The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 29, 2025


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


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

181.93813

Word Count

2,758

Sentence Count

171

Misogynist Sentences

6

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

In this episode, Wyatt talks about the latest poll in regards to support for Separatist ideas in Alberta, and what it says about the chances of separatists gaining ground in the province. He also discusses the top line numbers for the United Conservative Party and the Alberta NDP.


Transcript

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,
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
00:04:12.740 she gets the widest variety of people. She's very good at making sure she also gets rural input. Because
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
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
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
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
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,
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00:15:05.860 Anyway, so that's it for me. See you guys later.