The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Smith holds massive lead over NDP in Alberta - Low Popularity for Independence

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I'm very happy that today we finally got some good polling in

00:00:07.160 regards to the support for separatism in the province of Alberta. We've been seeing tons

00:00:12.780 of pollsters releasing polls that I have just not put a lot of faith in. If you think that

00:00:18.740 separatism is close to 50% support in Alberta, you are either living in rural Alberta or you

00:00:25.360 are too online. There are really not that many separatists in the province of Alberta. I live

00:00:31.280 there. I live in the Calgary suburbs. Go around the Calgary suburbs. You're not going to get a lot

00:00:36.240 of buy-in on separatism. And so we have this poll from Janet Brown, who is easily by far the best

00:00:44.440 pollster, not just in Alberta, but in Canada, doing a very detailed breakdown of what the support levels

00:00:50.960 are looking like in this province. And spoiler alert, they're not very good. But before I get

00:00:56.860 into the exact numbers, I also want to talk about the top line numbers when it comes to the UCP versus

00:01:02.900 the Alberta NDP. But before I get into all that, guys, if you like my coverage of politics, make

00:01:09.200 sure to give this video a like, subscribe to the channel if you are not yet a subscriber, and leave

00:01:14.240 a comment. What do you think about separatism? What do you think their chances of actually succeeding

00:01:18.840 are? Again, I'm biased, and I'm not even like anti-separatist. I'm just not also pro-separatist.

00:01:25.020 I just, I'm trying to be realistic, guys. There's just not really a path here. And I think if you are

00:01:30.220 a separatist, you should want the people pushing for the stuff to move a little slower and actually

00:01:36.780 gain support rather than pushing for the referendum vote without actually knowing if it can succeed or

00:01:43.580 not. So check out this. Thanks to Sheree Attiste for posting the stats. But this is the Alberta poll.

00:01:50.780 So this is not an NDP biased poll at all. Again, Janet Brown is more so just extremely accurate.

00:01:57.780 Janet Brown shows that 52% of people would be voting for the United Conservatives. And then you have NDP

00:02:06.660 getting 38%. That is a massive 14-point lead for the Conservatives in Alberta. And then you have

00:02:14.420 other with a 10%, worth 10% in this poll, which does make sense to me, considering that the other

00:02:22.340 options, any other party but the NDP and the UCP did terrible in the last provincial election. I could

00:02:27.920 see that 10% being the Republican Party of Alberta. Maybe the Alberta Liberals do a little bit better

00:02:35.160 because of the popularity right now federally of the Liberals. Maybe the Alberta Party does better.

00:02:40.140 I don't know. But at the very least, Albertans know they don't want the NDP. So when I get into the

00:02:45.680 separatist numbers in this poll, it's not because they polled a bunch of NDP people. This poll is very

00:02:51.720 good for the UCP. They are holding steady at 52% like they had back in the 2023 election. And the NDP

00:02:58.320 have in fact fallen by six points. A lot of people are going to, maybe some people who are saying

00:03:03.520 other right now would go towards the NDP. They're just people that, you know, haven't settled in

00:03:08.800 with who they're comfortable voting for yet. And they're just saying other, but they're not like

00:03:13.260 a separatist or anything. But now let's move on to the actual separatism questions, because

00:03:19.860 they're, that's just not good. So here is a poll asking people, the Janet Baran poll,

00:03:28.100 Alberta. Alberta would be better off if it's separated from Canada. Disagree is 67%. And

00:03:37.140 agree is 30%. Now, if anything, this poll question should be very good for the separatists, 0.64

00:03:43.340 because it's not saying, do you want to separate? It's just saying, in theory, if all the work was

00:03:47.180 done, would you be better off? And the conclusion is, I don't know, probably not. Two thirds already

00:03:53.780 basically say no, they aren't even willing to say that you'd be better off separating. And this is of

00:04:00.260 a 1200 people. And it's a telephone poll and an online poll. I know Janet Brown, when I was taking

00:04:06.020 my master's degree in public policy, she did a talk on polling of how she does her polls to make sure 1.00

00:04:12.740 she gets the widest variety of people. She's very good at making sure she also gets rural input. Because 0.99

00:04:18.020 the one thing that happens in a lot of pollsters polls is they call urban areas, because people working

00:04:22.980 office jobs are more likely to pick up the phone and take a poll, she makes sure to postal code 1.00

00:04:27.860 balance her polls, so that she's not just pulling Calgary and Edmonton, she will make sure to not

00:04:32.740 only go into small towns, but rural acreages and make sure that those people have input. And even with

00:04:37.780 that, it's only 30% of people who agree that Alberta would be better off as its own country. And

00:04:44.580 honestly, from my perspective, as someone who's not even a separatist, I would say probably Alberta would

00:04:48.980 do better on its own. It's just logical that when you have the one place in Canada that has to fund

00:04:54.820 the rest of the country with equalization payments, if that province went off on its own, it could keep

00:04:59.540 all that money and in theory invest it in things that it actually wants. Now I want to move over to a

00:05:05.620 different question about separatism. There is another one asking people about whether or not they are more

00:05:12.980 attached to Alberta or more attached to Canada. And for the separatists to win, they need this number

00:05:18.020 to be over 50%, but it isn't. So the question here is, would you say you feel more attached to Alberta

00:05:24.740 or Canada? More to Canada gets 34%, both equally gets 33%, and more to Alberta gets 32%. In fact, the least

00:05:34.740 popular option of all these. And that is an increase since like the last time this was pulled, or since

00:05:41.860 it was pulled in 2022. But still, more to Canada has increased by 14%. And what's happening here,

00:05:50.020 and again, I'm not saying that the separatists can't do their thing, can't make the attempt,

00:05:54.020 make an attempt, you can do that. The problem is what the polls are showing you is you're probably losing

00:06:00.180 out on retired people in the suburban areas because you're not going to win downtown youth in Edmonton

00:06:06.660 or Calgary. Urban areas in general are very NDP, everyone knows this. But the UCP's path to victory

00:06:13.380 in an election runs through Calgary suburbs. You need to be able to hold on to at least half the

00:06:19.140 Calgary suburbs if you want to win. Right now, I don't think there is a single suburban area in Calgary

00:06:25.860 that the separatists could win. We don't even talk about Edmonton. It gets so obvious that there's

00:06:30.500 no places in Edmonton that would vote to separate. They already vote NDP provincially. The separatist

00:06:36.100 question is an even more difficult question to win on than any normal ballot question between the UCP

00:06:43.220 and the NDP in Edmonton. You're not going to get more than probably 20%, 25% of people willing to

00:06:48.980 actually vote for separatism in Alberta's capital. And now, I'm not sure if we have any more stats from

00:06:55.620 this. I just want to scroll through. But again, I'm not trying to throw like a bucket of cold water

00:06:59.940 on the separatists and be like, oh, see, you can't win. You might as well not even try. My point is,

00:07:04.740 if you're going to try, you got to put in more than a year's worth of work. Because again, Janet

00:07:09.860 Brown, this is not a leftist poll. Again, this was the top line stats between all of the parties. Here,

00:07:16.820 they actually have filled in what the other was. 4% is just straight other, 3% Alberta Liberals,

00:07:22.500 1% Green Party, 1% Alberta Party. That's a big lead for the conservatives. And again, Janet Brown

00:07:29.460 was the closest to getting the results of the 2023 election right. She was very good. And so,

00:07:38.180 I don't think we should be discounting this as, oh, people must be biased against the separatists,

00:07:42.820 and they're trying to use propaganda polls to hurt us. I think that Janet Brown's entire career is 0.60

00:07:47.860 hinged on her being extremely accurate. She's not going to sacrifice that just because she doesn't

00:07:52.420 like the, she doesn't like the separatist movement. Now, here's a poll of how the different parties

00:07:58.580 would vote. Alberta, if a separation referendum were held today, how would you vote? NDP voters would

00:08:05.300 vote 98% against, 2% in favor. UCP voters, 54% in favor, 39% against. You only are getting a

00:08:18.660 bare majority of UCP voters willing to vote against or in favor of separatism. You're only winning 2% of

00:08:27.540 NDP and you're only winning 39% of UCP. There, I, maybe you could say there's a bunch of disengaged

00:08:33.700 voters. There's a bunch of people who don't usually vote at all. Let's say even in theory,

00:08:38.420 you just have crazy high rural turnout where separatism is actually more than 50% popular.

00:08:44.500 I'm not even sure if that's true. Well, let's say in rural areas, you have more than 50%

00:08:49.940 support for separatism. Even if you somehow won the referendum, if it was then found out it was just

00:08:55.780 because rural people turned out three to one compared to urban people, Mark Carney and the

00:09:00.900 government could easily just say, well, we're going to nullify those results because obviously

00:09:04.740 there just wasn't a lot of urban input and it was just a fluke of who showed up to vote that's going

00:09:09.300 to cause this province to separate. So we're just saying you can't separate. Is that kind of unfair?

00:09:15.220 Sure, but that's what they would do because there's not any real way to force the government

00:09:20.660 to like actually acknowledge the results. But yeah, I think I have one more here.

00:09:27.220 I don't think I do. I wish I did. I was trying to see if there was another one that was just asking a

00:09:32.500 flat out a different type of question about separatism. But those questions were totally

00:09:37.700 fair. I know Janet Brown, she's a great pollster. And so to the separatists out there who really want

00:09:44.740 this thing to work, you might need to take another year or two off of trying to get it on the ballot

00:09:50.900 and do the work to make sure that if you do get on the ballot, you can win. They're trying to

00:09:54.820 currently gather 177,000 or 173,000 signatures to get this on the ballot. But you need about a million

00:10:03.380 and a half ID to people if you want to actually be able to have the IDs to get people to turn out

00:10:09.620 and vote in favor of separation, especially with the UCP and the NDP pushing against you.

00:10:14.740 You need to have more data than both those parties probably combined. But now I just want

00:10:21.780 to talk about one more thing. And it's this ridiculous attack from the left on Daniel Smith

00:10:27.060 as if she is the ringleader of the separatists, even though she's just not a separatist at all.

00:10:32.260 Check this out. This is our favorite Laura Babcock having another meltdown on her show about things 1.00

00:10:38.580 she made up in her own head. Check it out. We see them make claims about fentanyl.

00:10:42.900 When we see them make claims about Alberta separation or about how Canada is unsustainable

00:10:47.780 as a nation or about how the people in this country are miserable, all things that we know

00:10:52.100 are factually inaccurate. They are meant to weaken us. I have been very angry at Daniel Smith,

00:10:57.700 whether she's covering up for her own corrupt care scandal using the separation thing,

00:11:01.700 or whether there's some more nefarious agenda at play to be challenging the integrity of our country

00:11:07.700 structure when we're under pressure from a foreign threat. I think it's despicable.

00:11:13.620 I never know what's going on with Laura. I've said it before. There are there are many villains in

00:11:19.380 this world. And one of the chief chief ones is whoever's hiding Laura's lithium from her. What is

00:11:26.980 she talking about? Daniel Smith is against separatism. She is a federalist. And I guess she's,

00:11:33.220 what is she lowering the signature threshold to try and distract from a scandal? I know about that 1.00

00:11:38.180 scandal. It sounds not great. Is it like something even comparable to anything Justin Trudeau has done?

00:11:43.860 No. If it's all true, it just sounds like some friend of the UCP in the healthcare industry got a

00:11:49.620 bloated contract. That's not good. But do you think that she's, she's using the separatist movement

00:11:55.460 that she opposes to try and distract from a scandal? I don't even know how this makes sense,

00:12:02.900 like what she's making it slightly easier to get a referendum on the ballot to like get the media

00:12:08.900 off her back. That's, that wouldn't work anywhere. So I don't know, I know what she's even on about.

00:12:16.180 She's threatening the structure, the integrity of Canada. How? How? These people are just make up

00:12:22.580 what their opponents believe. I have never seen anything that would indicate that Danielle Smith

00:12:27.700 is using this as a threat against Canada to get her away. How? Whatever, whatever. She'd never

00:12:34.260 talked with like this about Quebec separatists who are far more popular than the Alberta separatists.

00:12:39.220 Now, one thing we're going to have to look out for in Alberta is we do have three by-elections coming up

00:12:44.420 in June. Two of them are in Edmonton. Those are fairly ignorable. The NDP are going to win them.

00:12:49.460 Just flat out, these are very NDP ridings. Like if one goes UCP, maybe you have to review what the,

00:12:55.700 like what the past results have been like. But both of them have elected pretty radical people.

00:13:00.420 One of them is actually Rachel Notley's former riding. Before that, it was still a hardcore NDP riding,

00:13:06.740 even back when the NDP only had a few seats. And then the other one had that communist who tried to run

00:13:12.340 for the Liberals, resigned his seat, but then got kicked out by the Liberals. So the NDP took the opportunity

00:13:17.380 to replace him with someone slightly less crazy. But the one by-election that's really going to matter

00:13:22.340 is the one in Didsbury. Because there we have the Republican Party of Alberta leader Cam Davies

00:13:29.220 running against the UCP's candidate. If the Republican Party can get above, I would say, 12,

00:13:35.860 15% of the vote, that's where I'm going to see them as a provincial election threat to the UCP.

00:13:42.980 If they come in with 7%, 10%, 8%, it's a by-election that's kind of paltry numbers,

00:13:49.620 considering that if you are running a very populist, separatist campaign, in theory,

00:13:54.740 it should be easier to get your people to show up to a by-election vote than a mainstream party

00:14:00.260 whose voters actually just assume their party's already going to win it. So depending on how this

00:14:05.140 by-election shakes out, I think the threat level in the UCPHQ is either going to go up or down.

00:14:12.180 I've talked to some people in the UCP. They're not particularly scared. They think that Cam Davies

00:14:17.540 and the Republican Party are going to fall on their face. Let's see. I will be covering that

00:14:21.460 in the aftermath. But anyway, so that's it for me today, guys. Make sure to like this video,

00:14:26.820 leave a comment, subscribe if you're not yet a subscriber, and also sign up on my website if you

00:14:31.700 guys ever want me to point out good nomination candidates and provincial or federal nominations

00:14:37.060 going on. It's wyattclaypool.com. I always have it pinned in the comments below. You can go check

00:14:42.420 out, click on my website, sign up for the email list. I have never even emailed anyone on the list

00:14:47.540 yet outside of a couple of nominations that were going on. But I'm trying to build up the list so

00:14:51.860 if there's ever like an interesting leadership race or nomination happening, I can kind of let

00:14:56.420 people know in that jurisdiction who's a good candidate, who's a bad candidate, all that sort of

00:15:01.300 thing. Maybe I can even do miniature interviews with those nomination candidates so you guys can go watch it.

00:15:05.860 Anyway, so that's it for me. See you guys later.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 29, 2025

Smith holds massive lead over NDP in Alberta - Low Popularity for Independence

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