Ezra Levant examines Alberta’s October 6 UCP leadership vote, where Danielle Smith’s Sovereignty Act—allowing opt-outs from federal policies like Quebec’s Section 92 powers—could spark a clash with Ottawa. With Jason Kenney’s resignation tied to the Coots blockade protest (Jan 29–Feb 15), three key figures—Alex Van Herc, Marco, and George Jansen—now face $5K mischief charges for highway blockades, appearing in Lethbridge on October 4. Crowdfunded legal defenses and Smith’s potential rise highlight Alberta’s defiance of centralized power, testing Trudeau’s ability to manage dissent while reshaping Canada’s political landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
The province has not been big in the news for the past two years.
Politically, other things have been.
The lockdowns, of course.
Ontario had an election.
Quebec had an election yesterday.
The Federal Conservative Party chose a new leader.
Lots of stuff going on in the, quote, important parts of the world.
But what's cooking in Alberta?
Well, I think things are about to heat up in a couple of days when the province chooses its next de facto premier as Jason Kenney steps down.
We'll talk about that.
I'll give you my thoughts and we'll talk with Lauren Gunter.
That's ahead.
But first, let me invite you to subscribe to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, $8 a month.
What a bargain.
You get 20 episodes a month from me every weeknight.
And then we have four other shows that are weekly.
That's a grand total of 36 episodes every month just for eight bucks.
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Please go to rebelnewsplus.com.
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It's great TV.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, Quebec's election is the worst of all worlds and Alberta gets ready to choose a new premier.
It's October 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
Well, last night, you may have been one of the thousands of people who tuned into our live stream covering the Quebec provincial election.
I'm very glad we did.
It wasn't particularly long, and it wasn't particularly intricate.
I was here in our Rebel World headquarters, and our main lady in Quebec, Alexa Lavoie, was at the headquarters of the Quebec Conservative Party, led by Eric Duhem.
And we were on in the air for a few nights, but it was very quick that we saw the results were going to be a majority, a re-elected majority for the incumbent party, the Coalition Avenir Quebec, led by François Lega, and our little beloved Quebec Conservative Party, which was only revived a couple of years ago by Eric Duem.
Although it did well in the polls, it managed to punch through nowhere.
It actually got no seats.
It was shut out, a function of our first past-the-post system.
Here's a little chart, courtesy of the Montreal Gazette, that I think shows the story very well.
Francois Legaux's CAC party, as it's called, got 41% of the vote.
And no doubt about it, that's a win when there are five parties afoot.
But with 41% of the vote, they actually got 72% of the seats.
And the Quebec Liberal Party, very similar, 14.4% of the vote and got 16.8% of the seats, not too far off, the same proportion.
But look at how the other opposition parties fared.
The hard left-wing Quebec Solidaire got 15% of the vote, but only 9% of the seats.
The Partique, once a dominant force there, the separatist party of René Levesque, it got almost the same, 14.6% of the vote, but only 2.4% of the seats.
And the party that I had high hopes for, the Parti Conservateur de Quebec, they had 13% of the vote and no seats.
Eric Duhem, in a series of tweets today, saying he was not despondent.
He was pleased with the work they had accomplished and he would get right back at it.
Obviously, he's disappointed he had no seats.
I was proud that we had our live stream last night and Alexa was there on location.
It's been a busy political season.
Pierre Polyev, of course, took up a lot of the media attention.
He's well known in Ottawa and he plans to take on Justin Trudeau.
Even the fact that he's the new leader was interesting in that it happened because of the trucker convoy.
Aaron O'Toole, his predecessor, refused to meet with the truckers and tried to ban his MPs from doing so.
Well, they decided to replace the leader, not their principals.
And so Pierre Polyev, not only is he a strong conservative communicator who's going to shake things up, but the very fact that he was leader itself was the subject of some conflict.
Before that, I think a lot of the oxygen in the political room was that of the lockdowns.
If you think about it, for two years, this country has been in a terrible crisis: an economic crisis, a civil liberties crisis, a judicial crisis, a medical crisis, so many crises that we're only now emerging from and seeing the true damage done.
The damage was not done by the virus.
It was done by politicians using the virus as an excuse.
So, between the Quebec election, Doug Ford's re-election, Pierre Polyev's election, and the lockdowns, there's been a lot of focus other than on the province of Alberta, which is not normal.
Alberta really has an oversized place in the national discussion because it's economically so strong.
It's oil and gas and prairie freedom.
It's always been at odds with the Ottawa mentality.
Even the Constitution is tilted against it.
There was Western separatism afoot until Preston Manning tried to harness it and turn into the Reform Party.
Stephen Harper tamped down both Western separatism and Quebec separatism and gave the country nine years of peace.
Trudeau has ripped that up and is dividing us not only on geographic and ethnic and racial and gender lines, but also on vaxed and unvaxxed.
It's terrible.
But I think that in two days from now, when the Alberta United Conservative Party, the UCP as it's called, chooses its next leader, Alberta, which has been in the background for two years, I think will again come to the foreground.
I mean, Doug Ford, everyone knows him.
Francois Legault, everyone knows him.
Really, we've been stuck in the status quo for two years, but Danielle Smith, who is looking likely to win the UCP leadership, I believe that she will make Alberta the lightning rod of Confederation yet again.
She has proposed a sovereignty act.
The details are not yet written, but it would allow Alberta to opt out of federal decisions it simply doesn't like.
That sounds chaotic or outrageous, but of course, provinces do that all the time.
Even Justin Trudeau does it.
For many years, for example, police simply would not enforce laws against the possession of marijuana.
It's just a simple example of politicians choosing not to enforce certain laws.
What Danielle Smith proposes, and we've talked about this before, is that Alberta behave a little bit more like Quebec, taking up its full sovereign jurisdiction under Section 92 of the Constitution, Section 92 of the Constitution, Section 91 being the federal powers, and 92 being the provincial powers, for example, having its own provincial police force, like Quebec does, its own pension plan, like Quebec does, et cetera, maybe its own immigration policy.
I think that Danielle Smith has been under the radar of the national media for the reasons I said there were other things going on in more important parts of the country like Ontario and Quebec.
But now that those matters are all settled and now that the choice of the federal conservatives has chosen to take on Justin Trudeau, I think the Ottawa Press Gallery is going to be bored and satisfied enough that they will turn their attention to Danielle Smith.
And I think they're about to declare war on Alberta.
Alberta oil and gas and farms and guns and pipelines.
These are all the things that Ottawa politicians like to pick on to the delight of Eastern Canadian voters.
But if Danielle Smith does indeed become the leader of the party and the de facto premier, she won't have a seat in the legislature just yet.
I think that Justin Trudeau and the other liberals will pick on her to the delight of their base.
They like nothing more than going to war against a populist Alberta right-winger.
They'll call her a cowboy or a cowgirl.
I'm not sure how they'll handle fighting against a younger woman.
Justin Trudeau doesn't do well when he quarrels with women.
He seems to wind up either groping them or firing them.
But I think interesting times are ahead, and we're going to cover it from out there in Alberta.
I'm going out there for the announcement of the leadership results.
I mean, it's not a sure thing, but she seems to be leading.
So today, we're going to have an extended interview with my friend Lauren Gunter, who is based in Alberta, and he has been observing this race very carefully.
So for the rest of the show, I present to you, Lauren Gunter and I, talking about this leadership race and what it means.
Well, just two days to go until the leadership contest of the United Conservative Party in Alberta is resolved.
I have been following this along with many of our Alberta-based team.
In fact, I had the pleasure of hosting, co-hosting, a mini debate featuring three of the contenders, Brian, Gene Todlow, and Danielle Smith.
I really enjoyed it.
These guys have been to so many debates and panels.
I can't remember a leadership that had this many forums where the candidates duked it out.
But it seems that the conventional wisdom is that Danielle Smith will win.
Now, it's always dangerous to assume that that will come true.
There's no real way of knowing.
But joining us now to figure things out.
And our last thoughts before the result is revealed is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun, Lauren.
Great to see you again.
Good to see you.
Do you think the conventional wisdom is correct that Danielle Smith will win?
It's sort of tough to know.
She seemed to do well in fundraising.
She seems to get the media buzz, but that doesn't necessarily mean she's going to get party members' votes.
No, it doesn't, but she's within striking distance, I think.
I have one little caveat that I want to add to that, but for the most part, I think the conventional wisdom is right.
I think she will win on October the 6th, although it may take several ballots.
And the more ballots it takes, the greater chance someone else will beat her, because I think she has the least growth potential among the candidates.
So after the first ballot, she comes in at 40%.
It's iffy whether she can get another 10% to push herself over the top.
If she comes in at 45%, then I don't see that you can stop her.
There are two other candidates further down the ballot whose support is most likely to go to her.
And they may not on their own be very big in the totals, but they would be enough to give her the extra 5%.
So with that one caveat that if she's not at 45 on the first ballot, she may have some trouble.
I think she's there.
I think no matter whether she gets 40, 42, 45 on the first ballot, she will eventually squeak out a win.
But it's not going to be, for instance, as overwhelming as Pierre Polyev's win, which cleared the party for him.
Like he has total control of his party.
You can't have too many splinter groups or dissidents, disaffected people in his party because he won so big.
Smith will probably win, but she will inherit a party that's unsure of where it wants to go with her as the lead.
Yeah, I think it's a great analogy with Pierre Polyev at the federal level.
Not only did he win more than two-thirds of the points in their obscure point system, but in terms of each district, each riding, as they used to be called, he won almost every single one.
I think there was maybe six or eight and the whole country didn't win.
He won 330 out of 338.
That's how many.
And you could see the effect of that immediately because the media were hoping that Jean Charay or others would say, aha, the party is fractured.
The real Red Tories come with me.
But there was no room for that.
It was overwhelming.
And I think some of the other candidates sort of felt that was coming.
In Alberta, it's different.
A lot of the other candidates are sort of doing the opposite.
Federally, they all were sort of, other than Jean Chara, they were sort of sucking up to Pierre Polyev.
But in Alberta, they're sort of ganging up on Danielle Smith.
They had a press conference to denounce her signature policy item, the Sovereignty Act.
I think you're right.
A lot of the other candidates, their second or third rank support will go to each other.
I think maybe Todd Lowen's second chance, second choices will go to her.
Maybe some of Brian Jean's.
I don't know.
She really is a dissident figure.
She doesn't have ties to the party.
She's not been in MLA in almost a decade.
She's not part of the club.
And Jason Kenney couldn't be clear about denouncing her.
Yeah.
No, and that sets up some interesting scenarios if she wins.
As I said before, I think she will.
And that is she will have to be careful about putting together a team in such a way that she brings some of those disparate groups together.
But, you know, there's already talk.
There was some talk yesterday among the punditry in Alberta that, well, of course, she might win, but she can't govern as she campaigned.
Well, please, you campaign the way you campaign.
And she has to find a way to do a lot of the things that she wanted to do during the campaign, largely to bash Ottawa and to ignore Ottawa when it's possible to do so.
But at the same time, to bring in particularly Travis Tave's people.
Travis Tave is, or was the finance minister in Alberta.
He's the establishment candidate.
A lot of the people who still supported Jason Kenney went to Travis Tave.
And he's a very smart guy.
He's not just a rancher.
He's an accountant as well.
Travis Tave's Black Mark00:04:27
He was, by all accounts, a good finance minister, but he has the personality of a paved road.
You know, he's bland.
He's flat.
He didn't stand out at all during the campaign.
I think he will come second.
So how do you then appease what is largely your Calgary and establishment group represented by TAVE and still appease the Gene people, the Lowen people, and all the other candidates?
It's going to be a tricky operation for Smith.
She is smart enough to do it, but you remember too that one, I mean, I think you and I talked about this a few months ago.
She comes with this black mark, and that is that in 2014, she broke up her party by bolting over to the Tories who were in the process, in the throes of self-destruction at that point.
And that more than anything else surprises me that she's a frontrunner because that was such an awful black mark against.
I never thought she could recover from it, but she certainly seems to have recovered from it.
So, how does she then, instead of breaking apart Wild Rose, which is what she did in 2014, how does she bring together UCP?
That's a great point.
And I thought it would have been a bigger black mark too.
I mean, she basically not only destroyed the Wild Rose party, but destroyed the deeper and more important concept of an official opposition.
You can't just cut a secret deal to say we're not going to have an opposition anymore.
It's an essential part of our entire system.
And I think that is what paved the way for Rachel Mauntley.
And she did all that.
And she did all that without getting any cabinet positions for the people in her party.
Like, how do you take your party, meld it with someone else when they say, yeah, but we're not going to give you anything for it?
Yeah, I think that that was a terrifying moment.
One of the people that surprised me was behind that deal was Preston Manning.
He later revealed he advised Danielle Smith to do it.
And I want to mention Preston for one reason.
I remember because I was a young man working for Preston at the time when he wanted to evolve the Reform Party, make it more palatable for Eastern Canada.
So he created the Canadian Alliance, but not a lot of Tories.
It wasn't until Stephen Harper did the formal merger that that dream happened.
But Preston Manning tried a few times.
And he even said, well, this is really going to be a really, really, really new party.
And we're to prove it, we're going to have a leadership race.
And he was so certain he was going to win again that he didn't mind when Stockwell Day, his friend, they were actually friends, came and challenged him.
But wouldn't you know it, Stockwell Day won.
And that shocked Preston Manning.
He felt betrayed.
And his loyalists, Deborah Gay, Chuck Straw, Monty Solberg, Jay Hill, they sort of did not accept, they never accepted Stockwell Day as the new leader.
And they undermined him and they broke apart.
And this is a bit of an obscure piece of history of trivia.
They created something called the Democratic Representative Caucus.
They created like a mini party in Ottawa, but they didn't do it all at once.
It was like drip, drip, drip.
Deborah Gray quit, Chuck Straw quit, Monty Solberg quick, maybe one a week to constantly disable and stumble and step on the news coverage of Stockwell Day.
And he never really recovered from that.
And he was turfed and Stephen Harper took over the rest of his history.
And here's the reason I give you that little vignette from 20 odd years ago.
Jason Kenney has showed no compunction about trying to mess things up for Danielle Smith.
And I think that some people, maybe Kenny himself, maybe others who feel like they were deposed along with him, certainly some of the other candidates, Leela Ahir has been very vocal towards Danielle Smith.
I wonder if they're going to have the drip, drip, drip dissonance strategy towards her that Jean Charay never had a chance to do against Pierre Pollyv, but that Preston Manning and his acolytes did to Stock Day.
Do you think you're going to have a splittist counter revolution by Jason Kenney's faction?
Drip Drip Dissonance Strategy00:14:24
Yes, with, again, with some qualification.
I mean, I think there will be people who cannot see themselves serving under Danielle Smith.
But, you know, you and I both know Smith.
She's very intelligent.
She's very articulate.
And as long as she understands that she's not going to get her way 100% on the Sovereignty Act, I think she's going to be able to find a lot of common ground.
One of the other things she said is we're not ever going to bring back lockdowns and vaccine passports and mask mandates if there's another outbreak of the pandemic.
I think she can find an awful lot of common ground with all of the different candidates groups in this election.
So she has to find the issues on which there is a lot of common ground.
I mean, I think cutting billions out of health care and education, she's probably not going to get away with that, but she could easily find ways to make the other candidates' followers support about her by saying, look, we have 125,000 people working for Alberta Health Services.
22 to 23,000 of them are middle managers, not upper managers, not frontline workers.
There has got to be a lot of fat that you can trim out of that.
You know, you talk to any nurse, for instance, in Alberta, and they will tell you that their paperwork has increased in the last 10 years by probably 50 to 60 percent.
And that's because you have all these middle managers who want some sort of report every shift about this or that or the other thing that has very little to do with patient care.
Get rid of those people.
And so then you don't have to say, look, we're cutting the health budget by $5 billion and then allow bureaucrats to decide where to do that because the bureaucrats will cut nurses first and other health care work, all their frontline work.
Say, look, here are the numbers.
These are all the people in the middle of this stack who contribute very little of apparent value.
Let's try and get rid of a lot of those people and get more into patient care.
Then you could save money and at the same time expand patients.
So she has to find ways like that that she can get to her agenda without alienating the supporters for Taves and Rebecca Schultz and Brian Gene and the others.
It's going to require some cleverness, but I think she's clever enough to do that.
Now, Rachel Notley is waiting in the background.
I never thought she would become premier other than for the great cataclysm you and I discussed five minutes ago.
And then when she was finally chirped by Jason Kenney, I thought we would never see her again.
But I think Rachel Notley actually believes, and I think there's some basis to her belief, that she has a chance of becoming premier again.
We never thought it.
I mean, Kenny united the two nominally conservative parties, and he really was Canada's strongest conservative politician.
And here we are.
He didn't even finish the term and now Notley's licking her shops.
Yes.
You know, it's too early to say, but I think that I think it is a possibility she could win again.
I think it was unthinkable for her to be premier the first time, but she did it.
And so it's no longer unthinkable.
It's very thinkable.
And she was a socialist and she destroyed a lot of things, but she didn't have the same sort of gong show that the UCP has been the last six months.
I think there's a real risk Rachel Notley could win again.
I'm not saying I predict she will, but it's not a crazy scenario to have her restored as the premier again, Rachel.
No, I think if the UCP remains together and there isn't the drip, drip, drip dissension that you and I talked about a couple minutes ago, I think if there's a united UCP, she cannot win.
I think if there is one party of the center right in Alberta, the NDP cannot win.
But the last poll that I reported on, which was a couple of weeks ago, I've ignored most of the polls that have come out during this leadership race because they're very small sample sizes, and they aren't always just people who are members of the party or voting members of the party.
But one that I did report on showed that 97% of people who voted NDP in the last election intend to vote NDP again.
I have never seen that kind of intense loyalty anywhere, anywhere in Poland.
And so she's going to get her 40%, 38 to 40% of the vote.
That's a given.
So if there's a split on the right and there's somebody hives off 8 to 10%, then yes, she could win again the way she did in 2015.
In 2015, they won a majority, but they didn't have a majority of the vote.
They had about 41%.
And that was enough to win in marginal ridings where Wild Rose and the PCs split the vote.
And the NDP came up the middle.
If you look at any of those ridings where the margin of victory was not a majority of the vote, any of the constituents, once the two right-of-center parties amalgamated, the NDP lost all of those, all of those rides.
So that's the power of splitting the vote on the right.
And so long as Smith can find a way to keep the party together, then I think she gets to win.
I am here in Toronto, and I've become a Torontonian over time, but my heart is still in the West, and I still love the West.
And I know one of the things, I mean, I lived in the West for the first two-thirds of my life, really.
And there's a feeling that Ottawa doesn't understand the West.
Toronto doesn't understand the West.
And a lot of the idea, the intellectual capital, is in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal.
And so they either don't understand or don't like ideas in the West.
I don't think I'm saying anything new or unusual, but I believe this, Lord.
I think that if Danielle Smith wins on Thursday, she will come to the attention of the Central Canadian intellectual elite all of a sudden.
They've been watching her out of the corner of their eye, but they've been too busy talking about Justin Trudeau, Pierre Polyev, the Quebec election last night.
Like they're too busy talking about their own stuff.
But on Thursday, if Danielle Smith becomes the new leader, they're going to read the left-wing synopsis or the Toronto Star summary of the crazy stuff.
And they're going to say she's the new incarnation of Bible Bill Eberhardt.
She's a wild woman of the prairies who is radical and extreme.
And I think you're going to see a piling on such as you have not seen since, well, I suppose since Stockwell Day became leader of the Canadian Alliance and the media decided to assassinate him.
I think that when they look at her sovereignty act, when they look at her stances about separating Alberta intellectually and emotionally from the rest of the country, normalizing talk of separation, I don't think Danielle Smith is a separatist, but she will normalize discussions about that.
I think you are going to see a category five hurricane heading from Toronto to Calgary to wipe her out through the media party.
What do you think?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And, you know, the Wacky Bennett, the father who was the first Bennett premier in BC, once said that he never enjoyed more electoral success than when he was running against the lower mainland press.
And so he would go to the interior ridings, he'd go onto the island, he'd say, Look, those people from Vancouver, they want you to live under a socialist regime.
And if you don't want that for yourself and your children, then you vote for me.
And if Smith's smart, she'll use that.
And she will rally people in Alberta for her who would not otherwise be for her.
I mean, there are an awful lot of people in Alberta who would consider themselves centrists, maybe a few who are even progressives, who deeply resent the way that Central Canadian media portrays the problems.
And if she plays it correctly, and I think she can, I think she probably will, she's a very effective communicator, then she could use that hurricane that's coming her way to her advantage.
But you're absolutely right that it's coming.
I think it is.
And I think one of the reasons Jason Kenney will not be premier in a few days is precisely because he wouldn't battle Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal hard enough.
In my mind, he was always thinking, well, in five years, I might go and lead the federal conservatives.
And I want to make sure the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the CBC don't look askance at what I'm doing here.
So I'm never going to say anything now that might be interpreted as being separatist or sovereigntist or anti-federalist later.
I think Jason Kenney pulls all those punches.
I think what we've seen in this leadership race for the UCP is that he is not out as premier because of his pandemic stamp.
He's out as premier because he didn't fight Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal as hard as he could have, as hard as the people in the province wanted.
You know, here you have a federal government that has done everything it possibly can to shut down the number one industry in Alberta.
In fact, probably the biggest export industry in the country and the largest revenue generator for governments all across the country.
They've done everything they possibly can.
And I don't think we got the fight that we needed out of Jason Kenney.
And I say that as a friend of his.
I had advised in print many times that he had to get tougher with Ottawa.
And he never did.
And we've seen with the Sovereignty Act, with the launch of three of the candidates, the number one item that they mentioned when they launched their campaigns and throughout this whole race was standing up to Ottawa.
I think had Jason Kenney done everything he did on the pandemic, vaccine passports, mask mandates, the lockdowns, he could have done everything that he did.
As long as he was saying that Justin Trudeau is an SOB and we have to fight him, he'd still be premier today.
I think you could be right.
I think the lockdowns was part of it.
And the flourish of jailing pastors.
Yeah, but you can get away with stuff like that.
If that, to me, that was a secondary, that was an accelerant.
You had this large core problem, which was dealing with Ottawa.
And had he dealt with Ottawa properly, the accelerant wouldn't have caught the way it did.
You know, you've been very generous with your time.
I have one last question.
You mentioned Justin Trudeau, and he is very easy to campaign against.
He resonates historically with many Albertans who remember his father's antipathy towards the West and his war on oil.
It's my personal opinion that Justin Trudeau does not do well with women he can't control.
I think of Jodi Wilson Rabel, the former justice minister, Celine Cesar Chavannas, Jane Philpott.
And Philpot was, by many measures, his most competent cabinet minister, by the way.
Yes.
He just doesn't do well with women who he can't control.
And I think Justin Trudeau is going to have a rough time even talking about Danielle Smith because she doesn't bend the knee.
And I think that she will pose a particular problem for Mr. Feminist von Gropie Hans.
I think he's not going to know what to do with her.
And I think he's going to be his tone, I think he's going to get it wrong.
He has a good EQ, as they say, emotional intelligence.
I don't believe it.
I think he's going to have trouble with her.
Yeah, I think he will too, but I think he will.
The trouble he has with her will play well in downtown Toronto and in Montreal.
And, you know, as we've seen in the last two elections, he really only needs downtown Toronto, Montreal, probably Vancouver and Ottawa, and he can get a minority government.
So will he be able to use her as his foil, the way she uses him as her foil?
Yes, I think he will.
But I think in the rest of the country where he's already teetering, this will help push him over the edge because he will be seen as not very good at dealing with a woman, as you say, that he can't control.
I think that's absolutely true.
Lauren, it's great to catch up with you.
And I'll be out there in Calgary for the results reveal.
And I think we are in for some very interesting times in Alberta.
Who would have imagined a year ago that Jason Kenney would not even finish his first term?
We'll hope to keep in touch.
Go ahead, yeah.
It's very, very strange.
Hope to keep in touch with you in the months ahead, my friend.
Likewise.
Right, there you have it.
Lauren Gunter, senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Joe Bush says, we will continue to be your single source of truth are the scariest words you'll ever hear.
Now, that's Jacinda Ardern.
Yeah, that's just crazy talk.
Imagine being such a having a God complex that you are the source of truth.
Those are words, source of truth.
How can any human think that about themselves?
Someone named Interested Party said she's a failure.
She failed the people she represents.
She didn't keep people safe due to her policy.
New Charges: Mischief and Summonses00:05:00
She allowed her police to abuse citizens and condescendingly talked down to whomever questioned her.
People should stop rewarding these failures and vote them out.
Well, you're talking about Jacinda Ardern, but you could be talking about Justin Trudeau as well or Emmanuel Macron.
PDS says, not sure why this woman gets so much attention.
New Zealand has a population of greater Vancouver.
There's mayors with more constituents than the bucktooth Kiwi.
You know, I take your point.
And I don't know if New Zealand gets paid attention to too much.
I don't think they do, actually.
It's just that she's such a globalist and she's such a busybody.
She wants to censor the world and silence the world.
And I agree with you.
I think normally she would be ignored.
But in Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, she's found two globalist World Economic Forum allies.
So she seeks to use them to propagate her messages.
I mean, she piggybacks off them in many ways.
She hitched a free ride courtesy of Canadian taxpayers on our jet.
So yeah, I mean, in the one sense, who cares what New Zealand says?
Although, you know, they're part of the Commonwealth and we have a history together and they're an English-speaking democracy with the queen as their sovereign, but to the king rather.
But, you know, it's a shame what's being done in New Zealand.
And if you want to see what Trudeau's future is for Canada, look at what Ardern has done to New Zealand.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubble World Headquarters, see you at home.
Good night.
And keep fighting for freedom.
New charges have been laid in relation to the Coots blockade, a peaceful protest against vaccination mandates that took place between January 29th and February 15th this year.
It saw restrictions ease and acted as a catalyst for Premier Jason Kenney's stepping down as UCP leader.
On September 16th, the RCMP put out an update on the blockade.
This release came with three new charges of mischief over $5,000.
Sidney Vizard with Rebel News, and today we're going to share with you our interviews with Alex, Marco, and George.
RCMP say these new charges stem from the three individuals allegedly being key participants in the blockade.
All three will appear at the Lethbridge Courthouse on October 4th, at which point we will find out more about the case made against them.
Previously, Alex was held at a Fort McLeod RCMP detachment, where he informed us that the Crown sought a no-communication condition with Marco, another of the individuals now charged with mischief over 5,000.
We spoke with their legal counsel, Williamson Law, who have been assisting with bail considerations and will be assisting them further in court.
Crowdfunded donations through TruckerLawyer.ca are financing their legal defense.
For now, here's what Alex, Marco, and George had to say about these new charges of mischief.
My name is George Jansen.
I'm a realtor.
I have eight kids and a wife, obviously.
I'm Mark McNewboss.
I'm a small town councillor, town of Fort McLeod.
I married four kids, small business owner.
Alex Van Herc, a farmer south of Fort McLeod, father of seven, grandfather of six, just a humble farmer here in southern Alberta.
I've been living here for Fort McLeod since I was 14.
Love area, love Alberta, love southern Alberta.
And yeah, I wouldn't want to live in any other place except for our freedoms.
But nice to have them back.
Recently, you received some new charges or a new charge in relation to the Couts blockade.
Could you just tell us what that charge was and what happened the day of receiving this?
Yeah, so we were told beforehand that the RCMP would want us to come in and receive the summons to go to court for mischief over 5,000.
The charges were blocking the highway, so that's as far as I know up until this point.
So other than some minor traffic violations regarding the Traffic Safety Act earlier this year, right after the blockade, I have now been charged with mischief over 5,000.
Being proactive in regards to everything legal, I reached out to the RCMP and was in communication with them for a week or two prior on these charges coming down, how we'd like to do this, not being arrested, but being summoned to sign on a promise to appear in court on October the 4th.
What happens on October 4th?
October 4th, we're supposed to go to court in Lethbridge at 10 a.m. I guess to just basically see what the charges are all about.
It's very new to me as well.
I've never done anything like this before, so this is my first time being charged for something.
So October 4th, I believe it's just the first appearance.
Get Involved, Stand Up00:03:08
And our legal, we've got our legal.
Williamson law has been taken on for our legal.
We have three different lawyers assisting us, each with their own individual lawyer.
We hope to attend the courthouse, even though it's maybe not necessary, but we feel it needs to be done to show Albertans that we're not afraid of this.
I mean, we're good citizens, non-violent, and we hope that we get the support from all Albertans when on October 4th to show the Crown and the judge and the media that, yes, we are good citizens.
I feel as Albertans, as citizens, while we still can, we need to take our time and get involved, get involved in politics, get involved in all levels of whether it's school board, municipal levels, town councils, get involved, show your support, and stand up.
Speaking of town council, one of the individuals, Marco, is in fact a Fort McLeod town councillor.
Here's what he had to say about the political arena and the circumstances he now finds himself in.
At this time, I've decided that I will retain my role as counselor, as I believe this does not affect my ability to execute that role.
But a change in circumstances might reevaluate that decision.
I can't speak to individual decisions of politicians, but the political class as a whole has failed to stand up against, or has failed to stand up.
As a body, they have implemented emergency measures and given tremendous powers to health authorities to take away freedoms and restrict the general public.
The unfortunate part, the missed opportunity I see is that politicians have now come out and said it was a huge overreach on that essentially it was about power and control and not about health to the degree that we were informed it was.
Unfortunately, most elected officials were mute on the issue.
They were absent.
I do believe that our health services have an obligation to maintain the health of the public.
But the balance of power wasn't shared.
Our elected officials were absent and our health authorities had the power to detain, to restrict and impose draconian measures on the general public.
October 4th, Alex, George, and Marco will attend Lethbridge Courthouse to begin dealing with these new charges.
Legal Counsel's Reminders00:00:27
Williamson Law has informed me that their legal counsel will be entering pleas of not guilty, making disclosure requests and setting for the court dates.
Their legal counsel also gave us a reminder that these three individuals are presumed innocent in this important constitutional case.
Very soon we'll find out more and if you want to stay up to date with our latest coverage of the Coutz blockade, go to truckerlawyer.ca.
I want to thank you all for tuning in for Rebel News.