Ezra Levant calls Danielle Smith Canada’s most conservative premier, praising her bold opposition to federal policies like the Impact Assessment Act and emissions targets that stifle Alberta’s oil and gas sector—key to global ethical energy exports. He warns UCP infighting could backfire, citing Blaine Higgs’ New Brunswick defeat, while dismissing climate concerns as overblown compared to economic risks. Smith’s victory over Rachel Notley and pipeline expansion (600K barrels/day, $34B cost) prove her resilience, but internal challenges may undermine Alberta’s conservative future. [Automatically generated summary]
I think Danielle Smith is Canada's most conservative premier.
Scott Moe is pretty good, but I think Danielle Smith is combative and dramatic and an innovator.
I'm a fan of hers, you can tell.
I'm an old friend of hers, I should disclose.
But it looks like some folks in Alberta in the Conservative Party think she's not right-wing enough.
And they're talking about challenging her and questioning her leadership at the next party convention, which is just a couple weeks away.
I think that's nuts.
Imagine throwing out Danielle Smith just a couple years into her first term.
Well, that's what they're talking about doing.
We'll go over this and other things with our friend Lauren Gunter, the senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun.
But before we do, I want to make sure you're a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
And there's a couple of clips I want to show you of Danielle Smith in action.
And you want to see the video, not just hear the audio.
So please go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's $8 a month.
Not only do you get the good content, but you help keep Rebel News strong.
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That's at RebelNewsPlus.com.
Danielle Smith's Conservative Vision00:16:18
All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Well, I'm from Alberta originally, and I like to think I carry Alberta with my heart, even though I've been in Toronto long enough that I have to admit I'm a local now.
But you know what?
As a sign of patriotism, I still go back to Alberta a lot.
My folks are there, and it's close to my heart.
Our chief reporter, Sheila Gunreed, is an Albertan through and through, a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, a little bit oil and gas, a little bit farm.
And we love Alberta for so many reasons.
I love it because of its freedom.
In fact, right in its motto, the provincial motto is a phrase taken from our national anthem, Fortis et la Ber, strong and free.
And Alberta is the laboratory of so many good ideas.
I mean, although Ontario is a much bigger economy, it was Ralph Klein that perfected the common sense conservative balance the budget ideology that Mike Harris later borrowed out east.
For example, the Reform Party was born in Alberta.
Stephen Harper is from Alberta.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation really had its heart in Alberta.
So that province is essential.
And the fact that it is an energy-producing province, I think, shows the way in fighting radical environmentalism.
So many things about it.
And I love it because it was my childhood home and I went to university there.
One of the people I met in university was a young woman named Danielle Smith.
In fact, you may know that she was the president of the Young PC Club when I was the president of the Young Reformers.
But we didn't really butt heads back then because we were friends.
And wouldn't you know it, she went on to become the leader of the Wild Rose Party, which was in opposition before they did a dirty deal with the Prentiss Conservatives and merged just weeks before the election.
The province punished them for this anti-democratic act by voting in the NDP.
Well, years went by, and I think Danielle Smith paid her penance and she became the leader of the Conservative, the United Conservative Party, after Jason Kenney incurred the wrath of party membership for his policies during the lockdown.
So Danielle Smith is the new premier of Alberta.
But I am hearing even out here in Toronto rumors of an attempt to dethrone her at the coming annual general meeting of the United Conservative Party that will be in red year November 1 and 2.
I'll be there.
I think Sheila Gunrid will be there too.
And I saw this headline a little while ago from our friend Lauren Gunter at the Edmonton Sun.
Let me read it to you.
This should chill you to your very bones.
UCP dump Smith gang could end up handing government to NDP.
Are they really going to do it?
Are they really going to have a leadership review so soon after her important victory over Rachel Notley in the NDP?
I was just checking with our guest a moment ago before we turned on the camera.
And indeed, the last four conservative leaders in Alberta have been thrown out one way or another without serving a second term.
I don't know if you remember the name Ed Stelmack, Allison Redford, Jim Prentiss, and of course our friend Jason Kenney.
Four conservative leaders in a row have been defenestrated before they had a chance to serve a second term.
Are they really going to do this to Danielle Smith?
Joining us now is the fellow who confirmed that stat for me, our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun.
Lauren, after a while, people are going to get impatient.
If a party cannot govern itself, the thinking goes, how can a govern a province, don't you think?
Yep, absolutely.
And, you know, it actually goes back to Ralph Klein, because Ralph left in 2006 after he went to a convention where the leadership review gave him only 55% support.
And he said, that's not enough.
I got to go.
I think Ralph was getting ready to go anyway.
I don't think that that was a huge shock.
But even Ralph Klein, who is, you know, he's a demigod in conservative circles all across the country, but particularly in Alberta, he got shoved out.
And so, you know, this is a party that has basically done in its last five leaders and yet still managed to keep power.
I mean, the only reason the NDP won in 2015, the only reason they governed for four years till 2019 was there was the Wild Rose Party and there were the PCs.
And they split the vote and let the NDP come up the middle.
I've talked to all sorts of academics who say, no, no, no, this was a sign that the progressive element in Alberta is expanding and that we're due for some very progressive governments.
You simply have to look at the very basic, simple mathematics.
If you put the Wild Rose and PC vote together in 2015, it would have outnumbered the NDP by almost 10%.
And when Jason Kenney put the parties back together again, they did outnumber the NDP by more than 10%.
So it's very, very simple math.
Alberta is reflexively a small C conservative province.
Now, you can look at how much money the provincial government spends.
It's very often the highest spending per capita provincial government in the country or number two.
It's very seldom below two.
So is it real conservative?
No, it's not real conservative, but it is pro-business.
Like we have the lowest business taxes in the country.
We have a minister who I think has actually done a pretty good job who's dedicated to getting rid of red tape that keeps businesses from forming.
When Kenny came in, he went and recruited the guy who'd been the deputy minister of energy under the previous conservatives, who the NDP pushed out, a guy named Grant Sprague, who really understands the industry and he understands what makes CEOs in oil and gas companies make decisions to invest money.
And so then they redid a lot of the policies under energy in a way most people probably wouldn't have noticed, but all of a sudden, then there's more investment again.
That has largely been decapitated by federal policies on the environment.
But at least, you know, Alberta tries very hard as much as it can without being stomped on by the Trudeau liberals.
It works as hard as it can to get businesses going and attract money to the province.
And so, you know, this is a conservative province that has as much government as it can afford.
They have a lot of revenue, so they can afford a lot of government.
And they do, at the provincial level, spend a lot of money on government.
But it is largely conservative.
And so long as there is no vote split, so long as the people who are now cranky about Smith don't hive off and form their own party, there's not going to be, not likely going to be an NDP government unless, as you said, the voters are finally tired of all of this internocene bickering within conservative circles and nobody's good enough.
Well, you know, Ed Stalmack wasn't good enough.
Allison Ritford clearly wasn't good enough.
I think that was a good move on the part of the party to push her out.
Jim Prentiss was a decent guy.
I'm not sure that his heart was fully in conservatism, but he was a smart guy.
Had he not withdrawn, he probably would have been hunted out.
And then Jason was very conservative.
He did, as you say, he did get caught up in COVID restrictions.
But other than that, there really is an effort by most of those premiers to keep the province on a pro-business keel.
And, you know, I think one more leader done in by the never satisfied bedrock, hard rock right-wingers is just good news for Nehednchi.
Yeah.
You know, you've used the phrase pro-business and you've talked about the size of government.
And that is certainly an important part of being a conservative is smaller government to allow more freedom of action and more resources for individuals to let people keep the fruits of their own labor.
That's a very important part of being conservative.
But I think more and more as I grow older, I value the other parts of being conservative too.
And I think that Danielle Smith is strong on those.
For example, she's, I think, had a very thoughtful balance on the trans issue.
She's not coming across as a hater.
She's not coming across as mean or vindictive.
But she's saying, look, no men in women's sports, no men in women's private places.
And if you're going to do radical, unalterable surgery, got to wait till you're grown up.
You can't do that as a kid.
I think that's very gentle.
At least the way she describes it, that's part of being conservative.
She talks about a new bill of rights for the province.
Now, who knows how much teeth it will have, but that's part of being conservative too.
It's not just about money.
It's about identity and culture and helping parents protect their kids.
I think Danielle Smith, who's a bit of a libertarian, so I think she would be.
But I think compare her to other premiers in Canada, she's good on those trans issues, much better than Doug Ford.
I'll tell you that.
So I'm worried.
I read your essay in the sun about how there's a movement to vote non-confidence of her, and I think that's nuts.
She's only been premier for, what, a year and a bit?
I'd have to check the exact date.
To have a leadership review this soon before she's got her sea legs, it makes no sense to me, Lord, other than bickering for bickering's sake.
And you know, she does have, she does have the odd, like, I don't know, wacky idea.
Like she wants to build railroad lines all across the province, and we're going to have high-speed rail between Edmonton and Calgary.
And isn't we're going to double the population with a whole bunch of immigrants?
She walked that back a bit, thankfully.
She did.
She did.
But her initial instinct was to say, let's go from 5 million to 10 million by 2050.
And how are you going to get that way?
Are you going to spend, you're going to give people bonuses for every baby they have?
Of, you know, you're going to give native-born Albertans a bonus for every baby they have.
No, the only way you do that is if you start to accept an awful lot of immigrants.
Now, it could be in migration from other provinces.
And we do have the largest in-migration from other provinces of natural-born Canadians of any province in the country.
We, because we are freedom-loving, because we have low taxes, because there are plentiful jobs, we have attracted an awful lot of people from other provinces.
But by far, it's foreign immigration.
I mean, absolutely.
It's the only way you get to the number 10 million.
The only way.
So she did have to walk down.
Thank God.
I think she got, and you know what?
I read your essay, and it is true.
I've known, I've known Danielle since she was in college, and she's an ideas person.
She likes innovation.
She likes learning about curiosities.
And I think she looks at innovators approvingly.
But I think that she needs a bit more of a filter.
Well, and let's take a look at one of the ideas she has.
And from a conservative versus a progressive angle, she would like to see a rail line from the Calgary airport to Banff.
From an economic standpoint, that makes some sense to me.
It's a big tourist attraction.
It's well known.
How many times have you been in a far-flung part of the globe and you say to people, you're from Alberta, and they say, oh, near Banth?
Yeah.
You know, so probably as a business idea, that's a pretty good one.
But if it's a good business idea, then let a business build it.
The conservative would just get the government out of the way.
They would say, look, here are some tax concessions because it's a very expensive project.
We're going to get the regulations out of the way.
We'll keep the bureaucrats out of your hair.
That's what a conservative in the modern sense does.
But not here's $5 billion, go and build the rail line.
And by the way, right now, there are bus lines, there are cabs.
So you would be competing.
It makes no sense.
High-speed rail, look at California to see what that looks like.
There's a reason why this classic joke on The Simpsons was the monorail salesman.
Oh, you don't want this in Springfield.
Well, Shelbyville wants the monorail.
Like it's the huckster.
I've forgotten that, but that's exactly what it is.
You know, everybody's afraid that they're not going to be as sophisticated as the next people.
They're not going to be as worldly.
I don't care.
If it doesn't make sense, don't do it.
So she does have the odd idea like that.
That's a little wacky.
But for instance, she wants to change the provincial Bill of Rights to be more forceful on protection of property rights.
Okay, so one of the reasons Ed Stelmack got booted out as premier was that he tried to ram through power lines over all sorts of private property.
It was not a big issue in the cities, but it was an enormous issue in rural Alberta.
And that was where the party's base was.
One of its two bases, the other one's in Calgary, usually.
And so Ed got run off because of his unwillingness to protect private property.
She's talking about putting private property more forcefully into the Bill of Rights.
She's talking about putting a gun control prohibition in the Alberta Bill of Rights.
Now, that's not entirely up to the province.
And a lot of tut-tutting progressive constitutional experts have said, oh, she can't do that.
That's a federal.
Yes, but she can say, as she has since she became the premier, that Alberta will not cooperate with any federal attempt to control guns in the province.
One of the things that they said early on in their administration was they would not allow the RCMP for whom they pay in Alberta, any place where the RCMP is the local police force, that's paid for by the provincial government.
They said they would not allow a single dime of the money they give to the RCMP as a local police force to go for gun confiscation.
Okay, that's what she can do in the Bill of Rights.
And she is trying to do as many of the things as she can to the extent that it's possible for her to do.
I think initially when she came in and she was all big on her sovereignty act, they were talking about they were just going to invalidate federal laws.
We can't do that.
It's just constitutionally, they don't have the power to do that.
But they would say, look, in this area, this is a provincial jurisdiction.
And if they ask us to enforce their law, we're not going to do it.
And I think that that is, it's basically the Quebec model.
They have adopted this notion that, you know, if Quebec insists on some concessions, if Quebec insists the feds keep their nose out of a particular jurisdiction, we can do the same sort of thing.
Justin Trudeau's Conservative Challenge00:14:12
And I think that that's good.
I don't think on any of those that she has been too soft.
I think she's coming to a more realistic understanding of what limitations a provincial government has, but she's pushing to those limits.
And I guarantee you, they're giving gigantic headaches and pains in other areas to the federal government.
So I think she's done.
Well, and the thing I would ask people who are trying to get a non-confidence motion going at the annual general meeting the UCP will have in Red Deer on November 1st and 2nd, the thing I would ask them is, what's the alternative?
Who is your candidate?
So, okay, you didn't want Ralph Klein, didn't want Ed Stellman, didn't want Allison Redford, didn't want Jim Predice, didn't want Jason Kenney.
Maybe you don't want Danielle Smith.
Okay, so who is the perfect candidate?
I think for a lot of those people, if Christ himself became the leader of the UCP, he wouldn't be perfect enough.
So their standards are unreasonable because they don't ask the question, what's the alternative?
And I think in this case, as you said, you're going to upset voters.
You're going to give voters the impression that this is not a stable party, that it can't be trusted with government.
And in Calgary, which is the only place that there's really going to be a big battle in the next election, in Calgary, that could tip people over to the NDP.
Now, I'm hopeful that Calgarians will remember how much they hated Nehnensi when he left office as mayor in 2021, and they're not going to vote for him in big numbers.
He's going to have to start talking soon about what he believes, what he wants to see done.
He's been very quiet since he was elected as NDP leader.
Maybe they'll be reminded before the 2027 election about why they disliked him.
But otherwise, they're going to look like a, for instance, Blaine Higgs and the Conservatives lost in New Brunswick earlier this week to a liberal majority.
It's the only liberal government left in the country other than Newfoundland.
And they lost.
And you watch the mainstream media will say that they lost because Higgs was very tough on transgender issues like Smith has been.
That's not it at all.
That was a very popular stance he took.
What happened was he had part of his caucus then decided they were going to poke at him for the last year to show that they're progressive and he's not, and they don't want to lose their seats in Fredericton and St. John and Moncton to liberals because of the transgender policy.
And so what put voters off was not the transgender policy.
Poll after poll after poll showed that that was about 70% popular.
What put them off was all this bickering inside the Conservative Party between members of his caucus and Higgs.
And if you start that in Alberta, voters could say, I'm tired of these guys fighting each other all the time and kicking out their leaders every other year.
I'm going to vote NDP.
You know, I remember when I was a young man and I was in Ottawa, I worked briefly for Preston Manning as his assistant.
And then much more briefly, I went back to Ottawa to work for Stockwell Day when he led the merged Canadian Alliance.
And Stock Day was fairly strong in the polls.
He increased the number of votes the party got.
But when he didn't win the election, a lot of Manning loyalists had a bit of an insurrection from the inside.
And one at a time, they would announce, I have no faith in the leader, Deborah Gray, Sharak Straw, Monty Solberg.
And it was sort of a drip, drip, drip of people removing their confidence in Stockwell Day.
And eventually he bowed out.
The party fell in the polls, but only after it had this open rebellion, because people said, we're not interested in those shenanigans.
And it makes me think of another more recent example of the United Kingdom.
Now, Margaret Thatcher was thrown out by internal intrigues also, not by the people.
And look at the last few years in the UK.
Rishi Sunak, Liz Trust, Boris Johnson, all of them installed or removed by some internal intrigues.
And I just think, I mean, I know one of the activists who's challenging Danielle Smith.
His name is David Parker.
He's with Take Back Alberta.
And there's many things I like about them.
I like that they're tub-thumping to be right-wing.
I like that they're being watchdogs on the right.
But Lord Thunder and Jesus, Joseph and Mary, if you're not voting for Danielle Smith, as you said earlier, if not her, then who?
You can't replace someone with no one.
And we just had a leadership race in the Alberta UCP.
I call it Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
I mean, look at all these other candidates that got smoked by her.
Show me one of them who would be – Danielle Smith has just introduced herself to voters, has sort of stopped being wobbly, is getting some momentum.
And I just, if the UCP Conservative Party of Alberta actually dispatches, I don't think they'll get a majority who are.
I don't think they will.
If they manage to lower her confidence vote to, let's say, 70%, and if she, even that would be damaging.
And if she were to leave, they deserve the annihilation that will come their way in the next election.
And maybe you're right.
Maybe all Nahid NC needs to do is shut up and let the Conservatives destroy themselves from within.
That is a problem of tricking parties on the right.
It is.
And the other thing that makes this all unusual is Ralph Klein had won a majority before he got pushed out.
Ed Stellmack had won a surprising majority before he got pushed out.
Allison Redford won a comeback majority against the Wild Rose, who were very popular in the early parts of that campaign.
And she got pushed out.
Jim Prentiss is the only one who lost and then left.
Jason Kenney won a resounding majority and got pushed out.
This is a party that punishes success.
It's the puritanical notion that you have to be 100% on our side or we're going to get rid of you and find somebody who will be.
Well, there's a good reason that those views don't win you election.
So you're always in politics.
Do you want to have somebody who will compromise every value and position you have just so they win?
No.
I hate that about politics.
But if you've got somebody who is considerably better than the alternative, you know, are you just being dumb trying to get rid of them?
Yeah.
You know, I used to be very close with Jason Kenney, and I know you were too.
Maybe you still are.
And it felt to me, I mean, I disagree with him very strongly on his pandemic lockdowns.
And he was very good at first, and then he collapsed and became, in my opinion, rather punitive.
Or he allowed the province's enforcement to be very punitive.
I think Alberta had certain arrests and prosecutions that even Ontario didn't have, especially when it came to churches.
But let's put that aside.
I think that Jason Kenney, it looked to me like he was keeping an eye on a bigger prize, that he wanted to be Premier of Alberta for a couple of terms.
And it always felt like he was keeping his federal options open.
He never really went to war against Ottawa in a full-throated way.
And it seemed to me, because he didn't want, he was thinking, well, in eight years, when I run for prime minister, will something I say be seen as anti-Quebec or anti-Ontario?
Well, am I not suitably federalist enough?
And if to be a successful Alberta premier, you have to have a heavy dose of anti-Ottawa spirit in you.
And I think it was sort of evident that Jason Kenney didn't.
And that's my explanation for why.
Let me show you a video of Danielle Smith just very recently, which shows she's clearly focusing on Alberta First, which Albertans love.
Here she is protesting against Stephen Gilbo and Justin Trudeau in their outrageous attempt to cap emissions from Alberta, which is code for cap oil and gas production.
Just take a look at this.
And this, and I ask you, who else is doing this?
Scott Moe and Saskatchewan, good egg, but Alberta is the important energy province, the more important one.
And take a look at this and tell me if this isn't a strong conservative leader.
Take a look at this just the other day.
Once again, Ottawa is attempting to set policies that are short-sighted and reckless.
This fall, the federal government plans to table regulations that would set mandatory targets with irresponsible timeframes for upstream oil and gas and liquefied natural gas facilities.
Ottawa says they're working to cut emissions, but we all know that's what they're really doing is cutting production of oil and gas.
And this, by extension, will cut jobs and revenues across the country.
And that should concern every Canadian.
Alberta's oil and gas industry is a huge part of Canada's economy.
It provides a stable energy supply for Canadians and also for people who live in countries and import our oil and gas products.
It provides Canadian families with tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs as well as billions of dollars in federal revenues that pay for important programs, services, and infrastructure that Canadians rely on.
All of this will be jeopardized and lost if this ideological, irresponsible, and frankly terrible policy moves forward.
I mean, you got to love that if you're a right-winger, if you're an Alberta firster, if you're skeptical of Trudeau.
And I don't think Jason Kenney would have been as bold because he would be thinking, how does this look when I run the feds?
You know what?
And I don't know for a fact that he had federal ambitions beyond the Alberta premiership, but he didn't go after them hard enough in Ottawa.
And I wrote several times during the run-up to the plebiscite on whether he should be kicked out or not, that had he simply been harder on the feds, he would have been forgiven for some of the pandemic stuff.
Maybe not the churches, maybe not some of the charges and arrests, but certainly for any of the restrictions that most ordinary people felt, he probably would have gotten away with that.
He would have gotten away with the Sky Palace dinner, you know, some of the things that really did him in.
If he had simply gone after Ottawa enough, and she goes after Ottawa all the time.
About 10 days before that announcement, she sent Trudeau a letter saying, you got four weeks to make amendments to the Impact Assessment Act, which is we know as the No More Pipelines Act.
You have four weeks to make amendments, or we're taking you to court because we know this is unconstitutional and we're not putting up with it.
So, you know, do you think there's another, is Nenshi going to do that?
Yeah.
No.
Nahed Nenshi had like people used to talk about how close Rachel Notley was with Justin Trudeau.
Nahed Nenshi is way closer to Justin Trudeau on a personal level.
And Nenshi may have made the odd announcement about his support for oil and gas and he wants to help settle, you know, reduce some of the caps for net zero power transmission.
Yeah, whatever.
I don't buy that.
I do buy it from Smith.
You know, she started with that Sovereignty Act, which unfortunately for her and moderate Calgary voters in particular has soured them a bit because it looked flaky.
It looked because it wasn't, the province couldn't just nullify federal legislation it didn't like.
She ended up coming off like a little bit of a crank.
So that when she says things like she just said there, they keep thinking, you know, is this the same woman who two years ago thought that they should just be able to say, we're walking away from federal legislation.
You can't impose it on.
No, she's got a much more practical view of things now.
And they have said, we are going to resist to the maximum amount allowed under the Constitution, any intrusion by Ottawa into provincial jurisdiction.
And she is a leader in the country on provincial rights.
Other provinces would like to be as forceful as she is, but they're not.
I think that the clip you had there is very, very good.
I think the one 10 days before that where she threatened to take the feds to court over the Impact Assessment Act was very good.
She's done probably four or five of those this year.
And I can tell you from people I know in Ottawa in the liberal government that they don't like her because she creates headaches for them because she has legitimate points of view that stops their unconstitutional behavior.
There's a Mark Holland who is, what is Mark Holland now?
I think he's the federal health minister.
He said the other day in advance of the liberal caucus meeting to see whether or not they get rid of Trudeau, he said, Trudeau is the kind of guy who says ideology should come first.
And we don't care whether it's municipal responsibility or provincial or federal.
We're just going to do the right thing.
That's very dangerous when you start doing that sort of stuff.
There's a reason the Constitution has a division of powers between the feds and the provinces.
And Smith is probably the strongest defender of that division in the country.
And probably the best, the most knowledgeable premier in the country about that division of power.
Right.
Worldwide Natural Gas Market00:08:22
You know, you made me think of something a moment ago about, I mean, I understand that the business of Alberta is business, as they say.
It's also other things.
And I remember when both the Japanese leaders and the German leaders asked Canada.
What's the time frame we're talking?
That's right.
It sounds like I'm talking about the Axis powers in World War II.
I'm talking about two and a half years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Sorry about that.
I was assuming.
Yeah.
Japan and Germany.
It's funny how the last time they got together, it didn't turn out.
That's right.
80 years ago, they were our enemies, but now they're democracies who are buying conflict oil and conflict gas.
And one of the things that I've been conscious of since I wrote some of my books, including Groundswell, The Case for Fracking, was that if you're not buying oil and gas from Alberta, where are you buying it from?
OPEC or Russia.
And to this day, Germany gets an enormous amount of its natural gas from Gazprom, which is basically a state oil producer in Russia.
It's not just OPEC.
And there was the German chancellor, I think it was Chancellor Schultz, and the Japanese leader saying to Trudeau, please give us your ethical energy.
Please help us get off this conflict energy.
And Trudeau, remember what he said?
He said there's no business case for it.
He slammed it and he offered them, I'll help you with hydrogen energy.
Thanks very much for your fantasy fuel of the future that's perfect in every way other than it doesn't exist.
And both of those countries wound up getting contracts with conflict energy, including from Qatar, which just happens to be a terrorist sponsor.
And so it's not just in Alberta's interest that Trudeau and the feds be trimmed down.
It's in Canada's interest and the world's interest.
Can I show you, indulge me, forgive me.
I'm just thinking as I go here.
When I was in Davos last time in the World Economic Forum, I actually bumped in to a Ukrainian minister whose portfolio involved energy supply.
And I asked him about ethical energy.
Let me just play the clip, Lauren.
It looks like you've got to get on stage.
Give me 30 seconds.
I come from Canada.
We have lots of natural gas.
Some Canadians would like to sell that natural gas to Europe to displace Russian conflict energy.
Do you have an opinion on that?
I think a worldwide natural gas market's a great thing because we should not be buying gas from Russia.
I would call that conflict energy versus Western ethical energy.
What do you think of that terminology?
That's actually quite good terminology.
You're the first person I've heard to use it.
I congratulate you.
I don't know.
I know that's a little bit off topic about Danielle Smith and the UCP convention this week, but in a way it's not.
Because Canada is, I think, the third largest oil reserve country in the world, 99% of which is in Alberta.
And any other country in the world would lean into it, would get wealthy off it, would be a world force, would use that as soft power.
But instead, we're being attacked ideologically by Ottawa.
Danielle Smith isn't just fighting for Albertans and conservatives.
She's fighting for Canada.
And not to be too grandiose about it.
I think that's all very true.
You remember Stephen Harper said Canada should become an energy superpower.
Yeah.
She laughed at him.
But okay, how do you like Russia as your energy superpower?
Exactly.
Exactly.
So what we found just this week, because it's the six-month anniversary of turning on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion.
Right.
Is that now that one pipeline has added about 600,000 barrels a day to Canada's exports?
And it's now responsible itself for 17% of all the oil exports from Canada to the rest of the world.
And the first shipments of Canadian oil to Asian markets have come as a result of Transmountain being turned on.
Imagine what it would be like if we had Keystone XL and Energy East or Northern Gateway or any of the other pipelines that the Liberals kiboshed.
You wouldn't have the problem that you have with unemployment.
You wouldn't have the problems that we have with rising taxes, lowering productivity.
There was a Fraser Institute study that came out recently that Canada is losing its tax competitive advantage with the United States.
So now not only is their economy stronger, is their production level higher, is their GDP per capita bigger than ours, they also now have a lower tax rate.
How are we going to compete with that?
We're going to say, oh, well, we can compete with that because the world will look and say, oh, Canada is going to go to all EVs by 2035.
Look, they care so much about the environment.
They're going to have net zero energy.
How?
How are you going to do that?
They're going to go to heat pumps instead of gas furnaces.
So what if 15%, 30% of the population freezes in the wintertime?
Greta will be happy.
She'll be so pleased with Canada and what it's doing to save the planet.
It's this ideology and wokeness over common sense.
You can say, look, we need to really reduce our emissions.
I am not a big worrier about climate change, global warming, emissions, but you can say, okay, look, we need to reduce our emissions.
But we also need to keep producing.
So how do you do both of those things?
Not with the liberals.
The liberals is that you either have emissions and production, or you have no production to reduce emissions.
That's what Smith was saying essentially in that news clip you played a few minutes ago is that, look, this is, they say it's an emissions cap.
It's really a production cap because the only way they think you're going to reduce emissions is by reducing production.
And so that's what they're after.
And they can call whatever they want.
They can use whatever fancy, passive, aggressive term they want to use.
They're going after Alberta.
They're going after Saskatchewan's oil production too.
They're going after the bit of oil production that's in northeastern BC because they don't get a lot of votes from there anyway.
Doesn't hurt them at all.
The people who are going to be hurt by it the most are in ridings that don't vote liberal.
And yes, everyone else is going to be hurt in the country, but they're not going to know why they're being hurt.
We'll know why.
And the last poll I saw said the Liberals were at 7% support federally in Alberta.
I hope they get half that percentage of the vote next time around.
Yeah.
Well, it looks like Steph Andyon and his green shift actually won in the end.
I'm going to follow up on that Transmountain pipeline story.
I used to focus on that very closely, but I owe it to myself and to our viewers to go and do a proper report on, I didn't think that pipeline would ever come to fruition.
I thought that Trudeau was actually buying it to kill it.
But I accept the fact that my prediction was wrong.
I'm delighted that it was wrong, although it was triple the cost that the private sector was.
Wow, it was more than triple.
You and I and every other taxpayer in the like they bought it for 4.5 billion.
At the time they bought it, Kinder Morgan thought it was going to cost maybe as much as $9 billion to get it finished.
And Sedge ended up spending $34 billion to build that pipeline.
Like it's insane.
Nobody would have done that.
It's not as though there would be a $34 billion transmountain or no transmountain.
No, if the private sector had done it, they didn't take it up to $17, $18 billion.
Well, the reason they bought it is because they were worried about a bad faith trade.
lawsuit from the American owners of the pipeline.
So they basically paid them off.
An astonishing waste of money.
Oh my God.
But I'm happy to hear that the oil is flowing.
Sometimes Sad About Alberta00:01:14
Lauren, it's great to catch up with you.
I'll see you in Red Deer at the potential conference there.
I should close the way I opened.
I mentioned that when I was growing up, I was at university with Danielle Smith, and we were sort of counterparts.
I should also say that my debating partner at University of Calgary, for two years I was in the debate circuit, was no one other than Nahid Nenshi himself, a left-wing Muslim and a right-wing Jew were debate partners, and we won.
We won two years before.
Let's add a third story to that is that when you were articling for your admission to the bar in Alberta, you lived at my house.
That's right.
I really have my roots are in Alberta, and sometimes I'm sad that I left that wonderful place, but I can't deny it.
I've been in Toronto long enough that I have to call myself a Torontonian.
Lauren, great to see you.
I do remember when I was staying at your house to take the bar exam, and thank you for that belatedly.