John Bolton - April 08, 2026


Alberta INDEPENDENCE On Trial (Day 1) -My Conclusion- The Law Is An ASS


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

181.83905

Word count

2,112

Sentence count

138

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In today's pour, I talk about the court case between the province and the Indigenous lawyers representing the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. I give my interpretation of what I saw in court and give my thoughts on what I heard.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel 458 a.m. Wednesday, April the 8th. I hope you're
00:00:07.560 having a great start to your Wednesday morning with the big blue mug of coffee, which I tipped
00:00:10.980 to you today. And I thought I would be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about the court
00:00:16.900 case that's going on right now regarding the petition signing campaign for Stay Free Alberta.
00:00:23.800 And I'm going to give you my understanding of what I saw in court yesterday. Now, the
00:00:27.960 court case started yesterday. It's supposed to run until Thursday. For those of you who don't
00:00:34.220 live in Alberta, the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is trying to stop the petition signing campaign,
00:00:40.060 which began on January 2nd and is supposed to run until May 2nd. Now, I'm not a lawyer.
00:00:47.860 I watched most of it yesterday. Intently, no, but I listened in all day. And I'm going to give you
00:00:54.300 my interpretation of what I heard as a non-lawyer. And then I'm going to bring some lawyers into this
00:00:59.700 and have them explain what they heard yesterday. And these just happen to be a couple of lawyers
00:01:04.500 that will be in court on Thursday. So this started at 10 o'clock yesterday morning,
00:01:10.860 ran until about four o'clock. They took a lunch break of about an hour and a half, starting at
00:01:14.300 1.30. And Orla O'Kelly, who represents the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, spoke for most of the day.
00:01:20.960 I would say probably four hours out of the whole day, including from 10 until 1.30.
00:01:27.180 Now, I'm watching Ms. O'Kelly yesterday, and I think it was Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist who said, 0.92
00:01:33.600 the law is an ass, because I think that's a good way to describe Ms. O'Kelly. 0.91
00:01:40.780 Why do I say that? 0.98
00:01:42.180 Because the phrase, muddying the waters, came across my mind yesterday.
00:01:47.580 Not being a lawyer, but that's what I was thinking.
00:01:49.520 So what does that mean?
00:01:50.320 to make something more confusing, to introduce irrelevant information. And my God, did she
00:01:57.160 introduce a lot of irrelevant information yesterday. So a friend of mine wanted me to send
00:02:04.400 a text message because he knew I was watching this. Send it to me. I'm traveling.
00:02:08.960 What did you see yesterday? And this is what I sent. So this is at 1.39 yesterday afternoon,
00:02:15.240 right after they took a break. And this is what I wrote. The Indigenous lawyer just finished. In
00:02:21.320 summation, treaty, treaty, treaty, treaty. She brought up irreparable harm to First Nations, 0.60
00:02:28.340 racism a dozen times, talking about Cory Morgan's posts on how Indigenous people live,
00:02:34.820 how undemocratic having 177,000 people signing a petition for Alberta to leave is,
00:02:41.580 threw in the great replacement theory for a bonus. You need a law degree to get it all. Very dry and
00:02:47.900 boring. Hour and a half break, then our side gets its turn. Now, just to let you know, the lawyers
00:02:53.540 for State Free Alberta will be in court on Thursday. Yesterday, it was basically the province
00:02:58.480 there defending the citizens' initiative for the petition. Don't think they did a very good job on
00:03:05.200 this. Now, they did bring up racism a whole lot. Corey Morgan went on after Jeffrey Rath tweeted
00:03:12.660 out about this, and this is what Jeffrey wrote. Corey Morgan is now being publicly called out as
00:03:18.700 a racist in open court. And Corey, great follow-up here to quote Pierre Trudeau. I've been called
00:03:24.060 worse by better. Here's the video the chiefs are so upset with me about. It's as if they don't want
00:03:29.640 the public to see something. Here's just a short little clip from one of Corey's videos.
00:03:34.100 If you don't own things, how do you get rolling? How do you get businesses going? How do you build equity if you don't even have the house? There's a lot of people with ambition, but what do you do out on this isolated reserve to keep things rolling?
00:03:47.600 And sadly, the downtown, the businesses that are working, there's two liquor stores in this tiny little downtown.
00:03:55.720 There are bricked up buildings, again, where the business has shut down over the years.
00:04:01.800 The crime rate on reserves is terrible, unfortunately.
00:04:06.240 I mean, that's part of pretty much every socioeconomic measure.
00:04:11.040 There's a cannabis store as well, yes.
00:04:13.520 That's another thing that's still managing to sell there.
00:04:16.680 What Corey was doing here was not racism. It was pointing out fact. And he was trespassed
00:04:22.680 off reserve land for driving on a public road, which he had to fight in court. Now,
00:04:29.320 Ms. O'Kelly, who represent the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, went into a discussion regarding
00:04:37.000 democracy yesterday. And I tweeted this out yesterday. The lawyer for the Sturgeon Cree
00:04:42.200 Nation is next going to talk about democracy as a group of a few thousand people try to stop a
00:04:47.580 democratic process affecting five million. Eva Chibiuk will be in court regarding this on
00:04:53.140 Thursday, and this is what she says. This week, we will be in court on a challenge brought by
00:04:58.320 several First Nations in relation to the independence petition. Our petition is
00:05:03.180 straightforward. The matter is non-justiciable, premature and fundamentally political, not legal.
00:05:08.760 It is not a matter for the court and should be dismissed outright.
00:05:12.480 It is unfortunate that emotion and misinformation have become part of this campaign,
00:05:17.380 which has caused division and confusion.
00:05:19.740 Her thoughts on what happened yesterday,
00:05:21.660 and this is where she talks more about muddying the waters, how I described it.
00:05:26.740 Today's court case was hard to digest.
00:05:28.820 There were so many arguments being made that just did not make sense.
00:05:32.620 Take this one raised in the article below about tyranny of the minority,
00:05:36.840 But explain to me how one minority group argues tyranny of the minority against another minority.
00:05:43.380 Does that not just cancel itself out?
00:05:46.260 Or what about the argument that those proposing separation should form a provincial political party instead of proceeding by petition?
00:05:53.760 Well, couldn't we just say the exact same thing about those who oppose independence?
00:05:57.920 Or the one that gets people excited is foreign interference.
00:06:01.720 But ask yourselves, where is CSIS and the RCMP in all of this?
00:06:06.360 All we got was speciation, which I think should be speculation, and conjecture, hardly appropriate
00:06:12.620 for a court proceeding. And then we hear that racism and disinformation is an issue. Jeff Rath
00:06:18.700 got into this on X yesterday as well. Sturgeon Lake's lawyer actually stated that they weren't
00:06:23.920 seeking to enjoin the signature collection process or the counting of certification of the result by
00:06:30.000 the chief electoral officer. They are only seeking to get an injunction prohibiting the CEO from
00:06:35.700 communicating the result to the legislature. We aren't sure how this even makes sense, and I don't
00:06:42.400 think it's supposed to make sense. Again, it's more muddying of the waters, and that's from somebody
00:06:47.460 who's not a lawyer. And I think I was probably on the same page as Jeff Rath and Eva Chippyuk by
00:06:53.200 reading what they had in their tweets. Now, I talked to somebody last night, a friend of mine,
00:06:59.520 he said, how did it go in court today? What were your thoughts? And I said, again, I'm not a lawyer,
00:07:04.300 but based on what happened yesterday, I think Stay Free Alberta loses. I don't think that the
00:07:10.900 province did a very good job defending itself. So I'm really putting my money on Eva Chipiak and
00:07:16.580 Jeff Rath in court on Thursday. Here's what Jeff Rath told me on March 31st, his thoughts on what
00:07:21.960 was going to happen during this court case. People are really wanting to know about this court case.
00:07:27.680 I want to know about this court case. There's this challenge. Will the petition signing campaign be
00:07:32.680 shut down i think it starts on the 7th it could be a three-day thing uh next week will it be shut
00:07:37.760 down or will we continue until the march 2nd day line well i mean never say never i mean if an
00:07:43.080 injunction issues i mean we'll deal with it at the time but i you know as somebody who's been
00:07:47.780 practicing law for 34 years i'd say that the chances of that happening are you know i'll use
00:07:53.080 the judge's words slim to none i mean then the judge uh herself actually said in uh you know a
00:07:59.120 case management hearing that we had that the odds of her uh granting an injunction to stop the
00:08:05.400 you know the signature collection process you know were slim to none right yeah yeah you know
00:08:11.320 that being said never you know never never never say never jeff seems confident that this will go
00:08:17.600 our way but there's always a but who knows we were pretty confident with the court case before
00:08:23.440 Christmas with Justice Colin Feesby. That did not go our way. Now, I sat in on a Zoom meeting last
00:08:30.440 night, at least part of it, I was a little bit late getting on, but Mitch Sylvester talking to
00:08:34.860 a lot of the canvassers last night and discussing what's coming next. The next process in this won't
00:08:40.480 be about signatures. It's going to be about money. I think Mitch threw out the number $5 million
00:08:45.800 to help fight for the independence referendum and to get a yes vote. The other side's going to have
00:08:52.060 a lot more money. So you're going to be called on to try to raise some money or at least donate
00:08:56.900 money very soon. And I'm going to be helping out with that. I already got a couple of ideas
00:09:00.720 to raise some money. I like this kind of thing. Now, what about First Nations?
00:09:06.380 What does a referendum, a yes vote on a referendum mean for them? Here's Keith Wilson.
00:09:14.580 If the vote for independence is successful on October 19th, each individual First Nation,
00:09:20.700 However they make decisions as a community, we'll have a decision to make. They can say,
00:09:26.300 we don't want any change. We want our reserve land, that 1.3% of the land base cumulative of
00:09:32.500 all 48 reserves, to remain owned by the federal government in Ottawa. We want to remain under
00:09:37.900 the Indian Act. We want the federal government to look after our housing and the federal government 0.80
00:09:42.560 to continue to administer our treaty rights, except for those that are already transferred
00:09:46.420 to the Alberta government. That's their choice. They can say no change and they'll be able to
00:09:51.300 travel freely with their status card from the reserve through Alberta into the United States,
00:09:56.940 back onto the reserve, just like they can right now. Another First Nations may say, you know what,
00:10:01.940 Ottawa is really far away. They haven't done such a great job. We want Alberta, the new government
00:10:08.700 of the new country of Alberta, to step into the shoes of Ottawa and deliver the treaties and keep
00:10:14.600 everything the same, but now we'll be dealing with Edmonton, not Ottawa. And the Alberta government
00:10:19.640 and the First Nation and Ottawa can say, okay, we agree. People amend agreements all the time.
00:10:24.540 You and I can have an agreement and then we decide you're providing me a service, I'm providing you
00:10:28.380 a service and things change. And we say, hey, let's modify this agreement. As long as both
00:10:33.280 parties agree, you can always amend agreements that happens every single day. It happens every
00:10:38.320 hour of every day. Very common. So if the First Nations themselves decide, and only they can
00:10:44.800 decide, you can't tell them what to do, I can't tell them what to do, and I don't want to, and I
00:10:49.920 know you don't want to either. So if the First Nations themselves decide that they want to change
00:10:54.840 and have their treaty rights administered by Edmonton instead of Ottawa, that's their option.
00:10:59.140 Keith on the Sean Newman podcast there. For the first time, First Nations will have choice.
00:11:04.080 They'll have options, unlike what they've got right now.
00:11:06.680 Refer back to Corey Morgan's video from earlier.
00:11:09.740 What happens today, I don't know.
00:11:11.220 I'm going to try to watch as much as I can.
00:11:13.220 I do have family business to take care of today.
00:11:16.000 I've got some other things to do.
00:11:17.200 I'm very interested in what happens on Thursday
00:11:19.080 when our guys will be in court fighting this.
00:11:22.120 And I think their arguments will be a lot better
00:11:24.600 than what we saw on Tuesday.
00:11:26.900 Let me know what you think in the comments,
00:11:28.420 how things went.
00:11:29.260 If you followed along, if you liked the video,
00:11:31.360 please give it a thumbs up.
00:11:32.520 Subscribe to the channel.
00:11:33.400 ring the bell for notifications. I'll see you in the next one.