Lorne Gunter argues Alberta’s 2015–2019 economic collapse—8% private-sector income drop, 60,000 layoffs, and public-sector wage hikes under Rachel Notley’s NDP—stemmed from Trudeau’s pipeline cancellations, carbon tax, and bills like C-48 (tanker ban) and C-69. The UCP repealed 16 NDP laws but faces federal pipeline control, while Gunter dismisses Chrystia Freeland’s diplomacy as ineffective due to her urban-focused policies. Alberta’s separatist sentiment hovers at 20–25%, fueled by decline, but lacks a compelling case; historical precedents like Manning’s Reform Party or Cooper’s U.S. intervention fantasy underscore frustration. Without federal concessions or stronger leverage, Gunter doubts independence will succeed, warning Trudeau’s climate-first approach risks deepening Western alienation. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Alberta and Canada, will they fit together in the year ahead or will they fight?
A feature interview with our friend Lauren Gunter.
It's December 26th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, 2015 was a year of a triple disaster for Alberta's oil and gas sector.
The price of oil fell around the world, and that made it for tough times for the oil patch.
But then, in the spring, Rachel Notley and the NDP won the election in that province for the first time ever on an anti-oil platform, including higher taxes, including a carbon tax.
Then came Justin Trudeau that fall.
And before long, pipelines were being canceled and a federal carbon tax was coming.
Well, 2019 marked the end of Rachel Notley's reign.
She was thrown into the dustbin of history by Jason Kenney's United Conservative Party.
Justin Trudeau, however, was re-elected prime minister, if with a reduced seat count.
How will Alberta fare in 2020 and beyond?
Is it enough that Jason Kenney runs the province and that the price of oil has generally come back?
Or does the fact that Justin Trudeau was re-elected and there's a recalcitrant New Democratic government in BC, will that spell doom for Alberta in 2020?
Joining us now via Skype from Edmonton to talk about these and other prospects for Alberta next year is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
Lauren, nice to see you again.
Good to see you.
I think Alberta had probably the worst four years since the Great Depression.
And it was about as long as the Great Depression.
And unfortunately, it continues.
While other oil patches around North America, Texas, North Dakota, have fully rebounded, I don't actually think it's over for Alberta yet, this recession, this divestment of investors.
No, I mean, we've seen that, right?
We've seen Antana, we've seen Husky, we've seen all sorts of other resource companies either move or certainly lay off people.
Several of the big companies have also announced that they are going to put a cap on their drilling activity for the year.
Others are going ahead.
And I think there are some signs that things will be better under a UCP government than they were under the NDP government.
But boy, there was a big, big pin popped Alberta's balloon on October 21st when the Liberals won minority re-election, largely based out of Greater Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, because those are the three most anti-Alberta areas in the country.
And so the Liberals have to pander to those areas of the country, plus to the NDP and the Greens to keep them in power.
And, you know, people in the oil business aren't stupid.
They know what that means for their industry.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that irks Westerners, and I regard myself as sort of a spiritual Westerner, even though I've been out east for many years now, is the that so many liberal candidates, and even Trudeau himself, felt free to disparage Alberta and the oil patch to their voter base out east.
Um, and even the fact that they hand-picked a star candidate, Stephen Gilbo, the head of Equitaire, which is like the David Suzuki Foundation of Quebec, and they appointed him to cabinet immediately.
You had all these other liberal mps who had just served four years.
No way, this new guy goes straight to the front now.
They didn't put him environment, but he's in cabinet and he'll have his say on environmental issues for sure.
Um, I think that what's different, what's worse, is how Trudeau publicly demonized Alberta and didn't care that we knew that was sort of yeah, that's the point.
Here i'm trying to shore up the antipathy towards Alberta and and big rich oil companies.
They actually demonized those companies.
Yeah well, and and look at Catherine Mckinnon, who had been the environment minister until the election.
I mean, she talked all the time about having to go after big oil and the oil companies are so awful and we're going to keep an eye on those oil companies.
And you know, you know it.
It became tedious and and maybe that doesn't sound like much to people who live outside of a resource region.
Uh, you know, it's just political pandering, it's posturing by some, some uh politician, some candidate, some minister, but boy when, when they're going after the industry that keeps your region alive uh, actually keeps much of the country going too uh, even though the rest of the country might not understand that, all the time, when they're going after that industry and you know it's closely attached to how your region fares, you take that personally.
And why wouldn't you take that personally if you started to talk about, no, we have to cut down on on hydroelectric transfers to the United States, or we, we have to cut back on asbestos exports, or we have to do.
Do you think the people in queue would not understand what you're talking about?
Yeah, you know, and that's exactly what.
Even even when they weren't mentioning Alberta by name uh, Albertans understood what they were talking about and and it was clear, like it had been in 1980.
In 1980, the federal election Clark had miscalculated with his minority government.
The liberals had cleverly stacked the commons one night, forced a new election.
Now they're running to try and regain their majority and the.
The motto inside the liberal war room in 1980 was, screw the west, we'll take the rest.
Yeah, and at that time Vancouver would still vote conservative.
So you didn't get a single uh liberal seat, uh outside of Winnipeg in the entire west of the country.
And this time around they weren't quite as clever, they didn't have a motto like that, but it was very obvious that they had decided there were no votes for them to be had in Alberta Saskatchewan, the interior Bc, so they wouldn't care what they said about those regions.
They were pandering to the greater Toronto area, to Montreal Ottawa, that Golden Triangle, and then to the core areas of Vancouver and, and that won for them.
At least it preserved them from having a loss.
They only won a minority, of course, but they kept that minor.
They kept their power because, in part because of slamming the oil industry and indirectly by slamming Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Yeah well, I don't think any credit is due to Justin Trudeau, but it is simply a fact that Catherine McKenna is no longer the environment minister and I thought she was so ill-informed about anything and so strident in her mindless repetition of a few clichés that I it was almost like she was deliberately irritating anyone in the west.
Catherine McKenna's Demise00:05:45
I mean, I know that that's just how she sounds and she's just that shallow, just who she is.
So yeah I, I mean, I don't think Justin Trudeau said who's the most uh fingernails on a chalkboard screechy, annoying person like I don't think, I think it just happened that way.
Um, and she is no.
I think she sort of sounded like that to them inside cabinet too, because if you look where she is now, she got demoted.
There is no question that being moved from environment down to infrastructure is uh, is a demotion.
She's, you know, she's, going to do ribbon cuttings for the next two or four years, however long she's around in that portfolio.
Well, she had a few uh moments that I, I think, just absolutely crystallized what westerners think the an amazing one was when she went into a bar in St. John's and did what you know they tell, drunk sorority girls don't do, don't drunk dial your ex don't drunk tweet, don't do it, don't take.
And she drunk tweeted, I think here she is at a bar, sort of shouting here, see for yourself, take a look.
But you know, I actually gave him some real advice.
I said that if you actually say it louder.
We've learned in the House OF Commons, if you repeat it, if you say it louder, if that is your talking point, people will totally believe it.
Yeah, she basically says if just keep repeating something until it's true yeah we, we got you sister, I don't think you changed any mind.
Let me show you one more clip Lauren, just one more clip.
This is when she was stone cold, sober and she was saying that her new great vision under Bill C69 was to have gender analysis of.
Just take a quick look at this gender impact.
How does that fit into a pipeline approval process?
So I'm really glad you asked that, because I think people are like, well, what is this gender thing?
Well, imagine that you were.
Uh, you have uh, a huge number of people going to a remote community, many men.
What is the impact on the community?
What is the impact on women in the community?
And actually, once again, smart proponents understand this, so they're going to put measures in place.
That's all it is.
It's just taking a smart approach to thinking about, okay, what's going to be the impact of a major development in a particular area?
Yeah um, i'm just glad she's no longer there, because I don't think she moved a single vote towards the liberals.
She may have enthused the the liberal base that hated Alberta, but I don't think she won a single vote for Trudeau.
So really, what's the use other than irritating the West and she's out of that portfolio now, okay?
Well, let me ask you this, Christya Freeland is now the next shrill, shallow talker assigned to Albertia.
Christa Freeland, who was in New York before coming back to be our foreign minister, now she's being deputized to appease the West.
Do you think it's got a chance of working?
You know, But this is one of the biggest laughs I've got.
It's a big kick I got out of the cabinet appointments.
Maybe, you know, in our line of work, I should have been better informed.
But I honestly did not know that Christia Freeland was born and mostly raised in Alberta until she's made the intermediary between the prime minister's office and the prairie provinces.
So it's not like she's ever been extra proud.
And I'm not saying she's disparaged or whatever.
It's not something that you knew because she was always talking about it.
But now all of a sudden she's the proud daughter of the peace country of Alberta and in touch with everything going on in the West.
And she's going to save the relationship between the prairie provinces and the federal.
No, but I mean, she's not as shrill nor as shallow as McKinnon, but she's, she's, or McKenna, she's up there though.
And, you know, she got big strokes, for instance, during the free trade negotiations in Washington a couple of summers ago because she bought the press gallery ice cream.
Yeah.
What in heaven's name does that have to do with anything?
It has nothing, but that gives you an idea of how eager most mainstream reporters are to like liberals.
Oh my goodness, she's just such a delight.
She comes and she talks to us and she brings us ice cream and that must mean she's doing a good job on free trade.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a total disconnect on those two things, but okay.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it reminds me of during the election where Justin Trudeau handed a CBC reporter a little bowl of poutine and said, we take care of the CBC.
And listen, that's Trudeau making an unfunny joke that's actually a true statement.
But then for that reporter to gleefully dig in showed absolutely the master-servant relationship.
That's what I took away about that scene is not just how shallow Christia Freeland was, but how obedient, how easily pleased and domesticated the media were.
I think some of the media in Alberta will be easily persuaded that way.
But I think that there's a growing sense, even amongst what I call the media party in Alberta, that there are real problems and simply, you know, shallow tricks like that aren't going to solve them.
A couple of examples of what I think is more serious are things that Trudeau said, either directly or indirectly, indirectly in the throne speech.
Spending on Climate Pledge00:03:32
You know, they spent about the first quarter of that throne speech, which was mercifully fairly short.
They spent about a quarter of it talking about increasing their commitment to fight climate change, which we are always very worried about and need to be very worried about in the West.
That you spend about a quarter of it.
And then there's a sort of throwaway line.
Oh, yes, and we promise to use equal effort to get the West's resources.
No, you don't.
Nobody buys that.
If you've just spent all your time talking about climate crisis, emergency must do drastic things, get bolder, take more action.
And then you say, oh, yeah, yeah, by the way, we are going to get, we are going to work just as hard on getting your resources to market.
And that's it.
That's the statement.
There's no counterbalance in terms of time or tone or urgency.
Nobody's going to buy that here.
And then the second thing was over the weekend, Trudeau gave a speech and he said, yes, I want to assure the energy workers in the prairies that we hear their problems and their voices.
And first of all, we don't like to be talked to like we're at some group counseling session in a fern bar in downtown Toronto.
But so he said, you know, I want the workers to know that we understand your struggle since 2014 when the prices of world prices of oil came down.
We know it's been hard.
Never any recognition, never, that the prices came back to a level in 2016 that was high enough to make money.
And that other, as you said earlier, other oil-producing areas in North America are doing just fine.
Thank you very much.
And that the problem here, the barrier in Alberta is not geology.
We know where the oil is.
We know how to get it out of the ground.
It's not geography because we can get it to market if you let us.
It's political.
And so he glosses over in that speech he gave on the weekend, the fact that for the last three years, his government's policies have been choking the Western economy.
And until, I mean, I don't expect him to come out and apologize to us the way he would if we were an Indigenous people whose leaders had been hung injudiciously by the federal government 150 years ago.
I don't expect him to apologize to us like that.
But I do expect them to understand and recognize, articulate that there are policies in play from the federal government that have led to the choking off of Alberta's economy.
I mean, they could easily have stood up.
In fact, at one point, he promised Rachel Notley he would stand up against BC's obstruction of the Transmountain pipeline.
He'd stand up.
He'd have a motion passed in the House of Commons that said the federal government is asserting its constitutional power over interprovincial movement of goods, and we are going to have the Trans Mountain pipeline built.
It's two years, almost two years since he said that.
Never done that yet.
So those are the sorts of things that I think are deeper.
I mean, I think it's important to understand how unlikely Christia Freeland is by personality and character to do anything that's going to appease the prairies.
Promises Unfulfilled00:03:27
But we need to look even a little bit at what the prime minister says.
And it doesn't give me any hope at all that they even understand how they've alienated the West, let alone know how to fix it.
You know, if I may be permitted an anecdote, you may know that I was sneaked in to a press conference in Ottawa by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
He was having a joint press conference with Christy Freeland.
Christia Freeland wouldn't let us in.
So I asked Mike Pompeo's office, could we come in with your media entourage?
And he said, yes.
So Christy Freeland's people were shocked that, I mean, that sounds like a gossipy story, but it shows you how brittle and averse to any criticism Freeland's people are.
I met her director of communications, and this is like the big summit.
Here's the U.S. Secretary of State, very busy guy.
If he's not dealing with Russia or Saudi Arabia or Israel or India or China or Mexico, you know, like he's the busiest guy in the world other than the president, let's say.
And for that big fancy day, Christy Freeland's Director of Communications showed up without socks on as some weird fashion statement, and he was flitting about.
And I thought, what are you doing?
You can't even put on socks for the Secretary of State.
And here's a picture of the squad.
Did he at least have shoes on?
Yeah, he had shoes on.
But here's a picture of Christy Freeland, and I call this Christia's Angels, her four millennial staff, each of them who knows less than the next guy, but they've all got a bachelor's degree and are super woke, and they all know about Instagram and Twitter.
And the thing is, in foreign affairs, the older you are, the smarter you are.
Because there's nothing new under the sun.
Maybe if you were the minister of digital, this and that, you'd want a young, woke staff.
But if you're about trade treaties and diplomacy with, you know, countries that have had relations with Canada for decades, you don't want 20-nothing straight out of school.
But that style, though, we know what's going on.
And unlike you, unhip Stephen Harper, we know how to get China and India and America.
Like they were clueless.
That's what I'm worried about, Lauren, is that this fake glamour gal, Christy Freeland, who loved to jet to Paris and New York and Geneva and loved to be celebrated in Toronto in the high salons.
Now she's got a slummet in the West.
And worst of all, she's got to deal with people who wear hard hats and talk about oil.
And, you know, this is going to be such a come down for her communications director, who it's too cold in Alberta not to wear socks.
I just think you've got this woman who was sort of famous for being famous, but not even famous.
She was like a hanger on.
She was like the camera.
She hit any of them like that, though, right?
She was sort of the Robin Leech of her generation.
But not as interesting.
Lifestyles of the rich and famous kind of reportage with a lefty edge to it.
I mean, her book called Plutocrats talks about how, oh, the rich are getting richer and it's hurting all the rest of us.
Lots of People Want Out00:14:16
And so it feeds into Trudeau's mistaken narrative that the middle class is shrinking.
Well, if it is shrinking, who's taking its money?
It's not big business.
I have the ability to deal with Amazon or Walmart or Imperial oil or not, as I choose.
I have no choice in dealing with the government.
If I don't give the government the money that it demands, it comes to my house and puts me in cuffs.
Well, no one's given more giveaways to large corporate Canada.
I think of Catherine McKenna's $11 million free fridge grant to the wealthiest family in the country.
Anyway, let's get back to the theme of this.
I mean, I'm enjoying our conversation, but let me get out of the federal sphere and down to the province of Alberta, because, of course, Alberta's problems are rooted in part in Ottawa.
And I don't think Christy Freeland's going to fix them.
But of course, Jason Kenney has certain tools at his own disposal.
How do you think Jason Kenney is going to do?
What are your thoughts on his first, I guess it's seven or eight or nine months in power?
How do you think he's done so far and how do you think he's going to do?
I think he's done fine.
They've undone most of what the NDP did in four years.
So there was a session of the Alberta legislature that finished in the middle of December and it undid 16 different regulation regimes or laws that the NDP had passed.
For instance, I mean, I know you were very involved in covering Bill 6, which was the farm safety law that the NDP brought in and had no clue when they brought it in that they were going to set off the hornet's nest that they did because it was an insult to the way farmers do their business.
It implied that ordinary family farmers in Alberta are nothing but slave labor camp operators who are out to hose their farm workers and sort of twirl their mustaches and laugh sinisterly.
So there were all sorts of things that the NDP brought in that got undone in June, May and June in their spring setting.
And then the rest of what was left over was undone pretty much in the October to December system.
The UCP, for instance, got the NDP law change that allowed the provincial government to get into the electrical market in Alberta and meddle around with all the different prices.
So lots of good things that they have done.
They're very slow on turning around the fiscal side of things.
We're still going to ramp up a lot of debt before they start to turn this giant ship around.
But they have signaled that they're going to hold firm in labor negotiations with the public sector unions in Alberta.
So during the four years that the NDP were the government, income in the private sector dropped net 8%.
So it was 8% lower in 2019 when the NDP were kicked out than it had been in 2015 when they came in.
8%.
If you account for inflation, it's much bigger than that.
I don't know of any government that would ever have survived that.
But in the public sector, while the NDP were in power, no layoffs versus 60,000 net layoffs in the private sector.
And income kept increasing.
It's about 6% or 7% above where it was when the NDP came in.
But nonetheless, public sector unions in Alberta were preparing to ask for almost 8% increases from the NDP.
And the NDP were prepared to give it to them.
UCP comes in and says, no, no, no, we want you to roll back 2%, just 2%.
That's one quarter of what the amount that incomes have dropped in the private sector.
We think that's fair.
You've had a pretty good run for the last four years.
And by the way, there are going to be some layoffs.
Okay, that's pretty good.
I think they've not been as hard fiscally as they could have been, but they have been way better than the NDP.
And, you know, they're going to get things righted.
I really do have confidence this is not just show for one year and then they'll go back to spending freely.
So they've done lots of good things.
But the question now is: where do they go from here?
Because the big problems that they're going to have going forward are not undoing NDP mistakes.
It's going to be taking on the feds and wringing concessions out of Ottawa that are meaningful to the Alberta economy.
And I'm not sure how you do that.
I mean, I think they need to start work on an Alberta-made in Alberta pension plan, get out of the CPP, fire that across the bow, because we contribute as a province, as individuals in our province, about $3 billion more every year than our seniors take out.
And if we left, we'd have that $3 billion to invest as a provincial pension fund.
And the rest of the country wouldn't have that $3 billion.
And they'd have to find either higher premiums or some other way, lower benefits to make up for that.
And I think that would wake people up a bit.
So there are things like that that they can do.
But as you and I have been talking about in this segment, really, an awful lot of the stuff they have to rely on convincing Ottawa, convincing the liberals to do things that are not in their DNA.
They'd have to undo Bill C-48, which is the tanker ban on Alberta oil off the north coast of BC.
Have to substantially change, if not undo, I'd rather they just undid C69, which is the new environmental review process that also includes gender equity review and social justice review.
I wish they'd undo that too.
Are the liberals going to do that at the threat of losing votes in downtown Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa and Vancouver?
No, I don't think they're going to.
So a lot of the things that stand in the way for Alberta coming in 2020 are things that Kenny has to convince the feds to do.
He can't do it himself.
He can't use his majority in the Alberta legislature to repeal any of this.
And that's going, I think this is going to be a very interesting year for the UCP as they try very hard to change Ottawa's minds with, I think, very little hope of doing that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you were kind enough to be on panels we had at our town halls in Alberta.
We had about 500 people in Calgary and just under that in Edmonton for two nights there a few weeks ago.
People were concerned.
And I mean, I remember some of those folks from Preston Manning's the West Wants In moment of the Reform Party.
And here we are 30 years later and they're saying, well, we tried the West Wants In.
Now time the West should get out.
But curiously, a lot of those people were also Jason Kenney UCP members.
So here's what I kept on thinking.
My big takeaway was Jason Kenny's going to try and do all these things through negotiation and through taking back certain constitutional jurisdictions under provincial powers.
But at the end of the day, if there's no or else, Trudeau can ignore much of it.
And I don't think Trudeau, like you said, I don't think he's going to sacrifice support in Montreal and Toronto.
I'm still a skeptic that the Transmountain Pipeline Expansion will ever happen.
But I also am pretty sure in my bones that Jason Kenney will never even give sympathy to a WEXIT movement.
I think he'll, in fact, turn against it soon enough if it starts to get any momentum.
So if Alberta can't get changes from within Confederation, do you think there's any chances that Alberta could try and leave?
Or is that just a hopeless pipe dream?
No, and I would put the amount of solid support for leaving at somewhere just north of 20%, 25%, maybe.
I don't think it reaches a third just yet, although there's easily 40 or 45% of Albertans who are in the yes, let's go, or the, well, we could think about it camp.
I mean, I think if there were an independence referendum held in Alberta today, it would probably fail because the case hasn't been made yet sufficiently for what we would benefit from leaving.
Gut feeling, lots of people have the gut feeling that it's time to go.
That as you correctly said, you know, when Preston Manning came along in 1988, 1989 and said, no, no, wait a minute here.
The West wants in.
It doesn't want out.
A lot of people who were thinking about leaving at that point or thinking about becoming nationalists, separatists, whatever, said, okay, okay, let's go all in on a West wants in scheme and see whether or not we can get anything out of that.
There are a lot of people, as you also said, who went through all that who are not saying, yeah, we tried that.
It didn't work.
And there's no reason to believe it's going to work this time either.
Because you remember, the Reform Party tried that with a conservative government in Ottawa.
Now you've got a liberal and you've got a liberal who's named Trudeau in Ottawa.
What do you think the chances are?
So, you know, I think it's going to be a tough year for the UCP.
They're going to have to deliver a few things from Ottawa.
Premier Kenny and a lot of his ministers went to Ottawa just before Christmas to meet with their federal counterparts and see if anything will come out of that.
Nothing's going to come out of it because it's the party season.
So, you know, they went there, they said their piece.
They did not come back with any major concessions, but they maybe came back with a couple extra pounds because they stopped to have some cookies and an eggnog in the West Block.
But yeah, it's going to be a tricky year because as much as Kenny can change, and Kenny is not going to suck up to Trudeau the way Notley did, Kenny is not going to go after the social license idea that, you know, if we just impose an awful lot of environmental controls on ourselves, the environmentalists will get out of the way and let us build pipelines.
He's not going to buy into any of that whoey.
I mean, that's just hokeum, that stuff.
He's not going to do that.
But the ability then to extract anything out of Ottawa is still fairly limited.
And I think, I mean, you had at those panels you were talking about, you had an idea, which I think is very, very good.
If I were Kenny, I wouldn't say, I would say, you know, I'm a federalist.
I want Alberta to stay very much in Confederation.
But I think it would be very, very good.
He's got his fair deal panel now that's looking at ways of sheltering Alberta from federal intrusion.
But I think if when that is done, the next step for him would be the what else that you were talking about.
And that is, well, let's just let an awful lot of big thinkers in Alberta come up with ideas for what would we do about the currency if we left?
What would we do about monarchy versus republic?
What would we do about deals with the United States?
Would we look to become a protectorate of the United States?
Would we simply have a nice trade arrangement with them?
Would we look to them?
I mean, you remember in those panels that Barry Cooper, a professor, very respected professor from the University of Calgary, said, I think we're going to have to go to the Americans and ask them to send troops so that the federal government doesn't try and take over Alberta.
So, you know, work out all those scenarios so that they're constantly worried.
I mean, if they were worried that the yellow vests were coming to kidnap Justin Truth, if the provincial government of Alberta decides it's going to let all the academics and legal scholars in the province loose and the financial experts on what do we do the day after a successful independence referendum, the way Quebec worked all that out before the 95 referendum, work that out just to show we're serious.
Very interesting.
Holy cow.
I tell you, something has to be done.
I think Alberta, once the most entrepreneurial province in Canada, still is, by the way.
But you go in four years and then eight years and maybe 12 years under Trudeau.
And then I think like Detroit, which was once the mightiest city in all of America, things can change.
And you know what?
You remember for years and years, you and I have heard this from a hundred experts, experts, that as people move to Alberta from other parts of the country, the political culture in Alberta would change.
We'd become more moderate.
We'd become more left-leaning.
We'd be big on the welfare state like the rest of the country is.
And it never happened because Alberta was prosperous.
And when people got here, Alberta changed them more than they changed Alberta.
But if Alberta is, as you say, eight or 12 years stuck in this recession and it's not working, maybe that, not the prosperousness of Alberta, but the destitute nature of eight or 10 or 12 years will change the political culture.
And I would really regret that.
Yeah, very sad.
Well, Lorne Gunder, great to see you again.
And here's hoping 2020 is a better year than either of us are now predicting.
Nice to see you, my friend.
All the best to you in this Christmas Conuka season.