John Bolton - May 11, 2026


Alberta's Constitution - 3 Possibilities - Have Your Say On Your Future

Topics
new constitution for Alberta
Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Jason Levine Angela Tabak Kathy Flett Matthew Rowley Dennis Bruce Pardee John Pierre Trudeau Tanya Clemens Redmond Party Cathy
Independence Calendar Episode #23 - May 10th, 2026 - Petitions delivered Carney & Smith Are About To Throw Alberta A Bone - It Stinks

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

192.23

Word count

2,231

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Jason Levine, Angela Tabak, and Kathy Flett join me to talk about the importance of women in Alberta's independence movement. They discuss the need for women to have a voice in the independence movement, and why it is so important for them to be a part of it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel. Great to have you along today. And I wanted to talk
00:00:09.040 to these people you see on the screen right here about something I think is of great interest to
00:00:14.100 people moving forward when it comes to the Alberta independence movement. As you can see,
00:00:18.620 I've got Jason Levine here, Angela Tabak in the bottom right, and Kathy Flett in the bottom left.
00:00:24.760 And Kathy and Angela have been part of the Alberta Women's Independent Network, which I have been very happy to be part of, proud to have started off this series of interviews over the last several weeks, talking about Alberta independence.
00:00:38.160 But other issues as well have got into the discussion.
00:00:41.620 And we've got a discussion coming up that Jason will be hosting to talk about the Constitution.
00:00:48.460 And this is something I know that has been discussed for months.
00:00:51.380 and I think they've had a constitution for the most part drafted for an independent Alberta
00:00:56.080 since before Christmas last year, although it's being tweaked. It's sort of, I guess we could say
00:01:01.520 a living document at this point. And we're going to have an interesting discussion about this on
00:01:06.960 Monday night with three terrific guests, which Jason will tell us about in just a moment. But
00:01:11.600 I wanted to talk to Kathy and to Angela first. First off, thank you for letting me be part of
00:01:16.040 this. I started this off a couple of weeks ago. Tell us about the Alberta Women's Independent
00:01:21.360 Network and why you're doing this. Maybe Angela, you can start this off. Sure. And thank you so 0.99
00:01:26.580 much, John, for being a part of this. It's been so exciting. So the Alberta Women's Independence
00:01:32.360 is actually Independence Network. That's all right. It's something that we started a little
00:01:38.260 over a year ago. And our whole focus has been in engaging Albertans with a focus on women who
00:01:45.400 perhaps historically personally have not had a lot to do with politics who have not been a part
00:01:51.720 of the conversation that we find ourselves in now in alberta and so what we've been doing
00:01:58.920 is we've been going across the province we've been meeting in people's homes in local restaurants
00:02:04.360 cafes and even town halls speaking to albertans and inviting them to become a part of this really
00:02:11.720 important conversation and so we've been doing the last three four weeks a speaker series that
00:02:20.360 Kathy can kind of tell you a little bit about. Sure so as we were going around literally the
00:02:26.840 whole entire province of Alberta the same questions kept coming up and the same concerns kept coming
00:02:32.440 up and so another gal that works with us came to us with this document that Colonel Redmond had
00:02:39.400 written not very long ago just a couple of years ago and said what about these six pillars what if
00:02:43.640 we explore these six pillars and uh we said okay and then the idea is just morphed into this
00:02:50.520 into this series that we've done and the idea was to get our local podcasters alberta is filled with
00:02:56.440 amazing local podcasters you two are two of many and and some subject matter experts and those
00:03:03.240 subject matter experts did not need to be from alberta they could be from anywhere and the
00:03:09.080 conversations in these in these podcasts that we've had exploring these six pillars have gone
00:03:14.440 in directions that we couldn't have even imagined when when this idea first came to be and now
00:03:20.920 there's a hunger for more people don't want it to stop they want us to keep going so we will
00:03:25.560 yeah we'll get to you in a second jason you're waiting patiently there but i do have a question
00:03:29.240 for Angela and for Kathy right now.
00:03:32.080 I had Tanya Clemens on the channel 0.81
00:03:33.740 a couple of months back,
00:03:34.920 and I said,
00:03:35.820 do you think, Tanya,
00:03:37.500 it's important for women
00:03:38.540 to have a strong voice in this movement?
00:03:40.260 I know, Kathy, you're out speaking
00:03:42.060 in different events,
00:03:43.300 and obviously you've got this voice here 0.95
00:03:45.960 with the women who put together this network
00:03:48.280 in this series of interviews.
00:03:49.820 How important are women's faces and voices
00:03:52.860 going forward in the independence movement?
00:03:55.280 Either one of you can take this question.
00:03:58.020 well we are literally 50 of the population so if if we want to achieve albert independence we've
00:04:05.780 got to have the women on board and the fact of the matter is is that um as women we're just 0.83
00:04:12.180 wired differently than men not better not worse just different and we see things in a different
00:04:18.660 way and from a different perspective and what i just noticed is that like for myself personally
00:04:24.580 a lot of the messaging that was coming out about alberta independence was not appealing to me it
00:04:29.460 was not addressing the things that i was particularly concerned about and so as i
00:04:35.780 started talking to other women in my neighborhood i realized i was not alone in that and um and so
00:04:41.940 yeah we've got to have messaging that hits all demographics and that that is able to speak to
00:04:49.060 all demographics across Alberta if we are going to be successful.
00:04:53.700 Okay. You know, after you came back with that terrific answer there at the stop, I thought,
00:04:58.920 you know, that was kind of a dumb question. You are 50% of the population. Jason, I want to find 0.96
00:05:03.760 out about this event. What do you think? I mean, obviously women have to have a voice in this. And
00:05:08.920 as Angela so deftly said, there are a little bit more than 50% of the population. How important
00:05:15.480 important is their voice and then tell us about this conversation you're having on Monday night 1.00
00:05:19.680 you're asking me this question no I'm asking Jason okay Jason women are incredibly important 0.98
00:05:27.100 absolutely and I will have to fact check and I say fact check true that they're not more important 1.00
00:05:32.720 or less important they're just different and that's why I have a show here with my wife every
00:05:36.760 morning and we have these conversations to get that other perspective there but we're going to
00:05:41.000 have Matthew Rowley, who's going to be advocating for a repair of the current Canadian Constitution
00:05:46.900 as a starting point for Alberta. We're going to then have Bruce Pardee, who's going to be on the
00:05:52.260 other end of the spectrum there, talking about a completely different radical change, which is a
00:05:56.820 less power for the government and a smaller size for the government. And then right there in the
00:06:03.460 middle, we're going to have Dennis. He's going to be talking about how we can make changes and take
00:06:08.380 something like the Canadian and the American Constitution and merge them together to make a
00:06:13.020 much better, stronger constitution, something people are a little bit more familiar with and
00:06:17.200 understand that ends up in a republic. So I'm excited to have all three of these gentlemen
00:06:21.400 to talk about a spectrum of options and conversations about how a new constitution
00:06:25.980 for the nation of Alberta can be materialized for the people, by the people, and then at one point
00:06:31.380 ratified by the people. So I'm looking forward to that one. Yeah, I know Dennis, I mean, Dennis has
00:06:36.180 been working on the Constitution for Alberta, and I've talked to him about this for several months
00:06:41.340 now. And I know he's had discussions with Bruce as well about this, and I'm sure he's taken in
00:06:47.720 some information and probably tried to integrate some of what Mr. Party has to say. Bringing
00:06:53.100 Matthew Rowley into this is interesting as well. I've had a chance to speak with him.
00:06:57.420 What do you think? I know, Jason, you're doing this on Monday night because you've got a bit
00:07:01.060 of a background and you've talked about the Constitution quite a bit. Do you think we can
00:07:05.780 marry two different systems together to get something that a majority of Albertans will
00:07:09.760 agree upon if we get our independence in October? Well, I think what most Albertans want is a
00:07:15.260 different system, one that has representation, is a lot more fair, and it does listen to the people,
00:07:20.520 along with a lot more direct democracy, where the people have a say in what happens
00:07:26.220 throughout the government. It's not once every four years, four years that we actually have this.
00:07:30.900 Now, Matthew Rowley's position is a little interesting because he's not saying,
00:07:34.360 let's take the current Canadian system and work with it.
00:07:37.060 He's saying, let's go back to the original one,
00:07:39.160 which is before Pierre Elliott Trudeau changed it and messed it up.
00:07:43.860 His perspective is it was actually perverted at that point in time,
00:07:47.700 and it was functioning fine before then.
00:07:49.940 So he's actually advocating to go back to and repair the Canadian system
00:07:53.980 before that and start there.
00:07:55.840 But what I really enjoy about having this conversation at this point is
00:07:59.300 a lot of Albertans are waiting for the how.
00:08:01.660 Like, how do we get this done?
00:08:03.640 The why is pretty clear to many people at this stage.
00:08:06.480 The how is not so clear.
00:08:08.140 And about 20% of Canadians, and you can assume it's about 20% of Albertans,
00:08:12.360 do like the Commonwealth, and they do like the king being part of the head of state.
00:08:17.360 So that's still a large chunk of people that shouldn't be ignored.
00:08:19.940 So Matthew bringing that conversation to the table, I think, is important.
00:08:23.120 But the one thing that all three of these gentlemen have in common
00:08:25.720 is we need to have a new system that has to start with independence for Alberta.
00:08:31.460 So this is not about repairing inside of Canada.
00:08:33.780 This is about a new nation and how we should birth it.
00:08:36.860 Monday, May 11th at 5 p.m.
00:08:38.800 And of course, you'll be able to see it on Jason's channel.
00:08:40.920 I think we're going to be streaming it on my channel as well.
00:08:42.720 So I hope you'll watch it.
00:08:43.880 Kathy, I want to ask you this. 1.00
00:08:45.780 You've got a small group of women right now arranging these events.
00:08:48.780 Can people get involved with your organization and how do they do that? 1.00
00:08:52.900 Easily. Absolutely.
00:08:54.620 The easiest way is probably just connect with us on our social media pages.
00:08:58.060 so we've got one on x and we're on facebook as well you can sign up for our newsletter so you
00:09:03.340 can stay in the know of everything that's that's going on and if anybody wants to have a home
00:09:09.100 meeting let us know we're happy to come we'll go wherever like we keep saying have wheels we'll
00:09:15.020 travel and and we will we'll go wherever and um always looking for ladies too who are willing to 0.99
00:09:20.780 to do what we do, right?
00:09:23.240 Like it's better, Angela and I are happy to do it,
00:09:26.960 but more hands make light work.
00:09:28.880 And so anybody else who wants to learn the presentation
00:09:31.880 that we give to be able to do it themselves,
00:09:33.920 we're happy to equip them to do that as well.
00:09:36.180 And Angela, wrap things up with you here.
00:09:37.900 You're obviously looking for people who are coming out
00:09:39.600 who are gonna ask difficult questions as well.
00:09:42.040 I know by looking at Let's Talk Alberta, Cathy,
00:09:44.820 you've been involved with that very much,
00:09:46.680 making and having discussions.
00:09:48.380 They're always looking for objections because they want to counter those objections.
00:09:53.440 I suppose it's the same.
00:09:54.880 You're looking for people who are sitting on the fence who are dead set against independence here in Alberta?
00:10:00.460 Absolutely.
00:10:01.240 And this is also one of the opportunities that we have for tomorrow night because it will be live streamed.
00:10:05.880 If there are folks that want to get involved that have questions or have objections, please get on with the live stream.
00:10:12.340 We'll be following the chat.
00:10:13.960 We're going to try to answer as many of those questions as we can.
00:10:18.380 and it is an opportunity for people to ask questions we asking questions is part of the
00:10:25.440 discussion it's probably the most important part of the discussion that we need to have
00:10:28.700 and we need to as Albertans get back to being able to have hard discussions and be able to kind of
00:10:38.100 duke it out in a really polite and respectful way if we're going to find the best solution for our
00:10:44.020 province it's got to be we've got to be able to look at all the different angles and honestly
00:10:49.120 assess each each idea and eventually come to that the best solution possible thank you very much
00:10:56.420 angela kathy i appreciate you very much thanks for including me in this jason as always a pleasure
00:11:01.700 to talk to you good luck with this discussion bruce party dennis kalma matthew rowley five o'clock
00:11:07.200 monday of course you can check it out after that uh on jason's channel be sure to subscribe to
00:11:12.980 Jason Levine, for goodness sakes, everywhere. If you aren't, you should be. And it'll be on my
00:11:19.660 channel as well. The best to all of you. Thank you for joining me as we record this early on
00:11:24.740 Sunday morning. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. If you like this
00:11:30.680 video, give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, ring the bell for notifications. I will
00:11:34.820 see you in the next one.