A special extended episode on Alberta, where things are about to heat up in a few days as the province prepares to choose a new premier. Plus, a look at the results of yesterday's election in Quebec and a look ahead to the Alberta election on Oct. 4.
00:01:58.820It wasn't particularly long, and it wasn't particularly intricate.
00:02:02.040I was here in our Rebel World headquarters, and our main lady in Quebec, Alexa Lavoie, was at the headquarters of the Quebec Conservative Party, led by Eric Duhem.
00:02:13.220And we were on the air for a few nights, but it was very quick that we saw the results were going to be a majority, a re-elected majority for the incumbent party, the Coalition Avenir Quebec, led by Francois Legault, and our little beloved Quebec Conservative Party, which was only revived a couple of years ago by Eric Duhem.
00:02:33.040Although it did well in the polls, it managed to punch through nowhere.
00:06:18.100And really, we've been stuck in the status quo for two years.
00:06:21.380But Danielle Smith, who is looking likely to win the UCP leadership, I believe that she will make Alberta the lightning rod of confederation yet again.
00:07:27.300I think that Danielle Smith has been under the radar of the national media for the reasons I said.
00:07:34.400There were other things going on in more important parts of the country, like Ontario and Quebec.
00:07:39.420But now that those matters are all settled, and now that the choice of the federal conservatives is chosen to take on Justin Trudeau,
00:07:46.900I think the Ottawa Press Gallery is going to be bored and satisfied enough that they will turn their attention to Danielle Smith.
00:07:55.400And I think they're about to declare war on Alberta.
00:08:00.140Alberta oil and gas and farms and guns and pipelines, these are all the things that Ottawa politicians like to pick on to the delight of Eastern Canadian voters.
00:08:10.800But if Danielle Smith does indeed become the leader of the party and the de facto premier, she won't have a seat in the legislature just yet.
00:08:17.660But I think that Justin Trudeau and the other liberals will pick on her to the delight of their base.
00:08:24.120They like nothing more than going to war against a populist Alberta right winger.
00:08:28.820They'll call her a cowboy or a cowgirl.
00:08:31.820I'm not sure how they'll handle fighting against a younger woman.
00:08:35.520Justin Trudeau doesn't do well when he quarrels with women.
00:08:38.200He seems to wind up either groping them or firing them.
00:08:41.540But I think interesting times are ahead, and we're going to cover it from out there in Alberta.
00:08:46.760I'm going out there for the announcement of the leadership results.
00:08:49.200I mean, it's not a sure thing, but she seems to be leading.
00:08:52.780So today we're going to have an extended interview with my friend Lauren Gunter, who is based in Alberta, and he has been observing this race very carefully.
00:09:01.520So for the rest of the show, I present to you Lauren Gunter and I talking about this leadership race and what it means.
00:09:16.760Well, just two days to go until the leadership contest of the United Conservative Party in Alberta is resolved.
00:09:30.160I have been following this along with many of our Alberta-based team.
00:09:34.500In fact, I had the pleasure of hosting, co-hosting, a mini-debate featuring three of the contenders, Brian, Gene, Todd Lowe, and Daniel Smith.
00:10:04.460But joining us now to figure things out and our last thoughts before the result is revealed is our friend Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun.
00:10:32.600But she's within striking distance, I think.
00:10:38.200I have one little caveat that I want to add to that.
00:10:41.240But for the most part, I think the conventional wisdom is right.
00:10:44.580I think she will win on October the 6th, although it may take several ballots.
00:10:51.920And the more ballots it takes, the greater chance someone else will beat her, because I think she has the least growth potential among the candidates.
00:11:02.240So after the first ballot, she comes in at 40%.
00:11:05.960It's iffy whether she can get another 10% to push herself over the top.
00:11:11.520If she comes in at 45%, then I don't see that you can stop her.
00:11:16.680There are two other candidates further down the ballot whose support is most likely to go to her.
00:11:26.020And they may not on their own be very big in the totals, but they would be enough to give her the extra 5%.
00:11:33.340So with that one caveat, that if she's not at 45 on the first ballot, she may have some trouble, I think she's there.
00:11:44.680I think no matter whether she gets 40, 42, 45 on the first ballot, she will eventually squeak out a win.
00:11:50.420But it's not going to be, for instance, as overwhelming as Pierre Polyev's win, which cleared the party for him.
00:12:01.780You can't have too many splinter groups or dissidents, disaffected people in his party because he won so big.
00:12:10.980Smith will probably win, but she will inherit a party that's unsure of where it wants to go with her as the leader.
00:12:17.920Yeah. I think it's a great analogy with Pierre Polyev at the federal level.
00:12:22.420Not only did he win more than two-thirds of the points in their obscure point system, but in terms of each district, each riding, as they used to be called, he won almost every single one.
00:12:34.680I think there was maybe six or eight, and the whole country didn't win.
00:12:37.600He won 330 out of 338. That's how many he won.
00:12:41.240And you could see the effect of that immediately because the media were hoping that Jean Charest or others would say,
00:12:46.500aha, the party is fractured. The real red Tories come with me.
00:12:50.340But there was no room for that. It was overwhelming.
00:12:53.900And I think some of the other candidates sort of felt that was coming.
00:12:57.180In Alberta, it's different. A lot of the other candidates are sort of doing the opposite.
00:13:03.500Federally, they all were sort of, other than Jean Charest, they were sort of sucking up to Pierre Polyev.
00:13:08.740But in Alberta, they're sort of ganging up on Danielle Smith.
00:13:12.920They had a press conference to denounce her signature policy item, the Sovereignty Act.
00:13:18.360I think you're right. A lot of the other candidates, their second or third-ranked support will go to each other.
00:13:26.880I think maybe Todd Lowens, second chance, second choices will go to her.
00:13:31.740Maybe some of Brian Jean's. I don't know. She really is a dissident figure.
00:13:36.200She doesn't have ties to the party. She's not been in MLA in almost a decade.
00:13:40.640She's not part of the club. And Jason Kenney couldn't be clearer about denouncing her.
00:13:44.820Yeah. No, and that sets up some interesting scenarios if she wins, which, as I said before, I think she will.
00:13:56.840And that is she will have to be careful about putting together a team in such a way that she brings some of those disparate groups together.
00:14:09.100But, you know, there's already talk. There were some talk yesterday among the punditry in Alberta that, well, of course, she might win, but she can't govern as she campaigned.
00:14:19.820Well, please, you campaign the way you campaign.
00:14:23.200And she has to find a way to do a lot of the things that she wanted to do during the campaign, largely to bash Ottawa and to ignore Ottawa when it's possible to do so.
00:14:37.640But at the same time, to bring in particularly Travis Tave's people.
00:14:42.680Travis Tave is where was the finance minister in Alberta.
00:14:46.720He's the establishment candidate. A lot of the people who still supported Jason Kenney went to Travis Tave.
00:14:54.620And he's a very smart guy. He's not just a rancher. He's an accountant as well.
00:14:59.980He was, by all accounts, a good finance minister.
00:15:03.520But he has the personality of a paved road.
00:15:15.960So how do you then appease what is largely your Calgary and establishment group, represented by Tave, and still appease the Gene people, the Lohan people, and all the other candidates?
00:15:33.940It's going to be a tricky operation for Smith.
00:15:39.140But you remember, too, that one – I mean, I think you and I talked about this a few months ago.
00:15:45.720She comes with this black mark, and that is that in 2014, she broke up her party by bolting over to the Tories who were in the process, in the throes of self-destruction at that.
00:16:00.840And that, more than anything else, surprises me, that she's a frontrunner, because that was such an awful black mark against her.
00:16:11.040I never thought she could recover from it, but she certainly seems to have recovered from it.
00:16:15.140So how does she then, instead of breaking apart Wildrose, which is what she did in 2014, how does she bring together UCP?
00:16:22.200That's a great point, and I thought it would have been a bigger black mark, too.
00:16:26.240I mean, she basically not only destroyed the Wildrose party, but destroyed the deeper and more important concept of an official opposition.
00:16:34.600You can't just cut a secret deal to say we're not going to have an opposition anymore.
00:16:38.600It's an essential part of our entire system, and I think that is what paved the way for Rachel Notley.
00:16:43.160And she did all that, and she did all that without getting any cabinet positions for the people in her party.
00:16:48.960Like, how do you take your party, meld it with someone else, when they say, yeah, but we're not going to give you anything for it?
00:16:55.600Yeah, I think that was a terrifying moment.
00:16:58.160One of the people that surprised me was behind that deal was Preston Manning.
00:17:01.960He later revealed he advised Danielle Smith to do it, and I want to mention Preston for one reason.
00:17:06.520I remember, because I was a young man working for Preston at the time, when he wanted to evolve the Reform Party, make it more palatable for Eastern Canada, so he created the Canadian Alliance, but not a lot of Tories.
00:17:23.000It wasn't until Stephen Harper did the formal merger that that dream happened, but Preston Manning tried a few times, and he even said, well, this is really going to be a really, really, really new party, and to prove it, we're going to have a leadership race.
00:17:34.620And he was so certain he was going to win again that he didn't mind when Stockwell Day, his friend, they were actually friends, came and challenged him, but wouldn't you know it, Stockwell Day won, and that shocked Preston Manning, he felt betrayed, and his loyalists, Deborah Gay, Chuck Straw, Monty Solberg, Jay Hill, they sort of did not accept, they never accepted Stockwell Day as the new leader, and they undermined him, and they broke apart.
00:18:04.200And this is a bit of an obscure piece of history, and this is a bit of an obscure piece of history and trivia, they created something called the Democratic Representative Caucus.
00:18:12.140They created like a mini party in Ottawa, but they didn't do it all at once, it was like drip, drip, drip, Deborah Gray quit, Chuck Straw quit, Monty Solberg quit, maybe one a week.
00:18:22.900To constantly disable and stumble and step on the news coverage of Stockwell Day, and he never really recovered from that, and he was turfed, and Stephen Harper took over the rest of his history.
00:18:35.520And here's the reason I give you that little vignette from 20-odd years ago.
00:18:40.980Jason Kenney has showed no compunction about trying to mess things up for Danielle Smith.
00:18:45.440And I think that some people, maybe Kenny himself, maybe others who feel like they were deposed along with him, certainly some of the other candidates, Lila Ahir has been very vocal towards Danielle Smith.
00:19:02.480I wonder if they're going to have the drip, drip, drip, dissident strategy towards her that Jean Chirin never had a chance to do against Pierre Paglia, but that Preston Manning and his acolytes did to Stock Day.
00:19:14.420Do you think you're going to have a splittist counter-revolution by Jason Kenney's faction?
00:19:45.780And as long as she understands that she's not going to get her way 100% on the Sovereignty Act, I think she's going to be able to find a lot of common ground.
00:19:57.080One of the other things she said is we're not ever going to bring back lockdowns and vaccine passports and mask mandates if there's another outbreak of the pandemic.
00:20:10.000I think she can find an awful lot of common ground with all of the different candidates' groups in this election.
00:20:18.820So she has to find the issues on which there is a lot of common ground.
00:20:24.060I mean, I think cutting billions out of health care and education, she's probably not going to get away with that.
00:20:29.500But she could easily find ways to make the other candidates' followers supportive of her by saying, look, we have 125,000 people working for Alberta Health Service.
00:20:44.62022,000 to 23,000 of them are middle managers, not upper managers, not frontline workers.
00:20:50.620There has got to be a lot of fat that you can trim out of that.
00:20:53.800You know, you talk to any nurse, for instance, in Alberta, and they will tell you that their paperwork has increased in the last 10 years by probably 50% to 60%.
00:21:03.440And that's because you have all these middle managers who want some sort of report every shift about this or that or the other thing that has very little to do with patient care.
00:21:15.560And so then you don't have to say, look, we're cutting the health budget by $5 billion, and then allow bureaucrats to decide where to do that, because the bureaucrats will cut nurses first and other healthcare workers, other frontline workers.
00:21:34.200These are all the people in the middle of this staff who contribute very little of apparent value.
00:21:41.200Let's try and get rid of a lot of those people and get more into patient care.
00:21:47.140Then you could save money and at the same time expand patient care.
00:21:50.540So she has to find ways like that, that she can get to her agenda without alienating the supporters for Taves and Rebecca Schultz and Brian Jean and the others.
00:22:04.960It's going to require some cleverness, but I think she's clever enough to do that.
00:22:09.920Now, Rachel Notley is waiting in the background.
00:22:13.640I never thought she would become premier other than for the great cataclysm you and I discussed five minutes ago.
00:22:19.420And then when she was finally turfed by Jason Kenney, I thought we would never see her again.
00:22:23.980But I think Rachel Notley actually believes, and I think there's some basis to her belief, that she has a chance of becoming premier again.
00:23:01.400And she was a socialist, and she destroyed a lot of things, but she didn't have the same sort of gong show that the UCP has been the last six months.
00:23:10.800I think there's a real risk Rachel Notley could win again.
00:23:13.860I'm not saying I predict she will, but it's not a crazy scenario to have her restored as the premier again, Rachel Notley.
00:23:20.920No, I think if the UCP remains together, and there isn't the drip, drip, drip dissension that you and I talked about a couple minutes ago, I think if there's a united UCP, she cannot win.
00:23:33.720I think if there is one party of the centre-right in Alberta, the NDP cannot win.
00:23:41.620But the last poll that I reported on, which was a couple of weeks ago, I've ignored most of the polls that have come out during this leadership race because they're very small sample sizes, and they aren't always just people who are members of the party or voting members of the party.
00:23:54.520But one that I did report on showed that 97% of people who voted NDP in the last election intend to vote NDP again.
00:24:03.900I have never seen that kind of intense loyalty anywhere, anywhere in Poland.
00:24:11.020And so she's going to get her 40%, 38% to 40% of the vote.
00:24:34.080And that was enough to win in marginal ridings where Wild Rose and the PCs split the vote, and the NDP came up the middle.
00:24:43.460If you look at any of those ridings where the margin of victory was not a majority of the vote, any of the constituents, once the two right-of-center parties amalgamated, the NDP lost all of those, all of those rides.
00:25:01.820So that's the power of splitting the vote on the right.
00:25:07.560And so long as Smith can find a way to keep the party together, then I think she gets to win.
00:25:16.260I am here in Toronto, and I've become a Torontonian over time.
00:25:22.220But my heart is still in the West, and I still love the West.
00:25:26.400And I know one of the things – I mean, I lived in the West for the first two-thirds of my life, really.
00:25:31.240And there's a feeling that Ottawa doesn't understand the West, Toronto doesn't understand the West.
00:25:39.220And a lot of the idea, the intellectual capital, is in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal.
00:25:44.360And so they either don't understand or don't like ideas in the West.
00:25:47.920I don't think I'm saying anything new or unusual.
00:25:50.900I think that if Danielle Smith wins on Thursday, she will come to the attention of the Central Canadian intellectual elite all of a sudden.
00:26:01.260They've been watching her out of the corner of their eye, but they've been too busy talking about Justin Trudeau, Pierre Polyev, the Quebec election last night.
00:26:08.380Like, they're too busy talking about their own stuff.
00:26:10.280But on Thursday, if Danielle Smith becomes a new leader, they're going to read the left-wing synopsis of the Toronto Star summary of the crazy stuff.
00:26:21.940And they're going to say she's a new incarnation of Bible Bill Aberhart.
00:26:26.600She's a wild woman in the prairies who is radical and extreme.
00:26:31.500And I think you're going to see a piling on, such as you have not seen since, well, I suppose since Stockwell Day became leader of the Canadian Alliance and the media decided to assassinate him.
00:26:43.220I think that when they look at her Sovereignty Act, when they look at her stances about separating Alberta intellectually and emotionally from the rest of the country, normalizing talk of separation.
00:26:55.700I don't think Danielle Smith is a separatist, but she will normalize discussions about that.
00:27:01.500I think you are going to see a Category 5 hurricane heading from Toronto to Calgary to wipe her out through the media party.
00:27:12.480And, you know, the wacky Bennett, the father who was the first Bennett premier in B.C., once said that he never enjoyed more electoral success than when he was running against the lower mainland press.
00:27:31.500And so he would go to the interior ridings, he'd go onto the island, he'd say, look, those people from Vancouver, they want you to live under a socialist regime.
00:27:41.540And if you don't want that for yourself and your children, then you vote for me.
00:27:45.280And if Smith's smart, she'll use that.
00:27:47.700And she will rally people in Alberta for her who would not otherwise be for her.
00:27:55.480I mean, there are an awful lot of people in Alberta who would consider themselves centrists, maybe a few who are even progressives, who deeply resent the way that central Canadian media portrays the province.
00:28:07.720And if she plays it correctly, and I think she can, I think she probably will, she's a very effective communicator, then she could use that hurricane that's coming her way to her advantage.
00:28:20.840But you're absolutely right that it's coming.
00:28:22.920I think it is, and I think one of the reasons Jason Kenney will not be premier in a few days is precisely because he wouldn't battle Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal hard enough.
00:28:35.720In my mind, he was always thinking, well, in five years I might go and lead the federal conservatives and I want to make sure the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the CBC don't look askance at what I'm doing here.
00:28:45.820So I'm never going to say anything now that might be interpreted as being separatist or sovereigntist or anti-federalist later.
00:28:53.780I think Jason Kenney pulled all his punches.
00:28:56.940I think what we've seen in this leadership race for the UCP is that he is not out as premier because of his pandemic stamp.
00:29:06.980He's out as premier because he didn't fight Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal as hard as he could, as hard as the people in the province wanted.
00:29:15.280Here you have a federal government that has done everything it possibly can to shut down the number one industry in Alberta.
00:29:22.080In fact, probably the biggest export industry in the country and the largest revenue generator for governments all across the country.
00:29:30.940They've done everything they possibly can.
00:29:34.560I don't think we got the fight that we needed out of Jason Kenney.
00:29:40.840It's like I had advised in print many times that he had to get tougher with Ottawa and he never did.
00:29:46.960And we've seen with the Sovereignty Act, with the launch of three of the candidates, the number one item that they mentioned when they launched their campaigns and throughout this whole race was standing up to Ottawa.
00:30:01.380I think had Jason Kenney done everything he did on the pandemic, vaccine passports, mask mandates, the lockdowns, he could have done everything that he did as long as he was saying that Justin Trudeau is an SOB and we have to fight him.
00:32:26.560But I think in the rest of the country where he's already teetering, this will help push him over the edge because he will be seen as not very good at dealing with a woman, as you say, that he can't control.
00:34:29.640I think normally she would be ignored.
00:34:31.260But in Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, she's found two globalist World Economic Forum allies.
00:34:36.820So she seeks to use them to propagate her messages.
00:34:40.180I mean, she piggybacks off them in many ways.
00:34:43.320She hitched a free ride courtesy of Canadian taxpayers on our jet.
00:34:46.980So, yeah, I mean, in the one sense, who cares what New Zealand says, although, you know, they're part of the Commonwealth and we have a history together and they're an English-speaking democracy with the queen as their sovereign, but to the king, rather.
00:35:01.280But, you know, it's a shame what's being done in New Zealand.
00:35:04.680And if you want to see what Trudeau's future is for Canada, look at what Ardern has done to New Zealand.
00:35:12.060Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.
00:35:15.800Good night and keep fighting for freedom.
00:35:18.080New charges have been laid in relation to the Coutts blockade, a peaceful protest against vaccination mandates that took place between January 29th and February 15th this year.
00:35:29.100It saw restrictions ease and acted as a catalyst for Premier Jason Kenney's stepping down as UCP leader.
00:35:36.200On September 16th, the RCMP put out an update on the blockade.
00:35:41.240This release came with three new charges of mischief over $5,000.
00:35:45.600Sydney Vizard with Rebel News, and today we're going to share with you our interviews with Alex, Marco, and George.
00:35:50.840RCMP say these new charges stem from the three individuals allegedly being key participants in the blockade.
00:35:57.820All three will appear at the Lethbridge Courthouse on October 4th, at which point we will find out more about the case made against them.
00:36:04.640Previously, Alex was held at a Fort McLeod RCMP detachment, where he informed us that the Crown sought a no-communication condition with Marco, another of the individuals now charged with mischief over $5,000.
00:36:18.600We spoke with their legal counsel, Williamson Law, who have been assisting with bail considerations and will be assisting them further in court.
00:36:25.500Crowdfunded donations through TruckerLawyer.ca are financing their legal defense.
00:36:31.640For now, here's what Alex, Marco, and George had to say about these new charges of mischief.