The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 25, 2025


Smith UCP wrecks new Separatist Party in Alberta byelection!


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Length

19 minutes

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184.61383

Word count

3,642

Sentence count

249

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Hate speech

3

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Summary

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

In this episode, I break down the results of the three by-elections that took place in Alberta on May 9th and 10th. I discuss what I think the results say about the current political landscape in Alberta and what they don't say about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Last night we had three provincial by-elections take place
00:00:06.460 in Alberta and today I want to break down for you guys what I think they indicate about the
00:00:12.320 current political landscape in Alberta and what they also don't indicate because I think there
00:00:17.940 are a lot of negative things proven in these by-elections specifically around the separatist
00:00:24.440 movement and its actual political power. But first I want to start off in Edmonton. Two out of the
00:00:31.360 three by-election ridings were in Edmonton. That would be Edmonton-Ellersley and Edmonton-Strathcona.
00:00:38.200 Let's start in Edmonton-Strathcona because it's not very exciting. Nahid Nenshi easily was elected
00:00:44.140 as the new MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona. That's all that is to be said because it is one of the most
00:00:50.360 firm NDP ridings in the entire province, if not the most NDP riding in the entire province.
00:00:57.920 Even back in the day when the Alberta NDP would only win two seats in an election, one of them
00:01:04.500 would be Edmonton-Strathcona. So again, nothing ever changes. And speaking of nothing ever changing,
00:01:12.320 Edmonton-Ellersley was a riding I genuinely thought the UCP had a chance of winning.
00:01:17.080 Did it tighten up compared to the 2023 provincial election result? Yeah, but it's still such a
00:01:24.200 margin between the NDP and the UCP. It almost didn't matter. The UCP obviously invested a lot
00:01:30.420 of resources into the riding. And so I think the improvement really just demonstrates that it's a
00:01:37.120 by-election and by-elections have slightly different results than a normal general election.
00:01:41.660 Usually in Edmonton-Ellersley, the NDP would be able to get 61%. That's what they got last time.
00:01:48.740 And I think it's what they also got in 2019. This election, they got 50%. UCP got like 36, 37%.
00:01:56.100 Republican Party of Alberta got like three and a half. You know, Liberal Party got like one and a
00:02:01.040 half or two. It wasn't really much of a result that would tell us anything. Basically,
00:02:06.780 Naheed Denchie and the NDP probably still own Edmonton. Now we probably need to see a by-election
00:02:13.400 take place somewhere like Calgary to get a real reading on if anything has changed in a swing part
00:02:18.980 of the province. The general story about Alberta is that the UCP or whatever the Conservative Party is
00:02:24.980 owns the rural area and the NDP owns Edmonton and then Calgary is a battleground. Yeah, I guess
00:02:31.800 Edmonton has become a little less NDP, but that still means they're winning the entire city.
00:02:36.780 But now, without further ado, let's get into the stuff that's actually interesting. And that
00:02:42.900 is Olds Didsbury Three Hills. This is a rural riding. And although I just said the rural
00:02:49.400 ridings are basically owned by the Conservative Party, as has been alluded to in the previous
00:02:55.820 riding, there was another party that's not usually on the political landscape that ended up running
00:03:01.620 in this provincial by-election. And that is the Republican Party of Alberta. It ran in all three
00:03:08.000 by-elections, but outside of Olds Didsbury Three Hills, they didn't really have good results. They
00:03:13.680 had 3.4% in Ellerslie. Strathcona, they literally had 0.7%. I don't really blame them. It's not like
00:03:20.840 they were going to win that one or even put it in a great showing because even the Conservatives don't
00:03:24.520 put a good showing in that riding. Literally, Nenshi won it with 81% of the vote. So nobody looked good
00:03:29.240 there. But they put all of their eggs mostly in the basket of Olds Didsbury Three Hills,
00:03:36.440 which maybe we will start calling ODTH. And ODTH, how did they do? Well, I would characterize this
00:03:45.360 as disappointing. I'm about to show the data on screen. I just want to remind you guys,
00:03:50.100 especially if you live in Alberta, make sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel if you're
00:03:53.980 not a subscriber, leave a comment on what you think, and actually scroll down and click on my website
00:03:59.180 in the comments section below, WyattClaypool.com, if you want to join my organizing list to be made
00:04:04.680 aware of good Conservative candidates in nomination races federally, provincially, or even leadership
00:04:09.880 races around the country. But here in ODTH were the results. We had the UCP's candidate, Tara Sawyer,
00:04:18.800 get 9,363 votes, 61.12%. We had the new Democratic candidate get 19.98%, effectively 20%. And the
00:04:29.920 Republican Party candidate, who was also the leader of the party, Cameron Davies, got 17.66%.
00:04:37.300 Now, I consider this to be a big disappointment for the Republican Party. And I'm going to get to some
00:04:43.860 people who disagree with me on this particular issue saying it was their first run at it, you got
00:04:48.720 to give them some, you know, give them some slack, they tried their best. And that's great. That's a
00:04:54.160 great first election result. The problem for the Republican Party, this isn't some like, new concept
00:05:00.800 of a party coming out of nowhere and getting 17%. Everyone's like, whoa, who are these guys? It's not
00:05:06.520 like you had something named like New West Alberta or whatever. And it's not a separatist party, but
00:05:13.940 it's like, you know, some libertarian party, maybe it's some sort of, you know, working like a trade
00:05:19.800 union type blue collar conservatives or whatever, and they start doing really well, or it's a rural
00:05:25.560 interest party. That would be a really good result. The problem is that this party is saying that we're
00:05:30.940 going to capture the separatist sentiment, and we are going to maybe not drive like ride it into
00:05:36.280 office, but we're going to get close. We're going to maybe come in a close second. We're going to
00:05:41.060 give the UCP a run for their money. We're going to freak them out. I really don't think Danielle
00:05:46.140 Smith is freaked out by the Republican Party today. Because to get third place in ODTH is not very good.
00:05:55.300 This is one of the most rural, this is one of the most conservative ridings in the province. And yeah,
00:06:00.580 they ended up taking a bunch of the vote from the UCP. The UCP lost 14 points compared to how they did
00:06:07.060 in 2023. But that still only means the Republicans got 17.66 and came behind the NDP, who barely tried
00:06:15.560 in this area. Like, yeah, they had door knockers and whatnot, because it's not like they're going to
00:06:19.660 send their door knockers up into Edmonton. This is a riding close to Calgary, a bunch of their Calgary 0.97
00:06:24.160 people may have come out to try and do a half decent showing. But still, as a party that's saying
00:06:31.260 that because the separatist movement is more than 50% popular in some of these ridings, we should
00:06:37.280 have an easy time connecting with voters. And what we saw is that people who maybe have separatist
00:06:42.360 sympathies are still sticking generally with the UCP. They maybe will vote yes in a separatist referendum
00:06:49.380 or an independence referendum. I know some people don't like the word separatist. It really doesn't
00:06:53.940 matter. Either one of them pretty much means the same thing. I'm not trying to be derogatory.
00:06:58.220 But a lot of people will vote yes on a separatist referendum, but they're not going to risk the
00:07:03.280 government for a separatist MLA who can't do anything. It's not like a separatist MLA can just
00:07:09.300 push forward a piece of legislation saying we're leaving. They would still need to do a petition
00:07:12.680 and then have a referendum vote on the specific thing that they petitioned for. You still have
00:07:20.420 to do it the old-fashioned way. There's no way of taking the government and then having a premier
00:07:24.600 saying, if they're a Republican premier, saying we're leaving. And I think the way that the party
00:07:29.880 ran in this election wasn't good. Why did they pick the color red? I know it's the Republican Party
00:07:34.440 color down south. It's confusing. People look at it and they think it's a liberal party sign. I talked
00:07:40.360 about this with Candice Malcolm on her show on Juno News. I'll actually link that in the description
00:07:45.840 below and pinned at the top of the comments as well. I think it was a fun discussion, so you guys
00:07:50.200 might like it. But again, it was just that the party almost didn't feel like it was attempting to win
00:07:54.940 in many ways. And now I just want to bring up something I was seeing from, or first I'm going to
00:08:01.460 show up a map of the riding, and then I want to go to someone who disagreed with me on this particular
00:08:05.740 issue. Someone I actually respect a lot, but I just want to show what their disagreement was
00:08:11.400 because I think it's a good argument to tackle on this issue. So Kalem here, who did a really good
00:08:17.520 job posting this map of the riding, poll by poll, they show the riding results, 61%, 20%, 18%, and Wild Rose
00:08:24.960 had won. I don't even know what the Wild Rose Loyalty Coalition is anymore. It's still Paul Hinman's
00:08:29.920 vehicle. If you guys aren't in Alberta, you won't even know who Paul Hinman is. Not a shot against him,
00:08:35.160 but this is very deep political lore in Alberta now. But in this riding, and naturally they did,
00:08:43.260 but the UCP won 61% of the vote. What I think is concerning for the Republican Party is you think
00:08:51.380 that this party would be at least popular in the super deep rural areas, but not really. Even in some
00:08:57.800 of these deep rural areas, I'm not even sure if these ones are slightly lighter blue because maybe
00:09:02.220 they have some small towns that are a little bit more NDP-ish. Maybe there's some more people,
00:09:07.400 more retirees who live in those areas. Or I don't know if it's like acreages where people are voting
00:09:12.100 for the Republicans. My point is that for the Republican Party to demonstrate that it has real
00:09:19.100 staying power, I think, I'm not even saying they have to win a riding or climb close to the riding.
00:09:23.740 They need to show they can win a county. I can win this general poll area. This poll area,
00:09:30.320 or the type of people who will vote for us, now we can kind of find ridings that are made
00:09:34.160 out of poll areas that are a lot like that one. If you could do that, you could win. But there's
00:09:39.420 no general place where their particular flavor of separatist messaging is popular. And I know the
00:09:46.960 guy who runs the party, Cam Davies. He's a character. I like characters in politics. He's very
00:09:52.440 much an eccentric, outgoing guy. I don't have a personal problem with him in any way. But the way that the
00:09:58.000 party is being too niche about it, separatism is kind of a problem. When on your website, and I saw
00:10:03.660 someone post this from the Wayback Machine, at one point, they were almost marketing themselves as
00:10:07.240 sort of quasi-independence, quasi-51st state party. You're immediately taking the maybe 50, maybe even
00:10:14.920 55% of people who support separatism in ODTH, and having them now divided because they maybe don't
00:10:22.320 support 51st state stuff. Or maybe they don't want an independent Alberta that's going to be
00:10:27.860 anti-monarchy. And I know the monarchy is not super popular in Alberta, but these are all things to
00:10:32.620 consider because you're going to start slowly dividing people out of your potential voting base.
00:10:38.080 All small parties have to contend with this. And I'm not anti-small party. I help out small parties.
00:10:44.240 I currently work for a small party in British Columbia, 1 BC. We already have two MLAs because they
00:10:50.220 crossed the floor and joined. You know, I like the new blue party in Ontario. I don't even care if
00:10:55.260 they don't win, but they need to have a point to existing. And if this party is trying to get Alberta
00:11:00.620 out of Canada, if they can't win an election, that's kind of a problem. And they don't exactly have
00:11:06.420 decades and decades of time to develop this concept of a party. Because if the Conservatives take over
00:11:13.160 federally, things are going to improve and people will lose interest. Separatism has to be like 0.99
00:11:18.220 really hot and fast. It needs to be like, you know, you have a firebrand of a leader who can gather people,
00:11:24.000 get them to vote for something, and then go for a referendum vote ASAP. I'm not exactly a pro-independence
00:11:30.080 guy because, frankly, I think a lot of pro-independence stuff comes from a moment of exhaustion where
00:11:35.840 people want to leave. But if they stick around for four years, everything might be better and they're happy
00:11:39.540 they didn't leave. So I always think it's such a massive risk or potentially a reward that you may have
00:11:44.360 wanted to hand back later. But yeah, this is a problem. They didn't win a single county. They
00:11:50.200 didn't win a single poll area. And so let's now jump over to somebody who disagrees with me,
00:11:56.620 somebody I respect. And that would be Marty up north. So I made a post about how I thought that
00:12:04.460 this was not a good result. I said that, just bringing this up on screen, I said that I think
00:12:10.280 if they really wanted to prove that they could basically be a real party that had real momentum,
00:12:16.020 they needed 25%. They needed to take a quarter of this riding, win some polling stations, and that's
00:12:21.560 how they're going to prove it. I think they got enough of a vote that their people are probably
00:12:24.600 going to stick with them, but I don't think they're going to grow. So that was my point.
00:12:29.080 And Marty up north said, you're totally misreading what happened and drawing the wrong conclusions.
00:12:33.240 15,318 votes a voter is turned out for a by-election in a meaningless riding. That's a 42%
00:12:40.780 voter turnout in a by-election, which is unheard of. He is right, that is high for a by-election.
00:12:46.280 Especially considering the fact that everyone is suffering from election fatigue. Why the big
00:12:50.600 turnout? Because Daniel Smith has her marching orders from Ottawa to stop the separatist movement
00:12:55.540 at all costs. UCP threw a lot of resources in the riding. Now, I don't agree with that. Now,
00:13:00.920 Danielle Smith is not pro-separatist. At the same time, she was the one who lowered the citizen's
00:13:06.560 petition threshold to make it easier to get on the ballot because previously the petition threshold
00:13:11.380 was absurdly high. It was like over 600,000 signatures you needed within 60 days. She lowered
00:13:17.240 it to around 177,000, 176,000, which is far more reasonable. And it's still a tough lift still. It's not
00:13:24.360 like anyone can just go do that. But Marty goes on to say, so did the NDP. They got as many
00:13:30.720 votes yesterday as they did in the 2023 general election, which means they also mobilized everyone.
00:13:35.500 Just look at the advanced polling numbers and special ballots. The fact that Cam Davies got
00:13:39.560 16.7.6% of the vote is remarkable and definitely not a failure. There's absolutely an appetite for
00:13:45.500 a separatist party. Rural Albertans, the real backbone of the province, understand what's happening.
00:13:50.840 And he says, this should be a wake-up call for the Alberta separatist movement. Opposition to a
00:13:55.260 referendum will be fierce, if not unsurmountable. The NDP, the unions, Ottawa, other provinces,
00:14:02.040 immigrants, they're all against us. Now, I'm just going to end it there. My point about where I think 1.00
00:14:07.060 Marty is wrong is to make excuses for the failure. If you're basically saying that your opposition
00:14:15.220 simply mobilizing their voters to show up is always going to beat you, how are you going to win? Are you
00:14:19.900 hoping? You can't win an election hoping that nobody else shows up. You have to win when your
00:14:25.720 opponents are at their best. And it's not like the Republican Party didn't have the lead-up time for
00:14:31.140 this election. They had a few months where they were marketing themselves. They knew that they were
00:14:35.320 going to do this for a while. And I think that they did it a little bit too fly by night. They assumed
00:14:40.540 that this was going to be a standard by-election where 20% of people, 15% of people are going to show up
00:14:46.020 and you're going to make your numbers look really good by getting 2,000 people out, which would
00:14:51.220 normally only bank you 15% of the vote in a riding, but it's going to get us 30% if not a lot of people
00:14:56.940 show up. Don't hope for things like that. You've got to just win. And this is not at all unfair to
00:15:05.480 say that you should at least come close to win or win. Because guess who, guys, do you want an example
00:15:10.980 of a successful version of this? I'm not even having to go very far from this riding. In fact,
00:15:16.920 I'm not going literally anywhere. In 1982, in February 17th, 1982, sorry, that scrolled up,
00:15:26.060 we literally had Gordon Kessler from the Western Canada Concept Party in a by-election in Olds Didsbury,
00:15:35.180 back when it was a smaller riding because, you know, lower populations of the province.
00:15:39.800 Gordon Kessler won 42.20% of the vote. So you beat the Social Credit Party, you got 28, the PCs,
00:15:48.480 you got 25, New Democrats, you got 3%. It is doable. You can win. You can absolutely win. You just have
00:15:57.160 to try. And someone could say, well, they only had to turn out 4,000 voters to win. Well, I'm going
00:16:03.040 to remind people that Cameron Davies and the Republicans, in an era with much better technology,
00:16:09.480 with an ability to reach people without even having to go to their homes, got 2,700 people out.
00:16:15.320 Gordon Kessler got 4,000 people out in basically the same area. Is it a wider area? Yeah, but the
00:16:21.400 population is bigger. So in general, your volunteer base should also be bigger. They need to figure out
00:16:26.720 how to win the acreages. They need to figure out how to win a small town. If they're just going to
00:16:31.740 assume that eventually there's going to be this big mass appeal, that there's going to be this big
00:16:36.280 centering moment where everyone's going to come and just vote for them because they get sick of
00:16:40.580 the government, you're wrong. Even Gordon Kessler couldn't hold on to it for very long. He didn't end
00:16:45.700 up running in the general election. Someone else ran in the same riding. He went somewhere else.
00:16:49.920 But this guy, Daryl M. Jadick, got down to only 25%. They lost a lot. And then Gordon Kessler ran in
00:16:57.840 high woods and he got blown out of the water too. I think he came second place, but it was like a
00:17:02.040 really distant second place. There is no replacing winning in electoral politics. And unless the option,
00:17:10.400 the other option is just bad, there is no real reason to run a party if there's no horizon,
00:17:16.080 there's no victory on the horizon. There's not even a concept of how we're going to get there.
00:17:20.960 I don't think they know how they're going to get there. There's a reason why in Edmonton,
00:17:24.480 Ellerslie, they only got 3.4% despite putting up some amount of effort to try and door knock those
00:17:29.800 areas. There's just not much of an appeal. And even where there is an appeal, it's kind of limited.
00:17:34.580 That's the problem. And the thing is, again, I'm not an independence guy, but if you want a really
00:17:40.160 honest independence voice, Corey Morgan on his personal channel has been doing great work talking
00:17:45.960 about what the separatist movement needs to be if they want to actually win. And he says,
00:17:50.140 stop doing the party stuff, focus on a petition and focus on voting for independence. Stop trying
00:17:55.900 to create parties where big personalities and egos clash on the concept and who's going to be the
00:18:01.360 leader. Because guess what? A movement like this is going to succeed when there's no leader and
00:18:05.740 you're just voting for independence. There's no independence with this guy as the king. There's
00:18:10.860 no independence with this particular vision for how we're going to separate. Just say,
00:18:15.540 we're going to separate. That's all the petition should basically say. Don't have all these other
00:18:20.400 distractions around. Especially because, frankly, parties get money involved and then it becomes,
00:18:26.480 well, who's on the board? Well, who's going to, you know, is the leader getting paid? Well,
00:18:30.680 who's getting the contracts to run the advertising? Problem. Anyways. So that's it for this particular
00:18:38.240 topic, guys. I think this demonstrates, one, the independence movement is just not nearly as popular
00:18:44.400 as people think. Yes, there was a couple of polls that showed that it was 45 in favor of
00:18:49.000 independence, only 55% against, which is pretty tight for that particular question. That came up
00:18:53.940 from Leger, I believe. At the same time, you then have Abacus Data, which is a better pollster,
00:18:59.300 in my opinion, and especially Janet Brown, who is easily the best pollster in Alberta and
00:19:03.760 Saskatchewan. She showed independence support around 35%, 34. I think there needs to be a lot more
00:19:10.080 marketing on this issue. Again, even if you won an independence referendum, if all the polling
00:19:15.980 showed you only had 30% support and the only reason you win is because of low turnout, they're
00:19:20.160 probably not going to honor that result. So don't hope for low turnout. Don't hope for easy mode in
00:19:24.900 politics. Just win. Basically, just win. Focus on winning. Don't focus on hoping the other guys don't
00:19:31.720 show up. And I think that's what the independence guys got caught with yesterday. They hoped other people
00:19:37.280 didn't show up and their result was going to look better than it actually was. Anyways, so that's it
00:19:42.020 for me today, guys. See you later.