With Canada already facing a tough economic forecast, Alberta voting for independence could make the situation much more difficult, political strategist David Knight Legg told Ezra Levant during an in-depth conversation on an episode of The Ezra Levant Show last Wednesday.

Discussing campaigns from outside of Alberta to pressure the province to remain in Canada, David said “anybody close to the Canadian economy knows just how bad it's gotten.”

Stripping Alberta's contributions away from the country, “Canada falls,” he stated, noting “It's already at the bottom of the OECD” for growth.

“If you take Alberta out of Canada ... and Canada continues to pursue this heavy red-tape, extreme bureaucracy, extreme debt,” he continued, “you have a country that can't work mathematically without Alberta funding things.”

Those pushing a fear-based narrative of Alberta leaving are afraid independence activists successfully achieving their goal of separation — “and if they did, the Canadian experiment would be over,” David added.

“I think the stakes are much higher than people are willing to admit, and they're going through the five phases of grief,” he said.

David, who supports Quebec-style autonomy for Alberta as part of a unified Canada, suggested the signals coming from Ottawa, even after Prime Minister Mark Carney assumed office, show the Laurentian elites are “are totally unwilling to do even the most rational middle steps.”

This will lead to an escalation in tension, David predicted.

People like Globe and Mail columnist and CBC contributor Andrew Coyne are “angrier and angrier” as the potential for separation draws near, without realizing “they're just lighting a fire under the middle of the road people” who, like in the United Kingdom during the Brexit vote, will back the leave Canada vote.

“They're trying to play to their Toronto cocktail crowd and they're not doing the right thing; they're not fairly interrogating what the issues actually are that are splitting the country right now because they don't want to offend their friends in Ottawa.”

Like Brexit, this failure to address the issues that matter to swing voters will choose a new, unknown path instead of repeating the same previous mistakes.

“I think they just don't understand just how deep that middle vote is,” David said. “I'm talking to people that no one would ever guess would say if you asked me to vote, I'm going to vote to try something totally new here.”

David said Albertans feel “nothing in this federal structure is working — the whole thing is broken” and favour a reset.

“That's what a lot of people are going to vote for, and they're going to see the way that this question is framed is a little too much for them, but that they're going to be willing to try this way of forcing the entire country to have a real debate about this future.” 

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