Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, re-elected July 6th amid CBC’s retracted six-month smear campaign over alleged prosecutorial pressure, calls the network election interference and questions its journalistic legitimacy. She warns of federal censorship bills C-18 and C-11 targeting outlets like Rebel News and True North, proposing Alberta challenge tech company restrictions via constitutional means. Rejecting Trudeau’s net-zero timelines as unworkable, Smith demands global focus on high-polluting fuels, provincial control over cities adopting federal climate policies (e.g., Calgary/Edmonton’s C40 ties), and a 2035 emissions grid deadline—highlighting Alberta’s defiance of federal overreach while defending energy sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a feature interview with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
It's July 6th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Danielle Smith was re-elected premier just over a month ago.
It was a touch-and-go election.
There was a point in time where the NDP socialists led by Rachel Notley were actually in the lead.
I've never seen such a media pile on in my life.
Well, maybe since Stockwell Day was the public enemy number one of the media party more than a decade ago, oh, the CBC tried hard to get Danielle Smith confecting a story, a pure fabrication, that she had written an email or her staff had written an email threatening, pressuring prosecutors to drop lockdown cases.
It was a total lie.
The CBC at first claimed they had seen the emails, then admitted they hadn't seen them, but swore they exist.
And literally only now, after the election, do they admit they made the whole thing up?
It's atrocious.
And I asked the premier about that.
There's a lot of things to know and to think about with Alberta.
It's an important province in its own right, and it has also, for generations, been the idea factory of Canada, at least one of the idea factories.
It's been a populist place, a freedom-oriented place.
In fact, if you look at the Alberta motto, it's Fortis et Leber, which in Latin means strong and free.
Both parts of that are important.
Justin Trudeau doesn't believe in Alberta being strong and free.
Neither did his father, Pierre Trudeau.
Pierre Trudeau brought in the national energy program.
The goal was not to destroy the energy industry, but to nationalize it like Castro would or the Soviets would.
Justin Trudeau has a different approach.
He wants to tax the oil industry too, of course.
But unlike his merely communist father, Justin Trudeau actually wants to turn it off.
At least true Workers' Party socialists like his father believe in work.
Justin Trudeau talks about a just transition off the oil patch, which means unemployment.
I'll get to the interview in a moment.
I just stepped out of McDougal Center, which is the Premier's office here in Calgary.
It's nice to talk to the Premier about other things besides oil and gas and the election.
She brought up unsolicited the censorship bills brought in by Justin Trudeau and Pablo Rodriguez and before him, Stephen Gilbeau.
She's very alert to issues of free speech because she herself is a former journalist and because I think she truly cares about liberty.
What's also interesting is she's willing to call out the regime media who have supported Trudeau's censorship.
I thought it was an interesting meeting.
I think I had a chance to get most of the questions in that I wanted to.
I was grateful for her time.
I think that the world's socialists are not yet done attacking Alberta.
If they had managed to re-elect the socialist Rachel Notley, the doors of the castle, the drawbridge would have been let down, the gates thrown open, and the barbarians would have stormed in as they did in 2015.
But just because the United Conservative Party candidate of Danielle Smith won the election with a majority of the vote and a majority of the seats doesn't mean the hard left is done with Alberta.
Trudeau still has it in his crosshairs and so do NGOs around the world, whether it's the Rockefeller Brothers or the World Economic Forum.
And I talked to her a little bit about that.
How do you protect Alberta against these unelected, unaccountable global forces?
I also talked about how left-wing city councils are trying to make Alberta left-wing in matters outside their jurisdiction.
So it was a good conversation.
I'm still chewing it over in my mind.
I'd like your thoughts on it.
Are there questions you would have asked that I didn't?
Are there answers she gave that you were unsatisfied with?
And if I have the chance to interview her again in a period of time, what questions would you like me to put?
I suppose I'll ask those closer to the time at hand.
here it is my sit down with alberta's premier danielle smith premier great to see you Congratulations on your win.
Nice to see you as well.
44% of Albertans voted for the NDP.
You still won, but 44% voted for a socialist party.
Is Alberta losing its Albertan-ness?
It's not.
We got almost 53% of the vote.
And when I look back at voting in, especially when there's been change governments, when Lahid got elected, he got just over 40% of the vote.
When Klein got elected, he got over just 40% of the vote.
And I think what I have to, what I take from that is I've got a little bit of proving that I need to do to be able to increase the margins.
Certainly have some proving to do in Calgary, but I feel pretty confident that we've got a strong mandate.
It's very unusual for a government to get elected with a clear majority.
We've got a large number of people who turned out.
We got over 50%.
So I'm going ahead with my mandate.
What do you think the key ballot question was when people were voting?
What was the issue or personality trait or what was on their mind that they checked Danielle Smith instead of Rachel Molly?
I think that what the NDP wanted to make it about was a series of lies saying that we were going to make people pay for a family doctor, that we were going to steal their pension.
And we were able to say, well, you can vote for that, which is clearly not going to happen, or you can vote for us and make sure that your job is protected, the economy is protected.
And I think that the NDP made a major blunder when they promised that they were going to increase corporate income taxes again.
That, to me, gives me confidence that people see through what an NDP government has to offer.
Because if you remember when they got elected in 2015, they were straight up about it, that they were going to hit corporations, they were going to hit high-income earners, and they did.
And then what happened?
We ended up with a massive flight of capital, decrease in the economy.
It took years for us to be able to get that investment back.
The fact that they had to hide it, didn't want to come clean on it, didn't do the analysis of how much jobs would be lost or how much investment would be lost.
I think that Albertans were able to see through that and they didn't want to go back to that.
People from other provinces are coming to Alberta.
Are you getting the freedom-oriented entrepreneurial class, or are you getting sort of refugees from socialism who are bringing some of those socialist ideas with them?
Like in the States, a lot of Californians move to Texas and there's a saying, don't California my Texas.
Are the Ontarians and others coming here?
How would you describe them in terms of their political culture?
The ones I meet, and because I do a lot of events and do photo lineup and the number of people who tell me, I'm here from Ontario or I'm here from Manitoba, I'm here from DC, I would say that it's probably a mix.
But I think that what we're putting out there is what Alberta has always put out there, that we are a place where you can be free to start a business, employ people, keep more of what you earn, raise a family, practice your faith in your own way.
And we try to take a, just, we'll leave you alone.
We want to be able to get out of your business, but make sure that we create an environment for you to prosper.
And I think people are responding to that.
It also helps that we have a relatively low cost of housing as well.
I know it's still an issue because as people come in and we don't have the housing stock, it is pushing prices up.
You compare that to Vancouver.
You compare that to Toronto, where young families can't even dream of being able to own a home.
And so I think that that's another factor as well.
I think one of the turning points, last question about the election, I think a turning point was the debate.
And my theory for that is people saw an unfiltered. version of you for an hour or so that was not editorialized or cut into clips by a CBC producer.
And so they could compare really seeing you with how you were being demonized by the media party.
That's my theory, is that when they finally saw you without the filter of the CBC, they liked you.
What do you think about my theory there?
Oh, I think you're right.
I think people tuned in because they were given an image of what I was like.
And I think what happened is it didn't match when they saw that I was reasonable and I knew the policies I wanted to run on.
I was confident.
And I think that contrasted with my opponent, who was clearly running to be official law opposition leader again.
Mainstream Media's Role in Elections00:09:50
She was not running to be premier.
But one of the things I get told all the time is you're not at all the way the media depicts you.
And I think that's an indictment of the media.
The media's job is to depict a person fairly and accurately and with balance.
And I would say that the mainstream media has failed on that.
And I encourage them to go back to journalistic principles and maybe they'll actually manage to attract back some viewers and audience if they did so.
But I just can't believe that the mainstream media have decided that they aren't interested in giving content for 53% of the population that voted for me.
They should be interested in having that balanced discussion where you've got content that matters to those who are more on the progressive side of the spectrum and have content that's on the conservative side of the spectrum.
They, I think, unfortunately have gone a different path.
And I think it's showing in the lack of support that they're getting.
You said my opponent, and it sounded like you were referring to Rachel Notley.
I put it to you that your real opponent was not the NDP party, but the media party.
The CBC in particular, and this is not because of my own grudge with the CBC.
I have never, maybe since the time of Stockwell Day, seen an assassination attempt through media like I have.
The CBC in January said that you or your office had sent emails threatening and pressuring prosecutors to drop certain prosecutions.
They swore on a stack of Bibles it was real.
The government, the civil service, the neutral civil service examined more than a million emails.
None were found.
Every prosecutor, every single one testified they had not received such an email.
Everyone in your office testified.
And a former judge, Marguerite Trussler, said there was no evidence at all.
This was all before the election.
For six months, the CBC held on to that lie.
Only yesterday, July 5th, did the CBC write a grudging correction that those emails never existed.
How do you deal with wicked liars like that?
I'm full of rage for that's not journalism.
They weren't your chief opponent.
I put it to you, they were your chief opponents.
Well, and it's frustrating too, because what do they get?
A billion and a half dollars from the federal government.
And so they have the ability to do those kinds of stories, stick with them as long as they did, lie, and then, as you point out, grudgingly acknowledge that they lied and retract the story.
I feel vindicated because at least we managed to get them to acknowledge that the story was just frankly untrue.
After the election.
That is election interference by a government agency run by Justin Trudeau.
Tell me I'm wrong.
Election interference.
Have an opportunity and we tried to give them the opportunity to acknowledge, especially after we did the email review, that the emails didn't exist.
And they chose not to.
Well, let me ask you a question.
I remember when the CBC sued the Conservative Party of Canada.
And if I recall, it was Andrew Scheer, who's the leader of the time.
And he still went on CBC shows.
And I thought, have you no self-respect?
They're suing you and you're going on the show.
So let me ask you, Premier Smith.
The CBC lied about you for six months, a wicked lie that did great damage to the reputation of prosecutors in Alberta, claimed that they were corrupt in some way.
They aimed for you.
They also had collateral damage in the Justice Department.
Do you think you should still deal with the CBC as a news agency, or do you think you should deal with them as a kind of Trudeau super PAC?
Well, they certainly smeared everyone.
They smeared me.
They smeared all my office staff.
They smeared the independent public service.
They smeared the Crown Prosecutors.
And they gave ammunition to my opponents to smear me some more.
I mean, the NDP should also apologize because the NDP also wants to.
Are you going to still go do sit-downs with the CBC?
Like they came to kill you.
I'll have to talk to my team about that.
Yeah, I mean, you know what I've done?
I mean, I will take their questions in a mediated forum because I do a lot of press conferences.
And I think that's fair because I want to be the type of person who will take questions from everyone.
But it is, I mean, I do have to consider if they aren't prepared to be fair, accurate, and balanced, if they're really only interviewing me in order to get ammunition to be the official opposition.
I'm going to have to keep that in mind every time I answer a question from the CBC.
In the last election, you had some independent news outfits, Rebel News, True North, Western Standard, Keyn Bexty's Countersignal.
So we weren't as big as the regime media, but there was a counter force.
Tell me your thoughts on this trend of independent citizen journalism compared to the, I'm calling it the regime media.
Well, I think that the mainstream media, as they like to call themselves, traditional media, I think that they've created a market for alternative voices because they've been so unbalanced.
I mean, I got into media back in the 1990s, and my boss at the time said that that was the mantra of media, to be fair, to be accurate, to be balanced.
And I've seen precious little of that over the last number of years.
But what happens is that the alternative media are now providing that balance, which is why I'm watching what has happened with this new internet regulation bill they have at the federal level, because that worries me.
That worries me that that's really aimed at outfits like yours and True North and Western Standard and Countersignal to regulate them the same way the CRTC is regulated or to deny the ability to get the kind of revenues and coverage that you otherwise would.
And I think that what I've just gone through with the CBC demonstrates that you got to go to a second source when you read something in the mainstream media.
It used to be the other way.
It used to be you read something on alternative media and you go to mainstream media for validation.
They've created an environment where now you have to question what's in the mainstream media and see if it's validated in alternative sources, which is why I'm of the view that we need to have as many independent media outlets as possible to make sure everybody's getting the full picture.
I'm glad you're paying attention to these, I call them censorship bills.
Through C18, Trudeau just nuked access to Facebook and Instagram for independent media, for all media.
I think he did huge damage.
And C-11 regulates the internet as if we were broadcasters.
This just popped into my mind because you and I knew each other before you were in politics and we would talk as commentators.
But now you actually have the levers of power.
Justin Trudeau is treating websites as if it's a federal jurisdiction.
I don't know if it is.
Is it really a broadcasting enterprise?
I don't think the BNA Act contemplates Trudeau in Ottawa regulating websites.
I know the NDP, when they were in office, used all the levers of power.
The left, when they get in office, they ransack the place.
They pull every lever, even if it's a long shot.
They use their political capital.
I wonder if you as Premier, with your new mandate, concerned about freedom of speech, which you always have been, might have a role in defending media freedom by blocking the feds.
Do they really have jurisdiction?
Maybe there's a constitutional challenge to what they're doing in C-11 and C-18 on charter grounds, but maybe on BNA Act grounds.
How dare they regulate enterprises like that?
Do you think that way?
Do you think, all right, I'm going to do everything I can, push all the buttons I can, use our Justice Department, use our constitutional power to push back instead of just a slow retreat, which conservatives usually do, maybe to push back.
The question would be how to do it.
So I could propose something, and I don't know if this would work, but it does seem to me that if there was some way of us creating an island in Alberta for broadcasters to be able to establish themselves here and for us to be able to allow for private contracts to take place, so you could sign a deal with Facebook and you could sign a deal with Google and your content would be covered.
We have property and civil rights under the Charter of Rights or under the Constitution.
Would that be a contract that we would be able to enforce?
Now, would that mean that you'd be able to broadcast to the rest of the country?
I don't know.
But is there some way that we can create an environment here that would allow for more media companies to establish it?
Because I talked to somebody who I think was a former colleague of yours at Sun, Mark Patron, and he has already established an outfit in Florida because he wants the freedom of being able to operate in Florida and broadcast into Canada.
So if he has to go all the way to Florida, why can't we keep people closer to home?
Would we be able to do this in Alberta?
I don't know the answer to that.
At the moment, I'm dismayed to see that it's actually been some of the biggest media outlets who have been pushing this along.
I mean, post-media was cheering it along.
And so I have to see what kind of impact it's going to have.
But clearly, having Google say that you're not going to be able to search for stories online.
I mean, I get a morning media clippings.
And when this came out, I said, how in the heck are we going to get media clippings in the morning if we're not able to use Google to search what is out there?
So there's a real problem.
And that is not in the best interest of the public.
It's not in the best interest of consumers.
It's not the best interest of even accountability and oversight of government.
So I'll see whether there is some kind of meeting of the minds with Facebook and Google or if we're going to have to do more.
But I'm looking for suggestions about what we might be able to do.
I'm always prepared to challenge the federal government if they've stepped over the line in areas of our jurisdiction.
I just need to do a little bit more work on that.
In the United States, quite often states challenge federal laws for constitutional reasons, for legal reasons.
And certain governors are very activists in the courts.
Challenging Federal Climate Policies00:06:37
They just, like I said, flipping every switch, even if they don't work in the end.
We don't really have a lot of that in Canada, except for, I think Quebec is more aggressive.
Justin Trudeau's coming to town.
Can I just comment on that, though?
I mean, we have done the same thing.
We've put a challenge forward on Bill C-69, the Nilmore Pipelines Law.
We're challenging as well the plastics being labeled toxic.
But here's the thing on this particular issue, look how many years it's taken for it to be seen.
If we wait four years, how many of these independent media are going to still survive?
So I want to watch it and see if there's a federal resolution to this, because they are now talking about unintended consequences.
But we need to make sure that we have a robust media environment in our province.
Glad you told me about these, reminded me about these other challenges you're doing, especially the war on plastic.
That's crazy.
It's not just that.
The war on carbon, the war on nitrogen now for our farmers.
Where are these ideas coming from?
Because I've never heard a real person on the streets say, we got to regulate nitrogen.
We've got to shut down farmers and food.
Where are these ideas coming from?
Because Trudeau is one, is a guy who's pushing them, but where do they come from?
I have to believe that it's almost like he's taking the worst idea in the worst jurisdiction and then trying to adopt all of them here.
Because look what's happening in the Netherlands with farmers and the fertilizer ban.
So one of the things that what I'm trying to do, part of the reason I passed the Sovereignty Act in the fall, was to just draw a clear line and say, we have a constitution and it matters.
And our country is not supposed to operate this way.
We're not a unitary state.
You don't get to make edicts in areas of our jurisdiction.
And so that caught the attention of Eastern Canada.
I'm not quite sure why it was so controversial.
Quebec does it all the time and nobody even bats an eye.
You see that Saskatchewan is now doing the same thing as well with the Saskatchewan First Act.
And we have a number of provinces.
Every time I go to a Western Premier's Conference or a Council of the Federation, everybody is frustrated about the level of federal interference into their jurisdiction.
So I think we've started a conversation and the question will be whether they're going to back off.
So part of my approach, and I'm going to be seeing the prime minister this week, is I've kind of got three bottom lines.
Number one is the best way to reduce emissions is to reduce higher polluting fuels in the rest of the world.
And so if we can export our clean LNG and reduce coal and wood and dung and reduce all of the pollutants that are associated with it, we should get some credit for that.
And there's an ability to get credit for that.
So that's number one.
Number two is we can't have an emissions cap.
Their proposal of having an emissions cap of reducing emissions 42% on oil and natural gas by 2030, unachievable.
And I've told them that.
It means that we would have to shut in production, which is a violation of our constitution.
We get to determine the development of our resources.
And number three, the net zero power grid, maybe it could be done in Ontario and Manitoba and Quebec and British Columbia.
And good for them that they're able to get there because they've got vast hydro and nuclear resources.
We don't.
We're 90% reliant on hydrocarbon fuels.
Same, Saskatchewan similarly reliant.
Same with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
This is the reason the Constitution gives electricity generation to the provinces because every province has different conditions.
So I'm prepared to work towards what a lower emissions power grid would look like, but 2035, also unachievable.
Those are the three things I'll be raising with the Prime Minister.
We'll see whether or not we've had a breakthrough.
That's great.
I know we've got to wrap up because you have such a busy day, but I have one last short question, and it goes to jurisdiction again.
I know that the cities of Calgary and Edmonton sometimes color outside the lines.
Like their jobs is garbage pickup, policing, et cetera, traffic.
I see people from Edmonton and Calgary going on foreign junkets to the C40 mayor's conference to talk about climate action.
And the Rockefeller brothers, they have some resiliency climate fund.
And that feels like it's not their jurisdiction.
They're going to foreign places where there's no scrutiny.
They're not doing their business in their city halls with whatever checks and balances are there.
They're taking foreign funding, going to foreign meetings run by activist groups.
It's like many world economic forums.
And I wonder if there's a place for the province to say, you guys can make your mistakes in matters that are of your own jurisdiction.
If you want to screw up your policing or your transit, we don't like it, but you were elected.
But you were not elected to meddle around in foreign affairs or in environmental jurisdiction or climate emergencies.
At what point do you say threats to our Alberta-ness aren't just coming from Trudeau outside his jurisdiction?
It's coming from the Calgary and Edmonton city halls outside their jurisdiction.
Have you ever thought about that?
There's a couple of things.
One I would say is we've already demonstrated to the cities that we believe that their laws have to stay within their own jurisdiction and that they can't be offside with ours.
And I'll give the example of the approach that we've taken to firearms regulation.
We've told the cities, no, you can't come through with handgun bans.
No, you can't use your police forces to confiscate firearms on behalf of the Trudeau government.
So there's a couple of ways in which we've told them that that's not in alignment with our policing priorities.
Our policing priorities are border security, gun smuggling, drug smuggling, organized crime, and dealing with this terrible opioid crisis.
So that's one way that we've demonstrated.
If they go too far or they intend to go in that direction, we're just going to say no.
I'll have to watch and see if there are other areas that we're going to have to intervene.
And at the moment, working on creating lower emissions power, fair enough.
Bringing in hydrogen buses, fair enough.
Those are all things that I think are on side with how we want to build out our hydrogen economy now as well.
But the question will be: if they take a step, it begins to violate the rights of Albertans, if it's offside with our province-wide plan, we have the ability to step in and intervene.
And we've demonstrated that we will when we think the issue is serious enough.
Great to see you again.
Thanks for taking so much time.
Thank you.
Well, that's our show for today.
I'd love your thoughts on my questions, her answers, and suggestions for next time.