Kanye West’s Jesus is King album and 100-strong Salt Lake City choir mark his bold Christian turn, defying industry backlash after past controversies—from Trump endorsements to rejecting victimhood narratives in Black culture. Skeptics like Kurt Alexander dismiss it passively, while Kanye frames earlier work as "devil’s music," claiming faith over fear. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, criticized for youthful inexperience and anti-oil policies, faces corporate exodus: Encana relocates to Texas, Trans-Canada drops "Canada" from its name, and Western MPs like Jason Kenney struggle without leverage. Quebec’s "values test" for immigrants, ignored by Trudeau, highlights a double standard in cultural protectionism, leaving Canada’s economic and ideological divides unresolved. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take you through some of Kanye West's new songs.
I think they're interesting songs.
They're Christian songs.
But I also show you some of the questions he's being asked by the music media, including skeptics, liberals, or just people who don't think you should be allowed to talk about Jesus and certainly not about Trump.
So I hope you find these selections interesting.
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All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, the biggest name in rap music finds Jesus, and the celebrity left doesn't know what to do with it.
It's October 31st, 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.
Kanye West: The Entrepreneurial Musician00:06:09
Do you know Kanye West?
He's one of the best-selling musicians of all time.
140 million records sold if you measure it the old-fashioned way.
21 Grammy Awards.
He's not just a musician, he's an entrepreneur.
He's a fashion designer.
He's a polymath.
Oh, and he married Kim Kardashian, too.
An interesting life.
His dad was a Black Panther and then newspaper photographer and then a pastor.
His mom was a professor.
He spent some time growing up in China.
Smart kid.
He was offered a scholarship to university, dropped out to pursue music.
A celebrity who is so ubiquitous, he's in the news whenever he says something interesting, including irritating or annoying things or certainly political things or just being there.
He famously denounced George Bush as a racist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
George Bush doesn't care about black people.
Sometimes he's tasteless, like when he grabbed the microphone away from Taylor Swift when she was receiving an award to tell her she didn't deserve it.
Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you.
I'm let you finish.
But Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.
But really, he's a celebrity, singer, songwriter, rapper, fashionista.
Should we really pay too much attention to what he says, though?
My rule of thumb is no.
Whenever I inquire too deeply into the politics of musicians or actors, I'm usually grossed out and it makes it hard for me to enjoy their music or their movies anymore.
I used to love Alec Baldwin in Glen Gary, Glenn Ross.
What a great movie.
But I just can't watch him anymore without thinking of his insane Trump derangement syndrome.
But something interesting has happened to Kanye West.
He went very Trumpy a few years back.
He wore that red Make America Great Again hat.
He met Trump, started talking about how blacks are still slaves to the Democrats.
That ruffled a lot of feathers in the celebrity left, which is 99% of show biz.
Kanye West's wife, who is also smarter than she looks, has worked with Trump on substantive issues, including on prison reform, including getting commuted prison terms for some prisoners.
My message to President Trump is thank you so much, President Trump, for taking the time to really look at my case and to really look at me.
And as I've said before, I will, I promise you, President Trump, I will make you proud that you gave me that second chance.
And I tell Kim, Kim, keep your passion.
I believe that what she is seeing happen for me has really stirred something even more up in her, a desire to help people.
As she said, one person at a time.
Look, Kanye and Kim are interesting artists and celebrities.
There are a lot of interesting people, but I think they're smart.
They know what they're doing.
They're billionaires.
It's relevant that they are.
But Kanye had a bit of a mental breakdown.
He checked into a hospital.
It was a tough taking on the whole world, being called a race traitor for being an independent thinker.
But then he started popping up again.
Not in massive stadium concerts with rap music, but on the ground.
Church services.
He called them Sunday service.
He had a choir of about 100 people with him.
He would do a musical sort of church service with his choir gospel style in his own neighborhood.
He did one in Salt Lake City, started going around the country.
And I've got to say, it looked great.
A lot of black musicians get their start in church choirs and then go into pop music or even rap, I suppose.
But this was the opposite direction.
And so it happened that this month, Kanye West, who used to rap about sex and drugs and guns and conspicuous consumption, published his new album called Jesus is King.
I mean, if you thought that endorsing Trump would rock the boat, imagine endorsing Jesus Christ.
And he's done this celebrity circuit promoting his new album.
And most of the music media don't quite know what to make of it.
One guy is James Corden, a Hollywood liberal, originally from the UK.
He has a fun thing where he drives in a car with some musician, chats with them, and then they sing their favorite songs together while they're driving and listening on an iPod.
It's pretty fun.
Well, James Cordern did that with Kanye West, but instead of a carpool with an iPod, they flew in a jet with more than 100 people from Kanye's choir.
You saw a clip of it there.
It's a 20-minute video.
You can find it on YouTube in a second.
It's amazing.
It's trending, about 10 million views in a couple of days.
And Cordern was obviously a skeptic.
But he was respectful of Kanye West, and he enjoyed the music.
I have to say, he did well in the interview.
And Kanye West did well too.
I want to show you a few clips from that, especially of his political and religious comments and a few clips from his song Sung on the Plane.
And I'll show you another interview he did with an old-time rap music journalist that a bit tougher, a bit blacker than Corderon.
And it was even more interesting, I think, because it was the people who came up with him in the rap scene saying, are you still who you were?
I'm going to show you a ton of clips.
Kanye West Clips00:14:36
I like the music.
I'm fascinated by the religious and political comments.
I think he genuinely was searching for something and I think he found it.
I don't think he's perfected his understanding or even how to talk about it, but I don't think you ever can.
What's interesting is that while he's still learning, still discovering, he's already teaching.
It's always risky because he might not quite have things down path, but he's obviously impatient in his life.
But what I know, having watched a few hours now of his interviews in recent days, I know he's genuine and authentic in an industry full of fakes.
And I truly believe that he is going to make a significant cultural difference, particularly in black America.
I think it's actually amazing.
Let me start with Cordrin's airborne musical interview.
Instead of in his car, it's in a plane with the full choir.
When did you go, this is the thing I want to do?
Actually, when I went to the hospital a few years ago, I wrote in the hospital, Start a Church in Calabasas.
It's something I had a feeling that I needed to do that God put on my heart.
And now he just keeps on taking me to new levels and taking us to other levels that we didn't even imagine before.
So, and correct me if I'm wrong, so lots of people, I think, would be shocked to hear you talk like that.
But me, as I think about it, I feel like in a lot of your music, certainly earlier music, that message was always there.
Like, even, you know, if you think about the last line of Jesus Walks, when you say, I need to talk to God, I'm afraid because it's been so long.
Yes.
How long were you holding onto that feeling before you get to the, before you're in that place where you're in hospital two years ago and you write down, I need to start a church, and then this starts to come.
Do you feel like that's always been there burning inside you?
I mean, yes, and God's always had a plan for me and he always wanted to use me, but I think he wanted me to suffer more and wanted people to see my suffering and see my pain and put stigmas on me and have me go through all the experiences, the human experiences.
So now when I talk about how Jesus saved me, more people can relate to that experience.
If it was just, oh, we grew up with this guy's music and now he's a superstar, it's less compelling than, oh, this guy had a mental breakdown.
This guy was in debt.
This guy's been through, you know, not been through, but this guy has a beautiful five years of marriage.
But, you know, marriage years are different than human.
Like, you know, how dog years are, what is it, seven years?
Yeah, why is it?
Every marriage year is like 100 years.
It's like 500 years of marriage.
You know, there's a lot of people that were praying for me when I was, you know, all the way gone, when I was on the, you know, at the MTV Awards holding the Hennessy bottle, running on stage, when I was, you know, doing creative direction for certain award shows.
It was people in my family that were praying for me, but they couldn't call me and scream at me.
I'm a grown man.
I made my own mind.
I actually made it this far by not listening to anybody.
You know, so I don't want advice from people, but it's God, you know, that came and put this thing on my heart and said, you know, are you ready to be in service to him?
Do you look back on some of those things that you mentioned there with regret?
Or do you look at it and go, well, that's all a journey that got me hit?
I have no regret and no shame.
You know, that's the biggest thing, me being a perfectionist.
That's such a blasphemous statement to think that as a man, you could perfect anything.
God is the only thing that's perfect.
So the only thing that can be perfect is God's plan.
Have you had a Shake Shack burger?
Oh, because I will say that is pretty close to perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know how those cows that live on my ranch feel about the Shake Shack burger.
I reckon they're very angry about it.
Jesus, Jesus, walk with me, with me, with you, with me, to the hustlers, killers, murderers, drug dealers, even the strippers.
Jesus wants to damn the victims of welfare for we living in hell here.
Hell yeah.
Now here we hear we want to see thee more clearly.
I know he hear me when my feet get weary.
Cause we're the almost nearly extinct.
We rappers as role models.
We rap, we don't think.
I ain't here to argue about his facial features.
We're here to turn atheists into believers.
I'm just trying to say the way school needs teachers the way Catherine needed freezes.
That's the way I need Jesus.
So here go my single dog, radio Nises.
They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus.
That means God's sex slides videotapes.
But if I talk about God, my record won't get played.
Well, if this take away from my spheres, which will probably take away from my ends, I know it take away from my sins.
Bring the day that we dream about.
Next time we're on the plane, everybody's screaming out.
God show me the way.
Cause the devil tried to break me down.
The only thing that I prayed is that my feet don't fail me now.
And I don't think there's nothing I could do now to right my wrongs.
I want to talk to God.
I ain't afraid.
Amazing.
That's amazing.
Hollywood is fine with anything.
Sex, drugs, lies, violence.
Just not Jesus.
Here's the next song they sang.
And listen to James Corden after.
V-Box.
Said you'll never.
Save us.
So we stay.
So we stay.
On your word.
On your word.
Brought us out of darkness into your life.
Good light.
By your power.
By your power.
We're set free.
We're set free.
When two or three are gathered.
You're there.
You're there.
In the midst.
In the midst.
Thank you, Lord.
Thank you, Lord.
So that we know I'm soulsaker.
Every single day of early.
To you we give the glory.
Cause I souls across.
We think back where we started I don't know if it's the plane or the altitude or just because we're in the sky I am starting to feel closer to God.
I'll be honest.
I believe him.
By the way, I mean, when was the last time Corden went to church, do you think, in a positive way?
Listen to this.
Now, marriage, I think, has been a real great stabler for you.
Yeah, people thought it would be uncool to be married.
Then I got married and people are like, oh, that looks cool.
No one ever thought it'd be uncool to marry Kim Kardashian.
Everybody thought it would be cool to marry Kim Kardashian.
Well, not Chris Humphreys.
It's more than cool.
It's more than cool as hell or something.
It's heavenly.
It's great.
It's magnificent.
And God is using me as a human being.
You know, as humbly as I could put it, he's using me to show off.
Now, what's a regular night in for you and Kim now?
Kanye and Kim, they got nothing to do Tuesday night.
What are they doing?
I don't like going out at nighttime.
I like being at home with my family at night as much as possible.
So we don't like night.
What do you do?
We go, we'll eat dinner and we'll play with the kids and then we'll put the kids to bed and then we go to bed.
And then my wife watches Dateline.
So she watches Dateline and you're not really watching anything.
You're just straight to sleep?
I read the Bible.
For real.
Yes.
Seriously, you sit and read the Bible.
Yes.
Tell me this.
I've got three kids.
You've got four kids.
Would you recommend my wife and I going for a fourth?
Oh, absolutely.
Really?
The richest thing that you can ask is as many children as possible.
So are you saying you would roll for a fifth?
For seven.
Shut up.
You want seven kids?
Yes.
And have you and Kim talked about this?
This is something that you'd like to do.
Yes.
Seven children.
Yes.
So beautiful.
I need to talk to my wife.
After every little question and answer, the choir sang another song, and Cordon joined in.
I can't play the whole thing for you.
It's 20 minutes long, but Cordon was clearly having a great time.
But then he asked the skeptics question, and it's a fair question.
And he asked it respectfully, and then their interview ends with a great version of hallelujah.
What do you say to people who would say, and there will be people that will say, I don't believe it.
I don't believe the reawakening of that Kanye is saying he's having.
I don't believe if I look at the last two, three, four, five years of his life, I don't believe that this can be as night and day as it is.
Do you know what I mean?
That you would be one day living your life in one way and now saying everything is for this.
I'm not sure I believe it.
What would you say to those people?
I'd say, when you go to sleep, would you agree that you are asleep when you are asleep?
And when you wake up, would you agree that you are awake when you are awake?
Would you agree that those are two different states?
People who don't believe are walking dead.
They are asleep.
And this is the awakening.
That's it, we're down.
Woo!
Hallelujah!
He is one.
Oh, my word!
I thought that was great.
A white liberal like James Corden was moved.
I believe he really was.
But I think the effect of this music by Kanye West himself will reawaken the Christian tradition amongst African Americans.
Now, that's my thought.
But some of the hardest core rap personalities, they're not thrilled with this.
Here's a longtime radio host, Kurt Alexander, who goes by the nickname Big Boy.
And I think the conversation was a bit more real, a bit more tough, a bit less sweet.
I mean, his choir wasn't there either.
Now, listen to this, a bit more talk about Kanye West not doing what other people want him to do.
He starts by talking about James Corden.
That was like talking to James Corden earlier.
Same.
Yeah.
Okay, I wasn't.
And I told him, I said, look, My father's a Black Panther.
My mother got arrested for the sit-ins at age six.
They were fighting for us to have the right to our opinion, not the right to vote for whoever the white liberals said black people are supposed to vote for.
You get what I'm saying?
Then James Corden went in and said, well, this president, you're Christian and this president, I don't see anything Christian about him.
I said, okay, so last year y'all tried to tell me who I was supposed to vote for because I'm black.
Now this year, white liberals trying to tell me who I'm supposed to vote for because I'm Christian.
That would be like, I live in Calabasa, so everyone in my car has got to be a convertible, huh?
It's just all based on y'all vision of what I'm supposed to do.
And I understand like a lot of people, it's not a matter of whether you like it or who like it.
We are in a country where we allowed to like whatever we like.
I love Jesus Christ.
I love Christianity.
I love the Sistine Chapel.
Well, don't you know you can like anything else, but not that.
Big Boy makes me laugh to use that nickname.
I'll call him Kurt Alexander.
Alexander presses Kanye West, implying that he's a race traitor because he's breaking the mold.
Here's Kanye's reply.
What do you say to people that say you turned your back on the culture or exactly?
Like 100%.
I have turned my back on the idea of victimization mentality.
We are locked up.
We went from one and four.
We went from one and four to one and three.
But we always pointing at the white people, but yet we want to spend all of our money on foreigns.
We want to spend all our money on luxury as opposed to going and buying some land.
America is for sale and there's a lot of barren land.
Disney bought a lot of it in Florida.
But the culture has you focused so much on fucking somebody, bitch, and pulling up in a foreign and rapping about things that could get you locked up and then saying you about prison reform.
Like, it's, bro, we brainwashed out here, bro.
Come on, man.
This is a free man talking.
Democrats had us voting Democrats for food stamps for years, bro.
What is you talking about?
Guns in the 80s?
Taking the fathers out the home?
Plan B, lowering our votes, making us abort our children?
Why We Left Politics00:04:57
God should not kill.
I can't tell y'all how to feel, but what I can tell you honestly is how I feel.
And when I sat there seven years in, six years in, to the Obama administration, when I was sitting at the Met Balls, when I was sitting in front of white people and they thought, I wouldn't have thought you would like Trump because of the racism.
So you mean to tell me I make every decision based off my color.
The most racist thing a person could tell me is that I'm supposed to choose something based on my race.
I want to show you a few more clips.
Some are really short.
I'm not that interested in Kurt Alexander.
I think he didn't know how to handle Kanye West.
Look, Big Boy is a radio host, which means he's a professional suck up to rock stars to get them to come on his show.
And Kanye West is one of the biggest.
But Alexander also knows that he's supposed to be a good liberal, a good Democrat, and follow the corporate line, conventional wisdom.
He doesn't do it well.
He's passive-aggressive in this interview.
He never really has the courage to challenge Kanye, but he signals to his viewers that he disagrees with them.
Who cares about him?
Instead, let me play a few clips of Kanye West's answers instead.
Here he is saying that he was one of the first rappers to speak out against using the word fag, the F-word in this case, in rap.
But when he mentioned Chick-fil-A, he was called a homophobe.
Hip-hop was dropping F-bombs, and I said, stop.
You could play the footage.
I said, stop it.
As soon as I said, close on Sunday just like Chick-fil-A, there was LGBTQ articles saying they need to boycott my company.
I said George Bush don't care about black people.
As soon as I wore a red hat, I'm a coon.
You can't do enough for nobody out here.
So how about I stop?
You get what I'm saying?
People forget so quick.
Think about that.
I'm the one, I thought my career, you know, the funny thing is people are like, man, this is going to be harmful for your career.
Did you worry about that?
Man, I fear and love God.
When you remove the fear and love of God, you create the fear and love of everything else.
You're talking to somebody right now that only fears God and Jesus has won the victory, bro.
Listen to this little clip about families.
Social media doing more to hurt families than it is to help families and families are the key to health.
I love this line about pretending you're woke, but actually just sleepwalking and repeating what everyone else says.
Wake up.
Wake up, Mr. West.
Wake up, culture.
Wake up.
Everybody think they so woke, but they following the rules of what woke's supposed to be.
That's so true.
Here's Alexander who can't process all this.
Are you still our voice?
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
That's the thing.
You are quite easily controlled if they know everybody gonna be blue.
If you go to a white bar, you're gonna hear people talking about independent.
You're gonna hear people talking Republican.
You're gonna hear people talking Democrat.
But fair enough.
Does Kanye West regret what he used to sing about?
I heard you say with your pastor that you felt like you were making devil's music.
Yeah, because you're such a fucking, oh, I love it.
Excuse me, Christian scorecard down a little bit, cursing some more.
But I got to a point where I was always letting that Playboy magazine that I found when I was five years old have an effect on my music.
It could never be 100% everything it could be because I had to add that in always.
And it got to the point where literally I went from Jesus walks to you're such a fucking hoe, I love it.
Oh, I bet you the devil was happy on that day.
And where that record went, straight to what?
Number one, quick.
This is exactly what we want.
This fit right in with whatever else we got.
This fit right in with everything we got to deal with opioids.
This fit right in with everything we got that promotes killing so that we can have more slaves in the mass incarceration, mass incarceration, never-ended slave system.
This fit right in.
Why did you make it?
Because I was asleep.
Because I was drowned.
Because I was lost.
What do you want us to get from Jesus is King?
The title right there.
The fact that everyone says that is enough.
Well, can he fix things?
What's his purpose?
There's an opportunity where people are coming for the music, but they may leave with salvation.
Things Are Only Getting Worse00:12:15
It's not easy doing what he's doing.
Neither side believes him.
And now I've given my life to Christ.
I got this rapper say, what have you been hearing from the Christians?
They'll be the first one to judge me.
Make it feel like nobody loved me.
Because literally, the process of being delivered, you really be by yourself when it happens.
Because the Christians don't believe you.
And all the people that's not Christian is like, are you weird now?
Are you Christian?
Well, I don't know him, but I believe him.
And I believe that what he's doing, tackling the culture, leading by example, is perhaps the most important non-partisan movement in America today.
They'd call him racist if he weren't black.
They actually do already, don't they?
But I don't think he cares.
He's not afraid anymore, is he?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, Wexit wouldn't be my choice of a nickname for a Western separatist movement, but it seems to have stuck.
And of course, it's not just Alberta, Saskatchewan, too.
Every day it seems to get worse.
I see in the news that NCANA, which was once the largest Canadian company by market capitalization, the largest, has announced that it is moving its headquarters to the United States and changing its name.
It claims that won't affect staffing in Canada, but I don't believe that.
I think it's just done with fighting with Justin Trudeau and an anti-oil mentality.
Why wouldn't it go to the place that loves drilling and fracking and mining and exporting and pipelines?
I think that things are only going to get worse in Alberta, and no one in the center of the country seems to give a damn.
I'd like to refer to a column in the Edmonton Sun by our friend Lauren Gunter.
It's called, It Doesn't Matter That There's No One from the West in the Federal Cabinet.
And joining us to explain exactly what he means is our friend Lauren Gunter.
Hey, Lauren, how you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
Well, I'm frustrated because the price of oil is strong, strong enough to create a boom across the United States, record exports.
In fact, the United States is now a net exporter of oil, not just of energy, but of oil itself.
Some of that oil goes to Quebec.
So we're selling the good stuff to America below market prices, and we're importing their oil at world prices.
It's getting worse and worse.
Well, and the more frustrating thing for me with that is that Quebec is quite happy to buy oil from the United States, but it won't take oil.
Buy oil from Alberta because it has to come in a pipeline.
And, you know, it's just, it's the symbolism of it.
It's a political mentality that's involved.
It has nothing to do with the farm or science or anything like that.
It's all political symbolism.
Yeah.
Well, I was just looking through the latest stats from the Canadian Energy Regulator.
And Quebec oil imports from America are skyrocketing.
That's from railroad cars full of oil.
And of course, they take a lot of Saudi oil and Azeri oil, oil from Azerbaijan.
So whenever a Quebecer says they're against carbon or oil, they don't mean it.
They're just against Alberta, really.
But let's talk about your column.
You say, you know, we all know that the Liberals were wiped out in the West, not a single seat in Alberta or Saskatchewan.
Ralph Goodale wasn't a particular advocate for the West in cabinet, but at least he felt some obligation, I think, to do so.
What do you mean by it doesn't matter that there's no one in cabinet from those two provinces?
Well, there was Goodale from Saskatchewan, and at one point there was Amarjit Sohi from Edmonton and Kent Hare from Calgary.
There were five total members, liberal MPs in the caucus from Saskatchewan and Alberta from 2015 until 2019.
One of the Alberta Liberal MPs was kicked out of caucus for sexually harassing employees.
But what I was saying is that there was lots of representation in the caucus and at the cabinet table from Alberta and Saskatchewan between 2015 and 2019.
It didn't do us any good.
Who cares whether we have a member there who's just going to come back to Alberta and Saskatchewan and explain Justin Trudeau's latest wisdom.
You know, we had an Edmonton MP, a guy named Randy Boissano, who thankfully was defeated, who led the charge at the Justice Committee in the House of Commons to have the SNC Lavalin investigation killed.
What good did it do us to have liberals in the caucus and in the cabinet when they passed bills C-48 and C-69, which kill pipelines, ban Alberta oil, specifically Alberta oil from northern BC tankers?
So it didn't do us any good.
And so having more of those same sorts of people in Ottawa doing the same sorts of bowing and scraping to Central Canadian bias isn't going to do us any good now either.
Yeah, I suppose it's better not to have those because they'd be a placebo.
They would be a fake, oh, well, they're representing us.
At least now the hoax is gone and the reality is revealed.
Let me ask you, does Justin Trudeau or the PMO, to the best of your knowledge, have someone in Alberta who's speaking the truth to them quietly, off the record, you know, just saying, hey, it's really this bad or hey, you know, like someone who Trudeau or Gerald Butts knows and trusts enough that he can tell them what they don't want to hear.
I think Trudeau is surrounded by flatterers and hollow men, empty suits.
Do you know if he has anyone who can say, I want to tell you some hard truths now, boss, here's what it's like.
Do you know of anyone like that?
No.
And I think the people who are talking to him from Alberta, I mean, former Premier Allison Redford, oh my goodness, so glad she's back.
She's offered to give advice to Trudeau.
I once called her the first NDP Premier of Alberta before there was any inkling that there would be an NDP Premier of Alberta because she's so left-wing and she's so condescending to people who have what I would consider Alberta viewpoints or Western viewpoints.
She couldn't possibly represent the majority of people in Alberta if she was giving advice to Trudeau.
Then there was Nehet Henshi, the mayor of Calgary, who's as left as you can get.
He offered to help Trudeau.
And all those people would do is say, oh, listen, Mr. Prime Minister, I know that that nasty Mr. Kenny says XYZ, or that there's a lot of Albertans around who are writing letters to the editor or speaking out online who say XYZ.
But you know what?
They're not speaking for all of Albertans.
There's lots of people who really do think that your environmental programs, which would be absolutely bogus, but that's what he wants to hear.
And that's what they would tell him.
Well, and that's my point.
So maybe it wouldn't be someone who's in the political class, like the partisan class.
I've got to think that in the oil patch, I mean, there are senior oilmen who, for whatever reason, are liberal partisans.
I mean, I've never understood it, but I would call them good Albertans who just have this quirk.
Maybe they want to be different.
So they're partisan liberals, but they are living the Alberta way.
And there's even a kind of liberal, I think of a Lawrence Decor-style liberal who is not a conservative, loves Alberta.
I mean, there are liberals in Alberta who are not just Trudeau repeaters.
And there were in the mid-90s what they called the 3M liberals.
You had Manley, McLaren, and Martin, who were pro-business.
They were liberal on social policy, liberal probably on immigration.
They didn't mind a little bit of deficit spending here and there, but they knew how to balance the books and they were pro-business.
They wouldn't have come in, for instance, with Bill Morneau's punitive tax on small business people of a couple of years ago.
They wouldn't have come in with a litmus test for women's reproductive rights for Christian summer camps the way that the latest group did.
They were moderate.
And there are some, perhaps, still in the oil patch who are like that.
When I was, and some of your viewers may be surprised to find this out, when I worked for a liberal cabinet minister from Alberta in the mid-1980s, Alberta, despite the national energy program, was still contributing about one quarter of all the annual operating funds for the Liberal Party of Canada.
And that was coming mostly from oil people who hoped that by contributing and being involved in the Liberal Party, it would help mitigate some of the worst parts of the national energy program.
It didn't work.
It's not going to work now.
And that's why I said I don't think it matters whether or not we have any representation at the cabinet table or any representation in the caucus.
They're not going to listen to us anyway.
This is not a group that is driven by business instincts.
It has no understanding of how you create wealth.
It has no understanding of where the money to run government comes from originally.
They just think it's, I saw, for instance, in some of the liberal campaign material during the election, there was this idea that they would cut a loophole in income tax, and that would save the federal government close to a billion dollars a year.
Save?
It's not their money.
This is like all the money that exists belongs to us, and you should be grateful for what we leave you.
And if we don't leave it to you, then we're saving that, not saving that money.
They're taking less of it out of the pockets of people who originally earned it.
But that's the mentality that's involved.
There is no understanding that without pipelines, there is no money to tax.
But it's just to them, it's like, well, if there are no pipelines, we'll just all get barista jobs and the money will come from the taxes we pay as baristas.
It's cluelessness.
And it's this magic, I keep calling it magic wand thinking when it comes to the environment.
There was a lot of excitement on Monday when a large accountancy firm, Ernst ⁇ Young, put out this report that said if Canada would be a rapid adopter of e-vehicles, electronic cars, we would reduce our oil dependency by 250,000 barrels a day.
Now, we consume about 2 million barrels a day, and we could reduce that by about 250,000 a day, so roughly 10%, if we would simply go to 30% of our fleet as electric vehicles by 2030.
Half Electric Fleet00:02:36
To do that, we would have to buy 720,000 electric cars a year between now and 2030.
We buy a total of 1.5 million new cars a year, new light trucks, SUVs, CUVs.
We'd have to half of our new fleet, half of all new vehicles bought in a country for the next 10 years would have to be electrical.
And that would be half of the volume of all the electrical vehicles made in the world.
And so that's the kind of thinking that goes into this.
It's so easy to do.
Well, we're going to let a 16-year-old Swedish girl come and tell us.
I was just thinking about that.
I mean, there were old hands in the Liberal Party, but a lot of them were thrown out.
It was almost a rule, if you were over 40, you had to be thrown out because you didn't have that modern thinking.
And so if you look at Trudeau's cabinet, other than Ralph Goodale, really, I mean, he threw out anyone with gray hair.
Ralph was the only grown-up left.
And the staff, I mean, there's this one picture I show time and again.
It's a picture of Christia Freeland with her advisors, average age is like 22, looking so hipster-ish and millennial.
And I'm thinking, you know, there's some things where you want young energy and people who don't know the word no, but negotiating international trade deals is probably not one of them.
You probably want the oldest guy there is who hasn't yet lost his mental faculties, because that's where...
You want Derek Ernie.
You want the kind of person you want.
You want someone who's, they've done it before.
They know the people on the other side.
They have self-control of their mouth and their emotions, and they're not going to do weird things.
And they know that when the other side says A, that really means B.
And you don't really want B.
So you've got to be smart about how to do all of this.
And there just isn't that kind of long-term institutional memory.
On anything, I mean, and I mentioned foreign affairs because that's just been a string of disasters.
But anything touching business is too.
And I don't know.
I just'm sad because I think for instance, that Bill Morneau, who's the finance minister, and he's rumored to continue on as finance minister in the new cabinet that will be appointed in a couple of weeks.
Why Business Matters00:09:13
You'd think having run one of the most successful pension fund management companies in North America would understand business very well.
He doesn't seem to.
He doesn't seem to have any deep understanding.
And if he does have a deep understanding, he has no influence at the cabinet table to bring that to fruition.
So we're stumbling along based on like a 22-year-old pour over coffee artist's view of how the economy should work.
You know, I acknowledge that Bill Mourneau did run the firm Morneau-Chapelle.
He also inherited it from his father, and he had the good sense to marry a billionaire.
So I think his understanding of how wealth happens is a little bit different than how it happens for most people.
What makes me sad, Lauren, is that Alberta finally threw out the NDP and is slowly bringing back pro-business policies provincially.
But the fact that Husky laid off hundreds the next day after the federal election, the fact that Ancana is moving.
Encana.
I mean, it used to be called the Alberta Energy Corporation, Ancana Energy Canada.
Energy Canada.
It was the biggest Canadian company.
And it's just saying, yeah, good luck, you guys.
We're going to take our chances in Texas and Pennsylvania.
They did this sort of in two parts, right?
Last November, so just about a year ago, they said, well, yeah, we're moving a lot of our operations to the United States, and we're not going to have a head office.
We're just going to have a lot of decisions made both in Canada and the United States.
No head office.
No, And now, what do they call it?
They're going to have their business habitation in the United States, which means they're going to have a head office down there.
And they're changing their name to something I can't remember.
Yeah, it's Ovintus.
I don't even know what that means.
It's a name designed to be forgotten, I think.
That's very sad to me.
Lexon, for instance, was chosen by a marketing firm because it was a word that meant nothing in any language.
So this Ovintus or whatever it is, it's probably something similar.
Yeah, well, but what's sad to me, in Trans-Canada pipelines, same thing.
They're getting rid of the Canada part.
And Canada.
Because this is no longer a good place to do business.
That is so sad.
And I think of Detroit.
And people think, oh, you're crazy to compare to Detroit.
Lauren, it wasn't even a century ago that Detroit was the highest industrial wage in America.
That's right.
It was motor city.
It was, it attracted so many people because you want the best job in America.
You go to Detroit.
And it was undone by politics.
People still drive cars.
But they just said that city destroyed it.
I just spent two days in downtown Calgary trying to get a feel for what people were thinking after the provincial election and after the federal election.
And it's really disheartening to go to downtown Calgary now.
A lot of people used to think that Calgarians were bombastic and braggadosio.
And they had big fancy cars and they were buying big houses and they were getting huge bonuses and spending like the clothing stores were busy and the malls and the restaurants and everything, interior designers and caterers and everybody was just rushing back.
I so much preferred Calgary when it was like that than to the dismal, downtrodden, keep your head down and just do your job kind of place it is now.
It's lost a lot of its verb.
And that's sad for the whole country.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you about what I started our conversation with, the word Wexit.
I see Jason Kenning.
He has announced consultations with a predetermined outcome.
He says, how best to stay in Canada and be strong.
Well, Wexit means the opposite of stay.
And I think Jason Kenney's consultations will be interesting, and I think he will listen.
But ultimately, I think he's impotent.
I mean, you want to hold a referendum on equalization.
Yeah, okay, you and what army?
There has to be an or else.
And if there's no or else, what are you going to do?
You already threw at all the liberals.
What are you going to do?
Not send the money?
What are you going to do?
Have a little protest?
If there's no or else there, why would Justin Trudeau?
I mean, I get that.
I'd like to see what we can do with sort of a firewall kind of strategy, see if we can't wake up the voters in the GTA to the fact that they are going to be hurt if they continue to vote in a government that is destroying the oil, destroying the number one export industry in the country.
Maybe that's never going to happen.
And I'm not prepared to wait very long to find out whether it would happen or not.
But I'm prepared to try a few things first.
But it may come to the fact that things are so stacked against us and always will be that we have to think about WEXIT.
Yeah.
Well, if I was Justin Trudeau, I'd be laughing right now.
He just won when he shouldn't have won.
Andrew Scheer doesn't look like he's going anywhere.
And I don't see any best line about that.
I'm not a big Peter McKay fan, but Peter McKay, who now is making noise about trying to replace Andrew Scheer as a conservative leader, said the conservatives under Andrew Scheer failed to score on an open net.
And that's exactly what it was.
I think so.
Easy to win, couldn't do it.
And it's not going to get easier to win.
And I think Justin.
Go ahead.
No, no.
And what's he scared of?
What's Trudeau scared of?
And I don't know.
I think that this time, I mean, in 1980, the National Energy Program, the rise of the Reform Party, rise of Western septism back then, what was being done to Alberta was maybe unthinkable, although I suppose it had happened 50 years earlier.
But now people see the game is rigged.
It's more malicious this time because they really do want to shut down the oil.
I don't know.
I think that Jason Kenney wants to be a federalist and wants to save, wants the West in, but I just don't think it's going to work.
And all of his huffing and puffing, Trudeau's going to laugh.
I don't know.
Last word to you.
That could be.
I'm going to give it a couple, you know, six months, a year, two years to see how things work out.
But I'm not far away from saying, you know, let's at least threaten it because we're not losing anything by saying we'd leave.
Yeah.
All right, my friend.
Well, we'll keep in touch on this.
Thanks for being so candid.
You bet.
All right.
There you have Lauren Gunter senior columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
I encourage you to read his column called, It Doesn't Matter That There Is No One from the West in the Federal Cabinet.
Stay with us.
More Ahead on the Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Quebec announcing a values test for immigrants.
Liz writes, I think Quebec having a prerequisite values test is awesome.
A precedent has been set.
We all must demand the same.
Yeah, it's so odd how no one is taking him on.
I haven't checked today's news, but yesterday at least, not a word of criticism from Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh.
Isn't that odd?
Rick writes, as a Quebecois, say, bravo, Lego.
Other provinces need to follow suit.
Oh, I don't think you'll find any courage in the mainstream parties.
Certainly not in Andrew Scheer, will you?
Tom writes, if Alberta did that, they would be lighting their hair on fire.
Oh, you're so right.
I mean, I showed you the colour.
I didn't even show you a tip of the iceberg of the rage and the insults targeted at Kelly Leach when she proposed a similar thing when she ran for the conservative leadership.
I wonder why it is.
I wonder if it's because Quebecers are given a special pass to maintain their Quebecois nature, or if it's just because everyone knows if you fight against that in Quebec, you're going to be thrown in the dustbin of history.
François Legaud threw out the Liberals with his new party.
The Bloc Québécois came roaring back on these cultural identity issues.
I think it's a combination of ideological fear of taking on anything Québécois and pragmatic fear of being wiped out in Quebec.