Rebel News - EZRA LEVANT | Could it be true? Are the Liberals really ahead federally in Alberta polls?
Aired: 2026-03-16
Duration: 34:55


=== Liberal Polling in Alberta (14:20) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, my friends.
[00:00:00]  I find it hard to believe, but when six different polling companies in a row say it, maybe I should put my disbelief aside.
[00:00:07]  They say that the federal liberals are now competitive in Alberta.
[00:00:11]  I don't want to believe it.
[00:00:12]  I don't even know if I do believe it, but we'll have a hearty talk about that and provincial polls with my friend Lauren Gunter, the Edmonton Journal.
[00:00:20]  That's ahead on a feature interview on Rebel News.
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[00:01:27]  Tonight, could it be true?
[00:01:30]  Are the Liberals really ahead in the polls federally in Alberta?
[00:01:34]  It's March 16th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
[00:01:40]  Shame on you, you censorious bug.
[00:01:52]  Well, I'm certainly not an expert in oil and gas, but about a decade ago, I really did a deep dive as an amateur into the oil sets.
[00:02:00]  You might recall I wrote a book called Ethical Oil, The Case for Canada's Oil Sands.
[00:02:04]  In fact, a copy of it is over my shoulder here in our studio.
[00:02:08]  And I tried to learn as much as I could.
[00:02:10]  What is the difference between a resource and a reserve?
[00:02:13]  What is production like?
[00:02:15]  How do you make oil?
[00:02:16]  So I was really starting as an amateur, even though I was born and raised in the province of Alberta.
[00:02:21]  I had no connection to the oil patch.
[00:02:23]  And one of the things I learned very early on is the difference, if I may, between an oil reserve and an oil resource in place.
[00:02:29]  What does that even mean?
[00:02:31]  If a country or a company says they have a million barrels of oil in their reserves, it doesn't mean they have it like in a gas tank.
[00:02:41]  That means they can see it, they can detect it, they can measure it.
[00:02:45]  It's in the ground.
[00:02:47]  And at today's oil prices, with today's technology and today's regulation, it could be produced.
[00:02:53]  That's called an oil reserve.
[00:02:55]  And you actually have to be pretty stringent to prove you have it because remember, you're often selling your company stock to investors and you have to be able to prove you have certain reserves.
[00:03:05]  Otherwise, you could be misleading your investors.
[00:03:10]  Resources in place is a little bit different.
[00:03:13]  That could be oil that you know is there, but at current prices, it's not affordable and economic to produce it.
[00:03:20]  Just last point on this, and you'll see why I'm emphasizing it in a moment.
[00:03:24]  So Alberta's oil sands have about 170 billion barrels of oil reserves.
[00:03:32]  They're there.
[00:03:33]  We can see it.
[00:03:34]  We can measure it.
[00:03:34]  We can prove it.
[00:03:35]  And at today's prices and technology, you can produce it.
[00:03:38]  But there's another, get this, 2 trillion with a T barrels of oil that we can see are there.
[00:03:47]  They're just not affordable yet with today's technology.
[00:03:50]  There's a lot of oil.
[00:03:50]  Now you know the difference between resources and reserves.
[00:03:54]  That little lesson I just gave is a lesson I think we need to teach the energy minister of Canada, the liberal named Tim Hodgson, because he said the strangest thing the other day.
[00:04:03]  As you know, the war in Iran is causing the price of oil to rise.
[00:04:07]  There's questions on whether the Straits of Hormuz, this narrow passageway by which an enormous chunk of the world's oil sails from the Persian Gulf to the world, if Iran were to block ships, blow them up, deploy mines in the water.
[00:04:22]  So different countries in the world are doing something about this.
[00:04:25]  They're producing more oil.
[00:04:27]  And the United States has a massive strategic petroleum reserve, which is just what it sounds like.
[00:04:32]  It's huge underground caverns, actually, where oil is quickly produced and released into the public to moderate the price of oil every day.
[00:04:45]  Canada does not have a strategic oil reserve.
[00:04:49]  We don't have a huge tank of it.
[00:04:52]  At any given moment, there may be 100,000 barrels that is being held in tanks waiting to be put in the pipeline.
[00:04:59]  The reason I say all this is that Tim Hodgson, trying to chime in with the world's oil-producing powers, says, Canada and our companies should release our reserves.
[00:05:11]  Brother, what reserves?
[00:05:14]  Do you mean produce the reserves that are in the ground, the 160, 70 billion barrels that we know are there, but haven't produced it?
[00:05:21]  You are the reason, Tim Hodgson.
[00:05:24]  You and the Liberal government are the reason we have not produced an extra billion barrels because you blocked all the pipelines.
[00:05:31]  It's a little bit of chutzman.
[00:05:33]  I see a column by my friend Lauren Gunter in the Edmonton Journal just today: Canada energy exports still crippled by liberal lost liberal decade, quoting Tim Hodgson saying that we could become one of the largest suppliers of liquefied natural gas in the world.
[00:05:55]  How bizarre.
[00:05:56]  Joining us now to talk about this and the energy minister's international puffery is our friend Lauren Gunter himself.
[00:06:04]  Lauren, great to see you again.
[00:06:06]  Good to see you.
[00:06:07]  What do you make of the fact that Tim Hodgson is sort of strutting around as if Canada is going to be a major player here?
[00:06:13]  And yeah, we are an important producer and exporter of oil and gas, but he's sort of saying things he can't quite follow through on.
[00:06:22]  And it's his party that's locked in the oil and gas for a decade.
[00:06:26]  Yes.
[00:06:27]  And say we did have 50 million barrels sitting under the ground in some giant cavern somewhere, similar to the way the Americans do.
[00:06:39]  I mean, it's always fascinating to me the way the Americans pump oil out of the ground and then pump it back into the ground for their strategic reserve.
[00:06:47]  But say we had a strategic reserve like that.
[00:06:51]  How are we going to get it to market?
[00:06:53]  That's one of our big problems now.
[00:06:54]  We don't have pipelines.
[00:06:56]  We can use rail cars and we do, but we're almost at maximum capacity all the time.
[00:07:02]  Yeah.
[00:07:02]  Rail cars.
[00:07:03]  So it's one thing to say, hey, yes, we're prepared to jump in.
[00:07:08]  But as you said, we can't just dip into some giant reserve we have.
[00:07:15]  We have to pump more.
[00:07:17]  That's lesson number one.
[00:07:19]  And then we have to have some way of getting that stuff we're pumping out of the ground to market.
[00:07:26]  And we don't.
[00:07:28]  Our pipelines now are at near capacity.
[00:07:31]  And there's talk now in the last week or so about reviving the Keystone XL pipeline.
[00:07:38]  That would be lovely, but it doesn't solve our biggest problem, which is we cannot get our oil from Canadian oil sands and Canadian oil fields directly to export terminals where we can send it to Asia or Europe without first having to sell it at a discount to the United States.
[00:07:58]  Right, you know?
[00:07:59]  I I only learned the fancy word monopsony, not monopoly.
[00:08:04]  Monopoly is when there's one place you have to buy everything from.
[00:08:08]  A monopsony is one customer, and the trouble with a monopoly is you're paying more than you should.
[00:08:14]  The trouble with a monopsony is you're paying less than you should.
[00:08:17]  You're getting paid.
[00:08:19]  You're getting paid less because it's only America who could buy it.
[00:08:22]  So every barrel of oil you can sell on the open market, suddenly America has to pay us world oil prices to compete.
[00:08:29]  So it's so healthy.
[00:08:30]  Not only are we diversifying the market, but we're getting more for our money from the Yanks.
[00:08:35]  And it was the liberals who killed those dreams.
[00:08:38]  It's a bit of hoose.
[00:08:39]  But do you think Tim Hodges Hudson is well aware that he doesn't?
[00:08:44]  He's not accurately describing reserves and well aware that it was Justin Trudeau who said there's no business case for lng?
[00:08:51]  Surely he's got a no, if you and I know that, I would imagine the energy minister knows that too well.
[00:08:56]  Yes, except you know the the federal bureaucracy and the liberal caucus is full of people who will tell the ministers what they want to hear, and they may even themselves be blinkered by what is truly happening.
[00:09:16]  You know, they may have, as you said, they might have confused a strategic reserve with a resource.
[00:09:23]  They might have confused where this stuff is all the time, how easy it is to get out.
[00:09:28]  Um, and you know sure theoretically, we have a lot of oil.
[00:09:33]  We are the the third or fourth largest producer of oil, could or could be the third or fourth largest producer of oil in the world.
[00:09:42]  Uh, behind only Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and and maybe Iran um, and we have a ton of it, but we can't get at it because, as you said, the liberals killed every pipeline that came along during their 10 years under Trudeau.
[00:10:00]  And so let's say we do want to chip in, our our part maybe and, as Hudson says, maybe we do want to become one of the biggest players in the world in lng.
[00:10:12]  We're six to twelve years yeah, away from that.
[00:10:17]  You, you don't, you can't phone up pipelines are us and say hey, can you deliver one of those pipelines to us and we'll start pumping stuff through it tomorrow.
[00:10:26]  Uh, you know, they haven't changed the regulatory and approval processes.
[00:10:32]  They haven't gotten rid of the impact assessment act, which which we have called many times the No More Pipelines Act.
[00:10:40]  They haven't done any of that.
[00:10:42]  They haven't got their Major, THE Major Projects Office, which we have not heard of one iota since uh Carney brought it in last year.
[00:10:52]  The major projects office does not have a pipeline in any of its major projects.
[00:10:58]  So, do I?
[00:11:00]  That's the whole point of the column this morning: is it I don't think these guys are really serious.
[00:11:05]  They talk about all this stuff, but they're not doing anything concrete to try and get our oil there.
[00:11:13]  You know, I was looking at some stats today.
[00:11:15]  Again, when I wrote my book, Ethical Oil, the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia were each producing about 10 million barrels of oil a day.
[00:11:24]  That's like 10, 15 years ago.
[00:11:26]  Now, American domestic production is 14 million.
[00:11:31]  And if you include other petroleum liquids, it's actually 20 million.
[00:11:35]  Like under Trump, they've gone nuts with production.
[00:11:39]  It actually was even growing under Biden.
[00:11:41]  I have to give him some credit.
[00:11:44]  Here's what scares me, Lord.
[00:11:46]  When the United States basically took over Venezuela, you know, in two hours, one of Trump's first things he said is, We're going to, we're here for the oil.
[00:11:58]  Like it was almost like a Noam Chomsky horror movie come true.
[00:12:02]  Trump said, Yes, we are here for the oil.
[00:12:05]  And he's welcomed American companies.
[00:12:06]  And he's, I don't know exactly where that oil is being sold, but America is running it now.
[00:12:12]  And a lot of the Venezuelan oil in the past was destined for those same refineries in Texas because it's a really heavy oil that Alberta oil was going to go to.
[00:12:23]  So you got Venezuela in literally as a province of the United States.
[00:12:28]  I don't know what you even call it.
[00:12:30]  It's being run by, I don't know, the State Department of the United States.
[00:12:33]  And I don't know what's going to happen to Iran, but theoretically, it could be that that Iranian oil is going to come back on the legitimate market.
[00:12:44]  So you could see oil being filled by Venezuela and Iran.
[00:12:50]  It's on a legitimate market now.
[00:12:53]  Iranian oil accounts for about 40% of the oil that China consumes.
[00:12:58]  They buy that legitimately.
[00:12:59]  There's nothing impeding them from buying it.
[00:13:02]  And the Iranians are quite happy to ship it all to them.
[00:13:06]  And, you know, India buys an awful lot of Iranian oil.
[00:13:10]  It buys Russian oil too.
[00:13:13]  We have a tendency to get quite focused on what's happening in the West, Western Europe and North America.
[00:13:22]  But we shouldn't always worry about that.
[00:13:26]  We should be looking for markets other than Louisiana and Texas.
[00:13:31]  But what happens is there are 26 oil refineries in the American Midwest.
[00:13:37]  25 of them are hooked up to do heavy oil, like we have.
[00:13:44]  So we pump all this oil down there.
[00:13:45]  Most of it goes to the American Midwest.
[00:13:48]  They refine it for domestic use, but they take their lighter, sweeter West Texas intermediate and they sell that to the world at a premium.
[00:13:57]  So, you know, this is something that Stephen Harper said within the last month: is that we are not, we're not being mean to the Americans, like Trump keeps saying, we're not ripping off the Americans.
[00:14:11]  We are selling them a commodity at a discounted price, which then allows them to make even more money from their own economy.

=== Pipeline Damage and Refineries (09:07) ===

[00:14:20]  And so, you know, all of this is extremely complicated.
[00:14:24]  I mean, getting oil out of the ground and pumping it to market is incredibly complicated.
[00:14:30]  I went one time to a tank farm in northern Alberta, where there were within these three giant tanks, there were 12 different products that had come out of the oil patch.
[00:14:45]  And each of those went down a pipeline, one after another, with machinery that goes between the two products and cleans the pipeline as product number one goes down, cleans out the pipeline, product number two comes in, then product number three comes in.
[00:15:00]  Wow.
[00:15:02]  I had no idea it was that complicated.
[00:15:04]  Right.
[00:15:04]  But there are all sorts of people who understand how all this works.
[00:15:08]  And they think that Canada is just absolutely foolish.
[00:15:12]  The Trudeau-era green regulations cost Canada about $400 billion in investment in the oil and gas infrastructure and resource extraction.
[00:15:28]  It's hard even to conceive of how much damage they did.
[00:15:33]  Yeah.
[00:15:34]  You know, I was in Calgary when the Prime Minister Mark Carney met with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to talk about the so-called MOU, Memorandum of Understanding.
[00:15:44]  And it was so vague.
[00:15:46]  And the final deadline for the possible construction was 2040.
[00:15:51]  It was in there.
[00:15:52]  Whereas Alberta's obligations to the Fed started immediately.
[00:15:55]  I was skeptical then.
[00:15:57]  I don't know how many months have passed.
[00:15:58]  I'd have to look it up.
[00:16:00]  But the only news I've seen come out from the pipeline industry is Enbridge, big pipeline backer that had the Northern Gateway that Trudeau killed.
[00:16:10]  They're saying there's just too much risk here.
[00:16:12]  We're not proceeding.
[00:16:13]  So I don't, I mean, maybe there's people behind the scenes.
[00:16:17]  I mean, I don't know people.
[00:16:19]  I don't know the CEOs in those companies, but there's no public emanations on this other than Enbridge saying, no, thanks.
[00:16:26]  I don't think that MOU is going to do anything.
[00:16:28]  I think it was just a fake, a deke.
[00:16:32]  Unfortunately, I think you're right.
[00:16:34]  I sat down one time and tried to figure out how much money Canadian pipeline companies had put into the pipelines that were canceled by the Trudeau government.
[00:16:46]  So you can say Energy East was canceled by the Trudeau government.
[00:16:51]  It was done in a clever way so that they didn't have to take direct responsibility for getting rid of it, but they did it in.
[00:16:59]  Northern Gateway, they just did it in.
[00:17:01]  Like they said, no, you're not going to be able to do this.
[00:17:04]  And then Keystone XL, which they kept saying that they were in favor of, they didn't lift a finger to try and convince the Americans.
[00:17:12]  You remember it started under Obama.
[00:17:14]  Obama wasn't going to give the export permit to allow the oil to come across the line.
[00:17:19]  Trump, I have no idea why in the first term, Trump didn't do more.
[00:17:24]  And then Biden, of course, just said, no, you're never ever going to be able to do this.
[00:17:28]  So I tried to figure out, and I think it came to about $7 billion that Canadian oil companies had spent trying to get pipelines built.
[00:17:39]  And so of course they have a nasty taste in their mouth.
[00:17:42]  Of course they don't want to try for another pipeline.
[00:17:45]  And especially because this federal government doesn't say things like, hey, bring us a proposal.
[00:17:51]  We're looking to get pipelines built.
[00:17:53]  Let's get going.
[00:17:54]  Let's, you know, and all they're talking about, too, and I made this point in the column this morning, all they're talking about, too, is another pipeline to the West Coast.
[00:18:04]  There's an enormous market off of the East Coast, both for liquefied natural gas and for our oil.
[00:18:11]  But they're not talking about a pipeline over there because who does that upset?
[00:18:16]  It upsets Quebec.
[00:18:18]  And so if you have 44 seats that the Liberals do in Quebec, and you're afraid you're going to lose some of them if you build a pipeline across Quebec, you don't even talk about it.
[00:18:28]  They don't even mention.
[00:18:31]  One of the things I learned when I wrote Ethical Oil was that the largest refinery in Canada is not in Alberta.
[00:18:36]  It's in New Brunswick.
[00:18:37]  It's the Irving Refinery.
[00:18:39]  And it takes oil not only from the states, which was unusual, I didn't know, but from OPEC.
[00:18:45]  In fact, the oil that comes up from the states is often dropped off in Maine and pumped up to Montreal.
[00:18:52]  I'm not sure the path it takes now.
[00:18:54]  I might be a little bit out of date, but that Canadian refinery that serves Atlantic Canada and New England has foreign oil in it, the largest refinery in Canada.
[00:19:05]  And that's what Energy East was supposed to fill.
[00:19:08]  You had this beautiful pipeline from Alberta and New Brunswick, which would have cheaper than OPEC oil.
[00:19:15]  It just breaks my heart.
[00:19:17]  And I don't know.
[00:19:20]  Here you have these smug Quebec politicians who say, no, no, no, no.
[00:19:24]  We will never take Alberta oil.
[00:19:25]  It's dirty oil.
[00:19:27]  We must never take Alberta.
[00:19:29]  Well, they take about 700,000 barrels a day of Saudi and Venezuelan oil.
[00:19:35]  It comes in tankers up to St. Lawrence.
[00:19:39]  Tankers, yeah.
[00:19:41]  Tankers are safe, but pipelines are safer.
[00:19:44]  But they prefer the Saudi.
[00:19:46]  I remember a few years ago, we put up a banner outside the mayor of Montreal's office, and we said Denny Coder prefers conflict oil from OPEC to ethical oil from Canada.
[00:20:00]  Oh, they hated that.
[00:20:01]  By the way, they put a lot of pressure on the billboard company to have it taken down.
[00:20:05]  It was quite a fun little thing we did.
[00:20:07]  Well, and you remember, too, that they released over a billion, is it liters or gallons, I can't remember which one of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence.
[00:20:19]  But no, We mustn't upset the pristine waters of the St. Lawrence.
[00:20:25]  Or what was it?
[00:20:27]  Is it Norwalds that they have that they were worried about?
[00:20:30]  I'm glad you reminded me about that.
[00:20:32]  That's right.
[00:20:33]  They pollute.
[00:20:34]  It's shocking what they did.
[00:20:36]  And this was approved by the Liberals.
[00:20:37]  Hey, I want to ask you a question about polling.
[00:20:41]  You wrote an article a couple days ago about the United Conservative Party being in the lead in the polls.
[00:20:46]  I want to talk about that.
[00:20:48]  But I want to ask you about a phenomenon that I don't understand.
[00:20:51]  And it's not just one polling company, which you could write off as a rogue poll or maybe a methodology, but a number of pollsters, including some that I pretty much trust, have suggested, strangely to me, that the federal liberals are doing fairly well in Alberta these days.
[00:21:10]  And when I saw the first poll, I scoffed.
[00:21:13]  But after five or six polls, I mean, I can't dispute the science.
[00:21:18]  I mean, maybe all the polls are wrong, I guess.
[00:21:21]  Have you seen those polls and what do you make of them?
[00:21:23]  Yes.
[00:21:23]  And you know what?
[00:21:25]  You have to accept that the only people right now who are doing anything concrete in dealing with Trump and dealing with any of the other trade issues are the liberals.
[00:21:39]  Pierre Polyev sat for an entire year and said nothing about Trump, not a thing about Trump.
[00:21:49]  And so he's allowed the liberals to fill all of that empty space.
[00:21:54]  They look like, you know, if you and I start to examine things they're doing, like they're talking a good game about pipelines, but they're not building any.
[00:22:02]  They're talking a good game about housing affordability, but they're not building any.
[00:22:08]  We can go through all of the issues that are important to Canadians and show that the liberals aren't doing anything, but they are the only ones who are talking about these things.
[00:22:17]  And I think that that's having an impact.
[00:22:19]  Yeah.
[00:22:20]  It's a pickle for a conservative because especially if you in any way have used the style of Trump, you're lumped in with Trump.
[00:22:32]  And it's tough for a conservative to push the style of Trump.
[00:22:38]  Most of the legacy media will brand you as a Trumpist, even if you don't stand up for lefty.
[00:22:46]  That's right.
[00:22:46]  Yeah, it's a purity test.
[00:22:47]  I mean, look what they're doing to Wayne Gretzky and other sports, you know, hockey players.
[00:22:52]  If you're not actively denouncing Trump while playing a sport in the United States, you like Wayne Gretzky is a Canadian hero almost on par with Terry Fox, and yet he is being denormalized because he's not bashing Trump because he dared to have a photo taken with Trump.
[00:23:09]  It's sort of incredible this two minutes of hate directed at Trump or anyone Trump adjacent.
[00:23:16]  I think that's what happened to Jamil Giovanni, the conservative MP who went down there.
[00:23:20]  How dare you?
[00:23:21]  I mean, he may Polyev and I knew what the pitfalls were, I'd have told him not to go.

=== NDP Sovereignty Challenges (10:38) ===

[00:23:27]  Yeah, like whether or not he had things to say and he has people, his contacts, for instance, with JD Vance, the vice president.
[00:23:38]  I don't care.
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:39]  If I am Pierre Polyev and I know we're being slammed on this and I haven't said anything on my own, I'm going to say to Giovanni, do not go.
[00:23:49]  This is just too hard to explain away.
[00:23:51]  Hey, I want to talk about Alberta polls because there's quite a difference.
[00:23:56]  If the liberals are doing well in Alberta, and I don't even want to say that the Liberals are ahead in Alberta because I don't want those words to come out of my mouth.
[00:24:02]  I don't want to speak them into existence.
[00:24:05]  I don't think that's true, but they're doing better than they have for.
[00:24:09]  And I think an election, if it actually was one, would clarify the mind pretty quick.
[00:24:14]  But provincially, I mean, Danielle Smith, I think, is doing some very interesting things.
[00:24:18]  She's walking some fine lines pretty well, in my view.
[00:24:22]  Now, look, I'm out here in Toronto.
[00:24:24]  So what I get is, I mean, I'm out in Alberta a fair bit, but I think she's handling sovereignty and independence fairly well.
[00:24:32]  She's enabling the democratic system, but she's not championing it, but she's not denouncing it.
[00:24:39]  She's bringing in lots of small but thoughtful things, like bringing in the new, I think they're calling it Jordan Peterson's law, the rule that you can be a professional lawyer, doctor, engineer, psychologist, and not be fired for having incorrect politics.
[00:24:56]  Like that's what happened to Jordan Peterson at the Ontario College of Psychologists or whatever.
[00:25:02]  So she's bringing in niche things like that that I think are pretty great.
[00:25:06]  I think pumping up the Alberta sheriffs is pretty great.
[00:25:08]  So she's doing lots of little things that make people feel good.
[00:25:12]  Yeah, right on, you get them.
[00:25:13]  And she's often saying, well, what Quebec wants, we want.
[00:25:17]  That's my theory.
[00:25:18]  Now, am I just being manipulated by the social media I consume?
[00:25:22]  What's the truth?
[00:25:23]  I think that's exactly what she's doing.
[00:25:25]  And she has to walk a fine line because she has an awful lot of people in her core who would lean towards independence.
[00:25:36]  And so she cannot disparage that.
[00:25:40]  I mean, I have had those feelings myself over the years.
[00:25:44]  I'm so tired of being dumped on by liberals from a great height from central Canada.
[00:25:51]  I've entertained the idea that it would be nice to just leave.
[00:25:54]  So she has an awful lot of that in her base that she has to deal with.
[00:25:59]  And I think she's doing it very smartly.
[00:26:01]  Like she came out a month ago, a month and a half ago now with all of these referenda we're going to have this fall in Alberta.
[00:26:11]  And the one that's gotten the most attention is denying social benefits to people who are neither permanent residents nor legal immigrants nor Canadian citizens.
[00:26:26]  It's a reasonably small number of people, but I think it's very important to say, look, if you're here illegally, The federal government puts out ads in foreign language newspapers around the world all the time saying Canada has free health care and free social service.
[00:26:44]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:26:45]  It's like they're inviting more people to cross over Wroxham Road.
[00:26:50]  You know, and by the way, there's other, we've talked a little bit about Quebec today, and I think part of the Quebec political brand is not just being progressive, but being holier than now to some of the other provinces, including those cowboys in Alberta.
[00:27:03]  So I don't know if they would call themselves a sanctuary, you know, not like the sanctuary cities, sanctuary province, because Quebec is actually getting a little bit irascible on immigration too.
[00:27:14]  In fact, of all the provinces, they're the least afraid to be politically correct.
[00:27:18]  But it wouldn't surprise me if there's other provinces that would mock Alberta for this, to which Danielle Smith could say, hey, we'll buy you a train ticket, go down there, they'll pay for you.
[00:27:28]  There is the inequity of it.
[00:27:32]  Quebec is as restrictive as any other province on who it will accept as immigrants.
[00:27:39]  And it has been given the power to say by Ottawa.
[00:27:44]  So what Smith said in her speech about six weeks ago was that she wanted the same power for Alberta that Quebec has.
[00:27:51]  Well, suddenly, oh my goodness, the CBC, the Globe of Mail, the Toronto Star.
[00:27:56]  Oh, she's a racist.
[00:27:58]  Look at this.
[00:27:58]  She's just like Trump.
[00:27:59]  Oh, she just wants.
[00:28:00]  She's doing only what Quebec has been allowed to do by the federal government.
[00:28:08]  And they have matched Quebec initiative for initiative for initiative.
[00:28:12]  And it has just driven Ottawa and the central, the Laurentian elites nuts.
[00:28:20]  But I love it.
[00:28:21]  And I think that it's starting to be seen in Alberta as something that she's done.
[00:28:25]  So the UCP is ahead of the NDP province-wide, 49 to 36%.
[00:28:31]  They're ahead by 13 points.
[00:28:33]  That's a big gap.
[00:28:35]  But when you look at where they're ahead of them on issues, there are very, very few issues where the NDP even come close to the UCP.
[00:28:43]  So that means when you start running an election and you're talking about issues, you're already starting from a real big head start.
[00:28:51]  And the one for me that I loved the most was Abacus Data did some very significant polling on Alberta.
[00:28:59]  A thousand person sample, which for a provincial-wide poll is a lot of people.
[00:29:06]  In rural Alberta, the UCP gets 70% and the NDP gets 15%.
[00:29:13]  Yeah.
[00:29:13]  Well, that's how the whole province used to tilt almost, maybe not Edmonton.
[00:29:17]  Back in the day of Ralph Klein, that's where the NDP were.
[00:29:22]  But the NDP are only as ahead of the UCP in Edmonton by the same margin that the UCP are ahead of the NDP in Calgary.
[00:29:32]  So they don't wipe out the UCP.
[00:29:34]  Right, right.
[00:29:36]  You know, let me just say one quick thing about Quebec before I want to ask you more about polls.
[00:29:41]  I noticed that when Alberta talks about independence, it's treated with a derision and a condescension by the Central Canadian elites, the Laurentian elites, in a completely different way than when Quebec does.
[00:29:54]  Here's a stat I shared with our viewers before.
[00:29:58]  About two weeks ago, there was a by-election in Quebec, Shikudami, I think, and the Parti Québécois, the separatist party, won it.
[00:30:06]  And that's, I think, the fourth in a row.
[00:30:08]  So you have four separatists in a row.
[00:30:11]  And I could find only one story on the CBC website.
[00:30:14]  And it was just a straight up, here's what happened, no commentary piece.
[00:30:18]  Whereas you have this apoplexy about the same vibes in Alberta.
[00:30:22]  For Quebec, they get the Clarity Act, they get the rules on the referendum, everything's fine, they're exercising their democracy.
[00:30:29]  But if you even talk about this in the West, you're called a traitor.
[00:30:33]  They used the word traitor.
[00:30:34]  There was the word Nazi that was used the other day.
[00:30:37]  And I think that reaction to Alberta independence, I think Danielle Smith is very wise to avoid it.
[00:30:45]  How about Nahid Nenshi?
[00:30:46]  And by the way, I just should disclose that 30 years ago, he and I were debate partners in university, which is pretty funny.
[00:30:53]  You had this right-wing Jew and this left-wing Muslim as debating partners.
[00:30:59]  We got along pretty well, but we knew we didn't agree on a single thing.
[00:31:02]  Anyway, Nahid Nenshi, he's the NDP leader.
[00:31:05]  And funny enough, Danielle Smith was in school at the same time with us too.
[00:31:09]  Nahid Nenshi is trying to work on this independence angle, and that's probably a good idea for him.
[00:31:14]  How's it working out for him, though?
[00:31:16]  You know, he's solidifying his base.
[00:31:18]  That's pretty much all he's doing.
[00:31:19]  You're not picking up any support that I can see from beyond the NDP base.
[00:31:23]  The NDP base in Alberta now is somewhere in about a third to 40% of the vote.
[00:31:29]  And that's public sector workers, it's teachers, it's activists.
[00:31:38]  Together, they now form about 35% of the vote in the province.
[00:31:44]  And they're strong behind the NDP.
[00:31:47]  But so Nenshi is playing to that base, and he's keeping them in the fold.
[00:31:55]  But even this latest abacus poll showed that 25% of people who voted NDP in the last election could be convinced to switch parties.
[00:32:08]  25%.
[00:32:09]  That's a pretty good size number.
[00:32:11]  It's not huge, but it's a pretty good size number.
[00:32:13]  Whereas among people who voted for UCP in the last election, it's under 17%.
[00:32:19]  So Danielle has done a very good job of getting the base together, keeping it together, despite the fact that there are disparate elements in that UCP base that don't always see eye to eye.
[00:32:34]  You know, it's sort of funny.
[00:32:35]  I know both of these characters from back in the day.
[00:32:38]  I haven't kept in touch with Nenshi, but I have with Danielle Smith.
[00:32:41]  And I would say this: policy is part of it, but personality is part of it too.
[00:32:46]  And I think Danielle Smith, partly, I think, because she spent so much time on talk radio.
[00:32:52]  I think she comes across as someone you could talk with, even if you disagree.
[00:32:57]  This is how it looks to me.
[00:32:58]  And Nahid Nenshi, who's very clever, very bright, I think he can slip into sort of a condescension.
[00:33:04]  And even the tone comes across as Smarmie.
[00:33:07]  And I don't think I'm saying that because I oppose him on issues.
[00:33:10]  I think he just sort of lapses into a kind of sneer and his mannerisms.
[00:33:15]  Whereas I think Smith, so if it comes down to personality in a campaign, it often does.
[00:33:20]  I don't know.
[00:33:21]  I think these are pretty good polls.
[00:33:23]  Am I wrong in my assessment of the case?
[00:33:24]  No, I think that's right.
[00:33:25]  I think when Nenshi was mayor of Calgary until 2021, nearly his whole last term, he was convinced he was the smartest person in any room he entered.
[00:33:37]  And that showed, and people couldn't stand it.
[00:33:42]  Notley used to have a higher rating in Calgary than Nenshi does.
[00:33:48]  Well, she was Rachel Notley was never the mayor of Calgary.
[00:33:53]  So being mayor of Calgary is supposed to be a big thing for Nenshi with the NDP.
[00:33:57]  And I think it's, I think generally, it's either even or it's actually been a detriment to the NDP.

=== Nenshi's Calgary Core (00:49) ===

[00:34:06]  And he does not play well at all outside of Edmonton and Calgary.
[00:34:12]  Not at all.
[00:34:14]  Yeah.
[00:34:15]  Yeah.
[00:34:16]  I mean, I remember, I think he's the same man he was.
[00:34:19]  I mean, we've all grown and changed a bit, but I think his core, his core personality remains what it was when he was a student activist.
[00:34:28]  Lauren, it's great to catch up with you.
[00:34:29]  Thanks for the Alberta briefing.
[00:34:31]  It's sort of heartbreaking to me that the whole world gets to sell its oil, including Venezuela, but Alberta is corked up for a decade or more.
[00:34:39]  Great to catch up with you.
[00:34:40]  Thank you, my friend.
[00:34:41]  Likewise.
[00:34:42]  There he is, Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Journal.
[00:34:46]  Well, that's our show for today.
[00:34:48]  Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.
[00:34:52]  Night and keep fighting for Freedom.