The Critical Compass Podcast - May 20, 2026


Does Alberta Have Enough Unity for Independence? | Tanya Clemens


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

173.39755

Word count

624

Sentence count

30


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Do you think there's enough unity in Alberta, even with the large share of kind of more public sector collectivists and those who believe in Canada, is there enough unity to solidify a country? Or do you think those people will leave or will they stay or will cause division? Like, how do we factor that into the equation?
00:00:23.480 I still think that there is definitely enough unity. I know when we're talking about independence specifically and the referendum vote, we kind of estimate that there's a third of the population that will just never support independence and will never vote that. And that's okay. They've got their minds made up.
00:00:42.140 So we're not targeting those people to have conversations, but there's like a third in the middle. They're just not sure yet or aren't educated enough. And that's who we're really trying to target and have those conversations with.
00:00:54.320 as far as like the unions and some of the people who have like more of the collectivism mentality
00:01:02.320 I guess when I talk to groups like that or people that come from groups like that because I'm a
00:01:07.860 teacher by trade too so I understand a little bit about the unions although I'm not in favor
00:01:13.260 of forced unions but it just needs to be articulated that the pursuit of self-determination
00:01:19.060 and the pursuit of prosperity is actually a unifying pursuit.
00:01:23.440 It's non-partisan.
00:01:25.400 It doesn't matter what your background is.
00:01:27.480 This is something that will benefit all Albertans.
00:01:30.600 And if they wanted to look at something like the economics of it,
00:01:34.180 you can go read The Value of Freedom,
00:01:36.640 which was a fully costed fiscal document for a sovereign Alberta.
00:01:41.320 It's on the albertaprosperity.com website.
00:01:43.680 It's been out to the public for about a year, I think, now,
00:01:46.340 and inviting feedback.
00:01:48.400 So it's been reviewed by economists and anybody in the public.
00:01:52.700 And when you look at that, and it talks about your federal income tax ending on day one of being an independent Alberta.
00:02:00.200 And what would that look like on your paycheck if all of a sudden federal income tax wasn't taken off?
00:02:04.940 And then after five years, when we got rid of all income tax period, so you're working in your collectivist job.
00:02:12.260 if you're in a teacher's union or a nurse's union or whatever, but you're working and your work is
00:02:17.880 being rewarded and your paycheck that comes to you is your reward. It's not part of it being taken
00:02:23.440 off for the government to be sent out to Quebec or somewhere else in the form of a transfer payment.
00:02:29.280 This is your money that you worked for and earned. So I think talking in some of those ways,
00:02:33.420 it's not a partisan issue. We want freedom and prosperity for all Albertans.
00:02:38.120 If teachers, if one of their concerns right now is the lack of resources for teaching, right now they can't keep up. They want more schools. They want higher pay. So that is an economic argument in a sense.
00:02:55.560 And then if that's a major concern, then you'd ask them, why can't schools keep up? Why are they overloaded? Why can't the budgets be expanded to the point that you're paid what you feel like you're worth in this kind of situation?
00:03:11.120 Yeah, and maybe we need to look at the immigration policy that we have in place.
00:03:16.680 And in an independent Alberta, perhaps there is a little bit of a freeze on immigration
00:03:21.760 for a few years until our infrastructure can actually catch up with the mass migration
00:03:27.020 we've had here right now.
00:03:30.000 That's going to decrease the strain on teachers and make the education system better overall
00:03:34.540 once we can catch up with that.