Derek Fildebrandt and Ezra Levant examine Alberta’s political innovation, from Preston Manning’s Reform to Danielle Smith’s UCP, dismissed by central media despite its conservative base. Smith faces factional resistance—like Kenney’s "Kennyites"—and media hostility, while the NDP’s Rachel Notley remains a rare second-term contender. Trudeau’s federal attacks target Alberta’s industries, yet the province’s small seat count shields him from backlash. Fildebrandt’s Western Standard counters bias by scrutinizing all parties, rejecting federal bailouts for independent coverage at westernstandard.news, underscoring Alberta’s defiance of national political norms. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, a special interview with Derek Fildebrandt.
He's the publisher of Western Standard.
We're going to go deep on Alberta.
Not just because I'm sentimental for the place I come from, but I think it's important in Canada.
A lot of ideas are generated there.
It's like an idea laboratory.
And they're innovators in politics.
So what's going on?
Does Danielle Smith have a chance?
Are the media going to slice and dice her?
Can she beat Rachel Notley?
We'll get into all that with Derek.
That's ahead.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's $8 a month.
You get my show every weeknight, Sheila Gunnread's show, too, every week.
And we get the $8, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I tell you, it sure adds up, and we really rely on that to pay our bills around here because we don't take any money from Trudeau.
All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a heart-to-heart conversation with Derek Fildebrandt, the publisher of Western Standard.
What's going on in Alberta these days?
This is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Sometimes we talk about international news, the war in Ukraine, what China is doing.
Joe Biden.
These are interesting and exciting things because these are the big players and also because the big media talks about it.
So shouldn't we as the littler media be following their example?
And true, what Joe Biden does or what the war in a faraway land that touches oil prices or agriculture prices, that does have an effect on us back here in Canada.
But most of the things in our lives are decided at a more provincial or local level.
They may not quite be as exciting as the lead up to a third world war, but they affect our everyday lives very much.
And a place in Canada that I think is a laboratory for political experiments in smaller government and freedom and also a battleground between the authoritarian, centrally planned worldview of, say, a Justin Trudeau and a more rugged individualist world, of course, is the province of Alberta, a unique province, both economically and politically.
I think it really does live up to its motto, strong and free.
I was born in Alberta, and I still regard myself as an Albertan at heart, even though I've been in exile in Toronto for more than a decade now.
But I like to keep in touch with what's going on in the province of my birth, not just for sentimental reasons, but also because what happens in Alberta will have an effect on the rest of the country.
And if Alberta is punished economically, it will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the country.
If Alberta succeeds and thrives, it'll have a beneficial effect for the rest of the country.
And how political leaders from Ontario and Quebec deal with Alberta, I think, shows what kind of a person they are, if they're punitive and looking to demonize the other, as sometimes Justin Trudeau does, or if they want to truly build a harmonious confederation.
And so I often look to my friends at the Western Standard to let me know what's really going on out west because they are owned and operated out west, and they are led by our friend Derek Fildebrandt, who will join us for the next half hour to talk about the sweep of these things and Alberta's place in them.
Derek, great to see you again.
Welcome back.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you know, it's great to see you.
And I'm sort of jealous because you're out there fighting the good fight, really on one of the important political battlegrounds, which is Alberta.
Really think you could go back not just to Preston Manning or to Ralph Klein, but you can go back decades earlier to Bill Eberhardt, to Ernest Manning.
I think Alberta has always been a place where political innovations happen.
Even the NDP had one of its formative moments in Alberta.
There's something in the air out there, isn't there?
Yeah, and you use the term, the two terms that have some historical resonance in exactly this.
You talked about Alberta being politically innovative or a laboratory.
You know, I remember when I was in university, I read Preston Manning's book, The New Canada.
That was written right after the Charlottetown Accord referendum, which, of course, the entire political establishment in Canada lost to a hodgepodge group, including the Reform Party.
And this book was very, it was influential on me.
He talked, you know, he said there's only two regions in Canada that are political entrepreneurs or like to experiment beyond traditional party systems.
And that's Quebec and the West.
Alberta, probably more so than the rest of the West, but I think the West very broadly are political entrepreneurs or innovators.
They're willing to break beyond the traditional molds of things.
You know, that's why in BC, you have a two-party system, the NDP and the BC Liberal, or now maybe sort of BC United, whatever you call it, but also the Green Party.
I mean, not cup of tea of myself or you, I'm sure, but, you know, it's the only place that kind of consistently elects Greens.
You know, in Alberta, you had the social credit, you had the United Farmers Movement come from here.
You had social credit.
The Canadian Commonwealth Federation, which became the NDP, came from sort of a combination of Saskatchewan and Alberta together.
You had, you know, federally, you had the Reform Party.
You had the wild, provincially, you had the Wild Rose Party.
And, you know, it's a place where people are willing to step outside the traditional bounds of the typical two or two party system, you know, liberal and Tory or two-party plus liberal, Tory, and NDP system that you see more traditionally in Ontario.
Yeah, you know, I mean, what you're talking about there is innovation, progressive ideas, newfangled ideas.
I think that's the Alberta way.
You can be a right-wing progressivism, an innovator, an experimenter.
So often, though, these parties are looked down on and condemned by the center of power.
They mock them.
I remember being a young man involved with the Reform Party of Canada, absolutely demonized by the Central Canadian establishment, was never accepted.
Preston Manning was mocked ideologically, personally.
They mocked his voice.
They mocked his hair.
They mocked his glasses.
I remember Sheila Copps called him David Duke of the North.
Anything goes to smash down a political innovator from Alberta.
I think it hurts, by the way.
I think it hurts the feelings of Albertans who want to be good Canadians that they're so rebuffed.
But let me give you a modern example.
Look at Danielle Smith, the current premier, a young woman, premier.
I'm not sure how many young women there are as premiers right now.
There's a few, but Danielle Smith is, I think, the most energetic and active.
She's with a new party, the United Conservative Party, fairly new.
And, you know, she's a good talker.
She's a lot of time on talk radio.
And she's a political innovator in terms of policy.
Now, those things on paper are what the CBC and the Toronto establishment claim they love to see.
We need more women in politics.
We need more young people.
I mean, she's, I don't think she's, maybe she's just turned 50, which in the realm of premiers is not old.
She's on the younger side.
She's certainly open-minded in terms of politics.
You would think she would be the star of Canada.
And maybe if she was on the left, she would be.
But she's nothing but derided and demonized by the establishment media, especially the CBC, which is so obvious.
They're doing their best to kill her.
Well, you kind of hinted into what I think the real issue is there.
You know, the left or progressives say they want more women in politics or minorities in politics, all these different so-called equity-deserving groups.
What they really mean is they want more of these people in politics on the left.
You know, you have to have the right politics to be in politics and deserve it and have it being a part of any of these groups.
You know, Danielle Smith has had a very rocky history in Alberta politics.
She's achieved what is probably the biggest comeback in Canadian political history.
Even I have to pitch myself sometimes wondering how she managed to come back from the hole she had managed to dig herself in at one point.
But, you know, it's also not just that she's a conservative.
She comes from the anti-establishment, politically innovative and populist wild rose tradition.
And, you know, in the Alberta UCP, there's a lot of different, it's very tribal, it's very factional.
And, you know, there were differences between the wild roses and PCs.
Generally, the wild rose was further to the right.
It had more social conservatives and more libertarians.
But, you know, but there were sometimes, you know, there'd be like the right wing of the PCs would ideologically match up relatively closely with portions of the wild rose.
But the differences between those parties were more cultural and tribal.
A lot of the cleavages that still plague that party today are very cultural and tribal.
And she comes from the tribe that has been deemed to be politically unacceptable by most of the establishment, both media and business.
You know, there are a lot of people, you know, even within the UCP, who just don't think it's right that someone who came from the wild rose side of the legacy parties should be there.
And so that paid another target on her back beyond just not fitting the mold of what a progressive woman politician should be in the image of the media.
You know, I think about some of the challenges that Danielle Smith faces, and one of them is her own team.
You talked about tribal and different factions, but I think Albertan politicians, especially those on the right, and some on the left, are often populist, individualistic, sort of lone ranger.
There's a party out there called the Maverick Party.
And I love that because you know what a Maverick is.
It's a critter that won't go with the flock, really.
And there's nothing more different than the Trudeau caucus.
Like Justin Trudeau's liberals are the most disciplined MPs in the country.
Battles Over Nominations00:10:39
They will never say anything against their boss, and he will never say anything against them.
And they have this pact, never explain, never apologize, never dissent.
And that makes it hard to pick one of them off.
In Alberta, I think it's sort of the opposite.
I mean, you yourself got offside with your party on occasion.
And I think it's the individual spirit of the province.
That makes it tough, though, to go into a campaign because I think Danielle Smith, from time to time, may be playing, you know, defense on her own team, some of whom I don't think have fully accepted her as the new premier.
Am I wrong on that?
I'm a little bit worried that the rebelliousness of the United Conservative Party and that Western streak, that Maverick Street, makes it hard to operate in the current kind of campaign environment.
Yeah, no, it absolutely does.
And it's for better and worse sometimes.
So, right now, the main cleavages in the party are between Smith and the Kennyites.
And that was largely reflected in the leadership race.
You know, Travis Taves, the finance minister under Kenny and under Smith, was widely perceived.
And he didn't do much to disabuse anyone of the notion that he was the anointed Kenny successor.
And the battles that are taking place right now are a lot of it is over nominations.
So before Kenny was ousted as leader, he ensured that the nominations of some of his key allies were opened up.
And, you know, for those who might not follow this stuff too closely, the nomination is what essentially gets you your seat for the most part.
There's only a handful of seats in the middle that are actually competitive between the NDP and the UCP.
The rest are safe NDP or safe UCP.
You get the party nomination.
You were almost 100% guaranteed to be the MLA in that seat.
You're going to win the election.
And Kenny opened up the nominations in some of these seats and disqualified any challengers to his allies.
And that was obviously very controversial.
It angers people.
But at the end of the day, Alberta voters tend to just kind of hold their nose, say, hey, I might not like the way it happens, but that's just, you know, politics is dirty and I guess they're all dirty.
I'll hold my nose and vote for the party.
So Smith comes in, wins the leadership.
I remember I asked her in an interview right after that if, you know, if she would be opening up some of these kind of crooked nominations where there had been no Democratic due process taken just to protect some of these Kennyites.
And she said that'll be up to the local boards.
And in one constituency, say Ribby, Rock Mountain House, Sundry, that's the constituency of Jason Nixon, where, and he was kind of the right-hand man and government house leader and a senior minister for Kenny, where Kenny had essentially just given him the nomination and they disqualified anyone who challenged him.
The local board threw out the MLA Nixon's people.
They elected a whole new constituency association board and they demanded that the nomination be reopened.
The central party board, there was a big fight over that at the party's first convention right after her leadership.
Only half the board comes up for election.
Every single one of those spots were won by kind of an insurgency group, the party called Take Back Alberta that was generally supportive of her and was opposed to lockdown restrictions of the Kenny government and things like that.
And that's created deadlock in that party's board where you have 50% who are essentially more aligned with Smith and the anti-establishment, anti-Kenny stuff, and then 50% that came from, they were already elected there before, come from there.
And the party just quashed opening, reopening any nominations.
And the way that happened is there was an organized revolt, even though it's not in Smith's hands, it's up to the party.
There was a revolt in the caucus of the Kennyites who threatened to quit and create all sorts of trouble if she didn't find a way of protecting their nominations and kind of strong-armed her to do it.
And that's what's happened.
So now you've got these, you're going to have some candidates going to the next election who have no democratic legitimacy from the local constituency association members in those ridings Because they threatened to try and overthrow Smith as the leader if the party reopened their nomination so that local people can actually vote who their candidate is.
And so, this is just a long line in the continuing fight and civil war in Alberta.
It is worth noting that the last conservative premier or leader in Alberta to retire of their own free will was Peter Lotheed around the time I was born.
I should say something.
And the last conservative leader to actually complete a full term of an election in Alberta was Ralph Klein in 2001.
That was the last time there was an election in Alberta where the conservative premier finished their term because he won again in 2004, but then he was pushed out before that term is over.
Ed Stelmack comes in.
Ed Stelmack wins, pushed out before his term's over.
Allison Redford comes in, pushed out before her term's over.
Jim Prentice comes in, defeated.
Jason Kenney comes in saying Rachel Nutley's going to be one and done.
Well, he's pushed out before even his term is over.
Rachel Nutley lasted longer than him.
So, yeah, I mean, it's even if people like Smith, history's not on her side here.
If she manages to win the next election and make it to the next election, that'd be the first time since 2001 that anyone's done it.
And if she happens to ever retire on her own terms, well, that's something no conservative or no premier period of any party has pulled off in Alberta since around the time I was born in the 80s.
Well, it's a volatile place.
In some ways, that's good.
You don't want politicians to be too permanent.
You know, you look at the United States Senate, there are politicians who were there 30, 40, almost 50 years.
Look at Joe Biden himself.
I think there's some healthiness to, you know, turnover.
Although it sounds like Danielle Smith has a bit of a mutiny on her hands.
I think that it's hers to lose.
As in, I think that she's on an inertia that she'll win unless there's an eruption in her party, unless there are people who want to stab her in their back.
And I'm worried that there are some people who resent her coming in as the premier, as an outsider, as too libertarian, as too critical of Jason Kenney.
And they might rather lose the election and get rid of Danielle Smith than win under her.
Is that too crazy?
No, no, it's entirely true.
In fact, I think Jason Kenney probably even fits in that mold.
Jason Kenney, I've never seen before in any party, in any province, the sitting head of a government criticizing the frontrunner of the leadership race to replace them.
And then refusing to be part of a transition.
Like he refused to be like that, I've never heard of.
Like, it's one thing to be partisan in your party, but to say, I hate my successor so much, I literally will not help them become premier.
That's unheard of.
You'll remember, you know, you see the Lobranos poster from the old Western Standard when you ran it there.
Jean-Crad Chen and Paul Martin hated each other's guts.
If they could have gotten away with it, they would have shot each other.
But, you know, when Paul Martin was running to succeed Jean-Cretchen, Jean-Crad Chen stayed out of the leadership race, at least publicly.
I mean, everyone's got a private favorite.
You might, you know, call on some favors and pull some strings here and there, but you never got directly involved.
Jason Kenney was directly involved in that leadership on an almost daily basis, going almost exclusively after Danielle Smith, which he saw, I think, as a threat to his legacy, which had been pretty much defined by lockdowns and mandates and things like that.
And, you know, he was making government spending announcements literally the day of the leadership vote.
So, you know, by that evening, his successor will be selected.
It was assumed to likely be Danielle Smith.
That morning, he was making spending announcements in the same damn city, trying to take the spotlight.
So, you know, you had the most chaotic transition I've ever seen in government.
There's generally two kinds of transitions in Canadian or Westminster governments.
You have the one most people are aware of is when one party defeats another in an election.
So, you know, UCP defeats NDP.
Well, the NDP, you know, the government will take normally three to five weeks for transition.
The old government goes into caretaker mode.
They're not allowed to make decisions.
They're just kind of there to make sure that the police still arrest bad guys and the fires get put out.
They don't do anything in the assisted transition.
And there's no expectations on the new government because they're not actually sworn in yet because they're not technically the government until they're sworn in.
And that's, you know, what a lot of people see.
And then there's internal transitions.
You saw this really recently in BC where the new NDP leader was elected to replace Adrian Dix.
And they took two months, a very long transition.
It was within the same party, but it was a new administration coming in.
They took lots of time.
And the new premier could hit the ground running.
Here, Smith, I think, felt the necessity of taking power immediately because Jason Kenney was not acting as a caretaker, interim premier.
He was acting as a very hostile premier and going to govern in his own right until he was gone.
So Danielle Smith, I think, won the leadership on a Thursday night.
Monday morning, she was sworn in as premier.
And the rest of her cabinet wasn't even sworn in for a month.
She essentially just fired Jason Kenney from the cabinet and took his job.
And that resulted in a very chaotic turnover.
You had no premier's office.
You had a premier, but no, no real premier's office.
You just had kind of her campaign staff trying to pick up the pieces.
Well, it wasn't because she's premier.
There's an expectation from the media and the opposition that they're going to govern as the premier, even without any of the infrastructure.
So it was a very chaotic transition of the government.
It's kind of a third kind that I've never even seen before.
Even when you have two, you know, a hostile new leader replacing a hostile old leader like Jean Cretian and Paul Martin, just you just never see that kind of thing.
And I think it resulted in a pretty rough start for the government.
Yeah, I didn't realize it was that bad.
There is one thing that usually works in Alberta, and it also works in Quebec, works in Newfoundland.
John Thompson's Brief Tenure00:15:01
I think it works in BC and Saskatchewan, and that is you can unite your province against Ottawa because Ottawa plays favorites.
And, you know, Westerners like to think that Ottawa plays favorites, benefiting Quebec, but sometimes Quebecers feel misunderstood or threatened in some way.
I think Alberta has a legitimate claim, and Newfoundland does too.
I think the best moments of Danielle Smith have been when she pushes back at Justin Trudeau, when she challenges his goofy concept of a just transition off of oil and gas.
And when they met a few weeks ago and she was very reluctant to shake his hand, I know a lot of people on Twitter chirped about that and thought it looked childish.
I really liked it.
I mean, it was a little bit passive-aggressive, but I think it telegraphed to Albertans, I don't like this guy, unlike my opponent.
Here, just take a quick look at that awkward half-handshake.
Take a look.
people thought that looked small-minded or petty I thought, no, no, that's an expression of Alberta's views towards Trudeau.
Am I right on that?
I think almost any quarrel that the Premier of Alberta has with Justin Trudeau is going to be a winner.
If you're talking about Trudeau as Alberta Premier, you are winning.
If you're talking about health care or other more mundane matters, you may be losing, especially against an NDP.
But you're fighting Trudeau.
You're winning every day.
What do you think?
Well, actually, on the handshake, we discussed it a lot around the newsroom here.
I actually had a reporter ask, one of our reporters, Jonathan Bradley, I think, asked Premier Smith about that at a press conference when she got back.
What she had said actually is that they had met before the cameras started clicking and all the press are in there, they had already met, they'd already been introduced and already shaken hands.
And then, you know, they walk up to the chairs and Trudeau puts his hand out to shake her hand again.
And so she said she was already, she was just kind of confused by it.
They had already said hello.
They had already shaken hands and was just kind of confused by the kind of the state.
It wasn't really a deliberate statement.
Yeah, yeah, I don't think it was.
I think that's a, I think a fair, I think it was a fair explanation.
You know, others had posited that Trudeau had just like grabbed her hand and kind of manhandled it.
You know, like when he elbowed Ruth Elden Brusso, the MP, the chess.
I actually don't even think that either.
I think it was just awkward because they had already shaken hands and been introduced.
You know, it's like when you go for dinner with somebody and you say goodbye at the door of the restaurant and you turn out to walk the same direction down the sidewalk and you have an awkward second goodbye.
I think it's probably an equivalent of that.
So yeah, I think that's what it was.
But to your larger point of is it good politics to fight Ottawa?
Yeah, it generally is in Alberta and in many provinces.
You know, a lot less so Ontario because it kind of just sees itself as Upper Canada.
It's not really not as much a thing.
But the caution is that it can't look like some contrived, silly fight.
It has to be genuine over an issue.
It can't be, you know, every once in a while, like Rachel Notley would try to work herself up and do a tiff and say, Justin Trudeau is, you know, could do better.
And, you know, people are like, I'm not really buying it.
But conversely, you know, if, you know, if Danielle Smith had a grievance, but Albertans weren't bought into it and they thought it was just for political show.
This was part of Jason Kenney's problem.
He, you know, he ran against Ottawa in the last election.
He ran against Ottawa and the UCP leadership when he got made leader.
And then he, you know, for his roughly three years as premier, he would talk a game against Ottawa, but he never actually really did anything.
And so talking against Ottawa gets you, can get you in office, but it, you know, if you can't show anything for it, that you're actually willing to do something about it, it can be on the negative side.
And that was, you know, after his mandates and lockdowns and things like that, that was probably the clear second biggest reason why Jason Kenney lost leadership of his own party was just, it was just a bad joke that he would write an angry letter and hold a press conference about Ottawa, but never actually did anything.
My theory on that is as follows.
Jason Kenney is the consummate member of parliament in Ottawa.
He has traveled to every place in this country.
He was Stephen Harper's ambassador to new Canadian communities.
So he knows every ethnic group across this country.
He speaks pretty good French for a Western MP.
He was a great performer in Parliament.
He had foreign affairs and military and he had a lot.
He had a lot of big things he did.
And my theory, and I don't think it's that outlandish a theory, was that he just was in Alberta as premier as a holding pattern until it was more opportune to run for prime minister federally.
He didn't want to be the one to dash himself against the rock of Justin Trudeau in 2015, 2019, 2021.
Let someone else soften up Trudeau.
Kenny would do a term or two as premier.
Kenny's still pretty young, his early 50s.
And then he would go back to his natural and destiny.
And my point is: if you're going to run for prime minister and woo Ontario and woo Quebec, you don't want a bunch of footprints behind you where you condemned Ottawa or Canada too hard.
You don't want to be able to be pigeonholed as a small-time provincial guy who only cares about Alberta.
And I think that one of the reasons Kenny was so ineffective is that he was always thinking, how's this going to look when I run for prime minister?
And I think he never actually accepted being premier as his main and ultimate job.
He was always thinking, like when you're at a party and someone is obviously looking around for someone more interesting to talk to than you.
I think that was Jason Kenney.
He was looking around for someone more interesting to be the premier of than just Alberta.
What do you think of that theory?
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, a lot of people have speculated that.
I think it's true.
I mean, he was a creature of Ottawa representing Alberta, but, you know, he was rarely in Alberta.
You know, people didn't hold that against him.
I mean, you know, he was out doing, he was generally considered a very successful MP and minister, you know, had my support for a good time.
But, you know, it's not like the United States where there's a very long list of people who have been successful, have successfully been governors of a state, built executive experience, and then gone on to become president.
There's quite a few of them.
There is not a similar record in Canada.
So while you were talking there, I just verified.
I thought there had been only one premier in Canadian history who had become prime minister and that it was an insignificant one.
And boy, was I right.
The only premier in Canadian history who has gone on to become prime minister was John Thompson.
Can anyone tell me who John Thompson was?
I think this is one of those guys.
Yeah, I'm 99% sure.
This was one of the, I think, roughly four prime ministers who came immediately after Sir John and McDonald.
Some of them lasted just a couple of weeks and died.
And I think several of them all died in office.
Like it was just like a bunch of old drunks who were just like had gout or something replacing McDonald.
And they just were dropping like flies.
So John Thompson, I think, was prime minister maybe for a couple of months or something.
So as far as I know, there hasn't been a single premier in Canada who's gone on to at least win an election as prime minister.
We just had this one little anomaly.
He's not even a footnote.
You know, he's got a painting on a wall somewhere in the House of Commons, and that's the extent of his contribution.
So, and it's because I think it's largely because of the extreme regional nature of Canada.
Canada is not a nation in the traditional sense of the word.
It's a polity.
It's a state.
Quebec is a nation, but the Canadian nation, Trudeau has said post-national, doesn't have a strong sense of itself.
We have a stronger provincial identities in Canada than we do as a single overriding national identity.
And especially if you want to come from, you know, you can't be Alberta Premier and stand up for Alberta in a real way and then speak nationally.
You just can't do it.
Particularly so with Quebec.
I mean, I can't imagine people electing someone who's been the premier of Quebec.
It didn't work.
Jean Charais tried.
You know, many people have tried to go from premier to prime minister.
In Kenny's case, he never got to actually put it to the test because he, you know, failed his job as premier and got ousted by his own party.
That isn't to say he won't even try again someday if the opportunity presents itself.
Let me ask you why.
I think the extreme, the extreme regional nature of Canada makes it too difficult for premiers to make the change successfully.
Now, what's Kenny doing?
I saw a news release that he's joined a law firm as a senior advisor.
Now, he's not a lawyer by training.
In fact, I'm not sure if he, in fact, finished his undergraduate degree.
He's obviously a smart cookie with a ton of connections.
I was slightly surprised that he's sticking around Alberta.
I think he had such an ignominious ending.
I'm surprised he didn't decamp for, I don't know, England or America.
Have you heard from him or of him?
What is he doing?
Is he upbeat and moving on with his life?
Is he grumbling?
What's Jason Kenny up to now?
Well, I haven't got a Christmas card from Jason Kenny in some time.
So I can't give you an honest insight into where his headspace is at.
I know he's grown kind of the playoff beard.
Many of us do that when things get rougher in politics.
But the revolt against Kenny was from kind of the populist right in Alberta.
Generally, blue-collar people, middle-class people, small oil patch, guys who own like three, four rigs kind of thing.
The big business establishment, for the most part, still continued to back him.
And so, you know, it's not that everyone was against him.
The wild rose-style populist right was against him, and it was very hard against him and made it impossible for him to continue as the premier.
But, you know, he still kind of had that old PC business elite behind him.
So, you know, it's not like he was run out of town.
Allison Redford had to go to Afghanistan after her time as premier.
She had worn out all welcome, I think.
But, you know, like Jim Prentice, you know, Jim Prentiss found a soft landing in business.
He never lost the support of kind of the PC business establishment.
And similarly, I think Jason Kenney has still got some friends in that area.
So, if he wants to remain around, I can see that happening.
Well, let me ask you about the two elections that are on the horizon.
The first one, and it's a scheduled one, is the Alberta provincial election.
And I follow some of the left-wing bloggers in Alberta, and they're worried that Danielle Smith is picking up a bit in the polls, has found her feet a little bit, and is taking on Trudeau in this just transition business.
So I like the fact that the NDP bloggers in Alberta are a little bit nervous, but I'm still nervous that Danielle Smith is going to have a rocky go of it, especially when the media engages.
I believe that the Alberta media is atrociously opposed to her and are out to kill her.
Give me your prospects.
What do you think is going to happen in the Alberta election that's just a few months away?
Well, you know, I'll be not quite as cowardly as everyone who gets asked this question on camera.
I would give Smith and the UCP, I make them the odds on favorite Alberta.
So it's kind of like, it's just like I would give, you know, if you have two evenly matched teams, I give the odds to the home team, whoever's playing on home ice.
And it's Alberta.
Conservatives are on home ice.
So I give them the odds.
They're roughly evenly matched.
Rachel Notley is a capable political operator.
It's the first time in Alberta history, and it's very rare in Canadian history, period, where you have the ex-premier or prime minister of a government trying to get the job back.
Sir Johnny McDonald did it successfully.
Mackenzie King did it successfully, but only technically.
He never did also after the aberration.
And Pierre Trudeau did.
Yeah, and that's about it, really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it may have happened in other provinces.
It's definitely never happened in Alberta.
In fact, normally when a party loses government in Alberta, they completely disappear from history.
United Farmers lost an election, they disappeared.
Social credit lost an election.
The Liberals lost an election, gone.
United Farmers lost an election, gone.
Social credit, gone.
PCs, one election.
Sort of gone.
They kind of came back and controlled the UCP.
Now it's kind of a more of an equilibrium between the wild rose and PCs, but the PC party itself at least disappeared and would not have come back without the merger into the UCP.
The NDP did endure, and Rachel Notley is a skilled political operator.
They've been massively outfundraising UCP for a long time under Jason Kenney as core UCP donors walked away.
That's changed.
The UCP has now got a slight, at least in the final quarter of the year, the UCP took the lead.
They more or less tied overall for the year because the numbers were so low for the UCP for the first half of it.
I mean, there could be bozo eruptions that sink the UCP.
The media put a lot of scrutiny on the UCP.
Federal Election Fundraising Race00:04:36
Some of it's warranted.
Some of it's kind of gotcha.
Hey, someone said something controversial once they record.
They must be a Nazi.
A lot of that.
But you don't see any kind of similar lens put onto the NDP, which is, you know, one reason I've, you know, I've always operated the Western Standard.
One of my principles has always been we're here to fill vacuums.
If part of the media is doing something well, well, then we don't need to do a bunch of it.
We should do something that needs to be done and there's a market to be done, but isn't being done.
And I don't see a lot of scrutiny on the NDP, which is why we're trying to at least shine light on their candidates and their policies.
What do they stand for?
What's their record?
How is that applicable potentially in the next four years if they were to win?
So the NDP is more or less going to get a pass, I think, from the media.
They consider it very unthreatening.
But yeah, if I'm going to handicap it, I'd say advantage UCP as home ice advantage, but home ice advantage obviously doesn't win you every time.
Last question about the federal election.
Justin Trudeau, I think he likes to demonize people.
He likes demonizing people as racist and sexist and transphobes and Islamophobes, and that's what he did to the Truckers.
I think he tries to be a little bit more careful in his language about Alberta, but at the end of the day, you know, you don't have to say, I hate Alberta.
You can use code language like, we have to transition off the oil sands.
We have to transition off nitrogen fertilizer.
You know, you don't have to say, I hate Alberta farmers.
You can just say we're banning farming.
We're transitioning off oil.
Do you think Justin Trudeau is going to run if there's an election this year?
Do you think he's going to run against the West and make carbon a campaign theme?
What do you think?
Well, he has for the last few elections, so I wouldn't be surprised if he did it again.
Also, I think Danielle Smith presents, you know, it depends also.
A lot of it will depend on how Polyev responds to it.
Polyev was a born and raised Albertan.
He spent his entire career in Ottawa, but he was a born and raised Albertan, went to University of Calgary.
Even went to school at the University of Calgary with Danielle Smith and several others of the generation.
Liberals generally run against Alberta.
The question is, how hard do they lean into it?
I think the hardest anyone's ever leaned into it was the 1980 federal election that gave us the national energy program with Trudeau the seniors national energy program there.
But, you know, Trudeau's run against Alberta to one degree or another in every election.
And I have to be fair, it is fair to run against the leader or the politics of a province without necessarily running against the province.
You know, they tried to make an issue out of Jason Kenney in the last federal election.
I don't think that's necessarily running against Alberta.
They can be carefully conflated.
You know, I don't have a problem with Quebec, but I generally have a Quebec problem with every Quebec government.
And, you know, but that can be easily conflated.
So, you know, Trudeau ran against Kenny last time.
You know, his COVID plan had been a disaster.
Not that Trudeau's was any better, but Danielle Smith, you know, her talk, you know, she won the leadership of the UCP largely on the back of the Sovereignty Act, which is a scary word for some people.
And, you know, and there's just no votes to lose for him here.
The Liberals, I think, have one seat right now.
The Porch Pirate guy, George Jahal, in Northeast Calgary.
There's virtually no seats or votes for them to lose here.
I don't think they have under any illusions they're going to win a bunch of seats here.
And so in politics, you know, you always need everybody demonizes.
Everyone has enemies.
No one's completely sunny ways.
And if you're going to, you know, just the pure politics of it are: if you're going to pick an enemy, make sure you pick an enemy where you have nothing to lose.
And the liberals can pick Alberta because they could make a boogeyman out of it to win seats in the swing areas around the GTA, suburban Vancouver, things like that.
And virtually lose no substantial votes in Alberta because those votes aren't going to translate the seats in this system.
Preparing for the Alberta Election Run00:01:44
So yeah, buckle up.
You're going to see another anti-Alberta election run by Trudeau.
Question is, is it going to be more or less than every other election you've run?
Well, interesting days ahead.
Derek, it's great to catch up with you.
Give us 30 seconds on Western Standard.
What are you guys working on these days?
And what's the best way for people to support you?
Well, you know, one of the big things we're working on is preparing for the Alberta election here.
As I said, most of the media here give it a pass.
All four major daily papers in Alberta are operated out of Toronto and owned out of New Jersey.
And we're actually the only kind of print-style newsroom left in Western Canada that I'm aware of between Mississauga and Vancouver.
So, you know, what we're trying to do is provide a lot of context and coverage, not just during the Alberta election, but in the long lead up to it.
That's one of the big exciting things we're working on.
And, you know, like the Rebel, we are one of the only media outlets in the entire country that refuses to accept the federal government's media bailout.
So, you know, we rely on memberships or subscriptions from people who want to voluntarily make a business exchange.
We give you a valuable product in exchange for $10 a month or $100 a year.
And that's how we do what we do.
You can go to westernstandard.news, click on membership, join us, and of course, continue to support the Rebel at the same time.
Right on WesternStandard.news.
Great to see you.
Keep up the fight out there.
Look forward to catching up with you again soon.
Anytime.
Take care, Eric.
Right on.
There you have it.
Derek Filibrand, the boss of Western Standard.
And you can visit them at WesternStandard.news.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.