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- [00:00]
A
At the time of recording a few days ago, Stay Free Alberta, Mitch Sylvester's organization has declared that has met the threshold of 177,000 signatures to get Alberta separatism on the ballot in October. So Danielle Smith, last year the Premier of Alberta reduced the number of signatures you need to get a referendum for largely the same reason by the way, that David Cameron kept promising to hold a Brexit referendum, which is to quiet a restive and never satisfied nationalist separatist wing of her own party.
- [00:31]
B
Worked great for him.
- [00:33]
A
He's still prime minister and and now of course the separatists are being taken to court by one of the indigenous tribes who is saying well you can't leave Canada because all of our treaties are with Canada and we're in Alberta, so you can't do it. And the plan, of course, as ever, right, the plan where any minority has some legal protection against the sort of revanchist nationalist desires of the, of the majority. Even if they're not a majority, they're feel as though they are. They say ok, well that's clearly unimportant and if we get struck down by the courts, we're just going to tell Danielle Smith to put it on the ballot anyway. And it looks like she's probably going to. He said we don't necessarily have to turn the signatures to elections Alberta, we have other options. We could bring them to the government and have them vet. Right. This is a plan that is also encouraged by the US Between December of last year and February of this year, Stay Free Alberta has had I think three contacts with State Department officials from the US with their like ultra woke version of whatever the US State Office of Regime Change is that now destabilizes exclusively white slash Global north countries.
- [01:39]
B
Yeah, they have a, they've opened up a NATO bureau, like a NATO country bureau. I mean for people who don't know what we're talking about here like Alberta separatism or like Wexit stuff. I mean it's basically like if you scaled up US sovereign citizenship to, to a whole province and like a province that just, just happens to have massive oil and petroleum reserves. I mean it's funny because the right in that province like has a, it has a history like the main driving force of politics in that province or one of the main motor forces for a hundred years, if not longer has been, you have like a radicalized right that gets more and more radicalized and then eventually eats itself and then you know, whatever right wing dynasty that was the most right wing dynasty that had ever existed like gets eaten from its own right. Like Daniel Smith replaced Jason Kenny as premier who was you know, probably the most right wing premier. Albert had had maybe ever since the days of Bible Bill aberhart in the 20s. And you know, I don't need to tell you who he is. You could probably guess from his name what he was all about.
- [02:47]
A
He's really into Islam.
- [02:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. But like this is, this is not going to work, right? It is. I mean it might work politically in some sense for Smith, but like a province can't just unilaterally leave the federation even if there is a majority vote in a referendum to do so. Which you know, there would never be. There will never be. That's not what will happen with this. Because the overwhelming majority of Albertans, even those who don't like the federal government want to stay in Canada. And what's even crazier about all this shit and the fact that this shit is flaring up now is that the feds under Carney are quite literally saying like they are, they are rolling out the red carpet to Alberta. They're saying like you get a pipeline and you get a pipeline and you get a pipeline. And yet somehow the calls for Wexit only grow louder among the very small sect that is calling for it.
- [03:43]
A
So where this comes in right is that this is a project that is unpopular, it's encouraged by the United States and it is perfectly calibrated to make itself like a mind virus into something that is electorally possible because it will end up in our both sides is media. And then you know, the entire media argument outrage system will hyper focus on it. The 29% of Albertans that support separatism numbers likely to grow because the people who are just negatively polarized against Wokes or Trudeau or they like the truckers or whatever are going to fall in line along culture war, battleground. I think it's going to be closer than than anyone really expects. The reason I talk about it though is that it's a place where Carney is not meeting the moment because he does not understand Alberta separatism and the world that it is a part. It doesn't understand the the MAGA world. It's a part of the part the global revanchist right that emerged and the wreckage of the liberal society that fell apart in 2008 because in November, like Danielle Smith and Mark Carney did a David Cameron they met, he gave in to basically all of her demands specifically on energy policy, pipelines, carbon taxes, etcetera as you alluded to earlier, Luke, as the separatists claimed were their major gripes. And then she goes on stage and gets booed by her party anyway, she got them everything they said they wanted and she booed. He said, one lesson to be learned is that over and over and over again from the last decade, you'll never win over a constantly aggrieved political movement by listening to and accommodating their grievances because their identity is aggrieved people. It's white suburban idpol, expensive pickup truck magic. And Carney folded, right? He talked tough against Trump once, and it was funny to call him like a Marxist, Third world is Maoist, but he actually is, he's governing as a Stephen Harper, basically.
- [05:32]
B
Well, he was actually invited to join Harper's cabinet. Like this came up during the election. I think people kind of just ignored it. But yeah, like Mark Carney, you know, progressive enough to be invited into Stephen Harper's cabinet, possibly as finance Minister in the early 2010s. I mean, we should, we should say something about his, his Davos speech because I think it is important context for all of this. It's true that the speech, you know, had that section which I think is what everybody perhaps understandably focused on about, you know, taking, you know, we place the sign in the window and blah, blah, blah, and you know, the rules based international order was false and so on. But the thing is, if you looked carefully at that speech and especially the second half of it, what he could have been saying and what I think a lot of people thought he was saying was, you know, the old order is dead. And it was, it was riddled with these, like, moral contradictions and we need something new. We need, we need to like, preserve the things that were good about the liberal order by having middle powers act differently. The thing is, that is not what Carney was saying at all. If you look at the second half of the speech where he starts talking about the practical realization of, you know, like the, the, the praxis of these ideas, he goes on to talk about his own government's, you know, agenda and it's all, you know, trade diversification. Like we're, we're doing, we're doing an arms deal with Qatar or the uae. You know, we're, we're, we're subsidizing pipelines, we're doing tax cuts to restore competitiveness. We're, we're making the public sector leaner. We're going all in on AI and we're, you know, raising our military expenditure to 5% of GDP, which is, you know, is an astonishing amount of money. Just like that's all going to happen in the next few years. Hundreds of billions of dollars. Canada has never spent this much on, on its military. So what Carney was actually saying there was the liberal order is dead. And that means we no longer even have to pretend that like our conduct on the world stage especially has some sort of like it's informed by humanistic values or something like that. We don't have to think about that stuff as much anymore because we can't afford to. And that's very much the ethos they've embraced when it comes to their domestic agenda too where it's, you know, we can't afford environmental protections, we can't afford to have, you know, we can't afford to tax US tech companies, etc. Etc.
- [07:47]
A
It's because it's largely a managerial response to, not to the issues of the last two decades. It's a managerial response to Canada losing its biggest customer and needing to cut staff and get a new product and all this stuff. It's not a response to the system Canada's been working in. It's not a response to the way that how Canada is set up might be contributing to the fact that everyone's fucking miserable there. It's none of that. It's just we've lost our biggest customer and corporate partner. We need to make ourselves attractive enough to find a new one, then everything will be fine. That is the essence of Carnyism. In fact, in actual fact, it's fun to joke about it. I guess it's fun to joke about him. That's what it actually is. And you know, the anti American Stephen Harper is not going to be effective. I mean it's worth saying like put discuss before we get to Louis in the context of the previous election that it was heavily concentrated. 44 went for Carney, 41 for Poliev. With the NDP under Jagmeet Singh crushed to like six seats, this is largely down to negative cult polarization against the conservatives and the U.S. because Poliev, you know, spent years saying, hey, do you like, you like Trump but you're too Canadian to vote for him. You can vote for me, I'm him, I'll be your Trump. Me and him are linked forever. Carney won like Starmer, he went from negative polarization. Nobody actually cares about his project. Nobody likes it, nobody wants it. And the Conservative gains from the NDP followed the usual route of right wing gains from sort of traditional left wing parties which is retired or semi retired blue collar workers from extractive industries mostly white, mostly men mostly economically comfortable because they mostly have paid off houses and pensions and stuff like this. But they all say the identitarian madness of the left has gone too far. Ignore my pension, ignore my paid off house, ignore my giant truck that I drove in the trucker convoy. It definitely isn't $140,000 brand new Ford. That's actually the election math here and every pundit would describe the platform in a moment. Every pundit describes the new NDP that is much more confrontational with capital that's a lot more ambitious in what it wants the state to do and be for for more people and that's much more not just anti American but anti the world that America made. Let's say they're saying oh you're driving your traditional voters off into the hands of the right. You know stop me if you have if you've hear one before right.