This 9/11 anniversary episode critiques Canada’s selective memory, ignoring ISIS attacks like Parliament Hill (2014) while memorializing Pearl Harbor. It exposes government hypocrisy—labeling terrorists as "mentally ill" (e.g., Faisal Hussain), supporting families of suspects (Omar Khadr), and ties to pro-Hamas figures (Omar Al-Ghabra, Ikra Khalid). Academic censorship silences dissenters like Rick Maida (Acadia University), fired for "offensive" critiques, mirroring cases against Jordan Peterson. Alberta’s conservative parties risk fragmentation under Jason Kenney’s "Red Tory" merger and Derek Fildebrandt’s new Freedom Conservative Party, while Rachel Notley’s NDP faces decline—unity is critical to resist left-wing dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, it's the anniversary of 9-11 and we've forgotten everything we learned that day.
It's September 11th, 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 for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
17 years ago, 19 Muslim men hijacked four American airliners at the same time and carried out the biggest massacre on American soil since Pearl Harbor, except Pearl Harbor was an attack by one nation's military against America's military.
It was cowardly and sneaky and unprovoked, but at the end of the day, Pearl Harbor was an army attacking an army at the direction of a state.
And that ended when America's army dropped two atom bombs on Japan.
Today, Japan is a pacified ally, a liberal democracy.
On 9-11, it was a sneak attack, too, but on civilians, of course, I'm going to show you some disturbing images of people jumping to their deaths, so turn away now for a minute if you don't want to see that, okay?
These were civilians who had gone to work in the morning in the tallest tower in New York, and they were trapped in the burning building, and they had a choice, burned to death or jumped to death.
And these poor souls jumped.
And it wasn't just these civilians, it was police and firemen who rushed into the burning building.
I remember watching that building collapsing on TV and dreading the death toll.
Would it be 10,000?
Would it be 50,000?
No one knew.
And what would come next?
If there were four planes hijacked, would there be four more?
Or would there be 40 more?
Well, the answer is that there indeed would be 40 more.
Tens of thousands more, actually.
Just not quite as spectacular as the one on 9-11.
We learned the number 9-11, but London, England learned the number 7-7 when they had their bombings, their subway, and other attacks every few months since.
Terrorist Attacks and Tragedies00:08:56
Spain had their attacks, too.
France has had more attacks than could be named.
Attacks in Paris itself, attacks on the Charlie Habdo magazine, attacks on Jews, attacks on the Bata Clan nightclub, killing more than 100.
The horrific attack in Nice, where a Muslim terrorist got behind the wheel of a large truck and drove down the crowded street on Bastille Day, killing nearly 100 and injuring 400 more.
And that's just a sample.
And that's just the West.
It doesn't even make news anymore when there's an attack in Turkey or Pakistan or Iraq and Afghanistan.
And what has the Syrian civil war over the past five years been other than an attempt by ISIS, which was an offshoot of al-Qaeda, remember, to take over an entire country?
How many hundreds of thousands dead because of that?
But we're Canadian, right?
And as a diplomat once said about us, we're a fireproof house far away from matches.
Yeah, no, no.
An ISIS terrorist murdered a soldier, Nathan Cirrillo, at our war memorial and then actually entered our parliament itself when it was full of MPs and the government and the prime minister were literally barricade inside a meeting room.
It was amazing that no one else was murdered in the hail of gunfire inside.
At around the same time, another soldier, Patrice Vincent, was murdered too.
Let's take a moment to say their names and look at their pictures since no one else will.
Why is there no permanent memorial to them?
Why is their murder not marked by our government?
They were specifically attacked because they are symbols of our national sovereignty.
Why does our national sovereign not care?
It's not just us.
When I was in London recently and visited the site where a soldier named Lee Rigby was murdered by a Muslim terrorist, there is no marker at all other than a tiny little brass plate plate on the ground, covered in dirt, that doesn't mention who he was or why he was killed and how.
It's just covered in dirt, as you saw.
Sometimes the forgetfulness happens in real time.
A Muslim terrorist named Omar Mateen murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
You'd think that would be newsy.
And it was, but it was immediately transformed into an anti-NRA moment by the liberal media.
Nidal Hassan was a Muslim soldier in the U.S. military.
He actually made his own business cards that said, soldier of Allah on them.
Well, he murdered his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, and the Pentagon called it a workplace incident.
Just last month, the son of a known Muslim terrorist co-conspirator was found in the New Mexico desert with several polygamous wives raising their brood of children in a bizarre compound, a training camp, to be school shooters.
Not only did a local judge grant them bail, but the local prosecutor, he dropped the charges.
And then police bulldozed the crime scene, even though a baby was found dead in there.
Why did they bulldoze the crime scene?
We are now being made to forget things even as they happen, let alone trying to remember 9-11 from 17 years ago.
In Toronto, where I am now, there was a mass shooting in Greektown on the Danforth by a Muslim named Faisal Hussain, who was known to police for visiting extremist Muslim countries and for visiting extremist websites.
His brother was a known drug dealer.
They were into illegal guns.
They had massive quantities of a chemical weapon called carfentanil.
That could have killed thousands.
But it was all controlled news.
Trudeau's government said it was a mental illness.
Trudeau himself didn't even bother to break from his summer vacation to visit the injured because that would have led credence that this was some sort of big deal instead of just a guns problem.
Muslim extremists burst into Canadian forces recruiting agencies, but they're called mentally ill, so they're let out on bail.
And that's just the terrorism.
What about the Islamification?
What about the honor killings, like the quadruple homicide of the Shafia girls for the crime of not wanting to dress like medieval concubines, covered from head to toe in black smocks?
Why the mass unvetted migration?
Just yesterday, one of Trudeau's Syrian migrants was charged with the first-degree murder of a young teenage girl in Vancouver.
Why was a single Muslim man of military age allowed to come in as a refugee at all?
Were there no women and children?
What about Solomon Haj Soleiman, another alleged refugee, accused of sexually groping a half-dozen teenage girls at the West Edmonton Mall Water Park?
The judge in that case acquitted the man, in part because the judge said those molested girls, well, they couldn't be trusted to visually identify Suleiman because he was of a different race, you see.
Who's the racist now?
Why is everything worse now after 9-11 than before?
Why are we more Islamified?
More scared of speaking out, more under attack than before?
Why does London have an Islamist mayor now who says terrorist attacks are just part and parcel of a big city?
Really?
Ask Tokyo if that's true.
Ask Warsaw if that's true.
Sadiq Ken is not a liberal Muslim.
He's an Islamist who represented the families of actual terrorists.
Same thing in America.
Why are the Muslims who are rising in politics those of the extremist variety, not progressive liberal Muslims?
Why is Linda Sarsour, who wears a misogynist hijab, why is she the poster girl for Muslims in the Democratic Party?
Just the other day, she said the world should not improperly humanize Jews.
Well, Jews are human, actually.
The fact that she is the toast of the Democrats, despite saying things like that, is troubling, but no more troubling than Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labor leader and possibly the next prime minister, who, as you can see, poses for photos standing next to the flag of a terrorist group called Hezbollah.
You can make it out there near his head.
That's a green machine gun on their yellow flag, if you're wondering.
Justin Drudeau, he doesn't have as many skeletons in his closet as Jeremy Corbyn, only because for the first 40 years of his life, he was a Trust Fund international playboy, not a political activist like Corbyn.
But Trudeau is making up for lost time, whether it's meeting with Joshua Boyle, the Muslim convert who took his pregnant wife to Afghanistan to meet the Taliban, and he has since been charged with horrific crimes against her, or just plain old giving money to Omar Khader, the al-Qaeda terrorist.
And of course, there's Trudeau's right-hand man when it comes to Islamic issues, Omar Al-Ghabra, who used to run the anti-Semitic Canadian Arab Federation.
That group called for the legalization of Hamas and Hezbollah, a terrorist group, too.
And then there's Trudeau's star MP, Ikra Khalid, who introduced an anti-Islamophobia censorship motion that was forced through Parliament by Trudeau and in fact has been copied provincially in Ontario.
That censorship and self-censorship, I think, is the most tangible change in the 17 years since 9-11.
Back then, you could still criticize Islam and certainly criticize terrorism.
You could mock them even.
You could mock Islam, the religion, like you could mock Christianity and Judaism and any other religion, but not now.
In 2006, I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in a Canadian magazine I ran called the Western Standard.
I was prosecuted by Alberta's Human Rights Commission, but I had the support of the vast majority of Canada's journalists at the time, including even at the CBC.
But now human rights commissions regularly prosecute Islamophobia, and so do police forces and criminal courts.
And the greatest cheerleaders of this censorship are mobs on social media led by journalists.
To me, the Western world in 2018 is summed up in two statues.
The government in Victoria, BC, tore down a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister.
And almost at the same moment, the federal government, and Ikra Khalid was there, put up an official park in Winnipeg named after the Islamist extremist and mass murderer Mohammed Jinnah, the founding leader of Pakistan.
We took down Canada's founder.
We put up Pakistan's founder in Canada.
And our social and moral and media leaders, our entire establishment, all our school teachers, all our schools, they love this.
They love it.
They hate who we are and who we have been.
They are, in a way, peacefully trying to finish the work of the 9-11 terrorists, not by tearing down buildings, but by tearing down everything, destroying our own belief in ourselves, in our civilization, hating ourselves, apologizing for being alive.
Sorry, things are worse now than before 9-11.
The terrorists haven't won.
But they're winning, don't you think?
Stay with us for more.
A Permanent Speaker's Corner00:10:16
Well, universities are supposedly a crucible of free speech where young people go to test their minds, to become skeptics, to learn critical thinking, to have their suppositions challenged, a place of hearty debate.
like a permanent speaker's corner.
Well, that's what universities are supposed to be, but these days they're amongst the most censored places on earth with speech codes and trigger warnings and safe spaces.
We saw that a couple years ago with Professor Jordan Peterson at University of Toronto.
In his case, he simply did not want to be forced to use made-up words like g and jur for self-identified gender dysphoria people.
I don't even know what words to use.
It's gotten worse.
We saw the case of Lindsay Shepard at Wilfrid Laurier, who was prosecuted and interrogated merely for showing a clip of Jordan Peterson.
Well, today we have perhaps the worst case of censorship.
A tenured professor at Acadia University has been fired for his political comments.
And that professor, Rick Meta, joins us now via Skype.
Professor Mahta, welcome to the program.
Well, thank you for having me, Ezra.
Well, it's a pleasure to finally have you on the show.
I've followed you on Twitter and I've watched your comments.
I would say that you're part of the very small number of Canadian academics who were vocally supportive of Lindsay Shepard and Jordan Peterson.
I know there were others, but they were shy.
But now you've been fired.
Maybe that's why so few academics have the courage to speak out because they'll be sacked from their jobs even if they have tenure.
That unfortunately seems to be the case because I know there were a lot of colleagues who did support me, but none wanted to actually say anything publicly.
Well, tell me a little bit more about what you said, because I know you've been a bit of a free speech activist on Twitter.
That's how I mainly follow you.
But you talk about politics.
I mean, you seem like a pretty usual professor to me, opining on the subjects of the day.
I think that's something that professors sort of do.
I mean, words and ideas and debates is sort of their trade.
Tell me the kind of things you've been talking about and doing over the last year, and maybe tell us what got you in trouble at Acadia.
Yeah, well, I guess people can see on my Twitter feed what I've talked about and what I typically will talk about.
But behind the scenes, what I did at the university, well, in December, I critiqued an article that was published in the student newspaper, which was about the supposed gender inequities and academic hiring and just provided evidence contrary to what was in that article.
So the thing about the article was it had only two sources, and this is by the science editor.
So one source was just data from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, or COUT for short.
And the other was just an interpretation provided by a women's group called the Women in Science and Engineering, Acadia.
So there was no other perspective at all that was even considered, much less presented.
So I just presented, you know, just sent out an email to the campus with a short critique.
It was only like two pages, you know, saying, let's say for the wage gap.
So actually, I don't know if people know that, but lesbians on average earn 10% more than their straight counterparts.
And we see the opposite pattern when we compare gay males versus straight males.
So, you know, how's that?
And, you know, evidence for a wage gap, that's probably going to be biological, at least partly nature.
And so, you know, in terms of career choices, hours work.
So that's all they did was present those kind of arguments.
Well, I mean, that's interesting for people who are interested in such things, feminism and gender and Marxism.
I mean, those are interesting subjects for debate.
But, you know, and I'm curious personally, and I think I would be sympathetic to your point of view.
But let me pull the camera back a bit and say, it doesn't even matter if people agree or disagree with you.
It's what you're saying, if I hear you right, is that what got you in trouble was just having an opinion.
Whether your opinion was reasonable or unreasonable or people agree or disagree, that's all it was.
There was no misconduct.
There was no, this was not a me too moment.
This was not a fraud moment.
This was not a theft.
I mean, it was nothing that we would traditionally consider a firing offense.
Is it accurate to say you were fired because of your opinions, whatever they were?
And I happen to be interested in them.
But even if I wasn't, is it all just because you had opinions and expressed them, or was there anything worse?
Well, the way they say it is that we had no problems with your opinions.
It's how you express them.
Well, it's the same thing.
I mean, that's, so it's just a word crime or a thought crime.
Like, you didn't do, I guess what I'm saying is you didn't do anything wrong.
You didn't steal.
You didn't cheat.
You didn't, you know, do an academic misconduct thing like plagiarism or falsify a re like this was this was nothing real and substantive.
This was all just hurt feelings offenses.
And I just want to pin you down on that.
Was there anything real or was it all just a hurt feelings thing?
Mostly it was hurt feelings.
So the kind of thing they put in, like the president put in the letter was a breach of privacy.
So there what had happened was I posted audio recordings of my lectures online.
And so in one of the audio recordings, a student just out of the blue talks about how she was raped, even though that had nothing to do with the class content.
And so then afterwards, she was then saying that I breached her privacy.
But she said this in an open class.
She volunteered this personal anecdote in an open class with other students.
Am I correct in saying that?
That's correct.
Yeah.
And this is in a class of 200 people.
And yeah.
That's a stitch-up.
I mean, that's not privacy.
When you're in class and you stand up and you make a personal statement like that in front of 200 people, you're waiving your privacy.
It's a weird thing to do.
That would make me uncomfortable in class.
But I mean, whatever.
I guess classes are all about feelings these days.
So because you published a recording of your own lecture, that's a breach of privacy.
Exactly.
That gives you an example of what they consider, yeah, breaches of privacy.
Yeah.
Well, as my friend Tommy Robinson would say, that's a stitch-up.
Now, let me ask you, I was on, I mean, I haven't been on campus in a long time.
I mean, it's been 20 years since I've graduated.
I was under the understanding that if you're a tenured professor, once you've reached a certain level of seniority, you get this magic status.
It's like you put a wizard hat on you, and it's called tenure.
And I don't know exactly what it means other than you get paid more.
And I thought they couldn't fire you if you had tenure.
So it was designed to give you the freedom to really try out edgy ideas or whatever.
I don't know.
It's just a featherbedding thing for the union, maybe.
I don't know.
But how could they fire a professor with tenure?
Well, yeah, so they said it was, it had nothing to do with what I said, but the way I said it.
So the manner in which you express yourself and that you contradicted what was in our harassment and discrimination policy.
But to give you just an idea of just how preposterous the policy is, so it was, I think it was late November, early, yeah, late November.
So on Facebook, I just referred a student to a link on the Research and Studies Research and Graduate Studies website.
And I said, go to this link and tell me how this in any way is a positive reflection on the Faculty of Arts or the School of Education.
And so if you go to the website, it's about this master's thesis that wins an award.
And it's about this person's coming out experience, how he dealt with it through interpretive dance.
So that was the idea I was critiquing, was the idea that you have this thesis that reads like a diary entry, and it's about interpretive dance, and that somehow is winning an award.
And if you actually read the statement, they actually say the reason it was award-winning, award-worthy, was that the interpretive dance was the focus of the thesis and not just an add-on.
But somehow by making that link, I was minimizing the students' coming out experience, and so that could be perceived as homophobia.
Oh, my God.
And so that's why I was asked to take down that link.
See, I mean, you're talking to me from the bowels of the university where this debate you're referring to is normal.
But I, I mean, again, I thank God I haven't been in a classroom in two decades.
The idea that someone could do a thesis on their own interpretive dance, on their own personal life, the idea that someone stands up in class and talks about their own rape, however horrific that may be, that wasn't university.
We went to learn something to get a degree.
Hopefully it would be something useful in life.
And even if it wasn't practical, it was some deeper classical understanding of literature or history or whatever.
The world you're talking about where people do diary style interpretive dances about their own sexual life is, I wonder why anyone would even send their kids to school.
And especially at the great cost there is.
I don't even understand what's going on.
Tell me again, you're a professor of philosophy.
Investigation And Arbitration00:08:03
Is that your area?
Psychology.
Psychology.
Pardon me.
Excuse me.
I knew that.
So was there some sort of a hearing or an investigation into your ouster?
Well, that's what they claim.
So we had the one investigation by Wayne McKay.
So I found out about that on February 13th.
So I don't actually have my own copies of the report.
So that's what I find interesting is that even though these reports are the basis for my dismissal, I can't actually have my own copy unless I agree to conditions that are like a gag order where it literally says that I won't talk to any other person about them.
There's no form of retaliation.
So I meant, I presume that would mean even something like a lawsuit.
So I would be completely gagged.
I wouldn't have been able to do this interview with right now because that would be another basis for a dismissal.
So this person who did an investigation into you, did he interview you?
Yes, he did.
When I looked at the report, though, what I find interesting is you just have to look at the, let's say, the table of contents and you look at who he interviewed.
And so then there's going to be anonymous sources along with people who signed their name to it.
And I think that goes against what we normally think of as natural justice, is that you get to know who your accuser is.
Did you have a chance to challenge any of the facts that he included in his report?
I mean, I challenged them on the substance, but yeah, it was to no avail.
So was there an actual hearing?
It sounds like the university hired this outside investigator.
Is that accurate?
And then he produced a report and you had a chance to answer it.
In what form?
Was there like a trial or a hearing in the university?
No, actually, I didn't really get a...
So I met with the investigator.
Then the report came out.
Well, it was submitted to the university on May 14th.
In the meantime, the dean did his own investigation, and then I just got the letter saying, okay, here's what we say has happened.
Here's our evidence.
How do you respond?
And that's it.
So I didn't get the chance to actually respond to the contents of the report itself until it was actually used as a basis for disciplining me.
And so then it was in the context of a discipline meeting.
Did you, I mean, public sector unions are very strong, and the teachers' unions and professors' unions, faculty associations, I think they're usually called, are very strong.
Did they provide you, did your union, to whom you've been paying dues, I'm sure, for many years, did they provide you with support?
Did they have a lawyer for you or an advocate for you in this process?
Well, yes, I guess, yeah, we do have a grievance officer, and through that you have a lawyer, but I guess key point is the lawyer represents the faculty association, not me.
And so with the grievance officer, they work within the rules that are there to help the member, but they don't actually challenge the rules.
I think that's where the problem is.
And so they say, well, it'll be best for your case, because if it's going to go to arbitration, you don't want to say anything that could hurt you in the media.
So then therefore keep quiet.
So that's where I think the problems lie.
So I mean, it would have been nice if they set up a media committee to help me at this stage, right?
So it's kind of like the way they help you is probably not ideal.
So you've been sacked, but is there another arbitration or appeal yet to come?
Yeah, so usually the procedure is that there's an arbitration.
So I think the circumstances under which a union would not take it to arbitration are limited.
So if it was like a guarantee that I was going to lose a case, then they probably say no.
But usually the standard is to take it to arbitration from there.
Well, I saw that Jordan Peterson, who I mentioned earlier, has written a couple of tweets in support of you, or at least he asks why the investigation into you remains a secret document.
Have you received any help from any free speech organizations, from a civil liberties association, from another group that might come to the aid of professors who were being silenced?
Has any NGO or lobby group reached out to you at all?
Yeah, I've been working with a couple.
So there's the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.
So they've been great.
There's the Ontario Civil Liberties Association.
So they've been very helpful.
Oh, good.
I'm very pleased to hear that.
Yeah, and there's another group on Facebook called Academics for Academic Freedom.
So yeah, that's made a world of difference.
Otherwise, I don't think I could have gotten this far without their support.
Great.
Definitely grateful to them.
Well, I want to ask you a question, and I don't want you to feel obligated to answer if it would jeopardize any prospective legal action you may take.
But after Jordan Peterson and Lindsey Shepard went through their trials and ordeals, in fact, I think it was more than a year afterwards, they filed massive lawsuits against Wilfred Laurier.
Peterson has not sued the University of Toronto, where he was hassled.
He managed to navigate his way out of that with a lot of public support.
But both Lindsey Shepard and Jordan Peterson have sued Wilfrid Laurier, who denounced them both and defamed them both.
And I think they're going to win, by the way.
And even if they don't have a big financial settlement, I think their lawsuit will smoke out a lot of internal memos and emails and records from the university to show how high-handed they are.
I don't want you to give me your legal strategy or give me confidential legal advice, but have you considered legal action outside of the grievance process that you've described?
What Lindsey Shepard and Jordan Peterson are doing, your defamation lawsuits.
Is there anything legal that you think you might do?
Well, keeping those options open.
So right now, the first thing I'd need is a good lawyer.
So that's what I'm doing first is finding the right lawyer to work with, because if you don't have that, you don't have much of a case.
So yeah, so I'm trying to do it just one step at a time.
So yeah, just see what options are there given what I have and what's the best strategy.
So that would be, that's where I am now, just searching for a lawyer in the first place.
All right.
Well, I hope you find one.
Is there a website that you've set up where people can sign up either for updates for you or even chip in to help you cover the cost of a lawyer?
Do you have some sort of place that people can find out more info or even contact you?
Well, so far I've just been doing most of my publicizing through Twitter, sometimes through Facebook.
So starting to use those and then, yeah, just once I know what it is that I need in terms of financial help, then I'll work at it at that stage.
So the way I see it is this is going to be in the long haul.
So I'd rather just do little bits over a long term than try to put in so much information all at once that it's overwhelming for people to take in.
All right.
Well, keep us posted.
I'm frustrated and upset, but absolutely not surprised that anyone calling for free speech or challenging political correctness has been drummed out of the academy.
I think it was important that we established, as we did, that you actually did nothing wrong other than hold the wrong opinions and express them in a wrong manner.
I think that if anyone has students at Acadia University in their family, they should question that decision.
Professor Rick Mayder, thanks very much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me, Ezra.
Conservative Alternatives Debate00:05:06
All right.
Pleasure.
Well, there you have it.
I think that the number of conservative academics on campus is very small, but the number who will express themselves is even smaller for fear of being drummed out like Professor Maida was.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
On my monologue about the South Yorkshire police focusing on feelings instead of crime, Liza writes...
Declaring war on insult is ridiculous.
Who stands to gain the most by this move?
Certainly not the freedom-loving people, but those who wish to silence them.
Yeah, well, I can tell you who benefits.
I mean, it's pretty obvious.
First of all, you need budgets, you need bureaucrats, you need offices, you need all sorts of consultants.
There's a whole industry here, obviously.
People to train people.
Even social media, I guess.
Anyone who wants to silence someone else now has another arrow in their quiver.
And of course, the police benefit and the politicians benefit by distracting from the actual crimes they're not solving.
My interview with Derek Fildebrandt about the Freedom Conservative Party of Alberta, Stephen writes, therein lies the difference between conservatives and liberals.
Unity.
No matter what happens in the Liberal Party, they always stick together.
No divisions, no disloyalty.
They are always one.
There's a lot of truth in that.
The Liberals, you can't get a crack.
There's no daylight between any of them.
There is, of course, the cleavage between the Liberals and the NDP, but the Liberal Party itself is united.
Paul writes, The problem with the PC Party of Alberta was that they led for about 40 years with no real opposition.
Maybe it's better if the province has a party like this as an alternative instead of someone like the NDP.
give Derek Fildebrandt credit for putting himself out there and going on the Rebel anyway.
Well, listen, I've liked Derek for years, and I've dealt with him in his capacity at the Taxpayers Federation, and then as an MLA, including a lead critic for the Wild Rose Party.
And he acknowledged several times, without getting into the particulars of it, his mistakes that he's made over the years.
He takes some ownership of that.
I think that he's trying to reinvent himself as leader of a new party.
Hey, why not?
If you can't can't get in with your old party, create a new party.
I was very skeptical of him, and I think he overstates the criticisms of the UCP.
I'm sure they are timid.
I know that for a fact, and I'm sure they are heavy-handed with their nominations, but I think he throws the word corruption around a bit much.
I just think it's too far.
I don't think that Albertans want more splitism.
But I have to say, what I would leave that conversation after thinking about it for a day now is it'll be curious to see if it's more than just Derek Fildebrand himself.
I'm skeptical that it will be, but he says he has other names lined up.
But I do think, in terms of your question, it would be better if Jason Kenning were the Premier, but the opposition were on the right, pulling him back from the media instead of on the left.
That would be a healthy change for Alberta.
Barry writes, Alberta does not need a duplicate and competing Conservative Party in order to defeat the present Alberta NDP.
When will the Conservative parties across Canada learn to keep their house in order and work together for my and Canada's success?
Well, look, I don't mind the fact that the two parties are united, the old Progressive Conservatives and the Wild Rose Party, but I actually didn't think that there needed to be a unity.
Remember, that the Wild Rose and the Conservative Party were fighting with the lion's share.
They were both in like the 30% range, while the NDP was single-digits, very, very low teens.
It wasn't until Danielle Smith tried to euthanize the party and Jim Prentiss ran as a socialist PC that people said, you guys make me sick, and voted for the only other alternative, which was this innocuous enough-looking Rachel Notley.
So I think it was an accident of history, a freak incident that would not have been replicated.
And even if the parties on the right did not unify, I really think the NDP is going back to their traditional single-digit status in Alberta.
And I think the risk of the unification, I mean, the obvious benefit of it was that it assures a strong majority UCP government next time.
But the risk of it is that you keep within it all the Red Tories who really aren't conservative.
They're just part of a tribe and like to win.
In a way, the old PC party ought to have been crushed like the NDP party.
I think Wild Rose probably could have done it on themselves.
But as I said to Derek Fildebrand yesterday, all that is coulda, shoulda, would have talked.
It's all water under the bridge.
What's interesting is the next election, I think that Rachel Notley is going to be crushed.
And I hope that there's a right-wing opposition party to Jason Kenney's Conservatives.