John Bolton - September 24, 2026


Can Alberta Afford Independence？ Yes, We Can! with Dennis Kalma

Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Dennis Kalma Jack Mintz Smith
An Important Message And How You Can Help Comrade Carney Goes To War - How Did We Ever Get To This Point？

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

187.13

Word count

3,610

Sentence count

254

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 here today. A little different
00:00:07.620 setup, although we've done this on occasion here down in my basement. I don't have a lot
00:00:12.460 of people visiting me, but my friend Dennis Kalma from the Alberta Transition Council
00:00:17.680 doesn't live very far from me. He lived down here sort of in the southeast, not too far
00:00:21.320 from me here in South Calgary. So I thought, why don't we get together as opposed to doing
00:00:25.700 a Zoom call? It's always better when we're together. It's always good to see Dennis.
00:00:28.960 and let's tip the big blue mugs. Good to see you here. Thank you very much for being here today
00:00:34.260 to talk about this, which was just released last night. Might be a little hard for you to see. I
00:00:39.740 might put it up in post, but forward to freedom. Can Alberta afford independence? And this is a
00:00:45.240 question that has been asked for very many months. We've heard lots of numbers on how much it will
00:00:50.420 cost us for our independence. I think Premier Smith threw out a number of something like $400
00:00:56.060 billion dollars, if I remember correctly. The most recent one we heard from, I think it was
00:01:00.180 Jack Mintz, University of Calgary, 50 to 170 billion dollars. And of course, this got play
00:01:07.040 across the country that it was going to cost too much for Alberta to do this. You've got some
00:01:11.740 numbers here. I haven't really had a chance to go through the complete document, which you've got
00:01:15.620 here today. What are we talking about here? Let me ask the question. Can Alberta afford
00:01:22.360 independent status this is the question short answer yes right but i want to take it back to
00:01:27.400 why there are two documents okay because there are two when we were getting ready to release the
00:01:34.040 um transition plan uh we were working on the budget in parallel so that that didn't change
00:01:40.200 but we realized fairly early on that the transition budget covers that period of transition
00:01:45.800 from the time we become independent until the time the future legislature sits
00:01:50.280 and how much that's going to cost. And that document was published yesterday as well.
00:01:54.760 This document answers the question, okay, so you've transitioned, your legislature's sitting,
00:02:01.640 are we still viable? We made it there, but it's a lot of temporary scaffolding as it were.
00:02:07.160 And now what do we do? So this answers the same question that the value of freedom answered
00:02:12.760 from APP back in 2025, but it now answers much more thoroughly.
00:02:18.840 and it updates some of those numbers i'm sure i know i've spoken to you many times since that
00:02:23.560 document the value of freedom was released i've got it right over here but i know you've been
00:02:27.560 wanting to update those numbers over time so it does update some of that well it updates the
00:02:31.880 numbers and makes them much more thorough the main thing so there's several differences between
00:02:36.360 uh the old document and this document um in the in the original document we put a lot of policy
00:02:44.360 elements a lot of a lot of commentary about how immigration would be done and what do we do for
00:02:51.480 indigenous people and how do we do this and how do we do that and in the discussions and meetings
00:02:57.240 i attended after that a lot of people were bothered by those policies because they were not perfect
00:03:02.280 they were guesses by a few people who said hey i think this sounds good and realized that it was
00:03:07.480 not necessary to do the fiscal planning so this document is far far lighter on the policy aspect
00:03:14.360 It really talks about only policy elements that are essential to the costing process.
00:03:20.800 So that's what we did.
00:03:22.360 So that's one major difference.
00:03:24.000 The second thing, and we got this as feedback as well, the numbers need to be cited.
00:03:28.480 We just put the numbers in value of freedom.
00:03:30.400 It's all real nice and read okay.
00:03:32.380 So where did this number come from?
00:03:33.880 Where did that number come from?
00:03:34.740 Now every number we quote is cited right back to its source.
00:03:40.020 Okay.
00:03:40.080 The other thing that's changed is we no longer explore essentially a single scenario.
00:03:46.140 We say, well, what happens if oil price falls?
00:03:49.700 What happens if we have to take the full share of the national debt?
00:03:53.920 What happens if this occurs?
00:03:56.400 We have seven different scenarios.
00:03:58.560 We cost out and say, okay, at what point do we exhaust our surplus?
00:04:03.000 So we can say, well, all these bad things have to happen and they have to remain before we're in trouble.
00:04:08.520 What are the chances of oil prices going in the toilet and staying there for 20 years? Zero.
00:04:14.360 Right.
00:04:15.000 So we put all that in to structure the document, be much more durable, much more readable,
00:04:20.500 and much more focused on the actual question of can Alberta survive? Is it fiscally viable
00:04:26.680 on its own as a separate nation?
00:04:29.040 You know, you hear quite often people saying, well, what would Alberta's share of the federal
00:04:34.840 debt be things like that it's obviously something you've had to look at so do you look at a scale
00:04:40.280 of where we may be so and you kind of cost it out so so people are going to struggle with why we did
00:04:45.160 this but we put it in there as zero we haven't estimated what it would be worst case but we said
00:04:52.760 this is an unsettled discussion we need to actually have the conversation with Canada
00:04:59.240 we have to have the debate about wait a minute here how much of that incurred debt was actually
00:05:04.200 beneficial to Alberta. Point at those assets, please. We have to discuss essentially our
00:05:09.960 grossly overpayments, gross overpayments to Canada. Well, does that not buy us some room in
00:05:16.600 that debt? And ultimately we'll end up at a settlement that I think is quite a bit lower
00:05:20.780 than the per capita, or as the University of Calgary report said, is we'll do it on the basis
00:05:28.200 of GDP, which is truly a worst case that makes no sense in my mind. I'm wondering, for instance,
00:05:33.880 when it comes to the national debt, I can't remember, is it, I've heard the word, maybe
00:05:38.340 16% or something we might have to pick up or something like that. So basically that's an
00:05:44.220 estimate. That's a guess. It's a guess. And the real number will come later once we get into the
00:05:49.880 discussion. And we made a reserve for it and forward to freedom. We said, okay, if we have
00:05:54.580 to take the full share, here's what it costs. It is survivable. It's not like we're going to
00:05:58.300 bankrupt the company, country rather. You know, so it works. In the transition plan, though, he said,
00:06:04.000 no, we're not going to try and make an estimate of what that negotiation will result in. We'll
00:06:08.400 hold it as a contingency to be dealt with. But right now, it costed at zero.
00:06:13.340 Right. So the number from the premier, which was way up there, $400 billion.
00:06:18.520 Mintz was $50 to $170 billion. If you look at this document here, an estimate, how much?
00:06:24.680 So right now we're saying it's about $5 billion or so, and maybe I'm going to back up for a moment.
00:06:31.920 Let me discuss the mistake in my mind that's made by people like Danielle and the University of Calgary Report.
00:06:39.580 They conflate three different kinds of spending.
00:06:43.740 When you do something, when you do an activity, you have one-time cost that you spend to send something up, to stand it up, to make it run.
00:06:52.640 In our case, we say that's around $5 billion.
00:06:55.380 That's to buy the computers and whatever small equipment we need
00:06:58.800 and so on and so forth, temporary help.
00:07:00.840 That's a one-time cost.
00:07:02.840 The second thing is what increased administrative costs do we incur?
00:07:07.700 In other words, how many more people do we have to add
00:07:09.860 on an ongoing basis to run the thing, to administer the thing?
00:07:13.940 That's a second cost.
00:07:15.660 And then the third category is what is the money
00:07:18.120 that's actually paid out to individuals?
00:07:20.640 So, for example, pensions.
00:07:22.220 for example, age payments, for example, any other payment that goes to a business or to a person,
00:07:28.560 they tend to mix those three together and say, oh, look at this huge number.
00:07:32.920 You know, they conflate stand-up cost, running cost, and payments to taxpayers.
00:07:40.820 What the Alberta Transition Council document talks about is a lot of the things that
00:07:47.740 we're doing right now are just going to be a continuation of things that are going to happen
00:07:53.280 if we gain our independence, right? So there's not going to be additional costs here. It's the
00:07:59.200 same thing that we're going to be doing, that we're doing right now. Yes, well, that gets said
00:08:04.660 over and over again. There is absolutely nothing that we are doing that we need to do that is new
00:08:10.460 to the world. It's all being done now. We issue passports. Government of Canada does that. We have
00:08:15.640 a military government. Canada does that. There's a lot of this stuff that's within Alberta. We have
00:08:20.500 a banking system and a banking regulator. It needs to be expanded. We have a police force. It needs
00:08:26.580 to be expanded. So we have all those functions already. There's none that are new to world or
00:08:31.700 unknown unknowns. We just have to stand them up and make the run. There was a lot of, you know,
00:08:37.760 apocalyptic talk in the recent document that was released. Albertans are going to lose on average
00:08:44.600 something like $12,000 a year and things like that? What did you make of that? And what does
00:08:49.520 it say regarding things like that in this document that you released yesterday?
00:08:53.620 Well, so they were discussing the whole idea that people wouldn't want to trade with us.
00:08:59.860 We wouldn't be able to sell product. No investment would come in. People would leave,
00:09:03.560 whatever the case might be. And I happen to disagree with that. I would take, for example,
00:09:07.660 our shipments to the United States, primarily oil. They're going to want that oil. It's going
00:09:11.900 to continue be desired. They'll continue to pay and we will continue to get revenue and work from
00:09:18.060 that. The rest of Canada, I wrote an article about that a while ago that discusses the nature of the
00:09:24.880 trade between Alberta and the rest of Canada. It's primarily energy and agricultural products.
00:09:31.400 Well, they need our energy. Burnaby runs out of gas in something like a week.
00:09:36.360 That's right.
00:09:36.620 If oil stops flowing to eastern Canada through line five,
00:09:40.960 southern Ontario and Quebec are in trouble.
00:09:43.220 So that's not going to stop.
00:09:44.960 Agricultural products, people got to eat.
00:09:47.380 And the stuff that comes back to us is financial services, banking,
00:09:52.600 it's consulting services and so forth.
00:09:54.520 Why on earth would Canada want to stop providing those services? 0.95
00:09:58.700 Because it makes them money,
00:09:59.680 because their economy will be struggling as much as ours in some respects.
00:10:03.980 So they're going to want to sell stuff to us.
00:10:06.340 We're going to want to buy it to keep our economy going.
00:10:08.820 We're going to keep on selling oil to the United States.
00:10:11.980 I don't see any material impact to our economy.
00:10:15.560 Now, we did postulate in the plan, one of the scenarios,
00:10:19.380 is what would happen if we suffered the worst downturn in Alberta history,
00:10:24.360 which is roughly what that would be.
00:10:26.920 And how long did it last?
00:10:28.680 And still under that scenario, it's not as dark as the University of Calgary,
00:10:33.420 But yeah, it gives us a hit, but it's survivable. It works. We're not bankrupt as a country because
00:10:39.720 we have a downturn or several downturns at once.
00:10:43.980 When it comes to this document and when it comes to people and living their lives,
00:10:48.240 they talked about a $12,000 drop in income. It's been thrown around since we've been talking about
00:10:55.120 the independence movement, the rise of the independence movement, probably early last
00:10:58.780 year, 2025, the words like, we'd be to buy with snow, things like, and you've said that before,
00:11:07.280 I think I've quoted you on that before. You're obviously looking at all the different
00:11:14.100 contingencies, and I think that's very important, and you're saying, listen, this could happen,
00:11:19.140 but is there a good opportunity for people to be better off, as we've said, we've talked about
00:11:24.360 eliminating income tax and things like that, maybe after a number of years.
00:11:27.580 Yeah. So if you go to one of the sections of the document where we look to the future,
00:11:32.060 we walk through essentially six price production scenarios that say, okay, the base case is what
00:11:38.540 we're stating. No change in income, no change in revenue, flat as can be. Then we said, okay,
00:11:44.220 there's three choices. You say, well, what happens if Alberta sort of just continues more or less as
00:11:49.500 it is? Small amount of growth, nothing major. And we said, okay, what happens if it's more
00:11:53.500 aggressive growth and what happens at the high end if it goes all out you know many pipelines many
00:11:59.580 plants and so on and so forth which is the upper bound right in all those scenarios under two
00:12:04.860 different oil price scenarios we are substantially better off to the tune tune in some case of
00:12:12.940 hundreds of billions of dollars a year so what will we do with that money is the question i
00:12:18.140 will leave open for the legislature do they want to save it like norway do they want to reduce taxes
00:12:23.500 some combination of the two. An option is to in fact reduce our tax load in this country
00:12:30.460 to be so small as to be insignificant or perhaps zero. How do you get to hundreds of billions of
00:12:36.140 dollars? Well, because you increase the revenue. You do a reasonable price prediction on oil and
00:12:42.960 gas price in the future. You increase your production, let's say from the current
00:12:46.380 foreign change million barrels a day to maybe seven million barrels a day. That's a lot of
00:12:52.340 revenue coming into the country. That's a lot of government revenue. And that extra money is what
00:12:57.200 allows the government to offset taxes or whatever they want to do with it.
00:13:01.880 Right. So it covers a little bit of everything. You've tried to look, and again, you talked about
00:13:08.320 the University of Calgary thing. A lot of the things they put in there are, if this happens,
00:13:15.160 there's a lot of that in there. They're guessing that investment will flee from the province.
00:13:19.900 they're guessing that businesses will flee from the province. And that's how they came up with
00:13:23.340 their numbers. Yeah. And those guesses are fair. I'm not going to pretend I have a magic crystal
00:13:28.380 ball that can say, oh, none of that will happen. It could, but we stress tested it. If all those
00:13:35.100 bad things happen, where does it leave us? Right. So there's you sitting here talking about this.
00:13:40.620 Who looked at this? So the team of 45 souls that put together the transition plan,
00:13:48.940 As part of that work, we developed a lot of material, did a lot of research.
00:13:54.220 I know there were like thousands of pages that got put into the Alberta
00:13:57.740 transition plan was a couple of hundred, I think at the end, right?
00:14:02.300 But that research and those base materials and certainly the clear definition and cost of the
00:14:07.580 transition plan were definitely input into this. But the other material, we said, okay,
00:14:12.700 we can extract that. When someone went through and said, okay, Canada's cost revenue, whatever
00:14:18.220 the case might be in this area was this much well that's a wonderful figure to use in forward freedom
00:14:24.620 in the actual creation of the document there's a group of about four reviewers that went through
00:14:30.380 it and they would feedback and say okay this isn't right what about this let's explore that
00:14:35.500 we we discussed with other people i'm going to say somewhere within four and six people actually
00:14:40.220 contributed materially to the document and is it perfect no but we are asking for people to give
00:14:46.620 feedback. Right. I think it's pretty solid, but Hey, if we made a mistake, let us know.
00:14:50.880 Well, yeah. I'm wondering if people will be looking at this. I just received information
00:14:55.220 about this last night. So this could be in people's hands right now. There was a lot of
00:15:00.000 coverage of that UFC thing. A lot of it. Are you expecting to get a lot of people asking about,
00:15:05.660 I mean, there should be. I mean, I agree there should be. I mean, we certainly are willing to
00:15:10.920 talk to any media people. I've been responding online on X already. Uh, one fellow raised a
00:15:17.620 question about, well, you got the military all wrong. Well, read the document. You'll find out
00:15:21.320 that your questions are answered there. So I hope people read it and give it a chance
00:15:25.360 and understand it. We made it more readable. We think. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so how long did it take to
00:15:31.600 put this together? I know the transition plan was, it took a long time. There's a lot of work into
00:15:35.540 that, but this was kind of work, a work in progress at the same time. So you were able to get this
00:15:40.260 within a couple of weeks of the transition yeah i mean i had been working on it prior to um the
00:15:46.660 the transition plan being released for uh in my copious free time uh i was sitting down saying
00:15:53.540 okay we gotta update this document keith and i discussed it and i said look this is an essential
00:15:58.980 companion to the transition plan he agreed so when i had time i pulled things together did some
00:16:05.700 some reviews with the other people and so forth. So I'm going to say it probably was about a six
00:16:10.700 or seven week effort, but not full time. Right. So, you know, bottom line, what do you have to
00:16:16.020 say to people who are skeptical about Alberta independence and our finances? So I would say,
00:16:21.960 first of all, the transition from province to country is doable. It can be done by mere humans
00:16:29.680 and at an affordable price. You're going to send this over to Jack Mintz?
00:16:34.640 He has already been sent to him.
00:16:37.940 I'm wondering if he'd be interested in talking about that in some type of a forum or something, to go over the numbers.
00:16:45.580 I'm wondering if he would do something like that, or would you be willing to do that?
00:16:48.600 Well, I'd be willing to talk to Mr. Mintz, who I've never met and have great respect for.
00:16:52.460 Sure.
00:16:52.640 I think two guys debating numbers online is pretty well the definition of boring.
00:16:58.420 Yeah.
00:16:58.600 What I would like to discuss with him are the assumptions.
00:17:01.680 Yeah, that would be very, very interesting.
00:17:03.400 I think watching paint dry would be a good description of that.
00:17:07.840 So thank you.
00:17:08.440 I'm not going to host that event because nobody would want to watch it.
00:17:11.480 You're absolutely right.
00:17:12.540 It would be really boring, I'm sure.
00:17:15.060 But how can people get this if they want to read it?
00:17:18.220 So go to albertatransitioncouncil.com.
00:17:22.360 You'll see right in the headlines there will be transition plan,
00:17:25.580 there will be budget and costing, and then forward to freedom.
00:17:29.120 You can download those.
00:17:30.240 You can read them online.
00:17:31.180 and there are summaries for the two documents so you can read them.
00:17:35.020 And you're looking for feedback.
00:17:36.300 We're looking for feedback and debate.
00:17:37.980 And if the numbers have to change a little bit, you're open to that.
00:17:41.260 Totally.
00:17:42.240 Yeah.
00:17:42.380 If someone says, hey, your scenarios aren't strong enough, okay, well, let's fiddle them.
00:17:46.460 Right.
00:17:46.720 Good stuff.
00:17:47.220 Well, thanks very much.
00:17:48.060 I mean, this is, maybe the word superficial isn't the best way to discuss how we're talking
00:17:52.720 about it, but this has just been released yesterday and there's a lot to dig into here
00:17:56.560 and there's a lot of information.
00:17:57.880 I mean, and we're talking about numbers.
00:17:59.220 they may be boring to talk about, but they're really important. So people a lot smarter than
00:18:03.820 me have to look into this, like Dennis and the people that put this document together. So if
00:18:07.980 you're interested in getting it, check it out, albertatransitioncouncil.com. Dennis,
00:18:12.120 always good to see you. Thanks a lot for being here. Let's shake hands. Let's shake hands in
00:18:16.140 this one. Thank you very much for being here. And if you like this video, please give it a
00:18:19.540 thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, ring the bell for notifications. I'll see you in the next one.
00:18:25.260 It's morning again in the West and Alberta is waking from a long, dark night.
00:18:31.000 Today, Albertans go to work knowing their democratic vote for independence allows them to take home more of what they earn.
00:18:38.100 Young people and married couples feel comfortable and secure in knowing they now can afford a home,
00:18:44.340 something they thought unthinkable just a short while ago.
00:18:47.540 Today, senior citizens feel more secure, with an independent Alberta providing more for them than ever before.
00:18:55.540 And with Alberta keeping more of its wealth, and unfettered by the unfair government in Ottawa,
00:19:01.540 Albertans are building hospitals, schools and pipelines, and look forward with optimism for the future.
00:19:08.540 It's morning again in the West, a single mark on a ballot for independence,
00:19:13.540 and Albertans are more confident, prosperous, and free.