Ezra Levant interviews Derek Fildebrandt at The Western Standard’s Calgary HQ, critiquing Alberta’s "regime media" dominance by CBC and Post Media. Fildebrandt blames UCP leader Jason Kenney’s 2022 defeat on his alignment with Ontario’s Toryism over Alberta’s populist resistance, citing COVID-19 missteps and NDP-friendly policies. Danielle Smith’s rise—despite her 2014 Wild Rose betrayal—stems from her Sovereignty Act, promising to curb Ottawa’s control over healthcare, education, and free speech without separatism. With Alberta’s conservatives expecting bold action since Ralph Klein’s 2004 term, Smith faces a high-stakes test: deliver or risk repeating past leadership failures amid Trudeau’s hostility and the NDP’s fragile left-wing unity. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a feature interview with Derek Fildebrandt, the boss of the Western Standard.
It's October 10th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
I'm in Calgary, headquarters of the New West, heart of the New West.
I think that's one of its official mottos.
And what better place to be than in the headquarters of the new Western Standard?
I should tell you, I have a tiny bit of paternity over the subject.
15 years ago, I was the publisher of a print magazine called the Western Standard.
Alas, it was a victim of the internet technology.
But Derek Fildebrandt revived the brand, and now it's an online product, including videos, written reports, podcasts.
And they've really filled that space of pro-Western, pro-conservative reporting.
So rare in a country that's dominated by what I call the regime media or the media party.
So if you're in Alberta, as I am today, to cover the new ascension of Danielle Smith, the next leader of the United Conservative Party and the next Premier of Alberta, you don't want to talk to the CBC.
Obviously, the Toronto star is no help.
You need to go to the Western Standard.
And what a pleasure today to be sitting in the headquarters of the Western Standard with Derek Fildebrandt.
Great to see you, Derek.
It's a pleasure to have you back at home.
Well, it's nice of you to say.
I mean, I am a Westerner at heart, but I've been in exile for long enough.
I think I'm going to have to start calling myself a Torontonian.
Let me just say, you have taken the Western Standard and you have breathed life into it.
I'm impressed with the hustle-bustle of your office.
You've got a big team.
You're doing print.
You're doing on-the-spot journalism.
You've got podcasts.
You're doing a hell of a job as an independent journalist.
Thank you.
We built an incredible team.
It started very, very modestly.
We had no money when we started, but we just clawed our way up bit by bit.
And we've been supported by other independent media like yourself and the Rebel, welcoming us into the field.
You guys have just been welcoming, and we tried to follow in the footsteps of yourself at the original Western Standard and then the Buyfields with the Alberta report before it.
In fact, the Alberta Report is now the Alberta section of the Western Standard.
Someday we might launch it out as a more semi-autonomous sub-publication.
But no, we're following in big footsteps that come in the tradition of independent media in Alberta.
And we saw a voice that had to be filled.
And I figured, what the hell, I'll do it.
Well, I'm glad you did.
And you're right.
Just walking in here looking at the old front covers of the Western Standard and then seeing some of Ted Byfield's work here.
There is a real Alberta tradition of independent journalism.
And you're kind to give a shout out to Rebel News.
I think that there's starting to be a critical mess.
Yourself, Rebel News, True North.
I like to see it.
For example, at the leadership event where Danielle Smith was announced as a winner, there were, I'm going to say, 20 different people there associated with different independent outlets.
Five years ago, that wouldn't have been the case.
I think there's a demand for it because people don't really trust the incumbents anymore.
They see them as the regime media.
And really, so many of them are on the government take.
How could you possibly trust them to give you the straight goods about a new subject where Justin Trudeau has an interest?
If Justin Trudeau pays the CBC, CBC's going to run errands for him.
Yeah, and I think independent media has an outsized role in Alberta relative to anywhere else in Canada.
You know, the Rebel, I think you guys have had a strong base here long before we showed up.
You know, you got True North here.
There's a number of really independents, like one-man shows or two-man shows that are out there going around, mostly on the conservative leading side, but not exclusively.
It's even on the left and the so-called center.
And I think a lot of this, the influence of independent media in Alberta, was born out in, you know, Jason Kenney was stunned thinking, hey, you know, he would say, I didn't do anything worse than Doug Ford.
Doug Ford got re-elected with majority government.
Why am I getting all this guff?
I think the difference is Doug Ford didn't have to deal with as big a role of an independent media.
You know, on Ontarians or there's obviously a market for it in Ontario, but as a proportion of the population, it doesn't have the critical mass that it does in Alberta that I think made life so difficult for Kenny, leading to his eventual loss of the leadership of the UCP.
And, you know, I don't think someone like Danielle Smith could be elected anywhere but Alberta.
Some of that is just Alberta's political culture, but also that there's an independent media that is more free thinking here.
Albertans have a long tradition of distrusting Eastern-dominated institutions.
And that goes back to railways and telephones way back in the pre-Depression era and banks.
But all the more so now you have four major daily papers in Alberta: Calgary Sun, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Sun, Edmonton Journal.
All four are operated by Post Media out of Toronto.
And Postmedia in Toronto is owned out of New Jersey.
There's not a single homegrown major daily newspaper in Alberta.
And that all, I think, came together.
A lot of these, the different aspects of it came together.
There's going to be very fertile ground for a strong independent media in Alberta that's just rising.
I think you're right.
And I mean, the province is the most freedom-oriented in its bones and its history and its people.
But add to that independent journalists.
And you are going to have a kind of opposition to Jason Kenney when he goes hard on the lockdown and soft on Ottawa.
Let's talk a little bit about that.
I mean, I used to know Jason Kenney pretty well.
We sort of are similar in age.
I met him when I was in law school in Edmonton.
And I saw him rise through the ranks of the Harper conservatives.
When he stepped down to come back to Alberta, I would say it was fair to call him the leading conservative politician in Canada.
I mean, he had the highest profile.
He had strong connections, not just in Alberta, but in Ontario with new Canadians.
I think he was the leading guy.
How do you go from the leading conservative hope, fiscal conservative credentials?
He used to run the Taxpayers Federation, social conservative credentials, he was for religious freedom for Christians.
How do you go from that guy to imploding a conservative party in a conservative province?
I think a lot of people outside Alberta will not understand how that happened in less than one term.
I think there's a lot that goes into it.
But similarly, I think I knew Jason Kenney pretty well.
And at one point, I thought he was the great right hope.
There's a number of things.
One is I don't think he understood the Alberta Conservative Coalition.
And the Alberta Conservative Coalition is different than even the federal conservative coalition in Alberta.
Because Albertans' expectations of our federal conservative politicians is don't make it any worse than it is.
Just, we have such low expectations.
Okay, Wheatboard and Long Gun Registry are gone.
Okay, so just don't actively drop salt into our eye.
Like, that's the low, low bar.
But we have a different bar we set here.
Also, you know, the tradition Jason Kenney came up in, the base of the Reform Party and the Federal Conservative Party were generally thought to be social conservatives.
And social conservatives, I think, don't ask enough for themselves in Canada.
The deal with conservatives is détente when they're in power.
Well, we're not going to make it any worse for you.
It's kind of like the Western deal.
We're not going to make it worse for you, but social conservatives aren't expecting conservatives to come to power and ban abortion and gay marriage.
There's just no expectation of going in that direction.
So Kenny thought that the base in Alberta would just accept words and respect, but not require any action, and then he could pander to the other side.
And so he set the expectations that he was, we were going to go to war with Ottawa.
We were going to fight, and we're not going to cut deals that are not in our interest.
And, you know, he always had an eye, I think, still on the prime minister's office.
You know, I'm not sure how, if it was always front of mind for him, but he always had an eye on it, meaning that he couldn't do anything that would permanently despoil his reputation in the rest of the country.
But he just didn't understand that, particularly after Trudeau's reelection in October 2019, which is, we launched the Western Center, we launched the Western Center two days after that happened.
He didn't fully appreciate the explosion of anger that there was.
He had WEXIT and all these things.
He announced the Fair Deal Panel and that stuff.
And actually, that looked like a good start on a few fronts, but it was just talk.
Nothing happened.
Virtually nothing happened from it.
And then, of course, so he was already in danger then.
And then COVID just drove a freight train through his government.
And again, he just thought, well, the right will, and libertarians will just put up with me not calling them bad things, but we're still going to do everything that the NDP tells us to do.
And he just managed to blow it apart.
And I think he also fashions himself very much more of an old-fashioned Berkeyan Tory conservative.
You know, the two big conservative traditions in Canada are epitomized by Ontario Upper Canadian Toryism.
Yeah.
Founded by the loyalists, people who fled the American Revolution because they didn't want to govern themselves.
And its chief virtues are stability, tradition.
These are good things, but those are its chief virtues.
Whereas the Alberta conservatism comes more from the tradition of the American Revolution, diametrically opposed.
Individualism, populism.
Yeah.
And so while they're both conservative, they both come from traditions in the American Revolution that were diametrically opposed to one another.
And I don't think he fundamentally got the small R Republican Alberta tradition quite to the same extent.
And so he just, I don't think he was able to read the room.
And his own autocratic leadership style just didn't go.
There's just so many reasons why.
But in the end, he never stopped to think, is there something I'm doing wrong?
Instead, he turned around and, you know, after that rodeo in Bowdoin, I know the Rebel was the only other media along with the Western Standard there.
He said, well, if that's our base, I want a new base.
Yeah.
It's shocking talking.
Near the end, he started to sound like Justin Trudeau a little bit.
I mean, if you're opposing his leadership, you're a racist, you're a kook, you're a lunatic.
If you oppose his leadership.
I think by that point, he had crossed a certain line and he realized he was never going to be accepted by parts of the base again.
I think you're spot on when you say he was always casting an eye back to Ottawa because I think his ambition was to return.
I think he just, when he left after Stephen Harper was defeated, I think he didn't want to be the first guy to tackle the young, energetic, strong Justin Trudeau.
He didn't want to be the opposition leader for five or ten years.
He wanted to do something, build himself up, and then go back in to take on Trudeau when Trudeau was weaker.
He thought Alberta would be a safe place to go, but he was always thinking, what will Ottawa say about this move if I'm too vigorous resisting equalization formulas, if I'm too much of an advocate for firearms rights, that won't look good on CBC when I'm running for PM.
think he was always pulling back and saying, what would the prime minister do, as opposed to what would the premier of Alberta do?
Yeah, and it just meant that he was, he didn't view Alberta as the highest office.
So he didn't view the Alberta Premier's job as the highest office in the land.
He still viewed the prime minister's job as the highest office in the land.
The Prime Minister, for many Albertans, is a distant imperial warlord.
And, I mean, the best we can hope for was Stephen Harper, who...
Defection and Forgiveness00:08:23
Did no harm, really.
He did no harm.
He did a few positive things.
Long gun registry and Webboard.
But overall, even Stephen Harper probably genuinely wanted to go much further.
He couldn't under the federal system.
If you want to serve Albertans, the best way to serve Albertans is as the Premier, not as Prime Minister.
And I think he just, you know, he was a creature of Ottawa.
He spent his entire adult life as a politician in Ottawa.
And how do you not look at the prime minister's chair and say that's the big thrones?
That's the big throne.
So that's how Jason Kenney came undone.
Danielle Smith is an interesting story because she was once before the leader of the Wild Rose Party, which was really on the move.
I mean, you know a little something about that.
You former legislator yourself.
And it was, I mean, you know much more than me.
Maybe you can speak a little to it.
I don't know if it was panic or a shortcut or people whispering in her ear, but she did the most astonishing thing I can think of.
Without consulting members or voters or anything, she struck a secret deal to undo the Wild Rose opposition and throw in with the Red Tory progressive conservative government and say, we're all one anymore.
You don't need an opposition party.
You never really did.
Let's all win this together.
It wasn't just undoing the Wild Rose Party.
It was undoing the entire Democratic notion of an opposition.
Oh, we don't need two sides of the story.
We can all agree.
People want disagreement.
They want that clash of ideas.
I think that was a stunning, stunning error.
And not only did it destroy the PC party of Alberta and the Wild Rose, but it didn't destroy the Wild Rose.
It weakened it.
It nearly destroyed it, briefly.
Yeah, and it put Rachel Notley, the NDP, in power because she was the only one not sullied by the whole thing.
That's how it looked on the outside.
Tell me a little bit more about what you knew about that.
And how did Danielle Smith make such a shocking and undemocratic decision?
You know, so this was December 20, I think it was December 17th, 2014.
I'll remember.
It was a day that'll live in infamy for me.
I was working in this very building, actually, just a number of floors up.
I just started a new job as the vice president of the Oil Drillers Association.
And I couldn't believe it.
I started getting phone calls and whatnot before the news broke, but I couldn't believe it.
It was the most outrageous, crazy thing imaginable.
I started making phone calls around, and then it started to smell real bad.
Look, there's a number of things.
I think she had lost confidence in herself.
They had lost four by-elections that Wild Rose thought they were going to win at least one.
They got beaten in all four.
She had some floor crossings, including one who was a very close friend of hers, Kerry Toll.
This was a key ally of hers in caucus and a personal friend.
And then their behind the scenes had been a lot of There was a move by some senior members of her caucus to defect to the PC's apprentice.
From what I know, she was largely presented with a fait accompli, where it's like, well, we're going to go.
You should come with us, and you'll look like you're leading the charge, and you'll be a part of what we're going to build on the PC side.
And I think by then she had just lost confidence in herself and made the most incredibly terrible political decision I think has ever been made, possibly in the country, to go.
And it, I mean, it was packaged as were Uniting Conservatives, but the NDP remember was like 10% in the polls at the time.
No one cared about the NDP.
It was a fringe party.
And all of a sudden, it just, the NDP became the only credible option.
We had to rebuild the wild rose almost from scratch.
It was just absolutely hollowed out.
We had to rebuild it in no time.
It was just a stunning, terrible political betrayal that it took me a very, very long time to forgive.
I took it very personally.
And I wouldn't even listen to her radio station, her show for years because I just was still so angry.
I'm the same way, and I was living out east by then.
I thought it was such a shocking thing.
I remember your interview actually with her.
You were still on the Sun News Network.
And I remember when that played, I was sitting with some friends and we watched it.
And it was so spectacularly brutal.
And we watched it on repeat.
Because we were just broken by it.
We felt so stabbed in the heart.
I mean, I had known her for years.
I went to university with her and I didn't agree with every word she said, but I thought she was a bit of a hero.
Well, that's why it was so hard.
And she sold everything and everyone out.
I like you, didn't talk to her.
I did take it personally as well, even though it was a political move.
I felt it was a betrayal of so many things.
And here she is now, eight years later.
I should note that in last night's speech, you don't hear this often.
She said, I made a mistake.
And let me play a clip from when she won.
We're recording this on the Friday.
It's airing on the Monday.
So this is Thursday night.
Take a quick lesson.
You don't often hear politicians talk about mistakes, but this was such a big mistake.
Here, take a quick listen.
On a personal note, I want to thank Brian for showing leadership after I made a mistake in judgment in 2014.
Learning from your example has prepared me for today, and this party will always owe you a debt of gratitude as one of the founders of this United Conservative Party.
Thank you, Brian.
You know, she said a lot that she said she didn't go out in public for three years because she didn't want to face people.
There was hate and anger.
And she has said sorry a thousand times.
I think she means it.
It's tough to know.
I mean, if she wanted a political career, she had to deal with this enormous elephant in the room.
Do you think she is genuinely sorry?
I mean, she must be.
It blew up in her face and derailed her.
Can someone come back after that?
Is that forgivable?
Or is it a life sentence when you do something that bad?
Look, six months ago, I would have said, a year ago, I would have said it was probably a life sentence.
You know, there's been talk about her for a while.
You know, she actually announced she would run for the UCP leadership on the floor of the UCP's convention last November.
And because she had a show for a couple months with the Western Standard, and she stunned us all on the floor on a Western Standard broadcast saying, yeah, if Jason Kenny's gone, I'm going to run.
And we just about fell out of our chairs.
But, you know, there had been quiet talk about this for a while.
And I thought that, I don't know, people had largely forgiven her by then, but was the forgiveness conditional on, well, okay, she's a great radio host and she's got something out of the conversation, but it's conditional on her not ever going back into politics.
Or was it more carte blanche?
Was it a broader forgiveness?
And as we saw Thursday evening, it turned out to be a deeper forgiveness.
I think some of that, though, was coupled in that, you know, they had broadly forgiven her, but I think there was a lot of misgivings around trusting her again after what had happened.
But I think she got over that by giving skeptical, particularly, you know, kind of former wild rosers, giving them something no one else would, giving them something as has been portrayed as radical as the Sovereignty Act that no other major politician anywhere in the country outside of Quebec would ever fathom doing.
And so by offering something so appetizing, she forced down the throat of those reticent wild rosers.
They forced, even if they didn't forgive her, she still forced them to vote for her because no one else was offering anything like this.
Now, the Sovereignty Act is not written yet, which is interesting how people can oppose or support it without seeing the text of it.
And one of the things she says is, well, let's write it together.
Alberta's Decentralization Push00:05:58
Let's write it as a caucus.
Let's get some legislative counsel on it.
I mean, writing a law is a difficult thing.
In her speech when she won the vote, she made it clear she's not a separatist.
She doesn't want Alberta to leave.
She just wants it to be like Quebec, the master maitre Chénou, as they would say in French.
Here's a quick clip.
That's right.
Here's a quick clip of her remarks, which I think would tamp down sort of the Ottawa press corps.
Oh, you're a separatist.
At least it seems like she was trying to calm some of the nervous Nellies.
Here's a clip of her election leadership election speech.
They don't want us to succeed.
And sadly, these folks will do and say almost anything to keep us from succeeding.
They will dredge up old statements and mistakes from the past.
They will use cancel culture and fear-mongering in an attempt to scare and dissuade Albertans from supporting our MLAs and me.
For example, it is safe to say that many in the Notley Singh Trudeau Alliance will claim that my plan to stand up to Ottawa with the Sovereignty Act is somehow meant to move Alberta toward leaving our beloved Canada.
That is a lie.
What Albertans want is for our province and all provinces to have our rights under the Constitution of Canada protected and respected by an increasingly hostile Ottawa regime that seeks to control every aspect of our lives.
From healthcare to education to free speech to delivery of our social programs, they want to control it all because that makes it easier for them to impose their agenda on Albertans and on Canadians.
That is not the way to unify a country or secure prosperity.
That is a road to division and economic ruin, which is why, in closing tonight, I want to speak to our fellow Canadians.
Albertans love Canada.
It is our country, our home.
All we want is to live, grow, and prosper in the manner that we choose.
We want to set our own course, develop our resources and economy, and run our social programs and society as we think best.
We also want to share our prosperity with the entire country.
So tonight, I invite every Canadian to partner with us, partner with Alberta.
Let's work together to build the strong, prosperous, and unified Canada that we know that we can be.
A Canada where provinces work together and empower one another to reach our unique individual goals and aspirations.
A Canada that celebrates our great diversity of opinion and thought, rather than one that demonizes and sanctions one another for expression and speech deemed unacceptable by woke politicians in Ottawa.
A Canada that respects all of our citizens, regardless of their religious, cultural, or political beliefs.
Together, we can be the solution to the world's energy crisis and wrestle away the leverage that thug dictators are using against an energy-starved Europe.
Together, we can be the energy superpower that provides billions of people in Africa and in Asia with the clean LNG needed to replace their reliance on coal, wood, and other high-emission fuel sources, saving billions of tons of emissions and replacing them with billions of dollars for our citizens and our economy and our social programs.
We can become the nation that develops the breakthrough technologies that make continued fossil fuel use not only possible but preferable for fueling the energy needs of this generation and the next.
And we can feed the planet with our world-class food producers and technologies.
We can build the most innovative, entrepreneurial, and well-educated workforce in the developed world where students are taught to create and build and innovate rather than to conform, obey, and profess allegiance to failed and outdated ideologies.
Alberta wants to play a central role in building that Canada with you as an equal partner.
And I invite you and those you elect to join us in building the most prosperous and free country on earth.
You know, if all Alberta does is take up the constitutional space that Quebec does on pension plans, on police forces, on employment insurance, on immigration.
If Alberta just got the same things Quebec got.
so many of Alberta's grievances would be dealt with practically and substantively, but more importantly, they would feel emotionally like they were in charge of their own house again.
I think that would be a very good thing for Alberta, and frankly, it would lower the demand for separatism.
Well, I half agree.
The difference is, you know, Quebec, it's always been tough to find.
A lot of people say, well, you know, Alberta and Quebec both want decentralization.
They're actually natural allies if we don't agree on a lot of other things.
It's tougher than it actually seems on the surface, though, because Quebec wants a different kind of decentralization than Alberta.
Quebec wants cultural and social decentralization, dealing with ethnic linguistic issues.
Alberta wants fiscal decentralization.
Quebec only wants fiscal decentralization in the sense that they want all the money for the ability to spend all the money from Ottawa however they want, but they still want money to come from Ottawa.
Whereas, you know, Alberta, our issues, unfortunately, can't all be solved by just taking up that constitutional space.
NDP's Rise in Alberta00:07:34
We do need ways to starve the beast of Ottawa, to stop the flow of our revenue to them, to stop them from blocking our resource development.
But much of what you're saying can absolutely be covered domestically with the powers we have under the Constitution if we would only assert them.
You know, my column The night of Danielle's win, I think I may have introduced a new term to the Canadian parliaments, borrowing on the terms used around the European Union and Brexit.
You know, you had Europhiles and Europhobes.
And I talked about federal phobes and federal files.
And the federal phobes of which I would put myself in, it's a really broad range or a spectrum of views ranging from firewallers on the light side to full-blown independence.
And I think Danielle falls into the strong firewall tradition.
But it's bringing over people who were firmly in the independence camp for some time.
Six months ago, the Wild Rose Independence Party, a party with no seats, no money, no leader, was at about 15% in the polls.
Like, absolutely astounding.
With an expectation that Smith was likely to win the UCP leadership as of about two weeks ago, it was about 4%.
And that's why the UCP is leading in the polls again, is they've pulled those people back in from the right flank.
They haven't necessarily convinced a bunch of new Democrats to come over, but they've convinced these Wild Rose Independence folks over who, yeah, probably would prefer a Republic of Alberta, but they see this as a aggressive, tangible step towards greater independence, if not full du jour independence from Ottawa.
So I think if Smith can succeed in this, she will probably temper down the full-blown independence movement by bringing it into something a bit more in the mainstream.
But she has set these extraordinarily high expectations.
This was one of the problems Kenny had.
He set these sky-high expectations, and he didn't actually seem to make a ton of effort to actually meet them other than some angry letters he'd sent to Justin Trudeau.
But Smith now has got even higher expectations than Kenny, and it's going to be difficult for her to meet that.
And if she disappoints those expectations, she will have to probably suffer the same fate as every single conservative leader since Ralph Klein in 2004, almost 20 years ago.
Not a single conservative leader has completed a full term in office since Klein in 2004.
You get to finish the end of your predecessor's term, and you get about two, maybe if you're lucky, three years of your own term, and then you're gone.
And for her to break that cycle, there's going to be a lot of different things at play.
But one is she's going to have to meet these very high expectations, she said.
Very interesting.
Well, listen, you've been very generous with your time.
I just got one last question for you.
I was looking on Twitter, as I often do, for the reaction from other camps to Danielle Smith's win.
The first question I looked was, will Justin Trudeau even acknowledge it?
He has this habit of ignoring political successes for his enemies.
He didn't say a word when Jaron Bolsonaro of Brazil won last time.
He didn't say a word when Giorgia Maloney of Italy won.
Now, those are foreign leaders, but there's a tradition of just saying congratulations.
He's a G7 leader, yeah.
Yeah, he hates, especially women he doesn't control.
Look at his own party, Jody Wilson-Reynolds, Lina Caesars are banned.
So I thought, how's he going to handle her?
Well, you know, he actually had a fairly good boilerplate.
So I was surprised that he wasn't being as petty, but the pettiness will come.
I looked at the NDP in Alberta, and they, at least outwardly, claim to be jubilant.
Now, I think they would say that no matter what.
Even if they were deeply scared of her, they would say, oh, she's so radical, this is the best thing for us.
Rachel Notley's going to win for sure.
I think many NDPers believe that Danielle Smith is too extreme, too radical, and too conflict-oriented to win.
And they think Rachel Notley is going to become premier again.
I don't know how much of that is puffery or self-delusion.
The NDP has receded to its more traditional fringe place in the polls.
Are you worried that Rachel Notley and the media party will beat Danielle Smith and the UCP party?
Well, I think the NDP is a contender for power now.
I mean, their traditional place was actually always 8 to 10%.
10% would be a good year for them.
They now have completely consolidated the left.
And so they are contenders for power, but the odds, I think, are still stacked against them.
Just as the odds are stacked against conservatives at the federal level, the electoral math, the odds are stacked against the NDP at the provincial level in Alberta.
Conservatives, I think, still have home ice advantage.
That doesn't mean they can't blow it.
Smith, there's kind of two broad polls you should look at determining who was the most electable among the UCP.
There was the kind of intensity of likability and dislikability, and Smith had the highest negatives on that among all the UCP leadership candidates.
Now, one is probably she was by far the most well-known, and two, she was the most polarizing, but those negatives were hyper-concentrated among hardcore NDP voters.
So NDP voters who weren't voting UCP anyway, they just particularly hated her.
But she had the highest positives among conservatives.
The NDP is probably self-deluding itself because the media is so negative towards Smith and their personal intensity of how much they dislike Smith is so strong.
But that intensity, as I was saying, doesn't really affect how people are actually voting at the end of the day.
It just meant that New Democrats were particularly boiled about how much they disliked her.
And that, like Alberta, conservatives can have the same, make the same mistake about Justin Trudeau.
Justin Trudeau is passionately hated by most Albertans.
And we just kind of assume that people out east feel the same way.
I mean, opinions are changing, but people here, Trudeau gets re-elected.
And everybody says, how did he get re-elected?
I don't know anyone who voted for him.
Yes, because you're in Alberta.
And so, you know, you're in downtown Edmonton and you're hanging out in socialist circles.
You might be thinking, well, I don't know anyone who likes Danielle Smith, so she can't possibly win.
And I think the New Democrats have the risk, at least, of falling into the same trap as Alberta Conservatives do with Trudeau.
Yeah.
What's very interesting, I'm excited about it.
I was a big critic of my old friend Jason Kenney because he lost his way.
And like you, Rebel News is going to try and hold Danielle Smith to account on her promises.
And one of the things we care about is her revocation of the lockdowns and the prosecution of those caught in the lockdowns.
We have a petition at lockdownamnesty.com.
We're going to give it to Danielle Smith.
Hopefully she'll just stay all those prosecutions.
Very interesting times.
Derek, I'm grateful for your hospitality, showing us around your beautiful office and spending some time with me.
I know that you guys are going to be the ones to watch for coverage of this issue.
So thanks again and congrats.
Pleasure.
Thanks very, very much for joining us here.
Well, it's been my pleasure.
There you have it.
Derek Fildebrand, the boss of Western Standard Online from Calgary to you at home on behalf of all of us at Rebel News.