The Critical Compass Podcast - April 26, 2026


What a Failed Referendum Means for Alberta Independence ｜ Michael Wagner

Topics
political culture change
Mentioned
René Levesque Stephen Harper René Villette Jason Kenney
Rights and Freedoms ｜ Alberta United, The Collaborate Vision Series w⧸ Eva Chipiuk The Evolution of Alberta's Independence Movement ｜ Michael Wagner

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

201.18

Word count

1,579

Sentence count

59

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and long-term supporter, Doug Ford, to talk about the upcoming referendum on Alberta's independence from the rest of Canada. We talk about what the referendum means for the future of Alberta, what it means for Canada, and what could happen if the referendum fails.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 I'd say even if the referendum is not successful, like you say, we got 40% and we lose,
00:00:06.480 the political culture of Alberta has already been changed. In a sense, we've never had this
00:00:11.000 level of support before. So we have people for the very first time in their lives are committed
00:00:15.140 to Alberta independence. Now, even if the referendum fails, these people have thought
00:00:21.080 about it seriously before and committed to it. They might backtrack from it, but it's still part
00:00:24.880 of who they are and who they've been. You know what I mean? So this part of Alberta, this idea
00:00:29.320 Alberta will be a bigger part of our political culture, even if we lose the referendum. Like I
00:00:33.940 mentioned earlier, you know, with the National Energy Program, that changed the support level
00:00:37.920 of Alberta independence, you know, from single digit to double digit, and it never went back
00:00:41.080 to single digit. It just stayed a double digit and grew a bit. So that was a change in our
00:00:45.080 political culture in 1980 or 81. We're having the same thing now, so that even if we lose the
00:00:50.840 referendum, our political culture has changed to such a degree that the independence option is
00:00:55.160 going to be like something that's more credible than before. I guess it's kind of like Quebec,
00:00:59.040 You know what I mean? Like, even though they lost the referendums, there's always a segment, a large segment of the population that supports independence. And Alberta would be more like that than it was before, because we can't get away from the political change that's happening right now in our culture because of this issue right now. So much would depend then on what the liberal, how the liberal government responded.
00:01:17.720 Like if they respond with, you know, a peace offering and say, look, you know, now we realize you guys have, you know, are discontent even though, you know, the referendum went down.
00:01:26.760 We're going to try and help you out.
00:01:28.180 You know, that could alleviate some of the support.
00:01:30.720 But if they just keep ramping up their anti-Alberta policies, it's just going to keep building.
00:01:34.400 One of the things, too, is some people say, well, you know, a failed referendum is going to really hurt Alberta.
00:01:38.200 And there's a sense in which that's true.
00:01:40.080 But when we look at Quebec, you know, Quebec had two failed referendums.
00:01:43.820 And did Quebec lose power because they lost those referendums,
00:01:47.460 or did they gain power?
00:01:48.920 It seems to me Quebec was not set back by the referendum losses.
00:01:54.100 And in fact, one of the things that Stephen Harper did
00:01:55.740 that I'm not favorable towards was that he actually increased the equalization
00:01:59.300 or he changed the equalization program so that Quebec would get more
00:02:02.760 because he wanted more votes in Quebec, you know what I mean?
00:02:05.620 So even though Quebec lost in the referendum votes,
00:02:08.720 they seem to have gained influence and power
00:02:11.180 in relation to the federal government.
00:02:13.280 You know what I mean?
00:02:13.780 So even though I want the referendum to succeed, obviously,
00:02:18.180 if we lose and still have a substantial vote,
00:02:21.060 it won't necessarily be like something
00:02:24.060 where we'll lose out really badly.
00:02:25.520 I do wonder, yeah, I'm sort of 50-50 on that.
00:02:28.280 I do wonder if perhaps the federal government
00:02:30.480 will respond with further punishment, you know,
00:02:35.160 for Alberta for embarrassing them
00:02:36.920 on the national and international stage.
00:02:39.920 Although I do wonder as well if, you know, I've often joked with people that like, you know, this is not true, but I joke that like, you know, I'd be happy if Alberta got, you know, 10% of the consideration that Quebec gets in federal politics, you know.
00:02:53.080 But I wonder though, if, if a say, say the independence referendum gets a 40% vote or 45%, something like this, like just shy of a, of a, of a majority. I do wonder if the, if the federal conservative party at least would respond with at least making a show of, you know, running candidates in Alberta that are sympathetic to Alberta interests rather than running, you know, floor crossers in, in, in Edmonton South. 0.81
00:03:20.040 One of the things I want to throw in here in terms of what could happen with the referendum is one of the things Alberta independence movement has always lacked is a real credible leader.
00:03:30.380 Like this is one of the things that was a real turning point for Quebec is, you know, by the 60s, they had all kinds of separatist groups going, but they were divided and they didn't have a leader.
00:03:38.640 But when René Levesque, you know, he had been a Liberal Party cabinet minister in the Quebec government.
00:03:43.020 When he came out of the Liberal Party and said, I'm going to lead the separatist movement in Quebec, that tied them all together.
00:03:48.320 like the Parti Québécois became the one organization for people to join and he won
00:03:54.480 you know he won elections as and became as premier but it was his leadership that really
00:03:59.620 pulled it together and made that possible and if we had someone like that in Alberta that would be
00:04:04.540 a game changer for the whole thing you know because they're people look to leaders you know
00:04:08.840 to inspire them and to you know give them ideas and direction and stuff like that and if we had
00:04:13.500 a guy like a René Levesque type figure here in Alberta for independence,
00:04:17.720 that would definitely change things and it would definitely increase support for the movement
00:04:21.160 and it would increase the possibility of the referendum succeeding.
00:04:25.420 So hoping that a guy like that will come forward.
00:04:30.500 Yeah, I think it's great that we're making these comparisons to Quebec because we can learn a lot
00:04:35.980 by just taking a temperature check of Alberta and the rhetoric around Alberta versus the rhetoric
00:04:43.580 around Quebec. And there's a couple things to unpack. And one of them is that you get the
00:04:49.960 fear mongering saying that any talks of independence or separation will result in economic
00:04:57.300 decline like it has in Quebec. And Quebec's kind of a paradox because you're describing that Quebec
00:05:04.480 gained political power, gained leverage, and essentially now they have greater equalization
00:05:12.080 payments and all these perks from their separation parties and movement. But they've seen a decline
00:05:20.820 in some sectors, but people aren't talking about the self-restricted policies or the fact that
00:05:26.340 they've hamstrung themselves in developing their own resources or their language laws that are
00:05:31.700 making investment a little bit more difficult, or if a company had to choose between setting up
00:05:38.560 headquarters in Quebec versus headquarters in Ontario, they're going to choose Ontario
00:05:43.380 just because of ease of deployment. So these things are not talked about
00:05:48.040 in the layers that, in the kind of nuance that it deserves.
00:05:53.360 I just have an important point to make about that. Like I know people say, well,
00:05:55.680 it was after René Levesque was elected as premier in 1976, and all of a sudden all these people in
00:06:01.620 businesses started pulling out of Quebec. Now stated that way, it's true as far as it goes,
00:06:06.200 but that's not the whole truth. The policy that drove people out was Bill 101. Like right after
00:06:12.120 René Villette came in, he brought in Bill 101, which was the, you know, the charter of the French
00:06:16.700 language for Quebec. And because they were going to make businesses and other in various parts of
00:06:22.180 Quebec society, people were going to have to use French and, you know, for the first time. And so
00:06:26.680 the reason that Quebec declined so quickly in the late 70s was primarily because of English-speaking
00:06:32.600 people pulling out. The English community was in control of a lot of the businesses and the
00:06:38.920 financial side of things and stuff, so they pulled out. Montreal, I think, might have been the biggest
00:06:44.520 city in Canada in 1970, but by 1980, Toronto was the biggest city because Montreal lost so much,
00:06:49.420 because that's where the English-speaking people were largely concentrated in Montreal.
00:06:52.540 all. And so the primary reason for the decline of Quebec was not the fact that the party Quebec was
00:06:59.840 a separatist party, but was because the policies they brought in were forcing people to speak
00:07:03.660 French and people didn't want to be forced to speak French. It was easier to move out. So I
00:07:08.780 guess I want to bring that up because we hear that, you know, even someone like Jason Kenney
00:07:12.600 will say, oh, the separatist movement is going to chase out businesses and our economies to decline
00:07:16.500 just because we're talking about it. And, you know, if we become independent, we're going to
00:07:20.320 lose everything just look what happened to Quebec yeah Quebec did lose that stuff but it was because
00:07:25.100 they were forcing people to speak French that was the primary reason by far you know what I mean
00:07:29.260 and we're not proposing anything like that and so the the analogy is not correct because we're not 0.68
00:07:35.100 going to do something to chase people away the way they did and another point like that you made that
00:07:39.180 was quite important is that like our policies are more pro-business out here than they are out there
00:07:43.360 too so we don't have to worry about that there might be people who leave for whatever reason
00:07:48.040 I mean, some people might do that, but it's not the same as Quebec.