I am writing this memo/email homeward bound to London ON after a 2-week speaking tour through Alberta and British Columbia in the company of Laura-Lynn Thompson, Jim Thompson, Sean Taylor, Kaylene Crash and the 2-man band keyboard/vocalist Eliseo Ibarra, drummer Michael Root, with Dr Roger Hodkinson from Edmonton joining us in part of the journey. We spoke to and engaged with Albertans and British Columbians in packed townhalls, churches, and theatres. This has been an exhilarating road-trip starting in Edmonton that took us in a southward bound journey through several towns, including Medicine Hat and Calgary, and through southern Alberta into BC’s interior from Cranbrook, Creston, Trail, Grand Forks into Penticton, Kelowna, and onwards on roads with the most spectacular and majestic scenes of mountains, rivers, lakes, and pine forests that our country has been gifted with by God and nature. I wanted to share with you my preliminary thoughts at the end of this tour.
It will take time for me to sort out the experience of these two weeks on the road and the people I got to meet and spend time hearing their views about the country, and how the lockdowns and mask/vaccine mandates of the past two years and counting have affected their lives. I want to put in writing my first impressions while fresh in my mind, the extent to which I have re-discovered the vastness and beauty of our country, of how much excited I have become with the possibility of change and renewal in Canadian politics due to developments once again in Alberta, and despite the alienation, anger, and frustration of so many in the western provinces with Ottawa there is an abundance of energy among the people I met who now seem resolutely committed to redress the imbalances of Canadian federation that people in the east have so blithely and for so long arrogantly ignored.
The past is never the past, it resurfaces time and time again in new settings and in new garments breathing new life to what seemingly had been forgotten. It should be recalled how western Canada took the news in November 1986 when Brian Mulroney’s majority government of PC Tories awarded the over a billion-dollar maintenance contract of CF-18 fighter jets to Canadair Ltd of Montreal instead of Bristol Aerospace Ltd of Winnipeg with a bid that was below that of the Quebec based company. Prime Minister Mulroney is remembered for winning two back-to-back majority terms by bringing together Quebec nationalists and separatists under his leadership and describing his political savviness as “you dance with those who brung you.” He had his dance, stepped down knowing his politics of con had run its course, and sent his party in a tailspin into oblivion in the federal election of 1993. The Liberals came back under Jean Chretien with a majority and the PC Tories lost their party standing in the parliament with only two members re-elected.
In catering to his Quebec coalition in that fateful 1986 decision of CF-18 contract to Canadair, Mulroney gifted to Lucien Bouchard, his Quebec partner and then opponent after the failed Meech Lake Accord, the role of being the Leader of the Loyal Opposition in the parliament while sitting as the chieftain of the Bloc Quebecois made up of Quebec sovereigntists in Ottawa joined at the hip with the separatist Parti Quebecois. In the western provinces the PC Tories failed to elect any member, as the Reform party surged from barely one seat in the previous parliament to electing 52 members falling short of three that would have made Preston Manning the Leader of the Loyal Opposition instead of Bouchard.
The Reform party was formed in 1987 soon after the CF-18 contract was awarded to Canadair. It was a popular protest party with roots in religious and social conservatism, its strongest support based in Alberta, and its leader Preston Manning successfully flipping alienation and separatist sentiments across the prairie provinces into the more positive and appealing slogan of the “west wants in” to set forth a platform for reform of the Canadian federation. It was a reform package for a triple-E senate (equal, elected, effective), balanced budget, and paying down the national debt that would acknowledge the equal role of the provinces in the federation that remains heavily weighted in favour of central Canada (Ontario and Quebec) with its double majority in both the House and the Senate. The emergence of the Reform party signalled the rising importance of Alberta in federal politics with its abundance of natural resources in oil and gas in a global economy thirsting for hydrocarbon fuel.
Alberta’s fiscal contribution to the well-being of all Canadians under any federal scheme designed by Ottawa in return requires, if not demands, a degree of sensitivity to the views of Albertans that has been sorely missing in central Canada. The federal arrangement for equalization payment, for instance, was written into the Constitution Act, 1982, section 36 (2). It states, “Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.” According to 2017 figures only two provinces, Alberta and Ontario, qualified as “have” provinces with each having fiscal capacity above the average of the 10-province standard; and Alberta’s annual contribution has stood in this equalization payment formula ahead and above that of Ontario in recent years that makes all the other provinces, in particular Quebec, recipients from Ottawa of payments as “have not” provinces.
In the period since 2020 with the “fake” Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdowns and mask/vaccine mandates, Albertans have felt the unfairness of Ottawa’s policies that negatively affected their province’s export revenue from oil and gas. But in a larger sense Alberta’s fiscal contribution as a “have” province to the federal government’s equalization payment scheme has been insufficiently recognized in Ottawa and by other provinces, and again in particular by Quebec, while Albertans are repeatedly made to feel their interests being slighted, ignored, or dismissed. Here again, we may recall that this is not a recent phenomenon of how the western provinces, and especially Alberta, have been treated by the federal governments elected by large majorities of seats won in central Canada. The 1986 award to Quebec of the CF-18 maintenance contract stands out, as it ignited the Reform party movement of the “west wanting in.” But we can go back to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s national energy program (NEP) of 1980 that went down very negatively in Alberta, and Albertans felt stiffed by Ottawa denying resource development and revenue growth in their province that belonged within the provincial jurisdiction as enumerated in the constitutional arrangement of the BNA Act of 1867.
But these frustrations of Albertans pale in the context of the larger picture in how Alberta’s development has been grossly constrained by the alarmism and near hysteria, generated by the left-wing environmental lobby and the adoption by the federal government of the UN Agenda on climate change. To rub salt in Alberta’s wound on this matter, the role of the Conservative party in the politics of climate change has been grievously hurtful to Albertans and their place in the Canadian federation.
Here, I will only note, the science behind the theory of “man-made global warming” that became the all-purpose “climate change” pushed by the UN-IPCC, is unsettled, flawed, and might justifiably be described as a pretext for dismantling the hydrocarbon fuelled modern industrial global economy for the presumed benefit of that smaller segment of the world population residing in the global north. Professor Richard S. Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 stated:
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into plausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”
Ottmar Endenhofer of the IPCC in an interview given in November 2010 said,
“We (UN-IPCC) redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy… One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore…”
And the man tasked by the UN to organize the first Earth Summit in Rio (Brazil) in 1992, Maurice Strong, a Canadian, who served as under-secretary to 5 UN Secretaries-General (U Thant, Kurt Waldheim, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Boutros-Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan) was on record stating,
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our duty to bring that about?”
Strong’s apocalyptic or cult-like Malthusian belief went back a long way formalized in the Club of Rome’s agenda spelled out in the Limits to Growth (1971) or the Brundtland Commission Report on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987). These have been the prelude to what is now become Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) stated goals presented in Covid-19: The Great Reset (2020) and are driven by the UN Agenda 2030 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This is the grand scheme or ideology, the Globalist Agenda, promoted and being implemented by the EU and those developed economies, such as Canada, whose ruling class has bought into this agenda of depopulation and deindustrialization via net-zero carbon emission policy of which the people around the world and countries of the global south are awakening and repudiating. The accompanying question to the “Great Reset” agenda of the UN/EU/WEF under the slogan of “Build Back Better” is that of the “Great Rupture” in global politics led by the BRICS-plus (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa +) countries and with it possibly the end of the US (petro)dollars as the world’s reserve currency.
But the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by Ottawa under Liberal and Conservative prime ministers with support from the rest of the political parties represented in the parliament have direct negative consequences for Alberta’s growth and prosperity. And Albertans have been awakened to this “ganging-up” by Ottawa and the provinces of central Canada and the Maritimes against Alberta and the western provinces. The awakening means Albertans have become increasingly aware of how greatly the Conservative party has deceived them through the past decades despite receiving their overwhelming support in federal elections when it came to protecting Alberta’s interests.
In Medicine Hat I hoped I would get to meet Tamara Lich, the Albertan perhaps most responsible for setting in motion the Truckers of the Freedom Convoy 2022 that arrived in February in Ottawa. I tried to connect with her, but I learned on arriving in her hometown that she was still in Ontario after her second arrest for breaching bail conditions. In Calgary we had a surprise. Pastor Artur Pawlowski came to the Southside Victory Church where we were invited to speak after he had won the leadership vote of the Independence Party of Alberta earlier that day, and he spoke ahead of us to a packed hall of highly energized and excited Albertans. Pastor Pawlowski stayed with us at the church for the evening and invited Laura-Lynn, Jim Thompson and myself to come over the next day for coffee before departing Calgary.
Pastor Pawlowski is a charismatic individual. He is tough, courageous, highly intelligent and informed, and has proven that he will not be intimidated in his mission as a Christian preacher and now as a leader of a party that has the potential to do for Alberta, and Canada, what Preston Manning’s Reform party tried and failed to accomplish. I was hugely impressed by the Pastor and the devotion of his family to him. The repeated attempts by local authorities in Calgary and provincial authorities in Edmonton to fine, imprison and shut down his ministry for refusing to abide by the government’s Covid-19 public health orders failed when the Alberta Court of Appeal, in July of this year, unanimously overturned those charges and ordered partial payments of fines returned to him.
I learned subsequently on meeting with the membership director of the Independence Party of Alberta (IPA) at another speaking event outside of Calgary that the party membership is rapidly growing across the province. I further understand the IPA is an out-growth of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), an initiative designed to unite Albertans behind its vision to make Alberta “a new Sovereign Constitutional Republic.” The platforms of both the APP and IPA are inspiring, and they can be found respectively on their websites: albertaprosperityproject.com, and abindependence.com.
Unlike Reform party and its subsequent name change to Canadian Alliance prior to merger with the PC Tories to form Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) in 2003, IPA is forthright in its objective of leading Alberta to independence by arranging a referendum for Albertans immediately after forming a majority government in the province. The membership of IPA under the leadership of Pastor Pawlowski is, as I gathered speaking with some of the members and with Dr Roger Hodkinson, fully cognizant of the hurdles ahead, of the requirements of Clarity Act of 2000 passed by the Parliament of Canada in response to questions posed to the Supreme Court in reference to Quebec’s secession following the referendum of 1995 in which the province failed to win a simple majority for the second time, and the heightened level of animus, smears, and vilification that will inevitably be hurled against IPA from outside of Alberta.
It is, of course, too early at present to predict how IPA will navigate successfully, if at all, through the hurdles and achieve its objective of gaining independence for Alberta. What is striking, however, is the extent of awareness displayed among Albertans of the deceptive nature of both the federal and provincial Conservatives in Alberta. The hoopla behind Jason Kenney’s bid to lead United Conservative Party (UCP) and become Alberta’s premier after the federal Conservatives were defeated by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party in the 2015 election did not take long to go bust. Kenney’s resignation in May 2022 from the leadership of UCP with more than a year remaining in his term as premier illustrates the con game of the Conservatives bent on exploiting Alberta’s place in the Canadian federation against long term interests of Alberta on behalf of the ruling class, the Laurentian elite, ensconced in the triangular set-up of Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto.
The eye-opening message embedded in the APP and IPA platforms is the detailed accounting of how the WEF agenda of The Great Reset was funneled into Alberta by Conservatives under Stephen Harper as prime minister from 2006 to 2015. The prelude to Harper’s Conservative government in Ottawa was that of Brian Mulroney’s PC Tories from 1984 to 1993. Mulroney signed on to the Convention on Climate Change at Rio’s Earth Summit in 1992, followed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which was ratified by the parliament in 2002. Conservative party’s deceptive opposition to the climate change agreement (Kyoto Protocol) under Harper at the head of a minority government elected in 2006 was flipped when Harper went along with the Paris Accord on climate change duly signed by the incoming Liberal government in December 2015 under Justin Trudeau. But it is the extent to which Harper’s majority government elected in 2011 rolled over to spread the welcome mat for the WEF agenda at the heart of which is the goal for controlled demolition of the hydrocarbon fuelled global economy. Harper became the first Canadian prime minister to proclaim that Canada (Alberta) will phase out its oilsands energy resource in keeping with the WEF agenda. A full record of Harper and Conservatives engaged in pushing The Great Reset is made available on the IPA website. This record will get full airing in the months ahead as Pastor Pawlowski begins the party’s campaign for Alberta’s provincial election due sometime in 2023.
The evening Pastor Pawlowski joined us in the Calgary church as leader of IPA, Conservatives elected Pierre Poilievre as their party leader and Leader of the Loyal Opposition in Ottawa. The media and the CPC handlers have placed a halo around Pierre, as the designated opponent of the most “woke” Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, and seemingly with the right chemistry to oust the Liberal-NDP duo from running the federal government.
My own experience in the CPC goes back to the Manning years, and many of you know my story about being “disallowed” to stand for nomination in my electoral district of London North Centre for the 2019 election. Scheer and his sidekick Hamish Marshall, the national campaign director, expelled me from the party because to them I was an “Islamophobe” and, therefore, had no place in the party since that might or could trigger Liberal attack on Scheer’s leadership and his inability to push back when Justin Trudeau might paint him as soft on “Islamophobia.” It was soon after in a meeting with some big honchos of the CPC in Toronto who came together, as they imagined, to pacify my “wounded feelings” with gestures of concern and kindness that I had my opportunity to express what I thought would be the electoral result for the CPC contrary to, as they believed, Scheer becoming the prime minister. These folks were convinced that the 2019 election was in the bag, that Scheer, the “dimple-boy” was unbeatable. I told them in the gentlest manner I could that not in my lifetime, nor in theirs, would the CPC ever form a majority government, and forming a minority government would also remain a bridge too far given the party divisions in the parliament.
They looked at me aghast and asked how I imagined such a silly outcome. I explained that winning the barest minimum of 170 seats to form a government was well nigh improbable, if not impossible, for a party that has worked mightily hard to be sold as Liberal-lite in the Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area. I reminded them that the 2011 election, which gave the CPC a majority was fortuitous when Jack Layton’s NDP emerged as the Official Opposition by winning 59 out of 75 seats in Quebec and reducing the Liberals to a third party status. The likelihood of this being repeated is slim and unpredictable.
Then I told them about how the once mighty Liberal party in Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria that dominated British politics through the 19th century with Palmerston, Earl Russell, William Gladstone as prime ministers crashed and burned under Lloyd George through and after WWI and since then the Liberal party never formed a government in Britain. What I didn’t say is that this is the legacy left behind by Mulroney and Harper for a party without a soul, without any conviction, and without the courage to defend and keep secure the foundational culture and values that went into the making of Canada. Furthermore, theirs is also the legacy of complicity with Liberals and NDP to dismantle the traditions of pre-centennial Canada through multiculturalism and open immigration, of turning Canada into a laboratory of “wokeism” pushed by the WEF while embracing the UN Agenda of “sustainable development goals” as made-in-Canada policy.
I still maintain the view I expressed that summer day in Toronto ahead of the 2019 election to folks whose identity I must not disclose, as the meeting was privately called. Conservatives can pile up the popular votes with the support it has enjoyed in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but the score in Toronto is the CPC repeatedly shut out from the 25 seats in the hogtown, and for the 31 seats around the 905-belt in the GTA the CPC has barely made a showing by winning only 8 seats in 2019 and 4 seats in 2021. Pierre Poilievre might do better than Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole did. But the bloom is long gone from the CPC in the west, especially in Alberta.
There are 34 seats in Alberta after the 2011 redistribution. In the elections of 2015 CPC took 29 seats, in 2019 CPC won 33 seats, and in 2021CPC won 30 seats. Going forward, if the APP and IPA cut through the fog of misinformation around the CPC in Alberta, the consequences could likely be the Conservatives losing anywhere between a quarter and a third of Alberta seats, if not more as it occurred in the 1993 election, and this decepticon party will be done for good. CPC will not make up elsewhere for those lost seats in Alberta. This is why the birth of IPA could be a game-changer in Canadian politics. Pierre’s effort to distance himself from Harper-Kenney Conservatives will not wash in Alberta, when he was part of their inner circle and owns their legacy of selling their souls and Canada’s future to the Svengalis of the WEF – Klaus Schwab, George Soros and their ilk.
This is a pivotal moment in Canadian politics as it is in global affairs. The world that emerged after 1945 divided between the East and West blocs through the Cold War years is going through a meltdown right before our eyes. NATO’s full-spectrum hybrid proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia to bring about regime change in Moscow has back-fired mightily. There has been no serious discussion in the parliament about this proxy-war that Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland have endorsed and supported with men, money, and material as puppets of the US/EU/WEF, just as there was no opposition in Ottawa nor by the provinces to the WHO designed lockdowns with mask/vaccine mandates Liberals put into effect during the past two years under the pretext of a sham pandemic.
The Canadian federation is only as strong as its weakest link. Alberta is, in the positive sense, the weakest link which can snap unlike the posturings we have seen emanating out of Quebec. Alberta has the resources and the willingness, if a majority of Albertans determine their future prosperity demands independence, to reshape Canada by itself. Pastor Artur Pawlowski and his Independence party are at the cusp of shaking Canadian politics like never before and force the conversation on the nature of the Canadian federation that rest of Canada has assiduously sought to avoid since the nineteen-eighties.
William Wordsworth famously wrote the opening lines of his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” My youth is long gone and in the evening of my life I have felt despondent and discouraged by the state of affairs in our country and around the world. And yet, on the road through Alberta and British Columbia meeting people and making friends, I felt a surge of that lively and spiritually charged feelings that Wordsworth felt and expressed so powerfully as a young man with the world around him being transformed while shaken to its foundation by the tumult of the French Revolution and the ideas that ignited it.
Salim
September 16-17, 2022