The Current - The Current Introduces: House Party — one big election question, weekly

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

Today we bring you a bonus episode from our friends at House Party, a pop-up election podcast answering one big, burning question every week. This week: Will this election bring Canada together or tear us apart?The West wants out, Quebec wants in, and Canadian unity turned into a campaign issue this week after former Reform Party and opposition leader Preston Manning claimed increasing numbers of Westerners — particularly Albertans — may see secession as the only option if the Liberals win. Yet in Quebec, Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet took the opposite tack, downplaying separatist sentiment and arguing Canada needs to be united in its response to Donald Trump’s tariffs. So is separatism really a ballot box issue this time around? Catherine Cullen in Ottawa, Jason Markusoff in Calgary and Daniel Thibeault in Montreal try to unite their three solitudes with an answer. Find more episodes of House Party here: https://link.mgln.ai/hpxthecurrent

This is a CBC Podcast. Hello. If you've been listening to our cross country election series with Canadian voters, we've been on a bit of a road trip. You know that the stakes are high in this election and our visit to Red Deer, for example, we heard from Albertans who think our very

country, the national unity that we take in many ways for granted in many corners of Canada is actually at stake in this election. We're not the only ones who are thinking about this. Today, we have a conversation from the CBC podcast House Party. It brings together perspectives of three friends and journalists from Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec.

They do a weekly deep dive into one big burning election question. And this week, that question is, will this election bring Canada together or tear us apart? Have a listen. Large numbers of Westerners will not accept a liberal government that acts the same way as the one that did the last in the last nine years. That is a warning about Westerners wanting out and it comes from Preston Manning, the man who led the Reform Party and formed official opposition for a while. On my other show, The House, he argued that if the Liberals win this election, we could

have a national unity crisis on our hands. So I've sort of heard this thing before in Alberta, but maybe not as often as Preston might have some Easterners believe. You know, it's not unfamiliar to me that kind of discourse as a Quebecer French Canadian, separatist Quebecer would probably agree with Mr. Manning. I'm Catherine Cullen, host of CBC's The House. I'm Daniel Thibault, host of Radio-Canada's Politico Show Les Coulisses du Pouvoir. And I'm Jason Markazoff, producer and writer for CBC and Calgary, Wanting In from the West.

And together, we are House Party, a weekly podcast diving into the big burning questions driving us towards election day. This week we're asking, will this election bring Canada together or tear us apart. Alright, we should be clear, when we are talking about national unity, we are most often talking about separatists, successionists, sovereignists, choose your s-word, sentiment coming from Quebec and from Alberta at least to some extent. So Jason and Dan, how much do you think this question of the country coming apart or staying together is really on the ballot? Jason, I'll start with you. Getting a lot of echoes of 2019 in this. That was the first reelection, second term win for the Liberal Party. People were not happy at West with the way the pipelines had panned out in

Alberta, the way that oil sands was struggling and people were really, really ticked off at Liberals. And Liberals lost all their seats in Alberta, all their seats in Saskatchewan. They lost the popular vote, yet they still won government because they formed so many seats out east and thus form what we call the Wexit movement, kind of a portmanteau of western exit with some people in Saskatchewan, some people in Alberta, but it was some. You could feel 100 or so people, 200 people maybe in a room in Regina and Calgary, in Edmonton. It never really reached a fever pitch. It got a lot of attention, but it didn't go anywhere, go very far.

So the question is, do we get another Wexit movement and does it have any chance of being higher than what it was when a quite detested Trudeau government won no seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan? It's interesting because it's usually in my side of the country that you hear that kind of vibe or growling and separation right now and sovereignty is not even remotely close to being top of mind. To most voters I'm talking to, the question hasn't been raised, the Bloc Québécois is not talking about it that much.

Yves-François Blanchette, earlier last week, even said so himself, you know, this is something like, yeah, people are worried about the economy, but they're not willing to talk about that right now. We'll talk about it at some point. We'll talk about it once we've negotiated a new deal with the U.S. and then we can move on, as if it's going to be on the back burner for a while. And so to hear that kind of vibe from the western side of the country, it's pretty interesting. It's usually on my side. Yeah, it's kind of counterintuitive in a way to be talking about it at all, at least in some parts

of Canada, because what we've been hearing on the federal level for so long is this idea of Canada needs to come together, Canadian unity, right? This, the whole elbows up sentiment, I don't know to what extent the Liberals have sort of tried to make that theirs by having Mike Myers appear in ads with them. But I mean, there's a kind of patriotism happening in the country right now that we keep hearing over and over, people have not seen in their their lifetimes. So to be talking about this secessionist or separatist sentiment is a bit of a surprise. I do want to talk about how big the numbers are, like how significant is this, but Jason, what is it that fuels this sentiment? Why do Albertans in particular talk about wanting it? Well, if we want to go back to the 1930s and the

crow rates that were charged on something or other. But this is a long, deep-seated frustration that people have had, like 100-year-old editorial cartoons with this big cow representing Western Canada and liberals and Ontarians milking that cow. So there's been this long perception that agriculture, oil products are produced in the West and provide so much prosperity and revenue for this country and it's just leached away by Eastern governments.

And what's added to that over the last few decades, especially in the last maybe 10 years of liberal rule is the climate movement. That the climate movement is this either ulterior motive or well-meaning, well-meaning way to actually suppress the oil prosperity in the West for the sake of Braden-Tunberg, David Suzuki, you name your green antihero and basically pooch the West. It feels like a bit of an attack on Alberta, right? And full disclosure here, my in-laws are Albertans. I go to Edmonton quite a bit every year, a couple of times a year. So I hear this concern, I hear that.

I was wondering something, and maybe Jason, you can tell me that. The oil produced in Alberta not being sold on the eastern side of the country because of the east-west pipeline that never happened. It was repeated to me several times, you know, if we could do that, it feels like the sentiment would be better towards the rest of the country. Is that a reasonable take to have? I think that comes up a lot. There was this big push by the same company that was building Keystone XL

to build this energy east pipeline in the 2010s or so. And that would have been this big dream. And I think that this dream is being resurrected a bit now, even Carney is talking about it a little bit, to bring oil, to bring gas across the country, this big national idea. We have so much north-south trade in this country, including on electricity, including oil, so many other products, but there's not much East-West. And there was this plan, of course, who blocked that plan, who was the big rock in the way of that stream, was Quebec.

Yeah, it was Quebec. It seems like there is, and then you tell me this, Daniel, that, I mean, has that sentiment softened? I mean, is there more permissibility, more social license for oil and gas now in this weird moment we have with this whole first aid thing in Quebec? You know what? There's definitely an opening. And that's what's interesting because the whole crisis and what's happening with the States, you've mentioned Carney, Poirier, both talk about it. Francois Legault in Quebec opened the door saying, you know, I'm willing to have the conversation.

And that in itself is a huge shift if you compare to what was said three, four years ago about the energy pipeline. So there is still a long way between now and the opening of a pipeline, but there's a willingness to have the conversation because of the crisis, because of the dependency on the US oil and the US infrastructure.

So there might be something there. Is that going to make things better for national unity in the short term? Not sure. There's one part of this too that I'm trying to make sense of. I mean, we talk so much about the idea of Western alienation and I understand to the extent that somebody who's lived most of her life in central Canada can, the feeling that the feeling is different, you know, when I've been in Alberta, when I've been in British Columbia. Yeah, there is a sense of being apart from the rest of the country. But when we talk about Western secession, and you actually look at the numbers, let's take,

for instance, a recent poll by Angus Reid, where they have 25% of respondents in Alberta saying they would vote to have their province become an independent country, 20% in Saskatchewan. But British Columbia is still in the West. Their numbers are down at 9%, 7% in Atlantic Canada, right? That's within the margin of error. Manitoba, I know folks there get frustrated sometimes when they wonder whether they're getting lumped into all of this. Like, Jason, when we say Western secession, who are we really talking about? Well, and that's a funny thing. When you hear people like Preston Manning talking about this, entering the conversation, he wants to insist we're not just talking about Alberta, we're talking

about Saskatchewan, and we're talking about British Columbia, and we're talking about Manitoba, and maybe even parts of the North, and that's because they think that size matters, that at a critical mass of people, a wide range of people bringing this great Western Republic together might be more powerful. I hear that from a lot of the Western separatist rhetoric. They imagine that there'll be enough conservatives from parts of of Manitoba parts of Saskatchewan northern BC they think of as an adjunct of Alberta that they'll all come together and support it but 25% being the high the high mark for Alberta that means that 75% of a you know roughly don't want it

and let's also look at what Angus Reid polls and other polls are saying 30 some percent support for the Liberal Party. So there are more people who want the Liberal Party to win this election and will vote for the Liberal Party in Alberta than are saying, we want out. One interesting thing I found when I was looking at those numbers out west, the same numbers in Quebec, separatism in Quebec is always hovering around the 30 percent mark. It's not moving that much except for those big surges in 1980, first referendum with

René Lévesque, 1995, second referendum. And then after that, it just goes back down. Is there any reason for Quebecers right now to try to fend that flame more? Not sure at all. Doesn't feel like it anyway when you talk to people. It doesn't have to be though like a yes-no Dichotomy is I guess what I wonder about in all of this like you look at what Preston Manning is arguing this started with a piece that he wrote in the

Globe and Mail in which he warns that the next Prime Minister of Canada if it remains Mark Carney Would then be identified in the history books tragically and needlessly as the last Prime Minister of a united Canada We've just acknowledged the numbers don't seem to support that. Mr. Manning's argument is, you know, you can't know what's going to happen on the other side of an election and things would get worse. But if we take away that sort of extreme scenario, what I'm really interested in is how as a country do we sort of sort out a bit of a festering feeling of resentment, things kind of pulling apart at our national unity in Alberta. How do we get better at addressing that even if we're

not looking at this absolute worst case scenario? And I don't want to put all the questions today on you, Jason, but you're the one here's probably best positioned to try to tackle that. So here's my solution for a scroll. It's a fraud situation. And it's, you know, they have the bit of this built in advantage to conservatives that almost no matter, you know, they don't have to do anything to ease those tensions. They just win and people feel comfortable with them. They feel like they're the home team. They feel like they have their voice because, you know, if the conservatives form government, they'll have 30 some high 20s

number of seats in Alberta and they'll have almost all the seats in Saskatchewan a lot of seats at west they'll have that voice that matters a lot. There were moments that the voters out here still hang on to they don't they don't really talk about in favorable terms about Trudeau buying the Trans Mountain pipeline or, Help me out with that one. That's so weird. Because in the rest of the country, it's like billions of dollars for something. It hurt him in the votes.

People who are ingrained to think about Trudeau in the negative, and there are generations of people who do, because they think about his father, the National Energy Program still gets brought up a lot, even though it's 40 some years old now. But these opinions are built in so they may discount that what they'll discount the Trans Mountain pipeline and they'll focus on the Northern Gateway pipeline, the other pipeline to BC that was cancelled. They talk about the tech frontier oil sands mine up north in Alberta that was cancelled under the Liberals or the energy ease pipeline we've already talked about. They'll focus

on that that sort of stuff. There was one point, I think it was 2016 or 2017, pretty early in Trudeau's tenure, where he was asked a question about phasing out the oil sands. And he basically played ball with it. And people always talk about him talking about that he wanted to phase out the oil sands.

And the funny thing about that is that people, that phase out means gradual over time. But people sort of took that here to meant that he wants to get rid of it ASAP. And that sort of bitter mentality went out there. So we'll see how, if Carney is able to avoid poking the bear like that. So far, you know, he hasn't,

but then I listened to that, what Preston Manning said in that interview, and he just hand waved it all away. Oh no, he's not going to do those things. I don't believe him. Wouldn't the Liberals have done those things years ago? Now Carney comes in and his white horse saying they will. You know what the paradox in the transmittal pipeline is that it hurt him in Alberta and

it hurt the Liberals in Quebec as well. It played super badly in Quebec because they were seen as not pro-environment and that was the agenda they pushed so hard in 2015 and so when it comes to 2019 they actually lost seats because of that so it was originally a good idea I guess that just didn't play well on any side of the country. Okay I'm wondering Dan what you think about this. Pierre Polyev is not leaning in to what Preston Manning is saying, even though if he gamed it out, if people in Atlantic Canada and Central Canada listen to what Preston Manning is saying, they would choose to vote conservative because it would be to the benefit of the country.

Why isn't Pierre Polyev running with this or even really like touching it with a 10-foot pole? I wonder that myself. And I think the the conclusion is he feels like it's a bit of too much of a hot potato and that doesn't give him the traction that he needs to reach out to some more centrist voters in Eastern Canada, so in Quebec and Ontario. I don't think that would play well for him in Quebec. I'm not sure if it would play well for him in parts of Ontario where he's hoping to get some seats, gain some seats. And so as for other topics during the this election campaign, it's a bit of a balance exercise for the conservative. How do I keep that going in one part of the country and minimize the impact on the other side of the country. And that's the way I see it. It's probably why you didn't hear him grab onto that too much.

He's trying to avoid some stronger stuff coming from the States as well. He lets it hang out there, but he doesn't comment directly. He doesn't answer the question directly. So he doesn't wear it, but he benefits from it. He doesn't want to wear it. Yeah, exactly. In this case, Pierre Pauliab was asked directly about what Preston Manning said, and he said,

no. And I do think if you want to be prime minister of the country, to some extent, you do have to be something of a Captain Canada, right? So I don't think you can be seen as saying at this moment of unity, if you don't vote the way I want you to, the country could be at stake, right? That's not a great look for a prime minister. Do other of you think that people in Ontario will take what Preston Manning says to heart, that they will say, ooh, we don't want this national unity crisis?

When we did this interview with Preston Manning, some of the loudest feedback we got was from people who were saying, I don't understand why you would put that opinion out there. We also in the interview quoted a professor from the University of Calgary, Lisa Young, we had a clip of her where she said, this isn't healthy in a democracy. Democracies require what's called loser's consent. If you lose, you say, okay, we'll try again next time. And I think that this idea that the fundamental question at the heart of this is should someone

in any part of the country, I mean, it's easy to say downtown Toronto, but pick rural Nova Scotia too, anywhere else, should they say to themselves not, what direction do I want Canada to go in at this moment? What kinds of policies will make my life better and the lives of people around me? Or should the decision be, hmm, could be bad for the rest of the country if I don't do what some portion, and as you guys have noted, not the majority, but some portion of Albertans would like.

And so I don't know that it resonates in terms of actually influencing people's votes, but I am fundamentally very interested in this conversation about how effectively we are hearing one another in this country and trying to find ways to talk to each other, even when it's difficult. Because that, I mean, if that is not the theme of the political moment that we have been living through for years now, I don't know what is. And, you know, I'm glad to have these conversations. The extent to which it's actually gonna drive, frankly,

even a single vote is less clear to me. Aren't we in a moment right now where there's a bit of a consensus around the country about the way we're going and the way we should be going? It feels like that. I mean, I've been covering politics for 20, 25 years now. It feels like everyone is, like there's a threat coming from outside and everyone is rallying behind the, okay, we need to protect the country.

Despite the conversation we just had, it feels like a majority of Canadians are all on the same side. And that to me is probably one pretty good way to try to solve the divide between one side and the other. And even the policy positions, like, yeah, rally around the flag, but look at the policies that are being espoused by the two leading parties, energy corridors. Everyone agrees, yeah. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like knock me over with a feather that we are all talking about the importance of inter-provincial trade barriers.

I just cannot believe that this is like this mania that has swept the nation, but like people will talk about that at Tim Hortons at the local coffee shop now, but like how do we make ourselves more powerful as a nation when Trump is attacking us on a lot of these principal issues, getting more resources to market. There's pretty broad agreement. I mean, even tax cuts, right? Like there is a lot in terms of the direction that at least the main party leaders want to go in that does seem to represent a consensus. I mean, there's a lot of flag waving in Alberta now too, a lot of, you know, people are looking for those Canada flags on different products in their grocery store, looking for the Made in Canada stuff.

So there is that pride. And there, you know, in a normal situation, people might be looking around at all these politicians from the progressive side, and in Quebec, talking about pipelines more favorably, talking about East-West energy corridors, but there's been a skepticism, there's been a skepticism bordering on cynicism built in. And there's something that, I mean, the separatism is, it's an interesting separatism because it's a conditional separatism out West.

It's an if-then separatism. If Poliev comes in, it's totally fine. But if true to, if Karney and, true to liberals, I'm just saying, but that's the way people feel about it here. Get in, we want to talk about going out. Dan, like, is that a thing? Is there an if then separatist movement? Or are they just people who want, believe firmly in Quebec out?

It's interesting because I was thinking about that as I was listening to your answer. I think there's a bit of both right now. There's the, there's the hardcore separatists. They're there, they've always been there, they feel like they've been denied their dream 30 years ago and they're still hoping that there's going to be another moment where they can give it another shot. And then there's, you might remember a few months back, the perspective of a Poirier-of-majority government fueled some conversation about that may trigger a bit of a Poilier majority government fueled some conversation about that may trigger

a bit of a backlash on the Quebec side and that may be the catalystic moment that the sovereignists in Quebec were looking for to say, see we just don't recognize ourselves in that kind of government and that's one reason to go at it again and see if we shouldn't be our own separate country. Is there a Quebec Preston Manning saying that? No, you know what? It came from a couple of guys in Ontario, I think originally, in an English magazine. And then it was picked up in Quebec and it played a bit.

And I think the Severnists even tried to push it a little bit and see if there's a case to be made in an argument. The PQ, the Bloc is not super big on that right now. They're more trying to fight for the, you know, interest of Quebec on the federal level. The PQ, who's doing quite well in the polls in Quebec right now, I've been trying to put that forward, but with mitigated success, I'd say. I wonder, like in Alberta, the sentiment seems to be so much a reaction to certainly Trudeau, the Trudeau name, even though obviously he's out of the picture now and this Trudeau liberal, whereas Dan, my sense is that in Quebec when

we see a sovereignty sentiment flare up, it's less about specifically who is prime minister, but more in reaction to a sense that the country is being taken further to the right in a way that doesn't align with the sort of large political perspective of a lot of Quebecers. The original reaction that I was talking about was definitely that and then there is the feeling that they're getting treated unfairly on culture or language or anything that's very specific to Quebec and that's usually the that usually starts or fuel the conversation. Well I mean like Stephen, we saw Stephen Harper sort of trying to manage this in a way right because while some of the frustration perhaps within Quebec was

about resource management and is this a country that is becoming too much from the perspective of some Quebecers and the province does have a stronger environmental streak than some others, you know is this country that a country that is too much beholden to the interests of the oil sands? You also saw Stephen Harper acknowledging Quebec as a nation and he had that misstep where he seemed to attack Quebec cultural industries during one of his first election campaigns and he spent the whole rest of his time as Prime Minister basically trying to to make nice around all of this. I wonder Dan, can you, why is it that the PQ, the Parti Québécois, provincially, is still doing so well even though this Sovereign Test sentiment on a provincial level seems to be dying

down? Okay, so let's go back to when you look at the polls, the latest polls I looked in Quebec, we talked about the separatist sovereignty in Quebec always being at about 30 percent, it doesn't move that much up and down the titch. The voter intention for the PQ right now are much higher. So it's not seen as a willingness to separate, but more as a place to park your vote because you're just not comfortable with the government, with LACAC and François Lagault right now. There's not a very strong opposition. The Liberals are still looking for a leader in Quebec.

They'll take care of that before June, if I'm not mistaken. So we'll see if it changes the dynamic. But right now it's really people have parked their votes with the PQ. It's a bit of a protesting. They're not happy with the CAQ. I don't think tomorrow morning there's going to be... Say there's a PQ government, it would be a hard sell to have a referendum right away and try to win it. And for folks who aren't in Quebec, La CAC, it's the coalition Avenir Quebec, it is that that's the party that's governing right now.

Also you guys have PPSP, I really, I love, you gotta love the whole... PSP, Paul Saint-Pierre, Plamondon. You have to put the letters in the right order. Who is, that's pretty crucial. And he is the leader of the Vertu-Québécois, not to be confused with YFB, who is the leader of the BQ. Oh my goodness, Jason saved me from myself. We also call the GND Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the guy from Quebec Solidaires.

I covered him when he was a student leader and he is retiring from politics right now. And it is killing me. I've never felt so old in my life. Yeah, we have a thing for an acronym in Quebec. We haven't talked about Danielle Smith in this conversation amazingly. This is actually a new record for the longest I've gone on air without mentioning Alberta Premier's name. It's going to be interesting to see where she goes after this. I mean, she was the one before Preston Manning got out there saying that we could have a

national unity crisis if Alberta's needs aren't met. She's talked about doing what Jason Kenney did when he was premier back in 2019, having this fair deal panel going around the province. This would, of course, recommend that Alberta get its own pension, get its own police force. And irony of ironies, guess who was chair of that fair deal panel back then? A guy named Preston. Okay, if we are all the way back around at Preston Manning now, that reminds me, Jason, you haven't solved national unity yet.

But I give my pitch, we're going to listen to each other a little bit better. Jason, what do you think? I think part of it has to do with remembering these national sensitivities, these regional sensitivities. Don't talk about phasing out the oil sands maybe even if some people, progressive people really want to hear it and think it in their hearts. It plays differently at West and it will be remembered for decades and other politicians might remember that if they want to solve nationally, if they want to help national unity, it may not help to inflame some passions back home. Yeah. You know, if I'm not gonna talk badly about the oil and then let's make sure we recognize

the cultural differences between both sides of the country and then maybe if we both do that We may get to some common ground there and you know, it's been going pretty interestingly in the past month or so Funny enough because of Donald Trump I don't think we want to keep Donald Trump forever just to keep national unity going but there's there's something There's something to be learned from that. I think a national conversation, listening to concerns from one side to the other and trying maybe to move forward on a couple of projects like Energy East and

things like that might go a long way. And I'm just saying, how about maybe like a Ottawa-Emington Via Rail rapid line? Oh, that'd be nice. You know, I go back rapid line. Get a seat in the middle. That'd be nice. You know, I go back there quite a bit. I would take that. I think the three of us just need to find a way to sit down and have a beverage together.

That's my personal vote. But listen. Whereabouts though? In the middle? This is fair enough. We're going to figure this out. You know, Manitoba's not getting enough love. Let's go to Winnipeg.

Let's go to Winnipeg. Listen, guys, this was fun as always. And the campaign's not over yet. Let's do it again next week. Sounds good. I feel united. Okay, that is it for House Party this week. Thank you so much to my co-hosts Jason Markossov and Daniel Thibault and thank you to our wonderful

production team, Caitlin Crocker, Jennifer Chevalier and Carla Hilton. Be sure to give us a follow in the podcast feed for The House so you can catch both House Party and my other show, The House, every week. That's two shows in one feed. The House will be with you on Saturday and House Party will be back next Wednesday with another big Bernie election question.

If you like that episode, House Party is brought to you by the makers of The House. You can search The House on your favorite podcast app and give them a follow. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.