The Critical Compass Podcast - October 05, 2025


＂Alberta's Path to Independence is a Game of Chess＂ w⧸John Carpay of the JCCF

John Carpay of the JCCF on Groundbreaking New COVID Lockdown Harms Report John Carpay & the JCCF's Mission to Save Freedom of Speech in Canada

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

155.21

Word count

1,108

Sentence count

2

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the quebec secession referendum, the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in 1998, and the process that led to the declaration of Quebec's independence as a sovereign country. We discuss the process, the challenges, and what we can learn from it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 so the quebec secession reference came out uh that ruling came out in 1998 and uh it's written
00:00:09.200 in such a way that even though as per the title it's you know can quebec separate but the principles
00:00:14.960 in there are pretty clear that they apply to every province and so the court mentions certain
00:00:22.400 fundamental principles of federalism we have a federal system um we have the charter we have
00:00:30.480 individual rights we have democracy um it's kind of an interesting read if you want to get a an
00:00:37.280 introduction to constitutional law it goes through some of these principles of what they mean and by
00:00:42.960 way of background the 1980 quebec referendum uh then premier renee levesque had put forward a
00:00:50.000 proposal for sovereignty association and it was a bit murky it was definitely not that quebec would
00:00:56.880 become an independent country you know in the same way that that you know mexico is independent from
00:01:04.000 canada for example um and then in 1995 we had a very tight it was almost 50 50 50 50 but it too was
00:01:13.760 pretty vague there's a lot of people voting yes for quebec independence but they assumed that they would
00:01:18.880 still kind of be part of canada and they get their canada pension check and you know it was just very
00:01:24.320 murky and and it was scary too because what if there was a yes vote but then you know it wasn't
00:01:30.400 really clear what what was being voted on so the supreme court said that uh a province does have a right
00:01:38.720 to leave canada which is really good because if the supreme court ruled the other way
00:01:43.280 if there's not a legal way to leave it kind of makes it that the only alternative is violence and
00:01:49.840 military conflict and that the quebec or alberta would have to take up arms to forcibly liberate
00:01:56.720 themselves through military strength so thankfully the the court said no yeah if you have a clear majority
00:02:03.440 on a clear question so the clear question would be something like what now has been put forward in
00:02:09.600 alberta yeah so unfortunately the uh um chief electoral officer in um in alberta who is independent
00:02:19.440 right is is appointed but is not under the control of the premier's office so it's an independent
00:02:26.720 position he has taken it upon himself to uh go to court to ask for whether that's whether that
00:02:35.200 question is clear enough well it's ridiculous because the supreme court said that a province
00:02:40.880 has a right to leave and this question is is pretty clear and uh anyway it's it's kind of a delay tactic
00:02:50.320 i i i would venture a guess that the chief electoral officer of alberta is staunchly against independence
00:02:57.600 and so he is trying to do this to slow things down but the court was clear a province can leave
00:03:04.960 and then the clarity act is sets out certain uh uh terms about how the federal government would respond
00:03:12.640 if a province chose to leave uh it's related to the supreme court decision but it's also different it
00:03:20.400 it gets very specific into what the federal government would do and how the federal government would behave
00:03:25.600 so we've seen a little bit of the like we've seen comments and i've seen people kind of bring up
00:03:31.600 like what about this what about that we're trying to think down the line of like what would happen
00:03:35.840 if alberta actually went through this and it seems like first of all a citizen-led referendum
00:03:43.360 is that's our way of well it's a petition for a referendum but even if that fails if there's enough
00:03:49.920 support behind it the alberta provincial government ucp could just put in legislation for a referendum
00:03:58.000 anyways so what this really speaks to is that ultimately it just requires enough will like a very
00:04:06.800 obvious majority a loud enough signal that cannot be ignored and then there's multiple avenues let it be
00:04:13.600 citizen-led petition for a referendum or just enough pressure that a referendum happens and if
00:04:20.080 that's strong enough and a referendum goes through now both alberta and canada are duty bound to negotiate
00:04:27.760 in good faith uh i believe the supreme court decision says well alberta can't unilaterally leave without
00:04:37.120 good faith negotiations but canada can't prevent alberta from leaving but what is good faith
00:04:44.160 negotiation that kind of well that depends so let's say canada plays hardball and says you owe us two
00:04:50.240 trillion dollars for us granting you everything alberta could argue well you're not negotiating in good
00:04:58.320 faith and if negotiations break down or if they say well we need to update the constitution we're going
00:05:05.680 to try to prevent you to leave then it's into alberta's hands to just say well okay we went through
00:05:13.040 the proper channels we are going to declare our independence and now it's out of the kind of the
00:05:19.840 federal and now it's into the international recognition so it seems like it's almost a game
00:05:24.400 of chess you have to go through each of these steps you need a clear democratic will to be expressed and
00:05:31.280 the referendum proves that uh and then the rest is kind of unknown until you fully go down that path
00:05:40.640 a chess game is a really good analogy actually because it's like you know and for the for the
00:05:45.680 viewers and listeners that that know chess and presumably most do i mean it's like you you know you
00:05:51.360 you put your pawn forward two spaces and the other you know player might do the same thing or might do
00:05:57.760 something different you take out your knight you take out your bishop your it's just it's it's very
00:06:02.000 back and forth back and forth so there have to be these negotiations because in indeed uh it's not open
00:06:08.000 to alberta to unilaterally leave and just get whatever it wants no questions asked but nor can the 0.99
00:06:17.040 federal government say well we're going to for we're going to prevent you from from leaving it's like no
00:06:21.920 if if there was a clear question to separate if that had uh you know 50 of the vote plus one uh i
00:06:32.080 mean hopefully there would be more clarity you know you could see a lot of uh um negotiations
00:06:39.040 wouldn't be as smooth if it was really a 50 50 split but if you had a 50.5 percent 51 percent uh more
00:06:47.120 than 51 percent you know it's uh it's a majority vote and uh it's it's a far stronger mandate that
00:06:56.480 that than any government in canada i mean