00:00:59.540And today we're going to delve into Alberta's quest within Confederation, where this referendum stands within it, and the historical push for new powers for a change in how the Federation worked.
00:01:12.580Joining me are two gentlemen who have been at this for a little bit longer than they probably like to admit.
00:01:18.360They were both signatories to the Firewall Letter, which was published on January 24, 2001 in the National Post,
00:01:25.920just a short time after the 2000 federal election that returned the Kretchen Liberals to power.
00:01:33.280Ted Morton is a former finance minister and energy minister in the Alberta government.
00:01:38.840He's also currently an executive fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary.
00:01:44.300Ken Bozenkuhl is a longtime government relations expert, a political hand at the provincial and federal levels.
00:01:52.060He is a partner at Meredith Bozenkuhl & Phillips and currently lecturing at the Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal.
00:02:37.280more than 20% to sort of send a—I thought too low a vote would send the wrong message to Ottawa,
00:02:45.640to the Liberals, to the rest of Canada, that they could just safely ignore Alberta,
00:02:49.900that the separatists were a noisy but politically irrelevant minority.
00:02:56.680So I would have liked to have seen something higher, but I guess I wasn't surprised.
00:03:02.660But I'd be curious on Ken's view on this.
00:03:05.800I think 25% is double what it would have been a decade ago, and I would predict that if the next decade is like the last decade, it would double again.
00:03:19.860I think the separatism issue is going to go fairly quiet in the next 12 to 24 months, but the underlying issues are maybe in hibernation, but the bear could come out again.
00:04:09.520I think Daniel Smith had a bad day because Daniel Smith has two jobs.
00:04:14.340Her first job is leader of the United Conservative Party.
00:04:16.880And that job requires her to act like a separatist because that party is led and has a majority of members who are separatist.
00:04:24.540And then she's premier of Alberta where she has to talk like a federalist.
00:04:28.640And she's been doing this dance now for a while where she talks like a federalist, but she's been acting like a separatist, giving the separatist everything that they want.
00:04:38.540And then they got very little of what they want.
00:04:40.860And I'll just take a bit of issue with what Ted said about the numbers.
00:04:43.880My understanding is some of the deeper analysis of the polling is that, you know, a third to half, if not two thirds of the people that voted option two to start a referendum process weren't actually separatists.
00:04:56.700They listened to Ted's op-ed, but so I think separatism is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent.
00:05:02.820And I think, unfortunately for Ted's wishes and thesis, the send a message crowd didn't get a very good result either.
00:05:11.380And so, you know, I think that's bad for Daniel Smith.
00:05:14.800You know, she thought she wanted, she spent $4 million to get out the message to vote yes in favor of all those other non-separatist questions.
00:05:25.020and a bunch of those lost even things even things like firewall letter type stuff so she's done a
00:05:31.640she's done some damage to her ability to negotiate and i think she's in rough shape uh this morning
00:05:37.240but canada is in good shape we'll get into where danielle smith is and your claims about the ucp
00:05:42.640in a moment but i want to pick up on something ted said and get both your thoughts ted you said
00:05:47.480that this has doubled over the last 10 years due to how the last decade has played out and
00:05:54.220And if it's more of the same that it would double again, let me ask you about that. So how much of the separatist sentiment or anger or the send a message crowd that Ken was talking about, how much of that has been driven by Justin Trudeau, who's been gone for a year and a half, almost two years now.
00:06:18.900But was this angst all driven by Trudeau and how he treated Western Canada and Alberta in particular?
00:06:31.680Was it deflated and lower than you wanted because Trudeau's now gone and Mark Carney's at least making overtures, even if he isn't delivering?
00:06:40.060Well, the underlying discontent and unhappiness with Alberta's relationship with Ottawa and the Liberal Party, obviously, is much older than—much deeper than just Justin Trudeau.
00:06:55.420You know, we've started with talking about the firewall back to 2001.
00:06:58.840But there's no question the Trudeau decade exacerbated that.
00:07:03.700the anti-oil and gas, the climate, putting climate change ahead of everything else,
00:07:10.760and the cancellation of how many different pipelines, Energy East, Northern Gateway,
00:07:19.440all of that had a very devastating effect, not just on the Alberta government revenues,
00:07:25.420but on the economy in Alberta. So there's lots of resentment there. The big expectation was that
00:08:00.980Trump came in, and suddenly Mark Carney appeared to be the new champion for Canada, and Pierre never recovered from that.
00:08:11.780So there was another degree of alienation and unhappiness post that.
00:08:20.880I probably should have mentioned COVID as well.
00:08:23.860There's a lot of anti-vaccination sentiment in Alberta, particularly rural and small-town Alberta.
00:08:30.360And that, again, exacerbated the anti-liberal, anti—it wasn't just anti-Trudeau and anti-liberal. That fuels another factor that fueled the separatist movement.
00:08:44.320Ken, how much of it in your view was driven by Trudeau? And I'll throw this in there as well. I know I've spoken to some Albertans who scoff at the idea that Mark Carney is an Albertan. He was born or he was born in Northwest Territories, raised outside of Edmonton, but moved away at 18. I think he still has some sense of the province. You never lose your roots, really.
00:09:08.700um but i i've talked to several people who said he warned his cabinet and his caucus
00:09:15.460do not dismiss this because as both of you gentlemen will know in central and eastern
00:09:21.180canada um a favorite thing to do is be dismissive of ever anything western canada wants and he
00:09:28.200warned his caucus and cabinet do not dismiss it take it seriously you know let's be professional
00:09:35.020about this. So Carney maybe shaved some of the rough edges off, but was much of it driven by
00:09:41.020Trudeau and that decade of him being in power? So I'd want to differentiate between people being
00:09:48.700upset at the Trudeaus and people wanting to separate. And I point to my father. If you want
00:09:54.380to get my father going on on a rant, you say the word Trudeau and he'll spit skittles about the
00:09:59.980Trudeau, the elder for 10 minutes in the national energy program. Then he'll spit another set of
00:10:04.000Skittles about Trudeau the Younger and the C-69 and everything else. And then you talk about,
00:10:10.000you know, maybe Carney's different. He'll spit Skittles saying, I'm so sick of having the
00:10:13.860liberals in power. And then you say, dad, but you love Canada. And he'll stop spitting Skittles and
00:10:18.300say, I love my country. I love the country that I live in. I came to Canada as an immigrant. This
00:10:24.040country gave me everything. And so I just, I would dispute with Ted, if you look at the actual
00:10:29.320polling, my understanding of the polling of separatist sentiment has never been anywhere
00:10:33.740about between 20 and 25 percent. It hasn't moved. Has anger with Ottawa? Has anger with the Trudeau,
00:10:41.200Trudeau the younger and Trudeau the older, caused people to be more frustrated or less frustrated
00:10:45.280with Canada? Yes, but that doesn't dry separate sentiment. It has simply has not moved. This is
00:10:50.780the wrong solution to a problem. The problem, and we tried to address this with the firewall letter,
00:10:56.920the problem, Alberta can solve these problems within Canada. I worked very closely with Stephen
00:11:02.100harper for 10 years i helped write or co-write all of his election platforms and stephen harper
00:11:07.320almost everything he did was not just good for canada but it was great for alberta and when
00:11:13.460people say they want to separate from canada they're just spitting in the face of that 10 years
00:11:18.220where me we made canada better under stephen harper and if we've done it before we can do it
00:11:22.880again so i just i i just don't like this argument that just because we're angry we have to separate
00:13:59.400We had it for the simple reason that she invited the separatists into the party explicitly, explicitly because of the Free Alberta strategy that was a roadmap to separation for Alberta.
00:14:12.280Do you have the same read of the situation, Ted?
00:14:14.900No, Danielle has never advocated separation.0.84
00:14:18.920She didn't advocate it during this election.
00:14:24.000Ken's been around Alberta politics to know that all conservative parties in Alberta have different elements among it.
00:14:32.080There's a populist element, more rural, more populist, and more conservative and higher support for.
00:14:39.120But, you know, winning majority governments is about putting coalitions together.
00:14:43.740So I think I would politely say that Ken's exaggerating a bit to say that she gave the party over to the separatist.
00:14:54.040I mean, there is that element, though, and she does have to deal with it within the party.0.57
00:15:00.040And Mitch Sylvester was saying, we're going to go and take over the UCP and force her out.
00:15:07.280Did she unleash something that she might have trouble handling now?
00:15:13.740But I think that you can make a pretty strong case that she got what she wanted last week, that Albertans voted no on question 10 and yes or almost yes on most of the others, which is her reform agenda.
00:15:30.660So I think, you know, in that respect, she won.
00:15:35.760Now, I'm not denying there's the issues internal to the party, but when we get into it, I'll make an argument that what happens next in terms of her and the UCP in Alberta will depend less on what happens in Edmonton and more on what happens in Ottawa with Carney and the liberals in the next 12 or 24 months.
00:15:55.400What about the whole exercise of direct democracy? This is not something new in Alberta. You guys have had this for a long time. There's something about the western part of this continent, not just this country, where citizen-led referenda or initiatives are much more common. We wouldn't dare have them here in top-down Ontario. No, we just take what we're told from the people that run the place.
00:16:23.500uh there's a very clear historical explanation for that saskatchewan and alberta were in the
00:16:32.120early decades filled with uh immigrants from the u.s especially from michigan and minnesota that
00:16:38.500came up for the land grant land and they brought that late 19th century uh populism with them so
00:16:45.500that's been part of western political culture uh from the get-go it used to be just an alberta
00:16:51.460From the Canadian perspective, this was kind of an Alberta or Western eccentricity, but you can't say it's that anymore because the federal government had referendums on the Charlottetown Accord, and now the Clarity Act calls for referendums as well.
00:17:10.160And you've got recall in British Columbia?
00:17:34.060I'm a fan of representative democracy.
00:17:36.480I think we should elect representatives who make clear through an election campaign
00:17:40.560where they stand on a bunch of issues and that we should trust their judgment.
00:17:43.840And if after four years we don't like their judgment on things, we should find someone else.
00:17:48.380And despite the fact that Alberta has been run by one party, I would argue that that party has gone through some pretty drastic renewals over the years from Don Getty to Ralph Klein to, you know, we've had some pretty big shifts in Alberta, even though we've had the same party.
00:18:01.720And the problem I have with direct democracy is I think if you have a single question on a big issue, you can sometimes get direction.
00:18:09.160But let me take the immigration questions.
00:18:10.980There were a bunch of those questions that had questionable legal status.
00:18:16.120Like they said there's the Alberta definition of an immigrant that doesn't even exist.
00:18:20.920Number two, there's a whole bunch of interactions that happen between all these immigration questions.
00:18:25.600And voters, when they're given five questions on immigration, cannot arbitrate between the interactions of different questions.
00:18:33.720And I just think Daniel Smith ran in the last election campaign to give Alberta more control over immigration.
00:19:31.740and I think Albertans got very frustrated.
00:19:33.640And I think public sentiment is actually more in favor of some of the things she put on the ballot than people voted for it because people were frustrated by the very process.
00:19:42.860They were like, why are we doing this when there's more important things to be done?
00:19:52.000And I think it was dealt a blow, to be quite frank, in this referendum campaign.
00:19:56.600Well, Ted, your thoughts on the exercise?
00:19:58.000Well, I would probably agree with Ken 90 percent that I'm more of a fan of deliberative democracy with elected representatives getting together and discussing them and then standing for reelection and letting the voters judge on what policies they've adopted.
00:20:15.480But again, certainly from a Western perspective, I think allowing some opportunity for referendums going to the people, I'll leave 10% for some of that.
00:20:29.280Just on what I mentioned already that, you know, you can't just say referendums are Alberta eccentricity anymore.
00:20:38.180We did it, the federal government did it with Charlottetown.
00:20:42.140And back to Jason's referendum on equalization, he criticized Jason for maybe taking my advice on that, but the Supreme Court decision states very clearly in the secession reference that if there's a clear majority on a clear question, that that then triggers a constitutional duty.
00:21:06.760That's a Supreme Court phrase, constitutional duty, to get the other premiers together and discuss an amendment.
00:21:17.080So there was certainly some authority and basis for what Jason did on the equalization referendum.
00:21:25.540The clear question, clear majority on a clear question, and Ken's alluded to this already.
00:23:46.600Oh yeah, but then there's strings attached.
00:23:48.220And the minute the strings are attached,
00:23:49.480Then you begin to lose control of those policy areas precisely because then the feds can pull it back.
00:23:57.860So we can – so there's – if you think the liberal party of more national unity through stronger and stronger central governments is a good idea, then I could see why you'd vote against that.
00:24:10.780But I would argue it hasn't worked in terms of national unity.
00:25:06.520This is not a question, this is a discussion.
00:25:10.320And what Ted just gave you is a very good discussion
00:25:12.620about why these questions have caused problems,
00:25:14.540But this is why we should deliberate on these kinds of questions and that they're not the kinds of questions that you put on a referendum.
00:25:20.920I mean, it had how many four-syllable words in that question?
00:25:25.140And like, you know, voters don't have the time or the inclination to do this kind of stuff.
00:25:29.600They don't have, they didn't take a master's in public policy.
00:25:33.060So these are things that need discussion, not an up-down yes-no.
00:25:36.700So I'm glad we saw the inherent wisdom of Albertans that said, go pound sand if it's too complicated, I'm not going to support it.
00:25:42.880All right. When we come back, we're going to discuss the immigration issue. But before we go to break, just remember, we've got merch. You'll want to look good while supporting great journalism. Head to postmedia.store. You can get your Toronto Sun dad ball cap. You can get your National Post tote bag, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and more. That's postmedia.store. Visit today.
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00:28:27.520This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?, where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:28:38.460Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes from season two.
00:28:43.660And if you missed it, there are even more episodes from last season.
00:28:47.160So make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What? everywhere you get podcasts.
00:28:51.520So a surprising thing for myself when I first saw the list of 10 questions is that five of them were on immigration. Four of them were on assorted, unrelated constitutional questions. Let's dig into what they were talking about and whether it was worthwhile going for them.
00:29:12.720Premier Smith defended all of it, but it was about decreasing immigration to support more sustainable levels.
00:29:20.520I think that's pretty much a Canadian-wide view right now is that we let things get out of control.
00:29:28.180Now, we've got the Carney liberals saying we lowered things and we're not going to keep lowering them.
00:29:34.640In fact, we may raise them, except for Quebec.
00:29:38.200Mark Carney, the other day, asked by journalists heading into cabinet, said, well, he understands that in Quebec it's different.
00:29:45.880I figured, you know, a day or two after the referendum where these were big questions, he might not be talking like that.
00:29:53.700Are you shocked that on an issue that across the country people are saying, well, yeah, we're bringing in people faster and we can absorb them.
00:30:02.440This referendum question did pass in Alberta, and yet his reaction is, well, sure, in Quebec, but not for everyone else.
00:30:12.100Look, the two biggest policy failures of the second Trudeau government, in my view, were his immigration policy and his reforms to the Senate.
00:30:22.420I think in the long term, we're going to learn that his reforms to the Senate were very damaging for the country.
00:30:57.620so it's insane and it was one of the reasons why temporary foreign students were a big part of that
00:31:03.580if you look at the housing problem they largely were centered around places we have universities
00:31:07.860it created other housing problems and now mark carney has brought that number back again we're1.00
00:31:13.780we're doing a bit of comparing apples and oranges here but like the the non-asylum things the
00:31:18.700numbers have come back down to around harper era uh harper era so the problem has largely been
00:31:24.880solved. Rents are coming down in Toronto and Ottawa right now. House prices are down 30% in Toronto
00:31:29.680and are down in Vancouver by a similar amount. So we've largely solved the problem. But I want to
00:31:35.300make another point. Look, I'm in favor of provinces having more control over immigration. I don't
00:31:39.280think there's any reason why Alberta shouldn't have the same control over immigration that Ottawa
00:31:43.080does. But in 2024, Daniel Smith, at the height of this high immigration, was running ads saying
00:31:53.960Alberta needs more immigrants and she begged Ottawa for more control over immigration because
00:31:58.660she wanted to increase immigration. So this problem would not have been solved had Daniel
00:32:05.740Smith been the premier in 2024 because she wanted even higher immigration. So I just want to make
00:32:12.300that make it very crystal clear that sure we want more control over immigration but it's not clear
00:32:17.240to me that that would have made the situation any better had Daniel Smith become the premier. I don't
00:32:23.040have the tape I don't have the clip with me but she wrote a letter to the federal minister of
00:32:27.180immigration in 2023 or 2024 asking for even higher levels of immigration than were happening
00:32:32.800at my local subway station here in Toronto there were billboard takeovers I can't remember if that
00:32:38.840was under Kenny or under Smith but trying to get people from Toronto to move to Alberta Ted your
00:32:45.920thoughts on it? I'm not aware of what Ken just referenced. What I'd want to get out now and put
00:32:56.060on the record is that, again, the Liberal Party having one rule for the nine provinces, but a
00:33:03.360separate rule for Quebec, that's what people in Alberta are really tired of, and particularly
00:33:08.720people who support the old Progressive Conservative Party and the founders of the Reform Party,
00:33:15.180Stephen Harper and all that, that we want, you know, this isn't, this isn't the 19th century, we have a 19th century constitution and a 21st century economy, Ontario and Quebec, you know, they ran things in the 1800s, they don't run things anymore, but they still got a lot of governments because they have 200 seats in the House of Commons between Quebec and Ontario together, 200 seats, you only need 172 to form a majority government.
00:33:45.180So the liberals routinely form majority governments with virtually no representation or no meaningful representation from Saskatchewan, Alberta, and a bit B.C.
00:33:57.640I remember at one point, this might have been at the end of the Martin years, you did not run into a liberal between London, Ontario.
00:34:12.280Maybe, yeah, Ralph Goodell would have been in there.
00:34:14.840You could go from London, Ontario to Ralph Goodale in Regina and then not see another liberal until the lower mainland.
00:34:22.480And and that was a national government.
00:34:28.400The the issue of immigration, though, you know, you read some of the columnists in The Globe and The Star and places like that.
00:34:36.460And they claim that any attempt to say that there were issues with housing prices going up due to traumatic increases in immigration is anti-immigrant rhetoric.
00:35:10.800I said, well, did you find that there was a pressure on your budget from the temporary foreign worker program, which is the one that really got out of control?
00:35:21.140And in my view, Ken, the only one that is actually back under control, because I was looking at the numbers recently.
00:35:28.180But I asked Premier Smith about the impact on the budget.
00:35:31.620We actually did an assessment of this.
00:35:34.020We wanted to look at what in that given year, what was the amount of revenue generated by the temporary workers that we have in the province, which is some 246,000 now.
00:35:45.900So it went up to $246,000 over that five-year period versus the amount of dollars that were spent just on education and health care for themselves and their families.
00:35:54.940So it was about $150 million in revenue they generated for the provincial government and a billion dollars worth of spending on those two other areas.
00:36:02.340And that isn't how the temporary program is supposed to work.
00:36:05.540Temporary workers are supposed to come in to our country on a temporary basis to fill a job need.
00:36:10.760And presumably they're healthy and fit and aren't going to bring families.0.75
00:36:15.900And so they're going to be a very low cost onto our social programs.
00:38:24.380you're not going to pay as much for services.
00:38:26.360And if they're needed, that's one thing.
00:38:28.060It's when they're displacing existing youth workers, replacing existing young people's jobs that I think Canadians are upset.0.60
00:38:38.060And look, there was a consensus on immigration across all political parties for decades.
00:38:43.240The Conservatives supported immigration, the Liberals supported immigration, the Democrats supported immigration.
00:38:47.420And the reason why what Trudeau did was so abhorrent is because he upset this fundamental cross-party consensus that immigration was good.
00:38:56.580And he allowed credible arguments like the one Danielle made.
00:39:00.720And I think the one I'm making is more about youth unemployment of people that live, Canadians.
00:39:05.500Like those are both arguments that undermine immigration.
00:39:08.280And this was done because the Liberals lost control of the immigration system.
00:39:11.700There was a Tim Hortons franchisee just outside of Ottawa, east side of Ottawa, that recently filed for bankruptcy.
00:39:19.740And Blacklock's reporter had a story on the proceedings.
00:39:23.500One of their stores, 86% of the workers were temporary foreign workers.
00:39:28.560It used to be you couldn't have more than 10 or perhaps in hospitality, 20% of your workers at any particular location be from the temporary foreign worker program.
00:40:15.720And, you know, the conservatives in this country are more blue-collar conservatives than they are business people.
00:40:22.180And I think, again, Trudeau caved into the business lobby and allowed businesses to have cheap wages.0.82
00:40:29.600And I just, as a modern conservative, we believe increasingly in the rights of people to have their own jobs and not have them replaced by foreigners.
00:40:38.500But this, again, the consensus on immigration was undermined by the Trudeau letting it rip on immigration.
00:40:45.140And it's just, it was one of the worst policies under his regime.
00:40:49.980I would just add that it's one more example of why the Ottawa knows best, one size fits all.
00:40:58.720The liberal approach to policy, whether it's immigration, but I would say in health care, social services, well, it doesn't work.
00:41:07.160It's not solving national unity issues, and it's creating a gradual but very clear and steady decline of the Canadian economy vis-a-vis the other Western industrial democracies.0.93
00:41:21.360I want to hit on two more topics before I let you gents go.0.87
00:41:24.540One of them I know is your favorite, Ted, so we'll leave Senate to the end.1.00
00:41:28.980But first, let me ask you about judges.
00:41:39.720Judges, one of the questions, and it failed,
00:41:42.380was for Alberta to seek support from other provinces
00:41:46.680to change the Constitution to allow members of the King's Bench Court
00:41:52.540to be appointed by the province instead of the federal government.
00:41:56.140And a lot of people don't realize that.
00:41:57.820The upper levels of provincial courts are actually appointed by Ottawa.
00:42:01.760And I would argue when I pick up a copy of the Toronto Sun or the National Post and I read about a crazy decision, I Google the judge's name and inevitably they were appointed to a superior court in whatever province they live in by a guy named David Lamedi under Justin Trudeau.
00:42:20.980That's just a pattern of the last little while.
00:42:23.060People that Daniel Smith, Jason Kenney, Doug Ford, Scott Moe wouldn't have appointed.
00:42:27.960Those premiers I all mentioned, and I would add in Tim Houston, maybe even Wab Canu, I
00:42:33.140think would back that idea that the provinces should appoint or at least have a say in it.
00:42:40.720That did not pass, but there's potential for it to become a convention where the provinces
00:42:50.300and the federal government work together.
00:42:52.740Alberta recently did that for two appointments to the Canes bench.
00:42:56.400Is that good enough for it to be a convention rather than a constitutional change? Because, you know, to relate this to the Senate, Justin Trudeau wasn't appointing any elected senators, as you know, Ted.
00:43:09.980And, well, to come back to the judges, the question itself was too complicated, too technical.
00:43:17.840Normal people don't understand what appointing judges, what that's all about.
00:43:23.380But for the record, the listeners should know, Canada is the only federal state in the world where provincial or state judges are appointed by the national government.
00:43:35.300It's a remnant of 19th century British colonial regime was a way to kind of keep those distant colonies to have control.
00:43:45.180It has no role in contemporary Canadian federalism.
00:43:50.740There's an analogy that I like that in the Western Hockey League, the only people that travel more than the players are the referees.
00:44:00.060You can't have any hometown referees in the Western Canadian Hockey League.
00:44:04.680But basically, whenever a province goes to court on a federalism issue, it's basically the federal government, Ottawa has, chooses the hometown referees.
00:44:17.920And of course, it's even worse at the Supreme Court level.
00:44:21.420And I would note that, well, actually, again, Quebec has a role in dominating Supreme Court judges from that province.
00:44:32.180Well, how about extending that to the other provinces?
00:44:36.240And I believe there was a letter, I don't believe, there was a letter signed by Quebec, Premier, Ontario, Saskatchewan, maybe other, and Ontario, that the Section 96 court judges should be appointed by provincial governments.
00:46:22.880My views on Danielle Smith are no secret.
00:46:24.960Yes, I understand that. As far as, you know, the ones that won didn't win by a lot. The ones that lost didn't lose by a lot for the most part. I mean, there is a divide in the province and that's not good.
00:46:40.080We didn't learn anything from this process that we didn't know before we started the process.
00:46:46.660And therefore, it was an unnecessary, useless process that only existed because Daniel Smith gave away the United Conservative Party to the separatists.
00:46:55.520That's my bottom line about this entire exercise.
00:46:58.220It was an utter and complete waste of all of our time.
00:47:01.120I would counter that of the 75% of people who voted no to separation, a third of them came back and, you know, approximately 50-50 came back and voted for the other reforms.
00:47:16.000So I would argue that in many respects, Danielle won.
00:47:21.100She got no on the referendum, the secession, and she got close to 50-50 or better than 50-50 on the others.
00:48:38.080So maybe that's why they didn't do it.
00:48:39.600But should Alberta at least go back to trying to elect senators again and see if the PM will appoint them again, going down that convention rather than constitutional route?
00:49:19.720I actually think it would be interesting to allow senators
00:49:22.980to be appointed from lists provided by provincial governments.
00:49:26.400And I think the Alberta government should put forward senators that reflect the political, the current political landscape in Alberta. The BC should put forward senators put forward by the current political landscape in BC. Look, I think the Senate should be a place of memory. I've written about this. I think we should have people in there that are partisans that remember what we've done in the past.
00:49:46.160But again, Trudeau screwed this up by appointing experts because he thought we should be governed by experts that have no past history with any past government.0.87
00:49:57.800So our Senate right now is utterly and completely messed up.0.86
00:50:00.740And I think it's going to be a long time before we get back to anything normal.
00:50:04.300But I would love to see us, the federal government, appoint senators from lists provided by the provinces.
00:50:10.620So, 30 years ago, I was strongly committed to Senate reform. And I can say today, I'm 100% in favor of abolishing it altogether. How did that change? My support for it back in the 1990s came from actually, you know, I taught political science, I taught American politics.
00:50:33.020And I knew for a fact that I could point to examples in the United States and Australia where regional representation in the upper house, the second chamber, protected the interest of the less populated provinces.
00:50:47.380almost something very similar to the NEP was introduced in the in the U.S. in the 1970s
00:50:56.200when the price of oil it didn't just go up a little it tripled twice from you know three to
00:51:02.160ten dollars then ten dollars to thirty dollars that's what Trudeau brought in the NEP the same
00:51:07.720type of thing was was introduced in the U.S. by past the House of Representatives where the east
00:51:13.560coast and the left coast, control everything, and went to the Senate, went to the Senate Energy
00:51:17.600Committee. Who sits on the Senate Energy Committee? The senators from Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming.
00:51:23.980It never got out of committee, right? So a Senate, a proper regional representation in a second
00:51:29.720chamber can protect and address some of the issues that Alberta has. But we've been trying that for
00:51:35.50030 years. Stephen Harper, give him five stars for what he tried to do. But it hasn't worked.
00:51:42.080And the whole idea of the Senate is more provincial authority in Ottawa, I don't think that's going to work.
00:51:49.700The opposite is what Ken knows, and I think you probably know.
00:51:54.740I'm for less Ottawa and more Alberta, but not just less Ottawa and more Alberta,
00:51:59.080but back towards a more decentralized form of federalism where the provinces regain the authority that constitutionally they have
00:52:09.740over these big issues of health, education, and welfare, social programs.
00:52:15.860So I've gone from 100% in favor of Senate reform
00:54:06.520I mentioned earlier that intelligence officials knew well ahead of time0.99
00:54:09.700that Sikh extremists were trying to blow up an airplane.
00:54:12.560Well, what if I told you that it was even more specific than that?
00:54:17.200Air India believed they were the intended target,
00:54:20.060and had even requested extra security for the specific aircraft
00:54:23.860that ended up blowing apart off the coast of Ireland.
00:54:27.080Rescuers were still pulling bodies out of the ocean
00:54:29.420when Canada's then Transport Minister, Don Mazinkowski,
00:54:32.800had to admit that Air India Flight 182 had taken off from an airport that had extra police on hand
00:54:38.500for the explicit purpose of stopping any Air India planes from blowing up.
00:54:43.400Incredibly, luggage had actually been pulled off Air India Flight 182 due to fears it was a security risk.
00:54:50.060At virtually the exact moment that law enforcement was opening the bags under secure conditions,
00:54:55.020only to find they had saved the plane from harmless electronics like clothes, irons, and radios,
00:54:59.640The Emperor Kanishka was being blown up by the suitcase bomb they had missed.
00:55:04.240They weren't supposed to check your bags in for a flight that you didn't have a confirmed reservation on, right?
00:55:12.000And that's what happened with two bags on June 22nd, 1985 at Vancouver Airport.
00:55:19.420So these guys who were checking them in were very persistent and, you know, they got them through, right?
00:55:26.600They kind of hassled the agent right at the counter.
00:55:30.680Now, the other big thing was, in both cases, the passenger who was listed on the manifest for the connecting flight, which were then Canadian Air, you know, Canadian Pacific Airlines, which people don't even know what it is anymore because it no longer exists.
00:55:46.480But the both of the bags were checked into CP Air flights that were destined to land and connect with Air India flights.
00:55:53.640So it was, you know, I can imagine there were people that flew on the CPR flight from Vancouver to Tokyo and from Vancouver to Toronto who learned afterwards they had a bomb on their plane.
00:56:03.540Can you imagine what that would do to you?
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