Western Standard - May 01, 2026


Danielle Smith talks about the growing independence movement in Alberta

Topics
independence movement in Alberta
Mentioned
Mark Carney Trump
Carney’s debt-backed wealth fund CORY MORGAN SHOW： Carney’s new slush fund is another indication that Canada is broken

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

142.15

Word count

628

Sentence count

34


Summary

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

In this episode, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, sits down with Finance Minister Bill Morneau to discuss the state of the country's economy, the challenges facing Canada's largest economy, and the importance of working together.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Alberta has many of these things. Alberta also has a separatist movement, which is not necessarily growing in size, but perhaps growing in visibility.
00:00:09.000 There will be a likely referendum this fall on whether Alberta should become independent of Canada, which by all measures does not seem to be successful.
00:00:20.000 But there are questions about how this group has been cultivating relationships, not just
00:00:27.360 in Alberta, but within the United States, for example, and certain members of the Trump
00:00:32.160 administration, which you have sort of publicly said, called out.
00:00:37.500 You want to see no political interference in Alberta's domestic politics.
00:00:42.480 So where does this movement have legs and what do you see happening in October?
00:00:47.160 Well, I would say relationships take work, and I think this is one of the interesting
00:00:53.800 conversations I've been having, whether it was in Germany, Sweden, or now in the UK,
00:00:59.960 is that there have been these kinds of conversations that have happened in other
00:01:04.520 jurisdictions as well. There's these conversations happening right now in the UK, actually.
00:01:09.960 And down in Texas and the US, right?
00:01:12.060 Yeah. And you can always find reasons to find division, but you should also be trying to find
00:01:18.340 reasons to be together. And that's, I think, the renewed spirit that Prime Minister Mark Carney
00:01:25.940 and I have taken is that why has the relationship become frayed? And the relationship became frayed,
00:01:34.080 quite frankly, because we had a previous government that spent the last 10 years
00:01:39.480 damaging our economy, attacking our values, telling us that we should keep our oil and gas
00:01:45.700 in the ground. And because we have a system of equalization payments and we overpay into
00:01:50.680 confederation, using that money to subsidize the rest of the country at the same time as choking
00:01:56.240 off the supply. So that, you can imagine, creates a lot of tension. When anyone feels like their
00:02:03.860 livelihood is at risk, that their investment's at risk, that they may not have a job, that their
00:02:08.900 kids are moving away because they can't get a job, that there isn't opportunity to aspirationally
00:02:14.700 buy a house and take care of your family and your community. Those things cause tension.
00:02:19.860 But when you can have all of those things, when you know that you've got a partnership
00:02:24.120 where everybody is working towards ensuring that economies can thrive, and this is the role of our
00:02:29.420 federal government. They have a trade and commerce power which has been historically used to help us
00:02:34.500 get our products to market. It was never supposed to be used to block off access. It was meant to
00:02:39.540 be used to clear away access. And I think that that's the renewed approach that the prime
00:02:44.780 minister and I are taking. We come from different political parties. So we have, I don't think we're
00:02:50.000 going to have 100% agreement on 100% of the issues. But if you can agree on the big things
00:02:54.740 and work through them, that aspirationally, I think, is what most Albertans want to see.
00:02:59.920 So, yes, there was a lot of frustration when the Liberal government, once again, after 10 years, won another government.
00:03:11.260 And so the frustration spilled over with the independence movement getting as high as 40% approval in opinion polls.
00:03:21.600 But it's come down to around 30%.
00:03:25.100 And I think my job is to demonstrate that Canada can work, to identify in a real way the issues
00:03:32.220 that are causing tension, and then to find ways to work through them. And I think that the Prime
00:03:37.740 Minister has the same spirit. So I haven't managed to persuade everyone yet, but I am going to
00:03:45.580 continue to work on it. We've got a couple months to go. Thank you so much for your remarks.
00:03:55.100 Thank you.