Alberta’s UCP government, led by Jason Kenney, repeals its carbon tax on May 30, ending Rachel Notley’s NDP era despite 90% of her voters opposing it in 2015 polls. Ezra Levant and The Rebel reporters Sheila Gunn-Reed and Kian Bextie critique Notley’s "damnatio memoriae" tactics—like appointing outsider chiefs of staff, including Ed Whittingham (Pembina Institute/Rockefeller-linked), who resigned under scrutiny—and warn Kenney’s government against similar partisan activism. They highlight UCP policy shifts, like lowering youth minimum wage, and vow to expose "bad faith" media narratives while pushing for accountability, framing Alberta’s move as part of a broader revolt against Trudeau’s federal Liberal agenda. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, hello from the legislature in Edmonton, Alberta.
What a gorgeous spring day.
I mean that literally, but metaphorically too, look at the kids splashing around in the pool.
I nearly disrobed, kept miscevez on, and jumped in too.
But of course, there's all sorts of bylaws against that.
We don't want to terrify anybody.
But I'm only half joking.
The laughter here seems a little happier.
The air smells a little freer.
I'm not just speaking metaphorically.
Of course, in the NDP-caused liberal exacerbated recession, it is a dark fact that, of course, depression and suicides were way up.
You cannot throw 200,000 working men and women in the oil patch out of work without a devastating social cost.
Of course, the bubble of Edmonton, especially around the legislature, is immune from the vicissitudes of the private sector economy.
It's always boom time here in Bureaucratville.
But for the rest of us, the sun is coming out.
What a gorgeous day.
I say all this because tomorrow is the last day in Rachel Notley's punitive, job-killing carbon tax.
It appears that Jason Kenney is keeping his first and largest promise to repeal that tax, a tax that was never mentioned, by the way, in Rachel Notley's sneak attack election in 2015.
Need I remind you that according to an abacus poll, more than 90% of Albertans in 2015 who voted for the NDP said they did not support NDP policies.
They simply wanted a change.
Well, folks, they got a change and hard didn't they.
But the change is changing back.
It'll be interesting to see what Jason Kenny's does repeal and what he does not repeal.
I told you before about the ancient Roman concept of damnatio memoriae.
That's my attempt at Latin.
It means damn or condemn the memory.
What emperors would do if they were deposing a rival, let's say in a family feud, is they would erase every trace of their rival.
They would destroy any statues of them.
They would scrape off any painting of them.
They would repeal any laws made by them.
Now, we don't know if Damnatio Memoriae ever worked because if it worked, we wouldn't know about it.
We know the cases where it didn't work because there were remnants.
I believe the only way to cleanse Alberta is through the fire of Damnatio Memoriae to torch every single statute passed by Rachel Notley and her crew of destroyers.
It was as radical as any government in Alberta could get.
I mean, just for one example, we see the horrors of Venezuela unfolding before our eyes.
This is the government whose premier Rachel Notley personally had a shake of our wristwatch on.
So 20 times a day as she would check the time, she would see and admire, I suppose, an actual murderer and terrorist.
And of course, this fella was in caucus.
So those dark days are gone.
Jason Kenney and his government are in charge.
They're repealing the carbon tax.
What else will they repeal?
I understand they're repealing the desperate last-ditch attempt by Rachel Notley to appear to be pro-oil and gas, where she said she would buy, what was it, $3 billion worth of oil by rail tanker cars, a bizarre public expenditure.
Of course, oil and gas companies can buy all the rail cars they need.
It was Rachel Notley's analogy to Justin Trudeau buying the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline, a pipeline that was already happily owned.
It was just a distraction, a fake.
And I think the most costly press release Justin Trudeau ever issued.
I think it's the same thing for Jason Kenney repealing Rachel Notley's buy the oil tanker bill.
But what about other things?
Well, we see that they're reforming some of the labor laws passed by Rachel Notley that exacerbated the reception, sorry, the recession.
Will they go further?
Will they repeal Bill 6, the Farm Unionization Act?
Will they repeal some of the extremist changes made at Alberta Education where Notley and her anti-Christian bigots declared war on homeschooling and Christian schools?
We'll see in the days and weeks ahead, we know that the media party hated those social reforms the most.
I think the media party knew that the carbon tax was dead and the anti-oil, anti-pipeline, anti-gas manifesto of the NDP was dead.
But I think in the months ahead, you will see the media party and the rump opposition of the NDP try to hang on to those social changes.
That was the essence of their election campaign against Jason Kenney to talk about gay rights and abortion and bigotry, this and that.
I think of all the repeals that will be the most difficult in the Damnatio Memoriée.
It's rolling back those social engineering experiments.
That will be the toughest.
Certainly that will be the toughest because of the media.
The media party in Alberta is, you wouldn't think it, given that Alberta is such a conservative province, but it is one of the strongest media parties in the country.
And by strong, I mean the most whipped, the most disciplined, the most on narrative anti-conservative media in the country.
Because it's smaller, say, than the Ottawa Press Gallery or the Ontario Press Gallery, because the group of reporters who cover Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney is so small, you know, you could really fit them in one minivan, the full-time commentators.
They are a clique.
They are unanimous.
And they hate Jason Kenney, especially some of the reforms people.
So in the months ahead, you will see that they, even more than Rachel Notley, are the chief opposition.
So where does that leave us here at the Rebel?
Well, of course, we take great pride in doing more investigative journalism over the last four years than the media party combined.
You will suddenly see a renewed interest in the media party in actually doing some digging and grilling cabinet ministers that they somehow lost that curiosity for the last four years.
You won't see us lose our curiosity either.
But what I see our role as here at the Rebel is to hold Jason Kenney and the UCP government to account from the right.
And that means two things, I think.
Number one, it means holding them to their conservative promises and holding the line so they don't ooze to the left.
The entire gravitational pull in this building, in this city, in the media culture is to pull them to the left.
Not just the NDP opposition, but the media, every lobbyist now finagling their way into things.
It's important that the Rebel hold Jason Kenney and his team to account from the right because no one else is.
There's no counterweight to the rest of the media.
That's our role.
The second thing is to call out the fake, gotcha, buzzfeed-style gutter journalism of the media party.
So that is to criticize Jason Kenney and his government in a good faith way from the right and to rebut the bad faith criticisms of him from the left.
Is it possible to do that?
Well, yes, it is.
Of course, the Sun News Network, where some of our rebels came from, was born in the era of Stephen Harper leading the conservative government.
That did not mean we sat on our hands, the opposite.
We did our best to hold Stephen Harper to account for conservatives and to rebut the leftist media.
We did the same at the Rebel when the Rebel's first half year was under Stephen Harper too.
I see that as our role here.
But it's also to be a voice for issues that Jason Kenney himself does not want to talk about.
In the recent weeks, we've shown that includes rooting out leftist holdovers that Rachel Notley appointed and even the bizarre choice by Jason Kenney to appoint a pro-carbon tax lobbyist as one of his chief policymakers.
Now, as I said a few moments ago, tomorrow is the glorious day where the carbon tax will die.
So obviously Mark Cameron was unsuccessful in that regard.
But we've got to keep an eye.
We've got to keep a watch on the watchman.
I note that my old friend, Monty Solberg, who was such an outstanding conservative MP for years, he's got a lobby firm here in Alberta, and that's fine.
But he just signed on a former chief of staff to Notley's discredited government, an NDP activist hired by Monty Solberg to lobby the government of Alberta.
I love Monty.
I love the Solberg family.
Stan Solberg, Monty's dad, used to work for the Western Standard.
But we've got to keep an eye on all these rent seekers, all these lobbyists who are saying, I've got a connection with the UCP, and I'm going to rent that out.
I'm going to monetize the fact that I'm friends with this cabinet minister or that I used to be a colleague of that cabinet minister and I'm going to sell that to the highest bidder, which could well be some left-wing activist group or some left-wing business scheme.
We've got to keep an eye on that.
But let me say this.
The news from Alberta is good.
The tide has turned.
Or as Churchill would say, if it's not quite the beginning of the end, it's at least the end of the beginning.
Rachel Notley is gone.
We look across this country, and whereas four years ago, it was only little Saskatchewan fighting against the tide.
Now, it's Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and almost Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, Prince Edward, and almost Newfoundland fighting back against the Trudeau Liberals.
The tide is turning.
All attention now must go to the federal liberals and how we can remove that fool from office too.
Well, over the course of the next 10 minutes, I'll talk to our two Alberta-based reporters, Sheila Gunn-Reed and Kian Bextie, and give you their point of view.
Well, Sheila and Kian, thanks for joining me today.
We were standing, and it was almost like they sensed I was here because the hot dog stand people came and went right next to me.
They knew who their number one customer would be.
Sheila, great to see you.
Hey, Ezra, thanks for having us on.
Oh, come on.
You guys are the bedrock of the Rebel out here in Alberta.
Kean, great to see you.
You're flying all over the place, not just here in Alberta.
I am.
I'm all over the place across North America, but it's good to be back at Ground Zero.
Well, I mean, I'm in good spirits because it's Alberta.
It's a gorgeous day seeing everybody in the waiting pool.
I was joking about splashing around in there myself, but we didn't want Greenpeace coming to rescue a whale or anything.
But I mean, I think that things will immediately, quantifiably and qualitatively be better in Alberta.
Why NDPs Are Firing Severance00:04:19
But the number one change is that people know the war against the people by its own government is over.
So even without the changes, they just know they're not being hunted and hated by rulers and masters.
Now they're being represented by legislators.
It's a different thing.
Well, and I think it's not just a war on the people that's ending.
I think the war on business is ending also, which I guess at the end of the day is a war on people because businesses are people too.
Jason Kenney announced that he's lowering the minimum wage for young workers, which will of course result in more young workers having jobs.
The idea that a 14-year-old or 15-year-old or 16-year-old needs to make $15 an hour when they're living at home and doing really menial entry-level work, lowering that is really going to help businesses get back to growing and hiring and training those young people for the booming economy to come here in Alberta.
Yeah, I mean, of course, the minimum wage is never $15.
The minimum wage is always zero.
And if a young person who doesn't have the training yet, doesn't have that first job yet, isn't worth $15 in the eyes of an employer, they will get zero.
It's basically cutting off the lowest rung in the ladder and saying, if you're not good enough to hop up to the third rung of the ladder, you don't get rung one and two.
I think that's an important symbol.
And it's against the fashion of $15 an hour, which sounds so good, but no one who's ever run a business has ever said that.
Kian, I think that your campaign against an unrepentant communist activist named Anne McGrath, who was beloved by the media party for some reason, she was like a fan favorite, a communist.
Communism has killed more people in the last century than even Nazism.
Between the Soviet Union and China, and even if we look at hardcore socialism like Venezuela and Cuba, the fact that Anne McGrath could run in Alberta as a communist with zero scrutiny from the media party shows in my mind the absolute necessity for independent media.
And I think that your focus on Anne McGrath made the difference.
I think it did make the difference.
And I don't want to claim victory or defeat over the Anne McGrath thing.
The point of it wasn't to sway the election.
The point of it was to let the electorate know what secrets she was hiding because the mainstream media certainly wasn't going to share it.
What I am interested in looking at right now, because someone just told me, quipped it to me two days ago, Anne McGrath might actually still be on the government payroll.
She took a leave of absence from the McDougal Center in Calgary, the government operations center in Calgary.
And since then, I haven't seen a press release seeing that she was fired, have you?
No, I mean, that's one of the things that worries me.
In my opening comments, I refer to this Roman concept of damnatio memoriae, which is another way of saying raise it to the ground.
Leave no stone on top of the other, like rubble it, as they say in Aliens, nuke it from orbit.
And when you have had four years of appointees, now not every single NDP appointee was awful, but I'm going to say 90% of them were.
For example, their partisanification of the investment, like all the Alberta pensions, this was like the Alberta version of the CPP.
And historically, only world standard, absolute professional money managers would be allowed to touch that.
The NDP was putting their own hacks in the banking business, in the extreme, insane appointments.
I think, you know, there's a saying, better to let 10 guilty men go free than to convict one innocent person.
That's true in the criminal law.
But in terms of politics, better to fire 10 okay bureaucrats than to leave 10,000 on the job.
I truly believe that every single NDP appointee should be terminated.
Give him a severance.
Give them a severance.
Give Severance Packages00:05:57
And if there's any, there's Darren Billis right there, by the way.
Hey, Darren!
Darren!
Go, Key, and go!
Minister Billis, can you tell me, has anything changed in your lifestyle?
Has anything changed in your lifestyle since you got re-elected?
It became clear that they weren't really interested in your party's brand of politics, but for some reason they decided to re-elect you.
Have you paid off the drugs as your wife said you were on?
Where are we going right now?
Excuse me, I'm on the phone.
Yeah, no, Jim.
I was just wondering if you'd answered some questions.
You didn't really want to talk when you're in government, so maybe now you're in opposition you'd like to chat about what you've been up to.
You never know when you're going to get the opportunity to talk to a communist.
Or sorry, he's not a communist.
He was just running with communists.
So you never know when you get the opportunity.
So let's just get back to what we were doing.
He didn't really want to talk to me, Ezra.
He just, he's always on the phone when I chat with him.
Yeah, it's funny that way.
He's got a lot of people to talk to on the phone.
Well, let's get back to the official show.
Well, how much fun was that?
It was great.
He's always on the phone.
Like I said, he doesn't want to talk to me.
But, you know, you got to ask the questions that the mainstream media is not going to ask because he was re-elected.
He was re-elected with a healthy majority of people in Edmonton saying that, yeah, he's the candidate for us.
But, you know, if the CBC published what we published about him, that his wife says that he has a serious drug and alcohol addiction, that he was philandering with the head of caucus, basically, in a time when we weren't sure who the MLA was or the MLAs were that Rachel was covering up for.
Yeah, I mean, when Stephen Harper was prime minister, him and his cabinet would be chased with legitimate questions all the time.
But with the NDP and with most, until the last couple of months of Justin Trudeau, there's been some sort of immunity because the media are the auxiliary of the parties of the left.
That's why the rebel is alive.
People say, how can we beat the rebel?
I can tell you in one sentence, do real journalism about the other side of the story, and then there would be no market for what we do.
Well, and to make a point further to Kian's point, there's journalists sitting in this building behind us.
They're covering the legislature every single day.
They have a press room.
They have a little clique that they belong to that I refuse to belong to.
They could ask those questions that Kian asks of Darren Billis.
But Darren Billis walks around the legislature grounds knowing that no one's ever going to ask him those questions unless Keen jumps out of the shadows in the middle of a show and chases him down the block.
He walks around with complete impunity.
And it's because the media party inside the building behind us has completely abdicated their jobs.
All right, let's get back to what's going on here.
I made the case that literally every bureaucrat should be fired because although you will get one or two who were competent and legitimate and talented, literally the majority of them were improper appointees in the first place.
And I say that because I remember the very first list of the chiefs of staff for the cabinet ministers, I think there were 12 of them.
10 out of the 12 chiefs of staff for Rachel Notley's cabinet were from outside the province.
I got nothing against people outside the province.
I live in Ontario myself.
But to rule Alberta, to bring in hired guns, mercenaries from every failed NDP activist around the country.
It's basically a welfare job for failed NDPers.
That was so gross.
And it wasn't just chiefs of staff, which are an inherently political position.
Appointees in the bureaucracy, they tried to embed little termites.
Yeah, it's a great example.
So I think they have to wipe them all out.
And I should point out that that has not happened yet.
And I think that if Jason Kenney does not appoint a chief inquisitor of the NDP Inquisition, and I know the Inquisition has a bad rap, but I think that Jason Kenney needs to appoint a digger to check every single appointee because Donald Trump did not.
And so all these Obama-era holdovers were undermining Trump for two years, undermined him.
And don't think that's not going to happen here.
Well, and I think, too, that even just the mere suggestion that a house cleaning is going to happen, it created the conditions for the garbage to take itself out and not to call Ed Whittingham garbage, but he was...
He's recycling.
Recycling.
He's recycling.
Yeah, he was the head of the Pembina Institute, who during the time that he was there was featured in the Rockefeller Foundation tar sands campaign.
He was appointed to the Alberta Energy Regulator.
So the guy who decides which energy project goes forward.
Rachel Notley did that on her way out the door.
The mere suggestion that Jason Kenney was going to examine his hiring caused him to quit and resign in a big huff.
So, I mean, they really need almost like a Vivian Kross-style investigation into everybody who's been appointed here.
Yeah, you know, the saying nothing in public office became him like the leaving of it.
The best thing Ed Whittingham ever did was leave the public square.
Hi And Cameraispers00:07:15
Kean, you're from the south.
Sheila's from the north.
Just when we were, before the camera was on, we saw a lot of great MLAs coming out, and we had a great banter.
I said hi to a whole bunch of folks, some I knew, some I didn't.
You know, we were a voice for change in this province, but they've got a little bit of rebel derangement syndrome in the caucus, which is, you know, I had our team check, and literally a majority of the UCP MLAs are rebel members.
They're donors, they're subscribers, they've signed up.
Some of them have signed up for like 20 things.
I mean, I would never reveal the privacy of who's a member of the Rebel, but I know for a fact all the supporters of the Rebel who are now part of the government, they've got this politically correct, oh, I can't be seen with Kian and Sheila or Ezra.
I don't even get it.
I don't even know what the point of that is anymore.
I don't even remember how that started.
It just seems odd, especially when it's gaslighting, you know, and it works.
When the mainstream media tells you over and over and over again that someone is a Nazi or someone is an extremist or someone is evil, you start to believe it, even if you know differently.
I don't think these people believe it.
I think that they're afraid.
Oh, well, they don't believe it.
I mean, the point is, when the camera was off, how many MLAs came and shook your hand, my hand, Sheila's hand?
I think I saw a hug.
So if the camera's off, and all these MLAs, and I think there might have been a cabinet minister or two there, I can't recall, and some outstanding front-rank MLA, if they're all huggy, handshakey, back-slappy, hey, say hi to your dad, hey, say hi to your mom.
So they know they don't believe the BS.
So why are they going along with it?
That's what I don't quite understand.
I think that a lot of them are more scared of the CBC than they are of me.
And I think the onus then is on us for the next four years, hopefully more, to hold them accountable for their campaign promises.
That just because I'm conservative and they're conservative, that this is going to be a cakewalk and a friendly relationship.
I think that it's our job here at the Rebel to make sure that they, when, as you always say, Ezra, all the forces are pulling them left, the mainstream media, the CBC, the opposition party, and time in office, for that matter.
It's our job to bring them back right.
And right now, for some reason, they are far more scared of the CBC and the mainstream media, and I think that has to change.
I don't think they think that we'll turn around and expose them for things that we've been exposing the NDP for.
And I have no qualms calling out Jason Kenney for his failures.
But I will equally applaud him for when he does great things.
And I'm excited that Janice Harrington, the executive director of the United Conservative Party, is now gone.
And she wouldn't tell anyone why she left.
But I have a feeling it's because Jason Kenney was cleaning house, which is good news.
Well, this was something we thought a lot about at the Sun News Network when Stephen Harper was in office.
Because you don't want to just be a repeater of conservative talking points.
What's the point of that?
That's boring.
You could just sign up for a conservative newsletter then.
I think the difference was our criticisms were in good faith.
We gave Harper, as we'll give Kenny, the benefit of the doubt.
And we won't be stupid, BuzzFeed-style, vice-style, CBC-style, kooky, trash journalism, gotcha, like just the gutter journalism of the buzzfeeds and the vices of the world, the Huffington Post gutter journalism.
So if we criticize Jason Kenny, it'll be on substance.
It'll be ideological.
It'll be a good faith criticism.
And those, everything I just said there will be the opposite of how he's criticized by the CBC.
And we will also debunk the junk journalism of the CBC.
So we have an interest.
We're like a friend to all, a critic of all.
We're the same no matter who we talk to.
That's tough to do in journalism and politics.
I remember when you first accosted Darren Billis and Rachel Notley, not much further away than I am to you right now.
And you asked very challenging questions about his wife's sworn affidavit that Darren Billis was a drug abuser, that he had an illicit affair with another NDP MLA.
That's extremely hard to do from a personal point of view to ask another human being.
And so I understand why it's natural for journalists and politicians who work in close proximity with each other to have a collegiate, oh, I'm never going to ask you something difficult.
You're never going to ask me something difficult because otherwise it'll be uncomfortable working in the same building together for four years.
That's not checks and balances.
You have to be able to decouple your job as a journalist from a personal friendship.
And so in fact, all of the back slapping and hugs and handshakes and high fives that we had with the various MLAs and cabinet ministers as they came and went, that has to be expendable, actually, if they're doing something wrong.
And that will prove our value to Albertans.
That's my view.
Last word to you, Keen, and then Sheila, you can give us some thoughts to leave on.
I'm excited to be back in Edmonton.
If anyone wants to follow the work that I'm doing around North America, particularly in Canada, as I follow Justin Trudeau, the next person in my sites after Rachel Notley and Anne McGrath, they can go to www.rebelinvestigates.com, check out everything that I've been doing, where I've been, and the stories that I'm uncovering.
Right on.
Sheila, you really own the Alberta beats.
You've broken more stories, probably than the rest of the press gallery combined.
I don't want to quite say that because that would imply you're 10 times better than them.
I think you're five times better, maybe eight times better, maybe nine times better.
I want to just do the math before I say you're 10 times better.
But in my heart, you're 10 times better.
You had a big role in shining a light of public scrutiny on the misbehavior and the misconduct, and in some cases, the crimes of the NDP.
Three best-selling books all had Alberta-centric themes.
The Destroyers, your unauthorized biography of David Suzuki, and then Stop Notley, huge success.
You are a midwife of this new birth here.
It probably would have happened without the Rebel because the NDP was so awful, but you helped give birth to this new era.
What do you hope things will be like 12 months from now?
Well, going back to the point I was making about the United Conservatives being scared of me, I really want to keep them scared straight.
I want them to know that I will provide them the same level of scrutiny that I provided the NDP so that they never do the things that the NDP have done.
If we need an example of that, just look at our Fire Cameron campaign.
Jason Kenney appointed a pro-carbon tax lobbyist named Mark Cameron to be his chief policy wonk as one of his first major hires.
In his first gaffe in my mind.
Keeping Them Scared Straight00:00:56
Yeah, me too.
And we went just as hard, although fair, on Jason Kenney as we did with Rachel Notley.
We ran a petition.
I've got a billboard up on the side of it.
That's a pretty good billboard.
On the side of Highway 2, and I put it up on a long weekend.
So a lot of people have seen that billboard.
So going forward, if I'm doing my job right, if I'm doing my job, then we should have good, clean governance here.
But it means a lot of work and a lot of digging for me to make sure that that happens.
Well, I know you guys are the two to do it, and I thank you on behalf of the Rebel, our company, but also on behalf of our countless viewers in Alberta, across Canada, and around the world.
Well, I'll wrap it up there from my short but sweet trip to Alberta's capital, where I think the counter-revolution has begun in earnest.
And tomorrow, the last dying day of the carbon tax, that's a day to remember.