John Bolton - May 13, 2026


Court Rules Against The Petition - Mitch Sylvestre Responds

Topics
stay free alberta petition alberta independence movement Forever Canada petition
Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Mitch Sylvester Danielle Smith Stay Free Alberta Jeff Rath Thomas Lukasik Jason Kenney Corb Lund Fisbee John
Carney & Smith Are About To Throw Alberta A Bone - It Stinks Be Proud - Without Struggle There Is No Progress - We Will Win!

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

197.9

Word count

3,022

Sentence count

184

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Stay Free Alberta's Mitch Sylvester joins the show to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding the petition to hold a referendum on Alberta's independence from the United Conservative Party of Canada. Stay Free Alberta has over 300,000 signatures in support of their call for a referendum.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, May
00:00:07.060 the 13th.
00:00:07.720 Great to have you along today with the big blue mug of coffee, tasting sweet this afternoon,
00:00:11.780 but there's a little bit of bitterness in the coffee, it seems, after a decision came
00:00:16.460 down that came across my phone about, well, within the last hour or so, and you've probably
00:00:22.020 been following along with it as well, and this is the court decision regarding the petitions
00:00:26.640 that were handed in just a couple of Mondays ago by Stay Free Alberta
00:00:31.380 and the man you see on the screen right now, Mitch Sylvester.
00:00:34.420 Mitch, thank you so much for taking some time.
00:00:37.480 I heard about this, sent you a quick message, and you said you would talk to me.
00:00:41.840 The first question, I guess, is are you disappointed and are you surprised?
00:00:46.960 Neither.
00:00:47.840 To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I've been saying this for a couple weeks,
00:00:51.620 and I'm going to tell everybody not panic.
00:00:54.240 This is not going to affect anything.
00:00:57.220 We've sent the government a very strong mandate of 301,000 signatures of Albertans that want this referendum for independence.
00:01:04.820 We always knew it was going to be dropped in the Premier's lap.
00:01:08.780 And based on Section 1 of the Referendum Act, she's going to have to call this vote.
00:01:15.320 And we knew that was going to be the case.
00:01:17.080 We knew we were not going to win this court case.
00:01:19.380 We're going to appeal.
00:01:21.260 But what that does for us is it actually shows us exactly what we already know.
00:01:25.480 it just reinforces that, that we have to show up and we have to take control of our own process
00:01:30.480 in order to win. So stay tuned. We're going to have a rally, the mother of all rallies,
00:01:35.960 as far as I can. We're looking for a place to hold it right now. And we're going to have it
00:01:41.720 in the next couple of weeks. And just be aware that we're going to expect every single one of
00:01:47.460 you there. It's going to be one of these things that we're going to say, look, you remember back
00:01:52.740 in the day, while some of you may, some of you may not remember, but I asked everybody for 10 days.
00:01:57.580 This is day number one. This is the biggest day that we have to make a statement. We have to tell
00:02:05.140 and show the UCP that, look, this is important. We've been on this path for a month. We've been
00:02:10.340 selling memberships to the UCP just because we're expecting this very thing. So where we are right
00:02:16.160 now is we're in a position where we have to explain to the UCP that the largest part of
00:02:22.220 their membership is independence people. And they acknowledge that. I'm sure they do that.
00:02:28.540 They give us the opportunity to have the vote. So now we have to show up and show them that
00:02:31.960 that's actually who we are. I'm not sure if these numbers are correct. I heard that in the last
00:02:36.320 election, about 600,000 people voted in the last provincial election. Over 300,000 people signed
00:02:42.700 this petition. So that is certainly a message for Danielle Smith and the UCP that, you know,
00:02:49.360 we really want to be heard here. Now, what I'm concerned about, and I'm sure a lot of people who
00:02:53.740 worked very hard over four months, you saw those boxes when you handed them in, you had a big grin
00:02:59.160 on your face, those people sitting in the snow. What happens to the signatures? They were sealed
00:03:03.820 up. They're sitting at Elections Alberta, for all I know. You counted them, thank God. We know
00:03:08.760 there's over 300,000 signatures there. Are these going to be destroyed, all that work, and never
00:03:14.500 be counted because of this judge's decision well i don't think you should look at it that way okay
00:03:20.020 uh i think i think that what happened when we collected 301 000 signatures is we showed the
00:03:26.640 premier and the ucp government that there's 301 000 albertans that are prepared and i believe
00:03:32.660 the number is actually real i i i know that the number is actually real our our process was very
00:03:37.660 stringent i would be surprised if there was any attrition in those signatures uh they had to be
00:03:42.440 They had to be signed by the person that was actually signing the paper to authorize that they were actually there.
00:03:48.700 They had to be vetted according to living in Alberta or not, their age.
00:03:54.560 And they had to have a physical address.
00:03:56.820 And then the canvasser had to sign off on it.
00:03:58.820 So there's lots of steps there.
00:04:00.420 But the way you have to see this is that you all showed up.
00:04:03.820 You participated.
00:04:04.900 You did the work.
00:04:05.860 and you told the premier of Alberta, look, there's 301,000 people that have the courage
00:04:10.760 to sign this petition. That number is not going to change whether they destroy it or not.
00:04:16.500 That number is the message. And, you know, they play around with it and say, well, we need it.
00:04:22.040 They asked for 177,000 to trigger the referendum vote. They got 301. So our premier,
00:04:29.240 right from the beginning, was going to be tasked with making this call. And you've showed her in
00:04:33.900 large way that you want to vote on Alberta independence. So don't ever despair and say
00:04:38.720 that all the work that we've done was for naught. It was totally not for naught. This would not be
00:04:43.280 happening without that. And so you should all continue to be proud of yourselves, as proud
00:04:47.440 of yourselves as we all are for all the work that went into that. And, you know, it's not for naught
00:04:53.220 at all. As a matter of fact, like I said, I'll repeat it. Without that, we don't have a chance
00:04:58.120 moving forward. Right. Jeff Rath, your counsel here, who was in court, says we disagree
00:05:04.840 fundamentally with the decision which appears on its face to violate principles of natural justice
00:05:09.860 and contain numerous errors of law. We have been instructed to prepare and file the appropriate
00:05:14.780 appellate documents. So you talked about an appeal. How long would this stretch on? And
00:05:20.440 do you think you could win it if you appeal? No. Yeah. But we knew we weren't going to win
00:05:26.760 any of this from the start. That's why everybody said, oh, Mitch, you're pretty relaxed. Well,
00:05:30.760 I'm relaxed because I was expecting this from the start. We've got a contingency plan here.
00:05:35.380 We never thought this was going to be easy. We knew they were going to throw everything in the
00:05:39.120 world at us. They don't want to lose 47 to $57 billion a year in income every year for the next
00:05:45.760 100 years. They totally understand what's at stake. They're going to do everything they can
00:05:50.360 to stop this. But on the other hand, if we do everything we can to make sure it happens,
00:05:54.980 it's going to happen and i believe this right here is just going to make our people angrier
00:05:59.780 it's just going to make our movement stronger um i can't you know carney's going to come to alberta
00:06:06.020 on friday you know after they planned all this you notice how the judgment comes today and now
00:06:10.420 currently's going to come riding in on friday and he's going to say well you know from what i
00:06:14.500 understand he's going to say we're going to have an increase in carbon tax and probably say that
00:06:17.940 we're going to hook up jason kenny's pipeline he's going to take credit for that and say that
00:06:21.620 that's going to save us well pipeline's not going to save alberta from us we understand that you
00:06:27.700 know i mean if there's more money they're just going to take it all it's not going to be any
00:06:31.700 not going to be any benefit to us so you know what i think i think the the cat is out of the bag
00:06:38.100 i think people understand what's going on here and the more of this stuff that goes on
00:06:42.420 the clearer it becomes yeah and it pushes people over to the independent side we had the numbers
00:06:46.900 just come out a few days ago saying 46 of the indigenous people in this province would vote
00:06:51.620 in favor. And I'm sure a lot of those people who are on the 54% side would do the same,
00:06:57.040 but I think they're probably a little afraid to sign up or be part of this. Now, let me ask you
00:07:01.780 this. Do you think that this decision is unfair? We've got a very small percentage of people who
00:07:07.020 are indigenous, a very small percentage of Alberta is their land, yet they're making a decision based
00:07:13.320 on all of these people and 5 million people in the province, 300,000 people who signed
00:07:18.220 on a petition to get this done for a democratic process.
00:07:22.320 Is this unfair?
00:07:24.360 Well, I mean, I don't want to blame Aboriginal people for this.
00:07:28.520 No, no, I'm not doing that.
00:07:30.040 And I won't.
00:07:32.040 Yeah, and not only just the chiefs.
00:07:34.500 I mean, the federal government has been pushing this.
00:07:37.720 So we totally understand where this comes from.
00:07:39.840 But, you know, let's go back to that number.
00:07:42.040 46% of Aboriginal people with 13% undecided.
00:07:46.140 So that could possibly be 60% of Aboriginal people that are in favor of independence.
00:07:50.880 And so why would that be? 0.81
00:07:52.740 Because they hate the federal government as much as we do.
00:07:55.460 It's just plain and simple.
00:07:57.000 If you ever talk to them, they've gotten a raw deal from the federal government.
00:08:00.560 And, you know, it's their land.
00:08:02.900 Unfortunately, it's the province of Alberta's land.
00:08:06.080 And that's a bigger part of this conversation.
00:08:09.680 And, you know, I mean, Aboriginal people don't even own the land that they live on. 1.00
00:08:13.680 it's all um it's all belongs to the government of canada so so you know what we can do way better
00:08:21.460 for them and uh i believe that that's going to be the goal and we want to do way better for all
00:08:26.700 albertans and aboriginals can get a hand up and uh let's uh let's move the whole province on with
00:08:32.180 you know the shiny example uh of what we can do um if we don't have government with their hands 1.00
00:08:38.360 in our pockets and uh doing all the nefarious things the things that they've been doing to us
00:08:42.500 for the last, especially the last 10 years.
00:08:45.340 What do you say to the people
00:08:46.660 who have worked so hard at this over four months
00:08:48.880 and all the people who are part
00:08:50.100 of the Alberta independence movement?
00:08:51.520 Do you say that it's probably going to,
00:08:53.420 we're going to have a little get together?
00:08:54.740 I'm sure it could be the mother of all get togethers.
00:08:57.180 Any idea when that might be happening
00:08:59.840 now that we've had this decision?
00:09:02.060 Well, hopefully before the end of the month.
00:09:03.980 We're actively looking for a place to hold it right now.
00:09:07.300 So if anybody has any suggestions
00:09:08.760 and places that will hold,
00:09:10.460 I'm hoping we'll have 50,000 to 100,000 people there.
00:09:14.580 That's how big an event I want it to be.
00:09:16.900 Okay, what do you expect from Danielle Smith?
00:09:19.160 And I want to just finish what you asked me.
00:09:22.300 I'll say thank you to all the people that did the work.
00:09:24.520 Yeah.
00:09:25.000 And what do I say to Danielle Smith?
00:09:27.860 The same thing, basically, that I've always told her.
00:09:31.800 I've asked her five times if she would lead Alberta into being a new country.
00:09:38.160 I've asked her that, you know what, that would make it quite a bit easier for everybody, including us, if she would absolutely decide that if the vote was in, you know, in our favor, that she would, you know, plan the succession, like plan, you know, if she calls the vote, I believe she's going to have to make plans for Albertans to make sure that there's a smooth transition to the other side.
00:10:01.980 And I really believe that based on the fact that hopefully that, you know, that government, the UCP government allowed us to have what should be a Citizens Initiative referendum, where the people still have the ability to call the government based on a referendum to action, which is apparently we no longer have.
00:10:23.380 So I just want people to, you know, to internalize that, to quote Jeff, you know, to internalize the fact that they've basically given us no way to petition the government now based on this ruling.
00:10:36.440 So we've lost a bit of our democracy here, a big bit of our democracy.
00:10:40.260 So I expect the premier to call vote, to tell you the honest to God truth.
00:10:43.500 And I expect her to call a vote on independence. 0.93
00:10:46.960 And she's always championed the fact that she likes the direct democracy system.
00:10:52.920 So, you know, here's her chance to stand up and show us that she will.
00:10:57.380 And you know what?
00:10:58.080 I have all the faith in the world that she will.
00:11:00.240 However, the however is a big deal.
00:11:04.600 I've had, I've asked many, many people at many, many town halls, if this comes to a
00:11:11.780 vote between Alberta independence or the premier of Alberta, whoever that is, which way will
00:11:16.260 you choose?
00:11:17.660 I did not have one person in a hundred town halls tell me that they would choose the
00:11:22.360 premier, whoever that was. Is this, as you said in the legislature today, I'm going to go and read
00:11:28.900 the judgment. And that just came out a few minutes ago. And then we'll be looking at talking with the
00:11:33.760 committee that is reviewing another question, the Forever Canada petition that's going through a
00:11:38.660 legislative review committee right now. I don't know. I don't, I don't understand. I don't believe
00:11:43.940 the Forever Canada petition can actually trigger a vote because I don't think it's a constitutional
00:11:48.620 thing. I don't believe that's true. Is this a stalling situation? Because they're waiting for
00:11:52.740 another petition in June. I believe that's the coal one Corb Lund is involved with. Are they 0.99
00:11:59.380 stalling to the point where this will never be called? Let me ask you that. Well, absolutely.
00:12:04.640 I mean, Justice Fisbee himself said that Thomas Lukasik's petition is a nothing burglar. He said
00:12:10.500 it twice, right in court. As a matter of fact, I was shocked that he would say that. We all knew
00:12:16.640 that based on the transfer payment vote that we had several years ago
00:12:21.280 that had 61% support, that they did nothing
00:12:24.160 because they could not do anything.
00:12:25.660 You have to open the Constitution to make meaningful change.
00:12:28.900 And if they don't open the Constitution here,
00:12:30.660 and ours is the question that's going to open the Constitution.
00:12:33.200 So I don't believe the UCP is going to get away with playing those games
00:12:36.420 because we shouldn't let them.
00:12:38.020 So we've been selling UCP memberships for months.
00:12:40.540 Now buy a UCP membership.
00:12:42.640 Get your friends to buy a UCP membership.
00:12:44.480 this is your leverage against them and let's practice something that used to be uh something
00:12:52.500 that we thought was a real deal we thought that government listened to the people that it was a
00:12:56.380 bottom-up situation and forever now this has been a top-down situation and uh you know what maybe
00:13:02.240 now's the time to send government a message i want to ask people this go ahead yeah i want to ask you
00:13:07.660 i want to finish up on this but you know i i saw this decision come down i wasn't surprised i've
00:13:12.900 spoken to you before um i knew that you thought that this wouldn't be um in our favor but i'm
00:13:20.200 sure a lot of people were very disappointed this afternoon what are your what are your
00:13:24.380 final words to them what should they how should they be feeling tonight as they uh as they have
00:13:29.600 dinner energized okay energized because here's the thing we were always going to have to deal
00:13:35.860 with this this was not something that we didn't expect this was we expected them to throw everything
00:13:40.720 at us. This is one of those things. We have to show up. We have to continue to show up and just
00:13:45.920 understand this. This is very winnable. We can't just, every time we have a setback, we can't
00:13:52.020 think that, oh my God, the sky's falling because it's not falling. We're in a good position. We'll
00:13:57.900 still be in a good position. And moving forward, let's exercise the power that we have. We all
00:14:04.000 have to show up in big numbers. That's our power. That will intimidate government. That will win
00:14:08.740 this. So let's make sure we do that. I lied. One more question. Will there be a vote on
00:14:13.220 independence in October? Say again? Will there be a vote on independence in October? Yes. Okay. So
00:14:20.320 that's your final word. Yes. Okay. So that's leaving it on an optimistic note. Mitch, as always,
00:14:27.240 thank you so much for talking to me. I got in touch with you. I know you've been rather busy
00:14:30.740 this afternoon. Yeah, it's been a busy day. Yeah, you got back to me very quick, and I always
00:14:35.460 appreciate your time. And the people, they want to win this thing for you, Mitch, and we all want
00:14:41.820 to win this thing. So I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I'm feeling actually a little
00:14:46.260 bit better as well. So thank you for your time. Just understand this. We want to win it for them
00:14:51.100 too. It's for all of Alberta and all of Albertans. Mitch Sylvester from Stay Free Alberta,
00:14:58.520 the Alberta Prosperity Project. We appreciate your time right now. And not a setback. Let's
00:15:04.700 keep working and let's go. Let's keep going, eh, Mitch? We've got to keep going. So thank you very
00:15:09.500 much for watching. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, ring
00:15:13.500 the bell for notifications. I will see you in the next one.