I love Alberta.

I also love Canada.

I don’t believe those two things are in conflict, and I don’t believe strengthening Alberta requires weakening the country Alberta helped build.

I’ve spent some time going through all ten referendum questions. Here’s how I’m voting, and why.

One quick note on the numbering: Elections Alberta calls the Canada/separation question Question 10, but it will be the first ballot handed to voters. I’m calling it Ballot 1 below to follow the order we’ll actually receive the ballots.

Ballot 1 — Alberta and Canada

Official Question 10 — O.C. 160/2026

Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?

Option 1: Alberta should remain a province of Canada.

Option 2: The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.

Here’s why I’m selecting OPTION 1.

Because I am an Albertan and I am a Canadian, and I reject the idea that I have to choose between the two.

Canada isn’t perfect. Confederation isn’t perfect. Ottawa certainly isn’t perfect. There are legitimate arguments to be had over equalization, energy policy, federalism, taxation, regulation and the division of powers.

Have those arguments. Fight those fights.

But I am not interested in rehearsing a national divorce every time Alberta has a grievance with the federal government.

Option 2 isn’t merely asking whether I’m frustrated with Ottawa. It asks whether I want my provincial government to begin the legal process toward another, binding referendum on separation.

I don’t.

I want Alberta using its considerable political and economic influence to make Canada work better, not spending years preparing to dismantle it.

I’m choosing Alberta.

I’m choosing Canada.

OPTION 1.

Ballot 2 — Immigration

Official Question 1 — O.C. 110/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

There are several different ideas packed into this question, and I don’t have to accept all of them just because some sound reasonable.

Should immigration levels be sustainable? Yes.

Should immigration policy consider labour-market needs? Absolutely.

But immigration is already an area of shared federal-provincial responsibility, and Alberta already operates an economic immigration program specifically designed to nominate people who can fill labour shortages and meet provincial economic priorities.

So what exactly does “increased control” mean?

What powers are being requested? What would they cost? Who would Alberta exclude? And what exactly does “Albertans first priority” mean in practice?

Those questions aren’t answered here.

I’m not giving any government a blank cheque because several popular ideas were bundled into one carefully worded question.

Build a better immigration system within Canada. Target the skills Alberta needs. Match population growth with infrastructure and public services.

But do it with an actual policy.

NO.

Ballot 3 — Eligibility for Provincial Programs

Official Question 2 — O.C. 110/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

The phrase I’m most concerned about here is “Alberta-approved immigration status.”

What is that?

Who gets it?

Who doesn’t?

And exactly which health, education and social services disappear if somebody doesn’t qualify?

Those are fairly important details when we’re talking about people legally living, working, studying and raising children in Alberta.

I don’t support creating a provincial immigration classification and then using it as a gatekeeper for essential public services without knowing precisely who would be excluded or what services they would lose.

Immigration policy can have rules.

Public programs can have eligibility requirements.

But if a government wants authority this broad, it can write the legislation, tell Albertans exactly what it intends to do, and defend it publicly.

I’m not approving the blank space first.

NO.

Ballot 4 — Social Supports

Official Question 3 — O.C. 110/2026

Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

Because life doesn’t wait 12 months before going sideways.

People lose jobs. Families experience emergencies. Children need help. People become victims of abuse. Workers get injured. Circumstances change.

A person can be legally living and working in Alberta, contributing to this province, and still need help before Day 366.

I am perfectly comfortable with sensible eligibility rules. What I don’t support is an arbitrary one-year wall applying to all provincially funded social supports regardless of circumstance.

If government believes a particular program is being abused, identify the program, show Albertans the evidence and fix the problem.

Don’t ask me to approve a blanket exclusion first and work out the human consequences later.

NO.

Ballot 5 — Health and Education Fees

Official Question 4 — O.C. 110/2026

Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the healthcare and education systems?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

First, define “reasonable.”

Five dollars?

Five hundred?

Five thousand?

Per person? Per family? Per year? Per visit? Which medical services? Which levels of education?

None of that is here.

Many temporary residents are here because Alberta needs them. They work here, spend money here, pay taxes here, raise families here and fill jobs our economy requires.

Creating an additional health-care or education premium based solely on immigration status risks making Alberta less attractive to exactly the workers, professionals and students we say we want.

And I am certainly not voting to authorize an undefined new fee and trusting government to decide what “reasonable” means afterward.

Show me the policy first.

NO.

Ballot 6 — Proof of Citizenship to Vote

Official Question 5 — O.C. 110/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or citizenship card, to vote in an Alberta provincial election?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

Canadian citizenship is already required to vote in an Alberta provincial election.

That isn’t an opinion. That’s the existing rule.

So before making every eligible voter produce another category of documentation, I want to know what problem we’re solving.

Show me evidence that non-citizen voting is occurring at a scale that threatens Alberta elections.

If that evidence exists, deal with it.

But don’t make voting more cumbersome for hundreds of thousands of legitimate Canadian citizens simply because voter fraud sounds scary in a referendum question.

Democracy should be secure.

It should also be accessible.

We can have both.

NO.

Ballot 7 — Judicial Appointments

Official Question 6 — O.C. 109/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeal courts?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

I don’t want the Government of Alberta choosing the judges who may later be asked to decide whether the Government of Alberta acted lawfully.

Canada deliberately divides responsibilities here. Provincial governments appoint judges to provincial courts, while superior-court judges are federally appointed under section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867.

That doesn’t magically remove politics from judicial appointments.

It does, however, avoid concentrating even more power in the same provincial executive whose legislation and actions regularly come before King’s Bench and the Court of Appeal.

Courts need enough institutional distance from governments to tell those governments no when the law requires it.

I’ve watched this provincial government complain about judges often enough.

Giving it more control over selecting them isn’t my solution.

NO.

Ballot 8 — Abolishing the Senate

Official Question 7 — O.C. 109/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to abolish the unelected federal Senate?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

Do I think Canada’s Senate is perfect?

Not remotely.

Would I entertain serious Senate reform?

Absolutely.

But reform and abolition are not the same thing.

This question proposes eliminating one entire chamber of Canada’s Parliament without telling us what, if anything, would replace its role in regional representation, legislative review and Canada’s constitutional structure.

And this isn’t some constitutional tweak Alberta can accomplish by finding a couple of friendly premiers. The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that abolishing the Senate requires unanimous federal-provincial consent.

If we’re going to reopen the Constitution, I’d like something more substantial on the table than:

“What if we just delete the Senate?”

Show me the reform.

Show me the replacement.

Show me the country that comes out the other end.

Until then:

NO.

Ballot 9 — Federal Programs

Official Question 8 — O.C. 109/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to allow provinces to opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction such as health care, education, and social services, without a province losing any of the associated federal funding for use in its social programs?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

I get the appeal at first glance.

But if Alberta wants to reject the conditions attached to federal funding, it can’t also expect Ottawa to keep sending the same cheque with no strings attached.

Federal transfers help pay for health care and social programs, and some of those transfers come with national conditions. The Canada Health Act, for example, establishes criteria provinces must meet to receive their full Canada Health Transfer.

Those conditions aren’t automatically “federal interference.” Some exist so Canadians can expect basic standards regardless of which province they happen to live in.

There is plenty of room to argue about federal overreach. There is plenty of room for provinces to negotiate better agreements.

But I don’t support a constitutional principle saying Alberta should be entitled to Ottawa’s money while being automatically exempt from Ottawa’s conditions.

If we want complete independence from the agreement, we should also be prepared to discuss independence from the cheque.

NO.

Ballot 10 — Provincial Laws Over Federal Laws

Official Question 9 — O.C. 109/2026

Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws when the province’s laws and federal laws conflict?

Here’s why I’m voting NO.

Because this isn’t merely “standing up to Ottawa.”

This proposes changing one of the basic rules that allows a federation to function.

Under Canada’s existing constitutional doctrine of federal paramountcy, valid provincial and federal laws can operate together. Federal law prevails only to the extent that the two genuinely conflict, such as when complying with both is impossible or the provincial law frustrates the purpose of the federal law.

This question proposes turning that principle on its head.

Think about where that road leads.

Ten provinces could begin asserting ten different rules whenever provincial and federal authority overlap.

And Alberta should be particularly careful what it wishes for. We are a landlocked province whose prosperity depends on goods, energy, railways, pipelines and trade moving across provincial borders.

A functioning national government isn’t an enemy of Alberta. Sometimes it is precisely what prevents another province from treating the Canadian border as if it stops at its own boundary.

I believe in strong provinces.

I believe in provincial jurisdiction.

I also believe Canada has to remain governable as a country.

Giving provincial governments constitutional priority over valid federal laws when the two conflict isn’t stronger federalism.

It’s taking the federation apart one jurisdiction at a time.

NO.

My ballot

I’m not voting against Alberta.

I’m voting for the Alberta I want to live in.

An Alberta confident enough to lead Canada instead of threatening to leave it.

An Alberta capable of defending its jurisdiction without treating Ottawa as a foreign government.

An Alberta that attracts people, protects democracy, respects independent courts and understands that being part of a federation occasionally means compromise.

I can be frustrated with my country and still love it.

I can demand better from Canada without wanting to break Canada.

And I can be fiercely Albertan without pretending the maple leaf somehow makes me less so.

Alberta stays in Canada. So...

OPTION 1.

And NO to the nine.

Thanks for your time. 🍁

Official referendum documents

Elections Alberta — Referendum

Order in Council 160/2026 — Canada/separation question

Order in Council 110/2026 — Questions 1–5

Order in Council 109/2026 — Questions 6–9

Chris Sturwold is a project manager, photographer and musician in Alberta.

In 7 years of doing interviews, this is easily one of the most bonkers ones we have ever done!

We sit down with Dave Powell of the Athabasca University Faculty Association to make sense of their recent post https://aufa.ca/blog/2026/7/23/athabasca-university-forces-professor-to-choose-between-her-job-her-family-or-her-childs-legs and explain what in the heck is even happening!

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The twists and turns that the trade war between Canada and the US has taken since Donald Trump declared it on February 1, 2025 have been a very difficult to follow firehose of dramatic developments.

So it’s easy to forget that the threats of making Canada a 51st state from Trump started in December of 2024 where Trump made the comment at a dinner with then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and followed it up with this “Truth” posted on December 9th, 2024.

Fast forward 2 years and on June 2, 2026, US Ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra took a screen capture of a post that US president Donald Trump had made on his platform “Truth Social” and shared it to his social media platforms.

The Post not only claimed that Canada had “dipped into a technical recession” but also reiterated Trumps claim to Canada being the 51st state.

Nonetheless, Alberta premier Danielle Smith was sure to make time for a photo op with Hoekstra at the Calgary Stampede.

The reaction from the rest of Canada however, has been swift and sustained.

A petition was opened for signature on July 21, 2026 calling for Hoekstra to be declared persona non grata and to request his removal as US ambassador.

As of today’s writing, it now has well over 200,000 signatures.

The petition cites several reasons for wanting to have Hoekstra removed as ambassador and having him entirely removed from Canada.

Even after June 2, Hoekstra defended the reporting, saying not only that he believes “thats a great discussion for the president and the prime minister”, but he also went on the attack saying “if you actually had a media that did it’s job, you would find out that as the presidents representative to Canada, I present the presidents views”.

In the last couple of weeks, Hoekstra has received significant criticism for granting interviews to right wing Canadian social media influencers in what many have called a targeted attempt to appeal to particularly conservative voters and bring them more in line with Trumps vision.

None of this however, has stopped Alberta premier Danielle Smith from maintaining a regular relationship with the ambassador directly from the premiers office.

But how direct has that relationship been?

In late September 2025, Danielle Smith and Pete Hoekstra appeared on a podcast called “The Hub Canada”.

There are two particularly striking moments in that podcast.

The first is where Danielle Smith openly states that “The presidents style is misunderstood as an attack, as opposed to a negotiation position”.

The second comes at the beginning of the podcast where Hoekstra is asked about his trip to Alberta so far.

Hoekstra speaks positively about the number of Americans coming through the Calgary airport, he speaks positively about the construction he saw in Calgary and how much he enjoyed his trip to Banff.

It isn’t until Smith jumps in and breathlessly brags about how Heokstra also attended the oil sands that he spoke of the cooperation between Canada and the US on resource extraction.

So how impressive that trip was might just be up for debate...

But a much better question is who paid for the trip, and how much?

We know from the controversy that erupted when Danielle Smith and her staff accepted hundreds’s of thousands of dollars in travel and accommodations from the Saudi Government that Smith believes that host countries using taxpayer dollars for guided tours is entirely justifiable, because you just have to see these facilities in person to understand their significance.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Smith’s office organized a special trip for the ambassador to see the oil sands in person and taxpayers footed the bill.

On September 3rd, 2025 James Fischer, Danielle Smith’s Director of “Mission Planning & Strategic Services” put forward a proposal for a charter plane rental for a day for Hoekstra to tour the oil sands with several guests.

The proposed itinerary was for a chartered plane to fly Hoekstra and company to Fort MacMurray first thing in the morning and out later in the day.

The justification for the trip though expressed concerns that finding 15-20 seats on a commercial plane might be impossible, which is perplexing because the number of passengers on the same proposal is limited to 9.

Additionally, the purpose of the flight is explicitly limited to provide a tour of the Oil sands, but seems to also suggest that additional sites may open up and they may want to visit those as well.

This proposal was personally approved by Danielle Smith on September 16, 2025.

The itinerary of the trip is provided on the invoice (that it took the government almost 2 whole months to pay and the company had to chase down payment on).

The plane flew from Calgary to Fort Mackay/Albain and landed at the airport that was built to support oil and gas development at that Horizon oil sands. The plane remained there for approximately 3 hours before continuing on to Fort McMurray where is stayed for roughly four hours before flying back to Calgary.

The flight manifest also confirms that despite the justification that a charter flight was needed to accommodate 15-20 people, only 9 participated in the trip.

Who are these folks?

Security Detail (presumably 1 The Breakdown has redacted their name)

Alberto Benzo - Executive Director Energy Information and Analysis Branch (GOA)

James Carpenter -Senior Representative to Ottawa (GOA)

Nathan Cooper - Senior Representative to the United States of America Alberta Washington DC Office (GOA)

Alex Puddifant - Director, Alberta Office in Ottawa (GOA)

Tim Russell - US Foreign Service Officer

Emily Fleckner- US Consul General to Calgary

Pete Hoekstra - US Ambassador to Canada

A post from the ambassador tagging two of the largest oilsand operators in the area celebrates the tours of Imperial Oil and ConocoPhillips operations.

A post from earlier in the day shows the group at takeoff.

So Danielle Smith used her office to fund a trip for a US Ambassador and a whirlwind tour of the oil sands and taxpayers footed the bill, only for that same ambassador to 6 months later share the message of Alberta/Canada becoming the 51st state.

And how much did Albertans pay for a private plane for 3 Americans (2 of which work in Alberta) and 6 government employees?

According to the invoice we received via an ATIA request?

$18,721.37.

On the bright side, at least Danielle Smith got to appear on a podcast with Hoekstra, and there’s a very reasonable argument to be made that it’s a good thing she did, because up until her reminding Hoekstra of his trip to the oil sands, he didn’t seem to find it worth mentioning unprompted.

There are undoubtedly those who will argue that this sort of trip is necessary to preserving the business relationship between Canada and the US.

There might even be some room for that argument, but it begs a very simple question...

If the companies responsible for Oil and Gas extraction in Alberta believe that US officials visiting their sites is crucial to preserve their business cases, why don’t they pick up the tab instead of taxpayers?

Of course, the answer for that might be just as simple…

Why pay as a company when Smith will do the tours with taxpayer dollars?

The Breakdown reached out to the premiers office for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

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For me, Terry Fox felt like an older brother. Not polished or well spoken, Terry grabbed our hearts when he ran a marathon … every day … on a prosthetic leg.

I still get emotional thinking about Terry Fox and his legacy 46 years after he set out on his Marathon of Hope. I was, and am, so proud of this iconic Canadian. The rhythmic sound of his artificial foot, mile after mile — “tick-skip … thump, tick-skip … thump.”

Who could possibly be greater than that?

Tommy Douglas. A Canadian politician with humble beginnings, from Scotland to Winnipeg and finally Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where he embarked on a crusade that free public health care is a Canadian right.

A Baptist minister who championed our public health-care system — a politician not sitting in pious judgment of others, but a compassionate man so affected by the human suffering he witnessed during the Great Depression that he worked his entire political life toward one goal: free, universal public health care.

How did Tommy Douglas find the funding to make it possible?

Consider the 1950s. Canada built great things — our highway system, public schools, communities, churches and, yes, our public health-care system.

In 1956, Canadian federal tax brackets began at 13 per cent on the first $1,000 and rose on a scale to 80 per cent on incomes over $400,000, with no provincial income tax in Alberta at the time. By my calculation, $10,000 in 1956 is worth roughly $115,000 today and was taxed at about 34 per cent then — not far off the roughly 30 per cent a similar income pays federally and provincially in Alberta now. But someone earning $400,000 in 1956 made the equivalent of about $4.6 million today, and would have paid close to half what the top earners of the 1950s did.

Scott Galloway, an academic, professor and entrepreneur, has said people earning over $10 million a year should be taxed at 60 to 70 per cent, similar to rates in the 1950s.

I know what you’re thinking: “Are you a socialist?” The term became more politicized when Donald Trump used it while speaking about Venezuela and the U.S. far left. Let’s be clear — Maduro is a criminal, not a legitimate leader — and socialism isn’t a bad word. It’s entirely about context.

“Socialism,” in terms average Canadians understand, means we don’t go bankrupt because we get injured or sick. It means all Canadians can go to school and gain an education and job opportunities we wouldn’t have without funding from taxes. A well-funded education system means more people employed and less crime.

I was close with a ranch family for decades. Very good people — a son my age, and a father with serious health challenges. For the last 10 or 15 years of his life he needed an in-home nurse eight hours a day, an outstanding person who cared for him daily, provided by our Alberta health-care system. Socialism.

Years after his father’s death, the son said “the socialists” like it was a terrible thing. He works hard and earns his money — but it’s worth remembering that the care his father needed was made possible by the very system he now dismisses.

From purple gas to the 2021 Canada-Alberta Livestock Feed Assistance Initiative — which provided up to $200 a head for cattle during a drought when feed was scarce — even rural ranch and farm communities benefit from “socialist” government programs.

And the far left is complicit too, often conflating socialism with communism, some more concerned with symbolic fights than with real improvements to Canadian lives.

But here’s the rub: who’s the politician to champion higher taxes? Seventy years of politicians promising to lower our taxes while delivering more — ring a bell? “I can get you more for less!” Decade after decade.

In Alberta today, we are watching politicians dismantle Tommy Douglas’s legacy under the banner of “better health outcomes.” Bill 11, in my view, opens the door to two-tier health care and the privatization of Alberta’s public system.

Alberta needs more taxation, not less. There, I said it. Did the sky fall? No.

From orphaned oil and gas wells that will cost taxpayers billions, to private health care for those wealthy enough to walk away from Tommy Douglas’s legacy, our provincial choices are having negative consequences daily. But I’m not letting Ottawa off the hook either.

The federal contribution to public health care must be increased. In the 1960s and ‘70s, federal cost-sharing covered roughly 35 to 50 per cent of provincial health spending. Today those contributions have fallen to around 21 per cent or less.

This is one of the legitimate grievances Albertans have with federal politicians. Both Liberal and Conservative federal governments have eroded funding to public health care, leaving the whole system on life support.

Is that why Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t challenging what I see as Danielle Smith’s disregard for the Canada Health Act? Politicians too afraid to admit we can no longer squeeze more out of a chronically underfunded system.

Bill 11 is the final chapter of the privatization playbook: defund something for years, criticize it for failing, then replace it with private options.

Our health-care system needs a recommitment to proper funding. Splitting AHS into four parts is, to my mind, the beginning of the end of public health care in Alberta. Suggesting we can fix AHS by breaking it up is like starving a person nearly to death, then ordering them to retrain to improve their caloric efficiency.

Alberta needs a provincial sales tax. I know we think we’re special and that a sales tax is beneath us — but a sales tax impacts the highest earners most, and the poorest Albertans could receive rebates or exemptions to offset it. A five per cent sales tax alone would generate an estimated $6 billion a year, without touching income-tax rates.

And another sore spot: why don’t we have a sovereign wealth fund like Norway’s, valued at roughly $2.2 trillion U.S.? Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund sits at about $32 billion. It might have rivalled Norway’s, but for decades of skimming oil royalties to cover day-to-day needs instead of saving them. That was Peter Lougheed’s dream when he created the fund.

The good news is that it’s not too late. We should also make modest increases to corporate income taxes — Alberta has among the lowest in Canada.

But won’t that hurt investment? Alberta leads the provinces in GDP per capita. Are we seeing that in our budgets? We’re shipping more oil than at any time in our history, and we still faced a multibillion-dollar deficit this year — one that could grow further depending on U.S. tariffs.

Is that any way to run a province? Counting on world oil prices to balance the books? Should the price of West Texas Intermediate on Monday decide whether the Rockyview hospital has a doctor on Thursday?

Alberta needs someone brave enough to tell us the truth. Must my wife’s knee pain depend on our ability to pay for private care? Or is it time to ask ourselves to contribute more through taxes, balance our budget, build up the Heritage Fund, restore our public institutions, stop pointing fingers at Ottawa, take a long, hard look in the mirror — and make Tommy Douglas, ourselves and our grandchildren proud?

Now that’s a province worth fighting for.

Blaine Moen is a landowner and advocate in Southern Alberta.

As a society, we claim to place a lot of value on recovery and rehabilitation. We say that we want people to be able to recover from addiction and we say that we want to rehabilitate people who have engaged in a life of crime.

But even if a person does the work of recovering from addiction and they rehabilitate from a life of crime, does society actually acknowledge that change, the work it took to achieve that change and allow that person to live their new life?

Do we, as a society, understand that in order for us to claim to hold the values of recovery and rehabilitation, we also have to do work ourselves?

Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to a person living a life of recovery and rehabilitation isn’t themselves, it’s members of society who dig up the partial graves of all of the wrongs that have long since been buried and parade those wrongs for all of the world to see.

Why do they do this?

Sometimes it’s to advance their own profile or to diminish someone that they’re envious of. Sometimes they may not even know why they’re doing it.

But the end goal appears to always be the same.

It’s to discredit the person now living in recovery and rehabilitation.

Not because that’s who the person is now, but because those unforgiving grave robbers refuse to see past who that person was. They refuse to allow that person to be who they are now.

Guy Felicella’s life is better documented than most. While a great deal is publicly available because of his criminal record, a lot of that has to do with the choices he’s made to acknowledge and own the mistakes of his past. He’s transmuted a life of trauma, abuse, and addiction into a career built on not only trying to prevent others from making the same mistakes he’s made, but also letting others know that even if they have made similar mistakes, there’s a way back to a better life.

Guy’s history prior to recovery is one littered with violence. His life as an addict on the Lower East Side of Vancouver was for over a year sustained by dealing drugs and working as a debt collector for organized crime.

None of this is secret or hidden.

In fact, it’s the subject of the documentary “Resurrection”, which tells the story of Guy’s life and the hard work of not only extricating himself from his addiction and criminal ways, but also tells the story of his ongoing work to honor the recovery principle of making amends by doing the outreach work that he does.

But it wasn’t always that way...

“Two young lovers with nothing better to do...”

In late 1994, as it had many times before and would many times after, Guy’s addiction hit a breaking point.

When someone is not only psychologically addicted to a substance, but also has a physical addiction to that substance, there can be very serious health risks associated with suddenly stopping using. That physiological risk to suddenly stopping needs to be managed in a health care facility.

These facilities are called “detox”.

Despite being in Vancouver, Guy says that he recognized he needed a change of geography to try and help him break his addictive cycle, and with that as a goal, he was able to access a detox facility in Calgary, Refrew Recovery Centre.

After completing that program, Guy entered a follow-up recovery program called the “Christian Love and Shelter Program” to try and help him rebuild himself, separate from his psychological addiction.

He stayed with a friend he met in that program after completing it and according to Guy, it wasn’t long after that he met the young woman who would become a central figure in his life and, as he tells it, his literal partner in crime in a story that would span borders, be worthy of a Hollywood film treatment and ultimately be the story weaponized by people who disagree with his policies on treatment, recovery, and harm reduction.

That young woman’s name was Dawnelle.

As Guy tells it, he was introduced to Dawnelle by the friend he was staying with when they crossed paths at a mall in Calgary.

According to Guy, the chemistry was immediate.

“He introduced me to her, and I mean, we were both smitten. I asked her if I could get your number? She gave me her number, and then I phoned her, and we started hanging out, and one thing led to another really fast, and we just fell head over heels.”

That was the start of a whirlwind romance that saw the couple regularly engaging in Calgary’s nightlife.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the epicenter of Calgary’s nightlife was a stretch of 11th Ave SW that was referred to as “Electric Avenue”. By the mid-90s, though, it was well into its decline, in no small part because of a combination of violence and drugs.

According to Guy, this was the preferred partying place for the couple.

“Back then, she liked to go to Electric Avenue like bar hopping. So I started doing that with her, and obviously, with that came the fuel of alcohol. So I was drinking with her, dancing, you know, going from club to club to club.”

Guy is candid about the fact that this partying atmosphere quickly drew him back into his addiction, and after nights out with Dawnelle, he resumed his usage of crack cocaine.

“When you start with addiction, obviously, the other stuff quickly starts to come into play... When I would go home, I would order crack and smoke it at my place, and then you know, the next day, meet up with her again. And you know, that started to happen every couple of days. And then eventually, I just got to a place where it’s basically now a full-blown addiction again.”

While all of this was going on, Guy was also regularly spending time with Dawnelle and her family. As both Guy and later media reports tell the story, Guy was well liked by her family. However, he openly admits he misled them about both his past as a criminal and as an addict.

The cover story that was created for the family was that he was a model.

Eventually, the tensions around Guy’s drug use fueled a desire to get out of Calgary, that was, as Guy tells it, welcomed by his young girlfriend who shared his desire to get out of cowtown.

“It’s basically now a full-blown addiction again. I decided that I didn’t want to be in Calgary anymore. Like I felt like, you know, this is doomsday. I don’t know how it came up, but we were going to go somewhere and I had a warrant in BC, so I was like, can’t go that way, so maybe it was Toronto...”

“The truth is too is that at that point in her life, too, I think she wanted to do something else as well.”

But big moves require big money.

At that time, Dawnelle worked as a bank teller. A plan was hatched for her to steal the float for her till, roughly $20,000 on her last shift before the weekend. Guy says that the couple crafted a cover story for Dawnelle’s family that they were going away for a weekend retreat.

And then they crossed the Coutts border into the US.

“Take the money and run...”

As Guy tells it, they didn’t make it far into the US before their first interaction with the law, because Guy had lost his driver’s license.

“I was pulled over for speeding in Montana and I couldn’t produce my driver’s license, the cop asked where I lived and I said Calgary and that I did have a valid license and when he ran my name and nothing came up in Alberta, I then said my license is out of BC.”

“He fined me for speeding, and failure to produce a license and said I had to pay immediately or go to the station. I paid him in cash and Dawnelle drove to Vegas.”

But while the couple was making their way down into the southern US, the theft had been discovered and had hit the news.

On March 1, almost a full week after the bank heist, the Calgary Herald ran this article.

The tone of the article is striking and somewhat contradictory.

In the article, the family spoke with the Herald on condition of anonymity, despite both Guy’s and Dawnelle’s full names being published and repeated.

Further, the family says that “the family liked him, right up until he and their daughter vanished”.

The younger sister claimed, however, that “she witnessed a dark side. ‘I heard him threaten her, say he would ‘shut her up’. She was so scared of him’.”

In a slightly different version of the same article published in “The Province”, the younger sister gave a starkly different description, stating “We all thought he was wonderful, it was like she was in a daze with him”.

Meanwhile, the drug-fuelled binge moved into California, and the couple quickly found themselves running out of money. At this point, Guy says that Dawnelle was using crack just as much as he was, and the pair were making connections in San Francisco to obtain more drugs, often making multiple purchases a day to feed their destructive spiral.

But the stolen money quickly ran out.

With the pair no longer having the means to continue, Guy says he reached out to his lawyer.

“He said, ‘Listen, you both don’t want to get arrested in the United States. What you guys should do is make your way back to Calgary and go and turn yourselves in and just deal with everything’.”

The decision was made to reach out to Dawnelle’s parents for money to get back home.

“She had said, ‘Well, let’s call my parents’. And so she did, and she called her parents and said we want to come home. And so her parents said, ‘OK, thank god. We’ll send you guys the money, where are you?’”

And according to Guy, they did send money to a Western Union in San Francisco.

While Guy was concerned that the police might have been waiting for them, they picked up the money without incident.

However, money in hand, a different decision was made.

As Guy tells it…

“At that particular time, and being drug addicts too as well, we were just like, ‘I don’t want to be away from you, and she didn’t want to be away from me, and so we were like, ‘OK, well, let’s just go and do it again‘.”

Another short binge followed, including the borrowing or “cuffing” of drugs from dealers with the promise to sell some and return with payment, but the walls were closing in.

Ultimately, another phone call was made to Dawnelle’s parents, and while they wisely refused to send more money, Guy says that they arranged to have plane tickets for the couple to return home.

Except Guy still didn’t have any ID to travel with, and both were arrested at the airport after trying to convince airport authorities that Guy was who he said he was without any documentation.

“We tried to be like, hey, can you let him on the plane, this is who he is, he is this person, you can look him up, and then the police started to show up, and they put everything together.”

Guy was arrested in the US for Canadian authorities to retrieve, and Dawnelle was sent home to be arrested on her arrival in Calgary.

On March 22, 1995, Guy gave an interview to the Calgary Herald over the phone from a jail cell in California.

“We fell in love, that’s about it”.

This second Herald article reiterated the affection that the family had for Guy.

“Her family liked him, right up until he and the woman vanished”.

Much of this has already been publicly shared by Guy’s online detractors.

But what has been either left out, ignored, or has been failed to be found as a result of shoddy journalism is the next chapter of the story, because the reality is that the story of Guy and Dawnelle is far from done at this point.

“She slipped away...”

After discovering a love note with a blazer that Dawnelle had set aside for Guy and that was delivered via his lawyer, Guy says he was transferred from Calgary to Vancouver again, where he was eventually released from custody and he stayed with his parents.

Guy says that he contacted Dawnelle over the phone from Vancouver.

“She had told me that she was on bail and that she had a no-contact order with me, and that wasn’t going to work. She told me, ‘Are you going to come back to Calgary?’ And I told her, ‘I am.’”

Guy says that his father gave him the money to fly from Vancouver to Calgary, and on his arrival, he cautiously made his way to her house to try and contact Dawnelle again. Guy says he was sitting on a park bench near the family home when the two reconnected.

“Lo and behold, she came walking out of a trail walking the family dog, and we just saw each other and just immediately collided, you know, a big hug and kiss. I said ‘you ready?’ and she said ‘Yeah! Let me go put the dog at home and pack a few things’.”

According to Guy, while Dawnelle was packing her things, her father became suspicious and tried to chase Dawnelle before she re-connected with Guy, but the two fled up a large flight of stairs in a park and made their way back to Vancouver over a series of days.

When they arrived in Vancouver, Guy is very candid about the fact that they both immediately fell completely back into their addictions.

“We hooked up with the people I knew in Vancouver, and things just started to go down from that moment on, drugs everywhere, we were shoplifting a lot.”

Somewhere along the line, Guy says that Dawnelle used her knowledge of bank security policies to get cash with less effort.

“She told me that you can always go to a bank and hand them a note, and they have to give you the money.”

“She started doing that, giving notes to banks and taking money from banks.”

But predictably, that only lasted so long.

On June 15th, 1995, the Herald published another article, the opening lines of which are telling.

“Love dies hard - and the case of a handsome drifter and former Calgary bank teller gets stranger.”

“They’re still in love, as far as I know,” a source told the Herald.”

That Herald article went on to detail the charges that Dawnelle faced after the couple was taken into custody. All in, Dawnelle was charged with robbing 3 banks on four separate occasions on the West Coast.

After both of them were arrested on the Lower East Side, it was in custody that Guy says he had his second-to-last conversation with Dawnelle ever.

“VPD (Vancouver Police Department) said we’re releasing you, but before we do, we’re letting your girlfriend come in. And that was probably the most heartbreaking conversation of my life because it was over. And she said, ‘I’m scared. I don’t want to go to jail.’

“And I told her that I don’t want you to go to jail either. You’re going to have to do whatever you have to do and say whatever you’re going to have to say to get off these charges.”

“She just said, “Baby, I just love you.” And I said, “I love you, too.”

“I was so heartbroken inside because of the world that I’d brought into her world.

“I had to live with that for a long time.”

“I remember her just saying to me, “Well, after this is all said and done, you’re going to come back and get me, right?” Right Guy? And I just said, “Yeah.” And we just hugged each other as long as we could until the police came in and said, “Okay, time’s up.” And they released me and then when I got out on the street, man, I was just heartbroken.”

Guy didn’t go back to Calgary to get her though. He just fell deeper into his life of crime and addiction in Vancouver until the last time he got sober and began successful recovery almost a decade and a half later.

As the June 15th article from the Herald noted, Dawnelle pleaded guilty to the charges in Calgary with her next court appearance in July.

It took several months for her sentencing to complete.

On September 28th, 1995, an Alberta judge issued Dawnelle’s sentencing decision.

There is some important nuance to how that process would have unfolded.

While there is no doubt that family and friends would have issued statements in support of Dawnelle and while a psychological examination would almost certainly have been completed, the submission of all of that is an almost entirely one-sided affair.

In a sentencing decision, a person can claim to be the victim of another person, but those claims are not tested.

Perhaps even more importantly, there’s no space for the person who is being blamed for the decisions made by the person who has pleaded guilty to defend themselves against those claims.

There are some shocking claims made in that sentencing decision.

In it, the Judge openly states that he believed, based on what was submitted in that hearing, that Guy not only held a knife to Dawnelle’s throat at some point, but also that he assaulted a friend of hers.

In open contradiction to the news reporting at the time that Dawnelle’s family “liked him, right up until he and the woman vanished”, the Judge also stated that he believed that Guy had threatened Dawnelle and the family four days prior to the original bank theft and their escape to the US.

When asked if Guy committed any of these acts, Guy vehemently denies it. He also denies ever facing any charges related to these allegations.

The next day, the Herald released their final article on the matter.

In it, the details of the sentencing are retold, but intriguingly, there is absolutely no mention of the multiple bank heists in BC or the resolution of those charges. The Breakdown has not been able to identify how those charges ultimately resolved at the time of this writing, and Guy denies having any knowledge of the outcome other than he was never charged in those cases.

Guy also openly told The Breakdown that he avoided Alberta for an extended period and that he failed to appear for his charges in regards to the Calgary bank theft.

He attributes that failure to appear as a result of the severity of his addiction on the Lower East Side at the time. He does not know how the charges eventually disappeared.

Now

There are facts, there are truths, and there are stories we tell ourselves.

Facts are static. They are hard and they don’t care at all about your feelings. Facts can also be extremely difficult to pin down, and when presented as single pieces instead of as the sum of their parts, they often don’t show the entire picture.

A fact can be like a piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle. You can have some pieces, but without all pieces, you’ll never see the full and complete picture.

The Breakdown does not claim to have all of the relevant facts of this tragic story.

We have some publicly available media reports from the time, and we have a version of events from one person involved in the story.

The Breakdown did attempt to contact Dawnelle Frew to ask for her version of events but did not receive a response.

That is both entirely understandable and something that we absolutely respect.

It’s often said that there are three sides to every story, yours, mine, and the truth. More than 3 decades after these events occurred, it is impossible to know exactly what happened and how each person who experienced these events directly experienced them.

But sometimes, when we don’t have all of the facts of a matter, we tell ourselves stories to make sense of them.

The stories that we tell ourselves are what we use to fill in the blanks between facts and truths. The danger of these stories is that they’re entirely subjective and they are created by us, by our experiences, and our biases.

More often than not, these stories tell more about us than they do the subject of the story, because they’re our interpretations of those spaces between facts and truths viewed through the lens of our own personal experiences and beliefs.

It should be stunning given the contradictions, inconsistencies, and unanswered questions that a 30-year-old case has been weaponized by social media influencers and self-appointed “journalists” in an effort to destroy a reputation.

And make no mistake, that appears to be the stated goal.

As recently as July of this year, National Post columnist and anti-harm reductionist Adam Zivo unabashedly posted that his goal was to stigmatize Guy for his “violence against women,” citing exclusively the sentencing hearing for Dawnelle Frew.

The Cambridge dictionary definition of stigmatize is:

“To treat someone or something unfairly by disapproving of him, her, or it.”

This story is 30 years old. The two main characters in this story were, by their own admission on the public record, corrupted by drugs, addiction, and circumstance.

They were also both very young at the time, so much so that the judge who sentenced Dawnelle referred to her as a youthful offender despite being 20 years old at the time.

The careless regard for collateral damage on full display by those pursuing stigmatization is also deeply concerning.

By invoking a 30-year-old sentencing hearing, the self-described stigmatizers have also dug up the grave of Dawnelle Frew’s past and dragged it into the limelight. By the simple passage of time, she has earned every right to not have to re-live and re-litigate her past as well.

It’s also worth examining the reputation that is being targeted for stigmatization.

It’s not the Guy of 30 years ago.

That Guy was a violent criminal who worked as a debt collector for organized crime, all while in the throes of brutal addiction.

If you need someone to condemn the choices that person made, you need look no further than Guy Felicella.

Since getting sober and entering recovery, Guy has made it his life’s work to use his past as a cautionary tale and his present as inspiration for those looking to escape lives similar to the one Guy led.

But it’s his present life that’s being attacked using his 30-year-old past as the weapon.

Guy Felicella describes himself as being an entirely new person since he has entered sobriety and recovery.

If as a society, we believe in recovery and rehabilitation, when someone has demonstrated a commitment to recovery, rehabilitation, and making amends for their past, there has to be a threshold for when we allow someone’s past to simply be their past.

The failure to do that is not a failure of the person who has dedicated themselves to recovery; it’s a failure of those who refuse to live the ideals of recovery and rehabilitation that they claim to advocate for.

But perhaps there’s an even simpler view to what the truth of Guy is now.

As mentioned multiple times above, Guy was a thorn in the side of law enforcement for years in Vancouver.

In the recent documentary on his life before recovery, entitled “Resurrection”, two very high-ranking police officers who knew Guy when he was the worst version of himself spoke to his change.

These are police officers who have firsthand knowledge of the kind of criminal Guy was and who have had full access to Guy’s entire criminal history for years.

They pursued him.

And now, they celebrate who he has become.

If some of the members of law enforcement with the closest view to Guy’s criminality and addiction see his change as real, that should certainly carry more weight than what armchair internet pundits throw into the ether to try and advance their own agenda.

We’re proud to present “Part 2” of that show which is a conversation on the risks that Danielle Smith’s 10 referendum questions expose Albertans to in regards to foreign interference with decorated international intelligence expert Dr Patrick Lennox!

To get tickets to our August 29th live show in Calgary, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca !

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

You can do that at www.savethebreakdownab.ca !

As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca !

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We’re proud to present “Part 1” of that show which includes the introduction for the night and a conversation with renowned political scientist Dr Jared Wesley!

To get tickets to our August 29th live show in Calgary, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca !

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

You can do that at www.savethebreakdownab.ca !

As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca !

If you’re looking for our new merch lineup, you can find that at www.thebreakdownabmerch.com

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And this time around the audience made it clear that it wanted to get into th latest on separatism, the disastrous AISH/ADAP rollout and what the NDP can or should be doing to break through!

To get tickets to our August 29th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca !

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

You can do that at www.savethebreakdownab.ca !

As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca !

If you’re looking for our new merch lineup, you can find that at www.thebreakdownabmerch.com and if you’re looking for the “Unapologetically Canadian” products, visit www.CanadaProudDad.ca

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Launched in 2022, “Your Province, Your Premier” was billed as an unprecedented opportunity for Albertans to ask then premier Jason Kenney questions about whatever they wanted.

(He looked so happy back then)

One of the questions that Albertans immediately asked was, “ok, but what does this cost?”

At the time, according to CBC, there was no cost except for some promotional advertising to raise awareness at the launch of the show.

Further, “Alberta Politics” has reported that the show is produced “at no cost to taxpayers”.

But recent documents obtained by The Breakdown through Access To Information Act (ATIA) requests show that not only does it appear that there is a monthly budget dedicated to supporting the show, but Albertans are also paying for the hosting duties for the program.

But before we get into the breakdown on that, it’s worth doing a bit of a mini deep dive on the show and it’s place in Alberta politics.

Word broke on March 8, 2022 through a leaked email to The Progress Report

that...

“The premier will be live in studio joining former CHQR news anchor Wayne Nelson for a show focused on the key issues and topics that are on the minds of Albertans.”

This was confirmed the next day via press release from Corus Radio that the program would take place every Saturday (that changed pretty quick) with “no subject off limits”.

(Which given the recent apparent embargo on changes to AISH, changed as well.)

Back to the show.

The show is hosted by Wayne Nelson, a former broadcaster and according to this website he’s also a current realtor in the Calgary market.

He also has an instagram, where he posts videos that we used to confirm that the realtor is the same person as the host.

Those dulcid tones are unmistakable...

Kenney stopped doing the show when he stopped being premier, and Danielle Smith wasted no time in using it as a vehicle to return to the radio airwaves after having left the airwaves “of her own choice” https://globalnews.ca/news/7568250/danielle-smith-departure-corus-radio/ amidst rumors she was about to be fired for deeply controversial and problematic takes as well as sharing falsehoods on social media.

It’s been a particularly wild ride since Smith stepped behind the mic again. Not only is each airing a guaranteed spectacle because it’s a largely unfiltered stream of consciousness exercise for Smith, but there have been several major policy announcements that have been announced and even more shockingly, driven by callers to the show.

The nixing of daylight savings time despite a referendum result?

Smith is on the record attributing that and the strategy for the launch to a caller.

Course correcting health inspectors?

Smith intervened because a rural health inspector called in and plead her case.

Given that multiple media outlets (including The Breakdown) regularly tune in not only because of Smith’s penchant for speaking particularly candidly, but also because of the policy announcements she makes, that there will almost always be a guaranteed news story and that it is an arena where policy can be influenced on the fly, quantifying the value of the show can be a bit of an edgy proposition.

But at The Breakdown, we wanted to know whether or not the claims that no taxpayer dollars go towards the show were true.

Spoiler alert.

The claims are not true.

In order to get any kind of an answer, The Breakdown filed a series of ATIA requests.

Our first request was sent to the Premiers office on June 12th, 2026. We sent it to “Executive Council” given Smith’s consolidation of funding and communications into her office, under her direct control.

We asked:

“Please provide the total costs associated with the production of the radio program “Your Province, Your Premier” for the last 6 months.”

In something of a surprise, we received this response back letting us know that the records were held with “Communications and public engagement” and that the ATIA requests was being directed there.

On July 16th, we received this response...

That response also included this information.

So at this point we knew that taxpayers were funding “Your Province, Your Premier” for a lot more money that the nothing that had been previously reported.

On track to hit $100,000 in 2026 alone.

But unfortunately, the aggressively redacted results left us a lot of questions.

So on July 7th, we filed another ATIA request, because it had been reported in the past that there was supportive advertising done for the launch of the program and we wanted to know whether the costs were for advertising or production.

And we got an answer. Kinda.

So taxpayers are footing the bill for “Your Province, Your Premier” to the tune of almost $10,000 a month, and what we’re paying for can be broken down into 3 categories, The On Air Host, On Air Promotion and agency fees.

That’s probably the big takeaway. The headline.

(There’s probably a second subheadline about how the information from our first request had to be withheld but in the second request we got it. That second subheadline probably would highlight the wholly subjective nature of what the government is willing to be transparent on, but that’s a whole other article that would probably be better written in a more serious tone by someone like Matthew Black)

But we don’t know when to quit, so we’ve got a fun little thought exercise with math we wanted to try out...

If you take a look at the costs for each month, a pattern occurs.

We made a little chart...

In the months between February and June 16th (when we filed the initial ATIA request) there are two months where 1 episode was produced, two months where 2 episodes were produced and one month where 3 episodes were produced.

Which gives us some data to work with...

Because the difference between a one episode month and a two episode month is exactly $309. And the difference between a two episode month and a three episode month is exactly $309.

A reasonable person could look at this and interpret it to mean that the Alberta government has a baseline commitment of $8240 a month they pay for “Your Province, Your Premier”.

For each episode produced, there’s an additional cost of $309 per episode.

Unfortunately, because of the heavy redactions, we have no idea what cost centers any of that money is allocated to.

But we still have a lot of questions...

For example, how far back do these costs go? Have Albertans been paying almost $10,000 a month for “Your Province, Your Premier” since it started in 2022?

Because if we have, that would mean that taxpayers have spent almost half a million dollars funding the intermittent radio show to a government that has an entire Communciations and Public engagement department already at their disposal.

The same government that produces their own “Alberta Update” program.

Half a million dollars is a lot of money.

Another unanswered question is why these ATIA requests came branded with TBWA Canada, a “collective” marketing firm that has trademarked the word “Disruption”.

No really.

They trademarked it.

So needless to say, we’ve filed several more ATIA requests, because we want to get closure, and we believe that Albertans deserve to know how much money goes towards the premiers radio program.

Also, just to be clear, we did reach out to the Premiers office for comment, but for some reason, while Danielle Smith is happy to appear on separatist podcasts, her press secretary still doesn’t respond to any of our emails.

The Breakdown is a fully crowdfunded independent journalism publication and is only able to do these types of deep dives through the support of our audience. If you would like to help us continue to do this work, please sign up to be a supporter here on substack or via our Patreon!

Some people understandably doubt previous generations, regulations or even science. Coal mines in Alberta are no different. From allowing cigarette smoking in restaurants and on airplanes to building vehicles with plate glass and no seat belts, human history is littered with tombstone technology while forwarding scientific advancement.

The Grassy Mountain coal mine shut down in the early eighties. The operation closed its doors walking away from the mine leaving a mountain of destruction and decades of selenium leaching. In the Oldman River at Fort Macleod, over 80km downstream, selenium levels, which would be zero in untouched landscapes, measure 0.6 ųg / litre. The Federal guidelines are no more than 1.0 ų g / litre for fish habitat.

Forty-five years after closing and the selenium levels, which bioaccumulates, are still high 80km away from the site. I spoke with a biologist about how to reclaim the area and he was unambiguous, “leave it!” Any form of incursions into the eastern slopes create damage causing many issues downstream even supposedly well intended reclamation efforts. From roads, trails and railways creating unintended runoff to destruction of water cleaning and cooling ecology, Alberta’s eastern slopes generate water delivered in the Elbow, Bow, and Oldman Rivers to name a few.

Southern Alberta is the driest, most arid region in Canada. The west winds rip moisture from the soil and we (I live in southwestern Alberta) have the least rainfall and or snowfall in Canada. These are the reasons so many Albertans are fighting to stop proposed coal mines, to protect the water we do have.

In June of 2021 a Joint Review Panel of experts from the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and Federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change rendered a decision to reject the Grassy Mountain coal mine proposal after holding and hearing. These experts heard from both sides, educated experienced people provided expert evidence, listened and made their decision to reject the proposal. This wasn’t a group of environmentalists although yes, environmentalists were included. The hearing included all directly affected Albertans pro and con.

Then, in 2022, less than a year after the JRP Hearing and Decision, UCP leadership candidate Danielle Smith floated the idea that a vote might help revive the Grassy Mountain coal mine in the Crowsnest Pass region. This was Danielle Smith’s first political interference in Northback’s proposed metallurgical coal mine.

Smith has said repeatedly she stands by the AER. So why undermine our regulator by suggesting a local vote might somehow override a regulatory decision?

Making this contradiction worse is the fact that Smith invited a vote in the Crowsnest Pass, except the rejected Grassy Mountain mine proposal is 98% in the Municipality of Ranchland who absolutely opposes a new coal mine. It is like Calgary holding a vote to open a legalized red light district in Cochrane.

1,973 local residents in the Pass voted in favour of Grassy Mountain. Residents who only stand to gain from the proposal, no one downstream and more shockingly, no one from the Municipality where the mine is located were considered. Both Premier Danielle Smith and Energy Minister Brian Jean have since referred to the Pass straw poll when extolling the virtues of coal mining in our watershed.

In 2025 Smith lowered the threshold for citizen initiated referendum because as Smith put it, “I support citizen-initiated referenda. I think it’s really important that people have their say. The rules are out there, and I will watch with great interest.”

It is important to note that while meeting with Danielle Smith, Corb Lund, who launched a Water Not Coal Petition that Smith told Lund she needed editorial powers over the question because, we have particular outcomes we want so we need to frame the questions to our liking.

Danielle Smith wants Albertans who agree with her to have their say. Math, science and facts be damned.

Since May of 2020, when Jason Kenney rescinded the Lougheed era 1976 Coal Policy, thousands of southern Albertans have been fighting foreign coal speculators and our own government to stop this as it threatens our water. I am sorry Danielle Smith was too busy making podcasts promoting chemtrails and the health benefits of cigarette smoking to observe the Grassy Mountain hearing details. If Smith genuinely stands by the AER, then why challenge their authority with this sham “vote”?

Fast forward to last week when Elections Alberta discounted thousands of Albertans’ signatures, ultimately rejecting Corb Lund’s petition to hold a referendum on coal mining in Alberta’s watershed.

Elections Alberta (EA) accepted over 200,000 Albertan signatures who wanted a vote to stop coal mines. EA used a statistical sampling method, discounted thousands of Albertans then extrapolated to estimate the number of authorized signatures was 3% lower than required.

Apparently, those statistical samples were completed by random phone calls from an unaddressed phone number asking for personal information. How would you have responded to those calls, especially after Albertans just suffered the single largest data breach in Canadian history?

Science, ecological and economic review of Grassy Mountain by experts, forget it. 172,000 Albertans asking for a province wide vote on coal mines, no thanks. 1,973 people in the Pass and Danielle Smith want coal mining in our watershed, Autocracy thru Artful Artifice.

Blaine Moen is a landowner and advocate in Southern Alberta.

With two (not really) pipeline announcements and an AI data center with its own power plant and a natural gas processing plant nearby, there’s a lot to unpack!

Especially when the province’s version of how the data center and its power plant will be affecting Alberta’s water and electricity!

All of this and a run down on the latest in the voter list leak, the “Water not Coal” petition and a whole lot more!

To get tickets to our July 25th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca!

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

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We’re extremely excited to present this conversation with First Nations Scholar and Associate Professor from the University of Alberta Dr. Matthew Wildcat, which not only gets into what First Nations can do to better address some of these issues, but also offers some critical insight into the history of Alberta and Canada that has brought us to this moment in time.

To get tickets to our July 25th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca!

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

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As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca!

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We start with a bit of a follow up worm last weeks show before we get into yet another EMS policy shift from the UCP, a deep dive into the by-election candidates in Calgary, Smith’s latest performance on Your Province, Your Premier before we end up with what could be another development in the “Corrupt Care” scandal!

To get tickets to our July 25th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca!

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

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As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca!

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Last night, before today’s tragedy, we took a look at what Bruce posted to social media and the toxicity that is the “Manosphere”.

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Independent Alberta could be facing $27.2 billion cash deficit in year one

Using the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP) fiscal plan as a reference point, I project that an independent Alberta will record a cash deficit of nearly $27.2 billion in a hypothetical first year of independence (using fiscal year 2028/29 as a proxy). This $27.2 billion cash deficit will have to be funded by more provincial borrowing. I will update this fiscal analysis as new information becomes available.

The cash deficit is more complete portrait of the Alberta government’s financial position as it includes funding of the annual retained income of agencies and funds, including the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund (AHSTF) and ATB Financial, as well as annual capital investment. In fact, the Wildrose Party in its Financial Recovery Plan of 2013 once promised to eliminate Alberta’s cash deficit by 2014.

In the case of an independent Alberta fiscal plan, the $27.2 billion cash deficit includes a commitment not to fund the Alberta government’s day-to-day operations by dipping into the $16 billion in projected annual net revenue generated by Alberta assuming its share of Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) net assets. According to the APP, Alberta CPP annual net revenue will not enter as general revenue and will be used only to support pensioners now and in the future. The $16 billion is therefore deducted from the calculation of “surplus cash” as it is being retained in the Alberta CPP Fund and is not available for debt repayment or other spending purposes.

The calculation of the $27.2 billion cash deficit includes $10.2 billion in annual debt servicing costs, on top of the projected $4.9 billion in projected annual debt servicing costs for the Alberta government in fiscal year (FY) 2028/29. Thus, total Alberta debt servicing costs are now projected at $15.1 billion in 2028/29.

The $27.2 billion cash deficit does not reflect the APP commitment to eliminate Alberta personal income taxes (estimated at $17.7 billion in 2028/29), reducing or eliminating corporate income taxes (estimated at $7.6 billion in 2028/29), and eliminating the GST collected in Alberta (an estimated $7.4 billion, as of 2024). It also does not include the APP commitment to set aside a percentage of annual non-renewable resource royalties (NRR) for placement into the Heritage Fund.

Perhaps, the APP sees a rising Alberta provincial sales tax (a 5% AST is estimated by APP to raise about $3 billion annually in revenues) as a means to help fill some of the $27.2 billion cash deficit gap. The APP also suggests that expenditure cost savings as high as 50%, in some areas, can be achieved by using modern systems, such as artificial intelligence (AI). However, APP does not provide any specifics of the program areas where these savings can be found and what impact this will have on staffing and service levels in such program areas as health and education.

Using the independent Alberta financial statement of operations as the basis for the balance sheet calculations, I project that Alberta’s net financial debt will approach nearly $100 billion, as of March 31, 2029. The $100 billion net financial debt includes an independent Alberta recording its share of the net national debt (estimated at $174.2 billion) as a liability on its balance sheet

When examining an independent Alberta balance sheet, it is important to acknowledge that if Alberta chooses to separate from Canada it will have to record Alberta’s share of the net national debt on its own balance sheet as a financial liability, just as it plans to record Alberta’s share of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) net assets on the balance sheet as a financial asset. An independent Alberta will also likely have to refinance some of the $174.2 billion in debt at a premium, somewhat above the prevailing 10-year and 30-year Canadian bond rates, as investors and capital markets will now demand a risk premium.

The separatists in Quebec (the Parti Quebecois or PQ) recognize that if Quebec decides to leave Canada, it must take its commensurate share of the national net debt, even though there are likely flaws in the PQ calculations of Quebec’s national net debt share. The APP appears to believe that because Albertans have historically contributed more in federal taxes than they have received back in federal services that only federal government investments made that directly benefit Albertans or create an asset of value in Alberta should form the basis for calculation of Alberta’s share of the net national debt. However, this would be a very complex calculation and will likely not work that way, in practice, when it comes to the difficult divorce proceedings between Canada and Alberta.

The Alberta government also appears to recognize that an independent Alberta would have to take on its share of Canada’s net national debt. Premier Danielle Smith recently estimated Alberta’s share of the net national debt at $170 billion, requiring about $10 billion per year in expense to service that debt. The Alberta government calculates Alberta separation transition/set-up costs at $400 billion, with annual ongoing costs of between $25 and $50 billion per year.

The Alberta Transition Council, presumably in association with the APP, is now working on the fiscal and legal foundations to deliver a functioning Alberta sovereign state. Just as with the Alberta government, the University of Calgary School of Public Policy (SPP), and the advisory panel, the Transition Council must, as part its mandate, prepare a medium-term (10-year) statement of operations and balance sheet showing the fiscal impacts of an independent Alberta on the province’s finances. The Alberta government should seek the advice of Alberta’s Auditor General on how to record revenues, expenses, assets, and liabilities on an independent Alberta’s annual statement of operations and balance sheet.

Lennie Kaplan is a former senior manager in the Fiscal and Economic Policy Division of Alberta’s Ministry of Treasury Board and Finance, and later the Executive Director of the MacKinnon Panel on Alberta’s Finances. During his tenure, he focused, among his other duties, on assisting in the development of meaningful options to reform federal-provincial fiscal arrangements. This article was reprinted with his permission.

But did Danielle Smith plan to kick the petition years down the line the whole time?

To get tickets to our July 25th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca!

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

You can do that at www.savethebreakdownab.ca!

As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca!

If you’re looking for our new merch lineup, you can find that at www.thebreakdownabmerch.com

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Did Derek Fildebrandt and The Western Standard just mislead their audience and Albertans in an attempt to fundraise for a debate that they already knew was never going to happen?

But first, some background…

Derek Fildebrandt is unquestionably one of the more colourful characters in the last two decades of Alberta politics.

Something of a Laurentian Elite himself, Derek was born in Ottawa in 1985 and only moved to Alberta in 2012 with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation at the age of 27.

After his tenure with the CTF ended, Derek quickly pivoted to provincial politics and in 2015 was elected under Brian Jean’s Wildrose Party.

But his political career was marred with scandal.

2016 was a busy year for that.

In 2016, Fildebrandt was briefly suspended from the Wildrose caucus for a social media comment where he replied to a comment that appeared to have deliberately misgendered the then Premier of Ontario by saying “Proud to have constituents like you” to the original poster.

Only a few months later, Fildebrandt was accused by a neighbour of backed into his vehicle and leaving without telling anyone, effectively hitting and running.

Fildebrandt was was brought up on a charges for leaving the scene of an accident and failing to notify the owner and in 2017 was found guilty.

Also in 2017, Fildebrandt was accused of renting out his taxpayer paid for apartment (MLA’s get accommodations in Edmonton paid for) via Air BNB, with some of the spicier allegations (though unproven) being that the taxpayer covered apartment was being used as an adult film set.

2017 also saw allegations of double dipping for MLA meal expenses and another set of charges around trespassing on private land and poaching a deer. He ended up pleading guilty to unlawful possession of wildlife with the Crown dropping the trespassing charge.

That final charge and his guilty plea resulted in him being permanently barred from the UCP caucus after the UCP and Wildrose merged by Jason Kenney.

(Of note, Fildebrandt’s legal issues continued well after his departure from politics. He was also charged with uttering threats in 2024, a charge of which he was eventually acquitted, but the facts that the judge found are somewhat telling…)

(Of additional note, the “lawn ornaments” were also described as lawn signs in the official court record)

Fildebrandt then rebranded the former Separation Party of Alberta/Alberta First Party into the Freedom Conservative Party in an attempt to retain his seat in the legislature.

That plan failed.

Fildebrandt recieved just 7.38% of the vote in 2019.

But Mr Fildebrandt is, if nothing else, resilient.

Which brings us to his purchase of The Western Standard.

A failed effort initially launched by none other than Ezra Levant, Fildebrandt purchased the name and rights in October of 2019, only months after his crushing defeat in the 2019 provincial election.

And the Western Standard has, in many way, maintained Fildebrandts tradition of high profile, sensationalist scandals.

Whether it’s having to issue a retraction for a story alleging that Jason Kenney was attending restaurant gatherings, the Calgary Police Service having to issue a statement to correct Western Standard reporting, consistently transphobic reporting or, as we spent an entire episode of our show examining, the fact that while the Western Standard historically claimed to not take any government money in any form, they were actually taking in massive amounts of advertising revenues from the Government of Alberta, the Western Standard has a long history of representing things in ways that are open to some interpretation.

To say nothing of the fact that the website of a “news” organization is openly selling Alberta independence merchandise through an openly Pro-Independence storefront…

(Ok, we said it)

Which brings us to the latest debacle involving an apparent attempt to fundraise off of the success and momentum of the Forever Canadian campaign…

The “Invitation”

In order to try and make sense of this extremely bizarre turn, we’re going to approach this chronologically…

On June 8th, at 8:54 AM the Western Standard posted a video “inviting” Forever Canadian leader Thomas Lukaszuk to appear at an event. In that video, Fildebrandt openly stated that “the Western Standard will pay to host it”.

This invitation was followed up 5 hours later with an email blast sent out to The Western Standard’s email mailing list…

There are arguably two things particularly striking about that email…

The first is that Fildebrandt clearly states that The Western Standard will pay for the full cost of the event because “We must ensure Mr. Lukaszuk has NO EXCUSE WHATSOEVER to pull out of the debate.”

One might think that a publisher would be careful about the choosing of the words for the email blast that his name is attached to…

Fildebrandt didn’t say “We must ensure that Mr Lukaszuk has no reason not to agree to the debate.

He said “We must ensure Mr. Lukaszuk has NO EXCUSE WHATSOEVER to pull out of the debate.”

At this point, it’s probably helpful to turn to the Cambridge dictionary definition of “pull out”…

pull (someone/something) out

phrasal verb with pull verb

to stop being involved in an activity or agreement

So the email that Fildebrandt sent out used phrasing that explicitly stated that the fundraising was crucial to ensure that Mr. Lukaszuk didn’t back out of the debate.

And then the email set the goal, Fildebrandt made the ask. He claimed The Western Standard needed donations of $15,000 to raise the funds to cover the costs.

So not so much the Western Standard paying to host it, but rather the Western Standard fundraising to get the money to cover the costs of the event.

To some, a distinction without a difference, but very clearly to others, an important distinction.

The Missing Information

We reached out to Thomas Lukaszuk to get his comment.

His first comment?

“No, I will not be debating them under any circumstances. I never agreed to it.”

We shared that comment on our various social media channels.

Lukaszuk also took to social media to issue a a statement of his own.

Mr Fildebrandt appears to have been very unhappy with that.

In a post on twitter, Fildebrandt provided a screenshot of a series of emails from the Western Standard to Brent Rathgeber, a former Member of Parliament and a lawyer with the Forever Canadian campaign.

Of note, those screenshots did not have any replies from Rathgeber until one stating “We have decided that we will not be committing to any debates at this time”.

While the screenshot seems to suggest that offline conversations may have taken place, there’s no evidence of that publicly available at the time of this writing.

But curiously, what is cropped from that photo is the date the reply was sent.

The Breakdown has obtained the time and date that the reply from Mr. Rathgeber was sent.

June 5th at 1:38 PM.

So to be clear…

Derek Fildebrandt and the Western Standard had been given a clear answer that Lukaszuk would not be participating in any debates a full 3 days before they issued their public “invitation”.

They knew abut the refusal of their invitation a full 3 days before they sent out the fundraising email that many could interpret presented recipients with the clear impression that the money was they key to making the debate would happen.

The Western Standard chose to do both of these things, even though the Western Standard had already been given a hard no by Lukaszuk and a lawyer associated with Forever Canadian.

It’s difficult to imagine a legitimate news outlet attempting to promote an event that they had already been told was absolutely not going to happen.

It might seem even more difficult to imagine what kind of news outlet would attempt to promote and then fundraise an event using their own subscribers when they have clearly been told that the event would not happen.

But in Alberta, in 2026, not that much imagination is required.

This article was updated to reflect corrections offered by Mr. Fildebrandt. His charges in regards to the illegal possession of wildlife were not criminal in nature and his expulsion from caucus was made permanent following his guilty plea.

The UCP is increasingly revealing that the real political battle is not conservative versus liberal, but Up versus Down. The divide is no longer between ordinary Albertans with different opinions, but between concentrated power and the people expected to live beneath it.

We saw this clearly in the recent response directed at Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas, a fiscally conservative voice, who opposed the transition from AISH to ADAP. Farkas is not a socialist revolutionary. He is a conservative who believes in fiscal responsibility,
personal accountability, and community obligation. A glimpse into his character was seen during his 168-day journey along the Pacific Coast Trail in support of Big Brothers Big Sisters. That is not the behavior of a man who despises hard work or responsibility.

It is the behavior of someone who still believes society has obligations to one another.

Farkas and others asked the province to reconsider a transition that many disabled Albertans fear will treat them not as people living with permanent limitations, but as reluctant workers who simply need more pressure applied. The UCP appears to misunderstand what AISH was originally designed to be.

AISH was never meant to function as ordinary welfare. It was meant to recognize that disability itself imposes barriers and costs that cannot simply be overcome through willpower. Disability support is not merely charity. It is compensation for limitation,
loss of opportunity, and the unpredictable burdens that disability places upon a human life.

Farkas appears to understand something the current government does not, that many disabled people cannot participate in the workforce under the same conditions as healthy individuals. Some can work part time. Some can work intermittently. Some can work only from home, or only during periods when pain, fatigue, or mental strain are manageable. Others cannot work at all. A civilized disability system recognizes these realities.

AISH, at its best, was a foundation from which a person could rise if they could, not a stipend generated with Victorian poorhouse ideology.

The government’s response to criticism has often resembled political marketing more than serious engagement with these concerns. Suggesting that opponents of ADAP are trying to deny help to disabled people is like saying that a person who wishes to remove candy machines from high schools is trying to starve the children. It replaces discussion with slogans.

And while some people may accept arguments of such low logical quality, doing so reveals something troubling about modern politics. Too many citizens are being transformed into political team players rather than thinking individuals concerned with the well-being of their fellow man.

I often wonder when conservatism ceased meaning prudence, restraint, stewardship, and moral responsibility, and instead became synonymous with defending concentrated wealth at all costs.

When I was growing up, conservatism meant being careful with money while also understanding that a healthy society required strong communities, functioning institutions, and compassion toward the vulnerable.

Today, many ordinary people are encouraged to direct their frustration downward instead of upward. They are taught to resent immigrants, the poor, the disabled, or anyone receiving help, while paying little attention to the enormous concentration of wealth and influence occurring at the top of society.

No Albertan should wish to see the mega wealthy absorb ever more of the economic pie while ordinary people struggle harder to remain stable. The idea that the wealthiest individuals and corporations require constant political protection is absurd. They are already the most powerful actors in society. They have lobbyists, public relations firms, legal teams, and enormous influence over public discourse.

Meanwhile, the tradesman, the farmer, the nurse, the office worker, and the disabled citizen are increasingly told to compete against one another for scraps while the upper tiers accumulate more capital and more influence over the rules themselves.

As a former tradesman who paid high taxes and later became disabled through the actions of another person, I understand both work and disability. I understand the pride of contributing. I also understand how quickly life can change.

As a former Lougheed Conservative, I also remember a time when conservatism combined fiscal prudence with moral compassion. Peter Lougheed understood that stable societies are not built merely through markets, but through mutual obligation and human dignity.

To modern conservatives, I would simply ask this, return to your roots.

Fiscal responsibility is important. Waste should be opposed. Governments should be efficient and accountable. But do not allow yourselves to be convinced that compassion is weakness, or that your fellow citizens are your enemies simply because they require help.

The true division in society is not conservative versus liberal. It is between ordinary people struggling to maintain dignity, and systems of power that increasingly demand more from them while giving less in return.

When people are persuaded to believe that even the most vulnerable among us are somehow cheating them, they enter a world where loving thy neighbor is treated as foolishness, and where Dog Eat Dog replaces community itself.

That is not strength. It is the erosion of humanity.

Don Slater is a disability advocate who has been awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, the King Charles III Coronation Medal and the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers.

We take a look at those legal developments and the implications in the greater “CorruptCare” scandal given multiple public news stories that seem to draw connections to the company at the centre of it all!

To get tickets to our July 25th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca!

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

You can do that at www.savethebreakdownab.ca!

As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca!

If you’re looking for our new merch lineup, you can find that at www.thebreakdownabmerch.com

If you’re listening to the audio version of our podcast, please consider leaving us a review and a rating, and don’t forget to like and follow us on Substack, Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Threads!

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From there we take a look at the defunding of rural women’s shelters and the latest in the UCP’s gerrymandering of Alberta before we take a look at a dizzying week in Alberta separatism!

To get tickets to our July 25th live show in Edmonton, visit www.thebreakdownablive.ca!

If you’re able to support our legal defense fund to fight back against the $6 Million lawsuit against us by Sam Mraiche, the man who imported Vanch masks and the Turkish Tylenot as well as who hosted MLA’s and Ministers in his skybox as he had business with the government...

You can do that at www.savethebreakdownab.ca!

As always, if you appreciate the kind of content that we’re trying to produce here at The Breakdown, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter at our Patreon site at www.patreon.com/thebreakdownab and we can now accept e-transfers at info@thebreakdownab.ca!

If you’re looking for our new merch lineup, you can find that at www.thebreakdownabmerch.com

If you’re listening to the audio version of our podcast, please consider leaving us a review and a rating, and don’t forget to like and follow us on Substack, Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Threads!

#abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli

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