Juno News - Is Jagmeet Singh backtracking on carbon tax support？

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:19.660 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here the andrew lawton show

00:01:29.680 on this monday april 15th back in the regular studio not that it matters to you it matters to

00:01:35.740 me i get weird when i'm gesticulating and yelling in a hallway with a bunch of people around i mean

00:01:40.760 i'm weird in general so anyway disregard we were last week at the canada strong and free networks

00:01:46.120 flagship conference for the conservative movement in Ottawa. We had some great conversations

00:01:51.720 including with former Australian PM Tony Abbott which we shared with you on Friday and also a

00:01:57.020 couple of fireside chats with New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs and Alberta Premier Danielle

00:02:02.240 Smith. We'll have both of those in full for you this week. I'm excited about that. Today we'll

00:02:07.480 have my fireside chat with Danielle Smith which ended up being a bit abbreviated from what it

00:02:13.360 was supposed to be so I had to like go right come right out of the gate swinging for reasons I can

00:02:17.560 explain a little bit later on but that'll be coming up in just a few moments we've also got

00:02:22.020 our good friend Chris Sims got to check in with her in person last week and I met lots of really

00:02:27.140 fun people at the conference some listeners and viewers of the show so thank you very much for

00:02:32.520 all your support and for doing as I asked beforehand which was coming up and saying

00:02:36.100 hello and not doing it when I was in the middle of the show so that was a lot of fun but I want

00:02:41.000 to just begin this is a rather interesting development from the past week where the NDP

00:02:45.100 the federal NDP which has been a stalwart defender of Justin Trudeau and his carbon tax has started

00:02:51.240 to equivocate a little bit now I take this as a sign that the opposition to the carbon tax which

00:02:56.900 is not just being led by Pierre Polyev and the conservatives but by provincial premiers in a

00:03:01.640 majority of provinces including to some extent the NDP premier Wab Kanu that all of that opposition

00:03:08.520 and resistance is working, that the federal NDP has now started to see that the polling data are

00:03:14.220 not on their side, that Canadians do not want a carbon tax, that the Canadians are ultimately

00:03:18.680 accepting the premise put forward by the Axe the Tax Group, that this is a punitive, unnecessary

00:03:24.340 carbon tax that is not supporting the government's stated climate objectives, but is causing

00:03:30.380 economic harm. Now, the reason I bring this all up is because I want to just give this clip.

00:03:35.500 Jagmeet Singh has been a carbon tax defender.

00:03:38.680 Anytime there's been a motion on the carbon tax in the House of Commons,

00:03:41.580 the NDP has voted against the Conservatives and with the Liberals.

00:03:46.160 But then look at this exchange in a scrum last week

00:03:49.220 at the Broadbent Institute conference in Ottawa.

00:03:53.680 Consumer carbon price.

00:03:55.480 Well, what we want to do is we want to lay out our vision,

00:03:58.600 a new Democrat vision for how we tackle the climate crisis.

00:04:01.620 and the thing that we are noticing is that we need big polluters to pay their fair share.

00:04:08.320 We want to stop big polluters and we want to make sure there's a cost to that pollution

00:04:12.200 so that we've got to stop them.

00:04:14.280 We need government to take real action.

00:04:16.500 It can't just be that our only approach to fighting a climate crisis

00:04:19.880 is using free market solutions.

00:04:21.700 That is not sufficient to meet the seriousness of what we're up against.

00:04:25.740 And we also don't want this to turn into a question for everyday people

00:04:29.740 that am I worried about affordability or am I worried about the climate crisis?

00:04:33.800 I don't want that to be the choice that workers and people are having to struggle with.

00:04:37.320 I don't want the burden fall on working people.

00:04:39.040 So we want to lay out our plan, which addresses the real solutions

00:04:43.160 and using government power to tackle big polluters

00:04:46.380 and that unites working people together.

00:04:49.340 For the consumer price specifically, though, do you want to get rid of it?

00:04:52.660 Do you want to pause it? Do you want to stop the hikes?

00:04:55.340 What are you proposing here?

00:04:57.200 For our full plan, we're going to release that plan and we're going to present that to the Canadians.

00:05:01.580 So we don't have our full plan laid out, but we have some elements, the principles of our plan.

00:05:05.420 And the principles I wanted to lay out today were that I find it problematic

00:05:09.180 that the Liberals have set up a divisive system where they're dividing the country.

00:05:14.940 Some people got an advantage very cynically.

00:05:17.180 It was pretty obvious that it was for votes in the Atlantic region.

00:05:20.640 And that's the wrong approach to fighting the climate crisis.

00:05:23.040 It shouldn't be that certain regions get different treatment than other regions.

00:05:26.560 I think that's wrong.

00:05:27.900 I also think that Pierre Polyev, I spent a lot of time making it very clear,

00:05:31.260 that Pierre Polyev's approach to have no climate plan,

00:05:34.060 and really his plan is to let big polluters dump toxic waste into our rivers

00:05:40.160 without any regulation.

00:05:41.340 That's what's going to happen.

00:05:42.300 Pollute our air, pollute the land.

00:05:43.820 I think that is absolutely wrong.

00:05:45.380 So I want to carve out a different path, a new Democrat path, 0.62

00:05:48.080 one that acknowledges working people and acknowledges the need for fighting the climate crisis

00:05:52.500 and that it is going to be working people that bear the brunt of it.

00:05:55.380 So we're starting to chart that course.

00:05:58.380 So there was a lot of, I mean, it was an NDP person speaking.

00:06:01.880 There was a lot of nonsense, of course.

00:06:03.240 But if you go through that, he's actually saying something quite intriguing there,

00:06:07.420 which is that we don't have a plan.

00:06:09.700 We'll let you know what the plan is.

00:06:11.020 But he's not committing to this support for the consumer carbon tax.

00:06:14.620 Now, where I would caution anyone who's getting all excited is that

00:06:18.220 when people say we don't like the consumer carbon tax,

00:06:21.800 What they mean is they generally would want to put a carbon tax on industry and corporations

00:06:26.300 and all of that, which sounds good in paper, but when push comes to shove, any tax on any

00:06:32.680 level of this process is going to filter down to the consumer.

00:06:36.700 The consumer carbon tax has the one sort of advantage of it being marginally more transparent

00:06:41.860 than all of these other ones.

00:06:43.660 Because again, if you decide to tax XYZ Corporation, sorry, XYZ Corporation, it was an American

00:06:50.880 corporation the first time. If you decide to tax XYZ corporation, that corporation is going to

00:06:57.380 ultimately embed that tax in the cost of the good or service that it sells. So a carbon tax is a

00:07:04.540 carbon tax. The only issue here is that it won't be as directly tied to your gas bill and home

00:07:10.060 heating bill as it is in the case of the consumer tax. But so Jagmeet Singh even so is saying that

00:07:16.220 the federal government's carbon tax, the federal carbon tax that the feds have been pushing

00:07:20.140 on the provinces that the provincial governments have been resisting is something that he's not

00:07:24.780 saying is necessarily in the NDP plan. He says it's not the be-all end-all. That's actually quite

00:07:30.660 a significant bit of movement, so much so that Justin Trudeau says he doesn't understand the

00:07:37.440 NDP's stance on climate and carbon tax. Justin Trudeau says he doesn't understand it. Now,

00:07:44.140 I will say Justin Trudeau saying he can't figure something out, not exactly breaking news.

00:07:48.740 Jagmeet Singh saying something incoherent, also not breaking news.

00:07:52.080 But it is still interesting nonetheless that these two who have been thickest thieves on

00:07:55.980 the carbon tax and other economic policy for basically since 2021 are now starting to

00:08:02.100 sow some fractures.

00:08:02.840 Now, when push comes to shove, is the NDP going to pull its support of the Liberals?

00:08:07.200 I suspect not.

00:08:08.600 But the NDP are doing two things at once here.

00:08:12.200 Number one, they're trying to back the Liberals, keep the Liberals in power, support Justin

00:08:16.260 Trudeau as prime minister indefinitely. Number two, start paving the road to distance themselves

00:08:22.440 from the carbon tax in the next federal election. Jagmeet Singh, mark my words, is going to come out

00:08:27.080 in 2025, and he's going to have a climate change plan that has no consumer carbon tax, and he's

00:08:33.060 going to claim he was always against it while supporting and propping up Justin Trudeau and

00:08:37.540 his carbon tax every step of the way. That's what he's doing here. He sees the writing on the wall.

00:08:42.520 He can read the polling data.

00:08:44.680 He knows that Canadians are against this.

00:08:47.420 Canadians are turning on this carbon tax.

00:08:49.900 They can't afford it.

00:08:50.740 They don't like it.

00:08:51.760 And it's becoming a big political win for Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives and everyone else.

00:08:57.400 Like, it isn't just the Polyev Conservatives. 0.69

00:08:59.620 It's the NDP in Alberta now, most of the leadership candidates.

00:09:03.180 It's the Liberals in New Brunswick.

00:09:05.260 It's the Liberals in Ontario, the NDP in Manitoba, the Conservatives across the board.

00:09:10.100 There's no one left defending this.

00:09:12.520 except the BC New Democrats, the Quebec status, which tend to span different parties, and Justin

00:09:18.960 Trudeau's Liberals. Those are the three entities that seem to be able to live with the carbon tax

00:09:23.740 and Atlantic Canadians who sometimes don't care because they already got their carve out. But even

00:09:27.880 then, Liberal Premier Andrew Furey did the right thing. He came out and said, no, I fundamentally

00:09:32.760 oppose this. So this is an interesting fracture. Again, is it going to mean all that much in the

00:09:38.800 grand scheme of things? Maybe, maybe not. But it is something that we definitely need to pay

00:09:43.920 attention to. Now, do I believe that Jagmeet Singh is all of a sudden going to become some

00:09:48.280 crusader for the common man against overzealous climate policy? Absolutely not. And I'd be

00:09:54.000 remiss to not point out, it's not Canadian, but this story in Germany that came up. Do you know

00:09:59.280 Germany's transport minister? His name is Volking Wissing. Volking Wissing. Now, I'm not a follower

00:10:05.460 of the German transport minister,

00:10:07.120 so I don't know too much about him.

00:10:08.580 But I don't need to know much more

00:10:10.200 because there is a climate policy fight

00:10:12.140 underway in Germany right now.

00:10:14.500 And as one stage in this fight,

00:10:16.520 this is what the German government has promised,

00:10:18.820 an indefinite driving ban on weekends.

00:10:23.760 The politician, Mr. Vissing, says,

00:10:26.540 it forces us to consider

00:10:28.500 considerable legal and factual uncertainties

00:10:31.380 because they're trying to get their climate plan through

00:10:33.360 and they don't know if it's going to go.

00:10:34.380 He says that they need to reduce traffic to help meet their climate goals, and they can only do that through measures such as a, quote, comprehensive and indefinite driving ban on Saturdays and Sundays, unquote.

00:10:50.000 This would be an amendment to the emissions reduction bylaw.

00:10:53.460 It would look at all sectors together.

00:10:55.160 and if the government is not meeting its emission reduction target they have to do drastic extreme

00:10:59.820 action like for example driving banning you from driving your cars on the weekend now this is

00:11:06.460 particularly extreme I don't know if it's going to go through or not we saw last year or two years

00:11:11.440 ago the French government banned domestic air travel and it's so fascinating to me that a couple

00:11:17.180 of years ago when you had some people popping up and saying well you know we saw what they did in

00:11:20.760 the COVID realm, maybe they're going to give us climate lockdowns. And everyone said, oh,

00:11:24.940 you're a conspiracy theorist. You're never going to have, you know, movement restrictions because

00:11:28.860 of climate. And then all of a sudden you have domestic air travel being outlawed in France.

00:11:33.840 You have in the case of Germany, the government floating the idea of not being able to drive

00:11:39.420 your car on Saturdays and Sundays, not being able to drive on the weekend. So this is going to be,

00:11:46.980 I think an incredibly dangerous development. Now, again, when 15-minute cities, people were coming

00:11:51.920 up to me for a few weeks last year and just asking me, 15-minute cities, what are you going to do?

00:11:56.280 What are you going to do? And I said, hold on. If we're talking about just zoning and urban planning

00:12:00.540 and trying to make communities walkable, I don't really have an issue. If we're talking about things

00:12:04.920 that will fundamentally restrict mobility, I would have an issue with it. And again, even from that

00:12:10.220 position, people were saying, no one's trying to restrict mobility for climate. And then, well,

00:12:15.340 here we go here we have the game set match right there well uh let's talk about all of the things

00:12:20.860 that we can expect on this front and more with our good friend chris sims from the canadian

00:12:25.340 taxpayers federation we caught up with her in person last week back to our regularly scheduled

00:12:30.140 program now chris always good to talk to you did you have a good time at the conference last week

00:12:34.940 yes it was lovely to see you in person and uh i was front row center when you were speaking to

00:12:39.900 premier daniel smith i i like so just a little aside people often do an awful lot of work at

00:12:45.100 these conferences and they'll prepare themselves they'll prepare their remarks and they usually

00:12:49.260 don't have a picture from it and so i always try to if i can take a nice picture of whoever is

00:12:55.180 speaking and just send it to them because it's always nice to have a memento and it was nice

00:13:00.060 uh seeing you interviewed the premier about this one little note there what you were mentioning

00:13:04.220 with with the german uh minister you're absolutely right uh i'm of the same thinking of uh the

00:13:11.100 The government is often trying to restrict your mobility.

00:13:14.620 There's usually a war on the car, so to speak, especially in urban centers.

00:13:19.580 Well, in the UK, this has become like an all-out war where you have the government putting up these high-emissions-owned cameras

00:13:25.500 and then people going around and taking them down.

00:13:27.820 It was actually quite a thing for a while.

00:13:29.460 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:30.460 And remember, that all started with toll roads that you could only get into the downtown core.

00:13:35.520 And at first, it was for road maintenance.

00:13:38.540 And then it was for emissions.

00:13:39.600 And now they've got these crazy cameras everywhere.

00:13:42.560 It always seems to escalate until you force the government to stop the escalation.

00:13:47.600 And I need to point this out with that German minister recommending this.

00:13:51.300 This is a minister in the government of a G7 country musing aloud about not allowing his free citizens to drive their own privately owned cars.

00:14:03.640 this is not some weird organization that is giving some advice to the government here or there on the

00:14:10.400 back of a napkin no this this was the minister in germany a very serious player country so i did

00:14:17.080 want to flag that and really highlight it um that we're getting there yeah we had no if i can jump

00:14:22.100 in on that chris you're absolutely right and and we've seen governments for example do things like

00:14:26.700 you can only water your lawn every other day depending on where you live and these sorts of

00:14:30.500 restrictions. And again, like anything else, it's that old, I hate quoting Al Gore, but it's the old

00:14:35.600 frog in the pot of boiling water thing of these little incremental encroachments on your liberty

00:14:39.800 don't seem all that big. And, you know, if the government has the authority to restrict your

00:14:45.000 ability to drive on the weekend, they also have the ability to restrict your ability to drive on

00:14:49.740 weekdays. And that's the whole point here is that it will never stop at that because they, especially

00:14:54.380 when they tie it to emissions reductions, if they aren't meeting their emissions reduction goals,

00:14:58.420 The rest of you plebs need to do it. And you better believe there's going to be some essential worker carve out where the minister himself can go around in his, you know, motorcade or whatever, but you and I can't. 1.00

00:15:09.500 That's exactly right. There's a pivotal moment in Atlas Shrugged where the 20th Century Motor Company, which is the great novel, of course, by Ayn Rand, the 20th Century Motor Company has been taken over by these crazy statists and people have to plead their case every year.

00:15:24.900 please this is how many children I have please this is how big my house is this is what I need

00:15:30.740 to be able to you know afford everything and so I can see ministers and ministries being set up to

00:15:36.420 do this who is now essential why do you need to drive your car where exactly are you driving your

00:15:41.800 car what kind of groceries are you hauling in it like see where this goes real real fast and so

00:15:48.200 this is why again we always sound the alarm whenever government wants to get bigger Sheila

00:15:53.860 Gunn-Reed, our mutual friend, said that she wants government to be small enough to drown it in a 0.98

00:15:59.040 teacup. And this is why. Because regardless of, you know, if you like to vote green, or if you

00:16:04.820 like to plant flowers, or if you like to drive your big rig, the government will control your

00:16:10.180 life if you let it. So thank you very much for flagging that. That was new because we were so

00:16:14.480 busy at the conference. I didn't even see that on Friday. Speaking of the conference, and you

00:16:18.640 mentioned my fireside chat with premier danielle smith i i was looking at you out of the corner

00:16:23.620 of my eye when i asked i think my first question which people will see in a few moments which was

00:16:27.560 about the gas tax and i mean obviously people on on this show will see the answer in a moment but

00:16:32.700 i just wanted to give you a sense of what you thought of her response to that because i know

00:16:36.260 this has been something you've been pounding on for a little while now and i hadn't really heard

00:16:40.240 her address head on uh yeah i think they were your first four questions actually were along this line

00:16:46.380 so good on you uh normally i do a wind up but they like ate into my time so i had to like just

00:16:52.420 come out swinging but nice to see you premier by the way about this tax increase uh but it's true

00:16:58.640 and you know premier smith uh she's a big girl she's been in this game for a long time and she 0.98

00:17:03.020 knows that her government increased the fuel tax so it was really good that you asked her that

00:17:07.460 what i found interesting and to be clear a big fan of premier daniel smith she's done a million

00:17:13.180 very good things for Alberta, primarily, and I keep harping on this, keeping spending below the

00:17:18.000 rate of inflation plus population growth. That sounds really nerdy and wonky. So the government

00:17:23.180 is not getting the credit it needs for this. If they stick to this kind of spending restraint

00:17:28.800 for the next generation, we will have hundreds of billions of dollars saved. So they're doing

00:17:35.640 that very well. But you're right, they did fully increase their fuel tax. So for folks outside of

00:17:41.260 Alberta, we typically have a provincial fuel tax on both gasoline and diesel that is 13 cents per

00:17:46.960 liter. A few years back, then Premier Jason Kenney said, you know what, I'm going to reduce it every

00:17:52.780 now and then based on the price of a barrel of oil. Premier Smith was elected leader within the

00:17:57.180 party and thus Premier. She looked around, realized everything was unaffordable and said, you know

00:18:01.680 what, I'm going to decouple it really from the price of a barrel of oil and reduce it anyway.

00:18:06.820 So we had zero provincial fuel tax for an entire year in Alberta, and it was great. We had the lowest gas prices in the entire country. That's not so anymore. Manitoba is eating our lunch. NDP Premier Wob Canoe has had it down to zero now since January 1st. So we're paying 13 cents per liter back up again. And in Manitoba, they're paying zero cents per liter for the provincial fuel tax.

00:18:30.820 I hear what she's saying when she says things like, we need the funds, because governments will always say that they need the funds.

00:18:39.680 She also said that they need it, and I'm paraphrasing her, that they need it for road maintenance.

00:18:45.380 What I found very interesting about that is that the UCP government said in their budget document, Andrew, that they don't use it for road maintenance.

00:18:55.180 I found this really surprising.

00:18:57.040 So it's right in the page where they're announcing their $200 per year car, electric car tax. And they leave this little sentence in there saying, we do not allocate the provincial fuel tax to road maintenance. But we still see this as an issue of fairness for people who drive electric vehicles. That was such a strange admission.

00:19:16.720 so and then of course I don't obviously the premier doesn't sit there and write the budget

00:19:21.260 document herself but I think she made the same assumption that a lot of us do is that it does

00:19:26.000 go to road maintenance but her own government says that it's not so I don't think this fight

00:19:31.000 is over I think if the government is able to do their next quarterly budget update and review

00:19:36.760 and see the books and if they're in a surplus situation it would be very very very good of them

00:19:42.600 to reduce that fuel tax back down again because now hey a little secret just for you and all of

00:19:48.180 your viewers ottawa when i when we were just there a couple of days ago it had slightly cheaper gas

00:19:54.620 prices i couldn't believe it wow yeah that's with uh hst instead of just gst and in general i think

00:20:02.560 the fact that it's always more in ontario especially yeah so it was around if i'm guessing

00:20:07.120 I think it was around 152, 153 in Ottawa.

00:20:11.040 I'm here in Lethbridge back again, and it's 162.

00:20:14.840 Like, I've never seen it like this before.

00:20:16.700 So yeah, people are kind of grinding their teeth at the pumps right now.

00:20:20.700 One thing I wanted to ask you about here is corporate welfare, which has been, well,

00:20:25.520 typically it's been like the number one contributor to the Quebec GDP for many years.

00:20:30.920 But corporate welfare, it's been under the microscope by the federal conservatives,

00:20:34.500 but not historically.

00:20:35.600 I mean, Stephen Harper still was guilty of this in a number of cases.

00:20:39.040 There was a fascinating story you flagged for me that the federal government isn't saying

00:20:43.960 if companies will keep their job creating promises.

00:20:47.600 So all of these big lofty goals they put out here about you give us this money,

00:20:51.920 we're going to create this many jobs once they get the checks, once they get the subsidies.

00:20:55.920 So we don't actually know if, you know, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Ford,

00:20:59.680 if all of these companies that have made these big promises will actually deliver on the jobs

00:21:03.480 that they've said will be tied to this money bingo and so i don't know if i remembered to

00:21:08.960 introduce you to our inter investigative journalist ryan thorpe he's an excellent

00:21:13.320 reporter and he's with the canadian taxpayers federation very mild-mannered though so he

00:21:17.620 wouldn't have approached you and introduced i believe i ran into him in one of the hospitality

00:21:21.580 suites uh he was probably maybe it was franco that introduced me but yeah i did meet him he

00:21:26.300 would have been right next to franco at the time so we act as his interpreter his extrovert

00:21:30.520 interpreter. He did so much legwork on this and I really wanted to give him a shout out for this

00:21:35.780 because he went through all sorts of spreadsheets. And so what I found, I almost laughed. So you're

00:21:41.940 right. You set it up. You imagine no matter the color of the jersey that the politician's wearing,

00:21:47.300 they do the big ribbon cutting and they kiss the babies and they say, this is delivering this many

00:21:52.180 jobs because we're handing taxpayers money out to fill in the blank. Ford or a solar company or

00:21:58.440 loblaws or whatever it is it doesn't matter corporate welfare the only little problem there

00:22:02.840 is that they're not keeping the receipts and the way it was described in the article is that okay

00:22:08.360 say you get back the data from the government saying uh this is how much money it got the

00:22:12.380 company got this is how many jobs were promised and then there's a column there for jobs actually

00:22:18.480 created and almost always it's zero and we're like okay this is you know a little bit too good

00:22:26.660 to be true as far as juiciness goes. So it can't possibly be zero. Like there are human beings

00:22:31.500 working in these places once they're set up, but this is the kicker. They made it all zero

00:22:36.480 because they're not required to keep track of it. Not one bit. They could hire three or they could

00:22:43.660 hire 300. Doesn't matter, but it's taxpayer's money. So this was astonishing to a lot of people

00:22:50.340 in the office that they have no requirements to keep the receipts on how many jobs are actually

00:22:56.520 delivered once the cameras go home and the ribbons have been cut well quite something and it's insane

00:23:02.120 too because you know you would never if you were in the private sector and you were signing a

00:23:06.280 contract with someone i mean what do you do i give you this money you give me this service part of the

00:23:10.920 the only justification for corporate welfare at all like the only one is job creation that's the

00:23:17.000 only way to justify now nine times out of ten you could look at this and say it would have been

00:23:20.440 cheaper for you to actually just hand out the money on the street to people then uh put it in

00:23:24.280 because it's enriching Volkswagen, Stellantis, and all of these things. But if they're not even

00:23:28.220 required to fundamentally track the metric that the money is based on, what the heck's the point

00:23:33.480 of it all? Exactly. It's just shoveling it out the door and it's to win favors and patronage. 0.66

00:23:39.900 That's all it is. And it's disgusting no matter which party's doing it. And you're right. It

00:23:43.860 doesn't seem to matter which government, which party's in power. This happens at the provincial

00:23:47.800 level as well, right? We see corporate welfare at both federal and provincial levels. And for

00:23:53.740 anybody who is cringing at that term, right, they think that it's derogatory to say corporate

00:23:59.200 welfare. It was almost positive. It was Stephen Lewis, a very famous left wing person who coined

00:24:07.020 the term corporate welfare. So most folks in this game are using that term. And again, we almost

00:24:13.300 never see any good return on investment. And to your point, if we saw person for person, dollar

00:24:20.060 for dollar, we'd still oppose it because we think companies should be the ones paying for this sort

00:24:24.740 of thing and not taxpayers because taxpayers have no say. But at least then there'd be receipts.

00:24:31.060 But there's not even any receipts. These columns were apparently zero in all of the spreadsheets

00:24:36.280 that they were handing back to us. Wow, that's crazy. Good stuff on this. Great work to Ryan

00:24:40.900 and to your whole team there. Chris Sims, we'll talk to you next week. Thanks so much for coming

00:24:44.380 on. You bet. All right. We are going to hear from a couple of members of the Alberta government now

00:24:49.700 coming up in a little bit. We'll have Minister Devin Dreeshan on, caught up with him on the

00:24:54.300 sidelines of the Canada Strong and Free Conference. But I also wanted to share with you my onstage

00:24:59.420 fireside chat with Premier Danielle Smith.

00:25:08.540 Thank you.

00:25:14.280 Don't let the media tell the story is the great cue for the journalist to come on stage, by the way.

00:25:18.540 so thank you for that. Just to give a bit of disclosure, Premier Smith and I have known each

00:25:23.760 other for many years. We used to work together in radio and now I'm a podcaster and she's the

00:25:29.320 Premier, so take from that what you will. But whenever Andrew would sub in for me when I was

00:25:34.860 on the air, when I came back, I got a ream of text saying, oh man, I like Andrew so much better. Can

00:25:40.180 we have him instead? Yeah, I was her guest host, which I'd have to check the constitution, but I

00:25:45.820 believe that means I'm acting premier in Alberta because I've never formally been released from

00:25:50.580 that but you ended on the carbon tax and I spoke about this a fair bit yesterday with Premier Higgs

00:25:56.740 who I'm glad was not tired of me after that interview that he's returned and you have said

00:26:02.340 so much and have been such a strong voice on on this and that comment about it being a syntax on

00:26:08.160 productivity I quite like but I have to ask how those arguments do not apply equally to the gas

00:26:13.860 tax, which in Alberta has gone up this year, has gone up again within the last couple of

00:26:18.820 weeks. It treats something that for a lot of Albertans is necessary, driving around

00:26:24.740 as though it's an elective choice.

00:26:26.460 Well, you'll see that we added a tax on electric vehicles. And when we put that $200 tax in,

00:26:34.520 we calculated it as being essentially the equivalent of what an average driver would

00:26:39.180 spend in fuel tax so that electric vehicles are paying their fair share of our road maintenance.

00:26:44.680 That's what the connection is in most provinces between the tax we charge. That's originally how

00:26:49.260 it began. And then the federal government layered on their 10 centiliter tax. And of course, Stephen

00:26:54.240 Guibault doesn't want to build roads anymore. We're zero for nine in our province and getting

00:26:58.380 cost share. I don't know if Premier Higgs has had any better luck on that. But then they've also now

00:27:03.640 levied on I think what amounts to 17.6 cents in the carbon tax. And then on top of that,

00:27:09.480 they charge GST on all of it. So they're charging tax on tax, which is I think another seven and a

00:27:13.560 half cents at prices the way they are today. So yes, we do accept 13 cents a liter to pay for

00:27:20.020 roads and they accept 35 cents to essentially pay for nothing. So I would say that I cannot

00:27:26.680 sacrifice our need to gain revenue, to build roads, to make room for them to continue with

00:27:32.880 the punitive tax that does nothing, because a couple of things I'd say, the argument that they

00:27:38.580 make that it will encourage people to change behavior, they completely undermine, because

00:27:43.300 Stephen Guibault admitted that the carbon tax isn't going to have an effect until 2060, which means

00:27:48.020 we're all paying punitive taxes until then, and there really just aren't options. I talked to

00:27:53.640 any of the automakers and the auto dealers, that if you wanted to go out and switch to an electric

00:27:59.900 vehicle tomorrow to avoid the tax you couldn't because there aren't enough of them being produced

00:28:04.940 and the infrastructure isn't in your home to do it and the infrastructure isn't there for public

00:28:08.380 charging station to do it hydrogen vehicles as well there's we have a hundred of them in alberta

00:28:13.660 we've got a 5 000 car challenge but if you wanted to go out and buy a hydrogen zero emissions

00:28:18.220 vehicle you couldn't because they're not producing enough of them if you wanted in my province where

00:28:23.340 i think 90 of the homes are heated with natural gas if you simply couldn't switch to a heat pump

00:28:29.580 because they don't work in minus 35 and you can't get insurance if you do without having a backup

00:28:34.220 of some other type of of of heating so all it is that if there isn't a reasonable way to switch to

00:28:41.740 an equal or lower cost option then all it is is a punitive tax on consumers that's the reason why

00:28:47.580 i'm why why they're different but but when the alberta fair fair but when the alberta government

00:28:54.300 offered fuel tax relief those issues you described were still there and it was a recognition that

00:28:58.700 life was unaffordable and unaffordability comes in layers there's inflation carbon tax fuel tax

00:29:04.220 general cost of living so the crisis of affordability is still there well let me say

00:29:09.980 when we when we brought through our relief program our gas prices in our province were a dollar 89

00:29:15.740 so our tax is 13 cents so that would have taken it down from a dollar 89 down to you know a dollar

00:29:22.540 76. And right now, today, gas prices in Alberta are $1.58. So we will continue with our program

00:29:31.400 that when oil prices go beyond $90, we'll take that tax off again. In fact, I'd love to see

00:29:38.000 the federal government do the same. Make it variable so that when the prices get up above

00:29:42.860 a certain level, we're all paying more because of that. Take the tax off at that point so that

00:29:46.900 You're not adding to the problem.

00:29:48.780 And I should mention that we remain, along with Saskatchewan,

00:29:53.680 the second lowest in the country in our overall price of fuel.

00:29:58.980 Manitoba followed our lead, reduced the carbon tax,

00:30:02.700 or took their fuel tax off after Wab Kanu got elected.

00:30:06.200 But the other provinces, I think British Columbia,

00:30:09.020 who are the poor souls from British Columbia facing $1.98?

00:30:12.280 They couldn't afford to fly here, actually.

00:30:14.180 That's why there aren't more of them.

00:30:15.900 That's why.

00:30:16.520 So I would say we are trying to be variable because we also have to run a balanced budget.

00:30:22.600 And that's the first promise that I made to Albertans.

00:30:25.860 And that extra four cents, a leader that we added back on just on April the 1st,

00:30:30.520 that's the difference between us running a $400 million surplus or not.

00:30:34.000 So when those additional revenues come in, absolutely, our strategy is to give the money back to Albertans.

00:30:38.900 A couple of nights ago, Boris Johnson was on this stage with Tony Abbott,

00:30:42.820 and they had a spirited discussion on climate policy.

00:30:45.700 And Boris Johnson had made a comment, which some people have asked me about, and I wanted to get your thoughts on, that basically it's Pascal's wager.

00:30:53.180 So we should accept that, oh, maybe global warming's a big hoax, maybe it's an existential threat, but he said basically there are no costs to acting as though it is something that is a grave and pressing threat.

00:31:06.100 And then I noted, I think it was yesterday on Twitter, Stephen Gilbeau had met Boris Johnson and was praising him, which is inherently the endorsement you don't want.

00:31:15.540 But I reject that premise, and I assume you do, Premier, as well, that going along with this, and to be frank, going along with what Boris Johnson's government did in the UK, is without cost.

00:31:26.300 Well, if you try to accelerate things, as Stephen Guibault wants to do,

00:31:30.720 net zero power grid by 2035, net zero vehicles by 2035,

00:31:35.420 net zero homes, that's the new approach.

00:31:37.860 You think this accelerator fund is altruism?

00:31:40.460 It's not.

00:31:41.420 They want net zero homes, which I think will ultimately mean

00:31:44.780 no one's allowed to hook up to natural gas.

00:31:46.640 You all have to have heat pumps.

00:31:48.320 You're not allowed to be able to have electricity

00:31:50.800 that comes from an emitting source.

00:31:52.200 That's where I think they're going with that.

00:31:53.640 So I'm already, if you can imagine, what's it going to cost you to buy a new car?

00:31:57.700 What's it going to cost you to change out your home heating?

00:31:59.980 What are the extra costs associated with building net zero construction?

00:32:04.760 What's the cost associated with taking all of our home heating off of the natural gas system

00:32:11.580 and putting it onto the electrical grid?

00:32:14.060 One of our leaders in Alberta says that's a $70 billion cost.

00:32:18.220 What's the cost associated with upgrading our grid

00:32:20.460 so that you can plug in more than two electric vehicles in a home?

00:32:23.640 Because if you put two vehicles on a home city block, your transformer will blow.

00:32:30.300 So you need to upgrade your transformer, which is $40,000.

00:32:33.000 And that right now is going to the cost of the third guy who ends up buying the electric car.

00:32:37.920 So how much has that transformed over our entire system?

00:32:41.840 Probably hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars.

00:32:44.020 I think it was $1.6 trillion, in fact, that was estimated to implement the Guibo vision of everything being on the power grid.

00:32:52.620 your car, your heating, as well as current electricity from all sources, including industrial,

00:32:58.720 and then having all of that be from non-emitting sources. So yeah, it's very costly when you're

00:33:04.340 trying to do that. Now, the approach I would take is I have no problem with a transition away from

00:33:09.940 emissions. We do this all the time. We found clean ways to be able to take sulfur dioxide

00:33:14.120 out of coal plants so that we could have address issues of acid rain. We found ways to find an

00:33:20.360 alternative for chlorofluorocarbons to address ozone and I believe that we're already seeing

00:33:25.320 with carbon capture utilization and storage and some of the incredible minds that we have

00:33:29.400 that we'll be able to find a way to capture the CO2 and turn it into useful products which has

00:33:34.000 been the history of our industry but it is a transition away from emissions. It is not a

00:33:41.360 transition away from the production of oil and natural gas. A barrel of oil provides 6,000

00:33:48.520 different products for us now. How are we going to be able to have lubricants? How are we going

00:33:53.460 to be able to have petrochemicals? How are we going to be able to have food-safe materials?

00:33:57.080 How are we going to be able to have medical-safe materials if we don't have petrochemicals?

00:34:03.300 How are we going to have roads to drive our zero-emissions vehicles on? Because they're

00:34:07.720 made of asphalt, which comes from the bitumen that is produced in Alberta. So the approach

00:34:13.060 that I believe the left is taking is defeatist. It doesn't look at the incredible innovation that

00:34:19.160 we have, the brilliant minds that we have, who are able to take what are traditional waste streams

00:34:23.900 and turn them into something valuable. And I see Michael Binion is here too. He has done some great

00:34:29.280 work in elevating and showcasing, same with Second Street, I don't know if Colin Craig is here,

00:34:34.100 elevating and showcasing the kind of products that are being made out of CO2. So in my province,

00:34:40.140 Heidelberg is a cement company that is going to take the CO2 embedded in their

00:34:44.600 cement to make a stronger concrete and there'll be the first net-zero cement

00:34:48.820 plant in the entire world. Dow Chemical has, yeah truly, Dow Chemical is taking

00:34:56.380 the CO2 working with a company called Lindy. The Lindy is creating hydrogen

00:35:00.760 and then they're burying the CO2. They'll be the first net-zero petrochemical

00:35:04.500 plant. And then on top of that we've already got air products which is taking

00:35:08.760 CO2, burying it and doing net zero hydrogen. That's what an emissions-reduced world looks

00:35:15.580 like. But all of that takes time. You cannot snap your fingers and have innovation. But

00:35:20.420 I think it's our job as government to champion what it is the industry is doing, to support

00:35:24.720 them so everybody knows that there's a different way of doing it. That's the theme. The guys

00:35:29.640 on the left have a single-minded approach to how they want to do things. They identify

00:35:35.020 a problem, they propose solutions that make it worse, and then they fearmonger that, oh, look at

00:35:39.700 those guys on the other side, they want to do nothing at all. Couldn't be further from the

00:35:42.880 truth. We identify the problem, we identify solutions that will actually work, and then we

00:35:47.620 support our industry and those non-profit players that we believe will get there.

00:35:52.100 Making it worse is actually the headline of the broadband conference just down the road there.

00:35:57.940 Well, you said energy transition, so I guess transition is a logical segue to the next topic

00:36:03.200 here. Let's discuss your approach to gender in Alberta, because I discussed with Premier Higgs

00:36:08.180 yesterday how New Brunswick was the first to really go into this terrain, but Alberta was the

00:36:14.080 most extensive in terms of what you proposed, because you didn't just talk about parental

00:36:17.860 rights and consent and knowledge in an education context, you also extended it to sports and also

00:36:23.120 to the healthcare sector when, you know, interventions, medical interventions are

00:36:27.820 concerned. And we haven't seen the legislation, so I'm hoping you can provide a little bit more

00:36:32.360 detail in what you hope to achieve. And one particular aspect of this is the protection

00:36:37.240 of single-sex spaces, so women's shelters and also prisons, you know, or jails rather in Alberta. I

00:36:43.480 mean, are you proposing something where biologically male inmates who identify as female

00:36:48.960 would not be permitted to go into female jails? Well, look, let me tell you my starting point 0.56

00:36:54.960 because I've talked with many transgender individuals over the years from the first

00:36:59.300 time I got into politics all the way through when I was on radio until as recently as yesterday

00:37:04.260 because we've got transgender conservatives that are fellow travelers with us who want to give us

00:37:08.740 advice on implementing the policy. But the issue that I began with was are we giving good medical

00:37:16.640 care to those who do transition because in our province we don't do the surgeries. We have them

00:37:23.880 have people fly out to Quebec to receive surgery and then they fly back home and we don't have

00:37:30.320 good post-operative care. In fact, a lot of these surgeries have complications and so that was one

00:37:35.320 of the starting points. Those who have decided to transition as well need lifelong support for

00:37:41.020 hormone treatment and also lifelong support for the consequences that might happen of doing that

00:37:47.540 transition. And so then you get, so that's where it was, where it began is how do we give good

00:37:51.740 medical care for those as adults who make that transition. But then you have to have the

00:37:55.740 conversation at what age is the right age to make those decisions. And if you look at Dr. Hillary

00:38:02.200 Cass, the Cass report was just released in the UK, and she listed the most comprehensive review

00:38:10.020 of the medical literature and the science behind this. And what she discovered, quite frankly,

00:38:13.720 is there isn't very good science. So notwithstanding what the left like to tell us,

00:38:18.120 There isn't good long-term data about how many kids go on puberty blockers

00:38:23.000 and whether it impacts their future fertility and at what age.

00:38:26.200 There isn't long-term information about what happens to those kids by the time they reach 25.

00:38:31.280 Do they continue with the transition? Do they detransition?

00:38:34.260 They don't do that kind of study.

00:38:35.920 And so they've said, let's take a pause.

00:38:38.160 We're not going to assign puberty blockers as a matter of course.

00:38:42.980 And we're going to be a lot more deliberate in going through and making sure

00:38:46.140 that you're part of a medical team when those decisions are made, as well as that there's

00:38:50.860 long-term studies on it. So we're watching what the emerging scientific evidence is in the world.

00:38:57.500 This is science. The left says they believe in science. This is what science looks like as you

00:39:03.240 follow the information where it goes. So that's where we began. And then, of course, because the

00:39:07.520 first step of transitioning is changing name, changing pronouns, dressing on the opposite 0.90

00:39:14.740 gender you you cannot be out to your entire school community and the only people who aren't 1.00

00:39:20.960 allowed to know are your parents you can't you can't have that and that's important context but

00:39:27.020 but so let me get single sex space let me let me answer your question i um so one of the

00:39:31.560 transgender individuals i spoke with it has not transitioned below and um she likes to go for spa

00:39:37.600 days with her girlfriends and there's uh locker rooms where she she just told me like it wouldn't

00:39:42.680 be the same experience for me if I had to be in a separate locker room and not be able to be out

00:39:46.700 with my girlfriends. I think the issue is modesty, that you cannot, if you have not been fully

00:39:52.060 transitioned, then you shouldn't be exposing yourself in female-only spaces because no one 1.00

00:39:58.140 should know. You should either be behind in a washroom stall or you should show modesty and

00:40:05.160 then it's not, it doesn't become an issue. It's when there is, when women feel that their private 0.99

00:40:10.680 spaces when they're they're alone and they're naked that's when they want to make sure that

00:40:14.280 they're safe their places are protected so at the moment i have not seen anything

00:40:20.760 i've not seen anything in alberta that leads me to believe i have to do anything about that so i'm

00:40:25.000 not going in that direction and is that same for jails as well correct i haven't seen anything i

00:40:29.480 mean i i'm watching what's happening uh internationally and what's what's happening

00:40:33.480 in the rest of the country but in our own province i haven't seen anything that rises to it because

00:40:38.280 remember in provincial jails I think it's two years less a day that you serve so I have not

00:40:43.240 observed any emergence of problems that might happen that I'm seeing elsewhere. As we close

00:40:48.840 here what's the message to Alberta or from Alberta to Ottawa that you want to bring while you're here?

00:40:56.600 Well you may have seen this week I introduced the stay out of my backyard bill. It's the

00:41:03.000 provincial priorities act my message to ottawa is that federal politicians and the prime minister

00:41:15.240 in particular should do his job and stop trying to do my job that that's that's what the message is

00:41:25.400 and uh i don't know if premier higgs would would have said the same thing but when we

00:41:30.360 We meet as premiers, the really interesting thing is it doesn't matter whether it's NDP or Liberal or Progressive Conservative or UCP or Saskatchewan Party.

00:41:39.140 We all come from different parties and different perspectives, but we are united in that the federal government should stay focused on the things which they need to do.

00:41:46.560 There's lots of things they need to do.

00:41:48.340 They need to shore up national defense so that we're not an international embarrassment.

00:41:52.500 They need to make sure that our foreign policy is aligned with our allies instead of our enemies.

00:41:57.840 They need to make sure that they're expanding international trade

00:42:03.200 so every single one of our 10 provinces and territories can get our product to market.

00:42:07.440 They need to build critical infrastructure like the Trans Mountain Pipeline,

00:42:14.280 which is going to be getting to the finish line.

00:42:16.120 That is the kind of things that they should do more of.

00:42:18.820 They should be building ports.

00:42:20.140 They should be building rail lines.

00:42:21.440 They should be building highways, Stephen Guibault.

00:42:24.020 They should be making sure that they are living up to their obligation

00:42:26.920 and their treaties with First Nations.

00:42:29.500 They should be funding health care on reserve,

00:42:31.660 mental health and addiction treatment on reserve,

00:42:34.400 water on reserve, building out economies on reserve.

00:42:38.140 They should make sure that the value of our dollar

00:42:40.400 is not diminishing internationally.

00:42:42.860 They should make sure that they can process passports efficiently.

00:42:46.640 They should make sure that the Pearson Airport

00:42:49.020 is a lovely experience to go through

00:42:52.000 and that all of our airports are operating efficiently.

00:42:56.060 There is no shortage of things that the Prime Minister can do.

00:43:00.940 It's not a boring job.

00:43:10.760 So when you see in Alberta that we are going to take a posture more like Quebec,

00:43:16.120 which is no thank you, we don't need your policy advice on school lunch programs,

00:43:20.420 on pharma care, on dental care.

00:43:23.500 That is, just give us the money.

00:43:26.060 and trust that we'll be able to deliver on this.

00:43:28.900 That's the approach that we're going to take.

00:43:30.480 And we're going to be pretty vocal about doing so.

00:43:33.280 And I hope to see some of the other premiers do it.

00:43:35.540 Premier Danielle Smith.

00:43:37.000 Well, I always like catching up with Premier Danielle Smith.

00:43:39.880 Now, at the beginning, you heard me tell a joke.

00:43:42.620 My old deputy premier or my acting premier radio guest host joke.

00:43:46.880 I wasn't going to do that because I've done that joke

00:43:48.960 like three times now on stage with her.

00:43:50.920 But Franco Terrazzano said I had to do it.

00:43:53.940 And not that he lords over me in any larger-than-life way where I do everything he says.

00:43:58.180 I do most things because he's a smart guy.

00:44:00.240 But he's like, Andrew, it's my favorite joke.

00:44:02.640 Of course, you've got to do the joke.

00:44:03.660 So I did the joke.

00:44:04.700 I apologize for not getting some new material.

00:44:07.860 But nevertheless, that's what happened there.

00:44:11.460 So, I mean, it was a fun joke.

00:44:13.040 It was a fun joke the first time, the second time.

00:44:15.520 I'm not sure about the third time.

00:44:16.900 Maybe it starts to lose its zeal at that point.

00:44:19.500 But in any event, I wanted to go to another side of this discussion here. Premier Danielle Smith mentioned near the end of our chat that idea of really Alberta telling the federal government to mind your own beeswax, as the old saying goes, to stay out of its business.

00:44:35.140 And it was a topic I got to explore in a little bit more detail that afternoon with Transport Minister Devin Dreeshan.

00:44:41.900 Now, again, remember for context here, Stephen Gilboa once infamously said, as referenced by Danielle Smith there,

00:44:48.940 that, well, maybe the federal government's just not going to invest in any more roads.

00:44:53.320 And then he kind of backtracked that a little bit.

00:44:55.080 But it was a good point to get into a discussion with Alberta's Transport Minister on, Minister Devin Dreeshan.

00:45:03.000 Thanks for having me on your show.

00:45:04.840 really appreciate it. So obviously there's been a fair bit of strain on Alberta's relationship

00:45:09.700 with Ottawa over the the last say the last couple of years but but we've seen even some flashpoints

00:45:14.480 on this in the last couple of months. What is it you've brought here to Ottawa? What's the message

00:45:19.140 you're trying to send? What is it you were trying to get out of this trip? So roads roads roads. We

00:45:23.380 have Minister Guibo that has gone out in the media saying that the federal government isn't going to

00:45:27.140 be funding new roads. He clarified those comments by saying well not just any big new roads and

00:45:33.700 And that's actually caused a lot of concern, not just in Alberta, but in other provinces and even within First Nations across this country.

00:45:39.560 Because obviously it's the responsibility of the federal government to be building roads and maintaining roads on First Nations.

00:45:45.540 And we actually had a delegation of the OCHE's First Nation, as well as Clearwater County, the county that surrounds the First Nation,

00:45:52.040 to advocate for a road project that we have provincial dollars, municipal dollars, we just need federal dollars.

00:45:58.140 But for years we've been getting blocked.

00:45:59.640 And those types of comments from Minister Gebo saying the federal government has no interest in building roads really has a lot of people really concerned about that direction by the federal government.

00:46:10.040 Yeah, and despite the pseudo-backtrack on that, I think it does show a pretty big sense of misunderstanding how life is in Alberta.

00:46:18.200 I mean, certainly in cities like Calgary and Edmonton, you have mass transit systems.

00:46:22.460 People are able to use those, but not year-round in some cases.

00:46:26.180 And then you also look at rural Alberta, where you can't just say, well, we don't need the road.

00:46:30.480 And that just seems to be an utter mismatch here.

00:46:33.100 And is it a gaffe or is it accidental honesty?

00:46:36.500 I think it's just it's a lack of understanding of how rural Alberta truly is.

00:46:40.880 This specific road and so many in Alberta, it's there's one way in and out for people that live in that community.

00:46:47.640 And obviously they had a bad forest fire last year.

00:46:50.680 So even on safety egress, it's not just a smooth way to get to town or get to the hospital or doctor or or get to school.

00:46:57.680 But it's it's a life or death situation of being able to, in the case of a wildfire, to have evacuation.

00:47:03.440 It's a gravel road that needs to be paved.

00:47:05.200 So the dust that kicks up and the unsafety or the lack of safety on this road because it hasn't been hasn't been repaved is a huge issue for that area.

00:47:14.220 And I think people just don't understand because in towns and cities, there's lots of ways to get around.

00:47:18.800 But when there's one way in and out, I just think the federal government doesn't understand that in rural Alberta.

00:47:23.100 I know there's obviously been a fair bit of difficulty with your government and Stephen Gilbeau in particular for a range of issues.

00:47:30.120 Have you found with your federal counterparting on the transport file that there's at least been a fairly constructive relationship?

00:47:36.660 Or has it really been like pulling teeth to get anything, any cooperation from the feds?

00:47:40.760 Well, I've said this at federal provincial territorial meetings before.

00:47:43.740 If Alberta was a hockey team when it came to transportation and our power play was the National Trade Corridor Fund, which has been a huge, huge advantage to have within the country, Alberta is zero for nine.

00:47:55.700 So if that was our power play, that would be a pretty bad power play.

00:47:58.440 And I think people would ask lots of questions about what's going on.

00:48:01.080 So that's something that we're going to continue to advocate for.

00:48:03.680 I've met with Minister Rodriguez to really push the renewal of that National Trade Corridor Fund because it's been fully allocated, though, even though there's a couple of years left on it.

00:48:12.900 So we want to make sure that Alberta, we at least get our money back when it comes to the transfers that we give to the federal government.

00:48:18.400 When you talk about national trade, I mean, it's important to note that there are still barriers that exist on interprovincial trade,

00:48:24.060 which people don't really realize are front and centre.

00:48:26.380 And I was wondering if you had anything on that that you'd like to see some movement on.

00:48:29.740 So we actually, before our election in Alberta, we signed an agreement with Saskatchewan and Manitoba,

00:48:35.500 we call it our Prairie MOU, to work on harmonising our capital plans on road projects that come to the border.

00:48:42.460 as well as look at regulation that we can try to eliminate the borders across our provinces

00:48:48.640 to make sure that it's easy for big nation-building projects to finally be built again,

00:48:52.500 to kind of de-risk politically the approval process.

00:48:55.240 So that actually spawned on work with B.C., the three prairie provinces,

00:48:59.040 and the three territories to work together on a similar type of agreement.

00:49:02.520 We'd love to see the federal government at those talks,

00:49:05.580 because obviously national trade and interprovincial trade is a federal jurisdiction.

00:49:09.540 But we're not waiting for the federal government to do that.

00:49:11.700 In Alberta, we're taking the lead, and we'll see what happens on a lot of these negotiations that we're having with other provinces.

00:49:17.880 It's funny you mention that.

00:49:18.840 I mean, there have been a lot of issues where we've seen, especially between Alberta, Saskatchewan,

00:49:22.920 a lot of cooperation on areas where the federal government is either not present or is working against what you guys want.

00:49:29.400 And certainly on some issues, like the carbon tax, you have provincial government saying,

00:49:33.220 hey, we want a meeting, and the federal government not wanting to grant that.

00:49:36.460 Are you able to do what you're trying to do without the federal government?

00:49:39.800 Do you have an option to really do an end run around the feds?

00:49:42.400 Are you really at their mercy on some of this?

00:49:44.240 Well, obviously, with the Constitution, we have a lot of latitude to do what we need to do to promote Alberta and to protect and make sure that our economy is strong.

00:49:54.020 But it's always great to have strength in numbers, whether it's Saskatchewan, Manitoba, B.C., Quebec, Ontario, the maritime provinces,

00:50:02.280 to be able to join forces to say, you know, the federal government has a role to be able to partner with provinces on certain issues.

00:50:08.400 but the federal government should stay in their lane at the end of the day minister thank you

00:50:12.280 awesome thank you so much appreciate it the federal government should stay in its lane that's

00:50:17.920 basically i mean if i ever run for office that's like the campaign slogan right there federal

00:50:21.980 government should stay in its lane and that's true i mean if you're a federal politician you

00:50:25.460 shouldn't want to go you'll have enough to do without having to go outside your lane and if

00:50:29.760 you're a provincial politician you need to with just an iron fist respect and demand respect for

00:50:36.400 jurisdiction. That is what the Federalist Project is based on. And I think it's basically been

00:50:41.660 a failure on Justin Trudeau's part. So that does it for us for today. We'll have my interview with

00:50:47.120 Premier Blaine Higgs later this week, as well as some of the other chats we had with some

00:50:50.780 fascinating people on the sidelines of the Canada Strong and Free Network Conference. So do stay

00:50:55.580 tuned for that. Let me know what you think in the comments. And please subscribe to True North. We

00:51:00.700 love to hear from you. We love to know that you are in our corner, especially with all of the

00:51:05.060 forces working against us with big tech and government censorship so thank you god bless

00:51:09.680 and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show

00:51:14.140 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

00:51:35.060 We'll be right back.

00:52:05.060 We'll be right back.

Juno News - April 15, 2024

Is Jagmeet Singh backtracking on carbon tax support？

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