00:06:19.000So when we lost you, you were telling us about what this mission is that you're on.
00:06:24.540Yeah, so basically, I was placed on leave without pay for my public service job.
00:06:29.880I'm still employed in the military as a reservist, and the mandates affected me because, personally, I have strong feelings about disclosing my medical status.
00:06:43.760Number two, I don't feel that the government has the authority to tell me how to be healthy and what I need to do to be healthy.
00:06:52.560So that was my issues with the mandates that affected federal government employees.
00:06:57.400Because I pushed back on that, I refused to disclose my medical status.
00:07:07.520I was placed on leave without pay back in November, and then I was informed by the military that it would be released on an item 5F.
00:21:41.740I mean, well, going back before the Act of Union, you had Lord Durham's report and that famous line of two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.
00:21:49.620And in a lot of ways, we haven't moved much beyond that, it feels.
00:21:53.160Well, certainly not in your part of the world.
00:21:56.780Otherwise, you know, these these kinds of statements and if you actually look at some of the some of the remarks that I quoted in that C2C piece, it's for normal Democratic Canadians.
00:22:11.740I would say it's incredibly offensive.
00:22:15.040What these Quebec politicians are saying,
00:23:08.320uh i mean this is uh this is why um well a few years ago dave bergerson and i wrote this book
00:23:14.720deconfederation canada without quebec and it it was it was pretty clear what the argument i mean
00:23:21.280it's in the subtitle of the book uh we ended it with a nice french phrase bon voyage and bon chance
00:23:28.960and it was not received well in Quebec, particularly by Francophone Quebecers.0.86
00:23:42.720They could not believe that these two rednecks from Alberta said,0.95
00:23:47.040you know, buy. Do what you wish. Just don't involve us in your undemocratic special1.00
00:23:56.660status requirements because we're not interested. Let's talk about the political response to this
00:24:03.260here. And I want to make sure I'm getting the facts right here. But the Bloc Quebecois put
00:24:06.520forward the motion to reject, quote, any scenario for redrawing the federal electoral map that would
00:24:13.260result in Quebec losing one or more electoral districts or that would reduce Quebec's political
00:24:18.060weight in the House of Commons. So even if everyone else went up and Quebec stayed the same,
00:24:23.380they would object to that because of the relative proportion. But what's astonishing is that the
00:24:29.060Bloc, the NDP and the Greens all voted unanimously for this, as did the Liberals. And a lot of
00:24:35.580Conservatives, though, also voted for it. Yeah, it's and that's where I think it was it was chiefly
00:24:41.660a regional division. There were some Western conservatives who voted for it, and they were
00:24:47.440people, so far as I could tell anyway, who thinks that the kind of Laurentian focus of
00:24:55.320the Conservative Party should be the most important part. Most of the dissenting votes in the
00:25:03.240conservative party were from the west uh and it's it was a kind of instinctive um response you know
00:25:11.100there goes quebec again you know they just want more stuff and uh uh you know quite frankly i
00:25:18.240think a lot of westerners are kind of fed up with that so explain to me where this goes from here
00:25:25.140because i i think there's this general fear that a lot of people have of of a revival of quebec
00:25:30.600separation or separatism and Quebec secessionism. And I think there's probably an increasing number
00:25:36.200of people in the left that would say, as you say, bon voyage, just, you know, okay, get on with it
00:25:40.840already. But no one wants a country that's significantly divided if that division is
00:25:45.640coming from Quebec. I think Western alienation is probably attracting a lot less sympathy from
00:25:49.940the Laurentian elites. But where do you think this goes if Quebec doesn't get its way? Or do you
00:25:54.200think that it's a given that will? Well, they've already got their way. They've got, this is going
00:26:00.180be the law. I suppose the question is what the next conservative leader does about this,
00:26:11.860particularly if the conservatives form the next government. That will be very interesting to see.
00:26:17.540I suspect since in order to object to it in principle, you have to be willing to face down
00:26:25.540or face up to uh the implications with respect to the independence of quebec or eventually
00:26:31.060you might even say the independence of albert and saskatchewan you know it's it's it's a very
00:26:36.340divisive uh matter of principle uh and it's it's one that is i don't think it's going to go away
00:26:43.060uh it'll be papered over for a while but you know after a while even the paper gets a bit
00:26:48.100thin and you can see through it what strikes me too barry is that it's self-reinforcing because
00:26:55.060you have the conservative party notably which always has these delusions of a restoration of
00:27:00.180some significant quebec coalition which it never manages to materialize but the more seats you have
00:27:06.740in quebec the higher the stakes are of not kissing the ring of quebec politics and quebec politicians
00:27:14.340and and that is again just very cyclical in nature yeah it's it's it's really quite interesting and
00:27:20.980I would say that this follows directly upon the various Laurentian myths that I've written about
00:27:28.820elsewhere, that how this is the center of the country. And as Sir John A. himself said,
00:27:37.300the Northwest and Rupert's land are, quote, our crown colony. That attitude has not gone away
00:27:43.540in the 150 odd years since confederation uh and it's particularly a problem uh when western
00:27:52.260canada has not only an increased population but a much greater uh wealth and resources
00:27:59.940than it ever had ever had in the past even though it was certainly the source of a lot
00:28:03.540of wealth for canada through grain and before that through the fur trade
00:28:08.100i i don't know if you you've delved into this in any substantive way but but what are what
00:28:12.340are the internal migrations that we're seeing in this country? Because I know in the US there's
00:28:16.020been a lot, especially in the last few years, of people fleeing New York and California for lower
00:28:21.860tax and ultimately more conservative jurisdictions like Texas and Florida. Do we see it as starkly
00:28:28.100in Canada and for the same reasons? Well, we did before the Liberal Party made its, so far,
00:28:36.100fairly successful attack on the resource economy of particularly this province, but also Saskatchewan.
00:28:41.380And then COVID messed things up, too. But there was an enormous amount of in-migration to Saskatchewan and Alberta, not just from Ontario, but also from the Atlantic Canada.
00:28:56.400I mean, for a while, they were saying that Fort Mac was the largest Newfoundland population in the world because there were so many Newfoundlanders who were working there.
00:29:08.180So I'm not sure that that's true anymore since the oil sands have had an awful lot of damage done to them in the past couple of years.
00:29:18.380So and demography, I mean, Quebec is just not seeing the growth.
00:29:23.140And we've talked about, you know, well, we've talked about immigration, birth rates, another factor.
00:29:27.920So they are facing, I wouldn't say it's a demographic crisis, but they are facing a challenge that's not really with an immediate solution.
00:29:34.740So just holding on to their political influence is, I guess, the counterbalance against that.
00:29:40.160Yeah, that seems to be the kind of default position.
00:29:44.960When you are losing on a regular playing field, then you play the political card.
00:29:50.420It's certainly true that Quebec is under a lot of stress demographically,
00:29:56.620partly because of their, let's say, not exactly hostile,
00:30:01.080but not entirely welcoming uh position with respect to immigrants uh and the the effective
00:30:07.800of quebec nationalism uh it always has the the consequence of of driving fairly productive
00:30:14.840members of that province uh to uh let's say happier happier places well it was a fascinating
00:30:22.040read in the c2c journal kel surprise quebec wants more seats in the house of commons that
00:30:27.000is and i i've said it many times barry i'll say it again i think more columns need to cite the
00:30:31.0801840 Act of Union. You didn't slip Lord Durham's report in there, but I made sure to for the
00:30:36.120interview here. Thanks very much for coming on. You bet, Andrew. All right. Professor Barry Cooper
00:30:41.520from the University of Calgary. No, it was a fascinating piece. And again, we talk about
00:30:46.860separation and separatism as being these big things that Quebec used to use as the Trump card.
00:30:54.160And understandably so. No one wants to see the country just completely ripped up. But again,
00:30:58.920the capitulation only seems to go towards Quebec when you have Albertans that are raising quite0.96
00:31:04.540significant grievances and everyone's like oh yeah they're just a bunch of angry rednecks oh yeah we0.98
00:31:08.720don't need to care about them and I say Albertans more broadly it's the west I mean Saskatchewan1.00
00:31:13.380most of BC we often think of BC as being Vancouver and Victoria but the bulk of British Columbia as
00:31:20.700far as land goes and even a lot of the population is not in that which is why if you look at a map
00:31:26.740of BC politically. Conservatives do quite well there, just not in, you know, the lower mainland
00:31:31.380and on Vancouver Island and so on. But some parts they do. We'll talk about this more. And I'm
00:31:38.360actually headed out, as I'll share a little bit more about at the end of the show, to Calgary,
00:31:43.000just, I mean, like in about an hour, actually, I'm leaving. So I got to race off the race off
00:31:47.540camera pack and then go. But before I do, I went along with James and then I had Barry lined up.
00:31:52.400So I didn't get a chance to talk about this as much earlier. But what's happened today,
00:31:56.440There was a bit of hope, I think, this morning when people saw that the United States' ban on unvaccinated foreign nationals entering through its land border was set to expire today at 11.59 p.m.
00:32:10.540So folks were looking and being like, wow, is an unvaccinated Canadian finally going to be allowed to cross the U.S. border legally by land as of tonight at midnight?
00:32:20.440And that means you could essentially have access to the world because the U.S. doesn't have a vaccine mandate for air travel.
00:32:27.440So if you were a Canadian who's not vaccinated, you could drive across the Windsor-Detroit border, head on over to Detroit-Wayne County Airport, hop on a Delta plane, and you'd be in Amsterdam before you know it and you'd have the whole world at your fingertips.
00:32:41.120But of course, that did not last. The U.S. sent out a fact sheet today through the Department of Homeland Security, which you can see on your screen there.
00:32:50.160As of Thursday, April 21st, DHS will extend COVID-related land border entry requirements.
00:32:57.980Non-U.S. travelers seeking to enter the United States via land ports of entry and ferry terminals are required to be fully vaccinated and provide proof of vaccination upon request.
00:33:08.620This applies to non-U.S. travelers who are traveling for essential or non-essential reasons.
00:33:16.580Doesn't matter if you're a nurse, a doctor, if you have a visa that puts you in a category of essential worker,
00:33:22.500if you're there because you want to go visit grandma.
00:33:24.980It doesn't matter if you are not vaccinated.
00:33:26.760You cannot cross into the United States.
00:33:29.180Now, I will say that I know of Canadians who have gone into the U.S. who are unvaccinated because it hasn't been asked or they haven't checked.
00:33:36.640So I'm not saying you can't do it, but technically the law as it stands says you cannot.
00:33:42.960Now, I will say I'm a big believer in countries having the right to set their own immigration