Western Standard - Alberta independence in 2026, and the difference between Eastern and Western Canada

00:00:00.000 Good evening everyone and Happy New Year's Western Standard viewers. Today we welcome you to The

00:00:23.000 Hannaford Show. I am Leah Mashid. I am filling in for Nigel Hannaford today and to help us to

00:00:29.140 welcome the new year, we have Barry Cooper, a professor of political science at the University

00:00:34.320 of Calgary. He will help us discuss and understand more about Alberta independence today, which we'll

00:00:40.340 definitely be seeing more of in the new year, so I thought it would be a great topic to talk about,

00:00:45.080 as well as his most recent book called The Paleolithic Politics, The Human Community in

00:00:52.180 early art. So thank you very much for joining us, Mr. Cooper. Yeah, so I guess my first question

00:01:00.760 for you today would definitely have to be with how plausible do you think Alberta independence

00:01:06.540 really is? And if you think it is very plausible in the near future, when do you think it might

00:01:13.980 occur? Well, political scientists almost never predict anything, because politics is about

00:01:26.140 humans taking initiatives that can't be predicted. It's not a question of behavior. It's a question

00:01:33.320 of, I would say, leadership. And much of that will depend on how Laurentian Canada responds

00:01:41.820 to the inevitable, I would say inevitable, or nearly inevitable, likely rejection of

00:01:50.560 the Memorandum of Understanding, which Premier Smith and the Prime Minister signed, what,

00:02:00.080 a month ago now?

00:02:02.520 A lot will depend on how the Laurentians respond to that, because it's not going to work.

00:02:08.140 Anyone who's taken a look at the text or has performed an analysis of it

00:02:12.440 realizes that there's so many escape clauses for the government of Canada

00:02:17.740 that they have absolutely no reason to push either British Columbia

00:02:24.460 or the Indigenous partners, potential partners, particularly for pipelines.

00:02:32.920 So it's going to go nowhere.

00:02:34.200 You 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.

00:02:51.660 And 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.

00:03:12.600 okay well i guess relating to that since you're saying you know political science just can't

00:03:20.480 really predict that stuff and it's all about human behavior how do you think if the because

00:03:26.700 there's a petition that just got um approved for signatures for alberta independence sorry if i'm

00:03:32.140 not speaking loud enough um there's been a petition that was approved for alberta independence

00:03:37.320 that was approved, I think, late December, right before Christmas.

00:03:42.900 And if they get enough signatures, it's going to go for a referendum vote.

00:03:47.340 And say that the referendum vote gets voted as well for Alberta independence.

00:03:53.720 How do you think Daniel Smith would react to something like that occurring?

00:04:00.200 This is the big unknowns about politics.

00:04:02.960 I would hope that she takes the bull by the horn, so to speak, and leads the pro-independence faction, party, group, set of Albertans.

00:04:19.320 Whether she will or not is obviously up to her and how she reads the political landscape.

00:04:24.900 But if that happened, then I think it would certainly strengthen the hand of Alberta vis-a-vis.

00:04:33.940 It's basically about Ontario and Quebec.

00:04:37.160 We don't care much about what New Brunswick thinks about anything.

00:04:42.100 And neither do Ontario and Quebec.

00:04:43.620 They haven't thought much about the Maritimes since about two decades after Confederation.

00:04:49.260 So it's not really about them.

00:04:51.060 It's about Alberta and Saskatchewan vis-a-vis the central provinces, the big central provinces, Quebec and Ontario.

00:05:01.400 And because of the question of Quebec, I mean, you know, they've been talking about independence now as well.

00:05:07.500 And 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.

00:05:24.520 And, you know, that nothing but good would come of that for this province.

00:05:29.320 like so when you're talking about alberta and saskatchewan being the central provinces and so

00:05:35.320 would be dependent on them as well like so do you mean when alberta if alberta were to get 1.00

00:05:41.560 uh its independence would saskatchewan be a part of that or it would be more likely

00:05:46.360 that saskatchewan would be a part of that yeah well that's obviously up to the citizens of

00:05:51.320 of Saskatchewan, but Premier Mo has made comments very similar to those of Daniel Smith and to some

00:06:01.580 of the, what they call the Alberta prosperity people regarding independence, that it becomes

00:06:07.720 a viable option. Why? Because Laurentian Canadians don't want to change what benefits them so

00:06:15.380 enormously um which is you know it's perfectly understandable uh but they have to understand

00:06:22.100 that we get a vote in this too it's not just up to them what so would it be more beneficial if

00:06:29.140 alberta was um sorry if saskatchewan joined alberta in independence yeah yeah yeah uh and i think i

00:06:39.460 I 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.

00:07:01.740 But, you know, the barriers to understanding in that part of the country are enormously high.

00:07:06.920 But let's say they even understood that there's a crisis from which they will not emerge triumphant.

00:07:16.040 That will be because the economic engines of the country, namely Alberta and Saskatchewan, are united on taking a different path.

00:07:26.240 And we'll have to see what happens.

00:07:28.420 But that's certainly a live possibility.

00:07:32.980 Okay.

00:07:33.620 Okay. Well, I would also love to know your thoughts on the recent MOU that was signed by Daniel Smith and Mark Carney.

00:07:41.820 And do you think this will actually go anywhere? Yeah, what are your thoughts on this?

00:07:48.080 I would say it was a triumph of obfuscation on the part of the government of Canada.

00:07:55.120 They've left just so many loopholes that everything has to line up.

00:07:59.560 like the government of bc is going to have to change 180 degrees they're not going to do that

00:08:06.120 there are well-funded spokespeople for aboriginal communities that are opposed to

00:08:14.360 any pipelines they're not going to change because they're on the payroll

00:08:19.000 so what alberta should do if they want to play this game as well is start funding aboriginal

00:08:25.160 communities that want the pipeline uh and let's hear from them uh that would make a you know an

00:08:30.840 interesting conversation uh because both sides then would be uh in the back pocket of uh of

00:08:37.880 third parties either the government of alberta and the government of bc or or all of these uh

00:08:42.840 you know anti-pipeline uh uh foundations mostly most of which are funded out of san francisco

00:08:50.120 So, you know, there's a lot of really, let's say, interesting possibilities for a serious debate

00:08:57.160 sometime in the in the new year. Oh, okay, that's interesting. I guess also you wrote quite a few

00:09:05.320 articles about Alberta independence in the Western Standard, and one of them you were talking about

00:09:11.320 how Carney's basically anti-Alberta policies was pushing more Alberta separatists.

00:09:17.800 yeah, they're for it basically. Morale burdens are for it. So I remember you wrote about how,

00:09:26.840 this is just because I found it funny, about how Carney plagiarized his PhD thesis.

00:09:34.920 And I just wanted to know more about that because I thought it would be wild.

00:09:38.520 These are press reports that came out when he was elected leader of the Liberal Party.

00:09:46.360 And he wrote his PhD at Oxford, you know, which is quite a respectable university, but somebody did a comparison.

00:09:59.880 I 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.

00:10:12.560 This was brought to the attention of his PhD supervisor at Oxford,

00:10:16.920 and the guy denied it.

00:10:19.520 But, you know, I haven't checked it myself.

00:10:23.620 I mean, God, it's unintelligible economics.

00:10:28.440 You know, I don't know this.

00:10:30.320 I was just reporting what was said.

00:10:32.160 I think it was in the Manchester Guardian.

00:10:34.080 I'm not sure.

00:10:35.140 But it was fairly, it was widely circulated, put it that way.

00:10:40.260 Oh, yeah.

00:10:40.580 Yeah, I remember reading that the professor or whatever that was supervising him,

00:10:48.400 yeah, said he wasn't plagiarized, but I was just wondering if he knew more about it,

00:10:52.320 because I thought it was well.

00:10:53.740 Okay, anyways, what else?

00:10:56.960 Okay, when did you start talking about Alberta independence,

00:11:03.440 and what got you interested in the subject?

00:11:07.740 Well, that's a good question.

00:11:10.580 And I suppose the sort of deep roots of this were from my childhood.

00:11:18.480 I remember going on a fishing trip in Chilkootin in BC when I was about, I don't know, eight maybe.

00:11:27.840 And my two grandfathers were along.

00:11:30.500 My dad was sort of organized the thing, and he took my two grandfathers along.

00:11:36.000 And I remember listening to them talk about social credit, which was the government of W.A.C. Bennett way back then.

00:11:48.320 And I had one grandfather from Newfoundland and the other was from Nantan, from Alberta.

00:11:55.940 And they both agreed that this B.C. social credit was not the same as social credit in Alberta.

00:12:02.720 And 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.

00:12:19.920 This was during the Depression when Premier Eberhardt was first elected.

00:12:26.580 And my Newfoundland grandfather said that he was always slightly mystified by what he called Canadian politics.

00:12:35.400 And the main thing that I remember from him is that he spoke of Canada as a kind of foreign country.

00:12:41.700 as, you know, many Newfoundlanders did because of the, let's say, questionable election results

00:12:50.660 in 1949 about the accession of Newfoundland to Canada. So then, you know, I always started

00:12:58.020 thinking about, you know, what did these odd political parties mean? Then when I was an

00:13:04.320 undergraduate at UBC, I had a very, very good professor of Canadian federalism, a guy named

00:13:11.260 Alan Cairns. And he mentioned in a class one night on Canadian federalism, it took place in the

00:13:20.180 evening. He thought it was rather odd that social credit and the NDP were called third parties

00:13:28.700 by Canadian political scientists, when in fact, social credit and the NDP were the major parties

00:13:38.320 in british columbia and the uh third parties were the liberals and the conservatives

00:13:44.920 and he just sort of left it there and and uh left us to try and you know figure out this

00:13:50.400 what this meant um you know needless to say you know none of us undergraduates uh we sort of said

00:13:57.220 yeah that's kind of weird and left it at that well then you know flash forward another say

00:14:02.200 i don't know 20 years and i was teaching at york uh and i i couldn't quite understand

00:14:07.140 the attitudes of my students there because they were so different than the ones that I had thought

00:14:13.120 of as being normal. And so I taught a course on Canadian political thought. And then a lot of

00:14:21.820 things became a lot clearer to me, partly in response to the East Toronto students and what

00:14:29.240 they made of the stuff that I made them read. And basically, the bottom line was that the myths

00:14:37.260 of Laurentian Canada are not those of the Prairie West. And they're not those of British Columbia

00:14:43.840 or Newfoundland for that matter either. So I started thinking of Canada not so much

00:14:50.560 the way it was for my dad's generation. I mean, he was in what was then the RCAF,

00:14:56.920 close it is again. And he thought of this as a Canadian war effort and so on. But I was struck

00:15:06.840 by how the self-understanding of Albertans, Westerners generally, is not that of Central

00:15:16.560 Canada. So, you know, that was the kind of intellectual roots of this view of Canada as

00:15:25.600 a very tenuous coalition that was established initially in the 19th century by the imperial

00:15:34.200 ambitions of John A. MacDonald, which he inherited from the Brits, and never really was based on any

00:15:43.020 self-understanding of people who actually lived here.

00:15:46.080 So then you can see where if the Laurentians are not

00:15:51.000 willing to change the legal structure,

00:15:54.420 and everyone has said since 1982 that it's

00:15:58.020 impossible to open the Constitution again,

00:16:00.260 we can't have any more amendments,

00:16:01.980 which is complete nonsense.

00:16:04.080 Of course you can't.

00:16:05.040 The question is, do you have the will to do it?

00:16:08.940 So then that became the way that I looked

00:16:11.880 at the relationship between uh albert and saskatchewan um and uh and ottawa let's say

00:16:18.600 uh and it's not a it's not a it's not a structure that is viable over the long term because

00:16:26.680 of the enormous wealth uh that has come to the two prairie provinces um so what we do about it

00:16:34.680 as you know as uh as canadians uh you know we all hold the same citizenship uh is going to be very

00:16:40.840 interesting. I don't think that the Laurentians are going to do anything. So, you know, it's up

00:16:45.720 to us. We'll do it by ourselves. And that's where the independence question comes from.

00:16:51.280 I guess I have a question when we compare, I guess, Canada to the U.S. So it feels like the

00:16:58.800 U.S. doesn't really have the same issue that Canada does, where some states are wanting

00:17:04.180 independence from like the whole of the U.S. So you said that Ottawa and like Eastern and you called

00:17:13.060 it Laurentian, those people don't think the same obviously as like Western Canada does. So how come

00:17:21.460 there's like this stark difference between the U.S. and Canada if they were both like

00:17:25.580 from the British Empire originally? Well there are two things that are different in the American

00:17:33.020 case. The first is that they actually established a new regime from the British Empire after the

00:17:40.060 declaration and the war against the war for independence. The second is they also had a civil

00:17:46.380 war. And we have had none of those things. We have never had any serious rebellion against Britain,

00:17:56.620 you know, despite the rebellions in upper and lower Canada in the 1850s. Those were not really

00:18:02.300 serious rebellions um and we certainly have not have had a civil war uh for obvious reasons partly

00:18:11.660 because of the slavery question but also but we've been able to make uh deals with the only um let's

00:18:19.100 say potentially heretofore anyway potentially secessionist part of the country namely quebec

00:18:25.260 And that's what the 1982 Constitution basically responded to.

00:18:31.280 It responded to the growing sentiments in Quebec towards independence.

00:18:37.200 So 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.

00:18:54.380 And 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.

00:19:20.120 They think that somehow bilingualism and then multiculturalism after that became defining characteristics of the country, which is also nonsense.

00:19:32.640 Parts 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.

00:19:44.700 But that's not the country.

00:19:47.000 Those are parts.

00:19:49.120 And the myth of Canadian bilingualism

00:19:52.000 then becomes a kind of moral equivalent

00:19:56.200 to something that we cannot talk about.

00:19:59.800 Just as in the, let's say in the 1830s and 40s 0.51

00:20:04.300 in the United States, nobody wanted to talk

00:20:06.160 about the consequences of slavery in the South.

00:20:10.400 But it's still part of the reality.

00:20:14.060 Wow, that's very interesting.

00:20:17.460 And I would ask you more about also your book, but unfortunately we're running out of time

00:20:21.920 since it has to be 22 minutes and my producer just reminded me.

00:20:25.320 So thank you very much, Barry, for coming in today.

00:20:28.980 Really appreciate you being able to join us.

00:20:32.280 And yeah, so if you guys enjoyed this, then you should definitely subscribe to our YouTube

00:20:37.060 channel if you're watching this on YouTube.

00:20:38.580 You can also check out our actual website where we have a bunch of news.

00:20:44.460 So it's westernstandard.news, where you can subscribe for $10 a month or $100 a year.

00:20:50.960 Yeah, that's all I got.

00:20:52.240 So thank you, everyone, for joining The Hannaford Show, and goodbye.

Western Standard - January 02, 2026

Alberta independence in 2026, and the difference between Eastern and Western Canada

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