Gerald Butts

So I think that if we're looking for a silver lining here, I think we've exposed a bunch of people who first and foremost have exposed them to their fellow Albertans as people who don't share their values and don't want to remain part of Canada and to...

play the central role that the Prime Minister described that Alberta should be playing and that he hopes they will be playing and they should be playing in the future of shaping Canada.

But I think the second point here, and this is something we've talked about repeatedly on the podcast, I worry about at a moment when

We are under real siege by the President of the United States, that we are creating an avenue for him to wreak havoc within our own country.

And if you're looking to distract a prime minister with a strong mandate,

who would like to negotiate with that band-aid from very strong political footing, the easiest way to do that is to create a domestic crisis that absorbs his attention.

And whether or not they're in cahoots, and I have my real questions about this,

the small minority of Albertans who are trying to make this happen, hook or crook, against all democratic norms.

They are certainly doing the work of Donald Trump in Canada by dividing Canadians against one another and making us an easier and weaker target to negotiate with.

So I think that both of those things, one slightly positive and one extremely negative, have to be kept in mind as we're thinking about where this issue goes.

Well, I think there's an easy answer to that, Peter, is she's made the same mistake that David Cameron made.

in the United Kingdom, that he was looking for, with the promise to hold a Brexit referendum, he was looking for a way to glue together a constituency on the right that had a fundamental difference on a basic question.

And I think Danielle Smith is trying to do the same thing.

And you saw it with her press conference, which to me was, it was like watching a bear that's had their foot caught in a trap try and gnaw their own leg off to get out of the trap.

Only in this case, she set the trap for herself.

So I think that she thought that she could manage both sides of this question within her own party.

And let's remember the recent history of the Alberta conservative movement at the provincial level is that they lost their first election in many generations because the movement split into two parties.

that rachel notley won in 2015 only because there were two conservative options on the ballot and as soon as they were reconsolidated under one political party they won a majority under jason kenney and she does not want to see that happen again so she has a very direct interest in making sure that no issue comes along to divide her coalition because she knows if it does she'll lose the next election

So she is putting the interests of her own immediate political future and the interests of keeping her party together ahead of keeping the country together.

And she thought those two things would never come to a head, but they sure did come to a head last week.