John Bolton - June 27, 2026


How Premier Smith's MOU Is Like A Scene From Star Wars

Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Lando Calrissian Mark Carney Darth Vader Alberta Fact Check Sheila Gunn-Reed Corey Morgan Kearney Justin Trudeau Tony Wakeham Katy Perry Thompson Great John Nord
The Liberals And The Damage Done - This Had Me Shaking Independence Calendar - Episode #28 (June 28th, 2026)

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

174.34

Word count

1,609

Sentence count

98


Summary

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

BC gets a deal, Alberta gets conditions, and the price of oil doubles in price. The Empire Strikes Back reference is a reference to Star Wars Episode VI. Alberta is the only province being told it must solve another massive policy issue before it gets a project off the ground on the East Coast.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It might seem strange, but I wrap up today's video with some references to The Empire Strikes Back.
00:00:10.520 Hi, it's John, and welcome to the channel.
00:00:12.620 Saturday, June the 27th.
00:00:14.200 I hope you're having a great start to your Saturday, 444 a.m.
00:00:17.980 Great to have you here today.
00:00:19.360 Hope you're having a great start to your weekend.
00:00:20.860 I tip the big blue mug of coffee to you.
00:00:22.820 We're over 52,000 subscribers right now.
00:00:25.280 Thank you very much.
00:00:26.480 A lot of people come to the channel regularly and don't subscribe. I don't do this at the beginning
00:00:31.440 of a video very often, but if you haven't subscribed, please click on subscribe. Thank
00:00:36.560 you. Only 48,000 to 100,000 subscribers. Okay, so let's start off by saying this. I'm going to
00:00:44.280 try to keep this short today. I know you like to watch videos that are probably less than 10
00:00:48.460 minutes long, so we'll try to do that today. But I want to thank you for watching this video here
00:00:52.440 yesterday. More than 50,000 people have checked this one out. I'm sure it wasn't the vomit-inducing
00:00:58.860 picture of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry that drew you to that video. It's likely the title,
00:01:05.160 but thanks very much for watching. So I want to bring to your attention a great website that you
00:01:09.700 may want to check out, and this is from Rebel News. These are written by Corey Morgan and
00:01:15.860 Sheila Gunn-Reed. It's Alberta Fact Check. You can go over there and sign up for daily email,
00:01:20.500 and they fact check a lot of the information regarding the Alberta independence movement here
00:01:26.140 and just a few of the things they're talking about today is there not enough support for
00:01:30.760 a referendum will Alberta's unions join the indigenous people and block off roads and things
00:01:36.120 like that and then there's this one right here BC gets a deal Alberta gets conditions and that's
00:01:42.500 what we're going to talk about here today it's interesting and I said it right off the top
00:01:46.960 I was thinking about, let me take my face off the screen so you can see the subtitle down here,
00:01:51.780 Federal Government Keeps Placing New Hurdles in Front of Alberta's Energy Industry.
00:01:56.000 I was thinking about Star Wars when I went through the thought process to putting this video together,
00:02:00.960 because we're going to go from the west coast of Canada all the way to the east coast,
00:02:05.140 because we have short memories when it comes to stories like this.
00:02:08.860 Alberta Fact Check, by the way, is albertafactcheck.com.
00:02:12.420 And again, go over and sign up for daily email.
00:02:14.820 It's really great work that Rebel News is doing, Corey Morgan and Sheila Gunn-Reed on a daily basis.
00:02:20.520 So there's this article here. I'm not going to read a lot of these stories for you.
00:02:23.820 I don't want to go on too long, but the federal government keeps placing new hurdles in front of Alberta's energy industry.
00:02:29.680 The federal government is reportedly preparing to sign a major projects agreement with British Columbia as early as next week.
00:02:35.940 No extra conditions, no side deals, just an agreement to move projects forward.
00:02:41.220 Alberta, however, appears to be getting a different deal.
00:02:44.300 According to reporting in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa wants Alberta to reach an agreement on the multi-billion dollar Pathways carbon capture project at the same time it pitches a new West Coast oil pipeline.
00:02:55.180 That's an additional hurdle that BC doesn't appear to be facing.
00:02:58.920 The Pathways project is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars and has been the subject of years of negotiations over subsidies, tax credits and regulatory approvals.
00:03:09.140 it's really quite remarkable how that project has gone up in price over the last couple of months.
00:03:14.240 You might remember, you know, I've had that thumbnail I made of the giant carbon sucking
00:03:19.440 machine. And originally on the carbon sucking machine, it said $16 billion. I raised it to
00:03:24.620 $20 billion and then I added infinity to it. And according to this article, which I talked about
00:03:30.560 yesterday in a video I did, this project could end up costing $30 billion. So it's gone up and
00:03:37.200 almost doubled in price in a couple of months. What are the chances that this project will double
00:03:41.940 again in price because government is involved? But anyway, back over to the Alberta fact check
00:03:47.740 story here. The issue isn't whether a carbon capture is good or bad. It's why Alberta appears
00:03:54.120 to be the only province being told it must solve another massive policy file before getting a
00:03:59.300 nation building project off the ground. BC gets a major projects agreement. Alberta gets a major
00:04:04.580 projects agreement plus homework. I think that's a great line at the bottom of that story.
00:04:10.160 Now, you might say, well, you know, BC isn't putting in an oil pipeline. Their projects might
00:04:14.680 not be as carbon intensive, but we seem to forget what is going on on the East Coast. And just a
00:04:21.700 couple of months ago, there was a story that came out and an agreement made regarding Equinor. And
00:04:29.100 this is pumping oil off the coast of Newfoundland and there are really no conditions put on oil
00:04:36.700 pumping out on the east coast like a giant carbon capture project that Alberta has to agree to to
00:04:43.060 get a pipeline to the west coast and here is the premier of Newfoundland Tony Wakeham talking about
00:04:49.900 that project. For a decade Newfoundlanders and Labradorians were told that we cannot develop
00:04:57.380 are offshore due to anti-oil policies such as the emissions cap imposed by Prime Minister Kearney's
00:05:04.580 predecessor. While Prime Minister Kearney has lifted that cap, I am pleased to have Minister
00:05:11.140 Thompson join us on behalf of the Prime Minister today. The next stage of this journey will be to
00:05:16.980 officially designate Beta Nord as a project of national importance and send a message to the
00:05:22.820 world that Canada is truly back as an oil and gas superpower. Carney did get rid of the emissions
00:05:30.460 tax, but he added on an industrial carbon tax, which adds a significant amount of money to every
00:05:36.260 barrel of oil coming out of this country and makes us uncompetitive. And if Carney really wanted
00:05:42.100 Canada to be an energy superpower, he would unleash the third largest oil reserves in the world,
00:05:49.240 which are literally flowing beneath my feet here in South Calgary.
00:05:54.140 But he doesn't do that.
00:05:55.960 Here's the story on the Beidou Nord project
00:05:59.560 that the premier of Newfoundland was referring to there,
00:06:02.780 creating thousands of jobs.
00:06:04.480 But why am I talking about this when it comes to Star Wars?
00:06:07.480 That'll become evident in just a moment.
00:06:09.840 There's this article right here.
00:06:11.100 This is from Energy Now.
00:06:12.380 This just from yesterday.
00:06:14.120 Carney government already clawing back MOU promises made to Alberta.
00:06:19.240 I'm going to read a little bit of this to you, not a lot of it.
00:06:22.800 I'm going to go by this part at the top here.
00:06:25.060 It just describes the deal signed between Premier Smith and Mark Carney.
00:06:30.100 As the CBC reports, after feedback from thousands,
00:06:33.480 Carney government slows down sweeping environmental changes.
00:06:35.920 The subhead informs that consultations extended from June 7th to July 22nd.
00:06:41.840 By the way, here's that story they're referring to right here.
00:06:44.780 Link in the description.
00:06:46.220 pushing them neatly past the current legislative session in parliament that might have advanced the legislation.
00:06:52.620 This is, by the way, the same legislation the federal government is banking on to fast-track Alberta's potential pipeline.
00:06:59.140 In other words, it's a major part of the MOU, threatened only months after negotiation and formal adoption.
00:07:06.400 I'll go down to this paragraph here.
00:07:07.900 Of course, pushback on the MOU from environmental activists, Aboriginal interests, and a panoply of anti-oil, anti-development, anti-pipeline, and anti-tanker actors was as predictable as snow in Canadian winters.
00:07:22.060 But that Prime Minister Carney is showing signs of shakiness when Premier Danielle Smith is rubbing ink off the side of her MOU signing hand does not bode well for the future of Alberta's Grand Oil Sands bargain.
00:07:35.080 Smith would do well to push back on Alberta's initiation of its obligations under the MOU,
00:07:40.540 which includes carbon capture that we talked about, lest they be carved quickly in concrete
00:07:45.920 while the federal government's pledges assume the status of vaporware. So the terms of the
00:07:51.080 agreement in the Memorandum of Understanding may be changing as we speak. And that got me thinking
00:07:56.100 about Star Wars. Okay. So I was thinking of Mark Carney as Darth Vader. Some of you probably
00:08:02.620 already do. But I was thinking of Premier Danielle Smith as Lando Calrissian, near the end of The
00:08:09.420 Empire Strikes Back. You'll remember when Vader captures Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Chewbacca,
00:08:15.420 there was an agreement made between Vader and Calrissian. Calrissian is really upset because
00:08:20.300 the terms of the agreement are changing. Vader goes on to say that Princess Leia and Chewbacca
00:08:25.560 will never leave the city alive, and Lando Calrissian said these famous words.
00:08:32.620 this deal is getting worse all the time but that's not the only star wars reference here
00:08:39.220 because this one's even better what happened to han solo he got locked up in carbonite
00:08:47.640 i think you could say that it's an interesting analogy that just as han solo got locked up in
00:08:54.780 carbonite. Alberta's oil is getting locked up in carbon taxes and carbon capture. Thank you very
00:09:03.320 much for watching. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel.
00:09:07.520 Ring the bell for notifications. I will see you in the next one. May the force be with you.