Rebel News LIVE! 2025 in Red Deer, Alberta featured a number of prominent speakers discussing the unprecedented challenges facing Western Canada.

As part of that conversation, Rebel Editor-in-Chief Sheila Gunn Reid moderated a media panel featuring Western Standard CEO Derek Fildebrandt, Counter Signal editor-in-chief Keean Bexte and independent journalist Rachel Parker.

To start off the session, each journalist was given the opportunity to address the crowd before the panel convened.

Keean Bexte went first, discussing how he's “spent the last decade travelling across (Alberta).” From covering protests on the ground to visiting oil rigs — and even hearing Albertans' stories at their kitchen tables.

“Let me tell you, Albertans know exactly what they want: they want to be left alone. They want to work hard. They want to build something that is worth passing down, they want Ottawa out of their pockets and out of their way,” he said.

Up next, Derek Fildebrandt, told the crowd how “for the longest time, the independence movement has been defined, rightly or wrongly, as a couple of cranks living on the ranch somewhere in Central Alberta.”

“It's not anymore,” he added. One area that was lacking in the separatist movement, however, was a strong cultural presence unlike Quebec nationalists. In many ways,” the Western Standard publisher said, “I think Alberta nationalists see themselves as more Canadian than Canada. We don't want to leave, we want to leave the country that has already left us.”

Rachel Parker said that as a relative newcomer to Alberta, having moved to the province from Ontario, it's given her a unique perspective on the independence movement. After helping thrust the movement into current discourse through an interview with Jeffrey Rath of the Alberta Prosperity Project, she said “sometimes you'll notice outlets in Europe and in America are more willing to give the independence movement notice than they are here in Canada.”

This, she added, is why she views it as “her duty to cover these topics and force the mainstream media's hand.”