The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, has been in office for a little over a decade, and in that time, she has had to deal with some of the most pressing issues Alberta has ever seen. In this episode of Full Comment, she talks about what it was like growing up in the oil and gas boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and what it s like being a premier in a province that was in the midst of one of Canada s most turbulent periods.
00:00:00.000welcome to full comment thanks for joining us I'm guest host Rex Murphy and
00:00:12.240with me today and it's an exaltation for me is the premier of Alberta Danielle
00:00:18.120Smith small note if you're listening to this as a podcast I want to let you know
00:00:23.280there will also be an extended video version of this conversation available
00:00:28.680for you to watch online as well on Tuesday December 20th at national post calm so if
00:00:38.820that's in your interest turn it on and be edified now that I want to welcome but
00:00:45.900probably more than the normal exuberance that one welcomes a guest the fresh
00:00:51.600premier of Alberta Daniel Smith Daniel thank you very much for agreeing to do
00:00:58.080this well it's my pleasure Rex I've always appreciated how much you support
00:01:02.760our province and I'm so delighted to be able to talk to you about it before we
00:01:06.360get into and this is only be brief before we get into all of the many issues that
00:01:10.620are there just a little personal note you didn't get to the premier's job by a
00:01:15.240simple straight line but you did get to it what was the what was the personal
00:01:21.700feeling having worked so long and now you're in that high chair in one of the
00:01:28.140most controversial provinces or the province probably under the most
00:01:32.740pressure in many ways what's it like to finally have the chair in which you can
00:01:37.240offer at least some of the direction there have been a couple of key moments
00:01:41.980where I said my gosh I've been waiting all my life to do this and to be able to give
00:01:48.160direction on the parameters to develop the budget to be able to really finally
00:01:53.440start addressing the issues in health care it's funny when you've been on the
00:01:56.860outside talking about all the things that that need to change and I've done
00:02:00.340that in so many different roles in so many different ways it's it's really
00:02:03.780gratifying to be able to to make some decisions and start seeing some action so
00:02:07.720I think I'm pretty gratified well here's what I'd like to do this in a
00:02:11.960certain kind of way I've had the very very good luck and part of it wasn't luck
00:02:17.660incidentally these questions are going to be fairly not they're going to be long
00:02:21.160I was around when Alberta had its boom and when so many of the guys and women in
00:02:28.380Newfoundland after the collapse of the fisheries and that was a desperate time
00:02:32.940desperate unemployment it really was anxiety at the highest levels and almost
00:02:38.820suddenly you know there was this other province way out west was having
00:02:42.520something of a boom and it was like Providence had interceded and despite the
00:02:49.120roughness of the Newfoundland clan of which I'm a really good example 20 to
00:02:53.86030 thousand of our guys and girls ended up in various parts of Alberta in the
00:02:59.520fields themselves or in ancillary industries or towering roofs or getting
00:03:04.180into the rigs themselves I thought that was a rather wonderful moment in
00:03:08.520confederation that when one province had hit bottom and simultaneously another was
00:03:14.640having one of those wonderful moments that Alberta gave such easy access and by
00:03:20.680the way improved so many lives because otherwise down here it would have been
00:03:25.380depression and breakups of my job suddenly became available at a level of
00:03:30.000salary in some cases that many of my cohorts didn't know so give me a little play
00:03:35.640what it was like at that time you know it's funny you you mentioned that because I remember
00:03:41.640hearing one of the stories that you told of a personal friend and I think you you you
00:03:45.620did say that we saved a lot of lives and a lot of hope for a lot of people by being
00:03:50.080able to offer good paying jobs at a time when it seemed so down and gloomy and and it's
00:03:54.900nice to be able to see so many people learn about how our industry works and get good
00:04:00.480paying jobs in it and now of course Newfoundland and Labrador has its own oil and gas industry
00:04:05.300that they've been able to develop and so that that to me has been just such a wonderful
00:04:09.240partnership between Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador and the rest of the country too
00:04:13.860that there always has been an opportunity when we are in our boom we reach out we call it now
00:04:19.100our Alberta is calling campaign and say come and help us build this place and I think that really
00:04:23.660is one of the best things about confederation. It was also remarkable because I can think of other
00:04:28.420provinces where this didn't apply it was very remarkable how fluent and how hospitable how easy
00:04:35.620when you get a boom in a given province the idea normally is you know we must take care of our own
00:04:42.660first and if there is a great wave even if it's within the Canadian citizenry but if there's another
00:04:48.060great wave from other provinces there's usually a great deal of friction but I know this particular
00:04:53.700profile very well I've been out there a lot I'm home a lot it was so wonderful the friendships that
00:04:59.540were made the ease in which these news people could come in and by the way I'll give you this
00:05:04.860Newfoundlanders are almost toxically patriotic to their own piece of land Newfoundland is in their
00:05:12.280in their souls in their shoes in their head and they could never think of going to another province
00:05:17.860well once they got out to Alberta having these little buggers decided to stay there now it was
00:05:24.200a great thing that one part of the country could see another part of the country this is an unsaid
00:05:29.300element in kind of maintaining the confederation at the citizen level you agree oh it absolutely is
00:05:37.160and you know we want to facilitate that I I've always been amazed with Fort McMurray when we start
00:05:41.940seeing that they do direct flights to other parts of the country to make sure that even though
00:05:46.620people do come out here to be able to to work make some money so they can raise their family
00:05:51.140that there's an ease of them being able to also stay and return home to family and their home
00:05:56.160communities and I think that that's that's part of it is I the only time that you you get people
00:06:01.840feeling pretty grumpy is when you end up with a downturn in the economy yeah but when we're booming
00:06:06.900we want everybody to to take part in that and I I think that that's maybe some of the frustration
00:06:11.620that Alberta has had is that we are so welcoming it's a place where you can come here
00:06:15.760you can move your family you can stay for a short time or a long time but you can build a business
00:06:21.280and we want everybody to assist us in this in this project of building out Alberta and I I sometimes
00:06:27.260I sometimes feel that we're we're taken for granted oftentimes feel like we're taken for granted
00:06:32.560if you forgive me you're the premier I'm just a the idiot look around it's not the matter of Alberta
00:06:39.520being taken for granted in the last six seven eight nine years I certainly have absorbed this
00:06:47.080observed this the environmental organizations international organizations NGOs and protest groups
00:06:55.460within Canada the environmental movement and the central policy of the current federal government
00:07:01.540they're not taking Alberta for granted it looks like an almost active effort
00:07:06.640to put Alberta on on a very dark side of the sheet to demonize its principal resort I I'm speaking for me only
00:07:17.080I cannot think of another province whose main dynamic whose main industry especially after the generosity
00:07:24.620during the boom has been so targeted as being the source of all either planetary destruction
00:07:32.240or your your your ferrying dirty oil to Quebec or Fort McMurray as Neil McNeil Young said is Hiroshima
00:07:39.820there has been a sustained negative harsh and mean campaign against this province now will you agree
00:07:48.360with my assessment of that and if you do what damage has it done both to your economy
00:07:54.300and also to the temperament of Albertans it has been deliberate and I did I spent some time
00:08:01.700investigating where it came from and it's uh you've probably written about it before it was this
00:08:06.2202008 they called it I'll put it in the air quotes tar sands camp yeah by corporate ethics supported by
00:08:13.100tides foundation and all their other fellow travelers were literally tens of millions of dollars flowed into
00:08:19.940our country to demonize the the oil sands and they did they did it deliberately because when you look at
00:08:27.020their strategy document they had already had success in demonizing coal and the conversation was well
00:08:33.860we're going to see an increase in co2 emissions because of transportation fuels driven by the America
00:08:40.220mostly where does America get its its principal product from and they looked at Saudi Arabia and
00:08:44.980they looked at Canada and uh and we were such an easy target and so they said well let's see if we can
00:08:50.320choke off the supply in Canada as a way of reducing emissions in America on transportation the thing that
00:08:56.160is so remarkable about it is they they succeeded in landlocking our resource in so many ways and yet
00:09:03.040then you ended up with the drilling and pipeline boom in America and now they've become a net exporter
00:09:08.540of of oil and natural gas and so I would say the entire strategy was a failure started with a very flawed
00:09:15.700premise but we're the ones who are suffering the consequences of it the fact that they have spent
00:09:20.120a relentless amount of time since 2008 unfairly demonizing an industry that provides not only so many jobs for us and for the rest of the country but also so much revenue for our province and for the rest of the country as well
00:09:34.740and that's part of what we're now having to push back against it because it hasn't stopped it's continued
00:09:40.000no no no it hasn't stopped I'd like to jump in and add one more factor during that particular period
00:09:45.020yeah they did shut off all possible ways of getting uh pipelines that would let your product go to bigger
00:09:52.800markets uh the campaign against the pipelines was was almost hysterical but it also has to be placed in
00:10:00.020this context the context was that you did have a boom but then people it elides in their memory
00:10:07.040there was a sudden and precipitous drop in the world price of oil suddenly oil was no longer there
00:10:13.460then you had if that wasn't bad enough you had that raging almost biblical inferno in Fort McMurray
00:10:22.180and if that wasn't enough most people don't know this I went out after the fire and then I learned that
00:10:27.820they'd also had a flood and in the meantime Alberta's oil had dropped the offices were main offices in
00:10:34.960downtown Toronto Calgary were being emptied it was in the context of all of that that then on on the
00:10:42.360heap of the pile of miseries you are going through you had the federal government you had the
00:10:47.420environmentalists you had British Columbia you had Quebec saying oh we cannot have east west we cannot
00:10:54.140have pipelines leak taking this fuel to the United States for other markets it seemed to me they jumped
00:11:01.180on Alberta at the hardest possible moment it did jump on us at the hardest possible moment when you
00:11:07.960when you think about what happened in 2014 because that was the last time I was in politics there's a
00:11:12.040major reversal in our fortunes that happened because of new technology horizontal multi-stage
00:11:17.300tracking that opened up all the shale oil and shale gas in the U.S. and so we ended up with a
00:11:21.680triple whammy not only did conventional oil decline and uh and natural gas decline but also our
00:11:28.120the value of our bitumen also declined especially when you get landlocked it means that we end up
00:11:33.500with bottlenecks and so if you've got too big a glut of supply happening on this end and no place to get
00:11:38.280it to market we ended up seeing a massive undersale and underpricing of our resources here which lasted
00:11:44.640for eight years we only just began to see the recovery in prices over the over the course of the last year
00:11:51.780and so we have seen that over the period of the previous government there were 180,000 jobs lost
00:11:59.180we ended up with six consecutive quarters of people leaving our province to go seek jobs elsewhere
00:12:05.320former energy minister said well you may as well go to BC for a while and wait this out because that's
00:12:10.280where the jobs are we saw a decline in venture capital was a decline in consumer confidence
00:12:15.160everything uh the the number of stories of hardship because I was on the radio at the time for six
00:12:20.160years I still remember one guy calling in just before uh Christmas talking about how he was going to have
00:12:28.060to oh sorry Russ take your time there's no rush we have plenty of occasion to delay no rush
00:12:39.600no it was like that if I can interrupt for just a second when I covered the collapse of the fish
00:12:48.380let me just give you this as a break I went to the northeast coast
00:12:52.100and I met a man who had I think six or seven children
00:12:55.600third generation fishermen in his great-grandfather's house
00:12:59.620and here's the city I'm not making I'm not elaborating it