Tonight, Alberta and Canada, will they fit together in the year ahead, or will they fight? A feature interview with our friend Lauren Gunter on the future of Alberta's oil and gas sector, and what it means for Canada's oil patch.
00:00:00.000Tonight, Alberta and Canada, will they fit together in the year ahead or will they fight?
00:00:21.720A feature interview with our friend Lauren Gunter.
00:00:24.720It's December 26th and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:00:30.000Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:00:33.520There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
00:00:37.600The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:00:48.960Well, 2015 was a year of a triple disaster for Alberta's oil and gas sector.
00:00:56.000The price of oil fell around the world and that made it for tough times for the oil patch.
00:01:03.260But then in the spring, Rachel Notley and the NDP won the election in that province for the first time ever on an anti-oil platform, including higher taxes, including a carbon tax.
00:01:16.900Then came Justin Trudeau that fall and before long, pipelines were being canceled and a federal carbon tax was coming.
00:01:25.640Well, 2019 marked the end of Rachel Notley's reign.
00:01:30.340She was thrown into the dustbin of history by Jason Kenney's United Conservative Party.
00:01:35.120Justin Trudeau, however, was re-elected prime minister if with a reduced seat count.
00:01:41.220How will Alberta fare in 2020 and beyond?
00:01:46.300Is it enough that Jason Kenney runs the province and the price of oil has generally come back?
00:01:51.720Or does the fact that Justin Trudeau was re-elected and there's a recalcitrant new Democrat government in B.C.,
00:01:58.920will that spell doom for Alberta in 2020?
00:02:02.000Joining us now via Skype from Edmonton to talk about these and other prospects for Alberta next year
00:02:08.220is our friend, Lorne Gunter, senior columnist for the Edmonton Sun.
00:11:00.400This is one of the biggest laughs I've got.
00:11:03.200It's a big kick I got out of the cabinet appointment.
00:11:06.160Maybe, you know, in our line of work, I should have been better informed.
00:11:11.920But I honestly did not know that Chrystia Freeland was born and mostly raised in Alberta until she's made the intermediary between the prime minister's office and the prairie provinces.
00:11:27.660So it's not like she's ever been extra proud.
00:11:32.720And I'm not saying she's disparaged or whatever.
00:11:35.480Like, it's not something that you knew because she was always talking about it.
00:11:41.100But now, all of a sudden, she's the proud daughter of the peace country of Alberta and in touch with everything going on in the West.
00:11:50.300And she's going to save the relationship between the prairie provinces and the federal.
00:11:55.000No, I mean, she's not as shrill nor as shallow as McKinnon.
00:12:05.980And, you know, she got big strokes, for instance, during the the free trade negotiations in in Washington a couple of summers ago because she bought the press gallery ice cream.
00:12:32.920She's just such a delight. She comes and she talks to us and she brings us ice cream.
00:12:36.560And that must mean she's doing a good job on free trade.
00:12:39.240Yeah. Well, there's a total disconnect on those two things.
00:12:41.740But OK. Well, I mean, it reminds me of during the election where Justin Trudeau handed a CBC reporter a little bowl of poutine and said, we take care of the CBC.
00:12:53.820And listen, that's Trudeau making an unfunny joke that's actually a true statement.
00:12:58.900But then for that reporter to gleefully dig in showed absolutely the master servant relationship that that's that's what I took away about that scene.
00:13:08.660It's not just how shallow Christian Freeland was, but how obedient, how easily pleased and domesticated the media were.
00:13:17.140I think some of the media in Alberta will be easily persuaded that way.
00:13:24.180But I think that there's a growing sense, even amongst what I call the media party in Alberta, that there are real problems and simply, you know, the shallow tricks like that aren't going to solve them.
00:13:38.620A couple of examples of what I think is more serious are things that Trudeau said, either directly or indirectly, indirectly in the throne speech.
00:13:48.060You know, they spent about the first quarter of that throne speech, which was mercifully fairly short.
00:13:54.400They spent about a quarter of it talking about increasing their commitment to fight climate change, which we are always very worried about and need to be very worried about in the web.
00:14:05.980That's been about a quarter. And then there's a sort of throwaway line.
00:14:10.240Oh, yes. And we we promise to use equal effort to get the West's resources.
00:14:16.100No, you don't. Nobody buys that. If you've just spent all your time talking about climate crisis, emergency must do drastic things, get bolder, take more action.
00:14:26.960And then you say, oh, yeah, yeah. By the way, we are going to get we are going to work just as hard on getting your resources to market.
00:14:35.600And that's it. That's the statement. There's you know, there's no counterbalance in terms of time or or tone or urgency.
00:14:42.760Nobody's going to buy that here. And then the second thing was over the weekend, Trudeau gave a speech and he said, yes, I want to assure the energy workers in the prairies that we hear their problems and their voices.
00:14:58.580And first of all, we don't like to be talked to like we're at some group counseling session in in a fern bar in downtown Toronto.
00:15:07.800But so he said, you know, I want the workers to know that we understand your struggle since 2014 when the prices of world prices of oil came down.
00:15:19.580We know it's been never any recognition, never that the prices came back to a level in 2016 that was high enough to make money.
00:15:29.140Yeah. And that other, as you said earlier, other oil producing areas in North America are doing just fine.
00:15:36.440Thank you very much. And that the problem here, the barrier in Alberta is not geology.
00:15:47.400We know where the oil is. We know how to get it out of the ground.
00:15:50.300It's not geography because we can get it to market if you let us. It's political.
00:15:55.940And so he glosses over in that speech he gave on the weekend the fact that for the last three years, his government's policies have been choking the Western economy.
00:16:06.440Yeah. And until I mean, I don't I don't expect him to come out and apologize to us the way he would if we were an indigenous people whose leaders had been hung injudiciously by the federal government 150 years ago.
00:16:20.820I don't expect him to apologize to us like that, but I do expect him to understand and recognize, articulate that there are policies in play from the federal government that that have led to the choking off of Alberta's economy.
00:16:36.660I mean, they could easily have stood up. In fact, at one point, he promised Rachel Notley he would stand up against B.C.'s obstruction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
00:16:47.020He'd stand up. He'd have a motion passed in the House of Commons that said the federal government is asserting its constitutional power over interprovincial movement of goods.
00:16:55.500And we are going to have the Trans Mountain Pipeline built two years, almost two years since he said that.
00:17:01.920Never done that yet. So those are the sorts of things that that I think are deeper.
00:17:07.160I mean, I think it's important to understand how unlikely Chrystia Freeland is by personality and character to do anything that that's going to appease the prairies.
00:17:18.660Yeah. But but we need to look even a little bit of what the prime minister says.
00:17:24.580And it doesn't give me any hope at all that they even understand how they've alienated the West, let alone know how to fix it.
00:17:31.580You know, if I may be permitted an anecdote, I you may know that I was sneaked in to a press conference in Ottawa by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
00:17:43.520He was having a joint press conference with Chrystia Freeland. Chrystia Freeland wouldn't let us in.
00:17:49.480So I had I asked Mike Pompeo's office, could we come in with your media entourage?
00:17:54.960And he said, yes. So Chrystia Freeland's people were shocked that I mean, it was that sounds like a gossipy story,
00:18:02.120but it shows you how brittle and averse to any criticism Freeland's people are.
00:18:07.980I met her director of communications and this is like the big summit.
00:18:13.320Here's the U.S. secretary of state. Very busy guy.
00:18:16.020If he's not dealing with Russia or Saudi Arabia or Israel or India or China or Mexico, you know, like he's the busiest guy in the world other than the president, let's say.
00:18:26.500And for that big fancy day, Chrystia Freeland's director of communications showed up without socks on as some weird fashion statement.
00:18:36.120And he was flitting about. And I thought, what are you doing? You can't even put on socks for the for the secretary of state.
00:18:46.900But here's a here's a picture of Chrystia Freeland.
00:18:50.220And I call this Chrystia's angels, her four millennial staff, each of them who knows less than the next guy.
00:18:56.900But they've all got a bachelor's degree and are super woke and they all know about Instagram and Twitter.
00:19:04.420And the thing is, in foreign affairs, the older you are, the smarter you are, because there's nothing new under the sun.
00:19:12.100Maybe if you were the minister of digital, this and that, you'd want a young woke staff.
00:19:18.420But if you're about trade treaties and diplomacy with, you know, countries that have had relations with Canada for decades, you don't want 20 nothing straight out of school.
00:19:29.820But but that style that we know what's going on.
00:19:33.280And unlike you, unhip Stephen Harper, we know how to get China and India and America like they were clueless.
00:19:40.880That's what I'm worried about, Lauren, is that this fake glamour gal, Chrystia Freeland, who loved to jet to Paris and New York and Geneva and loved to be celebrated in Toronto in the high salons.
00:20:31.980Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous kind of reportage with a lefty edge to it that, I mean, her book called Plutocrats talks about how, oh, the rich are getting richer and it's hurting all the rest of us.
00:20:47.440And so it feeds into Trudeau's mistaken narrative that the middle class is shrinking.
00:20:53.620Well, if it is shrinking, who's taking its money?
00:20:59.300It's, you know, I have the ability to deal with Amazon or Walmart or Imperial Oil or not as I choose.
00:21:07.600I have no choice in dealing with the government.
00:21:11.240If I don't give the government the money that it demands, it comes to my house and puts me in cuffs.
00:21:17.520Well, no one's given more giveaways to large corporate Canada.
00:21:21.640I think of Catherine McKenna's $11 million free fridge grant to the wealthiest family in the country.
00:21:28.320Anyway, let's get back to what the theme of this.
00:21:30.980I mean, I'm enjoying our conversation, but let me get out of the federal sphere and down to the province of Alberta, because, of course, Alberta's problems are rooted in part in Ottawa.
00:21:41.520And I don't think Christy Freeland's going to fix them.
00:21:43.960But, of course, Jason Kenney has certain tools at his own disposal.
00:21:47.940How do you think Jason Kenney is going to do?
00:21:50.940What are your thoughts on his first, I guess, seven or eight or nine months in power?
00:21:56.420How do you think he's done so far and how do you think he's going to do?
00:22:03.900They've undone most of what the NDP did in four years.
00:22:07.000So there was a session of the Alberta legislature that finished in the middle of December.
00:22:11.560And it undid 16 different regime, regulation regimes or laws that the NDP had passed.
00:22:24.740For instance, I mean, I know you were very involved in covering Bill 6, which was the farm safety law that the NDP brought in and had no clue when they brought it in.
00:22:35.160That they were going to set off the hornet's nest that they did, because it was an insult to the way farmers do their business.
00:22:43.560It implied that ordinary family farmers in Alberta are nothing but slave labor camp operators who are out to hose their farm workers and sort of twirl their mustaches and laugh sinisterly.
00:23:02.260So there were all sorts of things that the NDP brought in that got undone in June, May and June, in their spring setting.
00:23:09.840And then the rest of what was left over was undone pretty much in the October to December system.
00:23:14.880The UCP, for instance, got the NDP law change that allowed the provincial government to get into the electrical market in Alberta and meddle around with all the different prices.
00:23:25.960So lots of good things that they have done.
00:23:28.560They're very slow on turning around the fiscal side of things.
00:23:33.680We're still going to ramp up a lot of debt before they start to turn this giant ship around.
00:23:40.020But they have signaled that they're going to hold firm in labor negotiations with the public sector unions in Alberta.
00:23:48.760So during the four years at the NDP, where the government income in the private in the private sector dropped a net 8 percent.
00:23:59.040So it was 8 percent lower in 2019 when the NDP were kicked out than it had been in 2015 when they came in 8 percent.
00:24:05.660If you account for inflation, it's much bigger than that.
00:24:08.560But I don't know of any government that would ever have survived that.
00:24:12.780But in the public sector, while the NDP were in power, no layoffs versus 60,000 net layoffs in the private sector.
00:25:42.460I mean, I think they need to start work on an Alberta, made an Alberta pension plan, get out of the CPP.
00:25:50.560We fire that across the aisle because we contribute as a province, as individuals in our province, about $3 billion more every year than our seniors take out.
00:26:01.660And if we left, we'd have that $3 billion to invest as a provincial pension fund.
00:26:08.460And the rest of the country wouldn't have that $3 billion and they'd have to find either higher premiums or some other way, lower benefits to make up for that.
00:26:18.560And I think that would wake people up a bit.
00:26:21.080So there are things like that that they can do.
00:26:22.740But as you and I have been talking about in this segment, really, an awful lot of the stuff they have to rely on convincing Ottawa, convincing the liberals to do things that are not in their DNA.
00:26:35.940They'd have to undo Bill C-48, which is the tanker ban on Alberta oil off the north coast of BC.
00:26:41.740They'd have to substantially change, if not undo.
00:26:44.800I'd rather they just undid C-69, which is the new environmental review process that also includes gender equity review and social justice review.
00:27:16.300He can't use his majority in the Alberta legislature to repeal any of this.
00:27:21.540And I think this is going to be a very interesting year for the UCP as they try very hard to change Ottawa's minds with, I think, very little hope of doing that.
00:27:33.820Yeah. Well, I mean, you were kind enough to be on panels we had at our town halls in Alberta.
00:27:40.640We had about 500 people in Calgary and just under that in Edmonton for two nights there in a few weeks ago.
00:28:12.400My big takeaway was Jason Kenney is going to try and do all these things through negotiation and through taking back certain constitutional jurisdictions under provincial powers.
00:28:22.800No powers. But at the end of the day, if there's no or else, Trudeau can ignore much of it.
00:28:31.460And I don't think Trudeau, like you said, I don't think he's going to sacrifice support in Montreal and Toronto.
00:28:38.560I'm still a skeptic that the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion will never happen.
00:28:43.840But I also am pretty sure in my bones that Jason Kenney will never even give sympathy to a Wexit movement.
00:28:52.360I think he'll, in fact, turn against it soon enough if it starts to get any momentum.
00:28:57.600So if Alberta can't get changes from within Confederation, do you think there's any chances that Alberta could try and leave?
00:29:04.780Or is that just a hopeless pipe dream?
00:29:07.100No, and I would put the amount of solid support for leaving at somewhere just north of 20 percent, 25 percent, maybe.
00:29:18.960I don't think it reaches a third just yet, although there's easily 40 or 45 percent of Albertans who are in the yes, let's go or the, well, we could think about it.
00:29:29.060Camp, I mean, I think if there were an independence referendum held in Alberta today, it would probably fail because the case hasn't been made yet sufficiently for what we would benefit from leaving.
00:29:47.100I mean, gut feeling, lots of people have the gut feeling that it's time to go, that as you correctly said, you know, when Preston Manning came along in 1988, 1989 and said, no, no, wait a minute here.
00:30:01.620A lot of people who were thinking about leaving at that point, thinking about becoming nationalists, separatists, whatever, said, OK, OK, let's let's go all in on a West wants in scheme and see whether or not we can get anything out of that.
00:30:18.800But there are a lot of people, as you also said, who went through all that, who are not saying, yeah, we tried that.
00:30:26.760And there's no reason to believe it's going to work this time either, because you remember the Reform Party tried that with a conservative government.
00:30:43.020So, you know, I think it's going to be a tough year for the UCP.
00:30:50.500They're going to have to deliver a few things from Ottawa.
00:30:54.960Premier Kenney and a lot of his ministers went to Ottawa just before Christmas to meet with their federal counterparts and see if anything will come out of that.
00:31:03.680Nothing's going to come out of it because it's the party season.
00:31:09.080They did not come back with any major concessions, but they maybe came back with a couple of extra pounds because they stopped to have some cookies and eggnog in the West Block.
00:31:20.800But but yeah, it's going to be it's going to be a tricky year because as much as Kenny can change and Kenny is not going to suck up to Trudeau the way Notley did.
00:31:33.580And Kenny is not going to go after the social license idea that, you know, if we just impose an awful lot of environmental controls on ourselves, the environmentalists will get out of the way and let us build pipeline.
00:31:44.800He's not going to buy into any of that who who he I mean, I just that's just hokum that stuff.
00:31:53.020But the ability then to to extract anything out of Ottawa is still fairly limited.
00:31:59.740And I think I mean, you had those panels you were talking about.
00:32:02.300You had an idea, which I think is very, very good.
00:32:04.740If I were Kenny, I wouldn't say I would say, you know, I'm a federalist.
00:32:07.920I want Alberta to stay very much in Confederation.
00:32:11.360But I think it would be very, very good.
00:32:13.500He's got his fair deal panel now that's looking at ways of sheltering Alberta from federal intrusion.
00:32:19.840But I think if when that is done, the next step for him would be the what else that you were talking about.
00:32:27.600And that is, well, let's just let an awful lot of big thinkers in Alberta come up with ideas for what would we do about the currency if we left?
00:32:35.440What would we do about monarchy versus republic?
00:32:38.120What would we do about deals with the United States?
00:32:42.520Would we look to become a protectorate of the United States?
00:32:44.780Would we simply have a nice trade arrangement with them?
00:32:47.640Would we look to them? I mean, you remember in those panels that Barry Cooper, a professor, very respected professor from the University of Calgary, said, I think we're going to have to go to the Americans and ask them to send troops so the federal government doesn't try and take over Alberta.
00:33:01.460So, you know, work out all those scenarios so that they're constantly worried.
00:33:07.320I mean, if they were worried that the yellow vests were coming to kidnap Justin Truth, if the provincial government of Alberta decides it's going to let all the academics and legal scholars in the province loose,
00:33:18.940and the financial experts on what do we do the day after a successful independence referendum, the way Quebec worked all that out before the 95 referendum, work that out just to show them we're serious.
00:33:44.240But you go in four years and then eight years and maybe 12 years under Trudeau.
00:33:48.880And then I think like Detroit, which was once the mightiest city in all of America, things can change.
00:33:55.740Oh, and you know, you remember for years and years, you and I have heard this from a hundred experts, experts, that as people move to Alberta from other parts of the country, the political culture in Alberta would change.
00:34:13.820We'd be big on the welfare state like the rest of the country is.
00:34:17.600And it never happened because Alberta was prosperous.
00:34:20.600And when people got here, Alberta changed them more than they changed Alberta.
00:34:25.940But if Alberta is, as you say, eight or 12 years stuck in this recession and it's not working, maybe that, not the prosperousness of Alberta, but the destitute nature of eight or 10 or 12 years will change the political culture.