The Critical Compass Podcast - March 08, 2026


Alberta’s New Constitution Must Avoid Canada’s Biggest Mistakes ｜ Dennis Kalma

Topics
constitutional conference
Mentioned
Pierre Trudeau Lethbridge James
“If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Be Done TO You＂ - John Carpay, JCCF How a New Alberta will Limit Government Power ｜ Dennis Kalma

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

146.02

Word count

1,000

Sentence count

54


Summary

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

In this episode, we have a special guest on the show to talk about Alberta's future as an independent province. We discuss the current state of the province, what it means to be an independent Alberta, and what we would like to see in a new constitution.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 The main thing that people really, really want to see is that accountability for government
00:00:08.120 is with the voters. That's probably the first principle. They want to make sure that there's
00:00:13.240 no PMO, Prime Minister's office, that can just write laws by itself. They want visibility and
00:00:19.780 transparency. And that's actually a key element. Very close to that, if not equal, is very clearly
00:00:27.440 very comprehensive rights. So, you know, that's everything from your property rights to the
00:00:33.440 normal ones, freedom of speech, freedom of association, so on and so forth. Without the
00:00:38.800 caveat that is currently in Canada's constitution, which is subject to the government saying that's
00:00:43.940 a good idea, you get your rights. And people really want to see what are called textual rights,
00:00:50.840 which is the text defines what it is no more no less it can't be reinterpreted by a judge
00:00:58.580 it can't be eroded over time by just reading a little different and that's the kind of things
00:01:04.600 really people want to see the other aspect they want to see is balance and people realize there's
00:01:13.180 interests of the majority there's also in regional interests i mean rural alberta is not the same as
00:01:19.360 Calgary. Calgary is not the same as Lethbridge, so on and so forth. So they want to have a balance
00:01:25.080 between essentially the majority and the region. So that's one element. The second thing is the
00:01:32.500 judiciary. They want the judiciary to be balanced on the other two, but also that it cannot do
00:01:40.960 anything but interpret the laws. It can't write them in like they do in Canada right now. So those
00:01:48.460 are probably some of the major ones. Well, I think just as a comment on that before
00:01:53.620 James asks you the next one, I think that that's been a common refrain amongst Alberta independence
00:02:00.800 advocates that we've spoken to and we've interacted with over the last few months that
00:02:04.560 they're very concerned that whatever constitution that an independent Alberta
00:02:09.860 comes up with, they don't want it to just be a slightly modified, essentially copy of what we
00:02:16.500 have now. They want significant changes and they want to, like you said, and I think is very
00:02:21.920 reassuring, enshrine some things that the Canadian constitution for what it's worth
00:02:28.620 simply just hasn't. Yeah, and actually there is a school of thought
00:02:34.040 amongst the people working on the constitution that we should actually just go back to the
00:02:40.560 Westminster system like it was prior to Pierre Trudeau. And that's something actually I got
00:02:47.340 educated in. And Westminster system is completely separate. It's not my favorite approach, but I
00:02:53.960 understand it a bit better. But the main thing is Trudeau, when he repatriated the Charter,
00:02:59.980 actually changed the basis of power in Canada from being Parliament as supreme authority to
00:03:07.580 the courts being supreme authority. And that's why you see so many times now is that part of them
00:03:14.460 can say whatever the heck they want, but if the judges say, nope, we don't like that, or that's
00:03:18.660 not constitutional, it's done. And that was a change Trudeau brought. So the school of thought
00:03:24.160 is, let's go back to the pre-Trudeau ages, let's fix it up, put in property rights amongst other
00:03:30.400 things, and put some more strength in it, but essentially keep the core of it. That is a fair
00:03:36.360 school of thought. It's not one that I really support. And I think a lot of people in the
00:03:40.500 movement don't support, but it is a thought worth considering. We look at a bunch of different
00:03:45.780 options. I think the one we're going to land on is the constitutional republic, more like the
00:03:50.360 American system than any other. And I think that's what a lot of people want. And that's likely where
00:03:55.520 we're going to end up. And so this is a draft, this is a framework. And essentially, if Alberta
00:04:05.120 becomes independent, then there would have to be a constitutional convention of actually
00:04:12.960 deciding on these ideas. So the way I look at it is this would be, the document we've got now would
00:04:18.980 be input into the constitutional conference. It would have the benefit of several years of work
00:04:25.120 by a number of people. It would have been stress tested over the months it's been released by
00:04:31.140 accepting comments and feedback. And then you get to the constitutional conference. And
00:04:36.400 one of the things we also are trying to do is to start the transition planning
00:04:41.740 for, okay, we win the vote. What happens the next morning? Well, one of the things you got
00:04:47.280 to start doing is planning this constitutional conference. And it needs to have a combination
00:04:53.260 of representations to make it work. So obviously, the existing provincial government would need to
00:04:59.400 be there. So some of the UCP people, indigenous people need to be there, representation from them,
00:05:06.320 probably some from academia, some from business, so on and so forth. So the way I'm imagining it
00:05:11.600 is it would be six or seven different groups or contingents, including maybe a group of just
00:05:17.700 normal citizens almost selected at random, like a jury. And no change to the constitution could
00:05:23.980 be adopted without a majority of each of those groups agreeing to it. So imagine you put a
00:05:33.340 sentence up on the screen, says clause 27, and people say, take a vote on it. It's got to get
00:05:39.100 a majority of each of the groups to pass. And if not, crack it open and start debating it again.
00:05:45.840 And that way it ends up being a broadly based constitution, hopefully largely based upon what
00:05:50.920 we were able to give to it. And then the next step after that, of course, is now you have the
00:05:56.920 structure of government, you have to run an election, you have to vote them into power,
00:06:01.700 and then that's when the lawmaking really starts. So it's a fairly logical process
00:06:06.500 we're imagining, but it's got some complexity to it.
00:06:20.920 Thank you.