Bruce Anderson

So if you say all of that happened, so then what?

You need to have a referendum.

The best version of a referendum is stay or go.

um this version that she's proposing premier smith is stay or maybe don't stay well that's a disastrous idea from the standpoint of uh creating an outcome that puts this issue to bed once and for all the polls are pretty clear if the choice is stay or don't or leave um

Maybe leave gets to 24%, maybe it's 20%, but it's not 35%, it's not 40%.

But if you say the option is stay or maybe don't stay, some people might get tempted in the course of a debate to go, well, maybe don't stay gives us more leverage, more negotiating power, more leverage.

more uh of ability to assert what we want with ottawa in order to keep the country from breaking up that's a terrible miscalculation in my view because

First of all, it wouldn't necessarily increase the leverage.

Second of all, it absolutely would increase the amount of uncertainty.

And uncertainty has an investment price.

There's no province more willing and able and constant in saying uncertainty carries an economic price.

And so for Alberta to put itself in a situation where the Premier is championing a question that has the best chance of creating more uncertainty rather than less uncertainty is folly.

And I'm not surprised that those Alberta journalists that you're talking about, Peter, are there.

The other point I wanted to make is that

There is a tendency on the part of the premier, which is not alone in doing this, to sort of say, well, I kind of understand the people who are interested in separatism because they're economically disaffected.

She uses that term pretty regularly.

And what it does is it credentializes the separatist idea in a way that I don't really think it deserves.

I think that the more

lucid interpretation of Rath and the people who are behind that movement is that they're not looking for a better deal from Ottawa.

They want to get out of Canada.