Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won 157 seats in Canada’s federal election, falling short of a majority but retaining power amid backlash over Jody Wilson-Raybould’s firing, blackface scandals, and private jet controversies. Conservatives secured only 121 seats, with 18 of 23 gains from Western provinces, while Andrew Scheer’s perceived distancing from populist allies like Maxime Bernier and Rebel News stifled broader appeal. Alberta’s separatist whispers grow—$100B in lost energy investments and Supreme Court precedents fuel talk of independence, contrasting Quebec’s equalization-dependent past. Trudeau’s minority risks deeper concessions, but Scheer’s leadership collapse leaves Western voters isolated, with media bias and economic decline accelerating regional fragmentation. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I give my attempt at a post-mortem of the election.
I'm sure it'll take me several days or weeks to get all my thinking out.
I also talked to Lorne Gunter about Alberta's reaction.
Alberta, a clean sweep of conservatives, except for one new Democrat in downtown Edmonton.
Saskatchewan, a clean sweep.
They roasted the last liberal, Ralph Goodeill.
What does it mean?
Well, I'll go into that today.
Hey, let me invite you to become a premium subscriber.
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And you get the video version of the podcast.
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All right, here's the podcast.
Tonight, the election was the worst of all worlds, but Westerners will pay the biggest price.
It's October 22nd, 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 is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The liberals won last night's election.
Liberals Win Big00:05:58
Justin Trudeau's corrupt, smug party won 157 seats.
That's not a majority in a 338-seat House of Commons.
You need 170 seats for a majority, but it's very close.
He'll be able to govern like he has a majority on most questions, I think.
The Conservative Party eked out just 121 seats, growing just 23.
How is that possible?
Trudeau blew himself up by firing his attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybold, because she wouldn't go along with his plan to let a bribe-paying company off the hook.
That stunned the country.
It made a lot of media fall out of love with Trudeau, so much for sunny ways.
And then came the repeated blackface revelations.
So he was a fake when he seemed so woke before towards minorities.
Oh, and then there was the two private jets move he had.
So much for being a global warming champion.
I know that those second two points I made, the blackface and the two jets thing, I know they don't go to the core of his governing substantively, like the way his judicial corruption does, but they proved that he was a fake, a liar, an imposter.
They took away his preening moral righteousness, his condescension, which should have made substantive criticism stick more.
The Teflon was gone, is what I'm saying.
So the carbon tax, the disaster with China, taking hostages, economically and politically, China's embargoes on us, our stagnant Canadian economy, most of which is self-inflicted, especially Trudeau's war on the West, Trudeau's war on oil, the war on pipelines.
But no, incredibly, the Conservatives only picked up a total of three seats in all of Ontario.
And in fact, they lost Lisa Rait's seat, and she's the deputy leader.
In Quebec, despite all of Andrew Scheer's pandering to the dairy cartel, the Conservatives actually lost ground.
Two seats down.
There were a handful of seats won in the Atlantic, but basically the party was retrenched in the West.
Of the 23 seats picked up by the Conservatives, 18 were in the four Western provinces.
All of the effort just to grow five seats in the center in the East.
It's really Preston Manning's Reform Party plus a few.
Not a seat in Toronto.
Perhaps that's to be expected, but precious few in the suburbs around Toronto, the 905 area code.
Andrew Scheer stayed away from Doug Ford and Doug Ford's team, thinking they were politically toxic.
Maybe.
The Liberals certainly thought so.
They campaigned against Andrew Scheer a little bit.
The Liberals campaigned against Stephen Harper a lot.
But the Liberals were incessant about trying to hang Doug Ford and his cuts around the neck of Scheer.
But funny thing about that, Doug Ford actually won Ontario.
Won more than 40% of the vote, won 76 seats.
I know that was a year ago, and they've fallen in the polls, but it's hard to imagine Scheer doing any worse in Ontario had he embraced Doug Ford.
I mean, he lost all of the 416 area code.
Can't do worse than that.
And if he had worked with Doug Ford, maybe he could have accessed the considerable political machinery of Ford Nation.
But Andrew Scheer did to Doug Ford what Andrew Scheer did to Rebel News and what he did to People's Party supporters.
He pushed them away.
Andrew Scheer hired a liberal dirty trickster named Warren Kinsella to smear People's Party members as racist.
That's a liberal move.
And pushing away Rebel News.
Why?
Because the CBC or CTV or Global News were so good to him?
Look at this incredible clip from just this morning.
I have never seen anything like it.
Take a look.
But Mr. Scheer, when asked why you're spreading false information about your opponents, like among other false statements, saying the liberals will decriminalize hard drugs and saying the liberals and NDP will raise GST, when they say that's a lie.
You can't draw conclusions where the hard facts don't back up what you're saying.
So you've explained your reasoning to Canadians.
My question to you this morning is, how do you explain to your five children, from toddler to teenage, that it is okay to lead a dirty campaign based on information that is not entirely true and constant attacks on your opponents?
Well, of course, I reject the premise of that question.
Wow.
And remember, Andrew Scheer has said he'll preserve CBC News funding, and he's never spoken out against the other media bailout either.
Not that he'll get a chance to be a decision maker on any of these things now, will he?
Last night, we had a live stream on election night.
We covered the whole night live.
We ran almost five hours.
We had more than 120,000 people tune in, which is pretty incredible.
Now, we were low-tech compared to the state broadcaster, obviously.
And obviously, we were more fair and, I think, more interesting.
I was here at our headquarters with Kean Beckstein, and David Menzies was out in the Bose, Quebec, with Maxine Bernier.
He got an exclusive interview, in fact.
And for some reason, the Conservative Party finally admitted one of our journalists, Sheila Gunn Reed, to attend their victory night in Regina.
What a laugh.
They agreed not to arrest us for doing journalism.
Oh, but they told Sheila that she wouldn't have room for a computer or a camera.
What a weird lie.
Obviously, they had enormous room.
It was a massive building.
What a bunch of weirdos Scheer has around him doing media relations.
But really, who would lead the Conservatives if not for Andrew Scheer right now?
Bernier took himself out of contention by bolting impatiently a couple of years ago.
Jason Kenney, the obvious option, is presently engaged as the Premier of Alberta.
He didn't want to fight Trudeau this time around.
I bet he could have won it if he had.
Alberta's Rising Separatism?00:08:59
What a mess.
Do you really think Andrew Scheer would do any better in another election in 6, 12, 18, 24 months?
Oh, he'll point to the raw vote count.
Sure.
I mean, that's what Hillary Clinton did after 2016 to find some fake consolation when Trump beat her under the rules.
There is no prize for raw vote counts either in America or in Canada.
Just because some Alberta ridings went 80% plus for Andrew Scheer doesn't mean he gets that riding more than once.
Like I say, it's really just a slightly augmented version of Preston Manning's footprint.
The Bloch Québécois grew in Quebec, including at the expense of the NDP.
The Greens went from two seats to three.
But what all these losers have in common is that they hate Alberta and hate Alberta oil and hate Alberta oil pipelines along with Trudeau.
That's what they all have in common.
Here's Trudeau as a young man.
Quebecers are better than the rest of Canada because, you know, we're Quebecers.
He was in his late 20s then.
That's when he was a teacher at West Point Grey Academy.
Here he is, about 10 years later, all grown up, almost 40, phrasing his bigotry even more aggressively.
Look, Canada is hard now because it's Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda.
It doesn't work.
Is Canada better served when there are more Quebecers in power than when there are more Albertans in power?
I liberalize their sister that way.
The Sol who environmentally coups, it was Quebec.
It was Trudeau, this Mulroney, this Christian, this Paul Martin.
So it honored this Canada and we.
Yeah, when someone shows you who they are, why don't you believe them?
And that's the thing.
Quebec's separatism was always fake.
They get, what, $14 billion a year from equalization, mainly from Alberta and Saskatchewan?
Don't tell me that they'd really walk away from that.
It's just a bargaining stance to get whatever else they want.
Alberta separatism, I see it rising in a way I haven't before.
And it's not fake.
And it's not noisy and it's not showy.
It's quiet and resolved.
I don't know what's going to happen.
But I know that across Canada, people are thinking the system's broken.
And it's not even broken in a neutral or a friendly way.
It's malicious now.
It's actively destroying the West, which is the economic engine of Canada in so many ways.
You know, Detroit was once the strongest industrial city in America.
Did you know that?
Highest industrial wage, factories.
It was motor city.
It was the place to be.
But then it was destroyed by democratic policies.
Look at it now.
Abandoned and decrepit.
It can happen.
Look at Venezuela.
It can happen.
Look at Baltimore.
It can happen.
But maybe Alberta won't stand by and let it happen.
Maybe Alberta will leave.
That's not illegal.
It's actually the opposite.
It has been legalized and formalized and proceduralized by Quebec, actually, when separatism was litigated a generation ago.
A clear question, fairly asked, a proper legal process.
Our Supreme Court has actually prescribed the manner of separation.
And you know what?
I bet Justin Trudeau wouldn't actually mind that.
You take out the most conservative province, you're probably going to win a lot more elections as a liberal.
Canada would be a smaller, poorer place, but it would be all Trudeau's.
You take out the 34 seats of Alberta from last night, Justin Trudeau would have his exact same count, but out of 304 seats, he would have a majority.
You don't think he wants that?
I wonder what's going to happen now.
Stay tuned.
We'll ask Lauren Gunter next.
In Alberta and Saskatchewan, know that you are an essential part of our great country.
I've heard your frustration, and I want to be there to support you.
Let us all work hard to bring our country together.
What?
Do you think that means a pipeline's going to go through?
Do you think that means the carbon tax will be held off?
No, no, no.
It's just another posture, another pose.
He's a fake feminist.
He's a fake carbon tax reducer.
I mean, he has two jets.
He dresses up all the time in blackface in costumes.
That was just a line someone threw in there that he had to read.
Do you think, do you really think he's going to lift a finger for Alberta and Saskatchewan when he's now in coalition with the NDP, the bloc, the Greens, all of whom are anti-oil patch, anti-pipeline?
Well, let's ask someone who is in the heart of the West, our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun, who joins us now live vice guide.
I think it's as bad as it gets, Lauren.
Am I pessimistic on that?
I think that I see already Husky is laying off hundreds, maybe thousands of workers this morning.
They were waiting to see how things go and they don't need to see any more.
I think Husky, I think you will see another $100 billion leave the West.
And you're seeing the Detroitification of Calgary.
Detroit used to be the number one industrial city in America.
Then the Democrats ruined it.
I think it's that bad.
Am I wrong?
It's not that bad yet, but will it get that bad?
It could.
Absolutely, it could.
You're absolutely right that we will probably see at least another $100 billion leave the country or not come into the country.
It's a little hard to prove just how much it is, but StatsCan estimated that in the last three years, there's been $100 billion that hasn't been invested in energy that would have been invested otherwise.
And I think that that's going to happen over the next two or three years, too.
I was sickened last night.
At first, I sort of snickered, and then it just felt sickening to hear Trudeau say, I want you to know that we're going to be there for you.
This is Bill Clinton's Feel Your Pain.
Without the masculinity, it is so weak and it's so insincere and smarmy that it just makes me sick.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, Albertans don't want him to be there for us.
Saskatchewan people, I mean, I saw the election results.
In many districts, the Liberals got less than 10%, sometimes as low as 5%.
And in most of the districts in Saskatchewan and Alberta, they're in third place.
So no one's looking for Trudeau to be their friend.
Westerners are disgusted by him, repulsed by him.
So they're not looking for him to feel any pain or to be there with us.
I think Westerners, and I speak as an exiled Westerner in Toronto, want tangible things like build the goddamn pipe.
Sorry to swear.
Don't bring in the carbon tax.
Stop talking about transitioning off oil.
No one else in the world is.
The number one messenger for Trudeau and Trudeau's handouts in the run-up to the election.
You remember there were stories that in the run-up to the 2015 election, the Harper government gave out about $1.5 billion in grants all over the country.
That was handshaking, check presentation, photo ops.
The Liberals did about $13 billion of that in the run-up to this election.
The biggest single ambassador for handouts was the Edmonton Center MP, Randy Blossano.
And to your point about we don't want handouts, we don't want gifts, we don't want bailouts, we just want you to do what's economically sensible, which is build the pipeline.
Buassano was defeated in a riding that the Liberals have held off and on for about 25 years.
But he came out and he said, oh, here's $100,000 for a woman's clothing boutique.
And here's $100,000 for a lady's custom bootmaker.
And nobody wants that.
That's not what anybody wants.
Donald's Tweet Mentality00:15:59
At one point, it came out.
He and Amarjeet Sohi, he was the natural resources minister and also an Edmonton MP who was decimated last night.
He was pushed aside by Tim Oppel, who's a former Harper campaign, a cabinet minister.
Both of them had come out and said, We're going to put $1.6 billion into retraining oil workers to do other jobs.
That's exactly the wrong message.
That's exactly why they're so unpopular.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oilmen don't want to be baristas or learn to code.
They want to do oil work.
And if they can't do it in Alberta, they'll do it in North Dakota or Colorado or Texas or Pennsylvania even with their natural gas fracking.
And I'm afraid that's what's going to happen.
Now, let me say something that I observed last night.
Maybe you know Keith Wilson, very straight-laced lawyer, a couple years older than me.
He worked for the farmer's advocate, then he worked in property rights.
And I saw him make a tweet last night.
I was doing our live show last night.
And he was so calm.
In fact, let's put that tweet on the screen if we can.
He said, and this is like the most straight-laced lawyer you'll ever meet.
He like irons his blue jeans.
And he said, let's hold a proper, fair, and lawful vote on separation.
If Alberta votes to separate, the Supreme Court of Canada has laid out the process to implement the divorce.
Alberta will be much better off without the burdens Ottawa imposes, and we won't have to send our wealth to Ottawa.
Sorry, but it's time to go.
And I saw that, and it was done in the style of that, of the personality of that man.
Calm, methodical, legalistic, absolutely law-abiding, not hot-blooded.
In fact, he's saying, sorry.
Like, it's not a rage.
I'm out of here.
It's not a hot-tempered moment.
He's not slamming the door.
He's just leaving.
Yeah, he's just saying, okay, so we're done.
All right.
Guess what, guys?
Good news.
There's a process here.
It's already been litigated by our Quebec friends.
There's already roads, so it's not illegal.
This isn't being a traitor.
This isn't being like, this is not a civil war.
Hey, guys, there's a little process.
It's already hammered out.
Let's do it.
I'm a lawyer.
I'm sorry, but I think this is how we should go about it.
You've got severely normal guys like that.
And I saw professional, moderate, fancy people, not nationalist populists, pitchfork.
I'm not talking about the press-demanding populace.
I'm talking about the establishment guys, the well-to-do guys, the temperate.
People who have a lot to lose from doing things wrong.
Yeah, and they're just done.
And it's not even rage.
It's all right.
No, it's resignation.
I tried to explain this to a radio host in central Canada earlier this week.
I said, it's just resignation.
It's not anger.
It's not, when I say that there's going to be a separatist movement come out of this in Alberta, I don't know to what extent that's going to happen.
I already know that there's a conference going on in Red Deer in mid-November where people are going to talk about some of the processes that need to go through in order to get a movement going and then to make the movement, to have the movement lead to real independence.
It's just going to happen.
And I said, they said, so it's that anger?
I said, well, there's a lot of anger for sure.
But mostly, this is not coming from establishment people.
This is coming from people in professions whose lifestyle really isn't affected as much by bad federal government decisions as people who work in the patch or who own small businesses.
I said, these are just people who are quietly resigned to the fact that this doesn't work anymore.
And I said, you know, the one thing that's different about Alberta independence, which doesn't really exist yet, I think it's coming.
I think the mentality is coming.
It needs to be, it's very amorphous right now.
It's kind of like a cloud.
It needs to be condensed a bit and become much more focused.
But I said, the difference is Quebec could never bring itself to leave because it could never give up the money.
It was always the money.
And $14 billion in equalization every year.
They just can't give that up.
And they know subconsciously they can't.
I said, but Alberta also knows subconsciously that if it left, it probably would have more money.
And so that's the huge difference.
And I said, this is not going to be Jacques Perez.
If it comes to this, and I am not entirely convinced yet that it'll come to this, but if it comes to this, this will not be Jacques Perrazot's never-ending trip to the dentist.
That's what he calls Quebec nationalism.
This will be done fairly quickly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was thinking, love and hate are not actually opposites.
They're different sides of the same coin.
There's still passion there.
There's still a feeling there.
The opposite of love is not hate.
The opposite of love is indifference.
And the pantomime, the theater of a Quebecer in Quebec City arguing with a Quebecer in Ottawa over Quebec separatism and how high the Dane Guild has to be paid, that's different here.
You know, that tweet I read to you from Keith Wilson, that's not hate.
That's indifference.
That's, you know what?
Canada was nice, got some sentimental feelings, but not a lot of feelings.
There was no hate there.
It wasn't, I hate Canada.
It was, okay, guys, you know, we sure gave it a good try, and thank you, but let's just, can we just follow plan B now?
So I think that's far more terrifying.
Yeah, in many ways, it should be.
And I think in many ways, it's going to be, if it comes about, and I'm going to repeat this again, I'm not entirely sure it's going to happen yet.
But if it comes about, the speed with which it comes about will surprise a lot of people in the rest of the country.
I mean, I saw people tweeting last night.
Oh, I'm so tired of Westerners whining about alienation.
And they never said that about Quebec nationalism.
They held this country hostage for 25 years, off and on, made it do somersaults and backflips and all sorts of demeaning things to prove that we loved Quebec.
That horrible fly-in, love-in thing in Montreal in 1995 during the second referendum still makes me nauseous when I feel like that.
And you would never see that in Calgary.
So let's say there was a referendum in Alberta.
You would never for the life of you see liberals fly in to Calgary and say, we love you, stay, because they don't love Alberta.
There is actually hate, but it's towards Alberta.
The common theme between the Greens, the NDP, the bloc, and the Liberals is they're anti-oil, they're anti-pipeline, and if you scratch the surface, they're anti-Alberta.
They think Alberta is a synonym for bigot.
That to me is the real nub in all of this, is that people are saying, well, now that Trudeau has to rely on the NDP to keep him in office, we're going to lose Transmountain, which I think is a real real possibility.
But all Jagmeet Singh has to do is twist Trudeau's rubber arm.
Trudeau doesn't want Trans Mountain either.
Yeah, they were supposed to start construction this past summer, and they obviously didn't.
I've been thinking about how it might go because Donald Trump published a perfunctory congratulations tweet to Trudeau last night, which is how you do it.
And I'm reminded that not long ago, Donald Trump made a half-serious offer to buy Greenland.
And I know that sounds absurd, but he wasn't the first American president to propose it.
America has bought territories before, including Alaska, the Louisiana Purchase.
You could see that right there in the name.
Slightly different times, but yes.
Yeah, and Greenland, there's almost no one who lives there.
Less than 100,000 people in this massive place.
And I think they were worried because China was trying to get their hooks into Greenland, believe it or not.
I tweeted back, I mean, my tweet, I'm talking too much about Twitter, but I thought, you know what, Donald Trump, you were rejected by Greenland.
make a good offer for alberta and what you know and i'm not saying full statehood but you know somebody said to me the other day i was again on a radio show and i was talking about when i was asked about is there going to be western resentment Is there going to be Alberta independence?
I said, well, you know, you have to remember that, and the one person said, well, why would you want to leave your land law?
I said, yes, but we still have one border that Ottawa doesn't control.
Yeah.
And that's the border between Alberta and Montana.
Yeah, and in his first week in office, Donald Trump indicated that he wanted to revive Keystone Excel.
And he, in fact, told the pipeline company, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.
And the courts have slowed him down, but Donald Trump is as eager for the Keystone Excel as Trudeau is as eager to block.
But maybe there's another pipeline out through Montana, Idaho, and Washington to the West Coast court.
Yeah, that's a good point.
There's all sorts of possibilities that don't involve us having to bow and scrape to Ottawa and to the BC government to try and get one small pipeline that's twinned with an existing pipeline that's been there since the 50s that has never been a problem.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a piece of metal.
It's boggles the mind when you start to think about what we're being told no to.
Yeah, it's a piece of metal, a tube about the size of a hula hoop, except for that doesn't convey the degree of high technology for finding and detecting and sealing cracks.
And it's a very high-tech piece of equipment.
And I mean, would America take Alberta?
Well, I mean, there would likely be Republican seats.
You could bring in a Puerto Rico as the Democrats and the Republicans would.
Or maybe Alberta would just stay as a territory as Puerto Rico is.
Or maybe it would be an independent place.
Maybe it would have the Queen still on our currency.
I don't know.
But all of a sudden, can I throw one different wrinkle at you?
I'm talking about someone who's I'm an Albertan.
I'm affectionate to Alberta, even though I lived in Toronto for 10 years.
But let's say you're Justin Trudeau.
Come home, all is forgiven.
Well, well, well.
You take 34 Alberta seats out of parliament.
I don't see how Justin Trudeau ever loses an election again.
That would be because you're removing 34 pretty much guaranteed conservative seats.
All of a sudden, Trudeau's got a majority.
And for Catherine McKenna and Gerald Butz, who care about carbon emissions, well, you've just reduced your national emissions by one-third.
You've just gotten rid of all those pesky right-wingers.
You've gotten rid of all the stuff you don't like.
you're going meat free you just said well and i hope it would be 48 seats that they would lose because i have to think that we could maybe talk saskatchewan into coming along oh Oh, absolutely.
And frankly, parts of the interior of BC would probably want to join too.
I remember at the Western Standard, we had a columnist named Rick Dolphin who had a great sense of humor.
And he talked about a future territory called Albumbia.
I mean, he had a little bit of humor there.
He said Alberta with that part of the interior of British Columbia.
He even wrote an anthem.
He was making jokes.
But look, Czechoslovakia is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
All around the world, we have people going to smaller units, not larger units.
Everyone wants out of the European Union, not just Brexit, but across the EU, there are many places that want more rights.
Italy, Austria.
I think the idea of splitting up the world's second largest country that's obviously not getting along with itself, it's unthinkable until the moment it's not.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so too.
And I still hope it doesn't come to that.
I still hope that there's some way of working around this.
But I'm not optimistic because the one thing liberals want more than anything else is to stay in power and they would sell their mothers.
Yeah.
You don't like Calgary.
Look, Jagmeet Singh never visited Alberta in the whole campaign.
Trudeau visited Calgary for 15 minutes at midnight on the weekend.
Suddenly they like Alberta anyways.
I mean, they like the tax money and the donations.
But frankly, I don't think Trudeau, I think Trudeau would absolutely be rid of Alberta just so he could and his liberals could rule forever in the rump of Canada that remains.
And I can't imagine that Donald Trump and his Pentagon and his State Department would say no to some sort of association with the world's third largest oil reserves.
Although I think by the time this happens, it will not be slow if it happens.
It won't be like Quebec going on for decades.
But I'm not entirely sure that even if he's re-elected, Trump will still be around as president by the time we get around to getting all the T's crossed and the I's dotted.
But nonetheless, I don't think whoever is the American president would shun an alliance of some sort with Canada.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there would be a free trade deal.
Why not just inherit NAFTA?
You know, and absolutely.
And Alberta, I mean, it could be like a Switzerland.
You could have all sorts of, it could have its own borders and its own, but it could have strong alliances and it could be a sort of, I mean, once you're freed of the equalization payments, that province could reduce its, it could eliminate the income tax.
You take out $14 billion that's shipped to Quebec and other parts every year.
I think that's more than Alberta collects in income tax every year.
I'd have to check my math on that.
It is.
No, it's considerably.
Well, listen, I've got one last question for you.
Jason Kenney, in my view, he harbors ambitions to become prime minister one day.
He speaks French very well.
He has national connections.
He has a national notoriety.
I wouldn't say he's a household name, but he's known widely.
He has strong connections to ethnic communities.
I think that he will not abide any of this talk because he doesn't want it to tarnish his Captain Canada brand if he seeks the prime minister's chair, which I think he will.
So I think he's actually going to seek to block any of this talk, but I don't know what the alternative is because diplomacy hasn't worked.
The alternative is, because I know that there's been talk of this already within the Alberta government, what do we do next, is kind of a revival of the firewall.
You remember back when Harper and Flanagan and Morton and a bunch of other Alberta luminaries came up with ideas about how Alberta could protect itself from the grasping hands of Ottawa and the demands of Quebec and there were a number of things that were thought of.
I know that they've been thinking about that within the provincial government.
And that may be enough to stall or stop independence movement.
I don't know.
It's going to be interesting, but it is not going to be the status quo.
That's the key.
Well, Lauren, it's good to catch up with you.
I know this story is not going away.
Alberta's Firewall Revival00:05:22
I saw Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan, sent a list of, I'd call them friendly demands.
But the thing about a demand is you need an or else.
Or else I'll do this, or then what.
If you don't have the or else there, it's just a daydream.
And why would Trudeau possibly, I mean, Trudeau has, even in some ways, even more than he hates Alberta, he hates Saskatchewan because Saskatchewan was the first to oppose the carbon tax because Rachel Notley accepted it at first.
So, and of course, Saskatchewan is now liberal-free.
Saskatchewan is smaller.
I think in many ways, Trudeau hates Saskatchewan more.
So why on earth would he possibly listen to Scott Moe or Jason Kenney?
Well, this is probably a point we don't even need to worry about.
I don't think he hates Saskatchewan more.
They are indifferent more to Saskatchewan.
Saskatchewan doesn't come up on the radar the same way that Alberta does.
Alberta stands in the way of Ottawa controlling everything because Ontario typically goes along with what Ottawa wants to do.
And if you look at it, the only region in the country that gave the Liberals the same or more support in this election as in 2015 was the Greater Toronto Area.
Everywhere else, every other region gave them less support.
But Toronto kept them in power.
And so Ontario is driven by Toronto.
And you talk to people in southwestern Ontario or northern Ontario.
They don't like Toronto very much because they don't like the way Toronto controlled their province.
So they don't, they look at us in Alberta as competition to their power center.
And that's what they dislike about Alberta.
Saskatchewan, they don't think so much of, so it's flyover country.
Well, it's good to talk to you.
These are very dramatic days, Lauren.
It's nice to see you.
Thanks for your time.
You bet.
All right, there you have it Lauren Gunter, senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
Stay with us more Ahead of the Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On the results of the federal election last night, Edward writes, for those needing consolation, Scheer did win the popular vote.
Now we can join Hillary Clinton and write a book.
I really had no great expectations and figured one or the other would have a minority government.
Just glad Justin didn't win a majority or there would be no taming his ego and ambitions.
He could be right.
Part of me is more afraid of his minority government because I have no doubt that what Jagmeet Singh or other minor parties like even the bloc would demand from him as a concession would be even worse than what he would cook up on his own.
I guess the only consolation for me is that Jody Wilson enabled one.
Mark writes, I guess Canadians are happy with a corrupt government.
Well, I can assure you that's what Trudeau takes away from the thing.
And by the way, I checked SNC Lavalan on the Toronto Stock Exchange just afternoon when I checked.
It was up 15%.
The stock market capitalization of SNC Lavalan rose $425 million this morning.
Because they know their good friend is there and they're home free.
Oh, by the way, this morning, Husky Oil laid off hundreds of workers in Calgary.
Who cares about them, though, right?
I mean, that's what we all want, right?
To phase out the oil patch.
Kyle writes, RIP, PPC, one and done.
Yeah, and to which I say, too bad, because I think we do need a populist nationalist voice to talk about issues that have been ignored by the rest of the parties.
I wish that had been done within the Conservatives, but Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier couldn't keep it together.
I think it was job number one of Andrew Scheer to keep Maxime Bernier in the party.
Jean-Cretchen managed to keep Paul Martin in the party after he beat him.
Stephen Harper managed to keep Peter McKay in the party after he beat him.
Doug Ford has managed to keep all his rivals in the party after he beat him.
It's on Maxime Bernier too, but Andrew Scheer let the split happen.
Liz writes, it's time for Wexitz.
There is no surviving this Canada.
Well, I note that the word Wexitz is trending on social media today.
We'll see what happens there.
The thing is, Jason Kenney wants to be Prime Minister, so I don't think he would entertain any solutions that involve Alberta decoupling from the rest of Canada.
It'll be interesting to see how that all resolves.
Well, I don't know if we're any better today than we were yesterday.
I think Trudeau is relieved that he's still Prime Minister.
I think Andrew Scheer has to be disappointed.
And Jagneet Singh, he was sure smiling last night, but his party was cut in half.
What a disastrous night for everyone, I say.
Oh well, we'll be there to fight.
I think part of the problem is media.
And so I think part of the solution rests with us.
I'll do my best and we'll do our best.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, do you at home?