Lorne Gunter and Ezra Levant dissect Alberta’s conservative future, where UCP leadership hopefuls like Danielle Smith ($21B Tech Frontier Mine tied to 14 Indigenous communities) and Pierre Polyev (CPC frontrunner with strong rural support) clash with Justin Trudeau’s "green cult" policies—like Sri Lanka’s nitrogen-linked famine—while Europe still buys Russian oil. Gunter blames Jason Kenney’s federalist caution for alienating Alberta’s base, contrasting it with Polyev’s ideological resilience and the UCP’s need to reclaim boldness against Ottawa’s overreach. Alberta’s energy sector, ethical yet undervalued, could be its key weapon in reshaping Canada’s political and environmental trajectory. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey Rebels, today we have a heart-to-heart chat with our friend Lauren Gunter with the Edmonton Sun.
Talk about the Alberta leadership contest for the United Conservative Party to succeed Jason Kenning.
We'll talk a bit about Pierre Polyev, Justin Trudeau, and anything that comes across our radar screen.
It's a special holiday Monday edition of the Ezra Levant Show.
Before I get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
It's eight bucks a month.
You get my show every weekday plus four weekly shows from my colleagues.
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Thanks.
Here's today's show.
Tonight, a feature interview about the state of Alberta and conservative politics.
Our guest is Lauren Gunter.
It's August 1st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
And joining us now live via Skype from Edmonton is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
Lauren, great to see you again.
You have been covering Alberta politics for decades, and Jason Kenney certainly shook things up when he unified the PC party and the wild roast.
And he burned brightly, but he flamed out in a way.
I watched the debate for his successor on TV last week, and I couldn't help, it popped into my head: Jason Kenny and the seven dwarves.
I thought none of these successors are really A-listers.
And I felt sort of disappointed about it as a conservative and as someone who loves Alberta.
Jason Kenny and the Seven Dwarves00:10:33
I'd love your take on it.
Yeah, I think that there's an awful lot of, there are an awful lot of very sincere, capable people who are running.
But do they have the royal jelly?
Can they take on Rachel Notley, who has a very powerful personal magnetism that a lot of voters, like a lot of voters, hate it too.
But nonetheless, she is a formidable foe.
And can any of them take her on?
And I, yeah, I think there are some.
It would be nice if there was another year before the next election, which will come in 2023.
It'd be nice if it didn't come until 2024.
And whoever takes over has a year to get seasoned and a year to campaign.
But that's not going to happen.
So you have to look at this and say, well, who will be the most acceptable to the greatest number of voters in the shortest period of time?
Now, I read your latest column on this subject where you referred to Danielle Smith as her idea of a sovereignty act to stand up for Alberta's sovereignty, really replicating some of the stances taken by Quebec over the last 50 years.
You said that sort of took up all the oxygen in the debate.
Let's run a clip of that just to show what you mean here.
She was proposing the idea, and it seemed to be something that a lot of her opponents said, oh, that's too wild.
That's too risky.
Here's a clip of that from the debate.
Ottawa has created chaos.
Ottawa has canceled our projects.
Ottawa has caused Energy East and Tech Frontier Mine and tens of billions of other projects to be canceled.
The reason these are linked is because part of our strategy in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is exporting our clean LNG to displace coal in India and China.
We cannot do that because Ottawa keeps standing in our way.
We need to build economic corridors.
We need to take the lead on that.
We need to work with our First Nations.
We need to take the lead on solving the environmental issues so that we can get our product to Churchill, to Thunder Bay, to Tuck Tayuktuck to Port of Prince Rupert.
We have to exert our sovereignty to do that because Ottawa is not going to do it for us.
Part of me thinks, well, even if it is going to be struck down by courts, even if it is politically risky, it makes the point.
Alberta's here to fight, even if not all the punches are landed.
Quebec has never landed a true punch, but look what it's managed to get from Ottawa because it was belligerent.
It got its three seats on the Supreme Court.
It's got it, you know, got so many little perks along the way.
It's got so many statuses.
They never did separate, but it was the threat of it that got them the goodies.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I just think, unfortunately, Alberta is never going to be treated the way that Quebec is.
The Liberals used to be founded in Quebec.
You used to look at the 75 seats in Quebec or whatever, like 72 or 68, or previous totals.
And you could count on all but one or two of them going to the Liberals.
And so there's just ingrained in the liberal DNA this desire to appease Quebec, to cajole Quebec.
You take a look at the way Quebec is dealt with on transfer payments and equalization payments.
And then you take a look at the way Alberta is treated for funding Quebec.
You know, oh, you say you don't want to pay this.
This is so un-Canadian.
Well, what is Canadian about demanding that you get 50% of all of the transfer and equalization money or you're going to leave?
Like Quebec gets pandered to in a way that Alberta never will.
And so I think Alberta has basically two options.
And one is not to follow Quebec's lead.
I think it's to follow Quebec's tone.
I think what we're seeing from the UCP leadership race so far is that Jason Kenney's big falling out with his own party was maybe not the pandemic response.
It was his refusal to hammer Justin Trudeau.
And, you know, because you see, Danielle Smith has become the frontrunner and or at least the person who has generated the most heat and light with her Alberta Sovereignty Act.
Nobody's talking about anything else.
You know, I've looked at some of the platforms for the other candidates.
They have fine ideas, but it's all, you know, and then everybody says, Alberta Sovereignty Act.
Oh, that's crazy.
So she has hit a nerve both for and against with her sovereignty act.
And Brian Gene, even Brian Gene, his theme for the campaign is not never another lockdown.
It's autonomy for Albertans.
And so I really do, I've come to think that Jason just was tone deaf to what Albertans wanted to do.
You know, you think of Ralph Klein.
Ralph Klein, mayor of Calgary at the time he said it, but said, let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark.
He wasn't a policy wonk.
He wasn't a deep thinker.
I mean, Jason might have been the smartest person we've ever had as the premier of Alberta, but he just didn't have the common touch the way Ralph did.
I mean, I remember following Ralph one time into a shopping center in Fort Saskatchewan.
And his government was terribly unpopular there.
They were closing hospitals.
They were cutting the budget.
They were scaling back on school funding.
And he walked from one end of that mall to the other.
And he got smiles and handshakes all the way along from people who, when he initially got there, were going to lay into him.
And Jason just doesn't have that.
Turned out he didn't have that touch.
I have a theory behind that.
I used to know Jason pretty well, but we haven't spoken in a couple of years.
And my theory is this, and maybe it's unfair, but I do believe it.
Jason Kenney was one of the A-list cabinet ministers under Stephen Harvey.
He speaks very good French.
You could say he had deep roots in Ontario as much as he had in Alberta.
He worked with the new ethnic communities.
He was really a Harper's liaison to the multicultural community.
He was immigration minister for a while.
So he had all these assets that are obviously useful in a federal campaign, but he wanted, he didn't want to run against Trudeau right away.
He didn't want to, he could see what we could all see, which is that, you know, it was going to take a while for the Conservative Party to get back.
So I believe he looked at Alberta as a safe place to be a conservative guy, always with an eye at moving back to Ottawa, that he would come back, show he could govern, unite the two center-right parties in Alberta, and then go back triumphantly, letting someone else take the heavy blows.
And the problem with that is he always, in the back of his mind, was second-guessing anything that would sound too Alberta-ish.
He was always thinking, well, how would this sound when I am running in the greater Toronto area?
How will this sound in five years if I'm trying to woo Quebec, if I'm trying to woo the area code 905 in Ontario?
And so he would never fully commit to being totally loyal to Alberta, which often means pit yourself against the feds.
I think he pulled back every time because he was keeping his eye on the main prize.
That's my theory.
What do you think of that?
Well, it's more than a theory.
I mean, I know initially that he did have thoughts that Alberta was not his final stop.
Being premier of Alberta was not going to be the pinnacle of his career.
He was going to go back and lead the federal conservatives.
I don't know whether, after a couple of years of uniting the party and getting it started, whether he still held on to that or not.
But he didn't warm to Alberta, and Albertans didn't warm to him.
And for whatever reason that was, there was a certain tone deafness there.
And he simply needed to say, I remember one time Lawheed got this ballroom full of oil executives and professionals, professors, all sorts of people who aren't normally really excited in politics.
He got them whipped into a frenzy by saying, you know, yesterday we stopped the feds at the door and tomorrow we're going to kick him off the porch.
Now, the man then went and signed an abbreviated national energy program.
And there's a very famous picture of Laheed tinking champagne glasses with Mark Law or with Pierre Trudeau after they'd signed the new NEP.
So Lawyed didn't always play the tough guy, Alberta rogue.
He was a lawyer and he did make these compromises, but he knew the rhetoric that would get people going.
And that just never, Jason just never seemed to clue into that.
I think he could have survived the mask mandate and the vax passports and the lockdown.
He might have had to come out and say, sorry, we found out these are wrong.
We'll never do them again.
But I think he could have survived those.
What he couldn't survive was the feds came in.
They wanted emission caps that didn't apply to anybody else in the country.
They wanted to end pipeline.
They wanted to destroy the oil sands developments.
There was the tech resources frontier project in the oil sands, a $21 billion project, one project.
And the feds kiboshed that.
And they didn't hammer back.
And the real shame of that one was that there were 14 indigenous communities around that project, all of whom had signed on to it because they could see the economic development that would lead to a better tomorrow for their people.
And we still didn't hammer the feds on that.
And so ultimately, whether that is something the voters of the UCP will admit to or even be able to coalesce in their heads, I don't know.
But it seems to me that ultimately what we're seeing in this race to replace Kenny is that the number one issue is we haven't been hard enough with a huddle.
I accept that.
I do believe that it's related to his heavy hand on the lockdowns because Jason Kenney would be a fancy VIP guy in Ottawa, but then he would go back and meet with real people in Southeast Calgary where he represented.
Gut Feeling in Politics00:07:54
And that would, and he would meet in rooms around the country and he would get de-autowashed.
But when there's a lockdown and there's no gatherings allowed, and the only people he consorts with are other insiders, many of whom weren't even from Alberta, actually, many of whom he borrowed from Ottawa.
When he's not getting detoxed from, you know, he's sitting there under the legislature, only hearing to official, only hearing from official people, he forgets that Arthur Pavlovsky, while a bit of a handful and a bit voluble, that's his kind of people, or at least his kind of people wants Arthur Pavlovsky to be treated with a little bit of respect, not a SWAT team-style, you know, 15-police arrest on a highway.
And in the end, on the pandemic, when he started to use Trudeau type language to talk about the extreme yeah who's taking over the party, I think they're related.
I think they're related.
I don't think you can get away up for the grassroots.
I don't think you can separate one from the other.
I agree with that.
And it is a common problem for all politicians that they don't get out enough.
And the longer you are in office, and this doesn't really apply to Kenny because he's only in his first term, but say you're in office for two terms, three terms, you tend to gravitate around you, those people who will tell you what you want to hear, those people who are loyalty becomes more important than honesty.
And, you know, and that is a huge danger for any person.
It's a huge danger for a CEO, much less a premier or prime minister, but it is really evident in politics.
Yeah.
Now, you said that Danielle Smith is generating the most heat and light, and I agree with you.
But there's a risk there in assuming that what you can detect in the media, in headlines on Twitter, for those who are on there, is the same as who buys a membership and votes.
And I remember a few years ago in Ontario, Patrick Brown surprised people by winning the Ontario PC Party leadership because while everyone was having a TV debate, he was selling thousands of memberships in his case to new Canadians.
So I don't know what kind of ground game Danielle Smith has.
I don't know what kind of support she has in the caucus of MLAs.
And so if the only information I have is what I can see on Twitter, I agree with you.
She's got this thing, you know, we could count the number of followers, count the number of retweets.
But that's not how the vote is done.
Do you know, have you been able to detect, do you have friends on the inside who can give you any measurement of what really counts, which is on the ground, are party members either buying memberships to support her or are existing memberships casting themselves for her?
Or is she just a distraction on the media while something else happens on subterranean?
I'm having real trouble getting a good handle on that.
This is a very subterranean campaign.
It is, I think, in part because you're talking about the seven dwarfs.
None of these people has the kind of organizational chops that Kenny had.
One of the things that really bothered the old wild rose element that became part of UCP was that Kenny used very professional, very federal techniques to organize things.
And he could out organize and out-hammer anybody who came up against him.
And that's not necessarily how provincial politics is done.
And provincial politics in a province of 4.5 million people is kind of collegial.
You know, you're just expected to sort of slough off Jim's unvarnished opinion about X, Y, and Z and not media manage the way that Kenny's people did and be as forceful.
They could tell you within a few hundred people how many phone calls MLA's offices had had on different issues.
And they just had spreadsheets on stuff.
They didn't actually use spreadsheets, but you know what I'm talking about.
They had reams of information that also gets you away from your gut feeling, right?
You have to have a gut feeling, I think, to run provincially.
So I don't have a good gut feeling yet.
I'm trying to get back into these campaigns and see who's doing what.
I mean, one of the people I think who's been having a surprising response is Rebecca Schultz, who is the youngest person in the race, who seems to appeal not just to urbanize.
I mean, her problem is she's a Calgarian.
And I think there's going to be an anti-Calgary movement in this race because Kenny, of his 29 cabinet ministers, 20 of them were from Calgary.
And, you know, you can't ignore rural Alberta like that and think that you're going to survive.
So, but she does play well with the rural caucus.
Apparently, the rural caucus members I've talked to said, yeah, she's good.
She's talked to us.
She's open about things.
She said she wouldn't do lockdowns again.
I mean, a lot of the things that really appeal to them.
So she's good.
And you can't underestimate and you can't overestimate Travis Tape, the former finance minister who is the establishment candidate.
But, you know, the establishment told me, establishment kept telling me Kenny was going to get 65% of the vote.
I thought he was going to get about 58%.
They said he's going to get 65%.
You just watch 65%.
He's going to get it.
Don't worry about it.
We know we're going to, he got 51.
So I can't tell from these establishment voices whether they're plugged in enough anymore to understand.
So it's really, I think we have to wait till after the federal leadership race is over to start seeing who's forming up where.
We'll have about a month after the Fed's finish.
We have about a month after that before the Alberta vote.
That's interesting.
I got one more question for you because you mentioned how Kenny's team was very confident in the leadership race, which again, you're right.
They were disconnected.
They were also confident that when Brian Gene, the former leadership rival of Jason Kenney, ran in Fort McMurray, that they could beat him in the nomination.
And it really was a proxy battle and Brian Gene beat them.
And he beat them on an explicitly anti-Kenny campaign.
So maybe Brian Gene has some subterranean, I keep using that word, action.
It's hard to measure.
It's something we hear him because Danielle has all the heat and light.
Gene has had almost no heat and light.
It's really odd.
And you can, as you said with Patrick Brown, you can avoid the media chaos and still win, provided you're doing the organizational things right.
But I don't see any evidence of that very much from genes people either.
So it's really hard to tell.
And I think, you know, now we're into summer.
You know, we're past the stampede.
Stampede's always a good gauge for who's got what kind of support and things because we flip 700 pancakes, those people flip 1,200 pancakes.
You can sort of gauge those things, but stampede's over now.
There isn't another big event until after Labor Day where you can really get a handle on this.
So it's frustrating for me.
Well, listen, I appreciate you chewing over this UCP leadership race with me.
And I'm still informing myself.
I was not very familiar with all of the candidates.
I really enjoyed watching the leadership debate the other night, even though I found it very depressing.
New Great Reset Decree00:07:40
I want to shift gears a little bit, but only a little, because one of the issues that did come up in that Alberta UCP leadership race was the new kind of great reset that Trudeau is talking about.
He's always talked about transitioning oil and gas workers out of the oil sense.
And Gerald Butts and David Suzuki, they all talk about transitioning away.
Now they've added transitioning farmers off of farming.
And instead of demonizing element number, I think it's six on the periodic table, carbon, now they're demonizing element number one on the periodic table, hydro, sorry, not hydrogen, they're demonizing nitrogen.
I don't have my periodical table of the elements on it.
I don't either.
I'm not going to call it.
Sorry, that's right.
It's not hydrogen.
It's nitrogen they're after.
It would be just as insane no matter which element they're after.
They're natural elements.
You know, I realize I've been talking about hydrogen before.
Nitrogen is the one they're trying to blame, but nitrogen is key to, you know, we talk about the Green Revolution.
Now that means sort of eco stuff.
But a generation ago, the Green Revolution actually meant how do we feed the world?
How do we get crops that are resistant to the weather?
How do we use fertilizers to increase the yield of land?
How do we feed billions of mouths?
That was actually the origination of the phrase, the Green Revolution.
And the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, life depends on it.
Look what happened to Sri Lanka, where they said, oh, we're going to go organic.
We're just going to stop using nitrogen.
You're going to starve a country.
And then the World Economic Forum and the globalist president of the Netherlands, Mark Ruta.
I'm sorry, I can't remember if he's prime minister or president, said, okay, hey, Dutch farmers, you're the number one exporters of certain agricultural products in Europe.
You're like for centuries, you've been a gem of our country.
We're just reducing you by 30%.
And they've been up.
And now that madness has come to Canada, and some of the candidates saying they're against it, but some of them talk about net zero.
Give me your take on this war on nitrogen.
They'll come after hydrogen in due time.
They'll probably charge you for oxygen.
They'll come after oxygen in a while.
This is a cult.
This is a cult.
It has become a cult to which CEOs, politicians, senior bureaucrats all belong.
And, you know, you get all these QAnon types who talk about the secret culture.
There's no secret about the cult that's the most dangerous, and that is the green cult that all of them have bought into.
It's fascinating to me to see Justin Trudeau come out and say, well, we will simply decree that there will be 42% fewer emissions from the oil and gas industry by 2030.
We will simply decree that we will use 30% less fertilizer.
We will simply decree that you won't build any more pipeline lines.
We'll decree that the economy is going to be great anyway, and we'll decree that everybody who's put out of work in the ag sector and the energy sector, they'll get great jobs in other sectors.
It'll just be, it'll just happen.
And the disconnect there, like we're talking about the disconnect between Kenny and Al Burton, the disconnect between the green cult and reality is enormous.
Like you should be George Mumbia, who's a famous British environmental reporter, was being interviewed on the BBC this week.
And he said, we have to get over our dependence on agriculture.
What in heaven's name does that mean?
Like, how can you get over this?
Yeah, just stop eating, I guess.
Just do that.
You know, I remember one time that my mother said that it was going to be very, very dangerous when the majority of people no longer had a connection to the farm.
And her generation, at least a lot of them, had parents who'd farmed, or they had cousins who are still on the farm.
But as soon as everybody became urbanized and they think food comes from the store, she said that's going to be very dangerous because people will not understand what goes into farming.
And she was absolutely right.
Because now we think, well, we could shut off fertilizer and the yields will still be the same.
And because there are people in think tanks, lefty think tanks, environmental think tanks, who've got elaborate charts and put into expensive reports who will say, yes, we could do with X less nitrogen and that'll save the planet and we'll still be able to feed ourselves.
Somebody says, oh, look, look, it has a nice, shiny cover on it.
It must be true.
It's wonderful.
And this just unreality.
That's what people just don't understand.
That's what led to the farmers' protests in the Netherlands, where people blocked mega highways and they rallied outside the legislature.
And it's going to happen here too.
Yeah.
Well, I can't help but notice that at the same time they're demonizing normal agriculture, they're promoting with government funds and government messaging, eating bugs.
And I know that sounds like madness and eating synthetic meat.
And I really do think it's related to their decarbonization and then eating.
Like it's, it's, it's a utopia.
And by the way, some of the same people are behind it.
But Bill Gates is behind so many weird, and they are, they all have sort of a megalomanic God complex.
We're going to change how you use energy.
We're going to change how you eat food.
And sure, maybe you're going to have to have a smaller life and a worse life, but Bill Gates himself says we need billions fewer people.
That bugs.
Will any one of them live a smaller life or a more miserable life?
No.
So they don't have to bear any of the consequences of this.
Guibo, Stephen Giru, the federal environment minister, his department said this week that, well, if you aren't going to be able to use plastic utensils at food trucks and takeouts, use your hands.
Use your hands.
Use your hands.
How insane are that?
And what happens when all of a sudden, now you've used your hands, but you haven't been able to sanitize them properly, and you stick all the germs in your mouth along with your taco, and it suddenly visits to the emergency rooms go up.
When San Francisco banned plastic bags about 10 years, they had a 40% increase in food poisonings at their emergency rooms in the city.
And somebody connected it back to the fact that people don't wash the cloth bags that they use instead of plastic bags.
These people just do not ever think how ordinary people live their lives.
They don't understand how ordinary people think.
They don't understand how they live.
And so they come up with these grand theories that are absolutely ludicrous.
Yeah, it's madness.
Well, yeah, yeah.
You know, it feels related when Justin Trudeau says he wants to be Ukraine's greatest ally.
And he met with, and I mean, he went over there and he certainly had a lot of photo ops.
And the one thing that I think powers Vladimir Putin, his greatest weapon is not a tank or a missile system.
Germany's Oil Deal with Russia00:11:09
And I mean, thank God he hasn't used nuclear weapons, but his greatest weapon and the one that pays for all the others is the oil weapon.
And in more particularity, the natural gas weapon.
It's astonishing to me that Europe, the Baltics, get about 90% of their gas from gas prompts.
Even Germany, it's about 40% of their natural gas.
Germany, this mighty industrial economy.
Donald Trump went out there to Germany and said, don't, let me show you this clip of Donald Trump warning them, don't buy gas from Russia.
And they smirked.
They laughed at that dumb Yankee who didn't.
Here's a clip of that.
I think it's very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where you're supposed to be guarding against Russia and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia.
So we're protecting Germany, we're protecting France, we're protecting all of these countries.
And then numerous of the countries go out and make a pipeline deal with Russia where they're paying billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia.
So we're supposed to protect you against Russia, but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia.
And I think that's very inappropriate.
And the former Chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that's supplying the gas.
Ultimately, Germany will have almost 70% of their country controlled by Russia with natural gas.
So you tell me, is that appropriate?
I mean, I've been complaining about this from the time I got in.
It should have never been allowed to have happened.
But Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they will be getting from 60 to 70% of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline.
And you tell me if that's appropriate, because I think it's not.
And I think it's a very bad thing for NATO.
And I don't think it should have happened.
And I think we have to talk to Germany about it.
On top of that, Germany is just paying a little bit over 1%, whereas the United States, in actual numbers, is paying 4.2% of a much larger GDP.
So I think that's inappropriate also.
You know, we're protecting Germany, we're protecting France, we're protecting everybody, and yet we're paying a lot of money to protect.
Now, this has been going on for decades.
This has been brought up by other presidents, but other presidents never did anything about it because I don't think they understood it or they just didn't want to get involved.
But I have to bring it up because I think it's very unfair to our country.
It's very unfair to our taxpayer.
Well, who's laughing now?
And all these so-called sanctions on Russia exempted oil and gas.
Because if you're going to truly put a sanction on Russia, you're really sanctioning, is Germany going to stop using 40% of its energy?
So my point is the one thing that Canada could actually do for Ukraine and Poland and the Baltics is actually sell them what I called ethical oil and ethical gas.
And we can do it if we only had some pipelines.
If we were allowed to frack, that's where you get shale gas.
The one thing Canada, we're not a military superpower.
We're not a financial superpower.
We're not a diplomatic superpower.
What's the one thing we have that actually they need is oil and gas.
And Trudeau said, we'll help you with hydrogen energy technology.
I don't even know what that is.
I don't think Europe knows what that is.
They need oil and gas.
The one thing Trudeau could do, he immediately said, I'm not going to do.
I think we need to revive ethical oil.
What do you think?
Oh, yeah, absolutely, we do.
And I think the only way we're going to do that is for people to start pitching to ordinary Canadians that you need to vote for people who are going to be behind ethical oil development, understand how you can develop oil and still be conscious of the environment.
And if you really are worried about climate change, you can still be concerned about that.
The Norwegians are very good at that, right?
The Norwegians have this enormous reserve of oil money from the past that they built up by selling this idea that Norwegian oil is cleaner oil.
It's more ethical oil than oil from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and a lot of North American oil.
And it is.
But we are the boy scouts of the world.
We are the purists.
We like to self-flagellate.
Oh, no, we can't have any oil at all.
No, no, no.
Any of it's bad.
And our federal government, current federal government, will even side with an awful lot of environmentalists who say that our oil sands oil is the dirtiest oil in the world, that it's the worst environmental threat in the world.
They'll say that.
They'll agree with that.
I don't know how I really don't understand.
Again, it's that disconnect between reality and our government.
And it's a deepening divide.
You know, when I used to talk about, I mean, I wrote that book, Ethical, I used to do speeches and I was often invited to talk in the oil patch in Calgary.
And some people said, why are you speaking to the converted?
No, they're not converted.
They were converted to the other side.
They became self-loathing oil and gas men because they believed what their opponents said about them in bad faith.
And, you know, I saw this in the UCP leadership debate.
I forget which candidate.
Maybe it was Leela here.
I can't remember, who was talking about, well, we need to show the world that our oil is acceptable.
So we need to impose net zero.
Really?
Haven't we just learned in the last six months that no matter what Putin does, no matter what Saudi Arabia does, Europe will still buy their, I mean, Biden literally sent an emissary to meet with Venezuela saying, please pump more oil.
Biden personally went to Saudi Arabia saying, please pump more oil.
And Russia, their ruble has never been stronger.
And it's oil money.
Like, haven't we just learned that this whole, oh, you need social license?
Really?
Tell me a single consumer of oil in the world that's turned their nose up to Canada, let alone Russia and Saudi Arabia.
It's being, if we're talking about Ukraine and dealing a blow to Russia and things too, I mean, why did we give the turbines for Nord Stream One back to Russia?
Because Germany asked us to.
Yeah, but Germany has gotten quite soft on Putin in the last couple of months because they started to see him pinching their economy and their lifestyle.
So, you know, and how many times have you had an environmentalist throw in your face German environmental policy as a way Canada should be going?
But as soon as they weren't going to be able to drive their Audis in Mercedes to 225 kilometers an hour on the Audubon, they asked us to send the equipment back so they could get oil and gas again from Russia.
It's hypocrisy.
Yeah, they never mentioned.
Hey, I've got one last question for you.
I really appreciate your time.
It's great to catch up with you.
And I know we're very Alberta-centric here, but I think that's okay.
I think Alberta is a leader within Canada.
And a lot of these issues we're talking about in Alberta, they apply elsewhere, whether it's nitrogen farming or, you know, Eastern Canada still imports oil from conflict countries, by the way.
I want to talk just for a minute about the federal CPC, Conservative Party of Canada leadership.
Give me your thoughts on that.
My read of things, because there was some measurement, the candidates sort of said how many memberships they sold.
My read of things is that Pierre Polyev is the Twitter winner. of that contest, but he is actually, he seems to be the membership sales winner too.
I think he's going to win that leadership.
And I think he's actually a surprisingly robust ideological candidate against both the liberals, but also against liberal media.
That's my take.
I'd love to hear your take.
And he will not, as Andrew Scheer and Aaron O'Toole both did, he will not crumble when liberal media start to attack him on his ideology because he is so solid on the things that he knows and understands and believes that he doesn't have to apologize for them.
He'll just explain them.
And that is so hopeful to me.
I think he's going to win too.
I think he has sold so many more memberships than anyone else that it's going to be difficult to stop him.
But the Conservative Party of Canada uses this really wonky point system for electing its leaders where every riding gets 100 points, whether it has 20,000 members or 200 members.
The only time you don't get 100 points is if you don't have 100 members.
So all the ridings get 100 points.
It's divvied up by what percentage of the vote each candidate gets in that riding.
But it's still deliberately done to take the power of the West away and the power of rural Ontario away and give it back to downtown Toronto, Montreal, and Atlantic Canada.
And unfortunately, one of the reasons the CPC will not give you the numbers, the actual vote totals for each candidate is they don't want you to know if by some chance Polyev were to get 300,000 votes, but they're all in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and rural Ontario.
And that's overcome by Shere's votes in Quebec and in Ontario.
So Shere could finish with the second highest number of votes and still win on this ridiculous point system.
And I don't like it, but I think Polyev is so far ahead in so many riding that even that goofy point system will not defeat him.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And I hope you're right about him standing firm against the media.
I saw he had a sort of a Twitter flame war with global news.
I love that, not for the substance of it, but I love seeing him fight.
And I love seeing all the other media pile on and him digging in because I want him to hate the media because otherwise it creeps into their mind.
Andrew Scheer did it.
Aaron O'Toole did it.
They like me.
I can win them over.
I really can feel like I'm getting through to them.
And that's the source of more corruption than anything else, thinking you can please the media.
Well, it's great to catch up with you.
And I really appreciate your take on the Alberta UCP race.
I think it's two things that under Jason Kenny, not standing up for Alberta versus Ottawa.
And I do believe his heavy-handed approach, especially on the churches.
And I know you don't share my views on that.
That's fine.
But I think that those visual images of pastors, you know, of almost riot police, I think that felt an Albertan.
And there were echoes of Trudeau there.
That's what I think.
But of course, that's all in the past.
Final Thoughts on Kenny00:00:43
And we'll see what comes next.
It's great to catch up with you and look forward to your columns always in the Emmy Sun and other post-media places.
Take care, my friend.
You too.
There you have it.
Lauren Gunter, one of our favorite guys.
Stay with us.
My final thoughts are next.
Well, that's our show for today.
I hope you enjoyed it and are enjoying your long weekend.
You know, we do shows even on statutory holidays.
So I hope you appreciated our chat with Lauren.
He's a pretty smart guy.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at, well, I guess I'm not at world headquarters.