The Tyee Podcast: We Have Got to Stop Talking About Alberta Separatism

Note: Episode transcripts may contain errors. Always check the corresponding audio before quoting any part of the transcript.

Harrison Mooney
I am really sick of hearing about separatism. I mean, the referendum on whether Alberta should start to begin the process of maybe looking into leaving Canada is still weeks away. That means several more weeks of grievance politics, of foreign interference claims, of electoral shenanigans. I can’t do it, but believe me, nobody — absolutely nobody — is more tired of this topic than Albertans. This is the Tyee Podcast. I’m your host, Harrison Mooney. Every episode, we dive deeper into the stories shaping the West Coast, because Canada needs more B.C. and Alberta, too. For the vast majority of the population, all of this separation talk is an embarrassing distraction from the very real issues impacting Alberta. Unfortunately, the discourse is being influenced by a small but mighty collection of angry online activists, racist conspiracy theorists, and good old-fashioned grifters. Nate Pike says we need to stop enabling this madness. The host of Alberta’s popular podcast, The Breakdown, joins The Tyee this week to explain why it’s time to turn off the fire hose of bullshit. Don’t go anywhere.

Harrison Mooney
Nate, thanks so much for joining me. I’m excited to talk to you because I don’t actually know what’s going on in Alberta. Like we write a lot of stuff at The Tyee, and I read most of it, but I don’t understand what’s going on in Alberta. Can you explain what is happening with this referendum?

Nate Pike
There’s probably multiple interpretations of it. I’ll give you my personal interpretation of it, and then I’ll try to flesh it out with a couple of other likely interpretations. But the reality is, is that the current premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, when she ran for leadership a few years back, she very much had to engage with a segment of the population that defines itself largely on grievance politics, so we’re talking about the folks who all went down to Coutts. We’re talking about the folks who were doing the slow rolls through the province during the pandemic. We’re talking about that whole grievance, freedom, I would say conspiracy-loving group. That’s who she brought to the table in order to secure her leadership. One of them very much was the separatist question. Separatism in Alberta is not new. Alberta has at one point in history, I think it was 20, 30 years ago, elected a separatist MLA in a by-election. So this is not a new conversation. There has always been this group that has had this as part of their — I would honestly call it part of their culture — and it has never had a leader or a political figure that was willing to elevate it to the levels that Daniel Smith was willing to elevate it to. She literally rewrote the law multiple times in order to make the referendum happen for these folks because these are the ones who not only brought her to the dance but by and large historically they’ve been in control of the party that she’s a member of, the United Conservative Party. So there’s an enabling, a great enabling that has brought us to this point.

Harrison Mooney
OK, so sometimes when people talk about these political figures who indulge these particular factions, there’s a, you know, this kind of divide that we do where we say, you know, this person is indulging this faction. They’re not part of this faction. You know they’re kind of they need these votes, so they throw some red meat to this group, but they’re actually like a calculated politician who doesn’t necessarily believe this. I know that you can’t necessarily speak for Danielle Smith, but sometimes I get the sense that maybe she really believes this.

Nate Pike
I think that there’s one of the problems that Alberta faces with this current premier, in my opinion, is she will believe whatever the people that she’s in the room with will believe. Like there’s a couple of people who have described her as an ideological magpie that just picks up the shiny bits, and that’s what she lines her nest with. And I think that there’s a lot of accuracy in that. I think one of the other things that happens with her is she will not invalidate crazy things. I cannot think of an example where I have seen Danielle Smith be confronted with something that was, and I hope I can use this language, batshit crazy, and her response has been to say, “Well, that’s a little far for me. Like I understand that you’ve probably spent some time with the Facebook and you’ve read posts and they have made you very upset, but you should not believe that because it is simply not true.” She will allow these things to propagate, and I think that’s another big part of the core of the problem around the referendum.

Harrison Mooney
I checked with my censors, and we are allowed to say “batshit crazy.” So thanks for that.

Nate Pike
Are there any other restrictions?

Harrison Mooney
No, no restrictions at all. This podcast is completely free of censorship. You can say all the worst words, but don’t say them all in a row because that, you know, it’s just, it’s crass. OK, so the separatist movement, I assume, is based on something. Can you talk about what the grievances are here? What are these folks mad about? Why do they want to leave us?

Nate Pike
Well, this is part of the problem. The great propaganda recipe is very much at play here, and by that, what I mean is there are slices of perceived grievances that, taken in isolation, could be perceived by some to be legitimate. These are grievances that are not being held in good faith. They’re not being held by people who have, “I would like to see these issues addressed in a meaningful way.” They’re being held by people who are using them as pretences to prop up their argument on separatism.

Harrison Mooney
I’m going to assume that one of the issues, just, I’m just spitballing here, is immigrants. It sounds very American to me this whole referendum, and I’m pretty sure we’re getting into the states’ rights issue here, and that it’s going to turn out to actually have a, like, a pretty obvious racial component. Is that fair to say?

Nate Pike
One hundred per cent. And I would make the argument that, you know, depending on which of the 10 referendum questions we’re talking about, I think four or five of them are targeted specifically towards questions of immigration, and they are largely built on data that is older, and they’re built on false pretences as well. The questions themselves have been panned by academics and experts across the board because they are horribly misleading.

Harrison Mooney
What do the experts know, though? Really.

Nate Pike
Well, and that brings us back to the problem — because it is the part of this whole cycle — is the demonization of expertise. We’ve seen it with Daniel Smith and her attacks on the judiciary. So there’s, the MAGA parallel that you’re drawing is not misplaced. There very much is that component at play. I recently, I’ve been having little pokes with a far right separatist content creator in the last little while, and one of the things that he is adamant on is that “They call us all racist, and it’s not true.” I don’t believe, and I will say this on the record at every given opportunity, I don’t believe that every separatist is a racist. I do, however, think that if you are one person in a room of 20, and the other 19 are openly racist, there’s some internal and external questions that you have to ask, and those questions aren’t being asked. And a lot of the tropes, a lot of the racism that we’ve seen towards not only immigrants but First Nations has been just naked. The anonymity of the internet has flowed over into real life in really horrifying and disgusting ways.

Harrison Mooney
One thing I find, too, though, is that often you know these movements will feed the racist component, the racist contingent, but actually behind that are a bunch of really wealthy people who are just trying to not pay taxes and exploit the resources of the region, you know. I’m assuming that’s also going on here.

Nate Pike
I would argue that the reality of this particular movement, and I’m air quoting that to some degree, because I think it is a cyclical iteration of the Freedom Convoy predated by the Yellow Vesters, predated by the, predated by the, predated by the… My interpretation of the leadership structure thus far is that there is a certain craven approach of “We’ve got a lot of people who are really, really angry. We want to keep them very angry, and we can get money from them. So let’s keep doing that.” And this is where one of my biggest concerns in regards to even entertaining the conversation and the air quotes legitimate grievances that these folks are ostensibly bringing to the table is a lot of them are not, taken in context of confederation, all that legitimate. And secondary to that the illegitimate ones, the WEF, the Brookfield, the 5g wireless, the COVID vaccines, the it’s all a conspiracy to stop Donald Trump, who is the second coming of Christ — these are all real things. I’m not being hyperbolic — the amplification of those creates very real harm, and one of the things that I look at when I look at a lot of the people who are deeply invested in this movement is these are people who have bought into the conspiracy theory realm. I mean, COVID broke a lot of people, and there were a lot of people who weaponized a lot of broken people, and there are demonstrated communications and psychological effects that are clearly, clearly at play here. And to elevate them, for the premier of the province to elevate them, to allow those things to further propagate is not only demonstrably harmful, but to me it is, it’s just patently irresponsible.

Harrison Mooney
Yeah, it seems like you’re, you’re saying that there is also a large contingent among the separatists of suckers. Is that, is that about what you’re saying?

Nate Pike
Yeah, like P.T. Barnum had it right.

Harrison Mooney
Yeah, yeah. We’re not saying that they’re all suckers. Just like we’re saying that they’re not all racists.

Nate Pike
The problem with suckers, in my opinion, is that if you have a person who’s saying a dumb thing, then you have one person who’s saying a dumb thing. But if that person can source out, let’s say, that there’s one sucker per 100. OK, well, in the good old days pre-internet, you might be able to find three or four of them, and you could start a little commune somewhere in the mountains. But now that we have the, the networking that exists via all the social media platforms and the loneliness that came out of COVID, the suckers are much, much, much easier to find, and that begets perceived legitimacy because now it’s not just one dude with four people meeting out back at the Denny’s. Now all of a sudden they’re renting out hotel conference rooms.

Harrison Mooney
We’re a movement.

Nate Pike
And that again begets more perceived legitimacy. And that’s again where I would argue the leadership in this province, by and large, although there’s some that are stepping up, like I’m looking at the mayor of Calgary, he is knocking it out of the park right now, on a number of, on a number of different fronts.

Harrison Mooney
What’s he saying? What’s he doing?

Nate Pike
He’s calling it out. He’s saying, like, “Look, Canada, Alberta is better in Canada.” A lot of the reasons why people are saying that they want to separate are not legitimate. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation. We have some very real issues that we need to address, and polling supports that. If you take a look at the major issues that Albertans have identified repeatedly in multiple polls, so I don’t care so much about the one methodology of the one poll that said the one thing. When you have multiple polls all telling you that Albertans are most concerned about cost of living. They’re most concerned about education. They’re most concerned about health care. To do the most destructive version of bread and circuses that you can possibly come up with is just irresponsible.

[music]

Harrison Mooney
Or maybe it’s ingenious. When we come back, is this separatism symphony being orchestrated by foreign agents looking to destabilize Canada?

[music]

Harrison Mooney
So, in addition to the idea that maybe there’s a lot of influence of the sucker contingent going on here, I think that there’s also a real whiff of foreign interference. This all sounds very American. Daniel Smith says stuff that I swear came right out of the mouth of Donald Trump first. There’s an interesting overlay happening here in terms of what we’re hearing out of the States and what we’re hearing out of Alberta, and honestly, sometimes it feels coordinated. Talk to me about foreign interference. Is there an American agenda at play here, or is Alberta just freewheeling and doing its own thing?

Nate Pike
Yes, to both. And I would say that in a couple of different ways. So first of all, if you accept the premise that Danielle Smith is very easily influenced by the people that she’s with, you know she has gone to Mar-a-Lago. She did make a special detour of her trip, paid for by taxpayers, to meet with, for all of 30 seconds, Donald Trump. She regularly makes sojourns down to the States. Many of her ministers, I mean, a couple of her ministers have initiated the prayer breakfast, the provincial prayer breakfast that they openly said was modelled after the Republican version of that. So there is and has been for many years in Alberta, particularly among some segments of the conservative movement, a “But we really, really want to be like Americans.” And so I think that there is a cultural influence that that very much is at play that the conservative movement is particularly vulnerable to. I would also say, though, given what we know about well, there’s two ways that I’ll come at this. So the first piece is, the U.S. State Department has taken meetings with separatists. That is on the record. It is confirmed. That is, to me, in and of itself, a form of foreign interference because these people have no standing by which to represent or negotiate for Albertans. But the U.S. State Department was like, sure, come on into a soundproof skiff, and we’ll have a top secret squirrel conversation. That is the U.S. State Department, in some capacity, legitimizing this movement, and I don’t know how that doesn’t count as foreign interference, because to me it absolutely is. It’s a little bit more subversive than overt, but it’s very much real there. That is demonstrable and provable and true and all of those things. So, do with that what you will. But I also think that in in today’s day and age, where you know one of the things that that a lot of people have taken to doing on the Twitter machine — it will always be Twitter to me — is now that you can see where people’s accounts are based out of, assuming that they’re not smart enough to use a VPN, there’s a lot of pro-separatist accounts that amplify and initiate separatist rhetoric. Secondary to that, we’ve seen reporting from the CBC that has talked about the fact that because this is a hot topic, there are people literally around the world who have figured out, “Oh, I live in...” I don’t know Norway...

Harrison Mooney
Switzerland. That’s the neutral country you were looking for. Yeah…

Nate Pike
“I live in Switzerland, but I can make 500 bucks a month by shitposting Alberta separatism stuff in Alberta separatism groups. I’m going to do that because I can buy things with money.” And that is demonstrable and proven to have happened. So all of that to me absolutely counts as foreign interference. I would also be comfortable taking it the next iteration and saying, given the ways that we’ve seen that foreign governments absolutely contribute to the destabilisation of states that are maybe a little bit less on the stable side, it would be naive and Pollyanna-ish on a level that I can’t begin to wrap my head around to go, “Well, Alberta’s thinking about separating, and that would have catastrophic economic impacts. It would also have catastrophic or potentially huge impact on geopolitical relations with the United States. And the United States has said they want to take over Canada, and this could be a foothold, anyways. But you know what? My name’s Vlad, and I’m going to sit this one out.” There are no protections in place, and the government itself, the provincial government, is engaging in misinformation and disinformation by nature of the questions that they’re asking. So, is it an exercise in a fire hose of bullshit, I would argue yes.

Harrison Mooney
Is it an exercise in a fire hose of bullshit? Yes. OK, I want to ask you about the logistics of the referendum itself. I mean, first question: Let’s say 51 people, 51 per cent of people say Alberta should leave. That doesn’t happen, then, right? That’s not what this referendum is about. Like, it’s like a referendum to have a referendum.

Nate Pike
Yeah, we’re doing things in a much dumber way. The referendum in itself is a referendum to have a referendum on should we start the process of separating. That gets into the, all of the constitutional mechanics of separation that turns into... we don’t have enough time to have that conversation today because it’s so fraught from a legal standpoint the idea of Alberta being able to secede in a year is just laughable.

Harrison Mooney
Can they separate? Is that even allowed within the constitution?

Nate Pike
That is the source of some debate. So the technical answer is yes. There is a very narrow pathway to start negotiation for separation, but it requires all of the other provinces to be like, yeah, it’s cool. You can go.

Harrison Mooney
We have to give permission.

Nate Pike
In effect, I’m oversimplifying this way too much, but in effect, yes. And it’s, I mean, and this brings up one of the easy counter arguments for separation. So Alberta is taking this great big victory lap about the new pipeline that we’re going to build, that I hear the folks in B.C. are very, very happy about.

Harrison Mooney
Yeah, yeah, we’re pretty upset.

Nate Pike
There’s nothing to say if Alberta was to separate that you guys couldn’t say, “Yeah, so there’s going to be this oil transit tax, and it’s going to be your entire profit margin less a penny a barrel. Thanks for the money.” Like there’s literally nothing to prevent that from happening were Alberta to leave Confederation, and so there’s all of these unmapped, unintended, not understood consequences of what the legality looks like, and that’s not even getting into the First Nations piece, which to me. Where it starts and stops.

Harrison Mooney
Can you unpack that a little bit for me?

Nate Pike
Well, it’s really easy. Alberta is, with the exception of the national parks, entirely covered by treaties. The treaties are with the Crown; they are not with the province of Alberta. So, in order for the treaties to cease to exist, the group of largely crazy white folks who are maybe a little bit racist, some of them, have to convince First Nations folks you can trust the white people this time.

Harrison Mooney
Oh right, OK, yeah, I get it. I get it. It’s not even their land, so they’re going to secede on land that’s not their land. That’s…

Nate Pike
It’s a different situation than B.C. because in B.C. you have all of the unceded territories, but literally everything except for like Banff and Jasper and a couple of the military bases and I think Waterton, I’m probably missing a couple of national parks. Those are the big ones. Everything but that is treaty land, and so in order to dissolve the treaties or to have those treaties, Canada and the Crown no longer have an obligation to defend those treaties, you would have to get the First Nations folks to say, “OK, we’ll make a deal with these white folks. It’ll be fine.”

Harrison Mooney
Yeah, these are the nice ones.

Nate Pike
Every time I bring that up to my First Nations friends and acquaintances, they laugh and laugh and then get very serious and go, “No.”

Harrison Mooney
OK, so the referendum then, like I want to talk about the, you know, you right before we started recording, you mentioned that the actual logistics of it, just how this election is going to go, sending out ballots, lineups, and stuff. That’s all already looking pretty messy.

Nate Pike
It’s a dumpster fire because this is another example of how the conspiracy theorists who Daniel Smith caters to have managed to influence policy decisions in the dumbest ways possible. So one of the big conspiracies was, “Oh the electronic voting machines. Don’t you know they stole the election from Donald Trump?”

Harrison Mooney
Right.

Nate Pike
“Electronic voting machines are bad. We should not be using electronic voting machines.” We don’t. The closest thing that we come to using historically that we’ve come to using has been vote tabulators or basically Scantron counters. Everybody votes by paper ballot. The paper ballots are kept. That’s how we were able to do multiple recounts in the last provincial election. But the misinformation and disinformation was sufficient, and enough pressure was applied to Danielle Smith that her very rubbery spine bent right over, and she was like, “OK, well, we’re going to ban it all. It has to be hand votes, hand-counted.” All of those eligible voters are going to be voting using paper ballots, and those paper ballots have to be hand counted. But we’re not just doing one question, we’re doing 10, and each of those questions has to be on a separate piece of paper, and so Elections Alberta has come back and said, “Hey, so remember that last provincial election? This is going to cost like 20 times more than that, and we need to hire like 60,000 people in order to be able to count the ballots.” Because one of the other fun things that they did when they got rid of the vote tabulators is they said, we have to have results quickly. So all results by law have to be hand counted within 48 hours of the close of the polls, which I hear has nothing but good effects on accuracy.

Harrison Mooney
Super fast, it’s fine. It’ll be fine.

Nate Pike
Elections Alberta is desperately trying to hire the people to be able to facilitate this thing, and this is months after Elections Alberta came back, went to the citizens’ referendum committee, and we’re like, “Hey, we need laptops. Can we have some laptops, please?” And the committee was like, “Well, you’ve asked for $14 million. We will give you one.”

Harrison Mooney
One laptop for $14 million.

Nate Pike
No $1 million.

Harrison Mooney
Oh, I see.

Nate Pike
But the institutions that are supposed to support these sorts of initiatives have been eviscerated. It’s going to be an absolute dumpster fire. So I, yes, I did apply for a special ballot, a mail-in ballot. I definitely encourage anybody who wants to be able to vote and not wait for 48 hours in a lineup to look at doing that. It’s a very easy process, but I dread how this is going to go because it’s so complex, it’s so convoluted that if anything goes wrong, the people who believe that the chemtrails are being put in the skies by the insurance companies because they want to make it flood so that they can raise your insurance premiums — real thing, not making that up — those people, if they don’t get the result that they want, which they won’t, because 75 per cent of Albertans do not support this in any meaningful way, they’re going to be like, “Well, this is because of the chemtrails, or they put microchips in the number four pencils, and that’s why everybody thought they were writing in this, but secretly they were writing it.” Like there’s, there’s no end to where this can go.

Harrison Mooney
Right. Yeah. I’m really detecting a disconnect between the complexity of this issue and the intelligence of the people handling it. That’s concerning for me.

Nate Pike
I think it’s deliberate. I don’t know that it is. Like here’s the thing, and this is one of the things that I have in seven years of covering Alberta politics, it is only in the last six months to a year that I’ve kind of adopted the — I hear a thing, always verify anything before The Breakdown puts anything out publicly, or we make it clear that this is unverified. But my reaction when I hear something now is, “Sure, why not?” Because sure we’re going to do a referendum with 10 questions using paper ballots. It all has to be hand-counted and the results have to be done within 48 hours. Five of the questions are wildly racist. The other question, the other four questions, are constitutional questions that we have no ability to have any sort of force and effect with, other than just saying we raised our hands and had a temper tantrum, and one of them has to do with just leaving Canada. Sure, why not? That’s a thing that sounds like it could happen in Alberta in 2026, because it is.

Harrison Mooney
Yeah, I mean, I guess you really do just have to accept that there’s a lot of a lot of nonsense happening. Like this is really giving like dumb Brexit, and Brexit was already pretty dumb. But I guess that that also concerns me because you know when Brexit was happening, most people thought this is never going to happen. I mean, there’s no way. It’s too complicated. And then lo and behold, so I do think that there’s, you know, there’s stuff to laugh at now, but this could get very unfunny in a hurry.

Nate Pike
Oh, I think it’s already unfunny. To be clear, I use a lot of humour. That’s my coping mechanism.

Harrison Mooney
Me too.

Nate Pike
But there are some. I have some very real existential concerns about even having this conversation. One of the big things that I think any political leader should be extraordinarily mindful of, and unfortunately, we get Danielle Smith in Alberta, is the ideas that you allow to elevate have real consequences, even if it’s obvious, demonstrable bullshit. There’s a principle called the illusory truth effect, and if, here’s something for all of your listeners to be terrified of. It’s a proven psychological principle. This is not Nate just pulling stuff out of the ether. By all means, please fact-check me.

Harrison Mooney
I’m going to tell my listeners now that this is unverified. Carry on, carry on.

Nate Pike
The illusory truth effect has been studied at great length, and there’s been a number of studies that have been done in the last 10, 15 years. Some of them even post-pandemic, and basically the way that it works is, you can say to someone, and I’ll use one of the questions that was actually used in one of the studies, the dress that a Scottish man wears, it’s called a kilt. That is a fact. Have that fact. Know that fact. I’m going to tell you that it’s actually called a sarong.

Harrison Mooney
Right? That’s “so wrong.”

Nate Pike
I’m going to do that 15 times, and by the time that I’ve done it 15 times, you are already questioning it, if not accepting that that’s what it’s actually called. You can be aware of false information, but because of the way that the brain likes to process familiar information, the more that you make bullshit familiar, the more that the brain accepts it. Even if you knew at one point it was bullshit. So when we elevate conversations about the WEF or chemtrails or the grievances that we have with the rest of Canada, and they are unfounded, there is going to be a significant percentage of the population that goes, “Well. I know they’re full of shit, but there does kind of sound like something to it.” And that is the most terrifying part of all of this for me because that’s a principle that gets weaponized on social media all the time, and it’s a principle that is being allowed to run unchecked by the leaders because nobody wants to... Like Danielle Smith cannot stand up right now and say, “OK, guys, look here’s the deal. I know that I said a bunch of stuff when I wanted to be the leader of the province, but 90 per cent of this stuff is not true. I’m not going to tolerate it. We’re not going to do the referendum. I’m not going to demonize the courts.” She would within hours be facing a leadership review by her own party.

Harrison Mooney
Is it possible that this referendum goes so badly and the results are so in favour of staying in Canada that this issue goes away, that they drop it?

Nate Pike
No, but I will say this because I think that this is important. One of the things that I very strongly believe is one of the approaches that the separatists have used is they have taken the tack of, “You know, what I’m not going to be ashamed of being who I am anymore.”

Harrison Mooney
Yeah.

Nate Pike
There is, I think, some truth to that. I think that’s why it resonates with some people. I think that, you know, one of the things if we want to put this issue to bed, it is going to require, from Canadians in Alberta, but Canadians across the country, the willingness to stand up and go, “I’m ******* done with this,” and we need to say, “You know what? No, you want to come over here and you want to talk some separatist bullshit? I’m not going to hear it. You go away. You get nothing to do with me. You get nothing to do with my family. You get nothing to do with my friends. I, no, we’re done.” That’s it, because that’s what they do to everybody else, and so this asymmetrical warfare that they are playing on us needs to be responded to, and it can’t be responded to with apathy. It can’t be responded to with an abundance of manners. It has to be responded to with, “Listen, here’s your problem, sir. Your whole argument is predicated on bullshit, and if you can’t see that, that’s fine. I do not have the time, nor the energy, nor the resources to try to deprogram you.”

Harrison Mooney
You know, one of my biggest frustrations with this movement, with separatism, and honestly, even with this kind of this new kind of right-wing movement, is just the way that it drags us all down into the mud. And you know, now suddenly, you know, I’m like a progressive about a lot of things. I don’t want to be out here saying that Canada is the best country in the world. I don’t want to be out here saying that Canada exports good to the rest of the world when we know that, like, we have in some cases, but we also haven’t in other cases. I don’t want to be doing that. I want to be having substantive conversations about how we can all work together to make this country better, or to somehow find a way to actually just work together with people in other countries, join everyone together, you know, collectively improve society, but instead we wind up having to have this fight about Canada’s virtue and you know whether or not we should actually cut them off from us because they’re bad and we’re good.

Nate Pike
Well, can I say one other thing real quick?

Harrison Mooney
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Nate Pike
I think one of the other takeaways because this is a podcast, I assume, that is going to be listened to by people in B.C. and people in Manitoba and people across Canada.

Harrison Mooney
One hopes.

Nate Pike
I hope so. The show is called the Breakdown AB, @TheBreakdownAB, by the way.

Harrison Mooney
Oh, you’re talking about your podcast. I see, I see.

Nate Pike
Yeah, I was, I was, I was plugging mine there because this thing is going to get heard by a lot of people. Do not think for one second, that any province is immune to the type of problems that we’re seeing in Alberta. I watched. I don’t have the full context. I desperately wish that I did, but I watched a video yesterday that was out of the Maritimes that was — based on what was presented, and again, I do not have the full context, so I’m not going to weigh in on it too much — but there were some people who were having way too much fun beating the shit out of another human being, ostensibly because they were Muslim. That didn’t happen, I mean, it happens in Alberta, but that video didn’t come from Alberta.

Harrison Mooney
Nate, this has been a wonderful conversation. Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Let’s make sure that we plug your podcast one more time.

Nate Pike
Yeah, it’s The Breakdown with Nate Pike. You can find it on YouTube. You can find it on all of the podcast places. All of the social media handles is @thebreakdownAB. And if you are someone who wants to be proud of being Canadian, you should definitely pay attention to our socials over the next little while because we’re gonna have some fun.

Harrison Mooney
And this podcast is called The Tyee Podcast. Nate Pike was my guest, and as he mentioned, you can find all of his work and videos by searching the Breakdown Alberta. Did you enjoy today’s episode? Let us know by sending an email or voice note to podcast@ thetyee.ca. The Tyee is a non-profit, reader- and listener-funded journalism organisation made possible thanks to the support of our Tyee Builders. That could be you, listener. Head over to support.thetyee.ca to sign up, so we can keep publishing journalism in the public interest. That’s support.thetyee.ca. And if you want to advertise on this podcast, we have a team that wants to hear from you. You can email them at [email protected]. Today’s episode was hosted by me, Harrison Mooney. It was produced by Jacob Boon and engineered by Isaac Phan Nay. Our music is by Bryan Binnema. Join us again in two weeks.