Western Standard - November 08, 2026


Is Forever Canadian Becoming a Political Party？

Borrowing for Projects… So Where's the Construction？ Hannaford Warns Conservatives About Walking Away

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

213.1

Word count

526

Sentence count

28


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Thomas Lukasik, former Redford-era MLA, former halal mortgage specialist, now former forever
00:00:09.000 Canadian advocate in the referendum campaign, despite him having said over and over again
00:00:17.880 that he's not going to get into politics or start a political party, it looks like he
00:00:21.200 might be starting a political party.
00:00:23.400 I mean, this was starting in the news department.
00:00:24.960 I mean, begin, David, what happened here?
00:00:26.880 Well, apparently he put out a survey, which I actually got because I signed up for the Forever Canadian thing to keep an eye on what was going on.
00:00:33.540 And he's asking a whole bunch of questions.
00:00:35.080 I actually took down a couple of them here.
00:00:37.560 One of them he asked is actually, should Forever Canadian get more involved in Alberta politics and furthering Alberta's interest with the federal government?
00:00:43.740 That's the very first question on this survey that he put out there.
00:00:46.360 And I think I have two days left because he just sent me a reminder email earlier today to finish the survey, which I might just do just to see how many questions there are and whatnot because I haven't looked totally.
00:00:54.040 But this is interesting because, as you said, he was getting into politics.
00:00:57.100 He gives a whole bunch of different things that Forever Canadian could do going forward.
00:01:00.240 One of the options was studies and polls on Alberta's place in Canada, policy papers, maybe start a research institute.
00:01:06.800 This is a weird one. Scholarships and essay contests for students.
00:01:09.520 Got to get them young, I guess.
00:01:11.180 And I think another one was debates and partnerships with universities were a bunch of the options he had.
00:01:15.540 So, yeah, it does seem like he still wants to stay in the political arena for the time being.
00:01:19.960 I think it was Gil McGowan from the Alberta Federation of Labour
00:01:23.300 who kind of talked about this and said that he,
00:01:25.700 Lukasik personally told him that he was not going to do anything like this
00:01:28.500 or start a political party with, I guess, the email list
00:01:30.860 he's gotten from everyone signing up for EverCanadian.
00:01:32.760 But I guess it looks like he might just be doing that
00:01:35.300 or something close to that.
00:01:37.140 Well, of course, he's going to deny that.
00:01:38.920 And nothing out of the list you read there actually says,
00:01:43.160 and by the way, the next move is a political party.
00:01:46.300 One of the questions did say, though, as one of the options,
00:01:49.160 to potentially form a political party.
00:01:51.400 It wasn't okay.
00:01:51.960 I missed that in your speed read.
00:01:54.380 But, you know, I guess if you see your neighbor digging a hole
00:02:00.000 and timber arrives and he says he's not building a fence,
00:02:03.640 you think, well, why else would you build a, you know,
00:02:06.140 why else would you order timber and just start digging holes?
00:02:08.580 So a lot of this stuff seems exactly the kind of preparatory work
00:02:11.740 that you would undertake to sort of leverage your existing profile
00:02:16.880 into something more ongoing.
00:02:18.820 And you'd have to be a very generous soul to think, well, no, no, he's not starting a political party.
00:02:26.420 This is all about scholarships for students.