Ezra Levant highlights Windsor Constable Michael Briscoe’s $50 private donation to the trucker convoy fund, later upheld by a court despite procedural concerns, while defending the convoy’s legality against Trudeau’s Emergencies Act. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announces interdiction patrols targeting illegal guns and trafficking, ties anti-trans policies to fertility rights and UK precedent, and supports Bill C-59’s oil patch exemptions. Alberta’s opioid recovery model shows a 51% inmate death reduction, contrasting BC’s rise, while economic optimism—$3B in agri-food investments, AI growth—clashes with Trudeau’s tariffs and perceived instability, suggesting Canadians blame him over Trump for economic woes. [Automatically generated summary]
Sheila Gonreed has a sit-down with the Premier of Alberta.
Year-end interviews, just great.
And I talked to James Manson, a lawyer for a cop who was disciplined and punished for making a $50 personal donation to the truckers.
We'll get caught up on those things.
But first, let me invite you to get the video version of this podcast.
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Go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
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Here's today's show.
Tonight, our year-end interview with Premier Danielle Smith, plus a police officer who donated 50 bucks to the truckers is in court again.
Finally Out!00:04:01
And finally, I've got a little bit of news for you about my new book.
It's finally out.
It's December 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
I greet to see you.
Oh, it's so busy.
I mean, today, for example, David Menzies and Lincoln Jay went to Emo, Ontario.
That's hard to get to, by the way.
They had to fly to Winnipeg and then drive four hours through Minnesota and into Ontario to this little town.
This is the little town, you might recall, where the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal punished the local council for not flying the pride flag.
By the way, they don't even have a flagpole.
It's a tiny village of 1,300.
And the lawyers who went after this town, they don't even live there.
What's so outrageous is they went right into the bank account of the mayor, part-time mayor, obviously, 77 years old, and seized five grand like he was in the trucker convoy or something.
Speaking of trucker convoys, in a moment, I'm going to talk with James Manson, a lawyer for the Justice Center, about a cop who on his own time privately donated $50 to the Give, Send, Go crowdfund campaign for the truckers.
He was prosecuted for misconduct by his police force, even though that trucker convoy was not illegal.
We'll talk to him.
And then I'm very excited.
Sheila Gunreed did the year-end interview for Rebel News this year with Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta, and she asked some great questions.
That's all ahead.
So we've got sort of a double interview for you today.
Sheila talks to Danielle Smith of Alberta, and I talk to James Manson.
But let me tell you one more thing that I'm sort of excited about.
I've got a hodgepodge.
So much going on.
And David and Lincoln, I give them full credit for being, it's so cold out there.
Glad they're doing okay.
Um, I know I teased my book a few months ago and then I sort of went silent on it.
To me, writing books and editing them and getting them out the door is the hardest thing in the world.
I mean, think about it.
It's such a long project.
Almost anything else seems more urgent in a given moment, but pretty soon a year goes by.
Anyhow, I am absolutely delighted to announce that today, right now, my latest book is available online on Amazon.com on our own website.
The book is called Trudeau's Secret Plan.
What he'll do to us if he wins again.
I'm excited about the book.
You can get it on Amazon or the website Trudeau'secretPlan.com.
And you're the first people I'm telling about it.
It is live on Amazon, but we haven't done an announcement on Twitter yet.
We haven't sent an email out yet.
You're hearing about it first.
And by the way, some people donated money in the past for a signed copy of the book.
We are aware of that.
And I will be sitting down and signing a ton of these over the weekend.
And hopefully, we'll be able to get some of those in the mail on Monday or Tuesday.
I checked, and if you order from Amazon, you'll actually get the book delivered in just a few days.
You'll get it absolutely in time for Christmas.
I wonder if I'll be sued for this book by Justin Trudeau.
He's still prosecuting me for the book, The Labranos, which I wrote in 2019.
This is sort of the sequel to The Lebranos.
Again, it's called Trudeau's Secret Plan.
And I don't know, he'll probably find some way to try and attack the book.
I'm slightly surprised that Amazon hasn't canceled the book.
Remember, they did that to my book, China Virus, a few years back.
So that's the news.
To see the book, go to Trudeau's secretplan.com or search for it on Amazon.
And without further ado, here's the rest of the show, an interview by me and one by Sheila.
Constable Briscoe's Disappointment00:15:30
Well, one of the things that drove me crazy during the trucker convoy was the statement by Justin Trudeau and everyone on the authoritarian side of the ledger that the convoy was somehow illegal.
They used the phrase occupation, which I suppose is not a legal definition, really, but they called it an illegal gathering and illegal protest, but it never was.
You don't get to just deem something illegal because you don't like it.
And even the Emergencies Act did not deem public protest illegal.
Quite the contrary, the Emergencies Act contains provisions to protect civil liberties, believe it or not.
The trucker convoy was not, was never, and could not be illegal.
I suppose if it turned into a riot, it could be declared a riot, but that never happened.
In fact, the opposite was the case.
The invocation of the Emergencies Act, that in itself was found by the federal court to have been illegal and, in fact, unconstitutional.
So, how is it that a police officer who quietly, discreetly online donated $50 to the Give Send-Go campaign to support the truckers, how is it that he could be disciplined by the police board?
How is that a thing?
Do we now discipline people for having incorrect politics?
Is a police officer not allowed to have a private donation?
And that donation, by the way, was only found out about because of a criminal act, the hacking of the crowdfunding service called Give, Send, Go.
If you follow the case of Constable Michael Briscoe, the cop who chipped in $50, you'll find that, in fact, he was convicted by the police investigation based on media reports.
It's an outrage and it's a sign of the politicization of our police.
Let me say that again.
Constable Briscoe's private and quiet donation to a lawful crowdfund was not the politicization of police at all.
He didn't do so in his work.
He didn't do so with his badge or his uniform, but rather the police investigating him, hounding him and punishing him.
That is the politicization of police.
Well, I can tell you that on Wednesday, two days ago, his conviction was the subject of a judicial review.
That's a fancy way of saying a sort of legal appeal where judges looked at the work of the police investigation.
I'm delighted to say that Constable Briscoe was represented by the lawyers of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, the JCCF.
And James Manson of the JCCF joins us now via Skype from Toronto.
James, great to see you again.
Thanks, Ezra.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
Did I accurately summarize the case?
Basically, here's a cop who, in his private capacity, on his personal time, chipped in $50 to a completely legal cause.
He didn't do it while wearing a badge or a uniform or a gun.
He just, in his private life, chipped in 50 bucks.
And the convoy itself was never illegal, was never declared illegal by any police under the Riot Act or by any judge.
Am I correct in that fact as well?
Ezra, as per usual, you've hit the nail on the head.
This is exactly what happened to Constable Briscoe.
The only thing that I would add to your correct statement of the facts is that he was at the time he made the donation, he was on kind of like a leave of absence.
Why was that?
Because he had trouble at a problem with the mandatory vaccination policy of the Windsor Police Service.
That's another issue, of course, that we maybe don't want to get into right now today, but that was why he was at home.
And ultimately, as you say, he decided one evening to donate $50 to the Give Send Go website.
And then, you know, naturally, all hell broke loose.
Well, isn't I think that adds to his strength?
So he wasn't even working.
He was on leave then.
It was not a vacation per se, but I think that would even add more strength to it.
So he was convicted in the first instance.
And now he just had his judicial review at the Ontario Divisional Court.
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Is there really a difference between a judicial review and an appeal?
One is just really reviewing what the expert panel of the Ontario Police Commission, basically.
What's the name of it?
The sort of police, the Ontario Civilian Police Commission.
They made a decision, and then this court was reviewing their decision.
So it's sort of like an appeal, right?
That's correct, Ezra.
Just let me give the viewers just a very quick overview here.
So what happened in the very beginning?
You had the investigation.
There was an investigating officer, and she was the one who downloaded those 25 or 30 newspaper articles.
Now, in legal terms, Ezra, as you know, we call that hearsay.
We call that something that is not really something that you should rely on for the truth of what is in the newspaper report.
It could be false.
Somebody could be lying.
You don't know.
And so ultimately, on the basis of all that information, and in that information, it wasn't, by the way, videos and photographs of buildings on fire and people murdering everybody in the streets, right?
It was literally Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford and chief of police slowly, as we remember him from Ottawa.
These people saying things like, this protest is becoming illegal.
This is an unlawful gathering, whatever.
They have no authority to make those types of declarations.
And you know why, Ezra?
Because we don't live in Iran.
There's no Ayatollah here that can just declare things to be illegal and then have consequences visited upon our citizens.
In this case, it was two weeks of penalty for Constable Briscoe.
Some other person may suffer a different consequence in a similar vein.
It's very dangerous.
Anyway, Ezra, the investigator did her thing.
She, you know what, here's the thing, the scandalous thing as well.
The data that came from the breach, the hacking incident, the police recognized in the beginning that there were holes in the data.
One of the investigators said to another, it's possible that the hacker, the illegal hacker that we never investigated, it's possible that they manipulated the data, added information, deleted information to the donor database.
We don't know.
And anyway, so then the investigating sergeant, she recognized that maybe she couldn't rely on this information if it was just that was all there was.
But what she did was she used her powers under the investigative sections of the act, of the legislation, and she compelled Constable Briscoe to go to an interview.
And then she could ask him questions on the record.
And because this was a disciplinary proceeding, right, not a criminal matter.
So the viewers have to understand he wasn't going to go to jail for this, right?
So you don't have the same charter of rights protections.
You don't have the right to remain silent.
You have to answer the questions in a disciplinary proceeding.
So he had to say, yes, I did make a donation.
I mean, you know, the walls came tumbling down.
I made a $50 donation.
So ultimately, that's what got him.
And so then we went before a hearing officer.
Our organization, Ezra, was not involved at the original hearing.
And so one of the things that I was a little bit disappointed was that nobody at the hearing originally decided to argue that this whole thing stunk from the beginning, that it was what we call in the legal business, an abusive process.
When you've got an investigator getting this information, recognizing it's not good, it's got holes in it, using it, though, to springboard a compelled hearing interview to ask this guy questions that he can't refuse.
That stinks.
And, you know, what it also does, Ezra, it incentivizes this type of behavior, doesn't it?
I mean, you've got hackers now looking at what happened and they're saying, hey, if I want to, if I want to challenge my enemies, personal, political, who knows what, I can hack in here.
Clearly, they're not going to care because they didn't investigate.
But maybe what they're going to do is they're going to investigate my enemy and penalize him.
What kind of a message does that send to us?
Yeah.
I mean, the fact that that hacker has not been prosecuted, that hacker was boasting online that he hacked the give send go.
Like he was bragging about it.
And the timing of it was so clearly choreographed to suit the government's needs.
It was published immediately by the CBC state broadcaster.
Clearly an illegal act.
We need to do a lot more investigating.
And I hope that one day, perhaps it'll need there to be a new government in place that there should be an investigation, perhaps even a hearing into the illegal conduct by the government during the convoy, including this hacking.
You know what I would respond to that, Ezra?
I would say, I hear you.
I would say it shouldn't matter what the government is in power.
It shouldn't matter if it's a liberal government, a conservative government.
I'm just saying there's no way they would investigate themselves.
We see that they just simply won't do that.
What I'm saying is that the Charter of Rights and the rule of law should be there no matter what government is going on.
But anyway, Ezra, just to get back to your initial question.
So the hearing officer found him guilty and docked him two weeks' pay.
Boom.
Then we took an appeal.
There's an appeal into an appeal tribunal.
This is not a court, just so the viewers understand.
It kind of looks like a court.
It acts a bit like a court.
It's not entirely a court, but they take appeals of these types of decisions.
And so we did the appeal.
And we argued before the appeal body.
It's called the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, the OCPC.
Got it.
And because we've got civilian oversight of the police services, that's the idea, which I think is just good in theory, right?
But anyway, what happened was we said, hey, the evidence that you guys trotted out to convict this guy was ridiculous.
You can't convict a guy on 25 newspaper articles where nobody who has the authority to make a declaration that a protest is illegal.
You know, that's all they said.
My point as well, we've got the Charter of Rights here.
This guy's got every right to make a donation.
And, you know, that's a problem.
Now, there were a couple more technical arguments.
We also trotted out, Ezra, the abusive process argument.
And I suggested in the appeal that this whole thing stunk to high heaven and it should have been tossed out.
Now, the problem with that was, unfortunately, Ezra, the guy, the lawyer, the counsel who assisted Constable Briscoe below in the initial hearing, he didn't raise it.
I don't know why he didn't raise it, but he didn't raise it.
So that brings up for the viewers a difficult situation because normally, Ezra, as you know, you're not really supposed to bring in these new arguments at the appeal level.
You're supposed to argue everything first and then argue that there were mistakes made.
You're not supposed to bring in new, have new kicks at the can, if you will, on appeal.
And that's kind of what we were trying to do.
Now, you can do it.
There's a way to do it.
There's a test you have to meet.
You have to explain to the court why it's important, that it's not going to cause anybody any trouble, that the prosecution is not going to be taken by surprise.
You can argue all these things.
And we did, you know, Ezra, we said, look, there's going to be a miscarriage of justice.
Right.
You don't hear this appeal.
If you don't hear my argument about abusive process, how can it be?
How can it be that in the way this investigation started, that this is fair to this man?
They didn't hear it, though, Ezra.
The commission declined to hear the appeal or rather the argument at all.
They said, we don't want to do it.
It didn't happen.
We're not going to do it.
And anyway, basically what they did, Ezra, was they decided to dismiss all of our grounds of appeal.
They had no time for it.
They said the evidence here, the newspaper articles, oh, no problem.
Newspaper articles are fine.
The problem, Ezra, there, right, as you know, again, in a tribunal setting, when you're not in court, yes, you can use hearsay evidence.
You don't have to be so strict about it.
That's okay.
But you can't just use 40 of these articles and assume that they're actually true.
I mean, you can get it in the record, but that's a different animal that the viewers, I'm sure, understand.
It's different to get it in the record than for it actually to be true.
Yeah.
So that's what happened.
Yeah, imagine having CBC journalism as sufficient evidence to convict you.
So you had the hearing two days ago in front of a real court with a real judge.
How long was the hearing?
How did it go?
And when do you expect to hear the ruling on that?
Right.
So what happened, Ezra, was this is this is now taking it into court, as you just said.
The proceeding is called a judicial review.
As you mentioned at the beginning, it's a fancy way of kind of being an appeal.
What happens is the reviewing court, this is actually what they call the divisional court in Ontario.
Doesn't matter really what the details are, but it's a panel of three judges.
Oh, three judges, okay.
That's right.
There were three judges, and they heard my arguments.
And so I had to suggest why the commission's decision was, in our parlance, unreasonable.
That's the way that we say these things.
We don't talk about appeals, we talk about review, and we talk about an unreasonable decision.
But basically, Ezra, as you know, it's kind of the same.
What happens is the court takes a look at what happened and asks itself, is this right?
Is this okay?
Does this pass muster?
And my argument, of course, was that it did not.
I argued the same thing, essentially what I argued before the commission.
I argued much of the same argument before the court.
Now, here's the thing: the proceeding was about two hours long, two and a half, maybe around there.
A Rough Ride to Justice00:04:00
We had me making my pitch.
We had the Windsor Police Services Council, the prosecution, making their pitch.
We also had the actual commission itself.
In these types of things, sometimes the actual commission will get one of its staff lawyers and they will show up and they will make some neutral statements about the proper procedures and the proper ways that they do things.
They don't take a position formally in this, but they want to be helpful to the reviewing court.
So that happened on Wednesday.
I can report that we had a fair hearing as far as I'm concerned.
The judges, you know how it goes, Ezra, as a counsel, you lay awake at night before and you wonder who are the judges going to be on your panel?
Are they going to be with you?
Are they going to be up in your face the entire time?
Or are they going to be quiet church mice just listening and not giving you any indication of where they go, where they're going?
I like a good debate, frankly.
I think that's nice because you can actually understand where the judges' concerns are and you can try to address them, right?
In any event, I was expecting a very hostile panel because this has to do with COVID, as you know, and the freedom protest.
And I can tell you that we in the civil rights organization space, we've had a rough ride with these cases, with the courts in the last few years.
The judges have not been on our side for one reason or other.
So anyway, I was expecting a rough ride.
I didn't get a rough ride.
I got a reasonable ride.
I got some good questions from the bench.
One judge in particular, she had some very good questions to ask.
And I, you know, what happens is, of course, you answer the questions, you know the file, you know what to say in response to these questions.
And they seemed satisfied with the answers.
I didn't get any indication really about where they're going to land.
You know, naturally, Ezra, they did not tell me, you know, when they were going to rule.
What happens is they take it under reserve, they take it under advisement.
And normally, a case like this would be a few months at least for a decision to come out.
I would expect the springtime, maybe late winter before we get a decision.
But here's the other thing, though, Ezra, right?
The viewers may be interested to know what happens if we win, right?
What are the options?
Well, usually a case like this, when you're talking about a judicial review, you're almost always talking about sending it back.
Usually what happens when there's an unreasonable decision that the court finds, they will instruct the commission to take it back, take the case back.
Yeah, to have a do-over.
Wouldn't that be crazy?
All over a $50 crowdfund donation, just madness.
This is one of the things that I said to the court.
I said, look, you know, in a couple of my arguments, you know, justices, what would be the point of sending this back?
This is a really minor situation.
You know, we've already spent six days in the original hearing.
Six days, Ezra, of time.
Then the commissioner.
You know what?
It feels a little bit like the persecution of Tamara Leach, who has the longest-running mischief trial in Canadian history, indeed the history of the entire Commonwealth, over, you know, even if you look into the worst case, inciting mischief, which I don't even think happened.
I think that this is an abuse.
They're trying to send a message.
They're trying to bully him.
They're trying to deter.
And it'll be interesting to see what the court does.
Well, when the result comes out in the new year, please let us know because I am interested in how things work out for Constable Michael Briscoe.
Active Steps Against Trafficking00:07:20
Is he working as a cop now?
Is he back on active duty?
Yes, as far as I'm aware, he came back to active duty reasonably quickly.
And now he's, I think the vaccine stuff sorted itself out and now he's back on the job.
Yeah.
Well, that's great.
Well, listen, thanks for fighting for him.
Thanks for the update.
Sounds like, I mean, the most astonishing thing I've heard from you today is that the hearing over this $50 donation was six full days.
That's madness.
And it shows, I think, that the police have become injected with woke politics.
Hopefully this court case will help return things to balance.
James Manson of the Justice Center, great to see you again.
Thank you, Ezra.
Cheers.
Right on.
There you have it.
The JCCF, one of the good guys fighting for civil liberties.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Sheila Gunn-Reed for Rebel News, and I'm here in beautiful downtown Calgary.
I'm at the McDougall Center.
And I'm sitting opposite someone who I think is the greatest opposition Justin Trudeau has ever faced in his nearly 10 years in office.
That is to say, I'm sitting across from Alberta's Premier Daniel Smith.
Premier, thank you so much for agreeing to sit down to this interview with me.
Let's get right down to it, shall we?
Today, you announced the new interdiction patrol team in southern Alberta to patrol for illegal guns, drug smuggling, human trafficking.
Now, critics say that this is just pandering to Donald Trump.
How do you address those concerns?
A couple things I'd say is that we've known for some time these were problems.
So if you look at when I came in, one of the first announcements we made was a collaboration with Paul Brandt on human trafficking, which is a serious issue internationally.
And he's got his Not In My City campaign that we wanted to make sure that we partnered with him on.
We have also faced a very serious overdose crisis with opioids and illegal fentanyl to the point where we've created an entirely new model for delivering a recovery-oriented system of care.
But the flip side of that is that we've got to stop the people who are victimizing those who are drug addicts.
So I had asked Mike Ellis, my public safety and emergency services minister, to create new specialty sheriff teams.
And we've created a specialty sheriff team already.
that is our scan team that shuts down drug houses.
They're shutting down one almost every week in communities all over Alberta, as well as the surveillance team that works in collaboration with their other police counterparts, as well as our fugitive apprehension team, which has been very successful.
And he was in the process of training up for two other new teams that I asked him to do, which is a specialized fentanyl sheriff team and a specialized border team.
I asked him to do that last July.
So we knew that this was a serious issue for Canada, for Alberta in particular.
And it just so happens that because it's a priority for the U.S. administration, we accelerated our plans.
We were going to announce it in March so we were able to get it through Treasury Board and announce it early.
And I think that people should realize that it may well be that it's a U.S. priority, but it should be a Canadian priority too.
I'm glad you said that because cracking down on illegal human trafficking and drug trafficking is, of course, in Canada's best interests.
Why do you think the Prime Minister is so reluctant to fix that problem and is instead talking about a trade war?
Well, I think that sadly, two of the things that have created the problems that we have today are federal decisions to allow for safe supply experiments in British Columbia in particular, which has added hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal high-powered opioids into the market and turned out to be a total failure to the point where we're now seeing British Columbia taking more of a recovery model approach and they want to do compassionate intervention as well.
So I think that that is a validation of the approach that we've taken.
Plus the revolving door on bad guys in going in and out of jail.
It's been incredible frustration for our chiefs of police to go out, apprehend somebody, and then they're back out on the street before they've even processed the paperwork.
And so we managed to get some tightening up of what was Bill C-75, but it's not working.
Clearly, we're continuing to see some of the worst offenders getting back out and reoffending.
And so I would say that unfortunately, it's been some of the federal decisions that have created the crisis that we have today.
And now it falls on to the provinces to do something with our power over policing to address it.
And this is the best thing that we know how to do.
Now, since the election of President Trump, you've taken a real active role in building stronger relationships with your American counterparts and the incoming administration.
At the same time, these are my words, not yours.
I would suggest that Justin Strowe is making active steps to undermine a lot of the work that you're doing by running off at the mouth about Trump.
Now, over the past year, opinion polls have put Trudeau at least 20 points behind Polyev.
Do you think that Trudeau is talking about a trade war because he'd rather campaign against Trump than Polyev so that he has somebody else to blame for the carnage that exists in the Canadian economy right now?
I sure hope that what we're seeing is just a lack of discipline in messaging.
And I hope it's not deliberate to try to antagonize the American president because we can't win that game.
I mean, they're a $27 trillion economy.
We're about a $2.7 trillion economy.
Any kind of tariff war will be crippling to us.
It might hurt them in certain key areas, but it will be crippling to us.
So that's why I've taken the approach of let's accept what the American people decided.
They put the U.S. president in the White House and they also gave him the Congress as well.
And so he has a mandate to move forward.
And that's what he's doing.
And if his mandate includes making sure that we're taking serious efforts to address our border, then we should take that seriously and address that as well.
I think that I would like to see a whole lot more conversation around our joint interests rather than saber-rattling around tariffs.
I told my counterparts when we had the call, and I'm happy to say so publicly.
Tariffs only hurt consumers.
25% tariff on all goods coming into Canada just makes all of those products more expensive.
Even using the examples that Justin Trudeau talked about, 25% more expensive for bourbon or ketchup or playing cards or cherries.
It hits Canadian consumers.
And same in reverse, but that's where I think we have our strongest arguments to make.
A 25% tariff on oil will end up increasing the cost of gasoline by a dollar a gallon.
That is going to have an influence on American consumers at a time where the U.S. president has also promised to bring consumer prices down.
So I say that we lead with strength.
We lead with talking about how Americans benefit from our energy, how they benefit from electricity, how they benefit from critical minerals, how they benefit from the cross-border trade in food and the cross-border trade in manufactured products, especially for our auto industry.
I think we've got a great story to tell, and we should lead in telling that story as opposed to talking about tariffs, which really don't benefit anyone.
Leading with Strength00:10:24
Moving on to the next topic, this fall you introduced a slate of what I think the mainstream media is calling anti-trans legislation.
You know, in reality, it protects children's futures, parents' rights, and fairness in sport.
As was the case with Saskatchewan, Justin Trudeau's well-funded activists in EGAL immediately announced legal action.
Saskatchewan did something different, though.
They shrouded their parents' Bill of Rights in the notwithstanding clause.
I've asked you this before.
I wasn't entirely satisfied with your answer.
I'll ask you again, why didn't you do the same?
Because I think it hands the activists a huge win, gives you a bit of a political black eye if pieces of this legislation are undone.
I would say that there's two ways that you can defend legislation.
One is the notwithstanding clause, which is kind of the really heavy hammer.
But the other is section one.
As long as you can demonstrate that something is reasonable, that it's proportionate, that it's evidence-based, that's the OAS test, then the courts should side with us.
Because as we have demonstrated, it is entirely reasonable to put restrictions on the decisions that young children make.
We do it all the time.
And when you're talking about a child making a decision that will have a permanent impact on their fertility, that is a decision that has to be made as an adult when it comes to evidence-based.
We have already seen the CAS report that came out of the UK that was the most comprehensive review of the literature and it found it lacking the long-term effects and studies on the impact that this has on kids, the long-term information on what happens when these kids become adults, it's just simply not there.
And I think it is proportionate.
I think the very idea that the state would interfere in the relationship between a parent and their child when it comes to something this foundationally important, I just don't think that that's a reasonable thing.
So we're prepared to argue it on the basis that what we are doing was well considered and that it was reasonable.
And we'll see what the court decides.
I hope we don't have to use the notwithstanding clause because I think that this is exactly the kind of careful lawmaking that we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for.
We have been careful and we're prepared to argue it to the fullest extent in the courts.
Now, what happens if portions of these laws are overturned?
Do you go back to the drawing board, fix the law, or do you just drop it?
Or do we use the notwithstanding clause at that point?
I mean, I'm not completely averse to using the notwithstanding clause.
I thought that the place we might have to use it is on our Compassionate Care Intervention Act.
Even then, we are trying to write the law in a way that is also very reasonable and proportionate and evidence-based.
And so we're going to try to a Section 1 argument there as well.
But I'm just watching this case in California that's going on right now of a 20-year-old girl who got puberty blockers, I think, on the first visit to a doctor, was on cross-sex hormones.
the next year at age 13, had a double mastectomy at age 14, and then at 20 just realized that she had severe issues, mental health issues that went unaddressed, and she's now suing.
So I think when we see those kinds of cases coming forward all over the world, that makes the case that we've just had about why it is that we need to make sure that these decisions are made by kids when they're old enough to understand the consequences of it.
So I feel like we've done our work and I'm prepared to make the case in court.
Now, a lot of conservative premiers, I'll say Doug Ford as an example, he's not even talking about this stuff.
Why was this an important one for you to tackle?
I think part of it was that I have been, I mean, I was in the media before I got into politics.
And so I was watching as this was unfolding in the United Kingdom.
I saw some of the concerns that were being raised there, why it is that they launched into this review in the first place.
We've been seeing the international evidence as well.
There's been other European countries that have gone in this direction.
And so we just don't want to be in a position where 20 years from now, someone looks back on this era and says, why didn't somebody do something?
I think that when you're making decisions that could sterilize people, especially children, I just don't want that weighing on my conscience.
I want to make sure that if anyone makes that choice, that they're supported in doing so as an adult.
But these are definitely adult decisions.
I want to talk to you about Bill C-59.
That's the anti-greenwashing legislation.
It was floated as a thought bubble by radical green NDP MP Charlie Angus.
People laughed it off.
I laughed it off at the time because it was so crazy.
But then the liberals adopted a version of it, which ended up changing the Competition Act.
And it's bizarre to call it greenwashing to talk about the technologies that are advancing efficiencies in the oil patch.
And especially when a government that is telling you that if you give them carbon taxes, they'll give you more back in return and then a national park won't burn down.
I know the province has responded to the censorship of the Competition Bureau, but will the province be considering joining in or intervening on court cases against it?
I think we're considering that right now.
I think there are a couple of organizations that have stepped forward saying that they are going to challenge it.
I want to say it's the Business Council of Alberta and Alberta Enterprise Group.
And so I've raised that with my justice minister to see if there's an opportunity to intervene.
And we've done that before when Dow Chemical and the other plastics manufacturers took forward a case against the declaration of plastics as a pollutant and toxic.
We intervened in that case on the constitutional grounds.
So we're prepared to do things like that.
I'm not sure of the status of that in particular.
But the other thing that we've done is we've indicated that we are passing more legislation under the auspices of our sovereignty within a United Canada Act to address this very issue.
So they gave a carve out to provincial governments to be able to talk about emissions.
So what we're going to do is have all of the energy companies who develop our resources on our behalf as a condition of their license, they have to report their emissions to us.
And then we'll report it.
And we will be able to herald the incredible reductions that our industry is making and the progress that they're making.
And we'll make sure that they're not able to divide and conquer and pick on any individual producer.
So they've pushed us into that position where if they're going to make it illegal for companies to talk about their true environmental record, well, we'll do it on their behalf and happily so.
Now, earlier you touched on the Alberta recovery model.
And I think that's one thing that really sets Alberta apart in their approach to this across the province.
Now, just like with your moves to protect the southern border, you are building treatment centers on reserve, even though both of those things are under the federal government's purview.
I've seen academics and activists alike say that even though opioid poisonings in Alberta are decreasing, we should not consider that a success of the Alberta model.
Why do you think there's such resistance to admitting that what is happening in Alberta is changing things?
It's saving lives.
There's this reluctance to admit the success of what's happening here.
I think a lot of people fall in love with their solutions, even if they're the wrong ones.
I have one of my colleagues in the legislator has said the NDP, they identify a problem, they come up with a solution that will make it worse, and then they demonize conservatives when they come up with alternative solutions.
And I've seen that formula play out over and over.
And I think that's what happened is that 20 or 30 years ago, the left embarked on this strategy saying that this would be a way to be able to reduce deaths.
And it's been a failure.
Whether it was initially the safe consumption sites that have morphed into safe supply, that have morphed into a permissive approach on criminals.
It's led to more criminality, more danger, and more deaths.
And I think that declaring failure is something they're unprepared to do.
We were prepared to do that five years ago.
We looked at what was happening and said, we don't want that to happen here.
It was happening all up and down the West Coast.
We said, we've got to try something different, especially after COVID, when we started seeing these massive encampments emerging in our large centers and even in our mid-sized communities, which we hadn't seen before.
So I would say that we had somebody who was, I think, pretty inspirational in the new approach, Marshall Smith, who was my chief of staff.
And we're about five years in to an eight-year plan, and it's multifaceted.
So we still have consumption sites, although we have shut down one in Lethbridge and we'll be in the process of shutting down one in Red Deer at the request of their council.
But we have the virtual opioid dependency program that gets people on suboxone or sublocate with an immediate prescription.
We have the same-day counseling services.
We have detox beds.
We've taken off the fees on treatment beds.
We've built out two recovery communities, one in Red Deer, one in Lethbridge, one in 03, Gunn.
We've got eight more coming, including four on reserve.
And we've also built therapeutic living units in our corrections for our corrections facilities.
And I can tell you some of the things that we've seen, Mike Ellis just shared with me some of the stats around those therapeutic living units in particular.
We followed people for a year after they left them.
The inmates asked to be in treatment.
And then when they get discharged, they go to one of our recovery communities.
And we followed them for a year, and we saw a 51% decrease in overdose deaths compared to what the status quo was.
I don't know how you call that anything but success.
And so it's a combination of all of those factors.
So we're going to keep on doing all of them.
And it may be the case that it doesn't work the first time.
Avoiding Major Investments00:04:33
Maybe that's part of the reason for the detractors.
But you know what Marshall Smith said to me is, you know what?
Sometimes cancer treatment doesn't work the first time.
And we don't say, oh, well, we tried.
We say, let's do it again and let's do it again.
Let's try something different.
And so that's what we're taking to the approach of this really deadly disease.
It is those who have a predisposition for addiction.
It's very hard to get them onto a pathway towards abstinence and recovery with life.
And sometimes it takes a little extra effort in doing things a different way.
We're going to do that because we want to give people their lives back.
And I think we're very gratified to see.
I mean, it's now been a few months that has been going in the right direction.
But we look at what we're seeing in British Columbia with the numbers continuing to go up.
Our numbers continuing to come down pretty dramatically.
And that seems to be a validation of everything that we're doing.
I know time is short.
Premier, what do you think is the biggest issue facing Albertans in 2025?
I think it is the issue of tariffs.
I think it will be really painful to the Canadian economy if 25% of cross-the-board tariffs come in, if there is a trade war that happens, and I hope it doesn't.
And if it goes on for very long, which I hope it doesn't as well.
So that's why we're doing our part to address the border issues as well as try to do what we can to avoid tariffs altogether or avoid them on energy in particular.
I mean, I think that we've got to be prepared to do what we can to meet the Americans in halfway on some of the things that they've raised with us.
But if we don't have that, I mean, to me, everything is looking up.
I just saw a press release before I came in.
Three oil science companies are talking about increasing their production.
It's been a long time since we've had that level of enthusiasm in the energy sector.
Same thing with the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors.
They said that we've seen an increase in drilling rigs from previous years.
We've got major investments in AI data centers being developed, major investments in alternative energies, whether it's geothermal or hydrogen.
We've got a vibrant and robust film industry.
We've got more investment happening in venture capital in AI.
We've got $3 billion that have been announced in investment in the agri-food industry.
I've been told by the forestry industry that we've got one of the best markets for investing in forestry.
It seemed like everything is ticking on all cylinders.
And so with that big threat hanging over us, that's a real problem.
But if we can have that go away, I think Alberta is just going to continue to boom.
Premier, thank you so much for taking the time.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
And Happy New Year as well.
to see you hey welcome back Your letters to me.
Jay Predge says it is essential that we have free and fair trade with the U.S.
Now is the time for negotiation and not confrontation.
The border must be made secure in the interests of both countries.
Absolutely.
It's so weird to me how Doug Ford is talking about terrorism punishing the Americans.
He's sounding like Justin Trudeau, sounding like he's running an errand for Trudeau.
It's really weird.
Whereas Francois Legault of Quebec and Danielle Smith of Alberta are saying, yeah, let's fix the border.
Pleasant Valley Picker CA says Trump plays chess.
Trudeau plays checkers.
Yeah, or he plays other more childish games than that.
I just think that Justin Trudeau is essentially an unserious man.
And Trump, for all his entertaining and all his joking style, is deadly serious.
It's a mismatch.
Boom Boom Billy says he wants to make a mess so big for Pierre that will be irreparable.
So in four years they can say, see, Pierre's a liar.
He can't fix anything.
Bring us back so we can fix it.
And the NDP will allow this.
I agree that Trudeau would torch the place on his way out if he could, but I think in his mind, he sees that there may be a path to victory if he can demonize Trump as his opponent, hang that around the neck of Pierre Polyev, and claim that the economic damage was not his fault, but Trump.
So I think, yeah, leaving a disaster for Polyev for sure.
But I think that Trudeau may actually think if he's just perfect enough, he can win.