Bruce Anderson

We've got this investor summit coming up in September where investor pools from around the world are coming and taking a look at what they can invest in in Canada and

It's a moment where businesses in Alberta really should be out there front and center, not waiting on a federal prime minister to explain the complexity of it.

I'm glad that he did that.

But they should make an economic argument to Albertans about what's really at stake by letting this conversation develop as though there's no complexity to it, as though it could happen on the basis of

a 50% plus one number, that it's almost as simple as, and it wasn't simple, as Brexit.

I mean, Brexit was a country deciding no longer to be involved with other countries.

For Alberta to separate, I think Andrew Coyne kind of made the point pretty well, which is that anybody can decide to leave.

You just can't decide to take it with you.

This is very, very different, very complicated, and it needs to be discussed that way.

Well, you know, I think that we see a version of this in the United States over the last several years where large corporations decide that they want to stay out of political fire, except when it's specifically in their interest to get involved.

So they think that they have a fiduciary responsibility to say a carbon price on oil that would add essentially pennies to a barrel.

is a no-go situation, is something that would destroy investment interest in Canada, which I think is an exaggeration for sure, especially given what's been happening to oil prices.

So they don't mind getting involved when their argument is the federal government needs to do something different to make our shareholders do a little bit better with their investment.

But getting involved in something that touches on that kind of –

line of grievance that we see in parts of Alberta.

And I don't think we should overstate how big it is.

It's a meaningful size, but it isn't everybody.

And it isn't a majority.

It's a smallish minority.

They don't want to do that in the same way I think that a lot of businesses in the United States decide that they don't really want to get involved in something that feels like a culture war argument or a debate that