 80 sobre esa pregunta específica, así que es difícil decir sobre la NEP, pero lo que diría es que para mucho de 2025, solo cerca del 30% de los albertanos dijeron que apoyarían el voto en favor de la separación.

Y en la elección de enero encontraron un apoyo de 28% para esa idea, pero luego hicieron la elección de nuevo hace poco, o en el último mes, y encontraron que el apoyo se bajó a unos 18%.

Así que hay la posibilidad de que estamos pasando por este referéndum en un momento en el que el apoyo para la separación está en realidad disminuyendo.

La gente dice que lo apoyan, pero ahora que la rueda ha caído en el camino, ahora que están mirando hacia abajo la barra de un referéndum, están reconsiderando su posición.

Así que en ese sentido, el sentimiento podría incluso ser menos... menos significante de lo que era un año atrás.

¿Qué piensas de el factor de Carney aquí?

What changed?

Yeah, it's a really good question.

And I don't know if there's a super clear answer.

You know, if you look at the polling numbers over the years, in 2019, Enveronics, or in 2023, I should say, Enveronics did this really incredible polling on the state of sort of Albertans' feelings towards the rest of the country.

And in 2019, 71% of Albertans said they didn't feel respected by the rest of the country.

That number has dropped considerably by about 20 percentage points in the years since 2019.

So that anger has actually dissipated a little bit, I think.

How have you been watching what he's doing and reading into his actions and words?

But was it still, was it simmering?

It, it wa- simmering to some extent.

You know, you, you don't see very much in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s.

Um, you do see a little bit of separation talk during the Great Depression.

Um, the Great Depression hits the West hard, I think in some ways harder than other parts of the country, because you had this simultaneous drought, um, that really affected the farm harvest, and, and you have this massive collapse in farm incomes across Alberta during the, during the Great Depression.

And the federal government mostly leaves the management of the Depression to provincial governments, and it basically beggars provincial governments and municipal treasuries.

Um, and, and in the 1930s, the Social Credit government under, it was William Aberhart was premier at the time, they try to regulate the banks, basically.

I 100% agree.

Uh, how did that political movement change how many Albertans viewed the rest of Canada?

In, in the early 1980s, right around the time the National Energy Program comes up, you have these two sort of separatist groups, the Western Canada Concept and the West Fed Association.

Um, and they sort of channel this, this anger over the NEP in a separatist direction.

This is the first time you see separatists really making an impact politically.

And the important date there is in 1982, a guy named Gordon Kesler, who's a oil scout rodeo cowboy, he wins a by-election in Olds-Didsbury, which is a riding sort of down by Calgary.

Um, and so for the first and only time, a separatist has been elected to the legislature.

But to give you an example of sort of what this movement looked like, I mean, one of Kesler's big objections was to the metric system, um, which sounds like an absurd objection now, but was a thing that animated sort of the separatist movement in the 1980s.

Tell us about the importance of that letter and its impact.