Jason Kenney’s UCP victory in Alberta’s election, marked by his French speech at headquarters, exposed media failures like the CBC’s silence on Anne McGrath’s Communist Party ties, which cost her 400 votes. With 700,000 advanced poll voters—Calgary West favoring UCP 3-1—and 170,000 unemployed, Albertans rejected NDP promises tied to carbon taxes and pipelines. Kian Bexte highlights UN Article 20’s voluntary student unionism push, while Sheila praises Kenney’s anti-NDP agenda: tax cuts, global business outreach, and scrapping "bad legislation." The Alberta Party’s 9.3% share and Robocall hoax fade as the UCP consolidates power, leaving 24-25 NDP seats and raising questions about future energy policy probes. [Automatically generated summary]
We're here live in Calgary at UCP headquarters on Tuesday night.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show at UCP headquarters on Tuesday night.
Jason Kenney has just announced, he just did his big speech, part of which was in French, which I actually thought was a pretty nice touch.
He's the new premier designate.
You at home, you're going to be watching this on Wednesday night because I have to make my way back to Edmonton and Kian is going to put in a bit of a long night here, I think.
Anyway, with me tonight, of course, my rebel colleague, Kian Beckstey, resident muckraker, commie hunter extraordinaire, and our friend Willie Macbeth from Save Calgary, a man with the best hair in all of politics and also a man I like to call the Olympics killer.
Yes.
Now, I wanted to ask Kian about the truck.
The truck, Anne McGrath.
She just might have lost her seat tonight, and I think you might have done it.
So throughout this whole broadcast here, I'm going to keep saying the advanced poll votes will be counted later.
So we're not sure that she's lost yet.
But right now, it looks like the people who voted on election day decisively, well, maybe not so decisively, it's my rhetoric kicking in.
400 votes kept Anne McGrath from a seat in Edmonton.
She lost the election today.
And unless advanced polls say otherwise, she will not be going to Edmonton.
And I think that the truck that we ran through her riding did its job.
We educated voters, and that's the job of the media.
And it's the job that the mainstream media has neglected for the past five or six years, I think, is when the mainstream media really started to stop doing their job.
So we educated voters.
Every voter I talked to that wasn't an obvious NDP partisan hack said once they realized Anne was a commie that they wouldn't vote for her.
There's at least three or four folks that we have on camera saying, oh my God, I can't believe it.
Once people know that Anne McGrath is a communist, they don't want to vote for her.
Surprise, surprise.
Who would have thought?
Yeah.
But it was a successful campaign, probably the most successful campaign I've mounted at the Rebel because the message was so obvious.
The CBC declined to report on Anne McGrath's red record.
They explicitly neglected to mention her past candidacy with the Communist Party of Canada.
And they did a disservice to the residents of Calgary Varsity and to greater Albertans when they did that.
I'm glad we had the opportunity to educate voters in this respect.
Yeah, I think it was a complete and total abdication of their journalistic responsibility.
And I think that, I mean, as long as they keep doing that, you and I are going to have all the job security that we can handle because we exist in this vacuum because they fail to do their job.
I mean, I wrote a book, The Destroyers, because the media failed to properly vet the NDP candidates so that we ended up with people like Deb Dreever and Thomas Dang and, you know, a whole host of others who were severely unqualified for their jobs.
William, let's talk about some of the other surprise or maybe not so surprising elections results.
I was checking just before we came on air.
Looks like Derek Fildebrandt finished third in his own riding.
He may have even finished fourth.
I think what's so interesting is the NDP have been spinning this narrative that this was going to be a nail biter campaign, particularly in Calgary.
And the reality is they were obliterated across the province and everywhere except their core, and not even everywhere in Edmonton, but in the downtown urban core of Edmonton.
And I think it's, I think anybody with any sense knows why that was.
This was an election about three things.
It was about jobs, it was about the economy, it was about getting pipelines built.
And for Rachel Notley, it is an over three record in her four years in office.
Alberta has 170,000 unemployed people and no prospect of job creation under the NDP.
Investment has fled.
People don't want to put their money here because Alberta is closed for business under the NDP.
And when it comes to pipelines, we were told, we were promised, we were assured that if we had a carbon tax, other provinces would fall all over themselves to let us build pipelines through their backyards.
And the reality was, we didn't get a single pipeline built.
And when people looked at Rachel Notley's record and said, do we really want four more years of failure?
They said, no, we're going to vote for someone new.
And they didn't just vote for someone new in drips and drafts.
They threw the NDP out and ushered in a blue wave of conservatism under Jason Kenny.
I wanted to ask you, now, nearly 700,000, is that accurate?
700,000 people voted in the advanced polls.
Which way do you think they're going to break?
I mean, we've now probably got roughly two-thirds of those people counted.
They were in-riding votes.
And those people, well, I can tell you I know one riding, Calgary West quite well, and it was a three-to-one margin for the United Conservative Party there with the advanced polls.
It was hefty.
And I cannot imagine a scenario where those out-of-riding polls are going to break substantially differently than the rest of the advanced polls.
I think Albertans were chomping at the bit for change, chomping at the bit for a new government, clamoring to throw the bums out.
And that's what they got tonight.
They got a solid United Conservative government and they sent the NDP packing.
A lot of the NDP, MLAs and ministers who are now looking for work are about to discover just how tough the job situation really is in Alberta.
Yeah, I've been tweeting them Arby's applications because...
Do you think they're qualified, Sheila?
They're going to spit my beef and cheddar.
That's all I know.
You know, may have to wear a mask.
Yeah, you know, and let's talk about the failure of press progress.
We were on air with Ezra for quite some time today because, as you know, Ezra can sure talk.
He's got the gift of Gab.
So we were like three and a half hours we were on Air Force.
But it seems to me that every candidate that Press Progress attacked that remained, it was like the golden touch.
If you were targeted by press progress, you, you know, you slid home with 60 to 80 percent of the vote.
I guess, you know, Rachel Notley's foreign-funded proxies weren't as successful as the mainstream media made them seem.
Every candidate that Press Progress attacked won, except for Kaylin Ford and Eva.
Yeah, the ones that didn't remain.
But if Eva remained, she would have won.
Her riding went UCP by a three to one ratio.
And Kaylin Ford, I think she was such a stellar candidate.
If she stayed, maybe she would have edged out in Mountain View.
The NDP did end up winning there.
But every other candidate they attacked, Grant Hunter, Jason Nixon, Casey Mattu, Madu, Devin Dries.
They won by margin, seven to one some of these.
Yeah.
It's, I mean, I can't think of, I wouldn't want to be in their position to know that the work that they do is so futile.
I know you're watching this.
They do.
They hate watching.
I mean, they're having a bit of a rough night, I would say.
They worked extremely hard to re-elect Rachel Notley, and Albertans just frankly disagree.
But I think there's some interesting things we have to ask ourselves about third-party involvement in this election.
You know, we've looked at Press Progress, who has run an unrelenting campaign against Alberta's energy sector.
We look at the big unions who have run an unrelenting campaign against Alberta's energy sector, and yet somehow they supported the NDP, which makes me think, did they really believe the NDP was going to stand up for Alberta's energy sector?
Or did they say, what we're seeing from the NDP is the dog and pony show, the smoke and mirrors of, well, we're not going to win Alberta if we don't pretend to support Alberta's energy sector.
The Problem With Justin Trudeau00:10:50
So let's all play along.
Let's all play ball.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
But then, you know, I don't think third party groups who are so opposed to our energy sector would campaign for politicians who are actually in favor of it.
I think what we saw was that foreign-funded, anti-oil, anti-Alberta oil campaign, and the NDP being called to task by saying, look, we don't really believe you.
I don't think Albertans believe them either, which is why so many of them have been sent backing tonight.
Well, I don't believe them when they appoint people like Ed Whittingham to the AER and Sephora Berman to the OSAG and Karen Mahone to the OSAG and Tim Gray to the OSAG, all foreign-funded radicals deciding the fate and future of our oil and gas development.
And, you know, I mean, there's a whole other level in this, though, and it's the oil field CEOs who are cutting deals with Rachel Notley's government to support the carbon tax that I have to pay and they really don't.
And working with people like Sephora Berman.
You know, Suncor worked with Sephora Berman to get in that emissions cap, and then guess who gets in under the emissions cap?
Yeah, I bet you their tone is going to be changing.
Darn right it is.
Jason Kenney.
He's a new sheriff.
Yeah, there's a new sheriff in town.
That's a good way to put it.
And Jason Kenney is known as being a stickler.
Throughout his whole time being Minister of Immigration with Stephen Harper, he was known as a pretty hard-ass minister.
And he's not going to put up with these hobnobbing CEOs who are rich in their own right just kind of coming up to him to brown nose.
We know that's what they were doing with Rachel Notley this whole time.
Yeah.
They never had any.
Sweetheart deals.
Yep.
now let's talk about what happens next so like the first hundred days Yeah, William, what are your first 100 days fantasy football Jason Kenney things that he's going to do?
Wait, I'll tell you mine.
I want him to send Stephen Harper as a special envoy to Donald Trump to get Keystone XL approved.
I do believe the U.S. president is in favor of Keystone XL.
But he needs to really push it through.
Jason Kenney has promised what is being called the summer of repeal, the line-by-line review of the bad legislation that this NDP government brought in over its four years.
I mean, I don't think the NDP sent a clearer message to the world than if you want to invest, don't invest in Alberta.
It was a key reason, I think, why so many Albertans decided we need a change.
Alberta used to be the place where if you had an idea, if you had a product, if you had a business, you brought it to Alberta because we were the province saying yes to entrepreneurship, yes to opportunity, yes to prosperity.
And that really took a big hit under the NDP.
So I'm hoping that we start cutting the red tape, that we proceed aggressively with the corporate, with the business tax cut, that we have Jason on a plane, something, by the way, you know, Jason Kenney is uniquely suited to, flying around and talking with groups of people.
He did it for five years as immigration minister.
I want Jason on a plane visiting New York and London and all of the financial capital saying, forget the last four years of government in Alberta.
Alberta is now once again open for business.
Please come here and help us kickstart our economy.
I really think that is why Jason needs to send that message, not just to Canada, but globally.
Well, and I'm also eager to see him circumvent the federal government.
You know, deploy somebody, deploy somebody like Stephen Harper.
Again, I mean, I would just send Stephen Harper everywhere to solve it.
You are setting a very high bar for who you're going to.
Maybe Kim Campbell's available.
Maybe we can get her instead.
And Sheila Copps.
Sheila Cocktails.
I understand she has a lot of free time right now.
Yeah.
I would like to see him circumvent the federal government and deal with issues like canola without the federal government.
Let's send our own people, our own experienced people, former agriculture ministers from Saskatchewan who aren't doing much these days.
Jerry Ritz.
Jerry Ritz.
Gorgeous Jerry Ritz.
Best MP that Canada has ever seen by the way.
You know what?
Him and his mustache could talk me into just about anything, so I think we should deploy him to China to solve the canola problems.
He's got a mustache like a curling broom.
It's beautiful.
I think he'd be really thrilled to hear that.
I think Jerry Ritz, outstanding minister.
But here's the problem with Justin Trudeau.
He is a naive waif when it comes to foreign policy.
He showed up in China with incredible lack of understanding about Canada's priorities when it came to foreign relations, international trade.
He lectured, you know, the second largest economy in the world and say, how dare you not hold our standards.
Standards, by the way, which I have no idea what they are anymore since apparently rule of law is no longer what our government believes in.
But we export billions of dollars of canola to China.
And yet, you know, Prime Minister Trudeau seems to think that 9,000 theoretical bombarding or sorry, I used to say bombardier because we prop the most SNZ laveling jobs are worth more than a multi-billion dollar trade contract for Alberta and Western Canadian canola.
I would hope, you know, it's interesting, Jason Kenney talks about this.
Justin Trudeau was his critic when he was a federal cabinet minister.
And he's noted, he's had a lot of critics over the years.
He's had NDP critics and block critics and whatnot.
And he's always found them to be, you know, well-read, up on the files, focused on the interest, except one.
And that one was Justin Trudeau, who he frankly just didn't think was smart enough to understand the issues that were being taught.
I know.
It comes a shock to many people.
I think Justin Trudeau just wasn't ready when he came to be annoyed.
I remember somebody trying to tell me something about that.
I mean, nice hair, though.
Yes.
Kean, what's your first 100 days fantasy football?
Voluntary student unionism is by far my most, what I'm most interested in.
And I know it's a niche thing, but I hate student unions with a burning passion.
I sincerely hope that students are freed from their from a system that violates their human rights guaranteed to them by the United Nations of all people.
Article 20, look it up.
It is a violation of students' human rights to be forced to be a member of student unions that tried desperately to keep the NDP in office.
By the way, they're forced to pay dues to them.
I hope that that is put on the table just like Doug Ford did Ontario.
Carbon tax gone, of course.
I hope there's some municipal reform.
William, you know more than anything about that.
I hope that Rachel Nauley's government throughout her term toyed with the idea of giving municipal governments more taxing power.
And I hope that that is just totally taken off the table with Jason Kenney.
The canola is a good point, what you were saying earlier.
I think Jason Kenney, he's obsessed with federal ministries.
He's been talking about immigration in almost every speech that he's given, which frustrates me to one point, but also it opens up some doors.
He has some federal experience, and he can actually have a minister for trade, who's not Darren Billis, doing real work.
Devin Drieshen would do an excellent job.
He joined Jason Kenney on the trip to India.
It was a trade mission that the opposition hosted.
It was something that was unheard of.
Someone's opposition did more work in that trip.
I'm sure that Rachel Nauley and Justin Trudeau did it in, well, in Justin Trudeau's trip, and Rachel Note never even bothered.
So in one of Asia's, in Asia's most emerging markets.
So that's what I'm hoping for in the first 100 days.
Let's talk about some of the more fun stuff.
I see the Alberta Party finished with about 9.3% of the vote.
Do you think that their Jesse Smollett style hoax with the Robocall complaint to the RCMP helped or hurt them?
I don't think it changed anything.
Yeah, because nobody knows who they are.
Nobody cares.
The only people who care about the Alberta Party are out-of-touch academics and elites and Red Tories who left the PC party hoping that they could find a home in a party that would welcome them.
And the Alberta Party was the perfect candidate for that because they were desperate for anyone.
Because turns out you can't elect a government with academic elites.
So Red Tories fled the old PC party after he joined with the Wild Rose, you know, the Allison Redford types.
Yeah.
And Stephen Mandel is a great example.
He was a former PC cabinet minister.
Dave Quest, too.
I love the vision.
Dave Quest.
Really?
Yeah, he was in the 1000s.
He was in that press conference where they talked about the autophony.
He was running in Sherwood Park.
I enjoyed that visual of Dave Quest standing behind Stephen Mandel as he nuked his own career on the steps outside, I think, of a city hall as he's like, oh, no, they did.
I had a few press conferences of this party.
Oh, God.
I enjoyed it to no end.
I watched it five times.
I did have to laugh because I thought, how bad does it have to be for your party when people say I'm being impersonated?
And the answer is actually just nobody knew who you were.
And so they assumed it was a different person.
That is not an endorsement for a major political party.
You know, if you're going to snatch votes from someone, don't pretend to be Stephen Mandel.
He's got none.
I just saw it.
90%.
90%?
Nine?
Nine.
Well, that's actually higher than I thought it would.
0.0% of seats, though, I think, if we give it a half-party.
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah.
Yeah, no, that.
And it was so funny because, I mean, then they're not even participating in the investigation because I saw that Matt Solberg offered to check to see if the phone number for this fake robocall pretending to be Stephen Mandel endorsing Jason Kenney matched the robocall that they used for the Stephen Harper one.
And they've not taken them up on the offer.
So I think they know, especially when the lady came out and said, oh yeah, I took my voicemail and it was actually, you know.
I actually suspect the Alberta Party has larger problems now that they're now concerned about, including the fact that after they stabbed their first leader in the back, you know, the leader who had actually won a seat and started to build a brand, they decided he wasn't good enough.
They stabbed him in the back, they put Stephen Mandel in, and he led them to losing their only seat.
Alberta Party's Backlash00:07:32
I think the Alberta Party has to have a serious sit-down about should we still be a thing.
They should have a joint conference with the Liberal Party about should we still be a thing anymore, considering we no longer have any other well, they could be a non-thing together.
Well, no, but like, can they get well?
Because the other option is you join the NDP or you infiltrate the UCP.
I think that's going to be what's happening.
Yeah, oh, yeah.
Well, I don't know, Thomas Lukasic, he endorsed the NDP to much success.
But I want to say that.
It really made a huge difference.
Yeah, indeed.
My hair's better, but yeah.
It is.
It is.
It's fine.
I'm very envious of the people watching this tomorrow because I want to know what you know right now, which is what has happened in Calgary varsity, what's happened in all those really close ridings.
Those advanced poll votes are really well, it's so close in quite a few ridings.
And I don't know how many are within like a couple dozen, because if you write, remember in 2015, there were about five ridings that were within 200 votes.
One of them was within six votes.
That was Cardsten Siksica's old riding, Little Bow, when Ian Donovan ran against Doug Schneider.
Yes, Doug Schneider.
Let's look at Drayton Valley-Devon.
I read a hundred articles written by people who had never visited Drayton Valley Devon or had spoken to somebody who had ever been to Drayton Valley Devon about Mark Smith and things that he said in his church that are really inconsequential to a town that's burning that's turning into a ghost town because of Rachel Notley's policies.
Clearly they didn't care.
What were the results?
Can you pull them up there?
Yeah, let's have a peek at Drayton Valley Devon.
Drayton Valley Devon, with nine, as we're recording this, 99 of 107 polls returning.
We've got 3,621 votes for the NDP candidate here, that Kieran Quirky, quirk?
Kieran Quirky?
Yeah, exactly.
You don't know who I am.
Sorry, I don't know.
That's my point.
And to Mark Smith, 12,091 votes.
Really, really, very close.
That's the press progress touch rate there, isn't it?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I think if you looked at when this issue first came out, Mark Smith had posted on his Facebook page.
And if you, a simple sampling of the comments in there was that the voters of Drayton Valley Devon were still standing very solidly behind Mark Smith.
I think, you know, conservative candidates are obviously held to a significantly higher standard than others.
I think that's a lot of conservative journalists.
Well, I would accept that point.
Yes.
You know, it's interesting.
We've pointed out how why wasn't the fact that Amcrath, who ran for the actual Communist Party, why wasn't that covered nearly as much as some of these others' issues?
And I think it's a legitimate point to say that there is a double standard for conservatives.
But despite the hysteria from various quarters of the NDP and of press progress and others of that regard, Mark Smith easily re-elected because I think people saw that that wasn't why the UCP were running a form of government.
UCP were running to fix Alberta's economy.
And that was the message Jason Kenny delivered goodness knows how many times over the last two years.
They did not believe that the UCB was running to implement some sort of agenda that was against what a majority of Albertans believe.
So for the NDP and others to suggest, I actually think it was to their real detriment in the end because as you attack your opponent, you may be able to scare a handful of voters into moving into another camp, but you harden the base of support for a party.
And I think as a result, their ability to move the undecideds or the leanings decreased the more they fired attacks.
And at the end, I think the NDP are going to have to have a serious conversation about, you know, was this really the best strategy for winning re-election?
I mean, it didn't work.
And now they've got an energized base of conservatives who said we're sick and tired of all being painted as homophobes and as bigots and as racists and as every other label that they'd be thrown against us.
So I hope there's a lot of soul searching on the part of the left and their allies and supporters about whether or not this really was a good strategy or if it has now alienated a majority of Albertans for a generation against them.
Yeah, they took an election campaign that should have been about jobs and the economy and each party's different plan for jobs in the economy and made it personal about the voters.
It wasn't even just personal about the politicians, but it was really personal about the voters.
I think for Drayton Valley Devon, they had already elected Mark Smith once.
They know he worked hard for him, or for them, they know Mark.
And so when NDP proxies are attacking Mark, I think your point holds true that they really just hardened their support around him.
And the suggestion that what one of 87 candidates must reflect what an entire diverse candidate team, I think that section, you know, people complain that they don't hear real answers in politics, that all they get are focus group tests and talking points.
Well, one of the reasons that is, is because if you ascribe to an entire candidate team and their leader, the views and comments of a single candidate in a single writing, that's all you're going to get then.
It's bromides and platitudes because it's an unfair standard to hold people to.
And it is a double standard.
Conservatives are held to that standard far more than people in the love.
I don't think anybody asked Rachel Notley about her abiding love of communism just because Anne McGrath happened to run for the Communist Party.
Is there anything to say, Kian?
Well, bring it home.
Well, I will bring it home.
I hope to God that the polls tomorrow show Ann McGrath losing.
There's no way in hell I think that she should be representing Albertans.
But I do think there's someone standing right there, right off camera, waiting to kick us out of here.
So I think outside of that, I'm pleased with the results.
Yeah.
I think that it was a win for Alberta.
I think that a new day is dawning in Alberta, as Doug Ford would put it if he was here.
So I'm pleased.
And that's about it.
Yeah, I think we have to wrap it up because I think this guy's literally going to unplug my camera.
I think he's going to unplug the camera.
Anyway, my prediction for NDP seat counts was 23.
I think, what are we at?
25?
Four.
24, 25?
Plus or minus.
Seems pretty good, Sheila.
Yeah, you know what?
They don't hire me for my look.
I should do journalism.
Should try that out sometime.
I think that's enough NDP left to prosecute when we open up the books and see all the things that they've done.
You can hang a lot of bad things around the yoke of 24, 25, or whatever it is people.
So that's enough people left to answer some very ugly, very hard questions once they crack out the things like whatever's been going on in the environment ministry and in energy.
So I think that's going to be very interesting.
I want to thank both of you guys for staying late.
It is 10 minutes to 12 here at UCP headquarters.
But a very long night.
Thanks, everybody at home, for watching.
I'll see everybody back.
Well, not here at home, probably in my home studio in the same time in the same place next week.