𝗟𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝘆'𝘀 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗰𝗵 (𝗔𝗣𝗣 𝗥𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆, 𝗔𝘂𝗴𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝟮𝟵, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲)
1:45 — Leighton Grey:
Thank you. [Applause] Hello, everyone. It’s a bit surreal to be here as a kid who grew up in Edmonton and drove by these buildings with my father and my parents probably hundreds of times. So, to be here and speaking to a group like this in front of these incredible buildings that were gifted to us by our forefathers is truly humbling.
I’m so excited to be here, and thank all of you for being here. That was a great introduction, and I’m grateful for it.
Some of you might know me as a lawyer; others as a podcaster. Maybe some of you have read my books, or you might know me personally. But to my government—I’m talking about the federal government now—I’m something else. I’m the other. I’m an Indian.
I have a card here that says I’m Indian number 37802704-01, which is to say that I live in an apartheid state. That’s what Canada is, because the oldest statute on the books in the federal government is the Indian Act of 1876, which creates another class of human being called “the Indian.”
It’s because we have that definition that we have a whole series of decisions—historical, legal, cultural, economic, and spiritual—that have treated Indigenous peoples as the other, as the alien.
You should understand, if you’re here and you’re an Indigenous person, that’s on their heart. And if you’re not Indigenous, you should understand that’s an important thing for us to understand, because if we’re going to create the greatest society—a new Alberta that’s free and prosperous—that society has to be one that unifies Indigenous peoples as Albertans, invites them into the community, and ends the otherness. And that’s what I’m here to talk about today.
4:25
[Applause and cheering]
Family background
4:30 — Leighton Grey:
So, a little bit about me, just so you understand who I am. I’m told, and I believe, that at least one of my ancestors was at Little Bighorn. And no, he wasn’t fighting for Custer.
4:44
[Laughter]
4:45 — Leighton Grey:
His grandson was my great-grandfather. His name was Burl Grey, a very remarkable Indian man—Nakota, part of Treaty Number 4 now. We’re part of the Carry the Kettle Nation at Sintaluta, Saskatchewan.
Anyway, my great-granddad was one of the first Indians in Canada to earn a Bachelor of Arts university degree. He was also a World War I hero. In fact, there’s a legendary story about him: he was court-martialled because, when they were walking back from the front in Belgium—somewhere in France—he and another guy from his reserve stopped to help a woman who was having a baby in a ditch.
Fortunately, he was exonerated, and ultimately he was decorated for that service. That gives you an idea of the quality of human being that he was.
He ultimately was the chief of Carry the Kettle. One of his sons served as chief, and my grandmother was his daughter. She and her sister and two of their brothers spent most of their childhood at Brandon Indian Residential School. If you know anything about IRS, that was one of the ones most notorious for abuses.
But that wasn’t my grandmother’s story, by the way. She was grateful for her time at Indian residential school. She once told me, she said, “Leighton, if I had not gone to Indian residential school, you would not be a lawyer.”
I said, “Grandma, what?”
She said, “Well, listen. If I hadn’t gone to the white man’s school and learned to read and write, I never would have been able to become a nurse, and your father would have grown up on reserve.”
She said, “Leighton, illiterate boys on reserve don’t have sons who grow up to be lawyers.”
6:55
[Applause]
Conditions and policy
6:57 — Leighton Grey:
So, let’s talk about the situation of the Indian in Canada. This is important because they call us the First Nation, but I find we’re first in all the wrong things, and we’re last in all the good things. Here’s a bit of a shopping list.
First of all, we’re last in life expectancy; last in household income; last in educational outcomes; last in government transparency, including the ones on reserve; first in alcohol and drug abuse; first in prison population; first in homelessness; first in domestic abuse; first in abortion; first in suicide; first in fatherless homes; highest in violence and crime; first in youth crime; first in child trafficking; first in gang membership; first in unemployment; and, most of all, first in government dependency.
Now I ask you: is it any wonder that the situation of the Indian and Indigenous peoples in this country is so terrible? Of course, it’s a rhetorical question.
But let’s talk about specific cases. Some of you might have heard an NDP MP recently—I won’t say her name—but she was complaining to Mr. Carney that he was sending money to Africa or Ukraine or somewhere else, and he wasn’t spending enough money helping the cause of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Now, I expect all you good people can agree the situation of missing and murdered Indigenous women in our country is a serious thing, that we should address it, and, if we can, we should change it. Right? Can we agree on that?
But the NDP solution is, “Let’s throw more money at the problem.” Well, some of you may know this; maybe you don’t: did you know the government of Canada now spends more money trying to solve Indigenous problems than it does on national defence?
And listen—who’s been to a First Nations community recently? So, you know that once you get past the casino and the hotel, what do you see? You see poverty. You don’t see schools. You don’t see hospitals. You don’t see youth centres or swimming pools or all the other things that need to be there for a happy, functioning community. You see a blight—a blight on the face of our country.
And, by the way, this is true in Alberta too. My message here today is that, in a new free and independent Alberta, we can do this all better.
Crime and federal government
10:06 — Leighton Grey:
So, talking about missing and murdered Indigenous women, let me explain to you how Mr. Carney’s government is addressing this problem.
Well, he says to judges in our country who are sentencing Indigenous offenders—and if you are a violent Indigenous offender, I hope that what I say right now offends you—94 percent of all violence committed against Indigenous women is committed by Indigenous men.
Okay? So, we’ve agreed missing and murdered Indigenous women is a serious problem. Now we know who’s doing almost all of that crime. But what is the government of Canada telling our judges to do?
They say, when you have a violent Indigenous offender, you have to give him a softer sentence based upon his race and his background circumstances.
So, what’s the result, folks? I’m sure you can do the math. This is the cycle of abuse, and this is just one example of the cycle of abuse in the dysfunctional relationship between that government in Ottawa and Indigenous peoples in this country.
What I would say to these chiefs who are pleading and going to court and trying to stop Albertan independence: explain to me how this relationship is good for our people, because I’m just a dumb country lawyer, but it goes way over my head.
So here’s what we do for missing and murdered Indigenous women: we take the very people who are victimizing them. We not only make it easier and simpler for them to commit these crimes, but we legalize drugs. We turn a blind eye to things like human trafficking. We do nothing to solve any of the problems that are causing Indigenous men to harm Indigenous women.
And so what do we have? We have people locked in a cycle of violence and abuse, and all the money goes God knows where.
You know, it’s not like we don’t know better. The federal government spent money in 1996 on a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and it talked about the problems of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It talked about the situation of Indigenous peoples in Indian residential schools.
But let me finish off with this point, so you understand the character of the man who’s running our country. Mark Carney’s father, Robert Carney, actually penned a sharp critique of the conclusions of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He spent a lifetime working within the residential school system in Canada, and so he understood the details of it intimately, perhaps better than anyone who was working in the government during that period.
He pointed out that the schools actually were not jails, despite frequent claims that students there were against their will. In fact, parents like my great-grandfather had to sign an application form to enrol their children in a residential school.
Robert Carney bristled at the lack of context in the report, noting that the schools performed a key social-welfare function in caring for sick and dying, abandoned, and orphaned children. So, there’s another side to the story.
But in the midst of the 2025 federal election campaign, Mr. Carney—Mark Carney—was asked about this. He said, “Hey, do you agree with your father’s take on this?”
He said, “I love my father, but I don’t share those views.”
So, this is the quality of the human being we have running our country right now.
William Wuttunee and Alberta
14:15 — Leighton Grey:
Okay. Now I want to finish off on a brighter note. So, I’m going to tell you about a very important man from Saskatchewan whose name was William Wuttunee. He was an Indigenous man, born in 1928 in a single-room log cabin on reserve in Saskatchewan, just like my great-grandfather.
Like many kids growing up during the Great Depression, he endured a childhood of poverty and hardship. Education was his release, and he went on to become the first Indigenous lawyer in Western Canada. Isn’t that amazing?
He also served as the inaugural president of the National Indian Council in 1961. He rose to prominence with his controversial book in 1971 entitled Ruffled Feathers. If you haven’t read that, I highly recommend it.
What did his book call for? An end to the Canadian Indian reserve system. This is 55 years ago, folks.
Mr. Wuttunee knew what he was talking about. He believed that the Indian reserve system trapped his people in a never-ending cycle of poverty and despair. He dreamed and fought for a nation where Indigenous people lived alongside all other peoples, enjoying the same rights and privileges as everyone else in the country.
What an inspiring vision for a new Alberta that is.
15:50
[Cheering]
15:58 — Leighton Grey:
Sadly, Mr. Wuttunee was actually ostracized for his views by his people in his own community. Even his own daughter, who is a professor at a university in Manitoba, has disavowed him, and he died in poverty in 2015. He should be a national hero.
So, what did William Wuttunee want? He wanted what all Canadians—what all Albertans, non-Native and Native alike—should want, in my opinion: that is, to be free from political constraints.
He rejected racial segregation. He rejected discrimination and identity politics in all its perverse forms. And yet, in dishonouring his life’s work, his own daughter now misrepresents his legacy by distorting the core truths of her father’s central beliefs and conviction.
I want to close off by sharing with you what I think is a wonderful vision for Alberta independence, which applies to all Albertans—Indigenous, non-Indigenous, regardless of race, creed, or colour.
It’s from a man named Roger Scruton, who’s a brilliant political philosopher and lawyer from Great Britain. Sadly, we lost him to cancer in 2020, but he left behind an incredible legacy of books. You’ll also find many of his talks and speeches on YouTube, and I urge you to go and look at them.
But he said this, and I want you to take this with you as a vision for a new Alberta:
“We all have a capacity for love and a deep-down knowledge that a life without love is futile. We all have to work to find that love and to create the context in which it can flourish. Likewise with oikophilia, which is a Greek word—it means love of home—and this is where the political difficulties arise. Oikophiles, or Albertans, are in search of a home, and it is to the beauty and heritage of this home that they devote their efforts of conservation. They are not globalists, happy to be anywhere on the planet, but localists who look after the place that is theirs, that is ours. And it’s this local focus that leads us to make the first and most necessary step toward sustainability, which is to mark out a territory and an identity that is our own, to be protected from predation and embellished and looked after for the benefit of their descendants.”
If that isn’t the vision of Alberta independence—if that isn’t what Mr. Rath and Mitch Sylvestre and others have been working toward all these years—then I don’t know what is.
If you have a better vision expressing this than I do, than Mr. Scruton has, then please share it with me, because I think this is precisely what we’re trying to do. We love our home. This is not a separatist movement. This is a conservation movement. We want to preserve our home because it’s beautiful and it’s ours.
19:25
[Cheering]
19:39
[Cheering and applause]
19:41 — Leighton Grey:
In closing, I want to thank you all for being here today. It’s been my honour and pleasure to speak to you in this way. And God bless all of you.