Alberta voted to stay

Eight months ago Dave Cournoyer told us the pro-Canada side in Alberta had no leader, no campaign, and no ground game. It became our most-listened-to episode ever. On Monday, the pro-Canada side won with a decisive margin, and we wanted to break it down with Dave.

With Percy on a road trip in his old patch, Dave and I mustered the energy, overcoming our two man-colds to look at why Premier Smith's week just got harder.

Dave has covered Alberta politics for twenty years at Daveberta, the Substack I turn to for Alberta, and he had the riding-by-riding numbers before most newsrooms did. 

What we got into:

• Ten ballots, ten boxes, no tabulators. Why the count ran into Thursday and why one First Nation ran out of ballots.
• The nine questions few polled. The government expected all of them to pass at 60 or 70 percent. Immigration scraped through; the constitutional questions all lost. Dave on the $4 million ad campaign that was "long-winded, vague, and confusing" at the same time.
• "I voted to abolish the Senate. I lost. I'll take the L." Why nobody outside the political-nerd caucus had the Senate in their top ten.
• Half a million leave voters. A message to Ottawa, or the real base? How the separatist pitch drifted from draft constitutions to "let Albertans decide."
• Who knocked the doors. The NDP ran a get-out-the-vote operation; the governing party, as far as Dave could tell, didn't to nearly the same extent
• The Premier's November problem. Thousands of members at the convention, a push to make separatism party policy that lost by one board vote last year, and a leader who just told her most active organizers to park their beliefs or leave.

Also discussed: Calgary-Shaw as the warning sign, why Thomas Lukaszuk deserves more credit than he's getting, Pollara's finding that separatists think Smith is a federalist and federalists think she's a separatist, the Quebec playbook (start a party, or take over the one you're in), and following ten counts from a Halifax hotel room at 1 a.m.

Dave's call: the next big moment in Alberta politics is the UCP convention in late November. We'll have him back once the Premier is through it.

Find Dave at daveberta.substack.com.

00:00 The Number — 75 percent voted to stay in Canada
01:31 Dave Cournoyer — Alberta's most trusted political voice
02:57 What actually happened this week — The referendum walkthrough
08:35 The urban-rural divide — Cities versus countryside on every question
10:28 The nine other questions — Immigration yes, constitutional change no
14:34 The Calgary-Shaw by-election warning — Conservatives lose a safe seat
20:47 Send a message versus leave Canada — Why the separatists shifted their pitch
22:04 The Mark Carney factor — How Ottawa calmed the waters
24:41 The Forever Canadian rallies — Late momentum for the remain side
30:11 Danielle Smith's impossible position — Federalists think she's a separatist, separatists think she's a federalist
32:35 What comes next for Smith — The UCP Annual General Meeting showdown
35:11 The leadership review threat — Can the separatists force Smith out?
39:22 Park your beliefs or leave — Smith's ultimatum to separatist members
41:22 The sense of betrayal ahead — Why separatists won't go quietly