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Nov. 17, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:32:34

Showdown with Ottawa: Alberta's New Premier | Danielle Smith | EP 306

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	And we always forget that, that our biggest supporters of all of our institutions, funders of hospitals and winged universities, and all of our charitable organizations are the people who really did well through a free enterprise, and they feel like they need to give back to their community.
	That is the full cycle of what conservatism is about.
	And I don't know why we don't talk about all of that, because that to me is a full vision.
	You know, part of what's tearing our culture apart at the moment are battles about identity.
	I'm whatever I say I am.
	What I say I am is whatever I feel I am, moment to moment.
	It's intrinsic to me.
	And that's a really pathological, narcissistic, and egocentric viewpoint.
	And it's doomed to failure.
	The young people...
	That I've been communicating with around the world are dying to hear a proper story about identity.
	And if you say to them, take on some responsibility, have some entrepreneurial daring, establish a long-term relationship, get married, have children, engage civically, right?
	Grow up and become part of your...
	Family, your community, your state, your province, your country, and dedicate yourself to a high-level religious view of the world, then you have an identity.
	You're embedded in multiple layers, and that actually constitutes psychological stability and purpose.
	And the conservatives have done a very bad job of delineating that vision for young people.
	But if you do, they're extraordinarily receptive.
	Thank you.
	Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and on the Associated Podcast.
	I'm very honoured today to have the new Premier of Alberta speaking with me, Danielle Smith, who's quite a firebrand from the West.
	Alberta, that's Canada's version of Texas, I suppose, and it's the province in Canada that's blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with I think the fourth largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, which that province struggles continually to get to market for reasons of idiocy that we're going to discuss in some detail in this podcast.
	Premier Smith newly occupies the premiership role in Alberta and is starting to put her government in order and to do battle, I would say, with the Liberals in Ottawa.
	And that's partly what we're going to start talking about today, about the relationship between Alberta and the federal government, historically and current.
	Welcome to the conversation, Premier Smith.
	It's very good to have you here.
	Well, Professor Peterson, it's a delight to talk to you.
	Thanks for having me on today.
	So let's talk about Trudeau and the Liberals and what you have to offer Albertans as an alternative, and Canadians for that matter.
	I know the Conservatives in Quebec are pretty interested in Alberta's push for increased provincial sovereignty.
	So it's not as if you'd only be speaking for Albertans when you talk about a more distributed balance of powers in this country, benighted country of ours.
	I wonder if people know how our country has been established compared to others, because as a confederation, there's a great deal of powers that have been given to the provincial order or sub-national level of government.
	Not all governments are structured that way, and I think it creates a little bit of confusion about why we have these battles in Canada.
	I think because we have an international audience, I think walking through that would be very useful for people as a beginning of the conversation.
	Well, I might go back to an academic journal because as soon as I started talking about the Alberta Sovereignty Act, of course, there was a mass freakout in the Eastern media.
	And so I went back to an academic paper that had been written just after the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement had been written in 1993.
	And at that time, they said, you have to be very...
	Mindful of how you implement international trade agreements in the Canadian context because there is a sovereign exclusive level of jurisdiction at the federal level and a sovereign exclusive level of jurisdiction at the provincial level.
	And they used the term sovereignty interchangeably with autonomy.
	It wasn't a provocative term back then.
	And that is really the appropriate way of talking about how we are supposed to operate as a country.
	That I have no more right to legislate in the federal areas of government.
	I can't set up military bases.
	I can't go out and negotiate international trade agreements on my own.
	I can't, sadly, even manage passport offices, much as my residents here would probably wish I could because they've been managed so poorly.
	But it's supposed to be a two-way street.
	That means that the federal government should not be legislating or interfering in our areas of jurisdiction either.
	And they do it all the time.
	They pass legislation that is unconstitutional, force us to go to court to strike it down.
	They are constantly reaching in to whether it's our municipal level of government or our universities or our middle-level management in every single department.
	Trying to get funding deals so that we end up compromising what we want to do here in service of Ottawa interests.
	And at the same time, they show massive disrespect to us as a province in being able to develop our own resources.
	So I can tell you that Albertans have had just about enough of this.
	And we've had times in the past where we've had conservative governments at the federal level who've been far more respectful of our jurisdiction and our rights.
	Even we've had liberal governments in the past that were far more respectful of our jurisdiction and rights.
	The past seven years have been a catastrophe in our relationship with the federal government.
	And as a result, we have to take some pretty dramatic steps in order to save Confederation, to get the country working like it was originally intended to work.
	And that's what the Sovereignty Act is about.
	It's telling Ottawa, stay in your own lane, otherwise we're going to put up a shield and we're just not going to enforce any of the laws you're trying to impose on us that fall in our areas of jurisdiction or that violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
	And I've been delighted to see that having this conversation, it was initially sort of shocking, I think, for the country, for Alberta to be talking this way.
	But if you notice, Saskatchewan recently has put forward the Saskatchewan First Act, which is very much along the lines of what we're proposing here.
	So I think that we've started a bit of a trend, and I think it is going to lead to a better country, a better confederation.
	Right, so for everyone listening, Canada has ten provinces and three territories, and the provinces, as Premier Smith just pointed out, have a fair degree of autonomy and power ceded to them, so it's a distributed confederation, and Alberta is one of the...
	It has been one of the most economically successful provinces in Canada for the last 30 or 40 years, primarily because of the energy industry when it's not being cut off at the knees by the federal government.
	And as Premier Smith pointed out, there's a constant battle for power depending on how centralized the federal government is between the federal government in Canada and the provinces, and that's really reached a head again.
	Over the energy issue in Alberta.
	So what's happened to the energy sector in Alberta since the Trudeau Liberals took power?
	It's been devastated since 2014.
	And some of that is technological change.
	There was a new type of of a development called horizontal multi-stage fracking which allowed for us to open up massive oil and gas fields and as a result the prices ended up collapsing so that happened just before the federal government got elected so we were already struggling in this province but then as we've been trying to find our feet find new markets we have been stymied at every single step there are multiple We're good to
	that was supposed to go to the Atlantic coast or the Northern Gateway project that was supposed to go to the Western coast, or whether it's even Keystone XL that was supposed to go to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
	Every single time that we have tried to find a way to get more of our products to market, we have either had a federal government that has actively cancelled it, in the case of the Northern Gateway, actively stood in the way on the regulatory environment in Energy East, they'd spent a billion dollars in the regulatory environment before pulling the plug because they couldn't see a way to get to the finish line.
	Or even Keystone XL. Billion dollars.
	Billion dollars.
	Just in the regulatory process.
	And then you had the Keystone XL project as well, which US President Joe Biden cancelled within five seconds of becoming president.
	We didn't have a single word of support that came from our national government.
	And so that has been, when you don't have takeaway capacity...
	Now, what's the point?
	The international investors are looking and saying, what's the point in developing new fields if there is no place for us to be able to get our product to market?
	And so we have seen multi-billion dollar projects that have been cancelled.
	Those I was just talking about with oil.
	There was a major oil sands project called the Tech Frontier Mine.
	Same story.
	It would have been a $20 billion project, a billion dollars into the regulatory approval process.
	They couldn't see a way to the finish line.
	They pulled the plug.
	There have been 18, I believe, different LNG projects that have been proposed, starting around the same time.
	That's liquefied natural gas.
	Yeah, well, that's the liquefied natural gas that the new leader of Germany came looking for, cap in hand, talking to Trudeau, who said that he couldn't make a business case for that kind of transaction, and then decided to make an agreement with Schatz to ship non-existent hydrogen from non-existent green plants on the East Coast to To a country that's desperate for energy now.
	You're following it very closely.
	And we started talking about developing these plans at the same time Australia did and the same time the US did.
	They are well along on that.
	And we haven't even really gotten to square one.
	And all of that is because of federal interference.
	We have the ability to develop our resources at the provincial level.
	So when we're talking about the subnational level of government, we have the exclusive right to develop our resources, to develop conservation policy around them.
	But the federal government has the right to develop the pipelines that go cross-border, and they have stymied us at every single step.
	And that is part of the reason we find ourselves at the impasse that we're at today.
	I just feel like there is an absolute hostility on the part of Justin Trudeau and his environment minister, Steven Gibbo, towards our industry.
	I mean, to talk about the ultimate slap in the face, when we had a referendum to try to talk about a better way to share the wealth in the country.
	They take a lot of wealth out of Alberta and don't have it come back our way.
	When we had a referendum on that, the answer from the federal government was to give us Stephen Guilbeault, who earned his stripes by climbing the CN Tower to protest oil and gas development.
	And so if that's the answer that the federal government gave us, When we were trying to, in good faith, seek a new arrangement with the rest of the country, we know where we stand.
	And that's part of the reason why we're taking such a strong stance and pushing back.
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	So I'm curious, so for those of you listening who aren't Canadian, and for many of those who are, it's the case that there are transfer payments in Canada from richer provinces to poorer provinces to try to balance out the economic status of the different regions of the country.
	And Alberta sends a tremendous amount of money out of the province.
	And this referendum that you were referring to, I believe, Was one that put the question to Albertans about whether or not they wanted, essentially, they wanted the transfer payments to continue, given the hostility of many of the recipient provinces to the mode by which Alberta generates its revenue.
	And I believe Albertans voted to cease offering the transfer payments.
	What...
	Have I got the story right?
	And what became of that, all things considered?
	I believe the transfer payments are still occurring as they were.
	It was essentially ignored by the federal government.
	We got a 62% mandate from Albertans.
	And I think the thing to understand is that Albertans are very generous.
	Because we've put up with this disproportionate way of distributing resources for decades.
	If you look at the amount of money that has come out of our little province to fuel the rest of the country, it's $600 billion since the 1960s.
	And the fact that we haven't put up a fuss before now is because we realized that there was a partnership with the rest of the country, that we would develop our resources, we would ship them, Eastern Canada would use our energy to develop products that we would need.
	We would purchase them back.
	And they've now broken that compact.
	Not only do they want the dollars to keep on flowing to Eastern Canada, but they want to stand in the way of us being able to develop more of our resources.
	And that's part of the reason why I think, loud and clear, I'm hearing from Albertan saying, you know, if that's the way you want to operate, Maybe we should start thinking regionally.
	Maybe we should start developing partnerships with just the coalition of the willing, the two adjacent provinces who share our values, maybe the American states, maybe going up to northern Canada.
	Maybe there isn't much point in us continuing this relationship where we have such a trade-in balance with Quebec and Ontario if they're not going to assist us in getting our product to market.
	And that's the conversation that we're beginning now.
	It seems a bit much...
	To both have to deliver the money that's produced by the oil and gas industry, and also to have the oil and gas industry demonized and shut down.
	Like, you can't have both of those, right?
	You could maybe get away with one.
	But to ask for both is just...
	You know, it's funny.
	I used to live in Alberta.
	It's a long time ago now.
	And I was, I would say, fairly federally inclined when I lived in Alberta.
	I like the idea of Canada.
	But as I've been out in the East and watching what's been happening to Alberta over the last, especially the last 10 years, and Saskatchewan for that matter, I keep thinking it makes less and less sense.
	The arrangement just makes less and less sense, especially now, especially given what's happening on the oil and gas front.
	It's so pathological.
	And so why is Alberta still delivering the transfer payments?
	We don't have much control over that because what happens is they overtax us at the federal level.
	This is sort of one of the flaws of our constitutional arrangement that we set up, is that the federal government can tax us into oblivion And then they hoard a pot of money, and then they sort of dribble it back to us, saying, oh, if you run your programs our way, then we'll transfer you some of the dollars back.
	So the real problem with the way the country operates is that the federal government is taxing and taking more money than they need, and then they're using that federal spending power to essentially dictate to the provinces.
	And that's a real problem.
	That's part of the reason why, when you look at what Quebec has done, they start taking back more authority over their provincial powers.
	So They collect their own income taxes.
	And the reason why I think they ultimately want to do that is one day I think they want to move to a more European style of system where each of the sub-national governments collect all their own taxes and then they pay to the central authority only those dollars that go to support the federal areas of jurisdiction.
	And that I think is when Quebec moves in that direction we need to be prepared to move in that direction too.
	But I think that's the evolution of where we're going.
	Is Quebec farther ahead on that road than Alberta?
	And is your plan to bring Alberta down that route?
	And is Saskatchewan on board with that?
	We are going to take as much action in our areas of jurisdiction as Quebec.
	We want to be treated just like Quebec.
	And Quebec has had the provincial tax collection powers for a number of years.
	In fact, a couple of years ago...
	They put forward the motion exactly as I described.
	They said, okay, now we want to be able to collect all taxes and we'll just remit to Ottawa our share.
	And even the Conservatives supported that motion.
	So they're very close, I think.
	If there's a change of government at the federal level, they're very close, I think, to being able to get that kind of arrangement.
	And we don't want to be left behind.
	We want exactly the same treatment.
	What stands in your way at the moment in practical terms in implementing that?
	Why not...
	Is there a reason not to just move ahead with it?
	I mean, it does seem to me to be that it's time for push to come to shove in Alberta and Canada because things are so absurd on the energy front.
	And Alberta is fighting for its life, economic life in many ways.
	I can't imagine that any...
	Any investors with any sense are going to have the kind of confidence that's necessary to invest in major oil and gas exploration projects, given the absolute uncertainty with regards to delivery.
	And to spend...
	You pointed out that...
	In two different projects, two billion dollars had been spent merely on trying to overcome regulatory hurdles before anything of any practical significance whatsoever was brought.
	It's no bloody wonder Trudeau could make a business case for liquid natural gas for shots when his policies have made it bloody impossible for the entire country to produce enough oil and gas to ship to our allies in Europe, let's say, even when they're freezing in the dark.
	Completely.
	And this is the fundamental problem we have in Canada, is that the power of trade and commerce was given to our federal level of government with the idea that provinces might be scrapping over jurisdiction and might be wanting to block each other's products.
	And so the federal government was given that power so that they could streamline the process to make sure that we could get our products to market.
	They're using it in an offensive way.
	They're using it to block access.
	for our products to get to market.
	So my view of it is this, that we were prepared to work collaboratively with the federal government taking the lead, and now we're going to take the lead.
	And what that looks like, and I just recently wrote a letter to Scott Moe, the Premier of Saskatchewan, and Heather Steffensen, the Premier of Manitoba, because if we could get an economic trade route along our northern territories, between our three provinces, we can get access to a port that will allow us to export our products we can get access to a port that will allow us And so I propose that we meet in Churchill, Which is the foundation for a port that might be able to begin that process.
	But that's not the only one.
	And I'll tell you the difference on this, because the issue that we have right now is we've been making our proponents of a pipeline fight every little battle on their own.
	So they propose the route.
	Then they have to negotiate with every single landowner.
	They have to negotiate with every single municipality.
	They have to negotiate with the different levels of government.
	They have to negotiate with the federal government.
	Then they have to go through court.
	And there's First Nations.
	And then on top of that...
	You can have a court process that throws the whole thing out.
	So if we reverse that process and said, you know what, we're going to do the work in advance.
	Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, we're going to get together and we're going to identify the corridor.
	We're going to work with our First Nations and Métis to make them equal partners in ownership.
	We're going to address the environmental issues of caribou habitat and other endangered species.
	We're going to make sure that we're avoiding the areas that are archaeologically Or ceremonially significant for our First Nations communities.
	And once this corridor is built, then we'll invite the proponent to come in because then we will have done our work of clearing away all those hurdles and be able to reduce those billions of dollars in regulatory costs.
	And that's a scrap that I'm willing to have with the federal government.
	This is their work, and they have failed to do this.
	We've been asking for them to do this since the 1930s.
	We've got a fantastic relationship with our First Nations communities, of which 100 of them are oil and gas producers themselves.
	They want to get their product to market, too.
	And so I believe if it comes down to it and the federal government tells us, wait a minute, you're invading our jurisdiction, I'll just say, look, we've got the right to develop our resources, conserve them, get them to market.
	Our First Nations, under the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, They have the right to be able to develop their resources too.
	And I think that we'll win that scrap if it goes to the court.
	But I think we have to start taking the lead.
	Stop acting like a junior player.
	Start acting like a senior partner and get some of these built.
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	Yeah, well, for everyone watching and listening, Alberta is a landlocked province.
	The provinces in Canada are stacked up from east to west, and so the province to the west of Alberta is British Columbia, and they have a huge coast, but British Columbia tends to vote more left and socialist, and it's been very difficult.
	Again, stop me if I'm speaking out of turn here, but it's been very difficult.
	Over many decades for Alberta to negotiate with British Columbia to get its products out to the West Coast.
	And so that's a big problem.
	But is Churchill, is the Hudson Bay, because the Hudson Bay is the coastline of Manitoba, it's in the centre of Canada, is the coastline, are the ports in Manitoba?
	Suitable for export use for these sorts of projects?
	I have a number of technical experts who've been working on developing different proposals, and my understanding is the answer to that is yes.
	There is also a port a little bit further south that I think is open and ice-free more months year-round, but look at Look at Russia.
	I mean, Russia's not...
	They're not saying, oh, there's some ice in the way.
	We can't build there.
	They said, oh, there's ice in the way.
	Let's get 47 icebreakers.
	And to me, if we have the technology to be able to keep these ports cleared year-round...
	We just have to have the political will to work together on getting the work done.
	And in the past, maybe it's because you have to deal with multiple jurisdictions.
	There's election cycles and it becomes difficult.
	I think we were also holding out hope that some sense of sweet reason might set in at the federal level.
	Yeah, well, you can forget that.
	It appears not.
	I mean...
	Even in this environment where we are facing, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we're facing massive disruption in our supply chains.
	Massive disruption in our ability to get a secure supply of energy.
	Massive disruption in affordability for our citizens all around the world.
	Great fears about what might happen in winter in Germany if we don't fill this gap.
	If reason hasn't set in with that as a backdrop, then we owe it to the world to take the lead in making sure that we provide energy security as well as energy affordability.
	And we can't wait for the federal government to negotiate on this on our behalf.
	Yeah, well, it sounds like that could be a real boon to the people of Manitoba, too.
	I mean, Manitoba is often a kind of economically underpowered province.
	There's not that many people there, but a thriving port industry there seems like just the ticket for Manitoba.
	It'd be lovely to see Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba form a coalition that had the kind of political power and population that could serve as a buttress against the centralists and the people in the East who think they don't need oil and gas or energy, except they still want the money from the West.
	Which I still, it's so appalling, that attitude, that it's almost indescribable.
	Well, let me add a layer to that too, because when I spoke with Premier Stefansson, had ever scoped out what it would look like to build transmission lines back to Alberta so that we could have non-carbon dioxide emissions fuel in the form of hydroelectric power coming to fuel our oil sands development.
	And I gather they've never really even considered that.
	But that's the kind of win-win that we're looking for.
	Because the other part, too, is that as our bitumen becomes more valuable, it gets put on rail cars because we can't put it into pipelines.
	When you put it on rail cars, Now you're crowding out all of our grain producers.
	And so we need to not only build pipelines for oil, for gas, we can build transmission lines.
	We can also look at building new highway, new rail line.
	And that's when you start getting a full-service corridor.
	That's the kind of proposal that our First Nations communities have told us that they want to see, so that we can start building out some of our northern territories as well.
	But this notion as well that if we can bring in Some lower emissions electricity and power to be able to develop our resources.
	Then what in the world would Stephen Gibault and Justin Trudeau have to complain about?
	That's the vision that our oil sands producers have, incidentally.
	They don't...
	The green types, they don't even support nuclear power.
	They don't support liquid natural gas.
	The fact that Americans used fracking allowed the U.S. to cut its carbon dioxide emissions 15% from 2000 to 2015, or I think it was 12%.
	They're the only industrialized country that has done that, and they did it because of fracking.
	And the greens oppose fracking, and they oppose nuclear.
	And so looking for logic in that Rat's nest of, what would you say, utopian moralizing is absolutely pointless.
	And you pointed out something very germane, I think, is that given the severity of the energy crisis that's confronting Europe...
	If that in and of itself isn't enough to wake up the people who are putting the brakes on nuclear power and on liquid natural gas development, then nothing short of mass starvation is going to wake them up and probably not even that.
	And so it does look to me like the time the iron is hot and it's time to strike it and the West could...
	Not only, I think, could the West do an excellent job of this, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta, but I think that that triad of provinces would find tremendous amount of international support for doing so.
	And that's another thing that might be worth considering on the strategic front, is to be looking for allies in Europe and in the UK and in the United States that would put their full weight behind such projects.
	And those people definitely exist.
	And we do absolutely need to do that.
	I want to talk just for a minute, if I could, about this environmental piece, because I think that this is the problem, is that the extinction rebellion types, you know, the ones who are gluing themselves to sidewalks and the top of I have no idea why anyone is giving them any airtime whatsoever.
	That is an extremist group that I do not think represents the genuine concern that more moderate environmentalists have about the challenges that we face.
	I'm looking at someone like Michael Schellenberger.
	Who has immersed such a reasonable voice on the environment.
	He's very concerned about emissions, and I get that.
	But he also has realized that we are not going to address issues of emissions and environmental harms by focusing on wind and solar and battery power.
	And I think he's done some brilliant work on this.
	And I might also give a shout out to Michael Moore with his Planet of the Humans documentary.
	That kind of blew it all wide open.
	Where we now have begun to have a conversation that guess what?
	You cannot produce a wind turbine with a wind turbine because there's a lot of steel that comes from coal and there's a lot of fiberglass that also comes from fossil fuels and you have to transport 1500 truckloads to get it to a site using fossil fuels and so until you have A situation where you've got solar and concrete and transportation fuels and fiberglass that are emissions-free, those are not emissions-free sources of production.
	And besides that, they're intermittent.
	So because they're intermittent, you have to build three times as many of them.
	And when you have to build three times as many of them, you're eating up a lot of landscape.
	And when you're eating up a lot of landscape and putting these turbines up, well, now you're also putting, if they're in the path of migratory birds, you're killing birds and bats.
	And why aren't we talking about all of the environmental impact I think part of the reason is that people are looking for easy moral virtue, you know, and so it's easy to be virtuous by having a messy life and saving the planet.
	And then it's simplest to save the planet by concentrating on one thing, and then it's simplest to concentrate on carbon dioxide, as if that's the only environmental challenge that confronts us.
	And so you have this overweening, prideful, and ignorant requirement to put yourself forward as some kind of planetary savior.
	You reduce the complexity of that problem to opposing carbon, and then if you can stick it to the rich just as an additional benefit to your envy, so much the better.
	No one wants to talk like Bjorn Lomberg talks about the multidimensional environmental challenges that confront us, about rank ordering them in some kind of economically intelligent way.
	No one in treating the challenges that confront us like adults might do it instead of like Greta Thunberg might do it.
	And I think the treatment that's been handed out to her is exactly emblematic of the whole problem.
	She's a...
	Relatively eccentric 13-year-old girl.
	She doesn't know anything about how the world works.
	And yet, green leaders around the world kowtow to her like she's some sort of We're a Dionysian prophetess, and that's a real indictment of the situation that we find ourselves in.
	You know, what I think we have to do, though, is that we've got to elevate the voices that are aligned with us, voices like Bjorn Lomborg and voices like Michael Schellenberger, because this notion of energy density is really the key to being able to reduce the impact on the planet.
	And this is why Schellenberger is a supporter not only of nuclear, and small modular nuclear reactors are becoming increasingly of interest to different jurisdictions, but also he's a supporter of LNG, because you can have a smaller footprint in developing those.
	And when you have a smaller footprint, you're going to have, just by definition, less impact on the environment.
	And that, to me, I think what I worry about in the...
	I call myself a libertarian conservative, maybe we'll get into what that actually means...
	But what I worry about on our side of the spectrum is that we only talk in dollars and cents, and we don't address this environmental piece.
	This is the emotional piece that everybody cares about.
	I mean, I was born in 71.
	The first Earth Day was 1970.
	So I grew up...
	Surrounded by that environmental messaging.
	And I think we have ceded the ground to the extremists, like Extinction Rebellion, and we haven't elevated the more moderate environmental voices.
	And that, to me, is going to be my big challenge, is that I want people to understand that, yes, we can provide energy security.
	Yes, we can address issues of affordability.
	And we can do it in a way that is going to be the most environmentally responsible, bar none, looking at all of the other options and all of the other producers around the world.
	That is going to be, I think, our big communication challenge.
	But I think that that's the way that we start building those allies that you're talking about in Europe.
	Yeah, well, it would be great for conservatives in Canada, and I would say across the world, to reach out to people like Schellenberger and Lombard, perhaps above all else, Because they have extraordinarily well thought out arguments on the environmental front, and also are astute economically.
	And that's a rare combination.
	And the Conservatives have erred tremendously, and the central Liberals as well, the middle of the road Liberals, by letting the Radicals take the moral upper hand on the environment front.
	And their story, you know, look at what's going to happen in Europe and around the world, likely this winter, as we put tremendous stress on poor people by jacking up energy and food prices.
	All that's going to be disastrous for the planet.
	In the terms that the environmentalists themselves hypothetically hold dear, the idea that we can make the planet more habitable on an environmental basis, On the environmental front, by impoverishing poor people, by raising energy prices and food prices is absolutely, it's not only absurd logically, but I think it's tantamount to genocidal in its intent.
	It's really appalling.
	It creates grave danger.
	For those who are on fixed income going into an environment, especially in our northern climates, January, February, March, April, it's dangerous not to have reliable power, not to be able to have reliable home heating.
	And we have to be mindful that, as you say, the people most impacted by that are the ones at the lower end of the income scale.
	And so if you are forcing a senior citizen to make a choice of reducing their food bill or reducing their pharmaceuticals so that they can keep their electricity and their heating on, those are not decisions that any government should be forcing their people to make.
	But that's the decision that this is logically...
	Where the policies of those on the extreme green left have led to is that they are now sacrificing those at the lower end of the income scale, which they put their heart on the sleeve and they say that that's who they care about.
	But it is just demonstrably untrue when you see the impact of it.
	And I'll add one more to it.
	The only people...
	That I have heard talk about the plight of those who are living in countries that do not have reliable energy and the impoverishment that occurs from it are some of the energy executives that are at our global conferences.
	This is part of the reason why we need to get reliable natural gas around the world because when you look at some of the most impoverished countries in the world, They're using wood and dung and coal to heat their homes.
	I talked to somebody, a researcher in British Columbia, who said we have 44 million deaths per year because of indoor air quality problems.
	Air rate.
	And so why is that not elevated as an issue that we know we can solve by having these secure types of energy?
	LNG is going to be a solution.
	And specifically, that's a great question.
	If there were 5,000 deaths from nuclear power a year, which there aren't, The legacy press and the left-wing liberal types would be all over that like mad.
	But the fact that there are 40 million people or thereabouts a year who die from indoor pollution from using substandard fuels, which by the way are not environmentally friendly in the broader sense either, that just goes under the radar completely.
	And so you look at facts like that, and that's a bloody, blatant fact, that one.
	And it's children that are disproportionately affected on that front, too.
	And then you also look at the willingness of the so-called leftists who are hypothetically in favor of the poor to impoverish the poor as a consequence of their non-effective green policies.
	And you really have to ask, well, just what the hell is driving this?
	And the only answer that I can think of is that...
	It's something fundamentally predicated on envy and that the desire to bring down the capitalist system that produces those who are richer than the typical environmentalist, let's say, that takes precedence over everything.
	It takes precedence over care for the poor.
	It takes precedence even over hypothetical care for the planet.
	It's like tear the bloody capitalist system down and it doesn't matter What or who gets destroyed in the process?
	Because otherwise, how do you explain it?
	Like, the indoor air pollution fact alone.
	It's like, that's incomprehensible.
	Obviously, the thing to do is to get cheap energy that's clean, as clean as possible, to developing countries as fast as possible.
	And then, you know, on the environmental side, the stats are pretty damn clear that if you can get the gross domestic product of a country up to something averaging approximately $5,000 US a year, then people start taking a long view and caring about the environment.
	And so it's quite obvious that if we did everything we could to eradicate absolute poverty, mostly by driving energy prices down, Then we could get people off of their reliance on those primitive biofuels that poison them and poison the planet and denude the territory.
	And we could get them caring about the environment.
	And so, why not do that?
	Okay, now do you want to become Premier of Alberta?
	Because this is exactly the point that I have.
	I want to see me on the international stage.
	And I don't know why it's so hard to get these messages out.
	It does seem, and maybe it is, that we're facing something that is more of a culture war underneath the surface, that we think it's about solving environmental issues, and we think it's about caring for those who are vulnerable, and we think it's about obliterating international poverty.
	And it's not.
	It's about something else altogether.
	And I would I would say I need to be very, very clear because I know the world keeps on talking about some transition to some other fuel that might someday exist in the future.
	And I'm going to tell you that our messaging here is going to be very, very different.
	We are not going to transition.
	Out of oil or natural gas.
	We're going to transition away from emissions.
	We're going to produce these products in a way that has lower and lower emissions.
	And we've got great technology to be able to do it.
	We're learning how to capture CO2 and to embed it into products to make them more durable or bury them underground.
	We're talking about developing out our hydrogen economy.
	LNG is going to be one way that we're able to reduce more polluting fuels around the world and reduce global emissions.
	But when you start doing all of these things, one of the things I don't think is well understood Is that out of a barrel of oil comes about 6,000 different products.
	And not all of them are combustion.
	About 70% of them aren't.
	We've got lubricants and plastics and building material, asphalt.
	So even the enthusiasts of zero-emission vehicles, they're going to need roads to drive them on.
	Which means that we are going to need to produce bitumen.
	And if we can produce bitumen with lower and lower emissions, then this is a win for everybody.
	This is a win for the environment.
	It's a win for the economy.
	It's a win for affordability.
	It's even a win for the environmentalists, though they don't realize this.
	And so we need to get away from any notion that these fuels are going to be kept in the ground.
	I think it's as ludicrous to talk about phasing out oil and natural gas as it is ludicrous to talk about phasing out concrete.
	We're phasing out steel.
	We are increasingly using our base products for construction materials, for plastics, and we are always going to need to have those.
	And as Michael Schellenberger has pointed out again quite brilliantly, is that when you start using these types of alternative construction materials, It means that you don't need to go to the natural environment to be able to harvest them there, and so you're able to preserve more habitat, and you're able to preserve more of the environment.
	We just need a paradigm shift in how we talk about the environment.
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	That's Shopify.com slash JBP. You said you don't necessarily think that what's going on is about the kind of micro-issues that you just described.
	And I think that's absolutely true.
	You know, I've been working with conservatives internationally and centralist liberals, too, on the construction of something like a more profound underlying traditionalist narrative.
	And I think what's happened, too, is the conservatives...
	The traditionalists and the liberals increasingly have been set back on their heels by the increasingly strident moralistic claims of the radical leftists and haven't really been able to respond to that properly and have been, in some sense, what would you say, the victims of their own guilt.
	You know, because the thing about conservative types is that they tend to be conscientious.
	And so if you go after them for not doing their duty, they tend to take that quite seriously.
	And so when the left levies on accusations of less than dutiful behavior against conservatives, the first thing the conservatives do is get guilty.
	It's like, well, we probably could pollute a little less more.
	We could be a little less sexist.
	We could be a little less racist.
	We're sorry.
	It's like, it's time to stop being sorry.
	It really is, on the Conservative front, to say, look, your bloody policies are not only raising energy prices to levels that are absolutely unconscionable, but certainly dooming a large percentage of the population in the world and in the Western world as well.
	To undo poverty and privation.
	And you're not doing a damn thing on the planetary front.
	In fact, you're making the situation worse.
	And so we've had enough of your cheap moralizing.
	We're going to go ahead with what the adults do, which is to deal with the world as it is.
	You know, I got some stats from Bjorn Lomborg recently.
	I just wrote an article for The Telegraph that's quite popular about delusional, genocidal globalists and their willingness to sacrifice the poor.
	And Lombard pointed out that the International Energy Agency and the Biden government have both projected that we won't be at 100% renewable energy until at least 2240.
	Not 2035 or 2050, that'll still be at best at something like 20%, assuming everything that's planned works out, which it won't.
	And so the idea that we're going to somehow transition to these magical technologies that are just going to suddenly appear is absolutely preposterous, even when you don't take into account the facts that you laid out, which is we make all sorts of other things from oil.
	And so what are we going to do?
	Stop making them?
	It's like, well, maybe, because you don't need those if you're going to decrease your carbon load.
	We're never going to get to 100% renewable.
	I may as well just put that on the table.
	Because when you think about what you need to get to 100% renewable, especially if you're talking about battery power to back it up, where are we going to get the lithium and the cobalt?
	And the nickel, you have to mine the surfaces in order to do that, but the environmentalists are opposed to mining as well.
	Every time you try to get a mining operation going, you've got a wall and an army of environmentalists trying to stop you there also.
	You have to move a lot of earth in order to be able to develop all of those resources to be able to feed the battery power, and you have to use a lot of landscape in order to put on the solar panels and the wind turbines.
	I think Lomburg has estimated that there is something under 10 minutes of battery power, sufficient battery power in Europe to power the European power grid at the moment.
	Something like, I think it's actually three minutes.
	It's somewhere between three and ten minutes.
	And all the vaunted improvements in battery technology that we're supposed to be zipping along like mad by now haven't manifested themselves.
	And so that's a non-starter as well.
	Well, let me tell you what I think the future is, honestly.
	And I think Canada is well on its way in helping to develop this future.
	I think hydroelectric power is the future.
	I think nuclear is the future, particularly small modular nuclear reactors, which we're going to be rolling out in Ontario and New Brunswick very shortly.
	And then on top of that, developing natural gas and using carbon technology to capture the emissions so that you're not putting anything into the atmosphere.
	And perhaps even geothermal.
	We have to be looking at ways that you can get secure, reliable base load that doesn't have a huge external impact on the environment across the whole range of environmental impacts.
	And I think we have to get away from this idea that solar and wind are the only answer.
	Sort of interesting you said that there's this envy or this hostility to capitalism.
	I see it a little differently.
	I feel like those on the other side of the spectrum have their own favorite capitalists that they like to support.
	You mean like pharmaceutical companies?
	Well, there's a heck of a lot of subsidies that go to wind and solar panels, solar power as well.
	And so I think really that's what we're seeing is that there's a multi-trillion dollar market at play here.
	And that we've got two different interests that are lining up.
	And one of those interests, on the other side, is also seeking to have a huge amount of government support for it.
	And I tend to believe in free enterprise.
	If something is going to be supported, it should be able to be supported on the basis of the market.
	That it's the best use of the resources, the lowest cost, delivering the better products.
	Best product for the lowest price.
	That is how we're supposed to be operating.
	If we're going to be operating from a position of crony capitalism, where you just have to get your guy elected and then you can secure a bunch of grants so that you can push your agenda forward, that's, I think, what has been driving things for the last 10 or 20 years.
	Yeah, well, I also think that's another undiscovered area for genuine traditionalists, conservatives and liberals alike, to start making headway on the moral front, is that a little less crony capitalism would be a good thing.
	Because crony capitalism is really fascism, to give it its proper terminology.
	And this collusion between huge industry and huge government, that's got to stop.
	It's not the free enterprise market that properly responds to transformations of demand and supply.
	It's top-down collusion and it's aided and abetted by very large players and that's really gone out of hand as well.
	I think the Conservatives would do well to address that as much as they possibly can.
	You're very right.
	You talked about small nuclear modular reactors.
	What's happening on the Canadian front in relationship to that?
	What do you see as promising?
	Well, we have an expert in nuclear development in Ontario.
	The Ontario market has powered 60% on their power grid by nuclear, and so they are looking at ways of bringing these smaller units.
	I think some as low as 15 megawatts, some in the 50 to 200 megawatt range.
	And this is proven technology.
	I mean, if you look at nuclear submarines, we've managed to find a way very safely to have men and women in nuclear submarines powered by this kind of small-scale technology.
	So now it's a matter of going through the regulatory process, getting it approved, getting it implemented, proving it out so that we can get it into other markets.
	So in New Brunswick, my understanding is they're rolling out one of these very small ones under 15 megawatts by 2026.
	And in Darlington in Ontario, they're rolling out a small one in 2028.
	And so once that begins, there's no reason why our oil sands producers wouldn't be able to use that technology to develop their products.
	And that also then will reduce the overall emissions of our energy sector.
	So those are the things that we're watching now.
	But of course, the federal government stands in the way, even on these promising technologies, they stand in the way of allowing those to go through a streamlined regulatory approval.
	And it's because, again, we have an environment minister who takes this paradigm view that the only way that we can develop electricity is to use the sources that he thinks we ought to use, and that excludes natural gas, and that excludes nuclear.
	So that's another big battle coming up, because I think that Canada...
	We'll be able to export that to the world and also reduce overall global emissions if we can just get our policies right.
	I should say, incidentally, Europe is already there.
	Europe already allows for green bonds to be issued for nuclear developments as well as for natural gas developments with a carbon capture component to it.
	But it's Canada who has also an advantage in developing these types of energy sources that our federal government is standing in the way.
	And so I think that gives us some common cause with our friends in the rest of the country, particularly Ontario, in making that argument more broadly.
	So what's happening on the political front in Alberta at the moment?
	When's the next election?
	How are the Conservatives doing in Alberta?
	How are you negotiating with your primary opponents, which is the Socialists, the NDP in Alberta?
	And what does the political horizon look like for you?
	At the moment in Alberta.
	We had a change in leadership because obviously we had some internal conflict in our party around some of the issues that we've been talking about.
	Are we getting our fight out to Ottawa enough?
	I think some of our supporters were feeling that we weren't Fighting Ottawa enough on our areas of jurisdiction.
	We weren't getting progress on being able to get our energy to market.
	We weren't getting progress on changing the transfer program in our country and also on issues of liberty that our government didn't do a good enough job of standing up for freedoms.
	And so we have some repair work to do with our conservative movement to stitch it back together.
	Leadership races help in that regard because it gets everybody out there talking and Meeting with people and making apologies where apologies need to be made.
	So I feel like our movement is pretty unified.
	But we are facing a very tough competitor in the NDP. They have cemented themselves as the progressive vote, and they have been polling strongly ever since they left government last time around.
	So I don't want to take it for granted.
	But I think these are the issues that are going to turn the election.
	As much as the NDP... And all of the socialist parties like to act as though they're looking out for the middle class.
	They are not.
	They used to be a party that looked out for the little guy.
	Now they want to maintain the elite institutions and the elite structures that we have, which only benefit those at the very top and also benefit those who are in decision-making roles in the bureaucracy.
	And it hurts the little person.
	I I mean, when you have our government talking about a 300% increase in the carbon tax at the federal level and the provincial opposition leader is walking 100% behind that and then trying to do videos about how much she cares about affordability, it's baffling.
	You can't do that.
	It's impossible.
	You can't say, we're going to increase the cost of all of your energy use by 300%, but my goodness, what happened?
	Why is food going up in price?
	Why is electricity and home heating going up in price?
	Why is gasoline and diesel going up in price?
	You have no credibility.
	The only way you have credibility is you say, remove the retail carbon tax to give people a break while we're going through this inflation crisis.
	I think that's going to be one of the big points of difference between us and the guys on the other side.
	I think they are revealing that they aren't who everybody thought they were.
	This is why we have to show our heart a lot more.
	Conservatives, sadly, when we run campaigns, we often talk about how much we're going to cut and we're going to reduce taxes.
	Anybody who We're good to go.
	You know, but one vision that Conservatives can offer, which I think is pretty damn straightforward, is cheap, plentiful, relatively clean energy for everyone.
	Because everyone, obviously everyone knows, if they have an iota of political or economic sense, that energy costs drive everything.
	They drive their transportation, they drive their food costs, they drive their heating costs.
	And the best thing you can possibly do for poor people over any reasonable span of time is to drive energy costs down to the lowest possible.
	And that's a great way of combating the moralism of the left.
	It's like, you guys, you've already shown your colors.
	You're perfectly willing to sacrifice the poor to not save the planet.
	It's a very bad strategy.
	I think the NDP is weak on the federal front, too, because maybe you can clue me in on this a bit.
	I do not understand Jagmeet Singh.
	So here's a proposition for you.
	So this is a man who wants to run for the leadership of the country in principle.
	And he essentially established a coalition government with the Trudeau liberals who wouldn't be able to hold on to power without them.
	And he didn't even negotiate to get a cabinet seat, even though what he produced was essentially a coalition.
	So you have a man who is so unable to govern that he couldn't even get himself a seat at the table for the price of selling his soul to the liberals And he's the leader of the socialists in Canada.
	Now, can you explain any of that to me?
	For the life of me, I can't understand what the hell is motivating him.
	And I cannot understand what that means for the socialists and the NDP. I think that there's a story that the socialists tell themselves, that the last time they were most effective in getting their agenda passed was when there was a minority liberal government and they had the balance of power.
	I think that's when the pension came in.
	There's certain things that they believe that they take credit for because they formed the balance of power at that time.
	So I think they believe it's enough to just have that threat of being able to call an election at any time.
	I think it's even worse for my opponent, Rachel Notley, because...
	As you know, since you were involved in NDP politics, you don't actually buy a membership in the federal NDP. You buy a membership in the provincial NDP, which gives you your membership in the federal NDP. They're embedded.
	And I don't know how in the world she's going to run a campaign saying, yeah, my federal leader is in this partnership with Justin Trudeau, and both of them Are taking actions that are damaging Alberta.
	I don't think that's a very strong position for her to be in.
	So I'm sort of mystified about why she's walking in lockstep and supporting that agenda, which is stopping our development, and that agenda, which is raising the price of everything.
	So I don't pretend to understand the world of socialism.
	The one thing I do understand is that I think that this is probably the most left-wing liberal government we have ever had.
	And so, maybe they should have a formal coalition.
	I got accustomed to seeing more moderate liberals in those positions in the past, like Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, which ran balanced budgets and surpluses and helped to develop the economy.
	I mean, a liberal who wants us to do well so they can steal our wealth is a liberal government I can understand.
	Like, let's scrap over who gets to the benefit of the wealth creation.
	A liberal who wants to destroy wealth creation and then think that you can have phony wealth creation by printing money is somebody who I simply don't understand.
	But that might explain why the two of them are actually more in lockstep than you might have thought, is because I think, foundationally, they just believe in central government planning, central government decision-making, central bureaucrats making all of the decisions, printing money, and everything will be fine.
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	If the Liberals are already doing that, why the hell have an NDP at all?
	Completely.
	And I mean, that's got to be the question that's on the minds of thoughtful Canadians, I would presume, when they're looking at the current situation, is that if the Liberal government is so aligned with the NDP that it isn't even useful for the NDP to oppose them, which seems to be the case, and to really require no commitment from the Liberals for doing so, then the party is superfluous.
	You saw what happened in the Ontario election.
	I mean, the NDP got obliterated, and I think that's a big part of the reason.
	And I don't know how Rachel Notley is going to justify her alliance with Singh, given precisely what you said.
	And it's especially the case when...
	As far as I can tell, there's zero evidence whatsoever that the green higher energy cost agenda has done anything but harm the environmental outlook.
	And we're going to see a lot more of that making itself well.
	And look at what it did with regards to precipitating a war between Russia and Ukraine.
	That's also something, an impossible-to-win war, that's also something that beggars the imagination.
	Far be it for me to give advice to the NDP, but let me tell you what they have done.
	They've really cannibalized their own base of support because the NDP used to be the party of the working person.
	They used to be the party of labor.
	They used to be the party of the blue-collar guys and gals, and they're not that anymore.
	Because every single time a resource project comes up, they end up taking the opposite position.
	They take a position that makes it more difficult to get those projects approved, and they take the environmental position, which actually sacrifices all of those building trades workers who would be commissioned to build those pipelines and build those projects.
	So this is, I think, the fundamental insight that Doug Ford had, is that that is a pool of voters that are no longer represented by the left.
	And so he's reached out his hand and said, come and join the Conservative Party.
	We want you to have a good paying job.
	We want you to take care of your family.
	We want you to feel secure.
	We want you to be proud of your industry.
	And that's what we're saying as well.
	I can't imagine why anybody in one of those resource sector jobs, one of those blue-collar trades, I can't imagine why they would vote.
	For such an extreme green agenda that's being manifest in the NDP party, and especially with that partnership with the Liberals.
	So I think that they have created an opportunity for us as Conservatives, and we just have to make sure that we're addressing those issues in a meaningful way.
	And I think we are.
	I think we're beginning to understand that we've got to speak more broadly.
	About those aspirational issues.
	It looked like Pierre Poliev did a pretty good job of that on the leadership front in the Conservative campaign and I want to talk to you a little bit about that strategically speaking because Poliev basically circumvented the legacy media and went directly online to people.
	And I know that's part of the reason that you're also graciously agreeing to do this conversation with me.
	I mean, it does look to me like there is absolutely no reason, and increasingly this is going to be the case for conservatives and centralist liberals to talk to the legacy media types at all.
	You just run your own show.
	And, I mean, Polyev was producing his own ads and they were getting like 500,000 views on YouTube, which is quite stunning.
	Much, much greater than he could possibly hope for on a legacy platform like CBC, cursed be its name.
	And so it's possible, I think, for conservatives and traditionalist liberals to take their message, their political message, or their cultural message, their philosophical message, directly to people in conversations exactly like this, and to say, look...
	And I do think it was the case that back in the 1970s, you know, the NDP was a genuine working class party because most of the people who ran it and many of the people who were members were actually labor representatives, right?
	Union types, back when the unions were powerful.
	And many of the leaders, regardless of their...
	Stance with regards to the basics of free market competition really were for the working class.
	But as you pointed out, that's all disappeared in the last 10 or 15 years.
	You saw that with Hillary Clinton.
	I mean, she basically abandoned the working class in the United States to go with the woke types and that cost her the election.
	And certainly...
	Contributed to Trump's popularity.
	And so the conservatives, and I think Poliev did this, conservatives could capture, I think, not only the working class, quite straightforwardly, especially working class men, but could probably also capture the immigrant population because immigrants are a lot more conservative.
	In Western countries, then the population at large, and the fact that they generally vote for the liberal left is really a consequence of egregious errors that have been made by conservatives in communicating with immigrant populations.
	Because the message to them should be, look...
	We want you to come here and thrive and we basically share your values.
	And so don't be voting for the handout people because they make false claims of, you know, diversity and ethnic inclusivity.
	It's all a bloody ruse and that isn't what you came here for.
	There's a lot of lip service paid, I think, on the progressive side of the spectrum to reaching out.
	Whereas I think you're very right that the values that we have in the conservative movement are really reflective of newcomers who come to Canada.
	I don't want it to sound sloganeering, but I do frame out how we build our coalition out and how we describe what it is that we want to do from a philosophical point of view on a range of six different values.
	So, obviously, freedom.
	And you saw that Pierre Paulia...
	Really talked a lot about freedom of the individual to make their own choices, get the gatekeepers out of the way, and just allow people to have more control over their lives.
	But there's also family, and this is the other part that I think builds out our coalition to include social conservatives, is we know that the best environment for an individual to be able to thrive is when they're surrounded by a supportive family.
	So any policies we can do to support families staying together, thriving, helping each other is going to be something that builds our movement.
	Then there's faith, and I would say that there's an open hostility to faith on the other side of the spectrum, whereas we embrace faith communities across the full range because we know that that adds that additional layer of support if something goes wrong.
	Our faith communities are some of the most generous communities when you look at how they support members who end up in trouble.
	On top of that, I would add fellowship because there are some people who are no longer part of a faith community, but they'll join their Rotary Club or their Elks Club or their Lions Club.
	And that's another way that you can build community.
	And some of the most amazing initiatives happen in a community at a local level when they're able to identify an individual issue and come together and government stays out of their way.
	And then on top of that, free enterprise, it won't surprise you, I was an intern at the Fraser Institute from years ago.
	And to me, free enterprise, genuine free enterprise, where a person with an entrepreneurial spark is able to get together the capital and try something new and have that creative destruction that happens when you come up with something truly transformational to the economy.
	That's what we've got to nurture.
	Because that is what genuine entrepreneurship and capitalism is really all about.
	And then the last one is philanthropy.
	And we always forget that, that our biggest supporters of all of our institutions, funders of hospitals and wings at universities and all of our charitable organizations are the people who really did well through a free enterprise and they feel like they need to give back to their community.
	That is the full cycle of what conservatism is about.
	And I don't know why we don't talk about all of that because that to me is a full vision One of the things that's worth pointing out is, you know, part of what's tearing our culture apart at the moment are battles about identity.
	And the progressive solution to the problem of identity, which is really the problem of meaning and purpose in life, let's say, is Subjective definition.
	I'm whatever I say I am.
	What I say I am is whatever I feel I am, moment to moment.
	It's intrinsic to me.
	And that's a really pathological, narcissistic, and egocentric viewpoint.
	And it's doomed to failure.
	And the reason, and I mean this technically, the reason it's doomed to failure is because your mental health isn't something you carry around in your subjectivity.
	Your mental health is in large part a consequence of being properly and harmoniously nested in that hierarchy of institutions that you just described.
	And this isn't taught properly to young people.
	And young people are looking for purpose, which the left, by the way, provides them with, right?
	Because it provides them with a messianic vision.
	You don't know what you're doing.
	You could be saving the planet, right?
	You could be a rebel who's saving the planet.
	And that's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
	But the conservatives can say, look...
	You need to get married.
	You need to have a long-term partner.
	Because without that, well, first of all, you're not going to grow up.
	And second, you're going to be lonesome.
	And third, you're going to need love.
	And it's like, find a partner.
	That's the basis for a family.
	And then, you know, you should probably think about having some children in a stable, monogamous, heterosexual, long-term family.
	Why?
	Because you're not going to be sane without that.
	Now, sometimes you're not going to be sane with it either.
	But, you know, otherwise you're lonesome and alienated and juvenile and depressed and nihilistic and your life is pointless.
	And then, well, you need that civic engagement.
	Because you need to contribute to the community.
	And with regards to faith-based organizations, the left and the radicals are opposed to such things, but it's not like they don't have their own faith-based propositions.
	They just substitute for traditional religion, idiot rational religion.
	And it's completely counterproductive and preposterous.
	Most of that religion is based on something like a recounting of the Marxist story.
	And every time the Marxist religion has taken the reins of power in any country whatsoever, ever, all there was was genocide and poverty.
	And so that's, if you want an example of a pathological religion, you can certainly point to Marxism.
	And The young people that I've been communicating with around the world are dying to hear a proper story about identity.
	And if you say to them, look, take on some responsibility, have some entrepreneurial dairy, establish a long-term relationship, get married, have children, engage civically, right?
	Grow up and become part of your...
	Family, your community, your state, your province, your country, and dedicate yourself to a high-level religious view of the world, then you have an identity.
	You're embedded in multiple layers, and that actually constitutes psychological stability and purpose.
	And the conservatives have done a very bad job of delineating that vision for young people, but if you do, they're extraordinarily receptive.
	You're very right.
	I think part of the challenge was that we've had so much social change over the last 20 years.
	And the conception of what it meant to have that strong, stable relationship was very binary.
	It was one man, one woman.
	I think now that we've broadened out the understanding that everybody needs a life mate.
	And it doesn't matter whether that's someone of the same gender or the opposite gender.
	Having a life mate is what is important.
	And now we've also broadened out so that those who've married in even same-sex relationships also are developing families as well.
	And I think that that has made the conservative movement far more inclusive than it might have been historically.
	And you see this all the time.
	I mean, there is this notion that those who have that sort of characteristic from the LGBTQ plus community are automatically aligned with the progressives.
	And I can tell you that is not the case.
	That we have gay leaders in the conservative movement.
	We have gay staff members in the conservative movement.
	We actually have a transgender woman who heads up our chief firearms office in Alberta.
	I don't know why nobody has written that story because it's a really amazing story and she's an amazing woman.
	And she has great support from the firearms community because we are able to have a broad enough reach and broad enough coalition that everybody is invited in and we agree on the core values that we were talking about.
	I agree on the issues associated with individual rights and freedom and entrepreneurship and family and community.
	And when you can have that common ground, then you can have a very broad coalition.
	So I think we had a bit of a bumpy ride for a couple of decades as we were trying to sort some of those traditional values out.
	But I am very proud of where the conservative movement is today and how inclusive it is.
	And I want to make sure that we continue to be that inclusive.
	You wanted to talk a little bit, too, about your philosophy of government and social issues from a Conservative viewpoint.
	And we've talked a fair bit about energy and the environment, and we've touched now a little bit on social issues, but I'd like you to talk a little bit more about your views on social issues.
	You said that Conservatives generally present themselves Really fiscally in some sense, right?
	We're going to make government efficient.
	We're going to cut back taxes.
	We're going to let you do your own thing.
	And that's a negative vision.
	And I don't mean negative emotionally.
	I mean, we're here to pair things back.
	And that's not an expansive vision, let's say, of care in some sense.
	And I understand why that is.
	But you talked about some of the ideas you had.
	We briefly talked about them on the social front.
	So maybe I could get you to elaborate a bit on that.
	I'll tell you, because I see Alberta, we've gone from, in the 1970s, having 1.5 million population to 4.5 million today.
	We are continuing to attract people from around the province and around the globe.
	I want to create Alberta's little bastion of freedom and free enterprise amid a bit of a sea of chaos that we're seeing in North America right now.
	And I think that that message is causing people to look here and want to come here.
	And so if we're going to continue growing our population, and I think we'll double if we continue this attraction by 2050.
	So if we're going to double our population, it means we're going to need more teachers and more nurses and more social workers and more doctors and more roads built and more schools built and more hospitals built.
	So talking about cutting in that framework doesn't really make much sense.
	What also doesn't make much sense, I don't think, is that this is what conservatives do, is that we spend a lot of time creating an excellent business environment to attract investment and grow the amount of revenue, which is fantastic.
	That's one of the things that I think people can reliably count on conservatives to do.
	But then what we do is we take that big pot of money...
	And we hand it to the central planners and say, go deliver stuff.
	We hire the exact same people that the socialists hire.
	And somehow we just think, oh, well, we'll hire better central planners without realizing that central planning is the fundamental flaw in how we're delivering our programs.
	And conservatives fall victim to this all the time.
	Is that we think, oh, well, if we just eliminate that layer of government and centralize, we'll eliminate administration, and we'll end up delivering better services.
	And it never, ever happens.
	Because the more you centralize, the more you're creating layers of managers who are disconnected from delivering those services.
	So you end up with a very costly system that gets worse and worse results.
	So what I have been...
	I started on the free enterprise side, as I mentioned, with my internship at the Fraser Institute.
	So I've always been thinking...
	How do we apply our free enterprise values to the delivery of public programs?
	And if we were to apply our free enterprise values, then we would say it all begins with the individual, giving individual choice, empowering them with dollars so that they can then go and purchase the things that they need to purchase.
	You would have competition.
	You would have not only public sector providers, but non-profit providers and charitable providers and for-profit providers all competing with each other to deliver the best service at the lowest cost.
	You would also make sure that you...
	We have this bizarre situation where we give all this money to a central planner, they use it to deliver services themselves, and then they evaluate their own performance and say, we're doing such a bang-up job, give us more money.
	And we always do.
	Those are not roles that in any...
	Enterprise are concentrated in one entity.
	You have to have a different purchaser and a different provider and then somebody else evaluating the performance to see how you're doing.
	And this is the way that you apply conservative principles to how you deliver health care, how you deliver seniors care, how you deliver advanced education, how you deliver K-12 education.
	And that's the project that I want to engage and get started on.
	Conservatives normally shy away from these types of issues.
	And we normally don't put forward a vision of how we want to do it differently.
	And what I observe with the left, and the left does this very well, is that they will do polling on a particular issue and find that there's very little support for it.
	So then they go out and they advocate and they get their fellow travelers and they write columns and then they poll again.
	And now the support is a little bit higher.
	And they keep on inching up the level of support until they've got 50% plus one saying yes and then they act on it.
	Whereas conservatives do the opposite.
	We say, oh, we've got this idea.
	Let's go out and poll on it.
	Oh, people don't like it.
	Well, let's put that back on the shelf.
	That is not what our job is if we want to win the ideas war.
	I also think that reliance on polls is also devastating to conservatives because conservatives take a medium to long-term view of things and polls sample short-term whim.
	And what the Conservatives need to do, I believe, in order to maintain anything even vaguely traditional, which means to maintain society itself, is to put forth the kind of vision that you were talking about today.
	And to rely much less on the hypothetical expertise of hypothetically expert pollers.
	You know, as a clinical and research psychologist...
	I know full well that asking people questions to find out what they think is way more difficult than it looks.
	You know, if you, as a research psychologist, if you want to find out what a group of people think about any given political issue, that probably takes one dedicated PhD researcher two years to manage.
	Because you can't just ask the questions that you think are obvious because they beg the answer.
	And you're not sampling anything that has any longevity in terms of attitude.
	And if you phrase the question slightly differently, you can get completely opposite responses.
	And so, conservatives get set back on their heels when they do opinion polling.
	And I think they do that very frequently to abdicate responsibility.
	It's like, well, we can't do this because it's unpopular.
	Well, you know...
	Maybe it's unpopular.
	Maybe it's your responsibility to put forth a coherent medium to long-term vision and to hope that you can communicate it well enough so that people come on board.
	You have to tell the right story.
	You have to tell the right story, and you have to find the advocates who will help tell that story for you as well.
	You...
	Your audience may not know my history, but I have been in this world of public policy for 27 years.
	I've been at a think tank with the Fraser Institute.
	I've done landowner advocacy with the Canadian Property Rights Research Institute, business advocacy with a couple of different business groups.
	I've been in media, in print media, television media.
	I've had my own podcast, and I own my own business.
	So I've seen the full spectrum of how you try to push ideas along.
	And I'll tell you what I would observe is that the conservative movement has pretty well seeded the ground on so many of the culture-shaping institutions that we have in K-12 education.
	We don't have a large number of conservative, libertarian-minded teachers helping to connect kids with all of the different ideas that are out there as well as all of the different jobs out there.
	Yeah, you have like zero of them.
	Completely.
	We've even pulled trades education out of most of our schools.
	So how is some young kid supposed to know he wants to be an electrician or a plumber or a welder if he doesn't have access to the opportunities to try it out?
	So that's one thing that we've seen.
	We've also seen at the universities, and you know this probably better than anyone else, how difficult it is to get your research funded if you happen to have something beyond woke views.
	It seems like there's only one particular type of research that gets funded these days.
	So our universities, I don't think, are giving us the support that we need in the conservative and libertarian movement.
	On top of that, all of our...
	Arts organizations, our filmmakers, the messages that come through all of our Hollywood and other popular film is almost uniformly negative to conservative ideals or capitalism or liberty, although there are some notable exceptions.
	And then, of course, I think as well, we haven't cultivated our friends in the union movement in the way that we should have, because increasingly, They're having the same conservative values that we're talking about here.
	And so I feel like so many of the different forces that shape society and shape the conversation, I should add media.
	I mean, media as well.
	I remember years ago, Lydia Miljan, who was a researcher at one of the Ontario universities, but she worked for the Fraser Institute.
	It's almost like a mirror image of how many people in the media self-describe as being atheist or agnostic compared to the general public.
	And that shapes the kind of stories that get told.
	So all of the opinion shaping that is done is done by and large by the progressive side of the spectrum.
	Even on the advocacy groups, we have far more active advocacy groups on environmental and social issues from a leftist perspective than we have from a libertarian conservative perspective.
	I'm talking about the things that I need to do to try to advance the message, but I'm not going to succeed unless we also have the backup.
	We need to have the advocacy groups and the think tanks and the academics in the universities, and we need to be hiring teachers and filmmakers who are going to tell our stories.
	And I think that this is a 20- or 30-year project.
	Because it took 20 or 30 years to get to the place we are right now.
	It's going to take 20 or 30 years to get us to some sort of balance.
	But we've got to start by recognizing the nature of the problem we created for ourselves and starting to undo it.
	So what's your strategy at the present time for communicating the ideas that we've talked about today to Albertans?
	You can't obviously rely on the centralized legacy media, especially given that they're government-funded now, which doesn't exactly help their bias.
	So how is it that you plan to get the ideas that you're describing out there to Albertans, especially in short order?
	Because as you said, you have, what, seven months till the election, eh?
	And that's when it has to be called?
	Yes, it does.
	I'm losing a bit of—I had lost a bit of heart in the legacy media.
	As I mentioned, I started there.
	I was an editorial writer and columnist at the Calgary Herald beginning in 1999, and the mantra when I was there by my bosses was that I had to be fair, I had to be accurate, and I had to be balanced.
	And that's all I ask of the legacy media, is just go back to the kind of journalism that we used to do, because that is, I think, what is alienating people when they're looking at the mainstream media.
	If they don't see that their view is going to be presented in a balanced way, then they're going to go to alternative media sites.
	And this has led to a number of alternative media sources.
	Some more credible than others, but we're seeing a polarization now of you.
	So that if you're going and looking for confirmation bias and you're on the left, you've got a handful of left-wing sources you'll go to.
	If you're looking for confirmation bias on the right, you'll have your handful of confirmation bias sources to go to.
	But what really moves us forward as a society is when those can meet in a public square, thrash it out so that we can come to some common understanding.
	On how we move forward.
	So I maintain a great hope that some of these legacy media will either get back to their original foundational purpose or that some of the new media is going to develop those same principles of being fair and accurate and balanced.
	I think some are, and I think that's very positive.
	So I will continue to do interviews with the mainstream media.
	But I do so knowing that they're sitting and waiting for me to say the one sentence that they know that they can light up on Twitter to get something trending so that they can then write a follow-up story about how I had some gaffe.
	That is not journalism, in my view.
	Journalism is...
	Here's an issue.
	Let's talk to three or four different sources.
	Let's educate people and analyze.
	And I would love to see that return.
	But you are getting some of that in these long-form interviews on podcasts.
	You're getting it in some of the alternative media that has developed.
	And quite frankly, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, I think, is going to be a net positive for humanity, that we are going to be able to finally have some genuine balance in the discussion that we haven't had for probably about a decade.
	So I'm watching it I will continue to do my own videos and my own memes that I push out on those different platforms.
	I'll do these kinds of interviews.
	I will talk to the mainstream media.
	But I do remain very concerned that we don't have anything approaching any kind of balance when we're looking at what we see out there in the legacy media.
	And that's a real problem.
	Yeah.
	So what's in the immediate future for you now?
	Like both on the policy front, on the strategy front, on the communications front, what do you see unfolding in front of you in Alberta in the next seven months?
	Well, number one, before the end of the year, we are going to make major strides in improving the health experience of people who are having to use an ambulance or appear in an emergency room at a hospital.
	We have studied this to death.
	We know what the issues are, and we just need to have the political will to act on them.
	So before the end of the year, people will begin to see Some major improvement in that part.
	We'll also start clearing the surgical backlog because we'll do the kind of things that I was describing.
	Whenever I go to any speech, I ask people to talk to their doctors and surgeons who are at local hospitals to engage with us on trying to bring some entrepreneurship into how we deliver healthcare.
	So that's going to be the most important thing.
	We also have to address the affordability issues.
	I mean, I have an economics professor from university who always told me that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
	And if I knew that, that printing more money would lead to inflation from the time I was 23 years old, I don't know why it is that the Bank of Canada And the politicians making the decisions didn't understand that would happen.
	So we are now in a position where I didn't create this problem, but we at the provincial level, we have to solve it.
	We have to make sure that we're addressing the issues of cost of foods by supporting our food banks.
	We've got to address issues of electricity and home heating by providing offsets.
	We've got to address the issues of cost of gasoline and diesel.
	At least for this temporary period of time until we start seeing prices stabilize.
	So that's going to be another big focus of ours.
	Another area is going to be telling the Alberta story on the international stage.
	In the past, our governments have defaulted and allowed the federal government to represent us at conferences like COP27. We're not doing that anymore.
	No, no.
	That's a bad idea.
	It was a terrible idea.
	So we're going to be sending our environment minister.
	And it's not to offer a counter message.
	It's to offer an accurate message that Alberta is at the lead on addressing issues of emissions.
	Our companies have carbon technology and hydrogen and want to export LNG. And we are here to help.
	So...
	You'll see us be a lot more aggressive in getting our own message out on the international stage.
	And we're going to keep this fight going with Ottawa.
	We have to fix this country.
	We have to get to a point where each province realizes that they have sovereign powers in their own right and they should stop allowing Ottawa to push them around.
	Ottawa will always try to take more money, more power, more decision-making away from the provincial level.
	And small provinces maybe felt the The federal government was here to help.
	We now know they are not.
	And so we are going to be working very hard to make sure that all of our areas of jurisdiction come back to us at the provincial level.
	So that's going to be an ongoing project, and I'm just delighted that we've got other provinces who are thinking very much along the same lines.
	Those will be the main things that we work on.
	Great.
	Well, it'd be very interesting to see a solid Western Prairie Province coalition form itself and start to act more independently in some sense within the confines of Canada.
	At the moment, I can't think of anything that would be better for the West, certainly for the country in the long run, and also for people everywhere else, given that Canada has abundant sources of clean, cheap energy and could provide them In the most politically and economically stable manner possible.
	Why is that not a good story to tell everyone in the world?
	And I guess that's part of what we're doing today.
	It's an excellent story to tell the world.
	And I'll add to it food security as well.
	I mean, I'm very concerned that you've got this same strange don't build energy.
	Anything attitude that is now being applied to our agriculture food producers as well.
	You've seen in the Netherlands that they want to dramatically reduce the amount of fertilizer use.
	And we see that our federal government is preposterously proposing the same thing.
	And fortunately, you've seen in our province here, as well as in Saskatchewan, we've said, no way, we're not going to abide by some arbitrary fertilizer reduction limits...
	Because it means we're going to reduce the amount of food we can produce at a time that we've got a global food security crisis.
	I was just speaking to a woman who's involved in trying to find food aid for Africa.
	And she was saying that the projections for starvation are in the 40 million person range.
	Why are we not talking about that and all the things that we can do to address it?
	Well, you know that the planet has too many people on it anyways.
	And so there's always that little bugbear lurking in the background, that genocidal statement.
	I know, well, the World Bank already estimates that at least 220 million people are in a situation of food insecurity, which means borderline starvation.
	And if the winter is particularly brutal, and maybe it won't be, and good if it isn't, then we're going to see...
	And those sorts of things tend to spiral out of control once they get started.
	No, it's absolutely appalling.
	Cheap energy and cheap food, that's good for the poor.
	It is.
	It's good for the poor, and it's good for the planet, too.
	I read a book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness.
	I don't know if you read it a couple of years ago.
	It's a great book.
	It is a great book, and he talks about what a great new story we have about the elevation of people out of poverty that has taken place over the last number of decades.
	And we also find that when women have economic choices, rather than having 10 or 15 children, they end up having two or three children.
	And so even those who are concerned about the impact on our resources and whether or not we can support the increase in population, The solution to that is to make sure that we have a good supply of food, a good supply of energy, economic opportunities for men and women, so that we can see everybody elevated to the same standard of living.
	The prescriptions of the extreme greens is the exact opposite.
	And it's going to lead to more poverty and more devastation.
	And it's not going to address some of these issues of economic opportunities for women as well.
	So I think that we've got such a good story to tell, not only here in Alberta, but also across the country nationally, and also a message for the international community.
	And I can't wait to get out there and start talking about it.
	Great, great.
	Well, that's a very useful and profound place to end.
	And so thank you very much for talking to me today.
	I look forward, hopefully, to meeting you in January when I'm in Alberta.
	If we happen to overlap, that would be lovely.
	And I'll put you in touch with some of the people that I talked about earlier.
	And I appreciate very much your willingness to...
	Talk unscripted in such a courageous way for an hour and a half so that everybody can actually hear what you're thinking instead of being forced into 15-second carefully machined sound bites.
	And so it's a nice new style of political discourse, you know, and I think it enables people who can actually think to shine.
	So more power to that as far as I'm concerned.
	Well, it's my pleasure.
	The last thing you want to call a politician is courageous.
	I used to watch Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, and that was something that the Deputy Minister would always say when he wanted a politician not to do something.
	I'm going to keep on doing this, though, so thanks for the conversation today.
	Yeah, my pleasure, really, my pleasure.
	So thank you to everyone who was watching and listening, and I'm going to continue my conversation today.
	With the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, on the Daily Wire Plus platform, we'll talk a little bit about the development of her career, which is what I do for an additional half an hour.
	For those of you who are interested, please consider subscribing to the Daily Wire Plus platform.
	They've professionalized my podcast, made a lot of projects possible that I wouldn't have been otherwise able to do, and also allowed me to continue doing all the other things I was doing, and so consider heading on over there and And checking out what they have to offer.
	And thanks again, Premier Smith.

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