BURST
RED DEER — The doors were scheduled to open at 6 p.m. An hour before, the lineup has already formed. Soon, it coiled around Red Deer’s Festival Hall. The parking lot filled quickly Wednesday night, then the lot at the high school across the street was jammed like West Edmonton Mall on the Saturday before Christmas.
They came to sign a petition endorsed by the Alberta Prosperity Project. If around 177,000 signatures are collected and verified before early May, a referendum on Alberta statehood will come in the autumn. Dennis Modry, the former CEO of the APP, said that the real goal isn’t to hit 177,000 — it’s to get more than one million signatures.
“We want to make a statement,” said Modry.
The speakers went on stage at 7 p.m., and still they lined up outside. When the speakers finished at about 8:30 p.m., people were still showing up to sign the petition. The crowd was told that an event in Millet earlier in the week led to 1,500 signatures — the goal on Wednesday in Red Deer was to smash that mark.
There was a merchandise booth next to the petition table where attendees bought shirts with slogans like “independence isn’t radical, it’s necessary” and “Ottawa, it’s not us, it’s you.”
Before the speakers begin, a man walked up to the microphone and got cheers when he spoke about his past support for the freedom convoy. He suggests that Red Deer independence supporters gather every Saturday afternoon at Parkland Mall, then drive around the city with Alberta flags flying from their vehicles.
Kathy Flett, a self-described Alberta patriot and a major voice in the APP movement, began her speech by quoting Frank Oliver, the late politician and newspaperman who has had his name stripped from an Edmonton neighbourhood.
“Everything is wrong with Canada,” she said, adding that Alberta and Saskatchewan were given no choice or chance to negotiate when they entered Confederation — that the two provinces were, in her words, “colonized by Ottawa.”
She said the feds support the “jihadist extremist population,” and pointed to a recent Supreme Court decision that struck down minimum sentences for possessors of child pornography.
“These aren’t our values,” she said, to much applause.
And she said communist and socialist parties are on school campuses, trying to recruit students.
“The Marxists, they’re here and trying to get our kids.”
And she was clear, that the idea isn’t for Alberta to leave Canada, but for this province’s separation to begin a process that breaks the country apart.
“We’ll pave the way for other provinces to follow our lead,” she said.
The PQ and the United States
Modry said that if the petition gets one million signatures or more, the pressure will be on Ottawa to begin negotiating with Alberta. He warned that the provincial government cannot go down “the rabbit hole of endless negotiations.”
He admitted that if Alberta separates, Canada could claim the province doesn’t have the legal right to do so — and that’s why it’s vital that Alberta’s statehood is recognized by others as quickly as possible.
He said a September meeting between APP leadership and PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon helped set the stage for that recognition. The PQ is leading in the Quebec polls, and if St-Pierre Plamondon is elected, he will be expected to honour his pledge to support Alberta’s independence . Modry spoke of the PQ as the APP’s allies, each working from opposite sites of the country to hammer away at Ottawa.
As well, the APP has claimed three separate meetings with the U.S. State Department. Modry spoke about it in Red Deer, and current CEO Mitch Sylvestre and APP lawyer Jeffrey Rath spoke about it at a town hall in Didsbury the week previous.
“Every level is supportive of Alberta sovereignty,” Modry said of the claimed meetings with the State Department.
This is how the APP is laying it out for its supporters.
Last week, Rath said there is no chance for statehood, but that the messaging from south of the border is that “they want to see Alberta taken out from under the control of Communist China.” A lot of APP messaging suggests that the current government has alliances with Beijing, and it’s a major selling point at town halls.
Modry said the APP has received assurances that the U.S. would recognize an independent Alberta immediately after it announced it was breaking away from Canada. But that’s not all. Modry said an independent Alberta would dedicate three per cent of its GDP to military spending. But he admitted that it would take time to build up reserves. He claimed a promise from the U.S. State Department to help Alberta establish its military during the early days of nationhood.
The APP has said that it is targeting the 30 per cent of Albertans who sit in the middle of the debate. Sylvestre and Modry have said that they need to ensure the rural voice is strong, so it can outnumber the federalists in Edmonton and Calgary. The idea is similar to Donad Trump’s rise to power or how Brexit came to be; that it’s OK for the big cities to ignore the rural grassroots until the wave of popularity grows to the point where it can’t be stopped. The APP has promised “hundreds” of town halls, and over the past two weeks they have been held across Alberta, with more to come.
Modry, like Rath and Sylvestre the week before, urged supporters to tell their neighbours about the benefits of independence, and not to look to the mainstream media. He said to tell them that their taxes would be a fraction of what they pay now, and that there will be a chance to ponder the possibility of eliminating property tax.
And, in Didsbury, Rath said that not only should independence supporters work hard to get more people on the bandwagon, but to name and shame those who oppose them.
“The people who aren’t our friends, make sure people know who they are,” they said.
Overheard in the lineup in Red Deer: Independence supporters claimed the World Economic Forum controls Prime Minister Mark Carney’s actions, and that Carney doesn’t even live in Canada. They spoke of Thomas Lukaszuk, the former deputy premier who founded the Forever Canadian petition, where supporters affirm Alberta’s place in Confederation. And they derided his Polish roots.
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