00:01:57.280The question now being placed on the ballot is a non-binding and it's only a question seeking a mandate to ask another question.
00:02:04.660Premier Smith has gone on a federalist campaign as versiferous as the one Jason Kenney has been on and as laden with misinformation as she claims the transition costs would cost about $400 billion.
00:02:17.340It feels like all the cards are against the independence movement because it's true.
00:02:21.060The system and those within it are pulling out all the stops to keep Albertans from having the choice of independence.
00:02:26.100So why should independent supporters carry on with the campaign in the face of such opposition?
00:02:31.740Well, why should a campaign for this fall's flaccid question be taken seriously by independent supporters?
00:02:38.540It's because the opponents to independence are taking it seriously.
00:02:42.100Federalists and Laurentians see the real risk of the referendum being held,
00:02:45.880and they're pulling out all the stops to fight it.
00:02:47.580Even Jean Chrétien was drawn out of his crypt to speak in opposition to Alberta's independence,
00:02:52.660while Pierre Polyev has decided to spend the summer in Alberta
00:02:55.480trying to convince Albertans why the status quo is fine.
00:02:58.740Columnists and premiers are fighting along with each other
00:03:01.600for the microphone to deride independent supporters in Alberta
00:03:55.700A strong vote for option two on the question ten in the election keeps the movement alive.
00:04:00.600A strong vote for option one on the question will put the debate on the shelf for another decade.
00:04:06.240Albertans can't allow Federalists to put this issue to bed.
00:04:09.720The months of petitioning in blizzards and holding meetings in town halls and winter nights were not wasted, guys.
00:04:14.640It doesn't matter if the 301,000 signatures weren't formally counted by Elections Alberta.
00:04:19.480People will since know they were genuine and they represent a groundswell of support for a real referendum on independence.
00:04:26.580The months of petitioning helped solidify the movement.
00:04:28.980Thousands of volunteers networked, bonded and reached hundreds of thousands of Albertans.
00:04:33.600They built the foundation of what will be the campaign to win the referendum this fall.
00:04:38.100The petitioning phase was just a warm-up and a trial run for the bigger campaign.
00:04:42.020The independent movement also has to be a little honest with itself.
00:04:45.580While the core of dedicated independent supporters within Alberta has never measured so consistently strong as it has,
00:04:51.420the number hasn't grown really over the last six months.
00:04:54.220The mushy middle of undecided voters has remained the same, and those fiercely opposed to the concept will never budge.
00:04:59.880But that's because the campaign to date has been focused on getting signatures rather than selling the concept.
00:05:05.360Now the path of the campaign becomes clearer.
00:05:07.780People must be convinced to choose option two, and to be frank, it'll be easier to sell
00:05:11.740than the binding yes or no question that petitioners had tried to get on the ballot.
00:05:15.120With a non-binding option, the independent side can pivot a little and gather those who want to send Ottawa a message rather than start the full process of independence.
00:05:23.920If those people can be moved, a strong option two victory can be won.
00:05:28.220With that extra time having been bought, independence advocates can continue to work towards a true independence referendum and to convert those soft supporters into full yes voters in the future.
00:05:37.460Never has there been so much open debate about Alberta's place and the federation.
00:05:40.640That discussion is going to be raging until October 19th,
00:05:42.940and if the independent side continues to leave the playing field to their opponents,
00:18:06.740We can only cover so many things for solid months.
00:18:08.920I mean, I understand giving recognition for days
00:18:10.800and things, but where is this coming from?
00:18:14.440Well, this came from the Etobicoke Centre Liberal MP,
00:18:16.920Yvonne Baker who I spoke to earlier this morning in the caucus pre-media scrum and he told me and
00:18:23.400by the way Corey he has proposed three private members bill in this session and all three have
00:18:30.340to do with the Heritage Month now himself he's of Ukrainian descent so he proposed the Ukrainian
00:18:35.700Heritage Month an Albanian Heritage Month and then a Somali Heritage Month and when I asked him a
00:18:41.160question he gave me a very expensive answer that I mean this is some of the makeup in his community
00:18:45.180And I specifically wanted to refer to the Somalis since, as you know, Corey, there's been over 1.5 million people last time I checked earlier this morning that have viewed that video on X, the clip of him standing in the house introducing it.
00:18:58.000You know, very, very simple, straightforward private members bill that usually doesn't get this attention.
00:19:02.180I think it's very much clear that the Minnesota-Somali story is flooding into the Canadian media landscape on this particular topic because, of course, there has been that history with certain elements within the Somali diaspora in the United States.
00:19:15.820but more specific to his answer that he told me is that he believes regardless of the proportion
00:19:21.000which Somalis I think about one point or 0.18 0.2 percent of the Canadian population obviously
00:19:28.220very small and marginal but he's talking about the fact that regardless of the proportion they
00:19:32.020make impact so with that logic in mind I'm very curious to have a follow-up with him and see
00:19:36.740exactly how far you want to go well if Albanians and Somalis who again they're a community and
00:20:07.240encourage, and that's fine, the celebration of the
00:20:09.420past cultures and things like that, but it's often a
00:20:11.340municipal initiative or an initiative from the cultural community itself if we get the house
00:20:16.740of commons starting to pick and choose a month for each and every one as i said we only have 12
00:20:21.320months we're gonna have a lot of overlap i mean it leads to i think maybe people just kind of
00:20:24.980ignoring the community altogether and having the opposite effect of what they want to do in the
00:20:28.400first place well cory i know ottawa i grew up here and i've been around in the local cycle for a
00:20:34.020little while now only two months at the western center uh but of course every day something else
00:20:38.260is happening i think the tradition is this if you have a heritage month recognized by the house of
00:20:43.380commons now you get events you get commentary you get specific community or diaspora community
00:20:49.700focused recognition and even face time with politicians on the hill or elsewhere when you
00:20:55.140have something like this officialized so i don't think this is giving one month off to every
00:20:58.420community you can give one month to five or six different communities i mean you have pride month
00:21:03.700For the LGBTQ community, you have obviously other national and diaspora groups that exist in Canada.
00:21:09.460So one group doesn't necessarily take away from the other.
00:21:13.060I think it's probably impossible for most people to track.
00:21:15.420But ultimately, I think it's a bigger question of trying to set in stone a party year where this individual politician or this governing caucus, opposition caucus, whoever, will host events related to this diaspora community.
00:21:28.720So I guess that's kind of what the strategy is for Yoman Baker, who has a substantial Somali community in his area and surrounding areas in his riding.
00:21:36.080So I guess July might be the opportunity to be down the line.
00:21:38.720Of course, it's Canada Day, how it kicks off every year, typically.
00:21:42.480But I guess he'll be having some events should this private member's bill be passed and July be recognized as Somali Heritage Month, along with probably other communities.
00:21:53.420Well, I guess, as you said, that's the nature of politics.
00:21:55.980There's always lots on the go in Ottawa.
00:21:58.760We have a Conservative Member of Parliament in an area of Calgary that's got a strong Chinese population.
00:22:03.420They're going to make sure that they're always speaking up for that population,
00:22:06.460if only, I would hope, for good reason, but also just for their own political health and their own constituency.
00:22:14.420So being in Ottawa, as you said, it's a busy area, a lot's happening.
00:22:17.060What kind of stories are you working on right now?
00:22:18.720What's coming up and what can we look forward to from you?
00:22:21.160Well, at 4 p.m. Eastern time, which I believe should be 2 p.m. your time,
00:22:25.020I believe Minister Mark Miller, who's heading the culture and heritage portfolio, will be introducing the government's bill to ban children or 16 years and younger users from using social media platforms without consent or without parental involvement.
00:22:42.880We don't know exactly what we're looking at right now.
00:22:44.760So I'm not going to give you too much details besides the fact that I'm going to be pressing forward for more details as soon as we get any announcements.
00:22:50.200because there seems to be a bit of a cross-partisan interest in the idea of protecting children online.
00:22:55.560It's been part of the rhetoric in Ottawa for months now,
00:22:58.240especially with AI and the takeover of social media in Canadian society.
00:23:03.400But I think what's most interesting is the how,
00:23:06.060which is the delivery method of, first of all, verifying people's age,
00:23:09.260which requires verifying identity as well,
00:23:11.460and the privacy concerns and the methodology concerns around that.
00:23:15.600So I'm going to be looking very close to exactly what it is.
00:23:17.880Australia, Brazil, a few other countries have studied that have done things that are similar in nature
00:23:22.160but typically it involves a lot of private sector responsibility
00:23:25.100before the government even gets involved in some ways
00:23:27.580where you have a company like for example Facebook or any website for example
00:23:32.020running a business where they might have children involved
00:23:35.180even though they have content for example like explicit sexual material
00:23:38.700that is available and ready on their website
00:23:40.700they might hire a third party to then offer software to verify people's age
00:23:46.440I know Discord, a very popular video game chat site and platform, uses AI to actually look at people's faces in real time with their camera.
00:23:56.160I know it sounds a little freaky for some of our folks, but I think it's an effective method that some companies are adopting.
00:24:02.120So I guess the government's going to be pushing on the companies to do that.
00:24:05.200Otherwise, they might take control or they might perhaps issue some sort of other methods to deter kids from having access to those platforms.
00:24:14.080yeah so it could turn into one of those things i would hope you can get more clarity you know
00:24:20.080there's lots of good intentions perhaps but the enforceability and the viability of making this
00:24:24.960actually work i mean we know kids are creative they're smart they're usually better on the
00:24:28.480electronics than we are i think australia has already been discovering a bit of that with
00:24:32.480their dipping into this that they're having trouble finding a way to actually keep the
00:24:36.720kids from finding bypasses as you said through ai vpns and in all sorts of ways it might be just
00:24:42.080long game of whack-a-mole well look the g7 is happening soon i guess my my possible future
00:24:49.840look forward to this bill is perhaps mark carney takes this off to france where he'll be meeting
00:24:55.520other g7 leaders and be pushing for some international cooperation specifically with
00:24:58.880european nations given the fact they represent a pretty significant block of uh you know online
00:25:03.280companies online businesses and have a little bit of parallel policy on a number of other issues in
00:25:08.240the same market space so i guess what i'm thinking is maybe that might be a bit more international
00:25:13.040push uh from other countries around the same time as canada perhaps canada being one of the countries
00:25:18.800taking the lead on this file right now uh again for the rhetoric portion is the conversation on
00:25:25.200online harm is a major conversation through multiple pieces of legislation including you
00:25:30.240know the banning and criminalization of defig ais when we're using real pictures of real people
00:25:35.440But that's the source of what we consider on the political level, the heart.
00:25:38.880What this bill today is really just focused on, for now, from what I heard, the access at the social media platform level for those that are 16 and under.
00:25:50.860So I guess we're looking at Facebook, Meta, even Twitter, all these platforms to have a response mechanism that can allow them to continue their operation in Canada
00:26:01.420while also ensuring that you don't have unrestricted access at the very least because as you know i
00:26:07.020mean we all use social media you access all kinds of material unfortunately there seems to be a spike
00:26:12.860in sexually explicit material banks in part by ai but also in part by the fact that the uh adult
00:26:19.020film industry uses social media to promote their content that individuals uh who are involved in
00:26:23.420the industry on a personal uh side are also using these platforms so my real question angle that i
00:26:29.100I want to take forward to Minister Mark Miller and his colleagues is how far you want to go
00:26:33.340because if the harm is the real concern here, the harm is platformed by social media. It's
00:26:38.280accessible on a wide scale on social media, but it isn't the source. Instagram doesn't produce
00:26:43.340the pornography or the explicit materials or the violence and the gore or whatever else we don't
00:26:48.420want children to be looking at. Other websites have that. We have gore sites, sock sites, and of
00:26:54.660course, we all know that there's these 18 plus buttons you got to click when you want to open
00:26:57.960these websites, but I think that there might be a room for area of a greater conversation on the
00:27:02.600public policy frontier as to how governments can actually restrict that kind of access. Because
00:27:07.660the real thing that has changed, Corey, in today's society is that we have all these taboo material
00:27:12.780and media out there in multimedia formats, but they're all much more accessible than ever before.
00:27:18.760It is so easy to see these things online, and I think there is a reasonable conversation across
00:27:23.140the partisan aisles about how the government can combat this.
00:27:26.300But ultimately, it will come later today.
00:27:29.820Yeah, and there'll be real concerns with it.
00:27:32.060I'm wondering, though, have the social media giants reacted at all?
00:27:34.580Because it does sound like the onus of enforcement, perhaps,
00:27:37.580and being gatekeepers is going to land on them,
00:27:49.940Have they spoken up at all about this yet?
00:27:51.580I don't expect them. I mean, typically, we've covered this before at the Western Standard that social media companies have oftentimes openly criticized directly government policies. But typically that only happens once the legislation has been tabled in the House of Commons. Once there's a text of a bill, once there's certain languages and provisions that can actually be read before the reactions are issued by the relevant platforms that will be affected.
00:28:14.420So there have not been any that I know of reports of any statements made by these companies who would be affected.
00:28:23.400Well, I'm looking forward to hearing the answers that Minister Miller offers you when you get to get them to the question there when you're up there.
00:28:29.960The time went fast, and it was easy because you've written so many stories.
00:28:32.840You've been great and prolific there on the Western Standard in your short time with us.
00:28:37.600Before I let you go, is there anything else you'd like to point our readers toward to make sure to follow what stories you're going to be working on?