The founder and former leader of the Reform Party of Canada, Preston Manning is no longer in politics, but he has remained, for lack of a better term, the godfather of the Western political and social cause. And what he says has a lot of resonance.
00:00:51.260And 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.
00:01:13.680Preston Manning is no longer in politics, but he has remained, for lack of a better term,
00:01:19.980the godfather of the Western political and social cause, and what he says has a lot of
00:01:28.540resonance. He penned a column in the Globe and Mail during the election, warning the East that
00:01:35.220a vote for Carney is a vote for Western secession, and that Mark Carney could very well be the last
00:01:42.580Prime Minister of a fully united Canada. The day after the federal election,
00:01:48.840Preston Manning released a statement. I'll read just a part of it here,
00:01:53.240saying that consultations are being held on the merits and means of organizing a Canada West
00:01:59.280Assembly to provide a democratic forum for the presentation, analysis, and debate of the options
00:02:04.600facing Western Canada, not just Alberta, from acceptance of a fairer and stronger position
00:02:10.460within the Federation based on guarantees from actions by the federal government to various
00:02:15.640independence-oriented proposals, with votes to be taken on various options and recommendations
00:02:20.300to be made to the affected provincial governments. So, I'm joined by Preston Manning. Preston,
00:02:26.640thank you very much for joining us today. It's an honor to have you on the show.
00:02:29.960Well, thank you, and thank you for that generous introduction.
00:02:33.680so um let's start with this uh canada west assembly this wouldn't be the first uh assembly
00:02:44.200of the west that you have been involved in the organization of uh in a period of great
00:02:50.340discontentment with an idea that something big is going to come out of it the last time uh or
00:02:55.540maybe there's times since but the the most notable one uh i i was uh still slobbering in kindergarten
00:03:01.620at the time but uh uh it was the vancouver assembly that led to the creation of the reform party
00:03:08.940uh the kind of steering committee behind it had put together several different options you know
00:03:14.160work within existing parties create a pressure group create a new political party um uh and
00:03:21.720it became your your calling card became uh coined by a term coined by my predecessor ted byfield
00:10:30.080So that was one of the encouraging things, that the democratic process can be used to achieve some fairly major things.
00:10:37.280One of the difficulties faced by the Harper administration, and Stephen has talked about this,
00:10:44.840is Westerners thought that by getting one of our guys, and Stephen started out as a reformer,
00:10:51.360into the prime minister's office was that that was all you had to do, that that would get the agenda achieved.
00:10:58.540And 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.
00:11:16.340There was kind of this thought that once we get sort of our guy there, that would solve the problem.
00:11:21.260No, no, no, no. You've got to keep pressure on in order to counter the pressures from other parts of the country.
00:11:28.540But 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.
00:11:45.180They learn things in that first experience that are informing the approach
00:11:52.380now that they've got a second kick at the can.
00:11:55.800And maybe one of the things that Westerners should take into account
00:12:01.500is what are the lessons that were learned from that whole exercise,
00:12:06.100eventually creating a new federal political party that became a government?
00:12:10.800What are some of the lessons that were learned from that?
00:12:12.780And what were some of the lessons learned by that government should a Western-oriented federal government ever be achieved again?
00:12:21.060So I'm going to talk about what might come after the Canada West Assembly here.
00:12:28.180You know, you said in your statement you released after the election that we need to see a 180-degree turn on climate change, pipelines.
00:12:36.620Derek, 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.
00:12:46.180The 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.
00:13:52.180like the position of the West in the federation.
00:13:55.100Then we can get on to what happens after, okay?
00:13:58.440Yeah, now I want to talk about what comes after.
00:14:00.060um so you you said here that we need to see 180 degree turn on climate change pipelines
00:14:07.300unregulated well that's not quite what i'm saying uh there derrick what is being said one of the
00:14:12.580options will be uh a list of items that if the federal government responded to them the west
00:14:20.060more ahead in the federation and that would include 180 degree turn on all of those issues okay um
00:14:27.900So 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.
00:14:48.420It's paper legislation with no actual applicable use at all.
00:14:52.340She'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.
00:15:03.200That's a huge amount of signatures, but it all of a sudden becomes very possible to achieve.
00:15:08.100I 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.
00:15:29.560uh if if we don't see a significant change from uh the carny government here because he's been
00:15:39.500kind of a political rorschach test you could people from different sides see different things
00:15:43.040in him uh the the rubber has not yet met the road we don't actually see how this guy is going to
00:15:47.600govern but if it is looking like a continuation uh in large measure from the previous nine ten
00:15:54.560years of justin trudeau uh what side of that vote which i think is inevitably now coming
00:16:00.880do you expect you'll find yourself on well i i wouldn't answer that directly because i can't be
00:16:07.060i've got my own views on what would be best but i can't be lobbying them if we're going to set up
00:16:12.680this assembly because this assembly can't be set up to lobby for one position or another sure enough
00:16:18.520But 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.
00:16:34.920But it would have to be broader than just what you talked about.
00:17:10.740They're relevant to Alberta, but they're broader than Alberta.
00:17:13.800But 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.
00:17:30.000So 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.
00:17:40.040And in the end of the day, if that option is to be pursued, you've got to deal with the federal government.
00:17:45.960You've got to deal with the Clarity Act.
00:17:47.800I was around when that was originally formed.
00:17:50.840This is where Quebec has plowed the ground.0.91
00:17:58.300A 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.
00:18:08.540And 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.
00:18:25.120That'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.
00:18:32.860but I think there is a whole wild card now that was not there when the Clarity Act was written
00:18:39.920or even there a year ago and that is the United States. You know the Clarity Act that's the
00:18:48.400process for beginning to get out but then to actually do it you have to have the approval
00:18:52.040of parliament and the other all the other provinces involved in it too which I don't
00:18:56.720think will ever be had I think they attach so many conditions to it that we'd never get out
00:19:00.100They'd be like, fine, you're taking half the whole national debt and you're taking none of the CPP.
00:19:05.140You know, they could attach all these things to that and then not agree to it.
00:19:07.960You'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.
00:19:18.700And then you're into kind of a much bolder and riskier conversation about a unilateral declaration of independence outside of the Clarity Act,
00:19:28.880which I think Quebec has actually always been prepared to have.
00:19:31.720Quebec has never actually accepted the Clarity Act.
00:19:34.720The Clarity Act, I think, does have a lot of,
00:19:58.880Well, 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.
00:20:18.520It was one of the criticisms of this last election campaign.
00:20:22.820What on earth is this country doing letting the president of another country virtually dictate what the issue would be in a federal election?
00:20:33.720What 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?
00:20:42.700I think we have to be careful about relying too heavily on the American positions in relation to this.
00:20:52.060Okay, I'll just leave you with one final question.
00:20:56.020We've both seen, and you've seen prior to my time, the independence like a well flare.
00:21:06.180Well, it never goes away completely, but it gets pretty small and it flares up again.
00:21:10.320It 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.
00:21:55.520credible leadership it i expect it probably will attract people willing to put money into it uh
00:22:03.380but you've you've been around you've seen these uh flare-ups longer than i have and you're familiar
00:22:09.340with the cyclical nature of them is this one substantially different in a way that you think
00:22:16.980could actually lead somewhere or do you think this is just likely to be another big outburst
00:22:22.100of anger and we kind of just go back to contentment and waiting for the super party to win
00:22:26.220it's uh it's stronger perhaps than anything except maybe during the depression years which
00:22:34.060my father was very familiar with and spawned two political parties that were hated the ground
00:22:40.420ottawa walked on but no i i think it is very strong and what makes it strong too is if you
00:22:48.840talk about the western region, you are talking about an increasingly strong and powerful part
00:22:55.800of the country economically. And I think that adds some strength to this particular
00:23:04.680option. And so it's a reasonable thing to present to this assembly if and when it
00:23:11.320is organized. But I would mention making that assembly democratic. What that means is that the
00:23:17.560The group that presents this option has to be prepared to have it debated and have it
00:23:22.740analyzed the way that it might not have been analyzed before.
00:23:26.920This group will have to listen, ideally, to the other options and at the end accept the
00:23:34.060votes of a majority on what might be the best way to go.
00:23:39.000I'm worried that we've lost the capacity for democratic debate and democratic resolution of big issues like this.
00:23:49.300And hopefully, this assembly could demonstrate that that can still be done by allowing all reasonable options to be presented, debated, and voted upon.
00:24:01.280Well, perhaps an alternative name would be the Continental Congress.