Western Standard - Preston Manning on debating Western independence

00:00:00.000 I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard.

00:00:27.540 Today, we have a very special guest joining us.

00:00:32.400 Preston Manning is the founder and was the leader of the Reform Party of Canada,

00:00:38.980 a party that many of you know was spawned coming out of Trudeau I's era

00:00:45.100 with the National Energy Program and the deliberate destruction of the Western economy

00:00:49.300 and national cohesion.

00:00:51.260 And then the frustration that came with the inability of the Brian Mulroney conservative, progressive conservative government to address Western issues and burst onto the scene, dominating Western politics from 1993 until its transformation into the Canadian Alliance and eventually today's Conservative Party of Canada.

00:01:13.680 Preston Manning is no longer in politics, but he has remained, for lack of a better term,

00:01:19.980 the godfather of the Western political and social cause, and what he says has a lot of

00:01:28.540 resonance. He penned a column in the Globe and Mail during the election, warning the East that

00:01:35.220 a vote for Carney is a vote for Western secession, and that Mark Carney could very well be the last

00:01:42.580 Prime Minister of a fully united Canada. The day after the federal election,

00:01:48.840 Preston Manning released a statement. I'll read just a part of it here,

00:01:53.240 saying that consultations are being held on the merits and means of organizing a Canada West

00:01:59.280 Assembly to provide a democratic forum for the presentation, analysis, and debate of the options

00:02:04.600 facing Western Canada, not just Alberta, from acceptance of a fairer and stronger position

00:02:10.460 within the Federation based on guarantees from actions by the federal government to various

00:02:15.640 independence-oriented proposals, with votes to be taken on various options and recommendations

00:02:20.300 to be made to the affected provincial governments. So, I'm joined by Preston Manning. Preston,

00:02:26.640 thank you very much for joining us today. It's an honor to have you on the show.

00:02:29.960 Well, thank you, and thank you for that generous introduction.

00:02:33.680 so um let's start with this uh canada west assembly this wouldn't be the first uh assembly

00:02:44.200 of the west that you have been involved in the organization of uh in a period of great

00:02:50.340 discontentment with an idea that something big is going to come out of it the last time uh or

00:02:55.540 maybe there's times since but the the most notable one uh i i was uh still slobbering in kindergarten

00:03:01.620 at the time but uh uh it was the vancouver assembly that led to the creation of the reform party

00:03:08.940 uh the kind of steering committee behind it had put together several different options you know

00:03:14.160 work within existing parties create a pressure group create a new political party um uh and

00:03:21.720 it became your your calling card became uh coined by a term coined by my predecessor ted byfield

00:03:29.380 was the West wants in.

00:03:32.720 The question I'm putting to you now is,

00:03:35.300 is it time for the West wants out?

00:03:39.980 Well, there's certainly a lot of discontent

00:03:43.620 and reasonable discontent in Western Canada

00:03:47.960 with the Federation,

00:03:49.020 and this last election is certainly not to help that.

00:03:53.600 I've suggested two things.

00:03:55.040 One is there will be polling to show

00:03:57.000 that the election of the Kearney government, if anything, increases the unrest in Western Canada.

00:04:07.480 We're not just talking about Alberta. We're talking about Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba,

00:04:12.440 and British Columbia. One of the things that I've proposed to deal with that is the creation of this

00:04:21.640 so-called Canada West Assembly. It's still very much in embryonic planning stages, but it would

00:04:30.880 be a forum, a democratic forum, to provide a chance for the various options for the West to be

00:04:39.940 presented and subject to analysis and debate, and then some votes taken as to what might be

00:04:48.640 the best options for the West and recommendations made along that line to the provincial government.

00:04:53.920 So whether this comes about is still an open question, but that's the concept behind the

00:05:00.560 idea of a Canada West Assembly. It's very different from the Assembly you're referring to because that

00:05:06.800 was a purely political exercise. The options were to work within an existing party to create a

00:05:16.480 a powerful, more well-endowed pressure group, interest group,

00:05:23.300 or to create a new party in the third-party tradition of the West,

00:05:28.200 this assembly, as I've mentioned, would be to consider

00:05:31.780 these various options for the West going forward.

00:05:36.420 You know, maybe I'm reading too much into this,

00:05:40.880 you know, as someone who edits people's work.

00:05:44.460 But Western Canada implies it's the western part of Canada.

00:05:48.840 Canada West sounds like it could be just its own thing.

00:05:52.900 Am I reading too much into the way you've,

00:05:55.020 because you've called it the Canada West Assembly?

00:05:57.600 Am I reading too much into the grammar and sentence structure?

00:06:01.620 No, I just think that's the geography.

00:06:03.980 And if you take the results of the last federal election

00:06:07.800 and paint one side red and one side blue,

00:06:11.340 the almost all of the western side is is blue so no i mean that's a geographical

00:06:18.540 term but it basically includes the prairie region the pacific coast region and the northern region

00:06:24.620 and one of the points i've made one of the sources of frustration for western canadians and canadians

00:06:30.780 other parts of the country is that the national government does not recognize uh or acknowledge

00:06:36.780 the regional character of the country. That Canada is a country of regions, Atlantic Canada,

00:06:44.140 the Laurentian region, the Pacific, the Prairie region, the Pacific region, the Northern region,

00:06:49.260 and that each of these, to use the Quebec word, has distinctive concerns and aspirations,

00:06:56.380 which need to be acknowledged by the federal government and responded to. The last governments

00:07:02.940 that Canada has had do not recognize

00:07:07.940 and acknowledge the distinctive aspirations

00:07:10.560 and concerns of the prairie region,

00:07:12.620 the Pacific region, and the northern region,

00:07:14.680 which constitutes Canada West,

00:07:17.480 and that's where the name comes from for that assembly.

00:07:21.880 So, I mean, from the founding of reform in 1987

00:07:26.160 until it's folding into the Canadian Alliance in, um, uh, 99, 2000. Um, although it was maybe a more

00:07:36.960 pure progression, I, I, I maybe I'd take it from reformist founding in 87 until the Alliance's

00:07:43.260 merger into the Conservative Party of Canada in 2004. Um, that process there of building a national

00:07:50.100 voter coalition uh with areas uh eastwards of us with primary largely in recipient uh parts uh

00:07:58.840 net net recipient parts of uh western largesse to build that coalition uh the party the conservative

00:08:04.620 party had to drop things like the triple e senate which we're seeing is just too distinctively

00:08:08.560 hard well i correct you on that the harper government did everything it could to push

00:08:13.780 one of those e's one of these yes it happened it had to drop two and then the supreme court

00:08:18.860 defeated the other well no you didn't drop to that in order to push the other two you had to

00:08:24.540 have constitutional amendments which our constitution is set up in such a way that

00:08:29.460 you could virtually never get them because there's no the amending formula doesn't work

00:08:34.900 so harper tried to push the elected part as far as was possible ended up the supreme court said

00:08:42.480 even that had to be subject to a constitutional amendment yeah okay so uh i'll take it higher

00:08:49.040 level than just just the senate uh because we're on we're not even talking senate anymore and i

00:08:53.680 think it's such a huge deal uh but we're not talking senate anymore you the party was founded

00:09:00.740 on with the slogan the west wants in and i remember uh in january 2006 stephen harper

00:09:08.360 stood in calgary and said the west is in and i i think for a time we were uh it was

00:09:17.140 not as in as i'd like to be it was constrained uh by the institute the institutions and the

00:09:23.880 political electoral reality of canada uh that's going to keep it in but whatever gains were made

00:09:30.560 under the harper government were almost in time with a few exceptions like long gun registry and

00:09:34.040 wheat board. Those gains have been completely swept aside. Would you say, did the mission of

00:09:42.800 the West wants in ultimately fail? No, I would say it achieved certain things, not as much as

00:09:51.760 it would have liked. One of the things it did demonstrate, and I've been as critical as anyone

00:10:01.300 about the state of Canadian democracy.

00:10:04.360 But one of the things the whole reform exercise proved

00:10:07.360 that a small group of people could take the tools

00:10:11.020 that Canada gives, freedom of speech,

00:10:15.040 freedom to organize, freedom to persuade people

00:10:18.880 to do this and that,

00:10:20.740 and could end up forming a national government.

00:10:26.360 That is something that could not occur in the United States,

00:10:28.860 but it did occur here.

00:10:30.080 So that was one of the encouraging things, that the democratic process can be used to achieve some fairly major things.

00:10:37.280 One of the difficulties faced by the Harper administration, and Stephen has talked about this,

00:10:44.840 is Westerners thought that by getting one of our guys, and Stephen started out as a reformer,

00:10:51.360 into the prime minister's office was that that was all you had to do, that that would get the agenda achieved.

00:10:58.540 And as Stephen has remarked, I think it may be in his book, those 10 members or however members he had from Quebec put more pressure on him, on the cabinet, than all the Western members put together.

00:11:16.340 There was kind of this thought that once we get sort of our guy there, that would solve the problem.

00:11:21.260 No, no, no, no. You've got to keep pressure on in order to counter the pressures from other parts of the country.

00:11:28.540 But the other point I'd make, and you see this in the United States, you see the Trump administration saying that they learned some things in the first Trump administration and some of the mistakes that were made and some of the goals that were never accomplished.

00:11:45.180 They learn things in that first experience that are informing the approach

00:11:52.380 now that they've got a second kick at the can.

00:11:55.800 And maybe one of the things that Westerners should take into account

00:12:01.500 is what are the lessons that were learned from that whole exercise,

00:12:06.100 eventually creating a new federal political party that became a government?

00:12:10.800 What are some of the lessons that were learned from that?

00:12:12.780 And what were some of the lessons learned by that government should a Western-oriented federal government ever be achieved again?

00:12:21.060 So I'm going to talk about what might come after the Canada West Assembly here.

00:12:28.180 You know, you said in your statement you released after the election that we need to see a 180-degree turn on climate change, pipelines.

00:12:36.620 Derek, before we talk about what happens after, maybe we should talk just a little bit about what that assembly is because it will determine what comes after.

00:12:46.180 The idea of that assembly is, if it comes about, which is still not a firm reality, is to provide a place for a hearing of the major options facing Western Canada in the future.

00:13:04.120 and to have those options,

00:13:06.820 some of these options are ones

00:13:08.140 that are in the back rooms today

00:13:09.560 and if anybody says anything about them

00:13:11.640 while they're denounced,

00:13:12.520 no, this will give groups

00:13:14.460 with responsible options

00:13:16.360 a chance to put the option on the table.

00:13:19.080 But secondly, those options

00:13:20.700 will be subjected to debate

00:13:22.300 and to analysis and heavy analysis

00:13:24.960 and then subject to a vote

00:13:27.740 at the end of the day

00:13:28.600 as to which of these options,

00:13:30.060 if any, or what combination

00:13:31.400 should be recommended

00:13:32.900 to the provincial governments.

00:13:35.060 And the emphasis is on a democratic process,

00:13:37.840 which is something that is lacking today.

00:13:41.020 And hopefully this assembly can kind of be set up

00:13:43.520 as a democratic forum that proves to people

00:13:47.680 you can apply democratic processes

00:13:50.180 to handle key issues

00:13:52.180 like the position of the West in the federation.

00:13:55.100 Then we can get on to what happens after, okay?

00:13:58.440 Yeah, now I want to talk about what comes after.

00:14:00.060 um so you you said here that we need to see 180 degree turn on climate change pipelines

00:14:07.300 unregulated well that's not quite what i'm saying uh there derrick what is being said one of the

00:14:12.580 options will be uh a list of items that if the federal government responded to them the west

00:14:20.060 more ahead in the federation and that would include 180 degree turn on all of those issues okay um

00:14:27.900 So yesterday, the day after the federal election, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced that she is tabling amendment legislation that will change the thresholds of Alberta Citizens Initiative legislation from the current thresholds, which make it, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

00:14:48.420 It's paper legislation with no actual applicable use at all.

00:14:52.340 She's going to change the thresholds to be 10% of the number of votes cast in the previous election, which is still a very high bar, especially if you're talking a province-wide referendum.

00:15:03.200 That's a huge amount of signatures, but it all of a sudden becomes very possible to achieve.

00:15:08.100 I put to you that it is almost a certainty then that if this legislation is amended in this way, that within the next year to year and a half, Alberta is going to be voting on independence. Saskatchewan possibly alongside us, but they don't as yet have the same democratic tools to initiate their own referenda at this time.

00:15:29.560 uh if if we don't see a significant change from uh the carny government here because he's been

00:15:39.500 kind of a political rorschach test you could people from different sides see different things

00:15:43.040 in him uh the the rubber has not yet met the road we don't actually see how this guy is going to

00:15:47.600 govern but if it is looking like a continuation uh in large measure from the previous nine ten

00:15:54.560 years of justin trudeau uh what side of that vote which i think is inevitably now coming

00:16:00.880 do you expect you'll find yourself on well i i wouldn't answer that directly because i can't be

00:16:07.060 i've got my own views on what would be best but i can't be lobbying them if we're going to set up

00:16:12.680 this assembly because this assembly can't be set up to lobby for one position or another sure enough

00:16:18.520 But what I would say is if that occurs, or even if the prospect of that occurs, because this assembly, if it's held, would be held fairly soon, that ought to be one of the options that would be presented to that assembly as this is one of the ways that we could go.

00:16:34.920 But it would have to be broader than just what you talked about.

00:16:38.280 That's just talking about Alberta.

00:16:39.720 This position of the West in the federations got to include more than Alberta.

00:16:46.160 And in fact, the polls say that secessionist sentiment

00:16:49.840 is even stronger right now in Saskatchewan than it is in Alberta.

00:16:54.180 I'm proud of our little brother in Saskatchewan right now.

00:16:56.640 You need to include British Columbia and Manitoba

00:16:59.520 because some of the questions they'll be asked about this.

00:17:02.500 How are you going to get access to seaboard?

00:17:04.920 And what are you going to do with the indigenous commitments?

00:17:07.620 There'll be hard questions like that.

00:17:10.740 They're relevant to Alberta, but they're broader than Alberta.

00:17:13.800 But to wrap it all up, the option you're talking about, one that could be put to that assembly and debated back and forth and analyzed it, that certainly could be one of them.

00:17:27.620 All right.

00:17:30.000 So you can get on, Derek, you can get on to referendum, and it's fine to have a referendum in Alberta, but that's not going to achieve separation or secession.

00:17:40.040 And in the end of the day, if that option is to be pursued, you've got to deal with the federal government.

00:17:45.960 You've got to deal with the Clarity Act.

00:17:47.800 I was around when that was originally formed.

00:17:50.840 This is where Quebec has plowed the ground. 0.91

00:17:54.740 It's true.

00:17:56.260 Let me finish.

00:17:58.300 A regional candidate can theoretically be in a legal position to secede if it holds a referendum on a clear question and gets a clear majority.

00:18:08.540 And Alberta, the West or whoever wanted to pursue the secessionist option would have to deal with that reality, which is a much bigger referendum than just one in Alberta.

00:18:25.120 That's true. And I think that's been the discussion around this, however hypothetical that discussion has been until it started to get very real very quickly here in Alberta.

00:18:32.860 but I think there is a whole wild card now that was not there when the Clarity Act was written

00:18:39.920 or even there a year ago and that is the United States. You know the Clarity Act that's the

00:18:48.400 process for beginning to get out but then to actually do it you have to have the approval

00:18:52.040 of parliament and the other all the other provinces involved in it too which I don't

00:18:56.720 think will ever be had I think they attach so many conditions to it that we'd never get out

00:19:00.100 They'd be like, fine, you're taking half the whole national debt and you're taking none of the CPP.

00:19:05.140 You know, they could attach all these things to that and then not agree to it.

00:19:07.960 You'd now have the interesting prospect of if Alberta or Alberta and Saskatchewan voted to become independent, the United States government could simply recognize them.

00:19:18.700 And then you're into kind of a much bolder and riskier conversation about a unilateral declaration of independence outside of the Clarity Act,

00:19:28.880 which I think Quebec has actually always been prepared to have.

00:19:31.720 Quebec has never actually accepted the Clarity Act.

00:19:34.720 The Clarity Act, I think, does have a lot of,

00:19:37.620 it's got some good aspects to it,

00:19:39.660 but in the end, they'll never,

00:19:41.580 I don't think Ottawa and the other provinces,

00:19:43.940 nine or eight, whatever it is,

00:19:45.480 would ever agree to it.

00:19:47.080 So I'd put to you that there is actually

00:19:49.040 the whole other option now.

00:19:50.340 If you had a referendum on a clear question,

00:19:52.920 you could do it without Ottawa's permission at this point

00:19:56.040 if you simply obtained American recognition

00:19:57.880 of your independence.

00:19:58.880 Well, I'd be careful. Again, this is all what could be presented in presenting the option you're talking about, and it would go back and forth. But I'd be careful myself about making the next option for the West dependent on anything with respect to the United States.

00:20:18.520 It was one of the criticisms of this last election campaign.

00:20:22.820 What on earth is this country doing letting the president of another country virtually dictate what the issue would be in a federal election?

00:20:33.720 What kind of nationalism does Canada have if the only thing that can get the vote up in a federal election is a threat from an American president?

00:20:42.700 I think we have to be careful about relying too heavily on the American positions in relation to this.

00:20:52.060 Okay, I'll just leave you with one final question.

00:20:56.020 We've both seen, and you've seen prior to my time, the independence like a well flare.

00:21:04.440 It comes up, it goes away.

00:21:06.180 Well, it never goes away completely, but it gets pretty small and it flares up again.

00:21:10.320 It tends to be somewhat cyclical with elections, sometimes, you know, with the pipeline cancellation project or something, but it's never really taken it. It got a little bit of traction with the Western Canada concept in the 80s with a flash of the pan there.

00:21:26.200 I was myself

00:21:28.420 only the second

00:21:30.480 MLA in Alberta to actually

00:21:32.560 openly sit as a pro-independence MLA

00:21:34.440 there was not much appetite

00:21:36.640 for that, not in 2019

00:21:38.520 but I

00:21:40.420 this

00:21:41.260 flare up feels very different

00:21:44.440 it is attracting

00:21:46.580 support from beyond

00:21:48.660 the usual corners of a couple

00:21:50.520 of angry guys in rural Alberta

00:21:52.260 it's attracting business people

00:21:54.640 it's attracting

00:21:55.520 credible leadership it i expect it probably will attract people willing to put money into it uh

00:22:03.380 but you've you've been around you've seen these uh flare-ups longer than i have and you're familiar

00:22:09.340 with the cyclical nature of them is this one substantially different in a way that you think

00:22:16.980 could actually lead somewhere or do you think this is just likely to be another big outburst

00:22:22.100 of anger and we kind of just go back to contentment and waiting for the super party to win

00:22:26.220 it's uh it's stronger perhaps than anything except maybe during the depression years which

00:22:34.060 my father was very familiar with and spawned two political parties that were hated the ground

00:22:40.420 ottawa walked on but no i i think it is very strong and what makes it strong too is if you

00:22:48.840 talk about the western region, you are talking about an increasingly strong and powerful part

00:22:55.800 of the country economically. And I think that adds some strength to this particular

00:23:04.680 option. And so it's a reasonable thing to present to this assembly if and when it

00:23:11.320 is organized. But I would mention making that assembly democratic. What that means is that the

00:23:17.560 The group that presents this option has to be prepared to have it debated and have it

00:23:22.740 analyzed the way that it might not have been analyzed before.

00:23:26.920 This group will have to listen, ideally, to the other options and at the end accept the

00:23:34.060 votes of a majority on what might be the best way to go.

00:23:39.000 I'm worried that we've lost the capacity for democratic debate and democratic resolution of big issues like this.

00:23:49.300 And hopefully, this assembly could demonstrate that that can still be done by allowing all reasonable options to be presented, debated, and voted upon.

00:24:01.280 Well, perhaps an alternative name would be the Continental Congress.

00:24:05.400 I'll leave it.

00:24:06.940 We'll give you the last word.

00:24:09.000 all right uh preston manning thank you so much for being uh generous with your time today

00:24:15.900 and uh and sharing your thoughts uh wish all the best okay thank you there thank you

00:24:21.180 uh that was preston manning uh founder and leader of the reform party uh we're gonna have a lot more

00:24:28.360 to follow up on this topic in the days months and i think years to go thank you and god bless the west

00:24:39.000 Transcription by CastingWords

Western Standard - April 30, 2025

Preston Manning on debating Western independence

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