Jason Kenney’s UCP is poised to win 70 of 87 Alberta ridings in the April 15 election, but his landslide faces hurdles: 220,000 advanced poll ballots (many cast out-of-riding) could delay results past 1 p.m., while Notley’s allies—like Rod Loyola and Nathan Rotman—may resist his promised rollbacks of the carbon tax and bureaucratic purges. Legal battles loom, with Kenney eyeing "riot boosting" laws (à la South Dakota) against anti-oil groups like Greenpeace, which stalled Syncrude’s trespass lawsuit due to leaked protest records. Yet critics question his toughness, citing past concessions to media pressure and billionaire oil executives’ quiet deals with climate activists. Victory hinges on uniting conservative premiers—Ford, Moe, Pallister—to outmaneuver Trudeau’s federal opposition while silencing Notley’s U.S.-funded ($900M) Tar Sands Campaign backers. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, this is your last full dose of pre-election news about the Alberta provincial election.
I think it's everything but a fait accompli that Jason Kenney will rout the socialist hordes.
I think it's going to be a slaughter, frankly.
I keep thinking that line from Barrett's private ears.
Barrett was crushed like a bowl of eggs and the main truck took off both my legs.
I think it's going to happen to Notley without the takeoff melegs part.
Hey, by the way, before we get to the show, can you do me a favor and become a premium subscriber?
It's eight bucks a month.
You get the video version of the show, which I think is pretty cool.
You get access to Sheila Gunnery's show, David Menzie's show, and you support the Rebel.
I'd be really grateful if you did that.
Go to the Rebel.media slash shows.
All right, here's my all-Alberta episode.
Tonight, what does a change in government mean for Alberta and for the rest of the country?
It's April 15th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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.
The other day I made six suggestions, some of them were easier than others to do, on what Jason Kenney could do as premier to fight back against anti-oil and gas extremism by environmentalists.
Some of it would be as simple as instructing a cabinet minister to do it under what's called a mandate letter.
That's a fancy way of saying a detailed job description that the premier gives each cabinet minister.
Or just issuing an order in council that is just to decree something.
No vote needed for certain things.
Setting up a special police force to counter environmental extremism, just like police right now have a special vice squad or a fraud squad, specialist police, experts in the given area of law enforcement, to stop the vandalism, mischief, trespass.
Another would be to use Department of Justice lawyers to go after the white-collar aspects of environmental extremism, especially abuse of the Canadian and U.S. tax laws, by lobbyists who pass themselves off as bona fide charities.
Another idea was using Canada's version of the U.S. RICO statute that targets organized crime.
Go after groups like Greenpeace that commit crimes as part of a fundraising model.
And then there's passing new laws like the South Dakota law against riot boosting.
Anyways, I had six ideas.
I won't go through them again.
Frankly, Kenny can start some of this literally on his first day in office.
That's what Trump did.
I don't know if you remember.
He was ready to go on day one, the day of his inauguration.
He got right to work.
He made so many policy announcements, decisions in the first hours and days after he was inaugurated, just to set a new tone.
Some of it was merely symbolic, I grant you, but others were real things.
You'll recall that he approved the Keystone XL pipeline and the COTE Dakota access pipeline within, I don't know, hours of becoming president.
He had obviously been planning those weeks in advance.
He just did them quickly as a symbol.
The Dakota pipeline is working great, by the way.
It's been up and running for more than a year.
I'm jealous.
I think Kenney needs to take steps on day one, and he needs to root out NDP plants in the government, like the Obama holdovers, who undid Trump in so many ways the past two years, caused so much trouble.
So I'd like to talk about today a little bit a list of challenges Kenny will face that have nothing to do with policy ideas, really.
They have to do with mischief and underminers once he becomes the Premier, which I think is quite certain tomorrow.
I think there are troubles coming his way, but each of the troubles are actually an opportunity if he handles them right.
Maybe that's obvious.
Obviously, all of this is contingent on him winning the election, but I know enough about my home province to know that it's a done deal.
Rachel Notley and the NDP destroyers.
It's not even passionate anymore, the whole thing.
It's resolved.
That's different.
I think the people of Alberta, I don't think there's any drama.
I don't think they're hot-blooded anymore.
There's no contest.
I think they're just resolved.
We're going to throw them out.
I know the left-wing media and Notley's union front groups have been making a lot of feists in a very dramatic election.
No, it ain't.
I mean, they've been focusing on non-core issues.
They're obsessed with student sex clubs in high schools.
That's what they are.
Now, I know the NDP cares a lot about that, but I don't think that's in the top 10 list of any Albertan unprompted.
There's just no debate left.
All that's left is finding out the exact numbers, just how many votes and how many ridings Jason Kenney will win.
I think he could get up to 70 out of the 87 ridings.
Okay, so if that happens, what should he do?
I think on the very first day he needs to fire a lot of holdovers from the Notley era.
He needs to purge dozens, probably hundreds of people, entire agencies, if need be.
Take Ed Whittingham, an anti-oil sands extremist formerly with the Pembina Institute, a lobby group that takes foreign money to attack the oil sands.
Rachel Notley just appointed him to the Alberta Energy Regulator.
That's the quasi-judicial tribunal like an energy court, really, that approves or denies pretty much anything involving oil and gas.
Whittingham has to be fired on the very first day.
The same way that Doug Ford, the new Ontario Premier, cleaned house at one of its problem childs, Ontario Hydro, the huge politicized boondoggle packed with appointees by his predecessor, Kathleen Wynne.
Do you know that Doug Ford also canceled more than 750 wind and solar contracts signed by the Wynne government?
Obviously, they were junk, extremely expensive, many of them patronage gifts to connected insiders, all of them a signature liberal platform.
Just cancel them.
Boom.
Gone.
Let them sue if they want.
Get out.
Gone.
You're done.
Kenny needs to immediately fire the Notley underminers.
They shouldn't be that hard to find.
Many of them only moved to Alberta from other provinces after her surprise win in 2015.
To me, they're epitomized by this guy, Nathan Rotman.
He's Notley's chief of staff.
He came from Toronto, where he was a junior staffer on the losing campaign of a hard left-wing candidate for mayor.
Her name was Olivia Chow.
It was actually Jack Layton's widow.
Seriously, some door knocker for the third-place loser in a Toronto City election became the chief of staff to the Premier of Alberta.
Had he even visited Alberta before he was given that job?
Obviously, he's a political staffer and would be let go anyways, but there are dozens, maybe hundreds of such interlopers, carpetbaggers, as they were called in the U.S. after the Civil War.
Fire them all and quick, just all of them gone, get out.
Not just to send a message, not just to save money, but otherwise they will become malicious holdovers like Donald Trump faced when he took office.
The entire collusion myth that was finally buried by Robert Mueller a few weeks ago was juiced up by Obama appointees who stuck around under Trump and colluded against Trump and used their access and information and connections and resources to plant little time bombs for him, to leak about him, to set him up.
They'll absolutely be doing that to Kenny and his MLAs.
They need to all be fired.
When in doubt, fire.
And given that Notley hired, what?
Was it 50,000, 60,000 excess bureaucrats in the past four years?
I think the default bias should be to overfire, not underfire.
When in doubt, throw them out.
And again, I would hope that Kenny would have some sort of transition team in place who was already working on these things while Kenney was campaigning.
There are probably things that need to be done right away to cancel abominations like Alberta's carbon tax, or like the war on coal plants in the province, like other agreements that Notley signed on behalf of the government.
Cancel, cancel, cancel.
There should be 100 canceled in the first week.
Cancel that bizarre last-ditch purchase of billions of dollars in railway tanker cars, for example.
Just cancel it.
Cancel the kooky tricks and programs and grants like the free solar panels in a province where there's snow on the roof half the year.
Cancel it.
And all the while, a no-shredding order should go out to bureaucrats.
Don't shred any documents.
You know they're going to break the law, but you should try and enforce it anyways.
I've told you before about an old Roman concept from the ancient days of damnatio memoriae.
It's Latin for damn the memory, condemn the memory.
It was a shocking totalitarian exercise by Roman emperors, especially when it came to family feuds.
An emperor would send out an order that anything, everything having to do with a damned person was to be obliterated.
So if someone was to have their memory damned, condemned, every single law approved by that condemned former politician was to be nullified and reversed.
Every appointment they had ever made, every decision they had ever made was to be reversed.
It was as if they never existed.
And what was Orwellian about it was that it went further.
Their pictures were scraped off.
You see the missing picture there?
Someone unpersoned?
Pictures were scraped off paintings.
Statues were smashed.
It's very Stalinistic in its style.
Obviously, we don't believe in that.
But there was nothing done in the past four years in Alberta that shouldn't be undone.
Nothing.
No appointment made should be kept.
No spending, no taxing, no decision that shouldn't be undone.
I could be wrong here and there.
Out of the thousands of decisions, you could find one or two tiny exceptions.
But that's the point.
The default should be to damnatio memorie.
Delete everything, reset everything.
You could probably count the exceptions on one hand's fingers.
More to the point, that has to be the spirit.
That has to be the corporate culture now.
Not just switching team colors, not just new personnel.
Raise it to the ground.
Now, obviously, you're going to have an entrenched opponent to that, namely those same public sector unions who were so enriched by Notley, who were so grossly overrepresented in Notley's caucus, and who spent lavishly as third-party advertisers to assist Notley in the recent campaign.
I mean, hell, Notley's own husband is a government union leader.
Half her MLAs were union bosses, including this.
I'm sorry, I'm going to use the word freak.
He's a freak.
Rod Loyola, I'm sorry I'm going to afflict this on you.
You have to watch this.
Do not look away.
Take a look.
About to hit the mic quiet, subversively.
Coming at you with ingenuity, breaking down, indoctrination of capitalist commodification that's taking over your mind.
Attacking you all the time through daily media blips like drive-by hits.
The clip just hit the ground.
We've been broken and bound, tied up behind enemy lines.
Incarcerating, confined.
To break free, we need to have an urban guerrilla mentality.
Observe your enemy, analyze strength and weaknesses.
Use the same ammunition.
Oh man, I forgot my lines.
Yeah.
I swear to God, that guy actually became an MLA under Rachel Notley.
seriously, it's the same guy here.
I know you think I'm kidding.
You think there's no way that guy could be a Notley MLA?
I swear to God, he is.
Anyways, yeah, so expect Rod Loyola to return to a life of, well, it's not exactly a businessman, is he?
Expect him to return to a life of being a perpetual student and a union organizer.
And to scream bloody murder about any cuts to come.
Yeah, fair enough.
But this election wasn't just a referendum on Notley.
It was a referendum on her friends.
Out-of-province interlopers like Nathan Rotman.
No one cares about them.
And the in-province profiteers, the public sector unions that didn't care about the job losses in the private sector because there was a true economic boom in the public sector.
Seriously, while nearly 200,000 Albertans suffered from the destroyed oil patch, it's never been better to be a civil servant in Alberta.
So yeah, they're going to squawk.
So what?
They just lost.
Elections have consequences.
It'll be interesting to see if Kenny has the fortitude to stare down the unions though when they march in the streets, when they put their students on strike in the schools.
Ralph Klein stared them down.
He brought in modest cuts 25 years ago.
Klein didn't blink.
I wonder if Kenny will.
So you've got the holdovers, some of whom will leave quietly, slink back to Toronto or Vancouver, others who will simply continue their campaign from outside power, the labor unions and the front groups.
Now they have all sorts of sources within the government, holdovers that won't be rooted out, who will leak information of them.
I mean, the battle will continue.
It always does with these radical leftists.
That's the Alinsky way.
The second challenge, though, is the media.
Kenny loves the media.
Or at least he loves playing along with them.
It worked for him pretty well when he was a cabinet minister in Ottawa because he gave the media what they wanted.
He was immigration minister.
He gave record high immigration levels and subsidies to ethnic groups.
What media would fight against that?
They loved it.
Kenny took that cooperative, even submissive approach into Alberta, and it didn't work for him so much.
I mean, the CBC put a record setting.
I said seven to you before, but look at this.
There are now eight journalists on this one story here.
The CBC has eight journalists digging into a single scandal on Jason Kenny that he colluded with a stalking horse candidate to attack Kenny's rival in the UCP leadership race a couple years ago.
I think it looks bad.
And I think if they did what they said was done, it was unnecessary, but seriously, so what?
No one cares.
We have an NDP to kick out now.
That's the most important thing.
That's the only thing.
But the fact that the CBC has put not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, but eight, eight, eight reporters on that one story, more than they have on the SNC Lab land story, shows you all you need to know about the media now.
They were obsessed with the student high school sex clubs.
They were obsessed with things Jason Kenney said when he was a student himself 30 years ago.
They were obsessed with any minutiae or trivia from some candidates' Facebook pages years ago.
It was quite something.
Even my old son news colleague Charles Adler, I think he went a little bit crazy.
Remember this?
The misogynistic crop, the homophobic sewage.
And they're saying people who hate LGBT people are highly attracted to the party and running for the party.
But the people who are LGBT people, the targets of the hatred, they're not running for the party.
Hate And Hateressements00:10:21
Many people in the LGBT community right now, Mr. Kenney, feel you're using this family as a campaign prop.
Why are so many people who bash gays and bash women?
Why are so many people who bash Muslims attracted to the United Conservative Party?
Why are the knuckle-draggers attracted to your party?
If you're wondering what that is, Jason Kenney agreed to a half-hour interview with Charles Adler.
Why would Kenny even talk to any media outside Alberta to begin with in the campaign?
And why would he talk to haters like the CBC state broadcaster?
To begin with, didn't Donald Trump teach us that you don't have to bend the knee to the fake news media, not in the age of Twitter and Facebook?
Kenny is so obviously afraid of what the CBC thinks of him.
I don't know all the details of all the candidates that Kenny threw overboard.
I think it was all exaggerated.
But it was like Kenny gave the CBC itself a veto over his campaign.
No one cares.
No real people care.
The media went absolutely wild against this guy.
For example, a Kenny MLA named Devin Dreeschin, because look at that.
Oh my God, everybody.
Oh my God, look, he wore a Donald Trump Make America great again.
Oh my God.
You know, he's from rural Alberta, South Red Deer, Innisfil.
Do you think that weird Trump derangement syndrome that absolutely grips the CBC and Charles Adler and the Toronto Star, do you think they feel the same way about it in Innsville, Alberta?
I say that because Kenny, of course, has given the Rebel the cold shoulder, even though I should tell you, the majority of his candidates and Kenny himself are rebel supporters, as in their subscribers or they otherwise interact with us, our petitions, our social media.
And this isn't about me or the Rebel, but it's my point.
We have close to 100,000 supporters in Alberta.
Why would Kenny care more about what the CBC in Toronto thinks about him than what 100,000 of his own grassroots Alberta members and grass tops activists care?
Why does he care what Wendy Mensley or Rosemary Barton think of him?
Why does he care about what Charles Adler says?
Why did he stick around that interview for half an hour to be abused like that?
I'm worried about this because the media and the public sector union bosses will be the true official opposition in Alberta going forwards.
And you need a certain contempt for the media, as Donald Trump has, if you're going to survive.
I don't think Kenny has that.
I think he actually tries to please them.
I predict that will be a big problem for him.
But there's another problem I predict too.
I call it the entryists.
Entryists.
For the past four years, the NDP has got rich off Alberta.
I mean, the party itself, NDP carpetbaggers like Nathan Rotman and Brian Topp, the Toronto union boss who was Rachel Notley's first chief of staff, and say Sappora Berman, who got paid to be on Notley's advisory board, and same with others too.
At Wittingham, got that sweet Alberta energy regulator gig.
They all got personally rich, personally.
Mainly the lobbyists.
So I remember well, back in 2015, all of a sudden all these oil companies and construction companies and property developers didn't know anyone in the new government.
How would you know a new Democrat?
You think you knew Rod Loyola, that weirdo beat poet?
Oh my God, I got to get in touch with Rod Loyola.
No one knows him.
Yeah, no one knows him.
He's a hobo.
So for 40 years, these oil companies knew who to call when you had a question or a problem or to ask a favor.
Suddenly they didn't know who to call.
And so all of a sudden, absolute losers.
Some of them literally failure to launch socialists, literally still living in their parent basements, like the other guys at that Beat Poet.
They bought a suit and said, I'm a lobbyist now.
I'm an NDP lobbyist now, so oil company.
If you pay me $100 million, $100,000, I can help you navigate through this new world.
I can hook you up.
You need me?
Just give me $100,000 retainer.
It happened.
And they got paid.
Dozens of Rod Loyola's hobo friends.
Some became millionaires.
Of course, they didn't actually help the oil companies.
They actually pacified them.
They told the oil companies, don't rock the boat, cooperate, don't argue, don't publicly criticize, stay quiet on the carbon tax, we'll help you out.
So these millionaire NDP hobo lobbyists actually suffocated what should have been a robust oil and gas response to Notley.
I remember my friends at CAP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, telling me they thought they, I think we can work with Rachel Notley.
We've got some real NDP lobbyists on the side.
And it's not going to be so bad.
So they decided not to publicly criticize her.
How'd that work out?
How did that work out four years later?
What a disaster.
My point today is, look, you have all these progressive conservative lobbyists who have been lean for four years.
Haven't had the 100 grand retainers from oil companies.
They're hungry for the fat of government again, all lining up for the gravy train.
Now, being a lobbyist is legal, and helping companies connect to the government is fine in principle, I suppose, but many of these bring with them the old corruption of the Red Tory politics with them.
The old, I don't know, Jim Prentice, Ed Stelmack, Allison Redford Tories.
There's a whole subset of conservatives who actually deeply believe in the carbon tax or carbon pricing or pollution pricing as Gerald Butts and Trudeau call it.
Preston Manning himself, I hate to say it, drank that Kool-Aid.
Failed Ontario PC leader, Patrick Brown, totally bought into it.
It's not what real grassroots conservatives want, but it's what lobbyists want who get huge contracts to push it on the government.
Even if the past few days, even the past few days, I've seen would-be lobbyists jockeying to get a piece of the action as moderate, sensible conservatives, not like the deplorables who are actually going to get Kenny elected tomorrow.
These are the entryists I'm worried about.
Some of the Red Tories in Kenny's own caucus and a lot of the perpetual hangers-on and would-be lobbyists who were thrown out by the Wild Rose Party.
They snuck back into the United Conservative Party.
And I can assure you, there's a lot more money in being a pro-carbon tax lobbyist than being against it.
It's one of the reasons Preston signed up.
Something to watch out for, not just for us, but for Kenny himself.
But I suppose the last thing, the last challenge is in some ways a good one, a healthy one, is Justin Trudeau.
You see how he's railing at Ontario's Doug Ford every day these days?
Him and Catherine McKenna.
It's amazing.
You'd think Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna were running to be the Premier of Ontario or something.
Just endless.
I can't understand it.
Ford's most popular thing is to be against the carbon tax.
McKenna and Trudeau are pushing a hated tax.
It's weird to me.
But boy, are they coming for Rob Ford, Doug Ford, excuse me, hammer and tongue, and he fights back.
I love it.
Well, if there's anyone they hate more than Doug Ford, it's Jason Kenney, especially if he keeps his promise to repeal Alberta's carbon tax and helps the fight nationally, at least in Ontario.
Trudeau thinks, well, maybe he could win some seats federally.
Trudeau knows he can't win in Alberta, so he's going to go scorched earth, just like his father Pierre Trudeau did.
It will be interesting to see if Kenney fights back and how hard, and if he does it all, and how he does it all.
If he follows Doug Ford's example, maybe he teams up with Ford and Saskatchewan's Premier Scott Moe and Manitoba's Premier Brian Pallister.
That could be interesting.
Can they form a counterweight to Trudeau and help fight his bad ideas, save the country, not just the provinces?
Frankly, I think they have to team up like that to survive.
Either they kick Trudeau out of parliament or he's going to kick them out of their provincial legislatures.
Those are four thoughts on what I think is the eve of Jason Kenney's landslide victory.
Number one, fire as many incumbent staff as possible to clean the house and then fire some more and then when you think you're done, just fire a few more and then just randomly fire another 10%, get rid of the underminers or risk sabotage like Donald Trump did from the Obama holdovers.
Move immediately to cancel contracts, programs, to put your enemies on the back foot.
If you don't move on them, they're going to move on you.
Number two, can you resist being bullied by the mainstream media so far?
It's Kenny's biggest weakness.
The very fact that he went on Charles Adler's talk show and let himself be trashed for half an hour.
We didn't play Kenny's submissive replies, but Adler basically trashed Kenny for half an hour.
And Kenny didn't hang up or say, I'm sorry, this is done.
You just being gross.
It shows how afraid Kenny is to offend the media, including out of a province.
He has to learn to hate the media as they hate him.
He has to learn, like Trump has learned, in order to survive.
Third, can Kenny guard against lobbyists who will bend his ear, always proposing to pull the party to the left.
Failed or just retired or just hungry ex-conservatives who want to make some money for the first time in their life, want to be fancy, want to be accepted by polite society, just like Preston Manning, who, when I worked with him 20 years ago, he fought against the Kyoto Protocol.
Well, now he writes op-eds in the Globe and Mail supporting a carbon tax and telling liberals how to implement it.
Now entire conservative lobby groups will be coming to tell Jason Kenny to be a Patrick Brown, not to be a Ralph Klein.
I think it's a risk, a similar risk to the media party risk.
But the last fight hopefully will be like a splash of cold water to Kenny's face.
Justin Trudeau coming to kill him and to use him as a punching bag for the delight of the rest of the country, a foil for Trudeau in the upcoming election.
And hopefully, the reality of that will cause Kenny to come to terms with the other three threats.
We'll see.
I'm still wrapping my head around things.
I'm still figuring it out.
I'm still thinking out loud, trying out my ideas on loud, trying to figure it out.
Let me know your thoughts.
Send me an email.
And I guess that's okay because the election hasn't even happened yet.
Maybe I'm too early.
By the way, we're going to be having a live election night show tomorrow on YouTube starting at 7.45 p.m. Alberta time, 9.45 p.m. Eastern Time.
Sheila, Gunread, and Kian Becksy will be at Jason Kenney's election night headquarters in Calgary.
I'll be here in our Toronto Outpost.
It'll be great.
I'm looking forward to it.
Until then, let's talk next with Lord Gunter of the Edmonton Sun, and we chew these things over.
That's next on The Rebel.
Well, it is just after 8 p.m.
If you're watching this, as soon as we upload it, 8 p.m. Eastern Time, 6 p.m. Alberta Time, which means that 26 hours from now, if I'm correct on the time of day, Albertans will have chosen their next government.
Every single poll for months has suggested that the United Conservative Party led by Jason Kenney will win a majority.
Syncrude And Pipeline Protests00:14:26
Some polls say it'll be a wipeout.
I myself think Kenney will win, oh, almost 70 out of the 87 seats.
I suppose we should always beware.
I mean, the Dewey Defeats Truman headline from last century is a reminder of predicting things before the voters have their say, but I think it's a done deal.
But what will it mean to the war against oil, gas, pipelines, and jobs?
Well, very interesting article in the Emerson Sun today by our friend Lauren Gunter.
The headline is, Vivian Krauss, the tar sands campaign and the election.
Joining us now to talk about it is our friend Lauren Gunter.
Hey, Lauren, great to see you again.
Good to see you.
It's a very interesting article.
It's something I've cared about for a decade since I wrote the book Ethical Oil.
Absolutely.
Most of the anti-oil activists in Canada are not your friendly neighbor, your concerned girl guides troop, you know, organic natural volunteers.
They're not.
They're not even Canadian in many cases, and they're almost never, at least the organizers are almost never volunteers.
I mean, they're paid professional foreign lobbyists.
Tell me a little bit about what you wrote about in your column today, please.
Well, I can't take any credit for the work that was done.
It all comes from a BC researcher named Vivian Krause, who I have to admit, I probably haven't given enough ink to her.
I've dealt with her in the past and corresponded with her back and forth.
She has some very, very good information.
And what she has found that over the last decade or so, an organization largely funded by billionaire foundations in the United States, a group called the Tar Sands Campaign, has raised about $900 million and funneled that into environmental and indigenous organizations in Canada.
So when you hear an environmental group say, oh, we're the little guy fighting against big oil.
Well, most big oil companies don't put anywhere near the amount of money into pumping up pipelines that this campaign has put into tearing down pipelines or preventing pipelines from being built.
And so Krauss has not only documented that very, very well, and how those organizations, for instance, helped fund the court challenge that last August caused the Federal Court of Canada to invalidate all of the construction permits for the Transmountain Pipeline.
And that's why it still has not gone ahead.
But the other thing she's found is that some of the organizations like Progress Alberta and Lead Now, who get this money, have been working very actively in this current provincial election to get the New Democrats re-elected.
Certainly working very actively to keep Jason Kenney from becoming the premier because the stated purpose of the whole tar sands campaign has been to quote unquote landlock Alberta oil.
Now, you and I have talked about this before there are other names for this.
It's called demarketing.
You can pump as much oil as you want, but we're going to make sure you can't sell it anywhere.
And I think it's fascinating that the people whose objective is to demarket and landlock Canadian oil have decided to champion the Alberta NDP, who claim to be the big fans of pipelines, but their supporters clearly are not.
And what do the supporters know that the rest of us don't?
Well, yeah.
You know, it's funny.
In the last few months, and especially this campaign, Notley has tried to rebrand herself as a defender of pipelines, but her staff picks.
You know, there's an old saying, personnel is policy.
Who you hire is a reflection of you and what you believe in.
As I showed, I think it was yesterday, Notley's staff have been working for Greenpeace in her office.
She had professional Greenpeace activists in her office when she was an opposition MLA.
I remember one of them got arrested for doing a stunt at Stelmack event.
So you have Sappora Berman, as you point out in your article, Shapora Berman of Greenpeace.
You have Karen Mahone arrested for rioting on Burnaby Mountain against the Transmountain pipeline.
These were people placed in senior positions.
Let me throw one more fact at you, Lauren.
The first chief of staff to Rachel Notley's energy minister was Graham Mitchell, who came from LEAD Now in Toronto.
He was a foreign-funded anti-oil lobbyist, literally registered to lobby against the oil sands, hired from that anti-oil sands lobby group and placed directly as chief of staff to Rachel Notley's energy minister.
And we know too that one of the other organizations that has received indirect funding from the tar sands campaign is the Pembeda Institute, which likes to portray itself as a sustainable development think tank.
Anytime that we call them anti-oil, they get all itchy about that.
But they are receiving money from the tar sands campaign.
And their most recent executive director, a fellow who stepped down in 2017, Notley just appointed him to, within the last couple of months, appointed him to become a director of the Alberta Energy Regulator.
So she knows perhaps that her time is coming to an end as premier and she's going to load up as many of the appointments as she can.
A la John Turner in the 1984 federal campaign.
And one of them is an anti-oil campaigner that she's put on the Alberta Energy Regulator.
And he was, his organization received money indirectly from the tar sands campaign.
So it's an intricate network.
Vivian Kraus has done a tremendous job in uncovering it.
And the beneficiaries of it in Alberta are the Alberta New Democrats.
Yeah.
You know, Jason Kenney has talked that he's going to try and push back against these groups, and I hope he will.
There are a lot of things he can do.
I mentioned some in the show yesterday.
Lauren, I don't know if you ever heard, did we talk about riot boosting?
It's a phrase I had never heard until just a few weeks ago.
South Dakota has introduced a bill against riot boosting.
And it's just anyone who is a booster for anti-oil and gas riots, anyone who organizes, cajoles, encourages.
Now, it has to be a real, urgent, imminent, like you can't just be hollering on Twitter, hey guys, you should riot.
You have to be right in there inciting a riot.
But it allows either governments or private companies or private citizens to sue, sort of like under a RICO statute or under an anti-gang legislation.
And what I find interesting is it allows companies to reclaim their damages times three.
So if you had a pipeline that was broken, it cost you a million dollars to fix, you can now go after Greenpeace for $3 million.
Now, my understanding is even if you have a pipeline delayed, there doesn't actually have to be damage to it, but there can be damage to your books, to your profits or to your balance sheet.
And you can sue for that as well.
So interesting.
I don't think we're going to see any of that in Canada.
But who knows?
Kenny seems quite sincere about taking legal action against these organizations that are working intently, directly, with the express purpose of upending Alberta's economy.
And despite the fact that they are working, not in secret.
They don't make any secret about the fact that they're trying to upend Alberta's economy.
Despite the fact that that's their goal, who are they supporting in this election?
They're supporting the Alberta NDP.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder if Kenny has the toughness to go through with this.
I mean, let me give you a small example.
Did you know that Syncrude, which is one of the largest oil companies in the oil sands, I think it might be the largest, they sued Greenpeace for trespass once.
Did you even know that, Lauren?
No, I did not.
Which is amazing to me because you would think Greenpeace would be squawking about it and shaming Syncrude.
Most people I asked haven't heard of that.
And I think it's because the discovery process is so embarrassing.
And the last I looked at the lawsuit was moving extremely slowly.
But one of the things Greenpeace had to do, Lauren, was to go through and show their list of relevant records.
So that included all the emails to the local hooligans, all the expense chits, all of that stuff.
We'll show some of them on the screen here.
So I don't think Syncrude was looking to make money by suing Greenpeace.
Syncrude makes money by selling oil, but by exposing and rooting around and shining the light of scrutiny.
Now, I don't know why Syncrude hasn't been noisier about it, but that's the way to kill these foreign groups, is to turn over the rock and watch them squirm in the light.
A lot of the big oil companies, even if they are, for instance, like Syncrude suing Greenpeace for trespass, really are very reluctant to make big noise about this because they really don't want to provoke more protesters.
They don't want to upset governments.
You remember when Rachel Notley brought in her carbon tax in November of 2015, there were people from the four largest oil sands companies on stage with her.
Now, what we didn't know at the time was that they had all cut deals with her, that their companies would have far fewer emission restrictions put on them than others in the industry.
But there they were saying, oh, no, we want to be socially responsible corporate citizens, et cetera, et cetera.
They play that PR game.
You know what?
And I don't think it's a game.
Unfortunately, I think an awful lot of those CEOs, they live in rarefied air.
Their jobs really aren't under threat from silly government policies.
And so they do.
They don't want to go to a cocktail party and have someone come up and poke them in the chest and say, you're going to ruin the planet for my children.
And so they go along with these silly emission reduction fairy tales like social license.
And that's, I think, probably why Syncrew is not making more of a fuss about what it's learning from the Greenpeace lawsuit.
You know, you're so right about those fancy CEOs.
I think of Murray Edwards, the billionaire who was one of the four men on stage with Rachel Notley there.
I think he has since decamped for London.
It's a little bit fancier there for him, I guess, with all those other oil barons, the Saudis mainly.
I think that they have a lot to answer for.
I mean, they're businessmen.
I suppose they were looking out for number one, looking out for their shareholders.
But politically, they, I think, helped sink the province because they undermined any opposition from the industry.
One of my ideas I had on yesterday's show, and I'm sorry I'm going over it with you, and you may not have had the benefit of watching it.
One of my six suggestions was that Kenny not meet with self-hating oil executives.
So if there's someone out there who's sponsoring the Pembina Institute annual gala, Shell does that, Suncor does that.
If there's someone out there who's saying, we love a carbon tax, Jason Kenney, as Premier should not be mean to them.
He shouldn't tax them or punish them.
He should just say, you know what?
I run a province of 4.5 million people.
A lot of them are hurting.
I'm going to meet with the guys who don't like the pain.
You carbon tax boosters.
You can meet amongst yourselves.
I'm not going to give you any FaceTime.
You big executive managers who report to a board of directors of a publicly traded company, do whatever you do.
Kenny, I'd say I'm interested in the guy who has 120 people working for him in an oil field service company or the four guys who were just put out of work as welders because the little company that they had that did part of a pipeline no longer has enough business to keep them employed.
Those are the people who make up the backbone of Alberta.
And sure, it'd be nice if the big fancy pants executives would come along.
I'd love them to understand how the short-term protection of their shareholders' interests is in their long-term harm.
It's going to do long-term harm to their companies.
But if they don't want to come along and be nice, then there are hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of working Albertans that Kenny should be meeting with instead.
Yeah, well, it goes to that fancy pants people at a cocktail party.
If I think his name is Steve Williams, I think he's still running Suncor.
I haven't followed it that closely.
If these fancy international jet-setting millionaire go to the art auction and buy a million-dollar painting, collect fine wine kind of oil men who probably started off in cowboy boots with a pickup truck and now are just trying to impress their new friends.
If they are marginalized, if Jason Kenney won't take a phone call from Murray Edwards anymore, if Jason Kenney or his energy minister won't take a meeting with Suncor anymore or Shell anymore, then you're playing on their ego and their wanting to be polite society.
You have a premier's oil and gas gala and they're not invited.
Maybe you can turn peer pressure to your benefit.
I guess I'm just saying, you know, he doesn't need to go cozying up to them.
I mean, whether or not he has a boycott of those guys, I don't care.
But he doesn't need to cozy up them.
He doesn't need to play favors.
He doesn't need to play favorites with them and try and win them over.
They'll either come over or they won't.
Where Climate Change Meets Peer Pressure00:03:14
You know what?
I remember when I wrote my book, Ethical Oil, and I would give talks about it.
And I was often asked to speak to oil companies in Calgary.
And people would say, why are you doing that?
Why are you always giving a sermon to the choir?
Why are you always preaching to the converted?
And I thought, no, no, no, you misunderstand it.
That's where the problem starts.
The problem starts from self-hating oil executives whose minds have been conditioned and colonized by the Tippora Burmans.
I mean, like I say, a lot of these oil companies are sponsoring the Pembina Foundations, sponsoring the Greenpieces, believe it or not.
And I think that you have to start by getting oil men to respect themselves.
If they don't respect themselves, how could a Premier respect them?
How could a Prime Minister of all of Canada respect them?
It starts by stopping the self-hating disease.
Yeah, for sure.
And it also starts by going back to the science of climate change and global warming.
When you concede that climate change is happening and it's going to be bad and it's caused by human activity, how do you argue against stopping it?
What you have to do is say, look, there's all sorts of scientists who solid, high-profile scientists at respectable universities who don't think this is happening.
And here's why they don't think it's happening.
And the reason that's important is that then you don't have to argue, well, yes, we know that we're going to destroy the climate, but we just can't destroy the economy too.
So you have to let us destroy the environment in order to keep people working.
And that's basically where we've gotten to with people of a conservative ilk in the Western world is that they concede the science of climate change, but then they have to make economic arguments that it's too expensive to do anything about it.
And as soon as you do that, you say, oh, I'm okay for destroying the environment.
I just don't want to see people lose their jobs over it.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you, I haven't, now that I think about it, I haven't heard Jason Kenney in an extremely clear way address the science issue.
I don't know if he has.
Have you seen him do so?
No, I haven't.
You know what it did to Danielle Smith in 2012, though, when she, in the last week of the campaign, decided to take on the science of global warming.
I think it's one of those things that's been so ingrained.
We're now into the third generation of children going through public schools who've been indoctrinated with the climate change sermons.
And it's going to take a long time to start backing that up and start pulling people away from that mentality.
And so it's something that I think the next Alberta government has to start to do.
And even if it's just taking baby steps.
Yeah.
Well, it's very interesting.
I'm hopeful.
My one fear, Lauren, I have a few fears, but my one of them is that Jason Kenney, because he lived in Ottawa for so long and the media has so much power in Ottawa, I fear he's too submissive to them and he cares too much about what the CBC says.
And I'm worried that he, unlike Trump, who has a healthy contempt for the media, I'm worried Jason Kenney will let the media shape him.
Alberta Team's Surprise Victory00:06:08
And they're certainly setting themselves up to be the official opposition.
Am I just indulging my own antipathy to the military?
You know what?
Jason's a very tough guy.
And he could have at many occasions when he was immigration minister fallen for the political correctness attacks that the CBC and the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail and the rest of them were launching at him about, for instance, the manual they had for newcomers to teach them Canadian values or the idea that, you know, take a look at the one example right now.
He and Stephen Harper set up the safe third country rules.
So if you'd come to Canada from a safe country, you couldn't claim refugee status here.
And there was gnawing and gnashing and wailing.
And oh, God, that's so racist.
You're condemning people to death.
I can't believe you did.
What have the liberals just done in the most recent budget document?
They've done even more than that.
They'll send people back to countries that aren't on our safe third country list if they've come here illegally.
So, you know, he put up with a whole bunch of attacks when he was immigration minister, fewer when he was defense minister, but he's a tough guy.
And I do think he actually means to set up a war room to go after people like the tar sands campaign, who are trying to under deliberately trying to undermine the Alberta economy.
Well, it's going to be very interesting.
I am looking forward to it.
I think it'll be the beginning of a healing for Alberta.
It's not going to happen immediately.
And the beginning of a fight back nationally.
Doug Ford has been very good on the carbon tax.
Of course, Scott Moe in Saskatchewan has been excellent, but he's one premier in a small province.
I think when Jason Kenny joins that trio right there, and in some cases, Francois Legault of Quebec, I think you're starting to see some pushback against Justin Trudeau.
Yep, absolutely.
Last word, I know I've kept you very long here.
Is there anything you're looking at in tonight, tomorrow's results?
Is there anything you're wondering about?
You know what?
We may not know the results on Tuesday.
There have been over 220,000 votes cast outside of the ridings in which the people reside.
This is the first time that the Alberta elections have allowed you to vote anywhere in the province during the advanced polls.
You can't do it during election day, but in the advanced polls, you could vote in any advanced poll, whether it was in your riding or not.
There's 220,000-plus ballots that were cast there, and they will not be counted until starting at 1 p.m. the day after the election.
And there are going to be ridings.
There are some ridings that have received as many as 5,700 ballots from outside of the riding.
And so I can see a situation where it's pretty obvious the UCP are going to win, but it isn't mathematically certain, and the NDP won't concede.
And we'll have this count going on until Thursday or Friday drawing it all out.
So that's the one concern I have.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, Lauren, thanks so much for your time and your advice.
I'm looking forward to talking to you after tomorrow's election.
It'll be very interesting and to watch Alberta's recovery.
Thanks for your time, my friend.
You bet.
All right, there you have it.
Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue Friday about Rachel Notley being shocked, just shocked, that anti-oil science protesters are being foreign-funded.
Ron writes, Notley says, I'm frustrated by it, of course.
Frustrated that the scam has been unearthed by Vivian Krauss.
Yeah, yeah, it's just nothing could be less credible.
Like I say, it wasn't just back in the day when she was anti-pipeline.
She literally put Ed Wittingham and the Pemina Institute on the energy regulator just like a month ago.
Bruce writes, I love the coverage you're giving to this Alberta election.
My feeling was the same for last year's Ontario Conservative victory.
Thanks for the reassurance about Bozo eruptions not being an issue in this election.
Well, I haven't been on the ground in Alberta that much.
I got to be here in Toronto most of the time where our main operation is, but you've probably seen some of the amazing videos by my friends, Sheila and Kian.
They have been so busy and so well received.
And I talk to them each every day.
Frankly, I tell them every time I say, I wish I was out there.
They're doing so much good stuff with the lawn signs, the Stop Notley book, the banner Jumbotron truck that Kian had.
I think they're doing great.
I hope you'll agree.
Oh, by the way, Kian showed me his video about Anne McGrath, the communist candidate running for Rachel Notley in Calgary Varsity.
That is the number one most watched video on YouTube of any channel.
That's CTV, CBC, Global.
It's the number one most watched YouTube video about the Alberta election.
Is that something?
Just in terms of raw number of viewers, that video by Kian was the most watched video in the Alberta election.
That's a fact.
Speaking of Kian, Jan writes, I just love Kian.
He's smart, he's cool, and he was born to be a rebel between Sheila and Kian.
Albertans are in good hands.
Good luck with the election.
Can't wait to watch it.
Well, you know, my feelings exactly.
I'm very proud of them both.
They're very, very different in their backgrounds and personalities, and I think they're a great pair also.
And they work together closely, as you can see.
And, you know, we call Sheila the bureau chief because she's sort of the boss out there.
And she works with Kian, and I think it's a very harmonious, like this really, got a lot of smarts, a lot of initiative taking.
I'm very proud of our Alberta team.
And maybe I call myself an honorary part of the Alberta team because that's where I was from originally.
Well, folks, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, Election Day in Alberta.
And there's so much going on tomorrow.
But by the way, you don't have to be from Alberta to want to give Notley the boot, am I right?
Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to U at home, good night.