00:00:00.000Without a doubt, the biggest loser in the Alberta referendum vote is NDP leader Nahid Nenshi.
00:00:07.240He wanted the referendum to be held in October 2027 and coincide with the provincial general election.
00:00:14.920That way, he and his very unpopular party could wrap themselves in the Canadian flag
00:00:20.340and say that if you're showing up to vote for a remaining in Canada,
00:00:24.580then you must secure your vote by also voting for the NDP at the same time.
00:00:29.160Well, that dream scenario is now out the window, and we now have Naheed Nenshi going on live TV to deny the election results on the majority of the nine policy questions that were there on the referendum ballot.
00:00:44.180That was actually the main purpose of the referendum.
00:00:47.620The independence question was kind of a sideshow.
00:00:51.040Frankly, the independence leaders, and I'm not talking about all of them,
00:00:53.940I'm just talking about people who were kind of starting the movement,
00:00:56.520Mitch Sylvester and Jeff Rath, were not organized.
00:00:59.760They were not prepared for this, and it was kind of obvious
00:01:02.040that they were only going to get 24%, 25% of the vote.
00:01:06.280The NDP made a big deal about it that unless we mobilize,
00:01:10.980That was proven not to be true, and he'd nenshi, the NDP,0.96
00:01:14.180and the federal liberals all look really dumb for having rallied so hard against this thing that0.73
00:01:19.080didn't have a lot of support but at the same time because they rallied so hard and they were telling0.81
00:01:25.260people to vote no to the nine which is the nine policy questions the fact that seven out of nine
00:01:31.500of them at this point they're still six percent of the vote left to count the fact that seven out of
00:01:36.240nine nine of them passed is absolutely insane since there was a large contingent of people
00:01:42.640who went out there simply to vote no on everything and then vote to remain in Canada, sight unseen.
00:01:49.580Did not care what the question said, they were just voting no, and a bunch of them still passed
00:01:54.700anyways. So check out Nenshi here on CBC saying that he doesn't care that Albertans want Alberta
00:02:02.200have more control over immigration because you can't vote away people's human rights or whatever
00:02:07.760his justification is. David, on these immigration questions, while they are, you know, margins in
00:02:12.700the 50s, not even into the 60s, they are still majority opinion. And, you know, he can say it
00:02:20.020that way. Well, these are margins in the 50s, but not quite the 60s. Well, some of them are actually
00:02:25.600up in the 60s. But considering that they have majority support on a referendum where a lot of
00:02:33.120people are simply voting no to spite Danielle Smith means that they actually probably are
00:02:37.240overwhelmingly popular they just had activists telling people put the blinders on don't read
00:02:42.380them just say no danielle smith wasn't even just saying blindly vote yes she was saying read them
00:02:47.080come to your own conclusion and the vast majority of them ended up passing so i don't care if it's
00:02:52.900in the 50s it's a majority things like voter id uh for people to vote not necessarily giving
00:02:59.440provincial funded social support programs to people without permanent legal status here in
00:03:04.540canada i mean over the next year to the election immigration and how we treat immigrants and
00:03:10.200newcomers to this country could very well be a core issue in your election campaign and in alberta
00:03:15.640politics in a pretty profound way how do you how do you look you're seeing it federally now with
00:03:19.420pierre polyev and you remember i used to come on the show an awful lot and one of the things that
00:03:23.540we always talked about is what what makes the right in canada different than the right in other
00:03:28.340places and one of the things i always used to say is because in canada we don't deviate from the
00:03:32.680consensus on immigration. We're not there is no consensus on immigration. This is one of those
00:03:36.980dumb things that J.G. McCullough speaks out about a lot. There was never a consensus on immigration.0.99
00:03:42.480If you actually follow the polling on what Canadians feel about immigration over the past
00:03:47.100few decades, pretty much every poll shows a majority of Canadians always felt that immigration
00:03:52.600was too high, not just in the Trudeau era, but even in the Harper era, in the Paul Martin,
00:03:57.940the Christian era, people always wanted it to be lower and slower change. The thing is that what
00:04:04.720we've had in Canada now is that conservative parties have sort of tapped into that anti-immigration
00:04:11.520feeling and are pushing the policies that not only do their own supporters want, but the majority of
00:04:17.140Canadians want. But he's now going to try and compare the UCP and the CPC to like the AFD in
00:04:23.120germany which by the way if you're in germany you probably would be voting for the afd they are the
00:04:29.840biggest party right now because all the other parties are delusional on migration and there
00:04:35.620is a lot of people who need to be kicked out of the country there are millions of people sitting
00:04:40.360there only sustained on welfare creating trouble not integrating absolutely there's a reason that
00:04:45.800people are voting afd in germany like the afd in germany or hungary or whatever right if it won't
00:04:52.060deviate from the consensus on immigration we're not like the afd in germany or hungary or whatever
00:04:56.280right that has changed now and we're starting to see folks on the right really understand that
00:05:01.640there may be a vein to tap in anti-immigrant sentiment that's what these questions are about
00:05:06.700they're about setting up that election right and putting me on the defensive on immigration but
00:05:12.100what we've learned is that the cities calgary edmonton the other cities voted massively
00:05:16.680against these immigration questions. They actually did not. When you look at the live results,
00:05:22.660yeah, the NDP strongholds in places like Edmonton and Calgary voted against some of them.
00:05:28.420Many others were voted in favor of, despite the fact that many of these ridings were even won by
00:05:34.720the NDP last time. The stronghold ridings where the NDP win by like 20 percent, yeah, they basically
00:05:40.800voted no to the nine on all these questions. They weren't even reading them, so we don't even know
00:05:45.120if these people actually opposed these policies. They were simply just voting no to spite Danielle
00:05:50.080Smith. And even then, writings in Edmonton that the UCP hasn't won since it was the PC party in
00:05:55.760the early 2000s, those ones voted for these immigration changes. And these are many of them
00:06:02.000immigrant-heavy communities. And I say that in the sense that, you know, naturalized citizens,
00:06:06.980first or second generation Canadians from Punjabi background or other parts of India,
00:06:12.920China Africa those people those ridings were voting for these immigration changes because it
00:06:18.720turns out it's not an ethnicity thing it's about whether or not Canada can handle millions of
00:06:24.420people coming in in a very short period of time who really do not have the skills and ability to
00:06:29.600actually sustain themselves here without government supports him trying to like basically play this
00:06:35.320off like oh they're going to try and like tap into this feeling on the right it's not a feeling on
00:06:40.640the right because it's the majority of the province you know and that's where immigrants
00:06:45.620are really a part of the economy where people live so do i have an answer on how we navigate
00:06:50.380that no do i know that danielle smith is going to try to pin me to the wall on immigration as0.97
00:06:54.960the right has done in so many places absolutely but look some of the pushback on immigration is
00:06:59.300not on the nature of immigration itself it was it's on poorly managed immigration in that that
00:07:04.300there was this post-covid surge where the federal government even by its stark reversals of
00:07:08.960knowledge it made mistakes right so you can keep it to the issue of policy as opposed to the issue
00:07:15.940of who the people are right that that's where yeah that's the calibration right if we were only
00:07:20.580talking about question one and i think i just heard uh one of your panelists say you can have
00:07:26.200those discussions with the federal government and you should because it's absolutely true that the
00:07:31.020federal government took its its eye off the ball immediately in those post-covid years that is also
00:07:36.120true that you cannot operate at negative population growth forever and ever right so this is a real
00:07:41.620opportunity for us to be able to have those real conversations but the reality of the fact the
00:07:46.820reality of the matter is even if you took all the young healthy temporary foreign workers out of the
00:07:53.060health care system even if you denied public education to refugee children it's not going to
00:07:58.520make the emergency room lineups any less it's not going to make your classrooms any smaller1.00
00:08:02.620actually it will if you start telling people who don't have a legitimate reason to be here
00:08:08.400that you are no longer going to be getting free benefits it actually takes care of like 80 percent
00:08:13.460of the problem itself even in europe in a lot of these countries that have just insane problems
00:08:18.500with migration we are seeing riots in places like paris milan it's spreading to spain portugal all
00:08:26.580over the place just migrant and leftist riots all over the place and it's supposedly about them not
00:08:32.240getting enough services. It's not, you can tell because of the behavior on the streets, it's just
00:08:36.840anti-Western rioting that's going on. Many of these people are only in these countries because
00:08:42.580they can sustain themselves on a lot of government benefits. If those government benefits went away
00:08:47.620tomorrow, they're not suddenly going to find jobs and start working and sustaining themselves. No,
00:08:52.420they'll simply go home. That's the biggest problem is that the only reason these people are sticking
00:08:57.760around and living in these kind of enclave slum areas is because the government's basically paying0.97
00:09:03.600them to do it. So when he's saying, oh, it's not going to make classroom sizes any smaller,0.99
00:09:07.780it's not going to reduce wait times in the healthcare system. Yes, it is. If you're getting
00:09:13.200free healthcare, a bunch of free money from the federal government, and a bunch of benefits from
00:09:18.040food banks and whatnot, and then you can just live off of that without having to work and you
00:09:22.460get all these extra free benefits from family, of course that's going to keep you here. If they
00:09:26.720were cut off you're going to probably take the money that you have and say okay well we made a
00:09:30.700little bit of money here we've saved up a little bit we can probably go home and find work over
00:09:35.040there and you know just go back to being with family that's what's going to happen overnight
00:09:40.120pretty much because people will make choices when the incentives change it's not going to make
00:09:45.560anyone's life better right and i think that's the place i've got to go to which is i am happy to
00:09:50.220have a conversation on numbers i am not happy to have a conversation on the dignity of newcomers
00:09:55.080And I'm not happy to have people voting on whether other people should have human rights.0.57
00:09:59.500So it is a human right for somebody to come to Alberta on, I guess, on the request or on the allowance of the federal government and just live off of benefit programs, cash welfare programs, food bank supplies, being able to get free health care without having to pay into the system at all, getting other sorts of support benefits from the government.
00:10:24.620And it is undignified for us to vote on whether or not that should continue.
00:10:30.900That would actually be a violation of their human rights.0.84
00:10:33.020In fact, unless you bring everyone who declares themselves to be a refugee and you bring them in Alberta and give them better benefits than Canadians, you're violating their human rights.0.89
00:10:42.780This guy is an absolute dumpster fire of an NDP leader.
00:10:47.020Can you smell this man losing the next election?0.63
00:10:51.240I want to jump over to another little kind of statement he made after the referendum question.
00:10:57.580He's trying to take some sort of like a victory lap on the fact that the independent support wasn't as high, but it was like, dude, that's what it was always polling at.
00:11:05.920Pretty much the independent support smacked right where it was at in all the polls.
00:11:10.520Again, many of the people who voted for independence have very legitimate reasons for hating the federal government.
00:11:16.940Many of these people live in rural areas that have been just absolutely demolished by federal government policies. Now, I think with better provincial government policies and the liberal federal government having to adjust a bit more, it will get better. That's not saying that it's good. It's saying, from my perspective, that you would be making a lot of drastic changes by leaving that may not actually result in more stability as fast as we could potentially try and replace the federal government at one point.
00:11:46.400I think for efficiency's sake and also the plus minus sort of analysis I do, I would say I would still put more effort into just trying to flip the federal government rather than trying to flip a massive amount of opinions of Albertans on independence and then figuring out the logistics to try and make sure we don't lose jobs and investment and whatnot because of the jurisdictional chaos that sometimes changing whether you're a province or a country ends up doing.
00:12:14.480But anyways, but the thing is, Nenshi doesn't care about any of that.
00:12:18.160He does not have an understanding perspective.
00:12:21.280In fact, he is now going to take the 24-25% of people who voted for this and try and drag them through the mud.
00:12:27.920But before I get to that clip, I do just want to remind you guys, if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on the video.
00:12:33.340Subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber.
00:12:35.460And then, of course, I always want to mention, if you live in the provincial riding of Calgary Curry in sort of that suburban urban part of southwestern Calgary, make sure you go to my website, WyattClaypool.com, sign up, and I'll try and give you a call at some point because I am running for the UCP provincial nomination for that area to try and win it back from the insane drug advocate, Janet Aramanco, who currently occupies the riding for the NDP.
00:13:03.380But anyways, with all that being said, I did link that, pin that on top of the comments, so go check that out. But now we are getting into another Nenshi clip about the 25% of people who voted for separation.
00:13:15.800Hi, thank you for taking my question. Looking at the referendum results from last night, as of right now, it appears that one in four Albertans voted in favor of holding a future binding independence referendum. The campaign has been really personal and divisive on both sides of the debate. How do you unite Alberta and patch the province back together? And you look at especially with 25% right now saying that they want a vote on getting out of Canada.
00:13:44.460Yeah, that's really a good question and probably the most important question facing us all right now.
00:13:49.640The context of the question is, remember that that number has never changed.
00:13:54.080The support for separatism in Canada has always been within an 8 or 9% range.
00:13:59.060And if these numbers hold, we're right smack in that range.
00:14:02.100So it's not like this is something new.
00:14:04.600And certainly even the separatists were saying, this is not a vote to separate.
00:14:09.160This is just a vote to keep talking or to give us leverage or to send a message to Ottawa.
00:14:14.840We don't know what percentage of people really wanted to separate which ones wanted to send a message.0.99
00:14:19.740So he's even admitting that this has been a just stupid boogeyman that he has been cooking up for the past year.0.99
00:14:27.380Because there was no chance it was actually going to pass.0.99
00:14:31.460There's just too many people that that is just way too big of a change for.
00:14:35.520And also the problem is, and I've heard it from people like Rick Bell, who I agree with, way too much of the messaging of the independence movement has been internal towards its own supporters and not trying to figure out, well, how do we reach the rural voter who doesn't want to vote for it yet?
00:14:50.660Or how do we reach the suburban voters who really are not supportive of independence?
00:14:55.080The thing is that Nenshi, though, has been acting as if this thing is like 2% away from winning.0.90
00:14:59.740And unless I get involved and the Prime Minister gets involved and Jason Kenney and Rachel Notley go on their weird cringe advocacy tour, then the Separatists are going to take over.0.92
00:15:12.640He knew it wasn't. This was a data mining operation for him.0.93
00:15:15.920But I don't think it's going to be worth it at the end of the day because he ends up looking like the boy who cried wolf about nothing because he was really just mad that this was happening in 2026 and not 2027 because this is an issue that does get people out to vote.
00:15:30.800I believe the voter turnout in all this is going to be like above 70%, which is higher than our last provincial election had.
00:15:38.780And so the position the NDP are in is that they know in the provincial election, they're not going to have this big turnout surge for them anymore.
00:15:45.840And now they're going to have to run on their own rat poison public policy ideas.
00:15:51.560All the stuff around bringing in safe supply and opening up injection sites, raising taxes, apparently doing absolutely nothing to push back on immigration, not doing much at all to actually push for more energy development, trying to defund charter schools and whatnot, bring back gender theory into the classroom, eliminate parental rights.
00:16:11.640no doubt guys that there's just Albertans all over the place clamoring to vote for those things
00:16:16.860they needed to be on the same ballot as this referendum vote or else they were going to get
00:16:22.800crushed in the next provincial election and now they're going to get crushed in the next provincial
00:16:26.760election and they're obviously flailing about and trying to sort of like seize victory out of this
00:16:32.440moment when they have been basically proven to being hucksters on the same level of people like
00:16:38.400jeff wrath in the aftermath of this jeff wrath and naheed nenshi are like traveling in the same car
00:16:44.140jeff wrath is like an independence guy and naheed nenshi is not an independence guy but they are0.91
00:16:49.700united in hating danielle smith for very vague and stupid reasons and basically always playing0.83
00:16:55.500up independence support to be bigger than it is in order to make themselves seem big and powerful0.98
00:17:00.920or in nenshi's case like a needed political figure to stop this rising tide
00:17:06.600But when I talk to folks who are really not doing well right now, who are angry, who are upset about things, you know, what they're really angry about is the cost of living.
00:17:17.400They're really angry about jobs now and in the future, and sure, some of them blame the Federation and some of them blame Ottawa.
00:17:23.740But our job is to ensure that we focus on the things that really will make a difference in people's lives every day, the things that will actually make people's lives better.
00:17:35.700like can he can he even lay a finger on danielle smith when it comes to jobs
00:17:40.540half of all the jobs created in canada since prime minister mark carney became prime minister
00:17:46.300have been in alberta meaning that he's basically created no jobs and it's all been danielle smith
00:17:51.900like it's kind of pathetic that basically every single thing that the liberals federally try and
00:17:57.640brag about in terms of objective metrics that have improved it's basically not improved at all0.66
00:18:02.980anywhere but Alberta. Crime, wait times falling for healthcare, increased wages, jobs, it's all
00:18:12.180in Alberta. And places like Ontario will see tiny little upticks, and provinces like Quebec are
00:18:17.500actually decreasing in job numbers. And he's going to try and say, oh, people are mad about
00:18:22.980the cost of living and jobs. Okay, go and attack Prime Minister Mark Carney for that, because it
00:18:28.800has nothing to do with premier smith i guess he's suggesting that the job growth would be even better
00:18:35.200if he was in from doing what increasing spending was he going to increase public sector employment
00:18:41.820to pretend he's creating jobs and i'm reminded of 1995 after the failure of the charlottetown accord
00:18:48.940and the near-death experience of that quebec referendum i remember all the commentators then
00:19:23.940I'm taking which is absolutely we need to work on things to make people's lives better but those
00:19:28.880things happen in Edmonton they don't happen in Ottawa and they are happening they are like I
00:19:33.720I don't even know what to say like what is his actual critique of what's going on at Edmonton
00:19:39.860right now because I don't think they have anything when you actually follow question period in the
00:19:44.880Alberta legislature it can be kind of hard to watch because it's Nahid Nenshi whining about
00:19:50.160nothing and the Alberta government like Daniel Smith usually answering him directly disproving
00:19:56.120why he's being hysterical about some random perceived issue around ethics or whatever
00:20:01.780but there's never actually really laying a finger on the government when it comes to
00:20:06.580objective metrics about how they're performing on jobs the economy education health care all these
00:20:13.800things it's like the education system like the classroom sizes are too big and it's like well
00:20:19.080there's a bunch of schools under construction pretty much in every single riding across the
00:20:23.600province and that will be online in a couple years it's like well it should have been done a couple
00:20:28.060years ago it's like weren't you guys in government for four years back in 2015 to 2019 they didn't
00:20:33.440build any schools really they didn't do anything they basically just didn't they just bloated the
00:20:37.860public sector raised taxes and chased away energy jobs that's pretty much all they did and now
00:20:43.700they're here to like come and critique this by the way you don't even exactly need constitutional
00:20:48.300changes in order for Alberta to get more control over things like immigration. Quebec has the
00:20:53.920ability to tell the federal government how many people they want and what type of people are
00:20:58.000coming in, what skills, all this stuff. And they respect that. Alberta is basically saying, hey,
00:21:03.480can you extend that deal Quebec has to Alberta? And maybe while you're at it, extend it to all
00:21:09.300the provinces right now, because it would be great for them to actually be able to tell the
00:21:13.540federal government, what their quotas are, how many people they want, or if they don't want
00:21:18.280anyone at all, in order to protect their domestic job markets, their public services, their health
00:21:24.160care systems, education, all that. That is all we are asking for. But you'll notice as I'm playing
00:21:30.320these clips of Nahid Nenshi, just how thin his points are becoming here. Even Mark Carney kind
00:21:35.840of knows he lost in all this, because he starts kind of coming up with excuses for why the
00:21:40.940immigration result on this referendum don't matter you can tell he was hoping his no to the
00:21:45.740nine push at the end was going to sink these things because now he actually has to act with
00:21:50.240the majority of albertans voting for his government to give alberta more leeway on immigration again
00:21:56.240despite the fact that he and naheed nenshi and forever canada activated a bunch of people to
00:22:01.500simply vote no on all of the referendum questions no matter what they said we've been having
00:22:08.480discussions with the provinces first ministers around getting immigration uh first and foremost
00:22:15.560to the right levels this government has retaken control taking back control of immigration we've
00:22:20.080got the numbers down foreign students down 80 percent you know if the problem with getting0.68
00:22:25.680them down is that they are down to still unreasonable levels because we are measuring
00:22:30.320from the high watermark when they were hellishly insane levels and we brought them down 60 percent
00:22:38.16070% down to levels where it's still just way too much. We are still filling in what should be a
00:22:44.840local kid's job, and we're giving it to an immigrant from India or from Indonesia or the
00:22:52.660Philippines or China. That's the problem we have, is that it was way, way, way, way too high,1.00
00:22:59.240and now it's still way too high. It needs to be cut further, and that's where I'm very happy to
00:23:03.360see the federal conservatives stiffen their necks on this thing and directly call for immigration
00:23:07.740and other temporary foreign workers and student numbers to be lower.
00:23:12.640Not just sustain them at this level, don't raise them, keep lowering them.
00:23:17.900Asylum seekers down 70%, temporary foreign workers down 60% on the floor.0.99
00:23:22.300A more sustainable level of permanent immigrants as well.0.85
00:23:30.280We need to assess where we are, keep that control, be at sustainable levels.0.88
00:23:37.020And while we're doing that, discuss how the economic class, particularly of immigrants, can be most effectively distributed across the economy, the country, and across different businesses.0.88
00:23:51.600So this is one of the different sectors of the economy.0.98
00:23:55.400Those are discussions we have with the problems that we'll have with all of them.
00:23:57.840And, you know, it's a question of making those judgments in a way that works for Canadians, works for Canada, and is sustainable.
00:24:08.260I just want to underscore, we will not budge from overall levels that are sustainable.
00:24:16.400So you can tell he feels under pressure on this because he kind of just went over what his current measures are,
00:24:22.240rather than responding to how the referendum basically said, you're not doing enough, now give over some authority to the Alberta government.
00:24:29.960He just defaults back to, well, you know, we're talking to all the first ministers, i.e. the premiers,
00:24:35.120about, you know, how do we keep a sustainable immigration system and serve the best interests of Canada?
00:24:40.900It's like, OK, that's great. But Alberta had a referendum. What about that?
00:24:45.520Are you going to cede more control to them as you have with Quebec?
00:24:54.820I need to get to this clip because, my goodness, the man is like the most petty person I know in quote-unquote conservative politics.
00:25:02.280Corey Tanike tried to basically run a conspiracy theory that Danielle Smith only had the independence question on the ballot in order to juice support upwards for all of her nine questions on the ballot.
00:25:14.680And it's like, no, if anything, the independence question brought out pretty much every single leftist in Alberta to vote against not only independence, but vote against all nine of the options.
00:25:25.800But I don't know what what his game here is trying to basically slag her and like act as this was her plan.
00:25:32.020It wasn't. It was a citizen's initiative. It was a citizen's petition to have the question.
00:25:37.740She had absolutely nothing to do with it, and if anything, it probably hurt the numbers, and yet a bunch of these policies, 7 out of 9 at the current time, have still passed.
00:25:47.320And the two that didn't are kind of boring constitutional questions about judges.
00:25:52.520They matter, but I could see why the average person reading them wouldn't really know what their opinion on it was, just like right off the hop.
00:26:00.500And you could see that the turnout numbers on who voted on those questions was significantly lower than the rest.
00:26:05.720But all the other ones that were more straightforward questions got affirmative answers.
00:26:10.080I don't even particularly want to spend a lot of time, you know, talking about the other nine questions in the sense that I think the mandate is so thin on that stuff.
00:26:22.220Like, you know, the questions are confusing.
00:26:25.780Turnout for those if, you know, you just had those on their own without the separation question drawing people into the ballot box.
00:26:34.100uh was uh you know would have been tiny it'd be less than 30 in my view yeah uh you know so like
00:26:42.700does he mean like less than 30 percent turnout for the entire referendum or does he trying to claim
00:26:49.240that support for each option would be less than like 30 percent of people i guarantee you if the
00:26:55.500referendum was just on the nine policy questions most of these would be above 60 i don't think any
00:27:01.220I don't think a single one of them would have failed. I think you would have had actually
00:27:05.920greater kind of UCP focus on those nine questions, whereas Danielle Smith had to waste a lot of her0.98
00:27:12.380time justifying that she is not in favor of independence. She's not a secret separatist0.99
00:27:16.960like the NDP keeps saying, and she didn't actually get to advocate as much for the policy questions,
00:27:21.160whereas her opposition had basically said vote to remain and then vote no on all nine of the
00:27:26.020questions, and yet they still passed. The idea that the nine questions don't matter is just
00:27:32.060politically stupid on Corey's part. Danielle Smith has given herself a mandate in the next year0.98
00:27:37.940to start moving on some of these things and start building a narrative for Alberta to take more
00:27:42.660autonomy on these issues. It's very smart politics. Rather than doing something and people saying,
00:27:46.900well, we didn't give you a mandate to do that, she now has a mandate to do it.