Treason! In Alberta?

Can you tell me the story of this separatist movement and why you take it so seriously as a treasonous threat?

So it originated in the Freedom Convoy.

Most of the folks who are in the leadership roles got their start during COVID in politics.

They became political during the pandemic, and they were inspired to join this Freedom Convoy.

And And they enjoyed it.

They met friends, they met neighbors, they built a community, and they found camaraderie in the common quest to overthrow a duly elected federal government.

And now they're back at it again.

And this is round two.

This is Freedom Convoy 2.0. It's not rooted in a deep sense of Western alienation, although they try to draw off some of those tropes.

This is much more recent, much more superficial than that.

We have to recognize it as such.

There is a tendency, especially in Eastern Canada, to want to view this as a grievance movement.

People want to treat it as similar to the suffragettes.

There must be a way to include these folks in a better way in our society and make Canada a better place.

And it's sort of the same dynamics that we've been through with a number of different grievance movements in Canada over the last decade.

But it's not that.

These folks don't want to make Canada a better place.

They want to break it apart.

And there's a fundamental difference there.

You call them a gaggle of hucksters, conmen, and megalomaniacal politicians.

Want to name some names?

One of the people who's really at the core of this is David Parker.

If you've been following Alberta politics in recent years, you will know Parker's name.

Perhaps best known as the head of that group, Take Back Alberta, that organized UCP members to turf Jason Kenney as the party's leader and Alberta's premier back in 2022, and then worked behind the scenes to have Kenney replaced with Danielle Smith.

He's now come under investigation by the RCMP, by Elections Alberta, and by the Privacy Commissioner,