Western Standard - January 09, 2026


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


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

144.0441

Word Count

3,057

Sentence Count

153

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Good evening, everyone, and Happy New Year's Western Standard viewers. Today, we welcome
00:00:22.560 you to The Hannaford Show. I am Leah Maschid. I am filling in for Nigel Hannaford today.
00:00:27.480 And to help us to welcome the new year, we have Barry Cooper, a professor of political
00:00:33.160 science at the University of Calgary. He will help us discuss and understand more about
00:00:38.680 Alberta independence today, which we'll definitely be seeing more of in the new year. So I thought
00:00:43.240 it would be a great topic to talk about, as well as his most recent book called The Paleolithic
00:00:48.880 Politics, The Human Community in Early Art. So thank you very much for joining us, Mr.
00:00:55.680 Cooper. Yeah, so I guess my first question for you today would definitely have to be with
00:01:03.400 how plausible do you think Alberta independence really is? And if you think it is very plausible
00:01:10.120 in the near future, when do you think it might occur?
00:01:15.800 Well, political scientists almost never predict anything, because politics is about humans taking
00:01:27.260 initiatives that can't be predicted. It's not a question of behavior. It's a question of,
00:01:33.700 I would say, leadership. And much of that will depend on how Laurentian Canada responds to the inevitable,
00:01:45.300 I would say inevitable, or nearly inevitable, likely rejection of the Memorandum of Understanding,
00:01:52.420 which Premier Smith and the Prime Minister signed, what, a month ago now. A lot will depend on how the
00:02:04.020 Laurentians respond to that, because it's not going to work. Anyone who's taken a look at the text,
00:02:10.420 or has performed an analysis of it, realizes that there's so many escape clauses for the Government of
00:02:17.300 Canada, that they have absolutely no reason to push either British Columbia or the Indigenous
00:02:27.780 partners, potential partners, particularly for pipelines. So it's going to go nowhere. You know,
00:02:35.220 then what happens? I think that probably Premier Smith will be put under a lot of pressure,
00:02:42.260 because it will be coming time for the various referenda to take place sometime in 2026.
00:02:53.620 And then if that happens, and she takes an active role in the pro-independence side of that,
00:03:04.740 then suddenly independence becomes both respectable and, in the short term, more likely.
00:03:12.660 Okay. Well, I guess relating to that, since you're saying, you know, political science just can't
00:03:20.340 really predict that stuff, and it's all about human behavior. How do you think if the, because there's a
00:03:26.900 petition that just got approved for signatures for Alberta independence, sorry if I'm not speaking loud
00:03:32.660 enough, there's been a petition that was approved for Alberta independence, that was approved, I think,
00:03:40.100 late December, right before Christmas. And if they get enough signatures, it's going to go for a
00:03:46.340 referendum vote, and say that the referendum vote gets voted as well for Alberta independence. How do you
00:03:54.260 think Daniel Smith would react to something like that occurring?
00:03:58.500 Daniel Smith This is the big unknowns about politics. I would hope that she takes the bull by the
00:04:06.500 horn, so to speak, and leads the pro-independence, what, faction, party, group, set of Albertans. Whether she
00:04:20.020 will or not is obviously up to her and how she reads the political landscape. But if that happened, then I think,
00:04:27.940 I think it would certainly strengthen the hand of Alberta vis-a-vis, it's basically about Ontario and
00:04:36.020 Quebec. We don't care much about what New Brunswick thinks about anything. And neither do Ontario and
00:04:43.140 Quebec. They haven't thought much about the Maritimes since about two decades after Confederation. So it's not
00:04:50.260 really about them. It's about Alberta and Saskatchewan, vis-a-vis the central provinces, the big central
00:04:57.700 provinces, Quebec and Ontario. And because of the question of Quebec, I mean, they've been talking
00:05:05.220 about independence now as well. And if the Bloc Quebecois wins, or the Parti Quebecois wins the next
00:05:15.940 election there, then the government of Canada will have, let's say, it'll have its business cut out for
00:05:22.980 it. And, and, and, you know, that, that nothing could, but good would come of that for, for this
00:05:28.980 province. Like, so when you're talking about Alberta and Saskatchewan being the central provinces,
00:05:34.820 and so it would be dependent on them as well. Like, so do you mean when Alberta, if Alberta were to get
00:05:41.460 its independence, would Saskatchewan be a part of that? Or it would be more likely that Saskatchewan would be a
00:05:47.620 part of that? Yeah, well, that's obviously up to the citizens of Saskatchewan. But Premier Moe has made
00:05:56.020 comments very similar to those of Daniel Smith, and to some of the, what they call the Alberta
00:06:03.540 prosperity people regarding independence, that it becomes a viable option. Why? Because Laurentian
00:06:11.060 Canadians don't want to change what benefits them so enormously, which is, you know, it's perfectly
00:06:19.620 understandable. But they have to understand that we get a vote in this too. It's not just up to them.
00:06:26.100 What, so would it be more beneficial if Alberta was, sorry, if Saskatchewan joined Alberta in
00:06:35.380 independence? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, it's, it's hard to tell how these things will play
00:06:41.780 out. But that is certainly a, let's say, live possibility, say sometime late next spring, early
00:06:52.580 summer, when the intransigence of Laurentian Canada becomes obvious, even to them, one would think. But,
00:07:02.260 you know, the barriers to understanding in that part of the country are enormously high. But let's say
00:07:08.180 they even understood that there's a crisis from which they will not emerge triumphant. That will be
00:07:17.060 because the economic engines of the country, namely Alberta and Saskatchewan, are united on taking a
00:07:24.580 different path. And we'll have to see what happens. But that's certainly a live possibility.
00:07:33.220 Okay, well, I would also love to know your thoughts on the recent MOU that was signed by
00:07:39.300 Daniel Smith and Mark Carney. And do you, do you think this will actually go anywhere? Yeah, what are
00:07:45.860 your thoughts on this? I, it was a, I would say it was a triumph of obfuscation on the part of the
00:07:52.900 government of Canada. They've left just so many loopholes that everything has to line up like the
00:07:59.860 government of BC is going to have to change 180 degrees. They're not going to do that. There are
00:08:06.580 well funded spokespeople for Aboriginal communities that are opposed to any pipelines. They're not going
00:08:16.260 to change because they're on the payroll. So what Alberta should do if they want to play this game as
00:08:22.340 well is start funding Aboriginal communities that want the pipeline. And let's hear from them. That
00:08:29.860 would make a, you know, an interesting conversation because both sides then would be in the back
00:08:36.260 pocket of, of third parties, either the government of Alberta and the government of BC or, or all of
00:08:41.620 these, you know, anti-pipeline foundations, mostly, most of which are funded out of San Francisco. So it,
00:08:50.500 you know, there's, there's a lot of really, uh, let's say interesting possibilities for a serious debate,
00:08:56.820 uh, sometime in the, in the new year. Oh, okay. That's interesting. Um, I guess also you wrote quite a
00:09:05.060 few articles about, uh, Alberta independence in the Western standard and one of them you were talking about
00:09:11.300 how Carney's basically anti-Alberta policies was pushing more Alberta separatists. Um, yeah, they're,
00:09:20.500 for it basically morale burdens are for it. So I remember you wrote about how, this is just because
00:09:28.420 I found it funny, about how Carney, um, plagiarized his PhD thesis. And I just wanted to know more
00:09:36.660 about that because I thought it would be wild. Yeah, these are press reports, um, that came out when,
00:09:43.860 when, uh, he was elected leader of the Liberal Party. Uh, and, uh, he wrote his PhD, uh,
00:09:50.500 at Oxford, uh, you know, which is a quite a respectable university. Um, but somebody did a,
00:09:58.900 uh, comparison. I mean, you can do this now by computer and it takes about, you know, four seconds,
00:10:04.020 uh, that, uh, indicated that a lot of the, the, uh, quotations without attribution were taken from
00:10:11.300 other sources. This was brought to the attention of his PhD supervisor at Oxford, uh, and the guy denied it.
00:10:18.260 Um, but you know, I, I didn't, I haven't checked it myself. I mean, God, it's, you know, it's,
00:10:25.220 it's, uh, unintelligible economics. Um, I, you know, I don't know this. Uh, I'm just,
00:10:30.500 I was just reporting what was said. Uh, I think it was in the Manchester Guardian. I'm not sure,
00:10:35.220 but it was fairly, it was widely circulated. Put it that way.
00:10:38.980 Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember reading that the, uh, uh, professor or whatever that was
00:10:45.700 supervising him. Um, yeah, I said it wasn't plagiarized, but I was just wondering if he
00:10:51.540 knew more about it because I thought it was, uh, okay. Anyways, what else? And do you, okay.
00:10:59.380 When did you start, um, talking about Alberta independence and what got you interested in the subject?
00:11:05.940 Well, that's a good question. Um, I suppose the, the sort of deep roots of this, uh, were from my
00:11:16.820 childhood. Um, I remember going on a fishing trip, uh, in the, uh, Chilkootin in, in, uh, BC when I was
00:11:24.820 about, I don't know, eight maybe. And my, my two grandfathers were along. My dad was, uh, sort of
00:11:31.940 organized the thing. And he, he took, uh, my two grandfathers along. And I remember listening to them
00:11:37.780 talk, um, about, uh, social credit, which was the government of, uh, WAC Bennett, you know, way back,
00:11:45.380 uh, way back then. Uh, and, um, I had one grandfather from Newfoundland and the other was, uh, from, uh, from
00:11:54.100 Nanton, from Alberta. Uh, and, uh, they both agreed that this, uh, BC social credit was not the same as
00:12:01.460 social credit in Alberta. Um, and they talked about why. And, uh, the argument from my Alberta
00:12:10.340 grandfather basically was that it was a way of, uh, Albertans taking, um, an initiative because the
00:12:18.340 government of Canada would not, this was during the depression when, uh, when Premier Everhart was
00:12:23.460 first, uh, was first elected. Um, and my, uh, Newfoundland, uh, Grant grandfather said that he
00:12:29.940 was always slightly mystified by, by what he called Canadian politics. Uh, and he, uh, the main thing that
00:12:36.900 I remember from, uh, from him is that he spoke of Canada as a kind of foreign country. Um, as you know,
00:12:44.100 many Newfoundlanders did because of the, uh, uh, let's say, uh, questionable election results in 1949
00:12:51.620 about the accession of Newfoundland, uh, to Canada. Um, so then, you know, I always started
00:12:58.500 thinking about, you know, what did these odd political parties mean? Uh, and when I was an
00:13:04.180 undergraduate at UBC, I had a very, very good, uh, uh, professor of, of, uh, Canadian federalism,
00:13:10.820 a guy named Alan Cairns. Um, and he mentioned in a class one night, um, on Canadian federalism,
00:13:18.660 it took part, it took place in the evening. He thought it was rather odd that, uh, social credit
00:13:26.100 and, uh, the NDP were called third parties by, uh, Canadian, uh, political scientists, when in fact,
00:13:34.260 um, social credit and the NDP were the major parties, uh, in British Columbia.
00:13:41.060 And the, uh, third parties were the liberals and the conservatives. And he just sort of left it
00:13:46.740 there and, and, uh, left us to try and, you know, figure out this, what this meant. Um, you know,
00:13:52.580 needless to say, you know, none of us, uh, undergraduates, uh, we sort of said, yeah,
00:13:57.300 that's kind of weird and left it at that. Well, then, you know, five forward another, say,
00:14:02.420 I don't know, 20 years and I was teaching at York. Uh, and I, I couldn't quite understand the
00:14:07.540 attitudes of my students there because they were so different than, uh, than the ones that I had
00:14:12.740 thought of as being normal. Um, and so I, uh, taught, uh, a course, uh, on Canadian political
00:14:19.060 thought. Um, and then a lot of things became a lot clearer to me, uh, partly in response to the, uh,
00:14:27.060 the East Toronto students, uh, and what they, what they made of the stuff that I, I made them read.
00:14:32.740 Uh, and, and basically the bottom line was that the myths of Laurentian Canada, uh, are not those
00:14:40.580 of the Prairie West, uh, and they're not, those of British Columbia or Newfoundland for that matter
00:14:45.300 either. Uh, so I started thinking of Canada, not so much the way it was for my dad's generation. I mean,
00:14:53.700 he was, you know, he was in the, what was then the RCA F course it is again. Uh, but, uh, and he thought
00:15:00.340 of this as a Canadian war effort and so on. Um, but it, I was struck by how, uh, the self-understanding of,
00:15:10.340 of Albertans Westerners generally is not that of, um, of central Canada. Uh, so, you know, that was
00:15:19.140 the kind of, um, uh, what intellectual roots of this, this view of Canada as, uh, as a very tenuous, uh,
00:15:27.940 coalition that was established initially in the 19th century, uh, by the imperial ambitions of, uh,
00:15:35.460 John A. MacDonald, uh, which he inherited from the Brits, uh, and never really was based on any
00:15:42.980 self-understanding of people who actually lived here. Uh, so, so then, uh, you can see where, uh,
00:15:49.220 if the Laurentians are not willing to change, uh, the legal structure, uh, and everyone has said since
00:15:55.780 1982, uh, that it's impossible to open the constitution again. We can't have any more amendments,
00:16:01.860 which is complete nonsense. Uh, of course you can. The question is, do you have the will to do it?
00:16:07.700 Um, so then that became, uh, the way that I, I looked at the relationship between, uh, Albertan,
00:16:14.820 Saskatchewan, um, and, uh, and Ottawa, I'd say. Uh, and it's not a, it's not a, uh, it's not a structure
00:16:24.180 that is viable over the longterm because of the enormous wealth, uh, that has come to the, uh,
00:16:30.660 to Prairie provinces. Um, so what we do about it as, you know, as, uh, as Canadians, uh, you know,
00:16:37.700 we all hold the same citizenship, uh, is going to be very interesting. I don't think that the
00:16:42.500 Laurentians are going to do anything. Uh, so, you know, it's up to us. We'll do it by ourselves.
00:16:47.140 And that's where the independence question comes from. I guess I have a question. And when we compare,
00:16:54.820 I guess, Canada to the U S so if he, it feels like the U S doesn't really have the same issue that
00:17:00.900 Canada does, where some States are wanting independence from like the whole of the U S.
00:17:08.340 So you said that Ottawa and like Eastern and you called it Laurentian, those people don't think the
00:17:16.980 same, obviously as like Western Canada does. So how come there's like this stark difference between
00:17:23.380 the U S and Canada if they were both like from the British empire originally?
00:17:30.100 Well, there are two things that are different, uh, in, in the American case, the, the first is
00:17:34.340 that they actually established a new regime, uh, from the British empire, uh, after the declaration and
00:17:40.900 the war against the, uh, the war for independence. The second is, uh, they also had a civil war.
00:17:46.660 Uh, and we have had none of those things. Uh, we have never had any serious rebellion against, uh, against
00:17:55.460 Britain, uh, you know, despite the rebellions in upper and lower Canada, uh, in the, in 1850s,
00:18:01.540 those were not really serious rebellions. Um, and we certainly have not have had a civil war, uh,
00:18:09.380 for obvious reasons, partly because of the slavery question, but also, but we've been able to make,
00:18:15.380 uh, deals with the only, um, let's say potentially here to four anyway, potentially secessionist
00:18:22.900 part of the country, namely Quebec. And that's what the 1982, uh, constitution, um, uh, basically
00:18:30.420 responded to. It responded to the, uh, growing sentiments, uh, in Quebec towards independence.
00:18:37.060 So we had this, uh, one of the most Machiavellian of our prime ministers, namely Pierre Trudeau,
00:18:42.340 uh, who put together this, the, uh, constitution act, um, and put it together in such a way that it,
00:18:49.860 that it became difficult, uh, to amend. Uh, and that's why all of these, uh, uh, esteemed
00:18:58.180 Canadian political scientists say it can't be amended. We can't open the constitution again.
00:19:02.340 Uh, and as I said, that's not, that's, uh, not true. Uh, they don't want to open the constitution
00:19:08.580 again and, uh, reconsider the position of Quebec, uh, in the country because they actually believe
00:19:15.140 that Canada is a, uh, bilingual country. Uh, they think that, that somehow bilingualism and, uh,
00:19:23.300 and then they, you know, multiculturalism after that, uh, becomes, became defining characteristics
00:19:28.580 of the country, um, which is, you know, which is also nonsense. Parts of Canada are bilingual,
00:19:35.220 parts of the Ottawa Valley, parts of Northern, uh, Ontario, parts even of Northern, uh, or central, uh,
00:19:41.460 Alberta, uh, and parts of Quebec are bilingual, but, you know, that's not the country, uh, that's,
00:19:47.220 those are parts, uh, and the, the myth of Canadian bilingualism then becomes, um, a kind of moral
00:19:54.980 equivalent to something that we cannot talk about, um, and just as, as, uh, in the, let's say in the 1830s
00:20:03.620 and 40s in the United States, nobody wanted to talk about the, uh, consequences of slavery in the
00:20:08.900 South. Um, but, you know, it's, it's still part of the reality. Wow. That's, that's very interesting.
00:20:17.380 And I would ask you more about also your book, but unfortunately we're running out of time
00:20:22.100 since it has to be 22 minutes and my producer just reminded me. So, um, thank you very much,
00:20:27.300 Barry, for coming in today. Really appreciate you being able to join us.
00:20:32.180 And yeah, so if you guys enjoyed this, then you should definitely subscribe to our YouTube channel
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00:20:51.060 Yeah, that's all I got. So, thank you everyone for joining The Hannaford Show and goodbye.
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