The Paikin Podcast - Martha Hall Findlay: The Price Tag for Separation and Alberta the 51st State?

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Martha Hall Findlay joins Steve to discuss the University of Calgary’s new study on the economics of Alberta’s separation, how much it would cost Alberta to separate, estimates of up to $170 billion in the first five years, the difficulty of negotiating pipelines if you’re not part of Canada, and the smoother versus more “turbulent” fiscal possibilities.They also discuss Indigenous treaty complications, hiring 60k people into a new Albertan civil service, the possibility of Alberta becoming the 51st state, why Alberta would end up more like Puerto Rico than Texas, and the comparisons of the upcoming referendum to Brexit. Support us: patreon.com/thepaikinpodcast Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastSPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OhwznCIUEA11lZGcNIM4h?si=b5d73bc7c3a041b7X: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social Email us at: [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, everybody, Steve Paken here. Those of you who have watched this show over the past year will know that every other week we have a discussion about national politics called Everything Political with former members of Parliament, Tony Clement, and Martha Hall-Finley. Well, this week, Martha is going to fly solo for an extra episode because her University of Calgary Think Tank is at the center of one of the most important studies looking into the costs of Alberta separating from Canada. We'll dive into that report one-on-one with Martha Hall-Finley, coming to the center. right up on the Paken podcast. Delighted to welcome, flying solo this time, the head of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. There's Martha Hall-Findley joining us from out west.

Martha, how do we find you this evening? Oh, wonderful. Thank you. I'm glad. You're always in fine form. It's a Monday and, you know, lots going on. Life is good. Okay.

Just before we get into the details of the study and what you have discovered, let's just do a little background here. For example, how did your school come to do this study in the first place? Well, we, I mean, we do have some of the best economists in the country. We have Trevor Tum. We now have Tim Sargent, a few at Kent Fellows, and Tim arrived to take over our econ portfolio just in time for this effort. The government of Alberta asked us if we would take this on. and they came to us in June. And it was interesting because there were a few eyebrows, well, that they're asking the university.

They're asking the School of Public Policy. And the answer was, well, they could have hired a McKinsey. They could have hired, you know, Deloitte Bain, not to disparage any of those firms, but they're all consulting firms. And having the opportunity to do this, having the government ask us at the School of Public Policy at the university,

lent the whole, effort, an air of independence that was, I think, super important both for the government of Alberta and for us. And we said right from the beginning, this is a big vote of confidence, but we have to retain full, full independence from, you know, people wonder if the government's asking you to do that kind of work. And I have to say they respected that to the nth degree. they, everybody we worked with in the government of Alberta, we had to talk to people at finance and treasury board. We get some of the information we got from them. Um, there was an advisory panel that was set up to sort of take the report and then advise to the government afterwards and we worked with them.

Um, they too, complete respect for our independence. And, um, I think the report, super proud of the work that they did, Steve, the whole team. I mean, when we first took this on in June, I had to, you know, assemble the team around the table and went, I'm really sorry, but I think I've just ruined our summers. Well, you've anticipated my follow-up question, which, of course, is people are cynical and skeptical of these kinds of studies, and they will want to know. There wasn't a single moment where anybody from government sort of whispered in your ear, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you could really be helpful to us if. No. And I, you know me well enough. I wouldn't say that if it weren't true. What was very interesting was that they had this advisory panel,

it was sort of like a group set up to provide advice to the government after the report was done. But we actually worked with the advisory panel members all through the summer on the same basis, that if there's input and the input is valuable, we'll welcome it. We were not, you know, more than happy to take information and input from wherever that was going to be credible. contribute. The advisory panel is led by Jack Mintz. Members included Alex Porbe, who's now executive chair but former CEO of Sinovus, so brought an awful lot of energy expertise to bear Janice McKinnon, who had been the finance minister in Saskatchewan for a while, Adam Legg, who's the CEO of the Business Council of Alberta, Ted Morton, a former cabinet minister,

all people with incredible backgrounds and terrific input to, to provide. provide, there were a few moments with them. No shortage of pretty determined personalities on that advisory panel. And there were times when we said, thanks for that input, but we're not actually taking it. And they respected that fully. And so, I mean, we laugh a little bit at it now, but to us, it all speaks specifically to the fact that we didn't necessarily have to take all of the input. We didn't get the wink, wink, the nudge, nudge. And it's standing the test of time. The report came out. And of course, you have the separatists pick, you know, cherry picking some of the numbers. You have some of the federalists cherry picking some of the numbers. But no one that I know of has

actually questioned the methodology. No one's questioning that the numbers are legitimate, that they were somehow not, you know, true to the actual data and evidence that that we had. So, know, we did work super hard over the summer. But we're all really very proud of the result. Any people involved in the study who were openly and overtly, Alberta separatists? There were some comments from some folks that suggested that they might have been. the same goes for there were some who before we'd undertaken the study had been fairly clear about their views ahead of time but we just we drilled it into all of us we have to come to this

as impartially as possible and and i say too i i'm not an economist so i wanted to see the numbers i'm in alberton i'm going to be voting i wanted to see the numbers that this you know group of very talented people pulled together. I contributed some of the, some of the oversight from a political perspective, international trade sort of understanding of some of those issues. But, but it, it was, people really understood the need to just let's look at this

as impartially as we can. And to almost as a proof point, the, there were lots of headlines after it came out, $50 billion, if it's smooth. $170 billion if it's not smooth over the first five years. Well, I've had to remind people we actually went out 20 years, not just five.

We did those numbers for anticipated five year run. But then if you look at the, we did the two scenarios for people who haven't read it. And by the way, I highly recommend it. It's only 24 pages. There are hundreds of pages of technical papers that support it. But the actual overview report is not that long. but in any case we ended up with two scenarios because our mandate was only to look at the economic and fiscal implications. But we realized pretty quickly you couldn't do that without laying out what the potential contexts might be, right?

So if it's smooth. Hold off on that for a second. Yeah. Let's hold off on that because I do want to drill down deeper on those two numbers that you just gave. And that was the big headline that Alberta, separate. from Canada would cost the province somewhere between $50 billion to $170 billion over the first five years, depending on how easy or difficult the negotiations were. And I want to give people just sort of a deeper understanding of what factors go into coming up with numbers like that. Well, but before we do, I need to say that we did do 20 years as well as five. And if it were done

and it were totally smooth, you know, federal government says, sure, we'll help, not a problem, totally smooth scenario. After 20 years, we figured there was all actually a potential upside for Alberta, not huge, but a potential upside. And that was really important because it made it clear that we were approaching this with the impartiality and the objectivity that we needed to do. The 20 years out in a tumultuous scenario, really big, really big numbers, not good, right? So that was why we had to look at the factors. What happens? What

happens? What's, what are the constitutional? We weren't asked to opine on the constitutionality. We weren't asked to opine on the legalities. We weren't asked to opine on what was going to happen with the indigenous communities, but we couldn't actually talk about the economics without setting those factors in play. And hence, we had a smooth transition where the federal government says, sure, we'll help, you know, do all of this. And then other countries are, are quicker to recognize a new Alberta as a country. Or it's not so smooth. And Canada is not happy about it and does not want to, you know, play ball.

Then other countries are loath to recognize that Alberta as a separate country. And then you just have all of these, all of these snowballing effects of lack of certainty. Investment doesn't like lack of certainty. So less investment. All sorts of those factors. we needed to address just to set the context for the economic analysis. Now, presumably, whether you're trying to divine the future one year, five years, or 20 years down the road, you've got to make certain assumptions about what the price of gas is going to be or what you can get for a barrel of oil.

What did you land on for that? Well, we used historical numbers and we acknowledge that they were assumptions, right? you had to acknowledge where assumptions were being made. But one of the important pieces about the dependence on oil in Alberta is that, yes, it's a big industry for Canada. It's a really big industry, relatively speaking, for Alberta. And one of the things that some of the separatists have said is, well, you know, we'll just negotiate a pipeline through British Columbia.

We'll be able to figure that out. Or, you know, we'll get our American friends to help us build a pipeline down through the states out to the West Coast. And I just, whoa, wait a second. With respect to British Columbia, there's a little thing called, this is the lawyer nerd in me, right? 92.10A of the Constitution, which David, none other than David E.B. actually brought out a few months ago saying, after all, British Columbia does not have the constitutional right to say no to a pipeline. Alberta loses, Alberta becomes a separate country. It loses that constitutional protection, which, by the way, our prime minister, Mark Carney was more than half. happy to remind the Premier Eby about.

But then they get into, well, the Americans. Well, okay, we had two of the most recent American administrations, Obama and Biden, not terribly keen on pipelines. And then you have an American oil industry that has been more than happy to have Canada be its, have them be Canada's sole customer. the minute the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline came online, the price differential for the Americans narrowed significantly. We benefit immensely from selling to Asian markets. Americans don't want us to do that.

So they're not about to jump on this bandwagon to help Canada or Alberta build a pipeline to the West Coast either. So there's a lot of that out there. There's a lot of, oh, well, we'll just do this with the Americans or we'll just do this. And, you know, then you bring in the expertise of, you know, political expertise, international relations expertise, international trade expertise. It becomes a lot muddier. Well, let's follow up on the politics because that, after all, you as an ex-parliamentarian would have some views about that. There are at the outer edges two different scenarios. One, as you pointed out, Canada kind of cooperates, and this is a fairly smooth divorce.

the other opportunity or the other possibility rather is that this gets really ugly, really messy, and we have a hell of a fight for the next many years about it. Knowing what you know about kind of Alberta and the rest of Canada, which scenario do you think is more likely? So I refrained from that kind of comment while we were doing the report. I just felt it was, and we all did actually. And we felt it was just really important for the credibility of the report, for us to be able to say, look, we're just, we want to see what the numbers

look like, right? But I have to tell you, there is no way this is a nice, quiet, easy divorce. And so, yes, now I've seen the numbers. I can now bring my hopefully at least a little bit of informed view on whether this would be smooth or whether it would be turbulent. And my view is it would be super, super turbulent. It just, I cannot. I cannot see a Canadian federal government. saying, sure, let's do this. Remember, we have a Quebec election on October 5th. That'll have happened before the referendum. Very interesting.

The numbers are still showing the Parti Quebecois very strong. Canada, even if Canada looked at Alberta and said, here, you know, you can go. The last thing it would want is to set a precedent to let Quebec go, let Saskatchewan go, let the northern two-thirds of British Columbia go. because in all of those places, there are people who are frustrated with Ottawa, who are frustrated with,

you know, some of the regulations and some of the sort of, you know, keeping their, your, Ottawa keeping its thumb on people is how it's felt in other parts of the country. And so the federal government, it wouldn't just be for Alberta.

It would be, no, no, no, this is existential. There's no way we're going to enter this and make it easy for anybody. The other thing, again, we weren't asked to opine on the indigenous community's reaction, but I think we have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen.

And there's an awful lot of land in Alberta, an awful lot of Alberta's real estate is in fact subject to treaties with the federal government. So you're not really sure that there are a number, you know, a terrific number of indigenous communities that would really see a future with Alberta being better than the future that they have. with the federal government. So that could take years to, if at all, frankly. And we'll be back right after this.

Just to give people a sense of how complicated this could get, Alberta's what, like 8, 9, 10% of the population of Canada? Am I in the ballpark on that? Yeah, pretty close. A little more of its GDP. Okay, yes. No, fair enough. So as you're trying to figure out, if, for example, we do divorce.

And you've got to figure out, you know, is 10% of the national debt Alberta's responsibility? Or conversely, does Alberta actually own 10% of every Canadian forces base in the country? Do you have to put all of those different inputs into your calculations to figure out those numbers? Yep, that's exactly what we did. So exactly why we were so busy all summer. There are those factors, right? Does Alberta set up its own military? The assumption is Canada's military stays Canada's, but the real estate that the bases are on,

something would have to be worked out. But does Alberta then set up its own military? Does Alberta want to join NATO? If Alberta joins NATO, is it going to commit to the three to five percent spending that NATO is requiring? Alberta wouldn't have to worry about a Coast Guard or Atlantic fisheries, but it would have to set up its own civil service for a whole lot of services that are currently provided. by the federal government. Our estimate was that Alberta would have to hire almost immediately up to 60,000, 600,000 people to make a civil service that could now all of a sudden do the things that the federal government does. You know, there are lots of people who will say and have said,

yeah, but Alberta's probably, you know, would probably run a more efficient civil service. I wouldn't be surprised. I think they are, it already does from, from the evidence that we'd seen. But you can't just replicate all of it, right, without significant expense. What happens to the national parks, right? And if Canada does not rush out to make this easy, then international recognition becomes very, very difficult. And if you don't have recognition by other countries around the world, it gets really hard to enter into trade agreements and other treaties and aviation.

how we control aviation. We have aviation treaties in the world. We have all certain. Canada's party to thousands of treaties and agreements with other countries. Huge endeavor, for sure. And that's why the number is so big in the short term either way, even if it's smooth, because it's just a big number. If it's turbulent, then, as you know, as I said before, past those five years, it's, it gets really,

ugly. The team also had to look at credit, right? Canada actually, Canada and a couple of other countries are at the top in the global rankings for credit rating. Alberta on its own, not so much. And so if Alberta went on its own, all of a sudden credit would cost more expensive. Interest rates would go up. That would affect mortgages. So all of these things came into the effort. It's actually really fascinating. Well, let me quote some more numbers from the report because you do say a difficult separation could leave the Alberta economy more than 16% smaller after 20 years. Reduce employment by nearly 5% create an ongoing annual provincial deficit exceeding $30 billion. This is for a population of what, 5 million people, which is huge, leading to potential income losses approaching $12,000 per resident.

what percentage of Alberta citizens do you think would be prepared to pay that size of a price for independence? Well, I'm because of my own view now, now that I've seen the numbers and I really think it would be a very turbulent exercise. I know how I'm voting in the referendum and I know how I hope most Albertans will vote in the referendum. Our job was not to make recommendations with the report, but now that it's out, I can at least have my own opinion, right? What's really striking, though, Steve, is for a lot of people, this isn't about the numbers anymore, right? Like, people will, people people will, I was just actually down at Berkeley doing a talk on the comparison between the Alberta and Quebec separatist movements. And there's this assumption that, well, you know, Quebec has been about culture and identity and language and, you know, but Alberta is really about economics. I find there's actually a lot more similarity between the two.

And to me it comes down to respect. It comes down to how you're being treated, right? I was just at an event today, and there were people saying there are lots of people in Alberta for whom the price, no matter what it is for freedom and independence is worth it. These are people who read the report. What percentage of the population do you think it is? the polls the polls don't ask that specific question the polls aren't saying you know would you would you go at any price right the polls are more how would you vote how are you inclined to vote and and you know you pick the poll but anywhere between 20 may and 35 percent maybe right it's still less it's still a minority

um my my my hope is that the report will have enough solid numbers for people to to really, you know, added into their discussions with their families around the table, around the, you know, what would we do if it really did cost us $12,000? What would we do if our mortgage rates went up significantly? What would we do if, you know, Johnny and Susie don't have job prospects in Alberta anymore, right? And you see your kids moving away. then it becomes more, it becomes more personal and more emotional.

But right now, there is a lot of emotion without question. Does the report at all take into account the possibility that all of those adverse consequences could be mitigated if Alberta alone, not the whole country, but if Alberta alone were to become the 51st state of the United States? Well, if there was an elephant in the room,

that has certainly been it. Yeah. We do talk about it in the sense of helping with pipeline construction, for example, being more willing to have pipes. We, in earlier drafts, we actually went further on that topic, but pulled back a little bit on the basis that, you know, we could have pictured any number of scenarios, right? but the the polly the the polly side people the politically experienced the international relations

experience the historian experiences that came into the report people contributing it was almost resounding the view if if that were to be the case and alberta just said we want to become the 51st state um again there's a naivity there uh the view the view among almost everybody who participated in the discussions was that yeah but that would render alberta kind of like porto not texas and that that was would not be what albertans had in mind if they thought they would join the united states as a 51st state so it's just a lot more complicated um so it was there we sort of talk about it but we don't talk about it as much as we had in earlier drafts. Again, just because there was a view that if we were going to do that,

we then would have to look at a whole lot of different assumptions that we felt were already covered in scenario one and scenario two. Got it. Not surprisingly, the pro-separatist forces, groups like the Alberta Transition Council, say your study exaggerates the economic harm, which they think would be considerably less. What do you think they are missing by saying that? They're missing the realities of pipeline infrastructure. They're missing the realities of significant increase in a reduction in your credit rating, significant increases in borrowing, significant costs of setting up a civil service, naivity in terms of how the rest of the world would welcome an independent country, especially if the country it's separating from,

supportive. I mean, that just that's very, very difficult to do. And so my view is that there's, there's just an awful lot of wishful thinking in some of those analyses, which is why it was so, for me, it was so important that we had such good economists, but we also had others to really weigh in. We had the report reviewed by some eminent folks in Scotland, for example, having Scotland, having gone through, you know, a referendum process, folks who were involved in Quebec, people have often used the example of Brexit. We all agreed quite quickly.

Brexit's not a very good example, partly because the UK was its own country, long before it joined the European Union. Alberta, as a province leaving, is a very, very different thing. I think the one comparison is the Brexit, that David Cameron, the then prime minister said, yeah, sure, let's do a referendum. Almost it felt like this will let the wind out of their sales if we just let them have a referendum.

And I think, you know, there's a sense that that happened here too. And of course, it got away from David Cameron. And it feels a little bit like it's gotten away from Premier Smith. Okay. I do want to follow up on the Brexit thing, because even though the analogy may not be perfect, one of the lessons we clearly learn from Brexit was that there are many people. in the United Kingdom, and I suspect in Alberta as well, that value culture and ethnic politics and freedom and being in charge of your own destiny that are far more important to lots of people

than strictly how are we going to do on the numbers and what does it mean to my economic bottom line. And even in the United States, you have to say, there are millions of people who voted for Donald Trump, even though that was against their economic self-interest, but they did so because, you know, for example, they couldn't stand the identity politics of the Democratic Party. How much of that do you think is going on in Alberta right now? A lot, a lot. And what's so frustrating is that, you know, I'm from Ontario.

I chose Alberta 10 years ago for a whole bunch of reasons. It is amazing to me how so much of the rest of the country doesn't understand why Albertans got so angry under the Justin Trudeau years or even the Pierre Trudeau years. There's an awful lot of what's wrong with you guys. How come you're whining? You do well. But there absolutely was a sense of, and this is where the comparison with the Quebec separatist movement, I think, is valid, that there was a sense of Alberta owns its resources,

but we were being told that we couldn't exploit them. We were being told we had to shut it, shut them in. We had federal cabinet ministers going around the country, actively saying we should shut down the oil and gas industry tomorrow, right? You know who some of them were. You know, if I had turned around and said, well, okay, Ontario or Quebec, if the federal government came along and said to Ontario,

you can't expand your auto industry. if the federal government had gone to Quebec and said, you can't build James Bay because we're worried about emissions or because we're worried about this or because we were worried about that, I think it wouldn't be taken terribly well. And that's exactly how people in Alberta are feeling and have been feeling.

And so the fact that we now have a prime minister who clearly gets that there's an opportunity economically for both Canada and Alberta to embrace the fact that we have these resources and we need to be able to get them to the world, not only from an economic perspective, but I'm big on displacing Russia as being the oil and gas country

that's making all sorts of money these days. So I think there is an awful lot of emotion. There is, without question, people who will say, I don't care what it costs. I want my independence. I want my freedom. Um, it's, it's just, I, it's a bit naive because Alberta would never be an island, right? Mm-hmm.

And landlocked, but maybe not an island. Yeah. Right. Now that the reports come out, what, have you been able to gauge what kind of impact you think it will have on how people vote in the referendum in October? It's definitely helping the conversation. Um, and as I said, you people are, you know, you get some people chair. picking the numbers or people focusing on the five years instead of the 20 years out.

But at least they have something, right? There was a real concern before that people were just throwing numbers out of, you know, pulling them out of their hats and nobody really knew. So you bring some of the best economists in the country together and really, really dive into this. it has at least given Albertans that range to think about. And now with those numbers, they can then put what they're feeling emotionally into, oh, but is that actually worth me feeling a bit better?

Or am I willing to risk that even if, you know, I'd like to get auto off my back, right? So I know and that's a response we're getting. I'm so pleased, honestly, I made the mistake of reading it the night before it was released. And of course, you're doing that and you go, oh, we should have written it this way and we should have said this. And I think I found a typo. And I'm just going, oh, no, oh, no. I didn't sleep a wink.

But the next day when it, when it landed, it felt universally accepted as this is the best work on pulling the numbers together that. we could have asked for. And as I said, there, there, there's very few people questioning the methodology, very few people questioning, um, how we arrived at the numbers. They might cherry pick, but they're not that the report is standing on its own, which I am really, really, uh, really feel good about. I slept, I slept much better than next night. That's good.

There is this expression, though, whenever a report is written, who holds the pen on the report? not necessarily meaning who writes the thing, but who gets the final sign off on every word, every comma, every period that's in the thing. Who was that person? There were a lot of late nights for a good cause. Tim Sargent was the lead. He's our director. You would know him from the federal government. He was deputy minister of international trade.

He worked in the PCO under Harper's government doing a ton of monetary and fiscal analysis. super economist and really knowledgeable about how government works. Just coincidentally, he'd agreed to come to be the School of Public Policy's new director of economic growth and prosperity. He wasn't supposed to start until July. As one does between jobs, he was on holiday with his wife in Italy, and he dove right in. We had to move his start date up a couple weeks, and he started while trying to be on holiday in Italy. his expertise and his understanding of how you take government work and economic work and put it in a format that cabinet ministers can understand, that the public can understand. We worked really, really hard at that.

I will say that yours truly did spend a lot of time reading, not a small amount of time with my editing pen in my hand. as an example one of the things that I I worked I personally worked really really hard on and did a whole lot of editing near the end was to get rid of any subjective words so we didn't use words like optimistic or pessimistic or good or bad and I've had to correct people including the premier who said something about optimistic and pessimistic I said no no premier you can't use that language we worked super super hard to to remove what whatever opportunity that somebody might say, well, you weren't objective in this, right? So I spent a fair bit of time removing the wood is and the couldas and the, if you will, to really make it so clearly as objective as we could possibly have made it. And again, let's peel the curtain back a little bit here. When the government asks for an institution like yours to do a study,

there is usually an expectation that the government is going to get to see the study before everybody else and we'll get a special private briefing on what's in it from from you from Mr. Sargent and so on, Dr. Sargent, and so on. Is that what happened in this case? We actually had a lot of interaction and some people might say, ooh, but the interaction was always very professional and it was always constructive. As I think I said earlier, there were a couple times, you know, some strong personalities on the advisory panel, maybe wanting us to look at a little more carefully. You know, I can say,

because she's been quite public about it. Janice McKinnon was hoping that we spent more time talking about the effects on Canada, right? We did have some of that, but our mandate was the effects on Alberta, right? That was the mandate, and this report was for Albertans. And so we had a little bit of a tug there,

but not on the content in that sense. And we absolutely shared drafts as they went along with the advisory panel members, with a few folks in the government, finance and treasury in particular, because we were looking at Alberta's numbers, right? We, you know, pretty good source of Alberta's government numbers. It happens to be finance and treasury board. But that engagement was helpful to us and the work we were doing. And we did, we, we, I can't stress this enough when we, we really, really reinforced right from the beginning.

Our independence was critical. Our academic freedom had to be absolutely adhered to, respected. And it was. All of that notwithstanding. Would there have been potential for efforts? Absolutely. But no, they respected that. And I'm actually really, really pleased with that.

how it went. And were you content with Premier Smith's public comments after the report came out? Yes. I mean, she has her views about what she would like to happen with the referendum. Don't forget, there are quite a few questions. Yeah. And so she is certainly encouraging certain voting in certain ways. She has said that she is, she's encouraging people not to vote yes on the actual separation one. She is encouraging people to vote yes on some of the others and there will be disagreements about immigration and, you know, the Senate and electing judges and things like that. But those are different questions for different people to answer the way they, they feel. We're going to have one more question for Martha Hall-Finley in just a moment. But first, we want to

remind everybody that we are really delighted when, well, as many of you have dug into your pocket and thrown a few shuckles our way every month to keep this thing going. Patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast is the way you can do that. And one of the things that we'd like to put on that Patreon website is some so-called web exclusive video that you won't get to see anywhere else. We don't put it up on YouTube. We have it for Patreon-only subscribers. And one of the things that we've just put up there now is a new documentary. It's a new documentary series, actually. This is the first episode of which we're rolling out. It's called Canada Rewind, and we go back into history and share a short documentary on a variety of subjects.

This time, it's on the 1988 free trade election. The country voted for a conservative majority back in 1988, Brian Mulrooney's second consecutive majority. And so we got a free trade deal with the United States. Almost 40 years later, how smart does that look? Given the trade war, we're currently experiencing with the U.S. We explore that in Canada Rewind. It's on our Patreon page exclusive to Patreon subscribers. Once again, patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast. And of course, all of our episodes are available and archived at stevepaken.com.

Martha, I want to ask you one last question, and that is, I will tell you bluntly, I've had conversations with Albertans who are friends of mine who say, we're going to vote yes on the question of separation, not because we want Alberta to separate, but because we feel if we don't do that, we're sort of tying one of Premier Smith's hands behind her back as she deals with the federal government. How concerned are you that there's a lot of that going on in your province right now?

There is a lot of it. I'm hearing an awful lot of... By the way, I just want to say, as a happy Patreon subscriber, I can't encourage people more to do the same. Back to the report. a lot of people are saying things like that. They're saying, I want to vote yes on this one.

I don't want to separate, but after all, this is just a referendum to have another referendum. I want to send a message. And my answer every time, Steve, is one, you vote yes in this one and we go to another one. It could be years, because the indigenous question would have to be resolved.

It could be years of uncertainty. years of investment reduction, staying away from Alberta because of that uncertainty. And I also say, and you want to send a message to whom exactly? Because Justin Trudeau's not there anymore. He was hugely problematic. But the current prime minister is working very, very hard to turn all of that around. The current prime minister clearly gets the office. opportunity both for Alberta but for Canada in terms of our resources. The prime minister clearly

gets that there was real frustration before. And by working with the premier, by setting up the major projects office, I'm hoping there will be some more news about some progress being made in that regard very soon. But given all of that, given that we have a prime minister that's really, really approaching Alberta and Alberta's concerns completely differently, the message you'll send is more likely whining than anything else, right? I totally could get it. If two years ago, people said, we need to send Ottawa a message, I don't think that flies anymore. And the downside of uncertainty, years of this continuing, you know, to bubble would be very, would be very, detrimental for Alberta. You don't have to, but do you want to make a prediction on how you think

that question of the referendum is going to come out? Honestly, Steve, our bigger concern is turnout. Because there's so many questions, there's a worry that in particular people for whom English isn't their first language will be even more hesitant to go out and vote. I mean, one question's bad enough, a whole bunch of them. And so that could skew the results a little bit. If there's a 20% voter turnout, I think it'll be higher. The mail-in ballots, I think I just heard today, 680,000 people asked for mail-in ballots, which is very high. But if you had like a 30% voter turnout,

that 40% said, yes, we want a new referendum, another referendum, that's not a small number of people, but it's not enough to carry a referendum. the bigger question then becomes, how do our politicians behave? Right? What's the Premier going to do? Premier has a lot of people in her own party

who will not be happy, right? There's no question. Some of the leaders of the separatist movement are presidents of writing associations in her party. I mean, there's some real issues with the UCP. She's trying to manage that. But then what happens? What does Prime Minister?

Carney do. If he's too one way, it could alienate people more. If he's too soft, who knows. So I'm actually, for me, look, the status quo isn't going to work. Clearly there are problems. We have this election in Quebec about to happen. We've had this alienation challenge in the West. The status quo is not good enough. For me, the real work starts after October 19th. Hopefully, We do not move to another referendum, but we absolutely need to work on figuring out how to make this country better, right? It's, we're not that old. We're still a work in progress. We still have a lot of progress to make.

And so I see that as being the next really big challenge. And I can assure you there are a lot of us who are kind of itching to get at that. Let's figure out how to make the place work better. Martha, I can't thank you enough for doing double duty this week on the Paken podcast, not just flying solo tonight, but we're going to see you later in the week for everything political as well. So rest up, kiddo, and we'll see you again later this week. This has been great, Steve. Thanks.

And can I just say it's really good to have a show like yours. I always thought the agenda should have been national. You know that. But this show of yours, having an opportunity to have a Western voice be able to talk about some of the concerns, we just need to do way more of that. And so thank you. Amen. See you later this week.

Peace and love, everybody.