Gerald Butts

former Prime Minister Harper.

I can imagine what he's thinking of all of this and being the strategic person that he is, I suspect he's hanging back and waiting for the optimum moment to intervene in this.

I think what other Canadians outside of Alberta and some of us are outside of

Alberta, but have lots of family in Alberta.

So we're only kind of partially outside of Alberta.

We're watching what's happening to the Albertan members of our family.

And I, for one, have many of them, many of whom have the same last name as I do, for instance, and would have had their information leaked to people who probably mean them harm just because of their association with me.

So let's not underappreciate the

has put regular people under in Alberta, knowing that someone who may, whether it's an abusive ex-spouse or partner,

affiliations are frowned upon.

There are lots of people in Alberta in the days after the data leak became apparent who are wondering if they're safe.

And as Canadians in the rest of the country and hopefully Albertans within, Canadians within Alberta are reaching out to those people to comfort them, to let them know that they live in a safe community.

But I do think that James is right that we're in the early innings of this.

I'm quite concerned about it.

And as you know, Peter, I've written

about this extensively in the quebec context over the past couple of years but it's everything i said about quebec is applicable to alberta and um the one place where maybe i differ james is i don't i do think there is something new about this and the new part is that the country is under uh stress and strain from our neighbor which has said

publicly at the highest levels that it would prefer to absorb us into the great republic to the south of us and they're not afraid to put stresses and strains on our country in the form of support either tacit or direct and i don't know if we will ever know the full extent to which the darkest force

are supporting this movement, both in Alberta and Quebec, but it would check out with behavior elsewhere that when you want to weaken and demoralize, it's ridiculous to say it this way, but an adversary, then what you do is you try and divide their camp internally.

This is a strategy as old as the art of war.

And in this case, we can't fully discount the...