¶ Alberta's "Slopaganda" Phenomenon
Canada Land, funded by you.
Hey, it's Sam Connor and today we're talking slop and politics.
Slobotics?
I made a match. Yes.
Yeah.
This week YouTube accounts pumping out hours of fifty first state content.
The western provinces have made a huge wave.
Something absolutely unprecedented is unfolding a couple of
Alberta bypassed barriers that no longer serve the national interest.
Do you think it is possible?
Alberta to be
Absolutely.
Possible.
If you were in their shoes, would you keep playing along? Or would you finally say enough is enough?
All of this happening while separatist groups say they have enough signatures to get Alberta separation on the ballot, so should we be worried about the slop? That's this slop after the slop.
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¶ Unmasking the YouTube Propaganda Network
Every year, the Netherlands sends 20,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa for the Tulip Fest as a thank you for Canada leading the liberation on the Netherlands during World War II. We love our Dutch friends, and they love us back. Which is why it came as such a surprise to me to find out Dutch coarse selling grifters are operating an elaborate foreign interference scheme in Alberta.
Okay, maybe elaborate is a stretch. It's not that elaborate, but there is definitely something fishy going on because a handful of Dutch YouTube accounts and possibly dozens of others are pumping out Alberta fifty first state content.
The US angle isn't a cause of pressure, it's the extreme
Western provinces have officially announced their intention to become America's fifty-first through fifty-fourth states.
Western provinces moving towards a US aligned path has left Canada stunned. Stunned, I tell ya.
They're part of a network of about twenty accounts that have gotten nearly forty million views. The thumbnails kind of look like mister Beast with a lot of AI use. We have Mark Carney with his mouth hanging open like the scream. Danielle Smith who looks smug but a bit odd. And the videos themselves aren't perfect.
From Edmonton to Regina, the Atlanta Prosperity Project filed the question. We Potash, uranium.
Not perfect, but they are well edited. They're long form and they are packed with news clips. So
Should we?
Be taking this seriously? 'Cause if I think about the last fifteen years, I didn't think Brexit would happen. It did. I sure as hell didn't think that Trump would beat those nine other Republican nominees on that debate stage in twenty fifteen. He did. 2026, the year of our Lord, is different. It's the age of misinformation and deep fakes. My point is that anything can happen. And right now we are inching closer and closer to the question of separation on the ballot at a referendum. So today.
We're gonna be talking about what is going on in Smithlandia from Wexiters to 51st staters to court junctions to dueling petitions to answer the question: Is Alberta being influenced?
¶ Anatomy of Slopaganda: AI, Actors, and Deception
Foreignly?
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First up is Chris Ross, a senior analyst with McGill University who wrote the paper that studied these YouTube accounts. So come and get your slob.
SEE
Let's get into it.
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Chris, welcome to the show.
Hi Sam. Thanks for having me on.
So maybe just walk me back to the beginning. When did you first start seeing these videos? And what made you think, hey, this might be a bigger issue?
My team started looking at the videos we analyzed. about a month or two ago, a set of twenty YouTube channels and we measured them for like fakeness and inauthenticity. The twenty channels we looked at had forty million views in the past year. We saw that they kind of use the exact same title, scripting. Had like a very um suspicious amount of shared commenters. And the edited clips that the channels use to talk about politics were all identical.
It's not just another Canadian province. It's an economic superpower. And it's not just Alberta, it's not just Sask. Parts of BC are expressing interest.
I wanna say something that might sound extreme, but it's exactly what people in that movement are saying. Canada needs Alberta more than Alberta needs Canada. That's the argument.
So we found like all these channels had this network of inauthenticity and we measured them for like how they talked about politics. So they just talked about grievances that Alberta has to Canada and we saw that they're much more grievanced than real Albertan separatists and then they use those moments to slip in pro US annexation framings and just content that promotes 51st statehood.
Western provinces moving towards a US aligned path has left Canada stunned. Stunned, I tell ya, because the system that holds the country together is Has been breaking for a very long time.
And I noticed some of the content mixed in real people with AI stuff and it's just a real mismash of techniques used.
It's a mess if you're trying to learn about Alberta politics through these channels. Like it's pretty advanced the level of editing they do. So some channels have real humans that are voice and body actors reading the scripts, and then some are just AI avatars reading the scripts, but they're often reading the exact same.
And then some are real conservative or separatist influencers that they've just pulled from or real news clips.
Smith believes separatist sentiments were created by Ottawa. She argues it's up to the federal government to fix it.
Yeah.
Equalization is sold as fairness.
Yeah, these channels use news clips from like C T V, C D P C or Alberta influencers that are promoting separatism. So they kind of like put it all together in a bucket and mix it around. So it's it's kind of hard to navigate about what's real, what's not real.
Yeah, it's sneaky. You mentioned it's just twenty channels, but are there more?
So there's one big channel, the Canadian Reporter. Hello?
Hello, and welcome to the Canadian Reporter, your reliable source for in depth analyses and updates on the latest Canadian news.
Which has almost half of the views. And then we use that as kind of the template one to search for more channels. We put all the titles into it and then using scripts we searched YouTube for more channels and through that process we got hundreds. Mm-hmm. Um and we kind of just applied some some strict criteria of like similarity and content. And then I manually went through about forty of them just to see like, okay, do they focus on Alberta separatism?
Are they inauthentic? Because some are like in the middle ground and it's like hard to determine if it's like, okay, this could be a real person. So we excluded the maybes because we wanted to focus on these like genuinely inauthentic accounts. This pattern on YouTube is very widespread. We just wanted to focus on the channels looking at Alberta separatism. So the main one, the Canadian reporter, has this guy based in Pennsylvania that reads
My name is Andrew, and every day we work hard to create new videos covering the most pressing issues in Canada.
And he uses the news cycle of the day to talk about politics. but from this very grievance oriented perspective.
We're gonna make Alberta great again and that is when we cut ourselves off from the leech that is Eastern Canada.
Much more than Albertans or even like Albertan separatists.
So you said one of the channels had a guy in it that reads the script based out of Pennsylvania. How did you figure that out? Was it advertised as being in Pennsylvania?
No, thankfully the channel like the photo on it is just like easily reverse Google searchable and he has like a voice acting career. He has a website, LinkedIn profile where he's public about this channel and kind of being involved with the Wexit movement. But there's no connections beyond like that little blurb. with this guy. I watched all the popular videos on it. Some have like over seven hundred thousand views.
And when he's reading the script, he'll mispronounce and like miscontextualize things. So he'll say the Atlanta Prosperity Project instead of the Alberta Prosperity Project.
Alberta's referendum push is not theoretical. The Atlanta Prosperity Project filed the question, and it reads and I'm quoting from
Regina instead of Regina.
From Edmonton to Regina to Prince.
George. When he's talking about, you know, cities around Western Canada. So it's like some of those moments were red flags for me.
¶ The Business of Political Click-Farming
Yeah, and so I'm sure he's just one example of this and you can't generalize, but what would be his motivation for doing this? Is there someone behind him paying him to do this?
I'm almost certain he's not like the main person that's clipping and editing all of these videos together. I think he's just a voice actor. Which is unfortunate because I think like these political issues are they really matter. And if somebody's using it to like learn about Alberta politics, they're gonna get a very distorted view from somebody that doesn't care about the issue at all. And that speaks to like this broader
pattern on YouTube. I think the people behind the channels might also just be doing it to kind of a clickbait, engagement farm, that type of thing.
I think it should be said too that some of the videos look really good. They look professional to me at least.
Definitely. The report we put out, we use the word slopaganda. And like one way to think about it is it's a low quality content in terms of like the information they're providing, but the production value behind the channels like requires a high amount of effort. Somebody is watching a lot of news and clipping all of this together.
Then writing the scripts, maybe, you know, with AI helping them. Like we looked at the scripts and there's just so much of like kind of like AI talk where they say like that's not just this, that's the Yeah.
That's not a crank group. That is your neighbor on one side and mine on the other. And what I'm gonna say this plainly, I do not think that people are chasing drama for drama's sake.
Like it's ridiculous the amount of that type of speaking, but the editing of the channels themselves is a lot of work.
Well that actually brings up a good point because You call it slop again in your report, but to me there's slop and then there's like
Yeah, this is definitely not like veggie love island type slop. It's different in form.
Not to put down Veggie Love Island.
Welcome to Veggie Island. Our sizzling squad of ladies is rocking their hottest Say hello to Bell Pepperita, broccoli bellerina. Cucumberita and pumpkin ocita.
Clearly people enjoy this content, you know, like AI slot on the internet is massive and gets a lot of engagement. And I think like there's a real conversation to have about what people are interested in, like what they say versus what they do.
and like revealed preferences. But it is fair to characterize that these channels they're different in form. Like there is this high degree of editing and the content spliced in. Yeah. It has like a human thinking about it more and I think like in qualitatively different ways than Veggie Love Island.
If there's one thing I know about the internet is that things aren't often as they seem. And I was scrolling through some of the comment sections of these videos and it it really does look like bots interacting with bots sometimes. So I'm just wondering, is that does that ring true for you as well?
It's like dead internet theory.
Especially when I see that these videos have forty million views. Is there any kind of hint that maybe we're overreacting to this and these aren't genuine metrics?
It's a good point. Like I talk to people and everybody who I talk to is like who watches this and like who's actually using it for information. Um, which is a fair point. Maybe there's like people outside
the loop of Canadian Albertan politics that watch this just in the background and think like, oh, that's funny, but don't engage with it very seriously. That's definitely possible. I still think it's like worth thinking about in a serious way because of the level of engagement, like forty million views. And then there's some reporting
done by the C B C recently that like they're making some serious money on this. So If it's just like bots talking to bots, there's like this weird economy behind that where people are making money talking about politics in a very like distorted way.
Totally. Well, we've seen it so many times. It was but it was those Macedonian teenagers that were like running huge mega Twitter accounts that were breaking in money.
Story that stretches all the way to Eastern Europe to a small town called Vellas Macedonia, where Buzzfeed and the Guardian traced around a hundred domain names to this small town uh that are creating fake news. There's a young man. by the name of Demetri, not his real name, that's the name that he gave to us at NBC News. He tells us that he's made upwards of sixty thousand dollars creating bogus news headlines.
You see what people like and you just give them. If they like Water you give water, if they like wine you give wine. It's it's really simple what we do.
So who's behind these accounts, as far as you can tell?
Right. So the CBC reporting I was just referencing the investigation team, they did some good work and they saw that there's this kind of a like network of people that are Like just applying for jobs and trying to learn more about faceless YouTube, where people can earn passive income through this like highly templated um AI sloppy slash, you know, human editing type.
content and they showed that there's like these connections to Dutch or people in the Netherlands that kind of like give advice on how to like produce these channels.
We trace some of this activity to multiple people in the Netherlands, two of which took the same online course, teaching how to make money with faceless YouTube content.
So I thought that was very interesting. I'm not sure if that's responsible for like this whole ocean of content on YouTube. So it's hard to say More.
Yeah. I read the C B C piece and Did really seem like they were painting the d As the main actors behind these accounts.
There's a couple of the channels with the human voice actors that did have associated X accounts that were like tiny, no followers. And the Twitter like geolocation stamps for those, which is a mess, right? Like some of the geography tags on Twitter accounts, like they're not
a hundred percent reliable. I find this to be like a really interesting experiment. Yeah, right now. But those Twitters did have like the Netherland tags on it. And I think that kind of like got the ball rolling in the investigation.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a funny story'cause to me It has completely freaked out the Canadian media ecosystem.
Today on Deception Decoded, a stunning new report is out revealing a network of YouTube accounts with millions of followers targeting Albania.
Burton's.
Say they're not real and appear coordinated using the same scripts, the same clips, and even posting at the same time.
But when I was reading the C B C thing, I was just thinking that what this sounds like to me is some like twenty-three, twenty-four year old Dutch guys that were like, Hey, we can sell a course on faceless YouTube. accounts where we can just target places around the world that we don't even care about and we'll make a shit ton of money.
I think people are very twitchy and like there's this big concern about like a covert intentional political operation happening, which, you know, is like fair enough. Like there's a lot of geopolitics going on right now. The information ecosystem does really matter. Um, but yeah, I think like this particular case, the politics might be a byproduct of, like you said, just these twenty five year olds in the Netherlands trying to make bank, right?
I think it's just unfortunate that Alberta separatism is caught up in it because it's such a hot button topic. It's just so hard to not click on those thumbnails and um give revenue to them.
¶ Foreign Nuisance or Intentional Interference?
Is this content banal? Like what could this actually do?
It's a tough question. In terms of like what this content actually does and is it like making people pro-independence or anti separatist movement? I think It's difficult to measure if it changes people's opinions, but it has high levels of engagement. I think one thing is that just talking about this research and that there's like these actors on the internet trying to take advantage of this moment in Alberta is good.
And it's good to have this conversation earlier rather than a couple of weeks before a referendum. I think elections, Alberta, the government of Alberta and kind of civil society really needs to Step up and like prepare for this onslaught of slop that's nefarious and banal.
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Do you think this is foreign interference?
I don't think it's foreign interference how people generally think about foreign interference. I think the political influence is a byproduct of these channels trying to click farm and get engagement. So I think it matters, but it's not the clandestine, you know, spy network trying to cyop a Albertin's brains towards US annexation.
Like a foreign nuisance. More than foreign interference.
Yeah. I I think sometimes problems are more boring but more complex than people want. And that is unfortunate, but it's just the reality of how things work.
Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show. After the break, we'll find out where these nuisance videos sit in the ongoing telenovela that is Alberta politics. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Do you have a friend that started a little side hustle and now somehow sells custom beer koozies or homemade hot sauce or custom prints of JT and KP at Coachella watching JB? I used to think those people were so driven to have a side hustle and super technical and business savvy.
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¶ Alberta's Secession Debate Intensifies
Last Thursday in Smithlandia, Danielle had a press conference to announce a new website. On that website, a lot of information about the nine referendum questions she's putting to Albertans in October. Questions like: Should they restrict social services for some immigrants? Should the government of Alberta push to have the federal Senate abolish? How could a loving God allow such misery?
Okay, that last one's not on there, but also missing from those questions is a very important one, the question of secession. But that question of secession is likely coming, well, maybe coming. So here to break down the confusion is someone with separation anxiety of the Western variety, Jen Gerson from the line. Jen, thanks for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Word on the street is that you are particularly freaked out about the upcoming referendum and possibility of separation. That's what the people are saying.
Particularly like like abnormally? Is uh am I that's what am I being accused of being a hysterical woman here? Like what's what's the deal?
So nur
Oh I set you right up, didn't I?
Who regularly hosts this show mentioned this to me. Um, I'm not I'm a snitch. I can I can let that go. What's got you so worried?
Look, uh a lot of people are looking at the overall polling on this saying Look, 70% of Albertans want to stay, 30% of people wanna leave, even as this gets to a vote, no way possible. It's absolutely impossible that that that this will get to a 50-50 and therefore the whole thing will fizzle out. And I think they're not considering a couple of potential risks.
One is that, yeah, if you were to force every single Albertan who was eligible to vote, it would be 70 30, but not everybody votes. Only the most motivated vote. So that's your first problem. Second problem is election campaigns matter, and the question that's on the ballot is oftentimes not the question people are asking. So the question on the ballot might be something like should Alberta leave Canada or stay Canada?
But the question that people might actually be answering in their head when they check that ballot is Am I happy with the status quo? And when you look at polling measures of um internal alienation and unhappiness with the status quo in Canada. Those numbers get into the forty to seventy percent in Alberta pretty quick, depending on the kinds of questions that you're asking.
And then thirdly, the thing I just would point out is again, campaigns matter. Momentum matters. Organization matters. The separatists are very organized, they have a lot of momentum. And they have a lot of talent on their team in terms of just moving bodies to polls, messaging. There is a federalist side emerging that is going to pop up in response to this. And those people are also very talented and capable, but they're also running into issues on on their side as well.
The separatists are ahead of us. They're ahead of us by years, and that's a problem.
¶ Political Reluctance and External Threats
But that's natural though, right? It would always be the people that go against the status quo to act first and then the status quo to come back.
But there has been a slowness. to to coalesce and congeal on on what the approach is, what the messaging is, what the strategy is gonna be. People right now, I think, are just starting to figure out what the rules are around advertising or not advertising. And I think that especially when you look at the conservative side, it's a very fractious place. Um, Alberta is known for being a conservative province. A lot of people here vote conservative.
And there's been a real reluctance by mainstream conservative leaders, with the exception of people like Jason Kenny, to come right out and say the separatist side is is nuts.
So my message to Albertans is like, is this really what we want to emulate? Is this, you know, impoverishment, becoming a have not province, becoming a net recipient of equalization? Is that the model we want to follow? Because that's what this sterile, pointless political civil war has created in Quebec
Well also there's the there's the other thing that we talked about in the first half of this episode is i is the potential of interference coming from somewhere else, whether you want to call it foreign interference or just people elsewhere trying to make a quick buck.
Does that
Part of the story were you?
Yes and no. I think that right now that has been an overemphasized part of the story, that potentiality. I try to follow the evidence where the evidence has taken me and so far you know, I've been covering separatist movements, Wexit movements off and on, um, for, you know, ten years here in Alberta. There's nothing new about a separatist movement in Alberta that is not unique.
the players and the actors involved are well known local names. Do I think that it's possible there's some money crossing the border? Uh yes, that I haven't been able to report on that. I think that that's a possibility, but it's by no means huge amounts of money. And
To be blunt, I think if money has crossed the border, it's been spent already. So that's not quite what I'm concerned about. What I think might be a growing concern if this is announced that the succession referendum is going to go forward is going to be the types of uh interference that is very obvious and over the top. So we're talking
Donald Trump tweeting his support for succession in the midst of Kumsa renegotiations in order to destabilize his opponents. It's gonna come in the form of MAGA influencers buying bots or engaging in slopaganda on YouTube, which is very, very hard to track.
And so easy to do.
¶ Legal Battles and Counter-Petitions
So easy to do. But how effective is that? I don't think that's going to be the deciding point in a campaign. I think that the deciding point on a campaign is going to be the local organizers who are who are very much Alberta based and their ability to frame a ballot question.
Now the Alberta Prosperity Group, the group responsible for quarterbacking this referendum, says that they have enough signatures to get it on the ballot, but it's not on the ballot. So Why is it not going ahead?
Yeah. Okay. So basically because Alberta is a never-ending telenovela is kind of how I would describe it. So let's let's go back and start from the beginning. So last year you had Daniel Smith and the U C P pass uh changes to what was called the Citizens Act Initiative in order to lower the threshold for the number of signatures required to put a referenda before the province. Okay.
That was a choice that she made, knowing very well that There were groups active in Alberta at that point who had significant memberships who felt that they could win a petition to force a succession referenda onto the agenda. So that decision was made. I criticized that decision at the time, being like, that's reckless and crazy, but it was done anyway. Fast forward a year after some legal finagling.
And you have the Alberta Prosperity Project effectively forming a group called the Stay Free Alberta, which is a different um group or claims to be a different legal entity, putting forward a Elections Alberta approved petition to try and force a succession referendum. Upper.
We're confident that we're gonna you know we're gonna achieve our goal. We're gonna shatter our goal of 177,000 signatures and you know we're you know trying to do everything we can to get well over a million signatures before the 120 days is up.
If they get, no this is disputed, if they get about 178,000 signatures, then there is a process whereby their question will have to be approved by the legislature and then be put to a vote.
Ten percent of the voter base, right?
Ten percent of the voter base. That's right.
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The issue that's happening right now is as these guys went through that process and uh went forward to try and gain their signatures, uh First Nations groups in Alberta came forward and said, Yeah, wait a minute, you can't just
You take an attack on treaty, on one treaty, you're you're really attacking them all.
A lot of Alberta is treaty based land, guys. Like the treaties aren't made with Daniel Smith and with the UCP. The treaties have have been made in perpetuity by with the Crown. So you can't just force a referendum on on all of us without taking in treaty rights in consideration here.
So w where this has gone to right now is that a judge has ruled that there is a pending constitutional question about whether or not what the separatists are doing right now is legal. And they have granted an injunction not on the collection of signatures. So the collection of signatures can continue until May 2nd, which is when the deadline is.
But there is an injunction on Elections Alberta's ability to certify those signatures and move that petition into the next stage of the legal process until the underlying constitutional questions are settled. Now here's where things get even more complicated. It's not a legal question. Right? It's a political question. So even if the judge says, look, I don't think that this Cons Citizens Act initiative petition process is constitutionally valid.
you could still have Daniel Smith say, yeah, but there was a clear overwhelming mandate by the people. So we're still going to put a succession referendum of some kind on the ballot on October 19th.
And then to complicate it even further, there's a petition on the other side of this that Alberta stay a part of Canada. I don't know.
No, I don't no don't ask me. I can't know. So look, last what was it? Last year, I think, um Thomas Lukazak was a former deputy premier of of uh knowing very well that the Citizens Initiative Act was about to be changed to lower the threshold, he said, Screw you, I'll beat you all to the punch.
I'll get petition signature campaign going under the old rules of the Citizens Act Initiative. So he didn't have to get 178,000. I think he had to get twice as many, like 300 something, thousand voters for his petition.
For the last three months, roughly sixty five hundred volunteers have been door knocking and setting up shop everywhere from airports. Parks and farmers markets, all with the goal of collecting signatures. His group needs two hundred and ninety-four thousand of them. The petition asks, do you agree that Alberta should remain within Canada?
And he branded that Forever Canadian. And it was kinda like, do you choose to stay in Canada as opposed to do you choose to leave Canada? Because the framing of his question was different. And I think that he did this for two reasons. One, it was really a an attempt to show overwhelming support for staying in Canada. so that the separatists couldn't come forward and claim that they uh had more support than they actually did. So I th I think it was more of a a show of support.
We activated Albertans, they created a community, a movement. Often I heard them say thank you for giving us our voice back. So this was something I never expected beyond it. No, almost half a miljone signatures.
But I think that the actual reason for Lukazak doing what he did, he got I I think it's something like 16,000 canvassers for those signatures. So he now has one of the most robust. political machines in the province that can now be deployed in favor of federalism if and when the succession vote actually happens. Like that, I think, is the actual game behind the game there.
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¶ Smith's Controversial Referendum Questions
There was a press conference last Thursday where I'm not even really sure what Danielle Smith was announcing, but she announced something.
Mickey Amory to share an update on our work to manage Alberta's population growth and more sustain more sustainably and to strengthen our sovereignty within a United States.
Canada.
As you know, back in February, Alberta's government announced that a referendum will be held in October.
Right. Okay. So in order to make this all radically easier to understand and less complicated, and also to demonstrate the pure strategic new of the people running our province. Danielle Smith and her party decided in the face of this separatist uh petition, which was caused by their own previous legislation.
to respond to this by saying, well, we're gonna put nine referendum questions on the ballot for Albertans on a host of issues, mainly around things like abolishing the Senate and reducing immigration into the province. They somehow want to create a democratic mandate for their ability to do a whole host of things that Alberta conservatives have been wanting to do for a really long time.
even though they don't need a specific democratic mandate to do it. So all of the the nine re referendum questions that they are um putting on the ballot are all things that they have the power to pursue right now without needing to go to a vote for it. But because they needed to like throw a bone to their separatist base, they decided we're gonna put these nine really terribly worded referendum questions.
at Albertans to try and like deflect or diffuse or drive up turnout or drive down turnout on a succession vote.
Alberta Referendum 2026.ca provides a detailed plain language explanation of each of the nine questions, as well as facts and background information on how our province got to this.
At this point. And if she decides to put a succession vote onto the ballot in October, then there will be 10 questions in addition to the nine. It's going well. Everything's going well here.
Why were they terribly worded?
Do you want to read them? Read them.
Do you support the government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration, and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities? Oh my god, good lord.
Yeah, what about that isn't clear to you, Sam? Keep going.
Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their families use of health care and education systems?
Yes or no, Sam, yes or no.
Okay. Point taken. That's crazy. When does this tightrope end?
never ends. I've been doing this for sixteen years, Sam.
It never But I mean October's the re
Never. It w the ride never stops. The ride never stops in this province.
One question I had also, the videos that we talked about in the first half of this episode, they're very much fifty first state content. Very much America's going to take Alberta. The separatists must not take kindly to that.
¶ Factions, Canvassing, and Inevitable Vote
Well,
Look, the one thing that I think people probably don't understand a little bit about the separatists, and you can talk to them of yourselves if you want to, is that like the separatists aren't a unified, coherent political movement. There are elements and factions within this movement that do you want to become the 51st state? There are factions within this movement that are like, yeah, I don't want to like give up. I don't want to go from Ottawa to Washington. Screw that.
There are factions within this movement that are predominantly economically motivated, and there are factions of this movement that are religiously and culturally motivated, right? Like they want to create a kind of uh conservative monoculture state. Agrarian conservative monoculture. Like that there's no place for me in in the future Republic of Alberta, I can tell you that.
You can't eat a podcast.
can't eat a podcast and they don't take kindly to heretics. Anyway, so generally speaking, I think that the researchers who did the work on slopaganda found, and I think this this reflects my own more anecdotal reading of it, is that the legitimate people who are advocating for separation in Alberta really aren't talking very much about 51st state. They're really not that support, at least not openly. They're not, they're not really team
Let's become American. Just have until May 2nd to continue collecting signatures. After that they are cut off. They have to be able to collect a certain number of signatures within a certain amount like time frame. So it's 120 days. If they collect those signatures, I think that there will be enormous political pressure on Danielle Smith within her party to move forward with a vote.
And to be clear, they allegedly have NFC.
They claim to, but I mean there's no way for someone like me to verify that independently. And also the thing that I try to point out to people is I don't think the se the separatists are so internally factional that Th I don't think there's any way for them to know how many signatures they have right now. Right. There have been something like six thousand canvassers approved by Elections Alberta to collect these signatures, but that means
all of this collection that is happening physically, by the way, it can't be done digitally. It's all physical, but all of this is decentralized.
Every once in a while I see a photo pop up on Twitter of like a guy sleep on a park bench with a f with a little sign that says sign here.
Here and they're everywhere. They're everywhere. They're they're everywhere here in Alberta. This is the thing that I think people don't understand is that they There there was an assumption for a while there that there's no way that these guys could get the numbers because the lineups had gone away and the big rallies had gone away. But what hadn't gone away was these 6,000 canvassers across the provinces who were showing up rain or shine in my suburb, in my co-op.
uh at the library, like they're everywhere and they're out every day. They've chosen to make this bar crossable. And in doing so, they've introduced an enormous amount of political and economic uncertainty upon the entire province. And they've chosen it. They've chosen a crisis for themselves. So we have to operate under the assumption that they will put the vote on the table, and organizers can't afford to waste
two, three, four months while Daniel Smith rags the puck trying to avoid a decision. Like you nobody can afford to do that. And we have to operate as if they will.
Jen, thanks so much for coming on the show. Appreciate you.
Do I'm doing my absolute best.
You're doing great. I it's a lot to wrap your head around and I appreciate it.
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This week in Canadian politics I will see you.
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Tomorrow, Sam Greywell will be talking to Sabrina Nanji of the Queen's Park Observer about a wild week of Doug Ford coverage and the shrewd strategy behind his folksy. Uncle Doug, Captain Canada, media personality. Back on the federal politics side, we are always looking for scoops about Canadian politics. If you have a tip, Email me at sam at canadaland.com. Otherwise, just let me know what you're pissed off about, what you're watching closely, and what you want to hear about on this show.
This episode was written, produced, and fact-checked by our senior producer of Viva Lasard, myself and Noor Asvie, who is sick, but I think she faking it because the weather is so nice. I don't know. I don't know. That's just my hunch. Mixing and mastering by Caleb Thompson. Jesse Brown is Canada Lance editor and publisher. Theme music is by Nathan Burley. Additional music by Max Collins, our director of audio. Syndication is by UMFM 101.1.
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