Ezra Levant, Rebel News founder, breaks precedent to endorse Danielle Smith in Alberta’s May 26 election, framing it as a fight against Rachel Notley’s proposed 38% tax hike and "woke socialism" that could collapse the province’s economy. He accuses Kenney’s UCP of betraying conservatives with authoritarian pandemic policies—like jailing pastors Arthur Pavlovsky and Tim Stevens—and federal policy alignment, while Smith’s leadership faces internal resistance from holdover ministers. Polls favor the UCP, but Edmonton’s NDP dominance and Calgary’s swing potential remain critical, as media disinformation (e.g., CBC’s false "interference emails" claims) risks distorting the race. Levant warns defeat would turn Alberta into another Trudeau-submissive region, erasing its free-market identity, and urges support despite party fractures and smear campaigns. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, why every Canadian should support Danielle Smith and every Albertan should vote for her.
It's May 26th and this is the Azra Lovance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
The Alberta election is on Monday, and I'm going to say something Rebel News has actually never said in our entire history.
We are making a formal partisan endorsement.
We've never done that before, actually, not for Andrew Scheer, not for Aaron O'Toole, not for Maxime Bernier, not for Doug Ford or Jason Kenney.
We have never formally backed a candidate or a party because part of our identity and part of the reason why people trust us is because they know we hold all politicians to account, especially those who call themselves conservatives.
And we don't like to get too chummy with any politician.
We don't want to ingratiate ourselves with them because we don't want any favors from them.
We don't want them to think we're beholden to them at all.
I like it when conservative politicians are a little bit afraid of rebel news.
They should be, precisely because they don't control us.
The reason why Justin Trudeau loves the CBC and gives him $1.5 billion a year is because this is how the CBC's journalists treat him.
I don't want to be that way with conservative politicians.
I want Canadians to trust us, not Canadian politicians, and you can't have both.
But I have to make an endorsement because I believe a lot is at stake in Alberta, and it's a confusing time for some conservatives in that province.
And I believe Rebel News itself has had some influence in that province over the past few years in politics.
And I believe in all modesty that we are one of the reasons why there is an election on Monday at all.
And it looks like Albertans want this election and know a lot is at stake.
Advanced polls have been open for a few days and voter turnout looks like it is about the same as last time when 1.9 million people voted out of a possible 2.8 million registered voters.
So 68%, which is pretty high.
Compare that to 54% in BC's last election or just 43% turnout in Ontario's last election.
Albertans know things are at stake and they're showing up.
According to Elections Canada, as of today, more than half a million people have cast their vote already in advance polls.
So it looks like it's about the same intensity as the last election, which really makes sense.
It's a polarizing election.
The last election in 2019 was a polarizing election, of course.
Rachel Notley, the incumbent NDP premier, was thrown out by voters in favor of Jason Kenney, the former conservative MP and Harvard cabinet minister, who before that was the head of the Taxpayers Federation.
I mean, what a contrast.
A carbon tax-loving, oil-patch-bashing socialist NDP versus Jason Kenney, who did a kind of unite the right in Alberta, merging the two leading conservative parties, and promising to return Alberta to its historic place as a small government, freedom-loving province.
It was a stark choice, and Kenney won that election handily in 2019, 55% to 32%.
Nature was healing.
But then the pandemic struck, and Kenney, after a few months of being the most freedom-oriented premier in the country, I don't know, something snapped.
He caved in and he became the most authoritarian premier in the country, jailing Christian pastors and demonizing Albertans who wanted a more hands-off approach.
It was hard to believe it was Jason Kenney who literally set up an Office for Religious Freedom when he was a federal cabinet minister.
That's the same guy who sent over 100 cops to expropriate a church, Grace Life Church, in Edmonton and turn it into a police garrison because it wouldn't close its doors during lockdown.
Kenny went from being Canada's Ron DeSantis to being Canada's Anthony Fauci.
That shocked and disappointed a lot of conservatives.
And there's something else, too.
Kenny didn't fight back against Justin Trudeau as hard as you'd think or want him to.
Every Alberta premier has to stand up to Ottawa, especially for oil and gas and coal.
It's part of the job, just as it's part of the job for the premier of Newfoundland and the Premier of Quebec.
It's just part of the system.
You need strong premiers to push back against Ottawa, taking advantage of provinces, pushing their way into provincial jurisdiction.
But I got the feeling, and a lot of other people did too, that Kenny never really fought back hard because he was always keeping one eye on a future candidacy to run for prime minister.
And so before fighting for Alberta, it was like he was always checking how will this look in five years when I run for PM.
So even though his job was to fight for Alberta, and he didn't have to care what the Toronto Star or the CBC's Ottawa pundits panels thought, it felt like he was tailoring his message to keep a future career choice open.
It was a disaster.
I think he lost both sides of the political spectrum.
The left hated him, always did, always will, for being a tax fighter, especially for being a social conservative, especially a pro-life conservative.
They would never abide him.
Fine.
You don't need their support in Alberta.
But then he dashed the right, both the libertarian right, the leave-me-alone right, and the Christian right.
And the way he discussed the trucker convoy was positively trudopian.
I was going to say utopian.
He sounded like Trudeau.
I know that these do not, these marginal voices do not represent Albertans.
They certainly do not represent the United Conservative Party.
But I am determined to ensure that such hateful, extreme, and divisive voices do not find a home in this mainstream, broad conservative party.
And so that's an issue that is very much at play here.
And I will not apologize for calling out these kinds of voices of division.
In the past, Alberta politics, we've always had one or two kind of hard-right parties that were, I guess, a natural home for people like this.
There was two or three percent of the province that voted for hard-right parties in the last election, provincial election, including Derek Fildebrandt's party, which is now called the WIP.
And there was 1% that voted for the Maverick Party in the last federal election.
So people who have hateful or extreme views, they can find a political home, but not in the United Conservative Party.
If they do not believe in human dignity, they're not welcome in this party.
Every single one of those truckers and farmers at the Couts border crossing voted for Kenny in 2019.
Every one of them.
And he started smearing them using Trudeau's language.
It was nuts.
By the way, I'm not the only one who thought so.
I learned that Kenny's own MLAs were much more supportive of the truckers.
One of them actually visited the Truckers at Coots several times.
Those truckers made Kenny blink, which he hated, but the feeling was mutual.
Take a look at this.
Here's an aggregation of public opinion polls in Alberta over the years, past few years.
You can see that Kenny started as premier with a huge lead, obviously, and it just plunged during the pandemic and the lockdowns.
He was on track to lose the election, hated by the right and the left.
Last May, his party gave him the weakest endorsement possible, just a 51% confidence vote at a convention that Kenny's team tried to stage manage.
Kenny quit, which was the right move.
And the party selected a new leader in October, and it was the non-MLA, Danielle Smith, who won.
That's important.
Think about that.
A lot of Kenny cabinet ministers ran, including the treasurer of the province.
An outsider beat them all.
I think that tells me the party didn't just want to replace Kenny with a Kenny Mini-Me.
They wanted to purge the party and punish it, or at least its leadership or anyone too closely associated with the atrocious decisions during Kenney's term.
But how does that work when an outsider takes over a party, not just a party, but a government?
Well, over the last seven months or so, Smith didn't just have to run a party.
She had to run a province.
She had to run a cabinet.
And every single cabinet minister was appointed by Jason Kenney.
And many of them still carry a flame for Jason Kenney and resent his ouster and certainly resent that this outsider, this usurper, is running the thing.
And how disgraceful was it that Jason Kenney, when he left his premier, refused to help in any way with the transition?
Look, it's a tradition in democracies that when a prime minister or a president or a premier leaves an office, he or she meets with the incoming leader to show them the ropes, explain things, help the transition, not out of affection for the rival as a person, but out of loyalty to the country and serving the country.
It's the difference between helping a partisan opponent, which you would never do, and helping the province, which everyone should do.
How grudging and bitter do you have to be to say to Daniel Smith, I'm not going to help you be premier at all.
I am so full of rage and vengeance that I won't just punish you, even though you have already run the prize, but I will punish the whole province too, because they chose you over me.
Kenney's worst day as premier wasn't when he arrested Christian pastors or small businessmen like Chris Scott at the Whistle-Stop Diner.
It was when he was so angry with Albertans for not supporting him that he left in a pout, not even helping the new government take the reins.
It was a low moment.
We had some paternity in all of that.
I suppose I personally did too, to a degree.
I mean, I had been friends with Kenny since we were young.
I met him when I was in law school and he was a young lad running the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
We would hang out in Edmonton, a couple of right-wing guys in a left-wing city.
We had a little crew we called the Snack Pack, including the young MP named Raheem Jaffer.
Jason Kenney was a close friend of mine for 20 years.
I knew him and trusted him, and he was surely the strongest of Stephen Harper's cabinet ministers, the most able, the smartest, the best French speaker for an Anglo, the best organizer, especially with new Canadians, hard worker, best debater, best media relations, best team.
So to see him become the locker downer, the jailer of pastors, the enforcer of vaccine mandates was shocking and uprooting and alienating.
To be honest, my response for the first few months was just to go silent, to pretend I didn't see it, not to call him or text him as I used to do from time to time since we were friends in our 20s.
I just thought, let me wait this out.
I don't want to quarrel with my old friend.
I'm just going to sort of pretend none of this is happening and hopefully it will go away soon.
But it did not.
It got worse.
And the thing about being in my position as a pundit and as a journalist and as the leader of Rebel News, which is full of pundits and journalists, and whose mottos, you know, are telling the other side of the story and whose mandate is fight for freedom.
The thing is, I really could not talk about it.
How on earth could Rebel News not talk about Jason Kenney, the best young conservative in the country, becoming the worst and going, you know, doing it in Alberta of all places and to Christian pastors of all people.
How could we not talk about it?
And so we did.
And we championed the little guy.
We championed his victims, Chris Scott and the Whistle-Stop Diner, Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky, Pastor Tim Stevens arrested in front of his children, just a disgrace.
Churches across the province, truckers, we told the stories of the protesters and we crowdfunded lawyers to pay for their defense.
We had billboards and we literally did 100 news reports and we sent more than 10 million emails into the province about him.
I think that woke a lot of people up.
Like I say, Kenny resigned when he got 51% in a confidence vote by party members.
Those are party insiders, activists, not just regular voters.
They're like members of his local boards of directors, but people who were in the part, the movement.
I truly believe that had we not engaged in the freedom fight in Alberta in the way we did, Kenny probably would have slouched to, I don't know, 71% instead of 51% approval, and he would have stayed on.
People would have been demoralized.
Conservatives would have said, what's the point?
And as that poll graph shows, Kenny would go to a slaughter by a rampant NDP.
That's what the poll showed.
It was a disaster.
Kenny was a disaster because he ran Alberta like Trudeau would run it, frankly, using the same language.
Now, I see a new poll in the CBC just out today, which is basically being operating as the NDP's warroom.
I mean, the CBC couldn't be more absurd in their partisanship.
The poll today suggests that Danielle Smith will indeed beat Rachel Notley on Monday.
The poll suggests Smith's United Conservative Party will get 56 seats and Notley's NDP will get 31.
That's still far too many for the socialists, but it's a solid majority.
I'm not sure if I trust that poll.
Things are volatile and the NDP knows it's now or never.
They're doing everything they can and so is the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.
They're appalled with Smith and her real conservatism.
They hate the fact that she cared about civil liberties during the pandemic.
They hate her Sovereignty Act, though they're fine with it when it's applied by Quebec.
The CBC has been absurd.
By the way, they concocted a story that Danielle Smith or her office sent emails to prosecutors telling them not to continue prosecuting lockdown offenses.
But every one of the 44 Alberta prosecutors who works on lockdown files said that none of them had ever received such an email from anyone.
And all 32 staff of the Premier's office swore to the same fact.
And a massive search by over a million emails done by the civil service's IT department found not a single such email.
The province's ethics commissioner, a former judge, said she found no evidence of these emails at all.
And yet the CBC continues literally to this day to claim that it happened.
They're wicked liars.
It's just insane.
That's a conspiracy theory.
That's disinformation.
That's the Toronto CBC trying to rig the Alberta election, and they just might get away with it.
Who would want Smith to lose?
Well, the NDP, of course.
And Trudeau, the owner of the CBC, of course, and the rest of the regime bailout media, of course, but also others within Smith's own government, as I said, who would want a restoration of the Kenney regime.
Not a return of Kenny himself, who has burnt his bridges, but Kenny's inner circle, the people who he was partying with that day at the Sky Palace.
You know, the image where the mere citizens down below were banned from going to restaurants or having parties.
But Kenny and his team met high above the night gathering in that famous or infamous photo is Tyler Chandrow, who was Kenny's health minister who enforced the brutal lockdown.
Cut Through the Noise00:09:56
He's Smith's justice minister now.
He'd love to get rid of Smith.
He'd surely run himself.
In fact, you might say he's done his best to get rid of Smith already.
Instead of helping her fulfill her campaign promise to stay the prosecution of those lockdown laws, he has embarrassed her and refused to help her.
It's atrocious and disloyal.
But again, what can she do about it?
She's an outsider being injected into a cabinet and a caucus that was constructed by Jason Kenney, her bitter rival.
What can she do?
Oh, there would be plenty of Kenny MLAs who would rather lose on Monday and select a new leader they prefer and try to win the province again in 2027 rather than win today under Danielle Smith.
Absolutely.
It's probably Jason Kenney's view too.
If he can't have it, no one can.
It's obviously his view, given that he refused to help Smith with the transition in the Premier's office.
In recent days, Arthur Pavlovsky, the Christian pastor that we talk about a lot here, spent nearly 50 days in prison for opening his church during the lockdown.
He started his own political party and he condemned Danielle Smith and Notley.
This week he held a press conference at the legislature denouncing both Smith and Notley, calling Smith a traitor and calling Notley a witch.
I don't think Pavlovsky's party will win.
I don't think it'll even get 1% of the vote, and I don't think it'll be enough to even split the vote.
But the charge that Pavlovsky made, and of course, you know, Rebel News has crowdfunded his legal defense through the Democracy Fund, and we've done dozens of news stories about him.
His charge is that Smith has been a traitor on the lockdown issues.
But I disagree.
In fact, she has been the most sympathetic person in the legislature, really the only sympathetic person in the legislature.
And her efforts to get prosecutions stayed by talking to the justice minister in a lawful way, in careful way, the efforts have been weaponized against her by the CBC and others within her own party, including Tyler Chandrow.
If you have to say the biggest landmine that Danielle Smith has stepped on in this campaign, the biggest embarrassment, her critics would say was her attempt to help Arthur Pavlovsky and others.
And I feel compelled to give you my view on this since Rebel News directly and our legal support for Pavlovsky and my own meeting with Smith give me a perspective on this.
Look, I have had my disagreements with Danielle Smith before.
I've known her since we were students together at the University of Calgary 30 years ago.
I was friends with her.
I was a supporter when she became the leader of the Wild Rose Party and was set to win the election in 2012 until she did a backroom deal to dissolve the opposition and join with the PC government, an anti-democratic act so appalling.
Imagine dissolving the opposition weeks before the election and joining the government.
That appalled voters.
They punished both the PC party and the Wild Rose opposition and just looked around and said, who's left?
Oh, give the province to the NDP in a shock result.
I was so appalled by all of that.
I do not endorse her lightly, but that was more than a decade ago.
And what is at stake is the future of Alberta today.
And what I would say to Pavlovsky, and in fact, I did tell him this directly, is that anything that damages Danielle Smith has only one result, to strengthen the chances that Rachel Notley, the destroyer, will take office again.
And the fact that Smith has not been able to convince Kenny's loyalists and cabinet to help her stop the prosecutions of lockdowns is not comparable to Notley's passionate commitment to prosecute anyone and everyone she can, not just for lockdown crimes, but many other political offenses.
By the way, I think Pavlovsky's press conference was so vitriolic, I don't think it actually moved the needle.
It had no appeal to the NDP voters other than they found it embarrassing for Smith.
And I simply don't think it moved UCP voters because it was so bellicose.
Here's what's at stake.
On Monday, there will either be a Premier Rachel Notley, the socialist destroyer, the hater of the Oral Sands and other fossil fuels, the taxer, the big government errand girl for public sector unions, someone who hates the essence of the province, namely its freedom and individuality.
We already know the damage she can do and will do and is itching to do in cooperation with the media party and Trudeau's Liberal Party.
It could be her or it could be Danielle Smith, the UCP leader who, it must be admitted, sometimes has too much of a media pundit in her and muses out loud about ideas too freely and can come across sometimes as too whimsical.
It's a hazard for someone who spent their life in the world of journalism where you can say things with no consequences then to become premier.
But it is absurd to me that Smith would be called too ideological or too extreme for championing basic Alberta ideas like smaller government or provincial jurisdiction.
But Rachel Notley, who wants a wholesale reform of the entire capitalist economy, she avoids that name.
Imagine saying Smith is too ideological, but not saying that Notley is.
Imagine saying that Smith is a risk to investment, but Notley and her war against oil and gas isn't.
They say Smith is extreme, but she's actually a pro-choice libertarian, always has been.
But that's just the CBC smear.
You want extreme.
How about an NDP cabinet in Alberta calling for a ban of oil tankers?
Or the NDP candidate who literally says Alberta should completely abolish oil and gas, 100% transition off it.
That's crazy talk.
That's really comparable to Stalin and the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farms level communism and authoritarianism.
Imagine telling 100,000 people, we will end your job.
That's the risk in this election.
That's the insane choice.
The case against Danielle Smith is that she's too concerned with civil liberties, too concerned with the lockdowns.
I don't see that as a flaw.
That she's too concerned about Alberta jurisdiction.
Well, that's her job, actually.
I wish Rachel Notley had been concerned.
What I'm more worried about is the true case against Danielle Smith, by UCP party members who resent her replacing Jason Kenny, or by those who are Red Tories and care more about social acceptability in the eyes of the CBC than what's right for the province and its economy.
Those who would vote NDP, but they just are team blue instead of team orange.
I see that Stephen Harper has made up his mind, and maybe it's not a surprise that he's endorsing Smith.
He would never endorse an NDP, but he could have simply remained silent.
Let me play for you his endorsement released today.
Fellow Albertans.
After some tough years, our province has finally recovered from the last NDP term.
But Rachel Notley is promising to undo all that progress.
The NDP is promising to hike taxes on job creators by 38%, a massive hike that would kill tens of thousands of jobs.
Rachel Notley tried a similar tax hike the last time she was premier.
Investment fled our province and mass layoffs ensued.
It's no wonder Rachel Notley doesn't want to talk about her record as premier.
Nor does Rachel Notley want to talk about the fact that the Trudeau Liberals are voting NDP in this election.
Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau are a combination that puts Alberta's economy at great risk.
In this election, there's only one option to protect the economic livelihoods of you and your family.
That's Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party.
Thanks for listening.
Pierre Polyev II, he doesn't have to endorse.
He could have stayed silent.
In fact, there's sometimes rivalries between provincial and federal conservatives.
Here's his video.
Let's cut through the noise on the choice between the NDP's Rachel Notley and conservative Danielle Smith.
Notley will work for Trudeau and Singh, the NDP Liberal Coalition bosses in Ottawa.
She'll support higher carbon taxes on your gas, heat, and groceries.
She'll help Trudeau attack the energy sector, putting you out of a job.
And speaking of jobs, she'll raise taxes on job creators, pushing you onto the unemployment lines.
That'll mean a weaker economy with less money for schools and hospitals.
On the other hand, conservatives will fight the carbon tax, stand up for Alberta and its energy sector, and unleash the full potential of our Alberta economy in order to grow and prosper in the future.
That means more money for schools and hospital.
In other words, vote for Alberta.
Vote conservative.
Vote early.
Vote now.
Now, I would never say vote for Danielle Smith because Stephen Harper or Pierre Polly had said to do so.
I would say vote for Danielle Smith because the case against her is absurd.
And it's made in bad faith by the Kenny loyalists in the party, by CBC axe grinders working for Justin Trudeau, by those who simply want to take the Alberta-ness out of Alberta.
And that's what scares me.
You know, Alberta will not survive the NDP winning.
I mean, of course it will survive, but it will not survive in its current form.
It will not be recognizable.
It will be Detroited.
It'll go the way that California is going.
The specialness will be beaten out of it.
It won't survive another four years of socialism.
Not just in terms of the economy, but civil liberties too.
If Arthur Pavlovsky thinks he's being persecuted under Danielle Smith, who has repeatedly tried to end the Kenny-era persecutions, well, he hasn't seen anything yet if Rachel Notley is elected.
I mean, Notley has shown what she thinks of civil liberties throughout the campaign.
Look at this one example of her press aide telling a mild-mannered reporter from the Western Standard that he is a hate criminal for merely criticizing the NDP in his journalism.
Jonathan Radley, Western Standard, I got a question about the military.
Don't yell your questions out, okay?
You know, native policy with your particular outlet where you have operated in hate speech against our candidates.
We are taking questions from you.
I've gone over this, Jonathan, several times.
Native Policy Debate00:03:51
Happy to continue talking about it.
Happy to have that discussion with your editors.
Thank you for coming.
Super appreciate it.
Yeah, imagine what they would do to you.
Danielle Smith must absolutely win, and every Albertan must vote for her.
And even if they have been offended or embarrassed or confused by the last six months of her tenure, much of which was done by Kenny Underminers, Danielle Smith has to win on Monday, and then the UCP can patch up the party and the government for the next four years.
But if she loses, that is the end of Alberta as we know it.
I make this video especially for the thousands of Albertans who know that Rebel News and I supported freedom and fought for freedom and hired lawyers to fight for freedom, even for Arthur Pavlovsky.
I'm here to say if the UCP and Danielle Smith do not win on Monday, Freedom's Light will go out in Alberta.
The CBC wants that, and Jason Kenney doesn't seem to care, but I sure do, and you should too.
Thanks.
Well, look, let me be honest.
Although I'm an Albertan at heart, I still have my old Alberta phone number.
I have been out here in Toronto for a while.
I no longer have an Alberta license plate or a driver's license.
I guess I'm a Torontonian, and, you know, I shouldn't be ashamed of it.
A guy is who he is, and there's wonderful things about every city.
You can find wonderful things about Toronto.
So I'm not going to badmouth the town I'm in, but my heart pumps Alberta blood because I love the province.
I love it geographically.
It's a place where I grew up, so I have a nostalgia for it.
I love the free spirit.
I love the fact that I grew up and I was amongst ranchers and farmers and free people, cowboys and Indians.
And the Indians were often cowboys.
I just love everything about that province.
And the fact that the NDP won in 2015 felt so invasive and unnatural.
And when Kenny won in 2019, I thought, finally, things are restored to normal.
But Kenny was not what was expected.
And now we find ourselves in the terrifying position where, oh, my God, Rachel Notley might come back in and maybe the Alberta I once knew and loved and grew up in as a child is not going to be that way anymore.
And when I ended my monologue by saying it could be Detroited, we think of Detroit now as a run-down slum.
But 100 years ago, it was the leading industrial city in America, the highest wage in America.
It was a place of racial harmony, by the way.
It was a wonderful, industrious city because of the auto industry.
Well, I think that Alberta could go that way.
Joining me now is a true blue Albertan who has not left for other pastures, and she's in the heart of it.
I'm talking about my friend, Sheila Gundried.
Sheila, look, I know I'm not an Albertan anymore, even though I feel in many ways that I am, but you are, and you have a foot in agriculture and you have a foot in oil and you have your finger on the pulse.
And you're in the north of the province when we have reporters in the south.
I don't know if I'm being dramatic, but I think that if Alberta goes to NDP again, it will forever deracinate the province.
It will change the province from a free place to just another Canadian Trudopian province.
That's what I'm afraid of.
But I'm here in Toronto.
What do you say out there in Alberta?
Yeah, we may as well name the place Toronto West because we will have leadership here that will put up no objections to all the terrible things that Justin Trudeau wants to do to agriculture, through his fertilizer targets, to oil and gas, through his net zero goals and his attempts to phase everything out, his gun grab.
Alberta's Future at Stake00:09:37
I mean, you look at the things that Justin Trudeau is doing as part of his liberal agenda.
They are all focused like a laser beam on the culture of the West.
And he sees us as culturally incompatible with him.
And we know, you know, to predict future behavior, you only have to look at past behavior.
And Rachel Motley rolled over every time Justin Trudeau wanted to do something to Alberta.
She brought in a carbon tax before he did.
Something she never campaigned on.
She never pushed back on any of the pipeline cancellations because that's what she wanted to.
She didn't want Keystone XL done.
In fact, one of her first acts after becoming premier here was to recall our energy ambassador.
We had somebody who was working in Washington to lobby on behalf of the Canadian oil and gas sector, which is, I guess, the fiduciary duty of the Alberta government because it's their job to market this thing that we all own.
She recalled him right away and fired him, Rob Merrifield.
And so there will be a repeat of this.
I've spoken to people, and our old reporter, Holly Nicholas, was one of these people.
In the days and weeks and months after the NDP were elected, I think totally, cumulatively, it was close to 200,000 jobs lost.
I think 185 to like 190,000 jobs that were lost as a direct result of the attack on the energy sector.
And it was bad in downtown Calgary.
Holly told me these stories, and she was one of them, where you would look out your office window in the morning, and it would just be a lineup of cabs and people coming down from the head offices with their belongings and getting in the cabs every day.
It was like 800 jobs here, 400 jobs here.
ConocoPhillips leaving and TC Energy changing their name and Houston Energy leaving.
It was just constant.
It was hard to keep up with.
We will return to that in the middle of an economic recovery.
Yeah, that's shocking.
You know, there was a brief hope in 2015 when Rachel Not Lee was elected that she would be a good kind of NDP.
And some people would say, no such thing.
Well, Saskatchewan had NDP governments for so long.
Their last government, if I'm remembering correctly, was a premier named Roy Romanov, who actually balanced the budget, actually allowed some free market health care.
Actually, I mean, listen, I, of course, supported the truth with no choice, quite frankly.
The place was headed towards bankruptcy, and there was an absolute influx of people from Saskatchewan into Alberta.
That was the joke at the time, is everybody in Alberta was from Saskatchewan.
Roy Romano was even forced to close hospitals, the rural hospitals, to balance the budget.
And I'm not saying he was great, but people said, but he didn't have the cultural extremism.
Like, that's another thing.
Rachel Not, like, there's different streams of New Democrats.
There's that prairie farmer grassroots, you know, Tommy Douglas, Bill Aberhood strain, but there's this new woke university faculty lounge strain.
And the funny thing is, Rachel Notley's dad, Grant Notley, was an old school New Democrat, sort of a little bit working class, a little bit bookish.
But Rachel Notley is full identity politics.
You're a hate criminal, racial this, gender that.
And just she is, she is not a Roy Romano.
She is not a Grant Notley.
She is a destroyer akin to Trudeau.
I can't, to this day, I can't think of a single thing she stood up to Trudeau on, even verbally, even just even just to say, hey, man, stop doing it, let alone challenging anything in court.
No, no, absolutely not.
And even just more close to home.
I mean, moreover, to your point, Rachel Notley is a university socialist.
That's where her riding is.
She's just surrounded by, you know, the left-wing wokeism 20-somethings.
That's where her riding is.
It's the most progressive part of Edmonton, which is the most progressive city in all of Alberta.
As Ralph Klein said, a nice place with too many socialists and mosquitoes.
That's an evergreen statement that will never go away.
But even closer to home, one of the harshest locker downers was Rachel Notley.
I recall her saying that it is time to seize Grace Life Church, shut it down, go in there before the RCMP ever did, before Jason Kenney ever did.
She was cheering for the arrests of pastors.
Jason Kenney was bad, terrible.
I mean, it was a civil liberties bonfire in Alberta constantly, and all we could do every single day was just run up and pour a cup of water on it in our own little way.
But Notley would have been so much worse.
We'd still be wearing masks.
We'd still have vaccine mandates.
Every single person who objected or honked their horn would still be in jail.
You know, you're not even kidding.
There were ND peers who were wearing masks like at official NDP events, I think even at the start of the campaign.
I call them NDP lawn signs for your face.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Well, the CBC has just been atrocious.
I mean, I mentioned that they had this bombshell story that Danielle Smith interfered and emails prove it.
And after the entire public service searched for it, all 44 prosecutors swore they hadn't received it.
A judge said they're still sticking with their story.
Like that is pure disinformation to use a Trudeau word.
And I just, I've never seen such a bald-faced lie as that.
And the trouble is, you know, Rebel News has a big following in Alberta proportionately.
It's actually our strongest place in the world is Alberta.
Oh, you're welcome.
Yeah.
Well, you're doing a great job.
You're a chief reporter for a reason.
But there's a lot of people who don't know about Rebel News or Western Standard or Counter Signal or True North.
There are four good, independent voices in that province.
I'm very proud.
We have some affiliation with all of them.
But there are people who still only get their news from the, well, I wouldn't say the Global Mail.
No one in Alberta reads that, but from the CBC and post media who have been like the liberal or the NDP party war room.
They have hated Danielle Smith.
I think it's because she's not from the club.
You'd think that they would like her because she's a former journalist, but she's just not their kind.
It feels very snooty and clubby.
You know, there's also, I think, a self-preservation reason for why all these journalists are actively campaigning for Notley.
Like you cannot read their articles and think this was like it looks like it was written in the Notley Warroom.
And that's because in 2015 through to 2017, we know that dozens of journalists from the mainstream media went directly into the government.
They want the jobs.
That's the thing.
They all went over there.
They went as issues managers, which is just a bunch of nerds who run around and record everything.
They became press secretaries.
Have to work on twice the pay.
Every shoe leather journalist on the legislature who's making 65 grand a year and working 60 hours a week thought if I am hired as a director of communications for some NDP cabinet minister, now I'm working less time and for six figures.
And I'm not just kidding.
That is the destination.
That's the dream job of any journalist is a guaranteed income, lots of benefits, tons of days off.
Like the Alberta legislature never sits.
Yeah, it sits less than any other legislature in Canada, which is actually a good thing.
They can't get it.
Yeah, I don't mind.
I don't mind.
I think that's a real moral hazard for journalists.
Well, I've seen two polls in a row.
One by Janet Brown, I think is her name, who's regarded as a pretty accurate pollster, they say, and another by Abacus, which is run out of Ottawa by liberals.
But both these polls put the UCP ahead.
Now they could, you know, some people would say, oh, that's just to lull us into a sense of complacency.
No, I think they're actually real polls.
Like, come on, it's still Alberta.
But boy, it's too close for comfort for me.
What do you think?
You know, I was never quite convinced that it was as close as the mainstream media and the NDP were saying.
And as I say, I mean, there's real, there's really no difference between those two things.
I probably repeat myself there.
But Janet Brown has been consistently right.
She was right in the last election.
She was the closest pollster.
I know Abacus has sort of corrected their polling because I think in earlier polling, they had the NDP and the UCP neck and neck, which probably frightened a lot of skeptical conservatives who are sort of skeptical of Daniel Smith because sometimes she says kooky things.
It'll energize those people to get to the polls.
But Abacus data was oversampling Edmonton.
And who cares if the NDP numbers go up in Edmonton?
All is lost there.
You can't win those ridings twice.
So if there's an NDP surge in Edmonton, who gives a darn?
It's really Battleground Calgary.
And I never believed that Calgary was as close as those early pollsters were staying.
Well, we'll find out very soon.
New Studio Launch00:03:54
All right, Sheila, great to see you.
Thanks for your great work on this.
And we'll see you on Monday night for our live stream when we're going to try out our new studio.
I'm very excited about that.
Yes.
And if everybody wants to see our reports from the campaign trail, because our team has been everywhere, it's albertadecides.com.
Albertadecides.com.
That's a great URL.
Take care, my friend.
Thanks for everything.
Thanks, boss.
All right.
Cheers.
Stay with us.
But my final thoughts are next.
Hey, welcome back.
You know, we launched our buildthedream.ca campaign for the new studio.
And I was in there today and it's really coming together.
I'm so excited by how it's looking.
We're putting the lighting in now.
It really feels professional.
Look, it's not a gazillion dollar CBC studio.
I don't know if you remember when I was back at Sun News Network.
My studio there was $1 million.
Look, we're spending $70,000 all in.
That's still a lot of money for us, but I think it looks great.
It really kicks it up a notch.
Anyways, we put that out by email and video and on Twitter.
And we must have attracted the attention of some left-wing internet army or something.
Sometimes I call them Truanon.
That's sort of the Trudeau cult QA.
They like QAnon, but when they're Trudeauists, all these Twitter accounts that had like 10 members or 20 members and have a really obscure name and no real name and no real photo.
So it's clear that some organization, some, I don't know, George Soros-funded or Liberal Party-funded War Room said, we've got to embarrass this, which tells me we're on the right track.
But there were some funny comments there.
Like some of the haters said, so you criticize CBC for taking money, but you want money from the public.
How is that different?
Well, it's easy how that's different.
When we ask for support from the public, it's voluntary.
You don't have to give if you don't want to.
When the CBC asks for support, they just call up Trudeau and say, extract the money from the taxpayers.
It couldn't be more different.
One person said, uh-huh, well, you don't take money from the Canadian government, but I'm sure you take money from Vladimir Putin.
All right.
Maybe because I'm not a cheerleader of a war that's killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.
By the way, my family is originally from Ukraine, from Dnipro, which, you know, who would before war?
Certainly not for me.
But I reminded that critic on Twitter that I actually did something.
I don't know if you remember, but Russia invaded Ukraine before when Obama was president in 2014.
And shortly after that, I published a book called Groundswell, The Case for Fracking.
And I have a whole chapter in there about why Europe should get off of Gazprom gas and develop its own gas through fracking.
And I don't know if you know this, because this was before we started Sun News, but I actually went on a short speaking tour in Germany.
I spoke in Munich.
I spoke in Frankfurt.
And I made the case to Germans why they should stop buying gas from Gazprom.
In fact, I did this whole funny routine making fun of Putin.
I don't think I can travel to Russia because I was so critical of him.
So I just had fun using that robot.
And if you follow me on Twitter, you can see me sort of haggling with these critics.
Sometimes I don't fight with Twitter accounts that are obviously fakes or robots because they have like 10 members and 20 followers or something.
And I've got, I don't know, 400,000 or whatever it is.
But the fact that the left is so up in arms about our new studio makes me feel great.
You know, they mock how it looks and they mock how the construction is and they say all sorts of, oh, you're Fox News North.
How is that an insult?
Oh, you're just like Tesla.
How is that an insult?
Anyways, it made me feel good and I feel great about it.
Feeling Great About the New Studio00:00:31
And I think that the new studio will be ready.
Maybe I'm giving it away here on Monday night when Alberta is having its election.
We have our election live stream.
That will be the first time we try out this studio and see what it can do.
We might have some first day hiccups too.
I mean, it's always dangerous to launch things on a big day, but our team's going to be working on the weekend actually to get the lights and other things installed.