True Patriot Love - June 13, 2026


Is Alberta Independence Already Losing Steam？ ft. Corey Morgan


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

189.92

Word count

1,896

Sentence count

16

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Corey Morgan joins me to talk about the breakaway movement in Alberta and why it s had a bit of a dip in support in recent polls. We also talk about why the independence movement is having a hard time getting traction.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Of course, if you don't campaign on a concept at all, meanwhile, Forever Canadian, a campaign on
00:00:05.780 the stay side, on the Federalist side, hit the ground running. They've been putting out signs,
00:00:10.220 doing events, dropping brochures, doing press conferences. Well, the needle starts moving
00:00:16.360 towards their side when there's a complete absence of an independence campaign on one side or the
00:00:20.660 other. So I suspect that's part of why it's had a bit of a dip, people just throwing their hands
00:00:25.040 up in frustration. And I got to admit, it doesn't look good for an independence firm who said,
00:00:28.480 we're going to become independent but these guys are going to run the country when they can't even
00:00:31.760 update a website in four months hi thanks for joining us i'm mike this is tpl media tplmedia.ca
00:00:42.320 subscribe wherever you're listening or watching uh and for goodness sake check us out on the local
00:00:47.280 level tplmedia.ca local we might have a local version of what we do here just for your town
00:00:54.800 we talk about canadian issues today is no exception to that uh joining us is corey
00:00:59.840 morgan we're going to talk about the independence movement in alberta let me give you a little bit
00:01:04.800 of a rap sheet on corey uh and corey don't hesitate to correct me as i go here uh corey
00:01:10.640 is a currently senior alberta columnist a guy that i read on a regular basis and he's a host
00:01:16.160 with western standard where he covers alberta politics energy policy western alienation and
00:01:21.680 the growing debate around alberta sovereignty check this out he was the founder and leader of
00:01:27.600 the alberta independence party in 2000 remember when we started talking about this uh and also
00:01:33.440 he was a founding executive member and vice president of policy for the wild rose party
00:01:38.240 helping shape one of alberta's most influential conservative political movements not only that
00:01:43.520 but he spent two decades involved in alberta politics not just as an activist or a commentator
00:01:49.120 or a policy advocate but actually as a provincial election candidate good god corey what a resume
00:01:55.200 thanks for joining us i appreciate this i don't know i really appreciate the invite uh we're
00:02:00.480 certainly in for some interesting times it seems like it now as i mentioned to you i just got back
00:02:05.360 from uh the west i was uh in medicine hat and calgary for a couple of days doing podcasts
00:02:11.200 and of course one of the first things a guy from ontario asked somebody in alberta is
00:02:15.360 how's this separatist movement going and we're often corrected right away saying
00:02:19.120 independence movement uh and i guess out of the gate six months ago when i visited alberta
00:02:25.140 this was all anybody was talking about and it was building momentum and kind of today
00:02:29.700 and i don't necessarily always buy into the polls cory just so you know uh but the uh you know
00:02:36.180 public polling says that it's uh support has kind of fallen sharply uh where are we right now with
00:02:43.360 the movement and kind of bring us up to speed, if you don't mind. Sure. As you said, it's been a big
00:02:49.380 issue since the last federal election. It was really spiking for about four months when there
00:02:54.140 was a petitioning process going on to try and initiate a referendum on independence and people
00:02:59.960 on the ground. There were 7,000 volunteers out petitioning, collecting signatures to try and get
00:03:05.820 this referendum initiated. So it was quite an organization. It was in the news a lot, quite a
00:03:09.960 presence on the ground from volunteers. And then at the point when the petition signatures were
00:03:15.880 turned in, and this was quite something, I mean, you had to have a person's identification to sign
00:03:19.960 their name, their address, a physical thing. It's a big deal. They presented 301,000 signatures to
00:03:26.080 Elections Alberta, and an injunction was dumped on them by the courts with a federally appointed
00:03:32.200 judge who said, you didn't consult the Indigenous bands on this petition, so it's now null, void
00:03:36.380 garbage and you've wasted your time so that sort of really deflated a lot of the movement for a bit
00:03:43.740 uh premier smith of course was uh in a lot of tough position i think she wanted this to be 0.98
00:03:48.780 uh citizens initiated rather than government most people felt lawyers there's some dispute 0.84
00:03:54.220 on that but if if she tried to initiate an up down question on a referendum a basic one yes or no
00:04:00.700 there would be a similar injunction immediately slapped on her and we're just back to the starting
00:04:04.860 gate so as a compromise she put in a very mushy question asking whether you want to stay in
00:04:11.100 canada or begin the process towards a referendum down the road which uh seems to have succeeded in
00:04:18.220 annoying everybody so it was when you try to split the difference you often lose and uh 0.92
00:04:26.060 there so she's being labeled a a secessionist by everybody on the left who doesn't like her
00:04:31.420 she's being labeled as weak on ottawa by all the independence supporters uh that you know that
00:04:36.940 were a large part of her party but either way as far as all that goes most people are starting
00:04:42.780 towards a campaign for this referendum on october 19th to at least to have a moral victory if they
00:04:48.860 could out of it the support is dropped i think partially uh because the campaign disappeared
00:04:56.460 the the largest proponent to the whole thing was the alberta prosperity project and then it was
00:05:01.720 turned themselves into stay free alberta for the petitioning thing a lot of electoral requirements
00:05:06.180 and so on going on and they forgot some internal issues and problems going on uh they've got
00:05:11.900 problems with elections alberta and i mean so we've got a month passed when these petitions
00:05:16.340 were filed and a referendum was scheduled with this mushy question and they haven't done any
00:05:20.700 campaigning they disappeared they haven't updated their website in four months so that was that was
00:05:25.120 notable actually when we were out west there was you would assume okay now's the time to start
00:05:29.120 marketing uh toward this notion and there was nothing no and of course if you don't campaign
00:05:35.060 on a concept at all meanwhile forever canadian the campaign on the stay side on the federalist
00:05:41.840 side hit the ground running they've been putting out signs doing events dropping brochures doing
00:05:46.940 press conferences well the needle starts moving towards their side when there's a complete absence
00:05:52.580 to the independence campaign on one side or the other so i suspect that's part of why it's had a
00:05:57.220 bit of a dip people just throwing their hands up in frustration and i gotta admit it doesn't look
00:06:01.300 good for an independence woman said well we're going to become independent but these guys are 0.81
00:06:04.260 going to run the country when they can't even update a website in four months it makes it
00:06:08.340 difficult it does it kind of feels like you're you're you're uh in the mud and and you know 0.55
00:06:14.820 trotting along and where is the other side of the uh of the mud pile you know you mentioned
00:06:20.180 danielle smith kind of uh being unpopular on both sides right now meanwhile from my perspective 1.00
00:06:26.980 she's going to make hay on this uh in a lot of ways because now she's uh she seems to have
00:06:33.060 buddied up with carney uh she seems to be uh making deals that are amenable with ottawa meanwhile
00:06:41.060 she's trying to get the glean of you know using the separatist movement to push ottawa i think
00:06:46.820 in a direction that it needed to go did this independence movement help danielle smith uh
00:06:52.500 help alberta you think in the end well i think that was kind of her hope like i've never seen
00:06:57.540 indications that she's an independent supporter and she's been actually starting to campaign very
00:07:01.300 heavily against independence because she's been getting labeled as a secessionist no matter how
00:07:06.260 much she says it that's what i mean is you got to pick a side because you're just gonna get labeled
00:07:09.940 from each side anyway uh so trying to split the difference doesn't work she's been doing uh the
00:07:16.260 mous and and uh agreements and meetings with mark carney for getting on towards a year now
00:07:22.740 and that's part of what's making actually the independence movement flare up even more because
00:07:26.740 we don't need more talk we don't need more promises we don't need more mous we need a bloody pipe in
00:07:31.220 the ground and despite her constantly saying well we've had this victory with that policy and that
00:07:36.580 victory with that policy he hasn't lifted the tanker ban and he hasn't lifted bill c69 which
00:07:42.180 kills pipelines so all of it's just talk if you don't get rid of those two things and kearney
00:07:47.140 could say in 30 seconds that he's going to lift those and he won't say it so nobody really
00:07:51.220 believes anything's going to come of this so that's part of why people say well that's it
00:07:56.260 we'll just go for the independence front we got nothing to lose at this point cory go back uh
00:08:01.060 a quarter century and a little bit to where you guys began talking about this what has changed
00:08:06.340 in the movement what's changed in the message from then until now uh the message hasn't changed much
00:08:13.940 and that's some of the frustration i think that's why it's staying as solidly this time around the
00:08:19.780 the last time the thing that kept it really from taking off was just a hope that uh things would
00:08:26.260 change eventually we got to stephen harper and others and maybe things would uh you know could
00:08:30.980 be repaired uh equalization of course has always been a big burn in alberta's saddle uh just the
00:08:37.060 general feeling of respect from the east you know not everybody but a lot of the political leadership
00:08:42.180 and so on tension issues and of course attempts to you know develop our economy out here um
00:08:51.060 we're always just feeling like we're having to push the rock uphill why should we have to fight
00:08:56.020 with the federal government all the time to develop our economy meanwhile they bleed us
00:09:00.500 through equalization and then subsidize central canadian industries at the same time this
00:09:06.900 frustration has been going on for decades it's sort of been going on since the national energy
00:09:10.660 program in 1981 so when you have a second trudeau show up and give everybody uh uh you know bad deja
00:09:19.060 vu and again his main target was attacking alberta's energy sector and he really was he was
00:09:24.340 shutting us in through regulation rather than through a national energy program like his father
00:09:28.100 did but it just a ground our our industries to a relative halt at least for expansion
00:09:36.180 and just built a lot more animosity between alberta and ottawa the the questions are always the same
00:09:41.060 what can we do you know with ourselves as a province without having ottawa getting in the way
00:09:46.820 and and it nothing seems to uh nothing seems to work it seems that uh alberta was in a heyday at
00:09:52.900 At the time that regulations started to grind things to a halt and net zero became a discussion.