In this episode, Dr. Barry Cooper, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, joins us to discuss the possibility of Alberta declaring independence from Canada. Dr. Cooper also discusses his new book, Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art.
00:02:34.200You know, then what happens? I think that probably Premier Smith will be put under a lot of pressure because it will be coming time for the various referenda to take place sometime in 2026.
00:02:51.660And then if that happens and she takes an active role in the pro-independence side of that, then suddenly independence becomes both respectable and in the short term, more likely.
00:03:12.600okay well i guess relating to that since you're saying you know political science just can't
00:03:20.480really predict that stuff and it's all about human behavior how do you think if the because
00:03:26.700there's a petition that just got um approved for signatures for alberta independence sorry if i'm
00:03:32.140not speaking loud enough um there's been a petition that was approved for alberta independence
00:03:37.320that was approved, I think, late December, right before Christmas.
00:03:42.900And if they get enough signatures, it's going to go for a referendum vote.
00:03:47.340And say that the referendum vote gets voted as well for Alberta independence.
00:03:53.720How do you think Daniel Smith would react to something like that occurring?
00:04:00.200This is the big unknowns about politics.
00:04:02.960I would hope that she takes the bull by the horn, so to speak, and leads the pro-independence faction, party, group, set of Albertans.
00:04:19.320Whether she will or not is obviously up to her and how she reads the political landscape.
00:04:24.900But if that happened, then I think it would certainly strengthen the hand of Alberta vis-a-vis.
00:04:33.940It's basically about Ontario and Quebec.
00:04:37.160We don't care much about what New Brunswick thinks about anything.
00:04:51.060It's about Alberta and Saskatchewan vis-a-vis the central provinces, the big central provinces, Quebec and Ontario.
00:05:01.400And because of the question of Quebec, I mean, you know, they've been talking about independence now as well.
00:05:07.500And if the Bloc Quebecois wins or the Parti Quebecois wins the next election there, then the government of Canada will have, let's say, it'll have its business cut out for it.
00:05:24.520And, you know, that nothing but good would come of that for this province.
00:05:29.320like so when you're talking about alberta and saskatchewan being the central provinces and so
00:05:35.320would be dependent on them as well like so do you mean when alberta if alberta were to get
00:05:41.560uh its independence would saskatchewan be a part of that or it would be more likely
00:05:46.360that saskatchewan would be a part of that yeah well that's obviously up to the citizens of
00:05:51.320of Saskatchewan, but Premier Mo has made comments very similar to those of Daniel Smith and to some
00:06:01.580of the, what they call the Alberta prosperity people regarding independence, that it becomes
00:06:07.720a viable option. Why? Because Laurentian Canadians don't want to change what benefits them so
00:06:15.380enormously um which is you know it's perfectly understandable uh but they have to understand
00:06:22.100that we get a vote in this too it's not just up to them what so would it be more beneficial if
00:06:29.140alberta was um sorry if saskatchewan joined alberta in independence yeah yeah yeah uh and i think i
00:06:39.460I mean, it's hard to tell how these things will play out, but that is certainly a, let's say, live possibility, say sometime late next spring, early summer, when the intransigence of Laurentian Canada becomes obvious even to them, one would think.
00:07:01.740But, you know, the barriers to understanding in that part of the country are enormously high.
00:07:06.920But let's say they even understood that there's a crisis from which they will not emerge triumphant.
00:07:16.040That will be because the economic engines of the country, namely Alberta and Saskatchewan, are united on taking a different path.
00:07:33.620Okay. Well, I would also love to know your thoughts on the recent MOU that was signed by Daniel Smith and Mark Carney.
00:07:41.820And do you think this will actually go anywhere? Yeah, what are your thoughts on this?
00:07:48.080I would say it was a triumph of obfuscation on the part of the government of Canada.
00:07:55.120They've left just so many loopholes that everything has to line up.
00:07:59.560like the government of bc is going to have to change 180 degrees they're not going to do that
00:08:06.120there are well-funded spokespeople for aboriginal communities that are opposed to
00:08:14.360any pipelines they're not going to change because they're on the payroll
00:08:19.000so what alberta should do if they want to play this game as well is start funding aboriginal
00:08:25.160communities that want the pipeline uh and let's hear from them uh that would make a you know an
00:08:30.840interesting conversation uh because both sides then would be uh in the back pocket of uh of
00:08:37.880third parties either the government of alberta and the government of bc or or all of these uh
00:08:42.840you know anti-pipeline uh uh foundations mostly most of which are funded out of san francisco
00:08:50.120So, you know, there's a lot of really, let's say, interesting possibilities for a serious debate
00:08:57.160sometime in the in the new year. Oh, okay, that's interesting. I guess also you wrote quite a few
00:09:05.320articles about Alberta independence in the Western Standard, and one of them you were talking about
00:09:11.320how Carney's basically anti-Alberta policies was pushing more Alberta separatists.
00:09:17.800yeah, they're for it basically. Morale burdens are for it. So I remember you wrote about how,
00:09:26.840this is just because I found it funny, about how Carney plagiarized his PhD thesis.
00:09:34.920And I just wanted to know more about that because I thought it would be wild.
00:09:38.520These are press reports that came out when he was elected leader of the Liberal Party.
00:09:46.360And he wrote his PhD at Oxford, you know, which is quite a respectable university, but somebody did a comparison.
00:09:59.880I mean, you can do this now by computer and it takes about, you know, four seconds that indicated that a lot of the quotations without attribution were taken from other sources.
00:10:12.560This was brought to the attention of his PhD supervisor at Oxford,
00:11:30.500My dad was sort of organized the thing, and he took my two grandfathers along.
00:11:36.000And I remember listening to them talk about social credit, which was the government of W.A.C. Bennett way back then.
00:11:48.320And I had one grandfather from Newfoundland and the other was from Nantan, from Alberta.
00:11:55.940And they both agreed that this B.C. social credit was not the same as social credit in Alberta.
00:12:02.720And they talked about why. And the argument from my Alberta grandfather basically was that it was a way of Albertans taking an initiative because the government of Canada would not.
00:12:19.920This was during the Depression when Premier Eberhardt was first elected.
00:12:26.580And my Newfoundland grandfather said that he was always slightly mystified by what he called Canadian politics.
00:12:35.400And the main thing that I remember from him is that he spoke of Canada as a kind of foreign country.
00:12:41.700as, you know, many Newfoundlanders did because of the, let's say, questionable election results
00:12:50.660in 1949 about the accession of Newfoundland to Canada. So then, you know, I always started
00:12:58.020thinking about, you know, what did these odd political parties mean? Then when I was an
00:13:04.320undergraduate at UBC, I had a very, very good professor of Canadian federalism, a guy named
00:13:11.260Alan Cairns. And he mentioned in a class one night on Canadian federalism, it took place in the
00:13:20.180evening. He thought it was rather odd that social credit and the NDP were called third parties
00:13:28.700by Canadian political scientists, when in fact, social credit and the NDP were the major parties
00:13:38.320in british columbia and the uh third parties were the liberals and the conservatives
00:13:44.920and he just sort of left it there and and uh left us to try and you know figure out this
00:13:50.400what this meant um you know needless to say you know none of us undergraduates uh we sort of said
00:13:57.220yeah that's kind of weird and left it at that well then you know flash forward another say
00:14:02.200i don't know 20 years and i was teaching at york uh and i i couldn't quite understand
00:14:07.140the attitudes of my students there because they were so different than the ones that I had thought
00:14:13.120of as being normal. And so I taught a course on Canadian political thought. And then a lot of
00:14:21.820things became a lot clearer to me, partly in response to the East Toronto students and what
00:14:29.240they made of the stuff that I made them read. And basically, the bottom line was that the myths
00:14:37.260of Laurentian Canada are not those of the Prairie West. And they're not those of British Columbia
00:14:43.840or Newfoundland for that matter either. So I started thinking of Canada not so much
00:14:50.560the way it was for my dad's generation. I mean, he was in what was then the RCAF,
00:14:56.920close it is again. And he thought of this as a Canadian war effort and so on. But I was struck
00:15:06.840by how the self-understanding of Albertans, Westerners generally, is not that of Central
00:15:16.560Canada. So, you know, that was the kind of intellectual roots of this view of Canada as
00:15:25.600a very tenuous coalition that was established initially in the 19th century by the imperial
00:15:34.200ambitions of John A. MacDonald, which he inherited from the Brits, and never really was based on any
00:15:43.020self-understanding of people who actually lived here.
00:15:46.080So then you can see where if the Laurentians are not
00:15:51.000willing to change the legal structure,
00:15:54.420and everyone has said since 1982 that it's
00:15:58.020impossible to open the Constitution again,
00:16:05.040The question is, do you have the will to do it?
00:16:08.940So then that became the way that I looked
00:16:11.880at the relationship between uh albert and saskatchewan um and uh and ottawa let's say
00:16:18.600uh and it's not a it's not a it's not a structure that is viable over the long term because
00:16:26.680of the enormous wealth uh that has come to the two prairie provinces um so what we do about it
00:16:34.680as you know as uh as canadians uh you know we all hold the same citizenship uh is going to be very
00:16:40.840interesting. I don't think that the Laurentians are going to do anything. So, you know, it's up
00:16:45.720to us. We'll do it by ourselves. And that's where the independence question comes from.
00:16:51.280I guess I have a question when we compare, I guess, Canada to the U.S. So it feels like the
00:16:58.800U.S. doesn't really have the same issue that Canada does, where some states are wanting
00:17:04.180independence from like the whole of the U.S. So you said that Ottawa and like Eastern and you called
00:17:13.060it Laurentian, those people don't think the same obviously as like Western Canada does. So how come
00:17:21.460there's like this stark difference between the U.S. and Canada if they were both like
00:17:25.580from the British Empire originally? Well there are two things that are different in the American
00:17:33.020case. The first is that they actually established a new regime from the British Empire after the
00:17:40.060declaration and the war against the war for independence. The second is they also had a civil
00:17:46.380war. And we have had none of those things. We have never had any serious rebellion against Britain,
00:17:56.620you know, despite the rebellions in upper and lower Canada in the 1850s. Those were not really
00:18:02.300serious rebellions um and we certainly have not have had a civil war uh for obvious reasons partly
00:18:11.660because of the slavery question but also but we've been able to make uh deals with the only um let's
00:18:19.100say potentially heretofore anyway potentially secessionist part of the country namely quebec
00:18:25.260And that's what the 1982 Constitution basically responded to.
00:18:31.280It responded to the growing sentiments in Quebec towards independence.
00:18:37.200So we had this, one of the most Machiavellian of our prime ministers, namely Pierre Trudeau, who put together the Constitution Act and put it together in such a way that it became difficult to amend.
00:18:54.380And that's why all of these esteemed Canadian political scientists say it can't be amended, we can't open the Constitution again. And as I said, that's not true. They don't want to open the Constitution again and reconsider the position of Quebec in the country because they actually believe that Canada is a bilingual country.
00:19:20.120They think that somehow bilingualism and then multiculturalism after that became defining characteristics of the country, which is also nonsense.
00:19:32.640Parts of Canada are bilingual, parts of the Ottawa Valley, parts of northern Ontario, parts even of northern or central Alberta, and parts of Quebec are bilingual.