John Bolton - November 29, 2025


Can Danielle Smith See Her Party Slipping Away？ - Thoughts on Her Keynote Address


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

173.13889

Word count

1,021

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Danielle Smith's keynote address at the United Conservative Party Annual General Meeting in Edmonton got a lot of boos and jeers. I give my initial thoughts on what I saw from the speech and what I think about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel 132 in the afternoon. I hope you're having a great day
00:00:07.320 today, Saturday, November the 29th. Hope you're having a good weekend as well. I've got my big
00:00:11.260 blue mug of coffee with me and I just finished watching Danielle Smith's keynote address at 0.57
00:00:18.080 the United Conservative Party annual general meeting in Edmonton. And my initial thoughts
00:00:25.680 are this. It seems to me that there, I'm not there, but it seems to me there is a huge fracture
00:00:32.720 within this party right now. And I'm not sure how the fracture breaks, what percentage is on
00:00:38.920 one side or the other. Yesterday, I would have said after the Jeff Rath question regarding
00:00:43.500 independence, maybe two thirds to three quarters of the people in the audience yesterday were
00:00:48.880 interested in independence. But what I heard from Danielle Smith here was somebody who was
00:00:54.220 kind of desperate to get some recognition for what she was saying, or at least some applause. 0.76
00:00:59.160 It was almost like a comedian trying to milk the audience for a joke, but she was trying to milk
00:01:04.080 the audience for acceptance. And she didn't get a lot of it when it came to specific things.
00:01:10.600 I sent out a tweet today and this is what I said. It said, on Danielle Smith, the things she does well
00:01:16.340 on are the things Alberta does independently or in spite of Ottawa. The things Danielle Smith does poor
00:01:24.320 on are the things where we have to endure federal meddling. And I finished it up with independence
00:01:30.340 versus meddling. What would you want? So let me go over a few of the things. I'm not going to get deep
00:01:35.340 into these. I'm not going to play any video for you here. There was plenty of booing, which was surprising.
00:01:40.840 I think overall, most people like Danielle Smith. I've said that here many times before. I'd like
00:01:46.180 her very much. But I think we get to a point where every politician has a certain amount of
00:01:54.080 political capital and it's only so long before it starts to run out. I would hope that Danielle
00:01:59.960 Smith's political capital isn't weighing or running out in this province. But if you look back over history
00:02:05.280 in Canada, you look at liberals in particular, when it comes to federal government, eventually
00:02:10.900 Pierre Trudeau ran out of political capital. I think Jean Chrétien was around for 13 years. It
00:02:15.880 happened to him as well. Justin Trudeau, Wonder Boy, 2015. He brought the Liberal Party back from the
00:02:21.340 brink of total destruction and he ran out of political capital earlier this year. It happens
00:02:25.780 provincially. It happens municipally as well. Danielle Smith hasn't been around very long as the premier,
00:02:30.860 but she may be running out of some political capital when it comes to the province of Alberta 0.99
00:02:35.440 and ruling here. She is slowly losing control of this party and she's going to have to come up with 1.00
00:02:42.280 some kind of a solution real soon. So here's where she's strong. Okay. She spoke about all these
00:02:48.680 things. I'm going to go through them quickly. It was a win on parental rights, a win on schooling.
00:02:53.120 She says more schools, more teachers, a win on health system reforms, which is a provincial matter,
00:02:59.360 but of course it's a federal thing. She talked about allowing some private care, dual practice
00:03:04.440 legislation for doctors so they can do some private work and public work as well. An activity-based
00:03:10.360 funding model as it is called. She was very strong in immigration, taking primary control of immigration
00:03:16.180 for the province of Alberta, basically taking it away from Ottawa. Again, she does very well in the
00:03:23.600 things where Alberta is acting independently. She talked about drug addiction care. She got
00:03:31.080 a good response to that. She talked about free speech, getting rid of DEI, not losing your job
00:03:37.220 for political beliefs known as the Peterson law. She talked about the social engineering of children.
00:03:43.320 People applauded for that. They don't want to see that happen in schools. And at the same time,
00:03:47.500 hammering the NDP for these things. No prosecution under federal gun seizure program. Another federal
00:03:55.100 thing that she's standing up against here from an independent standpoint here in Alberta. 0.96
00:04:03.000 We're going to allow people to defend themselves in their home. It's known as the castle law.
00:04:08.500 She used the saying, if you don't want to get shot, don't break into someone's house. No prosecution
00:04:14.220 from defending yourself against intruders. Very strong response to that. Banning of sexual images
00:04:20.980 in books in school. Protection against the transing of children. All of these things she does very well 1.00
00:04:26.040 on. And again, things that Alberta can do independently or in spite of Ottawa. Now, where she fails is when she 1.00
00:04:34.080 talks about Canadian unity. I guess you could say where she fails is when she talks about Team Canada.
00:04:42.000 A lot of the people in the audience there were booing her. Huge loss. Huge loss in this speech,
00:04:48.760 where she talked at great length about this memorandum of understanding with Mark Carney
00:04:52.580 and the federal government on oil pipelines. People do not believe what she's saying. And that's where
00:04:59.840 she's losing people. It was a pretty mediocre speech. I mean, she comes across great. She's a terrific
00:05:09.780 speaker. You know, she was a politician. She had to walk away from it for a number of years. She did 1.00
00:05:16.160 radio and was very good at doing that. She's an excellent communicator. But I think this, overall,
00:05:25.620 this speech was a pretty big fail. I'll put a link in the description below so you can watch it in this
00:05:31.660 entirety. You'll hear the boos. You'll hear people yelling back at her. And again, I thought she was 1.00
00:05:37.280 trying to milk the audience at times to try to get some satisfaction from something that couldn't have
00:05:44.460 been too satisfying for the premier. Thanks for watching. If you liked the video, please give me
00:05:49.120 a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel. Ring the bell for notifications. I'll see you in the next one.