John Bolton - May 20, 2026


Premier Smith Will Call An Independence Referendum - Thank You Thomas Lukaszuk？


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

168.36

Word count

2,257

Sentence count

116

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

If you get a chance to vote on Alberta independence on October 19th, does it matter who triggers the referendum? Is it the Stay Free Alberta petition or a referendum question by Thomas Lukasik that triggers the vote?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Let me ask you this question. If you get to vote on Alberta independence on October 19th,
00:00:06.260 does it matter who triggers the referendum?
00:00:12.420 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel Wednesday, May the 20th, 4.15 a.m. Great to have you along
00:00:18.120 today with the big blue mug of coffee, which I tip to you. I might ask you, would you please
00:00:23.080 click on subscribe right now? Let's get to 52,000 subscribers. Thank you very much. So I am
00:00:29.700 confused this morning. You're probably confused this morning. And if you're not confused, you
00:00:34.800 haven't heard what the hell is going on right now when it comes to the possible referendum on
00:00:40.020 Alberta independence on October the 19th. Everybody in the independence movement is calling on Danielle
00:00:46.360 Smith to just call for the question. And we might have a question within the next couple of days.
00:00:51.160 The question on the question is this, what will trigger the question? Does that sound confusing
00:00:56.860 to you. Will it be Thomas Lukasik's petition? He got more than 400,000 signatures on that for his
00:01:03.740 Forever Canada campaign last year. Lukasik is flip-flopping like a fish on the beach on this.
00:01:12.160 I didn't want a referendum question, but we've all heard the audio of him asking for a referendum
00:01:17.660 question. I've got him saying both of those things in this video coming up in just a moment.
00:01:22.440 Will it be the Stay Free Alberta petition that triggers a referendum in October?
00:01:28.480 Well, we don't know. It's kind of held up in court right now.
00:01:31.920 The signatures are in boxes, for all I know, still sitting in Edmonton at Elections Alberta.
00:01:37.680 Or will it be the premier that triggers this question?
00:01:41.520 You know, we've got the battle of a couple of lawyers here.
00:01:43.880 I don't think they're diametrically opposed to each other.
00:01:47.280 We're going to show a tweet from Jeff Rath.
00:01:49.220 And I'm going to show you a clip of an interview I did with Keith Wilson last November, okay,
00:01:54.760 where he talks about this and he talks about Lukasik's petition and how he's helping things
00:01:59.980 along a little bit. But ultimately, who will decide on whether we have a referendum question
00:02:06.500 in October regarding independence? Now, I did this video. This takes me back to
00:02:12.560 last June, I believe, sorry, July, because I'm wearing a cowboy hat. So this would have been
00:02:19.560 during Stampede last year. And my question was, why was Thomas Lukasik's application accepted?
00:02:26.160 I wrote the chief electoral officer of Alberta to find out. And I wondered at the time why the
00:02:30.760 question was accepted, because it wasn't considered a constitutional question. And the question that
00:02:36.840 he wanted for a referendum. We'll talk more about that in just a moment. Do you agree Alberta should
00:02:42.820 remain in Canada? So if this ended up on a referendum and it wasn't constitutional, it didn't
00:02:47.880 matter how you answered the question, the outcome would be the same. Everything would remain the
00:02:53.400 same. Alberta would remain in Canada. Why, Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure, did you okay
00:02:59.120 this application when the outcome would be the same regardless of how people voted on it? This
00:03:04.820 is a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of resources, but he okayed it. And now
00:03:10.040 we've got this confusion going on. Here's an article today by Dawn Braid. Let me bring it up
00:03:15.940 on the screen here. UCP may okay LaKazik's referendum question amid dispute over what it
00:03:22.680 means. And this is just from yesterday. An independence referendum question may head for
00:03:27.580 approval Wednesday, trailing a bizarre brawl. On Tuesday, Premier Daniel Smith was considering a
00:03:33.400 televised address to the province, probably on Thursday, to talk about a referendum. Meanwhile,
00:03:38.700 Thomas Lukasik has been invited to speak to a special legislature committee at 2 p.m. Wednesday,
00:03:44.420 which is, if you're watching this, on May the 20th is today. The committee is expected to advance
00:03:49.700 his pro-federalist question, do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada to a general
00:03:54.960 referendum vote on October the 19th? Let me go down here. This is Lukasik's words. I will remind
00:04:01.120 them that the forever Canadian question was filed under the legislative provisions, which means that
00:04:06.780 it wasn't tested for constitutionality like the separatist question. It would just be an opinion
00:04:13.180 poll that has no effect and is not binding because it wasn't filed under the constitutional
00:04:19.000 provisions. We're going to come back and let Thomas Lukasik speak for himself on this. He has said he
00:04:24.880 wanted this to be a referendum. And here's the thing I would like to know, and I want to know why
00:04:29.780 some intrepid person from the mainstream media hasn't found one of these 400,000 plus people
00:04:37.120 who signed the Forever Canadian petition and asked them the following question.
00:04:41.540 When you signed the petition, did you think you were going to get a referendum on the question?
00:04:46.820 Because I believe a lot of people signed it, believing that was the case.
00:04:50.940 And Luke Kazik, like I said, is flip-flopping on this like a fish on the beach.
00:04:55.160 Here's the other thing. I saw all kinds of stay-free Alberta petition setups all across
00:05:00.960 Calgary and the province when I went out and I never saw a single person collecting signatures
00:05:06.500 forever Canadian. But why hasn't anybody found one of these people and asked them that question?
00:05:11.900 Did you expect a referendum? Because I think that was the case in most situations. Now here is Jeff
00:05:18.380 wrath on this. And warning notice, this is from yesterday, Danielle Smith had better understand
00:05:25.420 that if she puts a question forward on independence, that isn't a constitutional question
00:05:30.800 that complies with the Clarity Act that she will be betraying her base in favor of Kearney as badly
00:05:37.360 as when she screwed them over for Jim Prentice. If she decides to go forward with the Lacazette
00:05:42.920 question referred to by the court as a nothing burger, she will be choosing to pander to people
00:05:49.580 who will never vote for her while betraying 301,620 Albertans whose vote she can actually count on.
00:05:57.920 The Lukasik question was designed to not comply with the Clarity Act and to force a second
00:06:03.920 referendum vote on independence in the event that we vote not to remain in Canada. If she does this,
00:06:10.700 hundreds of thousands of Albertans will be forced to mobilize to remove her as the leader of the
00:06:16.300 United Conservative Party. We can easily do this prior to an election in 2028. The courts have
00:06:22.120 made it clear that she can call the Stay Free Alberta question under Section 1 of the Referendum
00:06:28.120 Act. So that is Jeff Rath talking about this. My question from the top of this video was,
00:06:34.400 if you get a vote on independence does it matter who triggers it now there's really only one person
00:06:41.180 who can trigger this and it's danielle smith and here is me talking to keith wilson last november
00:06:47.900 we've got our poppies on just before remembrance day when i asked him about this and he talked
00:06:53.720 about the lakazic petition and who can trigger a referendum question there will be a referendum
00:07:01.180 next year the only party that can initiate a referendum and it's always been the case
00:07:07.380 is the premier through her cabinet the alberta government the the so at any time it's not in
00:07:17.080 dispute that the um that the premier and her cabinet at a cabinet meeting can pass an order
00:07:23.460 in council calling for there to be a province-wide referendum they can set the nature of the question
00:07:28.500 However, there's an additional triggering mechanism to cause her government, Premier Smith's government, to potentially hold a referendum on independence, which is the citizen initiative process.
00:07:42.020 But whoever goes through that pathway, whether it's Lukasik and the Forever Canada crew, or the Independence Group through Alberta Prosperity Project, at the end of the day, what both of them do is cause the Premier and her Cabinet to say, all right, are we holding a referendum?
00:08:06.680 When are we holding it?
00:08:08.160 And what is the question going to be?
00:08:09.700 so Lukasik has effectively um shortened the process and expedited the process
00:08:20.340 for there to be a province-wide referendum on independence thank you very much Thomas Lukasik
00:08:25.660 he did not think this through it's quite remarkable yeah uh and and that's why I was
00:08:30.600 tweeting about it extensively and yeah I know congratulating him and thanking him for you know
00:08:36.420 So ultimately, according to Keith Wilson, it'll be up to Danielle Smith, the premier of this
00:08:42.540 province, to call for this referendum. It's interesting, last year I did this video
00:08:46.620 breaking. Former politician Thomas Lukaszek may have just helped get Alberta a vote on
00:08:51.880 independence. I didn't know the difference between the different questions, whether it's
00:08:56.320 constitutional or not, which the Stay Free Alberta question is constitutional. More on that in just
00:09:02.100 moment. It's delicious what might happen here, so hold on. But Danielle Smith has been setting
00:09:07.240 it up so that she could use Lukasik's petition and signatures to get a vote on independence
00:09:13.980 for months. She said this several months ago in regards to Lukasik and his forever Canadian
00:09:20.980 petition. Mr. Lukasik's vote is yes, no question. It is a separatist referendum. He may be trying
00:09:29.060 to characterize it differently. But if you ask people if you want to remain in Alberta, yes or
00:09:33.760 no, there are implications if people answer no. Just about a month ago in a media scrum she was
00:09:39.480 asked about this. I found it fascinating. She had the document in her hand, basically Lukasik's
00:09:44.280 application to Elections Alberta for his petition. She started quoting from it. She talked about the
00:09:50.540 hundreds of thousands of people who signed the petition expecting a vote in a referendum.
00:09:55.480 So here she is talking about that, and I have put Thomas Lukasik flip-flopping right in the middle of this.
00:10:03.300 We believe the majority of Alberta residents are loyal Canadians and opposed to any form of separation.
00:10:07.860 Therefore, we, as represented by the signatory and applicant below, propose a referendum on the following question.
00:10:14.820 Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?
00:10:17.580 So we had 450,000 people sign onto this expecting a referendum.
00:10:23.000 So I know that the proponent has changed his mind afterwards, saying he just wants it to go to the legislature.
00:10:28.260 Nearly half a million Albertans have not signed this petition to have a referendum,
00:10:32.520 but wanted this question to be voted on in the legislature.
00:10:36.140 And if we need enough signatures, which I have no doubt in my mind that we will, we will have a referendum.
00:10:42.120 But that's what we're having to talk to Elections Alberta about, to justice officials about,
00:10:46.920 out because it does seem to me that this is kind of a legal process initiated in a legal way with
00:10:52.600 precise language that people signed on a certain expectation. And so we're just trying to get some
00:10:57.520 direction from the committee on that. They've had their first meeting and I'm looking forward to
00:11:01.400 seeing what they come back with. So will Danielle Smith, who ultimately has the authority to call
00:11:07.840 for this question in October, will she do it over the next couple of days? She has a news conference 0.91
00:11:13.460 tomorrow? Is this what she's going to announce? And will she use Thomas Lukasik's petition as her
00:11:19.560 reason for having the question in the fall? Because the Stay Free Alberta question and the
00:11:24.900 petitions are held up in court right now. That's the question that needs to be answered. And would
00:11:29.680 that bother you like it would bother Jeff Rath and probably a lot of other people that the Stay
00:11:35.140 Free Alberta petitions are sitting in boxes and the signatures have yet to be counted? Basically
00:11:41.460 and personally, I think it's a betrayal of those people who worked so hard for four months and sat
00:11:47.540 in the snow. It would bother me that their hard work did not go into getting the question on a
00:11:54.360 ballot in the fall. That would bother me in a way. But ultimately, I do want the question to be asked.
00:11:59.900 So should the question be, do you agree Alberta should remain in Canada? Because that's the
00:12:05.400 question on the petition that Lukasik had 400,000 plus people sign. Is that a clear question? Do you
00:12:15.460 agree Alberta should remain in Canada? Well, perhaps it is, but that will be determined later.
00:12:22.020 Wouldn't it be absolutely delicious if it was Thomas Lukasik's petition that triggered the
00:12:28.860 Premier to call for a referendum on independence, and instead of using Lukasik's question, they used
00:12:35.800 this one. Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada
00:12:42.080 to become an independent state? Which is the question that was on the petition
00:12:47.820 and the application for Stay Free Alberta, which, by the way, was written because of the Clarity Act.
00:12:55.760 almost exactly those words are in the Clarity Act. But it's kind of confusing right now.
00:13:01.920 I'm wondering what the premier is going to do. But as Keith Wilson said in his video that I did
00:13:07.420 with him back in November, we will have a referendum this year in 2026. Thanks for
00:13:14.020 watching. If you like this video, if you're confused by this video, I understand. But if
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