South Yorkshire Police’s redefinition of "hate incidents" to include subjective insults risks policing emotions over actual crimes, while its past failures—like allegedly ignoring 1,400 rape cases by Pakistani gangs—expose deeper institutional biases. Derek Fildebrandt’s exit from Alberta’s UCP under Jason Kenney reveals undemocratic nomination tactics and policy shifts toward liberalism, including Bill 2’s race/gender quotas, sparking his Freedom Conservative Party (FCP) as a potential right-wing counterbalance. If the FCP secures rural and Calgary seats while Kenney’s UCP falters, they could force coalitions, reshaping Alberta’s conservative future—but only if they prove more than a solo act. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau’s trade team, led by inexperienced Chrystia Freeland, faces criticism for media-driven tactics, contrasting sharply with Robert Lighthizer’s disciplined U.S. approach, as violence against conservatives like Bolsonaro’s stabbing underscores broader political polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a major police force in the UK has declared war on insults, not crimes, insults.
It's September 10th and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Look at this ad I saw yesterday from the South Yorkshire Police.
In addition to reporting hate crime, I'm quoting from it, in addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments online, in person, or in writing.
Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire.
Report it and put a stop to it.
Hate hurts South Yorkshire.
So it's not just crimes.
They're specific about that.
Anything mean, well, not even mean.
I mean, that's my word mean.
Their word is anything offensive.
But people can take offense to anything, including innocuous things that aren't meant to be mean.
That's the thing about being offended.
It's your own emotional reaction to the world.
In a way, if you're offended, it's just your own inability to control your own emotions.
It's all about you and your subjective worldview.
It's not what people do to you.
See, crimes, actual crimes that police investigate, those have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Those can be objectively measured.
If not, there would be no point in having any courts and any rules and any procedures.
Those things are all designed to put some predictability in the world.
Precedent, rule of law, we call it, not rule of those with the thinnest skin.
You can't be convicted of a crime unless you meet certain objective standards.
Did you actually do something illegal?
Did you actually have a guilty mind?
Was what you did heinous enough to be called a crime?
None of that is here.
It's just you getting offended by something you read on somebody's Facebook page and maybe getting offended on purpose, even if it didn't really offend you.
There's a lot of that going on these days, isn't there?
People who aren't really shocked and appalled by things, but they say they are because the more outraged you show yourself to be, the more righteous you obviously are.
Well, now add to that the fact that a major police force will come and be your little army to back up your emotional reaction.
Until now, if you were easily offended by things, if you were professionally offended by things like so many special interest groups are, you had to rely on your own tantrum or some sort of public mob, an online mob, not a real mob, to get your way.
But now you can have a police force with guns rushing in to aid you, I guess.
Every bully now knows what they have to do to get the police to help them in their little feud, their little quarrel, to take side in some private dispute.
Just say you're offended and the cops will come on by.
It's insane.
Let me read the little word, the words in the photo too.
You see those in the red box there.
Hate crime is an incident or crime which is perceived to be motivated by prejudice or hostility against a person's race, faith, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity.
But that's not quite right, is it?
I accept that there is such a thing as a hate crime.
It's a crime that's motivated by hatred.
That could be a motive, sure.
But the crime still has to exist.
If you punch someone in the face because they're black or because they're gay, for example, that's a hate crime, but a hate crime needs the crime part, not just the hate part.
But not in this weird definition.
say a hate crime can be a crime, which is obviously true, or just an incident?
What?
So a hate crime doesn't actually have to be a crime?
That doesn't make any sense.
Hate's the adjective.
Crime is the thing.
But none of this makes any sense.
I'm going to read just one more nutty part, because these words here were clearly written by social justice warriors, by political activists, not by real police by any definition that we have, not by judges or any legislature.
Do you see the words right under the picture there?
Hate hurts.
Report it and put a stop to it.
Hate can hurt your feelings.
If you feel like you're hated by someone, that could make you feel sad or mad.
Or maybe they mean hate hurts in that if you feel the emotion of hate, you yourself, the hater, are hurt.
And that's probably true also, don't you think?
If you're full of hatred, you probably have some underlying grievance.
You're probably hurt by something.
But what does any of this have to do with the police?
Hate itself doesn't actually hurt anybody.
It's not an action.
It's not a punch in the face.
And hate itself is not a crime.
It's an emotional feeling.
You can't legislate it away or police it away.
In fact, if you try to tell people that they're not allowed to feel feelings, including hate, I don't think it's going to stop them from feeling that way.
In fact, I think it's probably going to make them even angrier.
The peaceful expression of negative emotions through words, through poems, you know, through interpretive dance, whatever, including the peaceful expression of hate through offensive words.
It may not be pretty, but it is prettier than the alternative, which is people who aren't allowed to express themselves peacefully, people who are censored or sued or arrested for their feelings.
If the state starts hassling you, investigating you, policing you, prosecuting you for having the wrong feelings, don't expect those people to suddenly say, you know, I was really mad about something, but the government threatened me not to be mad about it.
So wow, that really worked.
I'm totally not mad about it anymore.
That is not how it works.
I put it to you, there's a correlation between countries where there is no freedom of speech and no freedom of political dissent and no right to be offensive and no right to be offended.
There's a correlation between places without those freedoms and violence.
Terrorism, assassination, whatever, because if you can't address your grievances, if you can't air them, if you can't have a real shot to fix the world peacefully through words, well, then maybe you will try to fix the world in a non-peaceful manner if that's all that's left to you.
But the insanity goes a little deeper.
You probably didn't notice it at first when I showed you the tweet, but look in there, when you zoom right into the image closely, do you see all those little pictures of people on them?
There's a whole bunch of hijabs there, for example.
These are people who apparently are offended.
These are what offended people look like.
I'm guessing.
What a happy photo shoot that must have been.
Inviting in a bunch of models and telling them to pose for photos, but don't smile, people.
Stop smiling.
Look angry and sullen and entitled.
I think that's what they did here.
But if you look at those little faces and look at the words written, you see there's a word written on each of those little faces.
Let me read them to you.
Victimized.
Do you see that word there?
Fear.
Hurt.
Alone.
Sad.
Humiliated.
Anxiety.
Can you see those words?
You've got to look sort of closely there.
Is that what the South Yorkshire police are now fighting?
People who feel sad?
Because I thought fighting against the natural human emotion of hate was going to be tough.
Now the South Yorkshire Police are trying to eliminate the natural human emotion of sadness and being alone, which actually is not an emotion.
You can be alone on purpose.
You can be alone because you have been a bad person and no one wants to spend time with you.
So it's good that you're alone.
Or you can be alone because you like peace and quiet and you are an introvert and you think the world has gone crazy, including the police.
You don't want to talk to the South Yorkshire police because that makes you anxious, another one of the bad words.
Seriously, is being anxious a reason to call 911?
That was on there, anxiety.
You saw that, right?
I put it to you that this will cause anxiety.
Not solve it.
What tools would a British policeman have anyways to combat loneliness or anxiety or sadness?
Do they get some sort of training in the British Police Academy these days on how to make people less sad?
Well, this video will put a smile on your face.
It's the launch of new rainbow-painted police cars in Yorkshire.
Take a look.
We challenge Hull, as part of UK City of Culture, week 29, to raise a rainbow.
I think those are Toyota Priuses.
I can't quite tell.
You know, I wish some of this effort and energy that the police are putting into feelings and rainbows and unicorns was put into solving real crimes in Yorkshire.
Just two days ago, this Muslim woman named Ayan Ali stabbed a man in the downtown shopping market in South Yorkshire.
Maybe if she had seen those rainbow cars, she'd have felt less hate or less sad or less lonely or something.
Or maybe she just would have laughed at the cops instead of getting all stabby.
Or maybe the opposite.
Maybe she would have known that all the police that day were at a special diversity in feelings training session at the police headquarters, so she'd be left alone to do her stabbing.
Or maybe she knows that if the police approached her, she could just call them racist and say they're committing a hate crime against her or a hate incident or just making her anxious so they should back off or she'll file a hate complaint.
Don't laugh.
1,400 Indigenous working class British girls were systematically raped and I don't mean raped once each.
I mean raped hundreds of times each, sometimes dozens of times a night.
Literally millions of rapes in South Yorkshire, right under the nose of the South Yorkshire police there.
In the city of Rotherham alone, that's a city of just 250,000 people.
But Pakistani Muslim rape gangs targeted young British girls, literally children, and tricked them and trapped them and extorted them and raped them and in some cases murdered them.
1,400 girls.
That's what a public inquiry found.
They said that was a conservative estimate.
It was probably more.
Here's the official report on that mass rape incident.
It happened over more than a decade.
You can find it online quickly.
Tories Dividing the Right00:15:23
I encourage you to read it.
The police knew all about these rapes.
They detected them almost immediately, as you could imagine.
But time and again, they were worried about being called racist.
That's right.
It's right in their report.
They didn't stop these Pakistani Muslim rapists because they were brown and Muslim and immigrants, while the children that were being raped were white and Christian and British.
So the police thought that abiding rapists was better than being called racists.
These are the people who now seek to get into the hurt feelings business.
And my friends, if you think this is so kooky, so stupid, so foolish that it could only happen in the United Kingdom, well, sounds like you haven't been paying attention to the transformation of Canada's police and social justice warriors from the RCMP on down.
Stay with us for more today.
Well, we've had him on our show several times, and he's been an Alberta political figure on the right for many years, not just as an elected MLA, but before that.
as an advocate for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in that province.
And he's also spoken at some of our rallies in Alberta against the carbon tax and in support of pipeline projects.
But Derek Fildebrand has gotten on the wrong side of the United Conservative Party, getting into quarrels with its leadership over some missteps he himself has made, and then over nominations in his own riding.
So Derek has decided to start his own political party, and he joins us now to talk about it.
Derek Fildebrandt, nice to see you again.
Thanks for having me back on the show, Ezra.
Did I accurately sum things up?
I mean, you've why don't we just refresh our viewers' memories?
How was it that you went from being a leading MLA in the Conservative opposition, the Wild Rose Party, to being an independent MLA on the outs with the United Conservatives?
I think that's important to go over because it informs your decisions going forward.
Why are you no longer an MLA under Jason Kenney's party?
Well, a year ago, you know, there was a series of news stories that were released, one after another after another, that were planted there by political opponents and opponents in the media.
Some of them were real mistakes that I had made for which I took responsibility and corrected.
Others were largely fabricated or spun, which had little semblance in truth or reality at all.
But I felt the need at the time because many of these things had been done almost exactly the same by many of my colleagues in the UCP.
I felt the need at the time just to not defend myself because it would have harmed many of my colleagues who had done the exact same things.
And so I sort of jumped on the grenade, stepped aside from the party, what I thought was going to be temporarily, and let things roll on.
Then in late November, early December of last year, I sat down with Jason Kenney and we discussed the path forward.
And he said, he said, Derek, we want you to back.
We want you to run in the next election.
And you could run in any constituency in Alberta, except for your own, because my own constituency had been redrawn by the NDP for the next election.
Right now I'm Strathmore Brooks and my neighboring riding is Chestermere-Rockaview and they kind of combined half of each of them into a new constituency of Chestermere-Strathmore and there was an incumbent Tory MLA, Leela here in the next door riding, next door neighbor, next door riding.
And she happens to be one of the only two women and three visible minorities in the Tory caucus.
And so when I sat down with Jason, he said, you can't run in that riding.
And I said, why?
You know, you committed to this grassroots guarantee where local conservatives would get to pick who their candidate is, not yourself or any other party back rumors.
And he said, Yeah, but in this case, it's different.
And his exact quote was: How would it look if a blonde-bearded redneck were to defeat one of our only women invisible minorities in the caucus?
We just can't let it happen.
And so Jason and I had drifted apart from there.
And, you know, I had made some missteps, but he had given every indication in plain language that it was all water under the bridge and no big deal and that everything would be fine until they kind of flipped the switch and said that I would not be welcome back.
And you know what?
In hindsight, I've had time to look back, and I'm very glad that happened because I may have still had the blinders on to not be able to see the absolute corruption within the Tory party.
That this is not the United Conservative Party that I believed that we were founding when I was working hard to merge the Wild Rose and PC parties.
I thought we would take the best of both parties.
But instead, we have just recreated the corrupt old Tory party and its entitlement to power.
And I want nothing to do with it.
And that's what I'm saying.
I mean, that's pretty heavy talk.
I mean, the word corruption, of course, is financial corruption, and I'm sure you don't mean that.
There's political corruption, which you probably, I'm guessing you mean in terms of violating political or ethical norms.
That's pretty heavy talk.
And I think conservatives who don't have skin in the game with you or with Jason Kenney would say, that looks like sour grapes.
If you made some missteps, and we don't need to rehash them, but if you made some missteps, and I know that Jason Kenney has said you were not candid with him as a leader, but if you're now not allowed to run, I mean, what would you say to someone who's saying, well, you couldn't get your way in the party, so you're taking your marbles and you're starting your own party, and it's not really about corruption, it's about getting your own seat in the legislature.
Well, I'll say this: Jason Kenney is lying through his teeth.
He's a career politician who's done nothing about politics since the day he was born.
And he'll say and do anything for power.
Well, I mean, look, I mean, Jason Kenney and I have our share of disagreements, but I got to tell you, when I look at you and I look at Jason Kenney, I see actually a similar career path.
Taxpayers Federation guy and then provincial MLA, he went to the federal MP.
I think you guys are pretty similar, actually, in terms of just politics, and I never campaigned on never accepting a pension and then being eligible now for a $3 million pension, that kind of hypocrisy.
So look, when Jason Kenney and us were bringing the Tory, the new Tory party together, we said that there would be open Democratic grassroots nominations.
And he very clearly has broken that in my case and in dozens of other cases across Alberta where good conservative candidates have been either disqualified from running or where they've just been rigging the rules and tilting the field within nomination races.
So it's not a matter of, you know, if you lose something fair and square, you can accept it and go on.
But in the case of my constituency, the people were denied, conservatives were denied even the right to choose their own conservative candidate.
They appointed Leela Ahir because of race and skin color.
They didn't let myself run, and then they bullied and refused to let anybody else run, even regular Joe Blows, who did not want her as the candidate for being too liberal and too tokenistic.
They wanted a real nomination.
And the party would not let people in my constituency select their own candidate.
So there's a reason that from the Strathmore side of my old constituency, every single last Wild Rose board member is not with the Tories.
They're with the Freedom Conservative Party here.
Okay, well, let's talk about that.
I'll just say that if you're not able to pick who your local conservative candidate is, then you don't have a Democratic say in the party, and you're just expected to vote for the candidate put in front of you like this was a Soviet election.
Well, I mean, I'm not sure when you started scorching Jason, but it's no surprise that he wouldn't want you if you call a fella corrupt and a career politician.
Well, I didn't say any of them.
No, I was on the best.
I was nothing but polite and nice with him until he decided that the people in my constituency would not have the right to select their own candidate.
Well, I mean, Derek, as you know, we've supported you in the past when you've been at odds with your party leaders.
When Brian Gene suspended you from shadow cabinet over your comments on Kathleen Wynne, we actually set up a petition called Save Derek.
And I think we were partly to credit for getting it back in the fold.
So we're fans of Derek Filibrand.
We're fans of Jason Kenney, although we have some disagreements with him.
But let's put the past aside because you have a new project.
And I remember our last discussion, you brooded the idea of a new party.
I think you even talked briefly about Western separatism.
I think you might have had a wine liner about that, if my memory serves me correctly.
You have gone ahead and started this new Freedom Conservative Party.
Tell me a little bit about that.
You actually took the legal structure of an existing small party, so you don't have to sign up thousands of new members from scratch.
So are you right now a functioning legal political party in Alberta right now?
Yes, we are.
So, you know, after my disagreements with Jason, I considered running as an independent in my constituency.
But then when I saw the absolute corruption of nominations across the province and the party, the Tories starting to take a lot of liberal-like positions, mimicking the NDP on things like government ownership of the pipeline, refusing to let their MLAs vote for or against Bill 9, taking away free speech right for pro-lifers, or voting for Bill 2, which was an APP bill that established race and gender quotas in the private sector.
All of these things led up to me believing that this was not just a local disagreement and a problem in my constituency, but it was a problem across Alberta.
So we came together with some conservatives, libertarians, and Alberta Patriots, and we founded the Freedom Conservative Party of Alberta.
We used the registration and legal foundation of the Alberta First Party so that we didn't spend nine months going out collecting signatures.
And we're able to start work right away.
And so we've got a great team together from across the province.
We've been building up, signing up members, raising money, and we are having our founding convention on October 20th in Chestermere.
And folks can find out more information at freedomconservativeparty.ca.
We flashed briefly your website on the screen there.
I have a couple of questions about him.
Jason Kenney's success, whatever other criticisms you have of him, was he came in, took over the progressive Conservative Party itself, and forced it, really, or led it, encouraged it, cajoled it, poked it into a merger with Wild Rose.
And I don't know if that would have happened without him.
So the whole theme was unite the right, a replica of what Stephen Harper had done federally.
Now, I was always of the position that that wasn't even necessary because the NDP vote in 2015 was such an anomaly, and every by-election we've seen federally and provincially shows that they're going to be wiped out.
So I never really believed in the necessity to it, but Albertans seem to like it, and so it is done.
Isn't what you're doing the exact opposite?
You're doing splitism.
You're splitting.
Instead of uniting the right, you're dividing the right.
Isn't that exactly what most conservatives in Alberta in both the Wild Rose and the former PC party wanted to do against?
And I mean, again, I believe Rachel Notley is going to get crushed like a bowl of eggs, but isn't splitism against what conservatives want in Alberta?
Well, I pose the question a different way.
I'd say, who is actually dividing conservatives, federally and provincially?
You know, my party has left me federally and provincially.
The parties have been undemocratic, not letting the members make the decisions that they have a right, a legal right and a moral right to make, both on policies and selecting candidates and their leaders.
If the leadership and elites of those parties abandon what they're supposed to be standing for and their duty to their members, it is them who is dividing conservatives.
Now, I was perhaps one of the very first people in Alberta to be pushing to merge the Wild Rose and PC parties like yourself.
I didn't believe that was actually necessary to defeat the NDP.
It was an anomaly for a number of reasons, but I nonetheless felt it was probably the right thing to do.
But under the right circumstances, and I believe that, you know, there's a lot of backroom politics people have no idea about, but during the negotiation process, there were some real problems, particularly coming from on the Wild Rose side.
To be fair to Jason, these problems were primarily coming from our side, which was really putting the cart before the horse in having the leadership race done too quickly before we even had a constitution for the party.
And this meant that the way things were done is the members didn't even get to write the constitution of their own party.
So they had different members.
That may all be true, but that's water under the bridge.
That party doesn't exist anymore.
By the way, you might recall, I encouraged you to throw your own hat into the ring.
I mean, I was hoping you had done so.
But that's all past tense.
Now, everyone's looking towards 2019.
The next election is the same.
So what I'm going to say, though, is that it's not good enough just to get rid of the NDP.
The Tories are not the party I believed we were founded.
They are proposing a 40-degree change from the NDP.
I believe we need a 180-degree change.
I don't want to keep one major item that the NDP has done.
I want to completely destroy the legacy of both Rachel Notley, Jim Prentiss, Allison Redford, and Ed Stelmack.
We can't simply turn the clock back to 2015.
We've got to remember that we had eight years of relatively bad government in Alberta with massive deficits, overspending, and an unaccountable government for three premiers before Rachel Notley.
Rachel Notley just made it worse.
Just turning back the clock to 2015, I don't think is going to be the answer, which is why I believe we need a bolder and more aggressive Conservative Party, a more grassroots Conservative Party that isn't captive to special interests.
Riding for Reform00:10:28
All right.
There's some ridings where I think the NDP vote in 2019 is going to be single digits.
And your own riding is probably one of them, and many Calgary ridings.
But there are some ridings, maybe in Lethbridge, probably not.
In Edmonton for sure, where the NDP might still be able to re-elect some MLAs.
And you never know what can happen between now and then in politics.
A year is a long time.
Are you not risking re-electing NDP MLAs in Edmonton or other less right-wing ridings than your own by fielding Freedom Conservative Party candidates to split the right-wing vote?
No, we're not, because we're not fielding candidates in any of those constituencies.
So we made a very conscious decision when we founded the Freedom Conservative Party that as bad as the Tories are, they are admittedly better than the NDP.
Now, better than the NDP is a pretty low bar to meet, and we think in most of the province that is naturally conservative, people shouldn't have to just settle for better than the NDP.
But in constituencies where the NDP have any real chance of winning, we have decided we will not be fielding candidates there.
So how do you list those?
Is that 10 ridings?
Is that 40 ridings?
How many ridings are you willing to stay away from to not risk splitting the vote?
So it's going to be based on a case-by-case basis from the last combination of results in the last election, more recent polling, and circumstances on the ground such as who our candidates are and who the other candidates are.
And so, you know, as a broad generalization, I can tell you that in most of rural and small-town Alberta, places like my constituency, the NDP have absolutely 0% chance of winning, and we will be fielding candidates.
In parts of some of the outer parts of Calgary, in the south and in the west, we will be fielding candidates.
But in the more downtown areas of Calgary, in Lethbridge, and in parts of the far north, and probably the vast majority of Edmonton, we will not be fielding candidates because we feel that our position on the ballot there could actually potentially help to elect the NDP.
Now, I don't think, even if we ran candidates everywhere, I think the NDP are going to get absolutely crotched in the next election, no matter what.
But we also don't want to help contribute to the election of any NDPs, period, even if they're not in a position to be in government.
We want us to be the second biggest party in the legislature.
Let me ask you this.
Sorry, go ahead.
I mean, you have had a prominent career.
We mentioned with the Taxpayers Federation and with the Wild Rose.
Pardon me, I'm coughing.
What would you say to people who said, well, this is just a one-man band.
This is a vanity project.
Instead of running as an independent, independents have a very poor track record in Canada.
This is really a party of one.
Would you acknowledge that or would you say it's more than that?
Are there any other personalities involved?
Are there any other prospective candidates?
At your convention next month, will there be other talent that is showcased?
Who else is with you?
Well, the people saying that are generally the people who are afraid of what we can do.
They know that we've got significant support across Calgary, rural, and small-town Alberta, even building up in Edmonton, even though we don't intend to run candidates there.
No, we've got a great team.
We've got a board of governors from across the province.
We're attracting some really great candidates who will be announcing that they'll be seeking nominations in the next few months.
Some of those people will be at our convention in October.
We've got a really great team here.
And one of the problems, really, in all Canadian politics, Alberta, federally, and in most provinces, is that political parties are almost all one-man bands, where the leader is not just the main face of the party, which is inevitable, but they control everything.
And they don't even let their MLAs vote freely or their MPs vote freely.
They won't let them speak up.
If they happen to have a different opinion than the leader on, say, supply management or free speech rights, they're told to shut up.
And we're not like that.
We are the only party, I believe, in Canada that has abolished the position of party whip.
Now, right now, the caucus is just myself.
So that's a rather, that's a symbolic move at this point.
But It is in our founding documents that we will not even have the position of a party whip.
So it is very important to us to have a team that we've got.
Sorry, go ahead.
You mentioned you're going to have some great candidates, and I'm sure you'll want to time that strategically probably at your October conference.
But is there anyone else you can name at this point that the public would recognize and say, oh, there seems to be a crystallization of other people.
Like you mentioned, I think you said dozens of ridings where the United Conservative Party has been heavy-handed.
Can you name someone else who has joined your movement?
I would be breaking confidence if I were to mention any of the folks who might be more household names in Alberta, but we certainly have had especially some of the ridings where there's been a very corrupted nomination process where conservatives have not been allowed to select their candidate in a fair and free race.
And in others, we've had a lot of good candidates come forward.
We have not opened our MLA nominations yet because we're going through our leadership process at this very moment.
And we're going towards our founding policy convention and leadership vote in October, as I said.
But when that's done, we're going to be opening up the nomination process in constituencies for candidates to come forward.
But yeah, no, I can't, I'd be breaking confidence if I mentioned those names right now because they're not public, but they will be coming forward as we open up the nominations.
Well, and I'm sure that's true.
I mean, things have to happen in their due course of time.
Well, listen, I'm grateful for your time today.
I've had a number of critical questions because there's a I mean, I acknowledge that Jason Kenney has been timid on certain files, and I'm not privy to the kind of shenanigans that go on in nominations.
That seems to happen in every party.
But let me end with a more positive note.
I think that Alberta traditionally has had a conservative-ish government, and the opposition parties were usually on the left.
It might be something that is more reflective of the province's true character and might be better governance if the dominant party, let's say the government next year were the United Conservative Party, but there was a principled right-wing opposition that helped keep it honest, because the alternative is for the media party to pull Jason Kenney in the UCP to the left, which is, I believe, what has happened.
Every misstep that Jason Kenney has made, every watering down of policy, even your description of the nomination stakes in Chestermere, it's all driven by his concern about the perception that the media party will have of him.
Having a counterweight to Jason Kenney on the right to balance the media party on the left could be a salutary thing.
I just don't know how serious a movement the Freedom Conservative Party is.
I guess maybe you'll show us at your October convention.
Indeed.
And I put this to you.
There's the potential not just to be an opposition party on the right, but potentially to hold the balance of power.
If the NDP were to hold most of Edmonton, which is a possibility, and the Tories were to knock the NDP out of much of the rural far north and Calgary, and the FCP were to form a strong caucus, you could see the potential where the FCP would hold the balance of power after the next election.
So kind of on the opposite side of how the Greens hold the balance of power in British Columbia and work with the NDP, you know, the Freedom Conservative Party would be willing to work with the Tories after the next election in some kind of agreement or coalition if we were able to, you know, if we were able to agree on some key governing priorities.
And that would be a much more conservative government than just the Tories governing alone.
It would be a significantly more conservative government.
It'd be a more accountable government.
And without the ability of a single party leader to whip everything, it would be a government that would actually have to listen to people and let MLAs vote and speak freely rather than just be told to shut up and follow the party line every time.
Well, it'd be very interesting.
And I think a lot of the proof will be in your founding convention if it's more than just the Derek Fildebrand Party, if these other personalities do come, if you have grassroots people.
I think that's actually, that's my own view, my own opinion, is that's going to be a key moment.
I think we will pay attention to it and we'll cover it.
And we look forward to seeing what happens.
We care about Alberta and we think it needs to be fixed.
So thanks for spending time with us today.
Well, I'll tell you this.
You won't be banned from this conservative convention.
That's right.
All right.
Well, thanks, Derek.
I appreciate the update in answering my most candid questions.
No problem.
Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Well, that's Derek Fildebrand being on our show many times before in different capacities, a new capacity today as the new interim leader of the Freedom Conservative Party.
I put my questions to him.
What do you think?
Am I too critical?
Am I too negative?
Am I too soft on the fella?
Send me an email to Ezra at the rebel.media, and we will continue to cover the phenomenon to see if it does grow into what Derek says it will.
Stay with us.
We're ahead on The Rebel.
Why Justin Sent Freeland00:07:00
Welcome back on my monologue Friday about Brazil's leading presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, getting stabbed and the normalized violence against the political right.
Peter writes, The worst part is that the mainstream media either ignores the violence against conservatives, cheers it on, or at the very least implies that the victim deserves it.
All that attitude does is encourage it.
It is becoming, by the day, increasingly dangerous to hold conservative values.
Yeah, and the labeling far-right, alt-right, neo-Nazi, we all know, even those of us who are young and have no family connection to the Second World War, we all know that the word Nazi is the purest evil of our age.
So if you call someone a Nazi, and we know that we sacrificed millions of lives to fight the Nazis and the Nazis killed millions of people, if you call someone a Nazi, you're basically saying they're killable.
That's the ultimate extension of that.
So it starts with deplatform someone, get someone fired, punch them in the face.
Then it goes to stabbing like Bolsonaro, and then it goes to murder.
That's what the media party is doing.
They are normalizing violence, which will lead to murder.
Deplorable John writes, Frank Buckley is my kind of guest, as you must have him back on.
The way he triggered Barton was marvelous and very entertaining.
Great show, man.
Yeah, I really liked him.
I don't think I had followed him closely before.
He's an interesting guy because he is a smart professor of law.
I mean, that's a pretty smart dude.
But he's got that fighting spirit, doesn't he?
He likes to scrap.
He's also got a bit of a sense of humor.
He's also an author, and he obviously is a puny.
He's a Trump speecher.
I didn't really know that much about him, but we talked for almost 20 minutes.
I know I talk too much.
I always do.
Hey, by the way, in the first 24 hours we put that video on YouTube, got about 150,000 views.
So you're not the only one who liked it.
It's quite something.
I think there's a real appetite for the other side of the story on these NAFTA negotiations, not because Canadians are feeling un-Canadian.
It's not that.
is that Canadians can detect that Justin Trudeau and Christia Freeland are totally botching the negotiations, which should have been the easiest negotiation in the world.
And Trudeau's made it bizarre and complex, and he's going to wreck it.
And the media party in Canada, especially the CBC, says, no, no, it's all wonderful.
And people know they're not getting the whole story.
What was so interesting about that was Reshme Nair, the CBC anchor, when Frank Bockley said Christia Freeland was blowing it.
She wasn't mad or hostile.
She was just stunned that anyone could say such a thing about Precious Christia.
She just never heard her before.
Ron writes, I also enjoyed the professor and his opinions of Freeland.
He said that the White House doesn't like her, which is a popular opinion.
Negotiators are supposed to be, like salespeople, very likable.
The Russians don't seem to like her either, as they have also banned Freeland from entering Russia.
Yeah, I mean, can I point something out that's pretty obvious?
The United States has their equivalent of a foreign minister called the Secretary of State.
His name is Mike Pompeo, used to be the CIA director, now he's being promoted.
He's not doing these negotiations.
I mean, I'm sure he gets reports, maybe even on a daily basis.
And he'll probably be there at some sort of signing ceremony.
But Mike Pompeo is a politician and he's a former military man, actually, went to West Point.
But he's not a professional negotiator.
And so he is not leading the negotiations for the Americans.
There's a trade representative, Ambassador Lighthizer is his name.
That's all he does.
That's all he's done for years.
Just negotiate trade deals.
So he's an expert.
I don't know his pedigree.
I'd have to check him out.
I bet he's got a lot of degree.
I bet he's got a lot of experience haggling, negotiating the fine points of things.
He's probably a lawyer, probably business.
I mean, I'm just guessing, but this is all he does is negotiate.
He is a professional negotiator, and he's not selected from Congress.
He's not even a cabinet appointee.
He's appointed just for that.
Do you see my point?
He's probably the best trade negotiation in America.
Why are we sending Christia Freeland down as our negotiator?
Is she the best trade negotiator in Canada?
I don't know if she's a lawyer.
I don't think she is.
I think she's just a journalist and a chatty politician.
Why is our foreign minister doing the negotiations?
Why don't we have a professional, calm, sophisticated, experienced, quiet lawyer doing?
Why are we negotiating in the media?
Why is it Christy Freeland going down there when I believe what Frank Buckley said is that Christy Freeland is irritating them?
I mean, she gives speeches poking at them.
When was the last time you saw a speech by Robert Lighthizer, the American trade rep, denouncing Justin Trudeau?
He would never do that.
He has one job, get the best deal for America possible.
We have people like that in Canada, by the way.
The people who helped negotiate the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement more than about 30 years ago now.
The people who negotiated the NAFTA agreement.
We have professionals, even people who've worked for the Conservatives in the past, they would do this for the aid of the country.
Even Brian Mulroney, he's a blarney kind of politician, but he's actually, he actually was a lawyer and a negotiator in business.
I don't know if you know that about Brian Mulroney.
Why are we putting such an irritating, unskilled, inexperienced blatherskite as our point person here?
Why?
In fact, I saw news, forgive me for going on.
Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to Justin Trudeau, and Katie Telford, chief of staff to Justin Trudeau, they went down to meet with Lighthizer too.
They're skilled people at campaigning and at managing staff and at ideological matters, but are Gerald Butts or Katie Telford, are they experienced, sophisticated, world-class trade deal negotiators?
I don't think they are.
Why are we making this weird personnel decision?
Why is it all political people on our side?
and all trade negotiators on their side?
Don't you see how we're going to be bamboozled or just lose?
All right, sorry for the five-minute answer to the question, but it is quite something.
And I think that's what spooked Reshme Nair, is the revelation that maybe, maybe, maybe, not everyone in Washington, D.C. thinks Christian Freeland is the bee's knees, as I called it.