Western Standard - May 01, 2026


Danielle Smith talks about the growing independence movement in Alberta


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

142.14577

Word count

628

Sentence count

31


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.