Juno News - Why did Alberta Premier Jason Kenney get ousted？

00:00:00.000 Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has announced his intention to resign as Premier and Leader of the United Conservative Party in Alberta.

00:00:07.420 So what is next for Conservatives in that province? I'm joined by Professor Ted Morton on the show to discuss.

00:00:12.880 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:14.780 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the program.

00:00:30.380 So as you know, we covered the news event last week that Premier Jason Kenney has decided to step down after a leadership review that let's just say came in unfavorably for the Premier.

00:00:40.840 He seemed to be caught a little bit off guard as did the people around him and he did what I think was the honourable thing, which is to step down to avoid future division in the party.

00:00:51.640 On the whole, I think it is a bad thing for Alberta that Jason Kenney did not succeed in this leadership review.

00:00:58.120 I don't agree with the idea behind the leadership review in the first place, but as I disclosed on the show, I'm not exactly a neutral observer.

00:01:05.320 I once worked for Jason Kenney and he remains a friend, but I can try to take a step back and give an analysis of why I think he managed to lose control and why he lost.

00:01:17.900 And I think it's important for Conservatives and for Canadians to understand those reasons and not to draw the wrong conclusions.

00:01:25.180 Unfortunately, I think a lot of what's going on in the media right now are people drawing the wrong conclusions, saying that this was some kind of a populist uprising, that it was a bad kind of populism and sort of blaming the people for the fact that Jason is no longer the Premier of the province.

00:01:41.300 I think that the responsibility lands on the Premier's shoulders and on his desk, the people around him.

00:01:46.600 There were a number of shortcomings.

00:01:48.260 I think the way that they handled COVID was wrong.

00:01:50.600 I think the way that they communicated their policies wasn't the right way.

00:01:55.360 And I think that there are a lot of important lessons that should be learned for Conservatives going forward.

00:02:00.320 So as I mentioned, I wanted to bring in someone who is a very astute observer of all things Alberta, someone who's very knowledgeable on everything to do with Alberta.

00:02:09.580 I'm talking about Professor Ted Morton.

00:02:12.060 So Ted Morton is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Calgary.

00:02:15.540 He's a former Progressive Conservative member of the Legislature Assembly in Alberta, and he is the author of several books.

00:02:23.620 His latest book co-authored is called Moment of Truth, How to Think About the Future of Canadian Politics.

00:02:29.700 So, Ted, thank you so much for joining the show.

00:02:32.520 Hello, Candace. Good to be with you again.

00:02:35.300 So let's just start off with the first obvious question.

00:02:38.060 What happened?

00:02:39.080 Why do you think that Jason Kenney lost the confidence of his party?

00:02:42.900 Well, there's no question that the COVID pandemic was the main reason.

00:02:50.160 I think most incumbents on both sides of the border had trouble dealing with it and striking a balance that was acceptable to the voters.

00:03:00.660 In Alberta, I think it was particularly hard for a Conservative Premier, given the composition of the United Conservative Party.

00:03:09.120 Certainly, there's a large libertarian wing, which did not want the lockdowns.

00:03:15.580 There's also a large, I'd call it, older urban wing, and older people, of course, were more vulnerable, who wanted more lockdown.

00:03:26.460 I think Jason tried to play it down the middle.

00:03:28.440 And normally in politics, playing down the middle is not a bad strategy.

00:03:33.020 But in this case, the middle was only about 20 or 30 percent, and the other 60 or 70 percent were on the two wings.

00:03:39.720 So it didn't work.

00:03:41.220 And he was dealt some pretty bad cards.

00:03:44.000 And a couple he didn't play very well, but it was, I think, most unfortunate.

00:03:48.780 Like you, I'm not neutral.

00:03:50.780 I'm an old friend of Jason's and was very happy to see him become the Premier of Alberta.

00:03:55.200 Well, one of the things that I heard a lot from True North supporters in our audience was wondering why no one in Canada did what Ron DeSantis did, the governor of Florida,

00:04:07.120 where he sort of just went against the conventional wisdom that was being pushed by the elites and said, you know, in Florida, we're going to do things differently.

00:04:14.460 We're not going to lock kids out of school.

00:04:16.920 We're not going to force people to wear masks.

00:04:18.380 And he just had a totally different approach.

00:04:19.980 I think a lot of conservatives in Canada wished that there was a premier in Canada that was willing to do that.

00:04:25.580 Jason Kenney seemed to potentially be well positioned to do that.

00:04:30.120 And at one point, there was some hope, right?

00:04:31.820 He came out really firmly against the idea of a vaccine passport.

00:04:36.040 This was back in July.

00:04:37.340 And then by September, he had changed his tune.

00:04:40.740 Florida also has an older than average population, a large elderly constituency.

00:04:45.960 And yet Ron DeSantis managed to sort of thread that needle more successfully.

00:04:51.760 Do you think that Jason was misguided in not trying to go down that path?

00:04:56.600 Or do you think that that would have not been a good strategy in Canada?

00:05:01.020 At least in Alberta, I think that would have backfired just as badly as going down the middle did for him in the cities.

00:05:08.180 And again, remember, Calgary and Edmonton, that's over half the population.

00:05:12.840 And then you have four or five other large cities, medium-sized cities that you're up to 85% of the population.

00:05:20.380 So it's not just Cowboy, Alberta.

00:05:24.600 It was very hard.

00:05:25.780 The lockdowns were very hard in the rural areas, in the small towns, because of their fewer services there to begin with.

00:05:32.900 And when they suddenly are locked down or restricted, it was very, very difficult.

00:05:36.360 And so there was a populist element to it.

00:05:40.040 But again, I think if you look at the political demographics of Alberta, there was no, there wasn't the path that DeSantis took in Florida wasn't there for Jason.

00:05:52.920 So do you think that Alberta, I mean, it's interesting.

00:05:55.580 I noticed that you did an interview with the Calgary Herald.

00:05:58.180 You said that Kenny did what was best for the party in stepping down.

00:06:01.320 And you said that it kind of wipes the slate clean and that the prospects for the party are good.

00:06:07.860 I sort of saw the opposite because I see a party that's deeply divided, right?

00:06:11.540 You have 51% versus 48.5% on the other side.

00:06:15.420 I almost see the old divisions of the PC Wild Rose coming back out.

00:06:21.060 Do you think the party is going to stay united?

00:06:24.240 Or do you think that it's going to fracture back along old lines?

00:06:29.020 I think the division was as much personal as ideological.

00:06:34.680 I said Jason drew some bad cards, but some of the cards he didn't play very well either.

00:06:40.360 And Jason's political skills and political style, I think, was developed and honed in Ottawa.

00:06:51.460 And a style that works in Ottawa doesn't work and did not work for him in Alberta.

00:06:59.620 And so I think the division was more personal than ideological.

00:07:04.540 I think the candidates, plus, hopefully for all of us, the pandemic is moving into the background, will no longer be front and center.

00:07:16.780 I mean, basically, Jason was only in office for less than a year when all of a sudden this happened, and it pushed all the other issues off the agenda.

00:07:26.460 So, at least in the last 12 months, the Alberta budget is balanced again, investments coming back, employment's rising, a lot of positive things happening in Alberta, plus some interesting legislation passed by Jason, things that he promised to do, and then followed through on those promises.

00:07:50.240 So, I tend to be optimistic.

00:07:54.260 I like to fish and hunt.

00:07:55.960 Fishermen are always optimistic.

00:07:58.060 But I think a lot of the division was personal, and I think there will be positive things going forward, and that the candidates, there'll be disagreements, but I'm optimistic.

00:08:10.920 One of the criticisms I've seen, even from conservative writers, is in the media, people coming out, people who are long critics of Jason Kenney first coming out saying, you know, we respect him and we like him.

00:08:25.300 But then on the other side, you have conservative analysts really pointing to the conservative base and saying that the problem was this populist spirit in Alberta, that Albertans are ungovernable, that the rise of the oppositional mindset is to blame.

00:08:41.740 I'm wondering if you subscribe to this idea that conservatives have become angry and oppositional, and that's why he's come down.

00:08:52.360 Does any of the blame fall on the conservative base, or would you prefer to push blame more towards Kenny himself and the people around him?

00:09:01.760 Well, that oppositionist mentality that you've just described is definitely there in the conservative side of Alberta.

00:09:13.140 But I think it's a minority position, and I don't think it will play a role in the leadership race.

00:09:21.900 But I think any candidate that tries to focus, just cultivate that group, will not be successful.

00:09:33.000 Right. I see what you're saying.

00:09:35.360 One of the other things that's interesting, I mean, you would never see a leadership review of a sitting government official in other parties, in other places in the country.

00:09:46.820 Like, you know, usually a leadership review would just be for a candidate who lost an election, not someone who brought in a historic majority government.

00:09:58.100 And so, you know, considering what Jason Kenney did to, you know, first unite the two, well, first become leader of the PPC party, vote, unite these two parties, then run again for the leader of that party, then run in a general election.

00:10:10.580 I mean, he did so much for conservatives and for the province of Alberta.

00:10:16.160 Even just the idea of why there would be a leadership review in the first place confuses a lot of people, especially in Ontario, who might not be super familiar with this sort of political culture in Alberta.

00:10:27.020 So I'm wondering if you could maybe help us understand why we were in this position where he was getting a review, even though he was a sitting premier with a majority government.

00:10:34.800 It's highly unusual, but it wouldn't have happened unless Jason agreed to it.

00:10:39.380 And I think Jason felt that it had just become the divisions, both within the party and within the caucus, that we've gotten to the point where it was becoming difficult to govern.

00:10:49.260 And he still has another year, the party has another year to govern.

00:10:53.040 So I think he hoped and he was optimistic.

00:10:55.680 He was surprised by the results.

00:10:57.400 I think he was quite confident that he'd be above 60%, which would have been enough to continue.

00:11:04.200 And that's what he wanted.

00:11:05.440 He was tired of all the kind of squawking and infighting.

00:11:10.440 He felt with a 60% support rating, they could move forward.

00:11:15.940 And as I said, there are a lot of good things happening in Alberta right now.

00:11:19.900 He could take credit for that and be well positioned to win the next election.

00:11:24.040 Didn't happen.

00:11:25.240 It's too bad.

00:11:26.100 So what's the party left with?

00:11:28.540 I know Danielle Smith, the former leader of the Wildrose Party, has indicated she wants to run.

00:11:33.240 Brian Jean, another former leader of the Wildrose Party, has indicated that he wants to run.

00:11:39.300 What do you see happening with the party and its leadership at this point?

00:11:43.820 I think there'll be a pretty vigorous leadership race.

00:11:46.900 Those are the two obvious candidates.

00:11:49.060 But Minister Taves, the finance minister, I'm quite certain will be a candidate.

00:11:55.400 He's done a very good job under very difficult circumstances for the past three and a half years.

00:12:02.200 And he has a base and he has the advantage of sort of avoiding the Calgary-Edmonton rivalries, not from either city.

00:12:15.340 And so, and there'll be some other candidates as well.

00:12:19.180 And so, do you see whoever wins, whichever sort of background they have, having the ability to keep this party, this juggernaut of very different kinds of conservatives and different kinds of Albertans, rural, urban, you know, there's lots written about the sort of changing demographics of Alberta.

00:12:37.660 Do you think that whoever the next leader will have, will have a difficult time keeping this party together?

00:12:43.700 Well, I hope not.

00:12:45.620 And I think not.

00:12:47.220 Maybe that's more hope than thought.

00:12:50.700 But I think, again, the response to COVID and the pandemic was very, very difficult for, I think, any government.

00:13:00.100 It's particularly difficult for a conservative government.

00:13:02.560 It was particularly difficult for an Alberta conservative government because of the tensions between the libertarian wing and the, well, certainly the older and more urban wing that wanted, was hoping for protection from lockdowns.

00:13:20.240 I think that's behind us now.

00:13:22.880 Let's all hope it's behind us.

00:13:24.160 And so, I'm optimistic that the candidates we've just identified can move past that, talk about the positive things they've done within Alberta in terms of renewing the economy, getting the budget under control, but also pick up what Jason started but then dropped, which is the whole fair deal panel, the panel that he struck Albertan.

00:13:49.240 We had the referendum on equalization, abolishing equalization last fall, over 60% voted for that, but then nothing, Jason did nothing with it.

00:14:00.220 And I understand he felt that it was not the right time because of COVID and public health issues.

00:14:07.660 If those are behind us, I'm expecting what I'm certainly looking for in the leadership race or which one of these individuals will step forward and say, yes, I will pick up the fair deal panel report, the so-called Alberta agenda, which I was part of, good grief, almost 25 years ago.

00:14:31.100 So, the inside joke is we're right, our timing just was really bad.

00:14:35.800 So, anyhow, I'm looking forward to that.

00:14:38.000 And I actually think there's potential with the right leader to find allies in, not just in Saskatchewan, but possibly British Columbia, and I hope in Ontario as well.

00:14:48.360 Another issue that Jason Kenney sort of spearheaded was the challenge to Bill C-69, the so-called No More Pipelines Bill, that required all kinds of sociological reviews in order to get major infrastructures deals passed.

00:15:07.400 We know that the Alberta court just ruled that it was unconstitutional, that'll probably get further challenged.

00:15:14.420 So, do you think that Jason Kenney's departure will hurt this specific challenge and if it will hurt the energy sector more broadly?

00:15:25.020 Well, that's an important question, and there's no easy answer to that.

00:15:29.560 Very significant, the Alberta Court of Appeal, I think was a four-to-one decision as well, so strongly decision, said this is simply an invasion of provincial jurisdiction.

00:15:42.660 Certainly in Alberta, back when the Constitution Act was done in 1982, for Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, but the other Western premiers as well, and for Quebec, Section 92A, which very explicitly reasserts, reaffirms, and expands provincial control, provincial responsibility for the development of natural resources, that was central.

00:16:10.040 Now, Lougheed and the others would not have agreed to the Charter of Rights and all that other, everything else that happened, that if there had not been that very strong and explicit affirmation of provincial jurisdiction over the development of natural resources.

00:16:26.340 Now, since 2015 under Trudeau, that's been under constant attack, and very much to the detriment of the economies and the people and the families in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

00:16:38.960 Right now, because of the terrible things that have happened in the Ukraine and the global oil shortage, prices are up again, and so people are going back to work.

00:16:48.880 But again, I think that's a change that makes me optimistic, not for Alberta, but for Canada.

00:16:53.780 Suddenly, energy security is front and center, not just for Canada and the United States, but for Western Europe, for the whole world.

00:17:00.500 And Canada, and specifically Alberta and Saskatchewan, are very well positioned to play a very important role in the energy security, the balancing of climate change concerns with energy security.

00:17:13.800 Energy security was completely ignored for the past decade, and we're paying the price for it now, particularly Europe's paying the price.

00:17:20.760 They're not going to forget this time, and so again, that's an opportunity, not just for Alberta, but I think for all of Canada, and I think conservative leaders, not just in Alberta, we are, conservatives are the party of opportunity, of free enterprise, and so forth.

00:17:39.440 So that's another reason I'm trying to be optimistic going forward.

00:17:44.700 Well, that's great. I think you're right that energy security has come to the forefront, but I still feel a little skeptical of the idea that, you know, a government like the Trudeau government that would pass a bill like C-69, to me, that's a red flag to any investors.

00:17:57.920 I mean, you know that the people in charge have openly said, you know, they're all gathering at the World Economic Forum right now, talking about how they want to transition away from energy.

00:18:06.200 They don't want oil and gas to be a necessity in the future.

00:18:10.340 So if you're a company, why would you put your investment into building a project that may take five, ten years to get off the ground for a commodity that the government and officials and elites openly say they don't want anything to do with it,

00:18:26.840 and they're creating legislation to make sure that we're not reliant on it in the future.

00:18:33.120 Do you think that Canada can still attract investment?

00:18:36.940 Do you think that businesses, and I'm talking about big oil companies, would still be willing to come to Canada to build this kind of critical infrastructure,

00:18:44.120 given the rhetoric that we still hear from the people in charge?

00:18:47.860 Well, we'll see.

00:18:49.200 And the question is, who are going to be the people in charge?

00:18:51.940 Unfortunately, we're probably stuck with Justin and his NDP friends now for another three and a half years.

00:18:59.580 That's bad, but with new leadership out of Alberta, the possibility, it'll be interesting to see what, I'm assuming Ford is going to win in Ontario,

00:19:13.320 and that I would hope he would step forward on the energy file, because Ontario benefits very much from a strong Alberta, Western Canadian energy sector.

00:19:25.580 Even Quebec, you might have seen that, ironically, Premier Kenney and several of his ministers were in Washington just the week before the leadership review in front of a Senate Energy Committee,

00:19:39.240 but there were also representatives from Quebec there and the federal government talking about U.S.-Canada cooperation on the energy front.

00:19:49.060 And again, 90% of the talk was about energy security, only 10% was about climate change and renewables.

00:19:58.420 So I think there's a new reality out there.

00:20:02.120 I think people have heard that everyone's hoping that the woke will wake up, right, now that we've seen what's not just what's happened to the Ukraine,

00:20:13.620 but what the position that's put Europe in, where they're basically blackmailed by Russia because they've become dependent on Russian oil and gas.

00:20:22.780 We don't want, Canada doesn't want that, the U.S. doesn't want that, Western Europe doesn't want it, most of Asia doesn't want it.

00:20:32.440 So there's, what happened in the Ukraine isn't just going to affect the Ukraine, Russia, and Europe, it's going to affect the whole world.

00:20:40.680 And energy security is going to be front and center for at least the next decade, I think on a par with climate change.

00:20:47.460 And, well, we'll see.

00:20:48.920 In the end, voters will decide.

00:20:51.060 But with $5 gas, fertilizers at all-time high, wheat prices hit a new historical high last week, food is very expensive.

00:21:01.880 But I think you could see a lot of political changes on both sides of the border and electing parties and leaders who are going to say energy security and getting the price of energy back into affordable realm is a priority.

00:21:17.980 Absolutely, it should be.

00:21:18.880 Final question about Jason Kenney, and that is that I think when he was running for leader and he was trying to establish himself as someone who was firmly on the side of Albertans,

00:21:32.960 one of the things, the expectations that Albertans had was that he was really going to fight Justin Trudeau, he was going to demand more of a fair deal.

00:21:41.960 And I think people thought that there would be more of an adversarial relationship.

00:21:45.200 I think a lot of people in Alberta hoped that there would be more of an adversarial relationship.

00:21:48.880 That didn't really come to fruition.

00:21:50.980 I think Jason tried to be much more diplomatic to Trudeau, and I think that angered many conservatives.

00:21:56.880 I'm wondering if you can comment on whether you think that was a strategic mistake and whether you think that Kenney was able to have an influence on Trudeau sort of behind the scenes.

00:22:07.520 No, I think you're absolutely right that the fact that he did not follow through on not just the campaign promises, he started.

00:22:18.140 I mean, fair deal panel, that was the follow through, but then nothing happened after the fair deal panel.

00:22:24.160 We did have the referendum on equalization, but then that was a card that certainly I expected him and many others expected him to play in Ottawa.

00:22:32.520 We didn't hear anything about that after October.

00:22:35.260 So, yes, that contributed to his unpopularity among a large sector of the Conservative Party.

00:22:47.220 But again, he had dealt some bad cards.

00:22:51.760 If he had continued down that path on the fair deal and those issues, provincial policing, pension plan, and all of that, in the middle of COVID, that would not have played well, I think, certainly in the urban areas.

00:23:07.460 So, again, my optimism is that with that issue now off to the side, the next leader with strong support from Alberta and strong support from other parts of Canada is going to make energy security a key issue.

00:23:24.360 And remember, Alberta has, Canada has the third largest reserves in the world, and the first and second are in places that nobody wants to do business with.

00:23:34.880 It certainly wouldn't be their first choice to do business with OPEC in the Middle East.

00:23:41.500 That's a good point as well.

00:23:43.840 You mentioned a few minutes ago about how you don't think that people in Alberta, Premier, former Premier Lougheed, would have even signed on to the charter had they known some of the things that were going to play out.

00:23:56.480 You had a pretty devastating piece in the National Post a few weeks ago about the charter.

00:24:01.380 We know that we just celebrated the 40th anniversary.

00:24:04.440 And I wanted to ask you about it while I have you.

00:24:06.840 You wrote, after 40 years, the charter is still one of the worst bargains in Canadian history.

00:24:13.040 So I'm wondering if you can explain to the viewers why you don't have a lot of faith in that document.

00:24:19.620 I think one of the cornerstones of Canada is our federal structure, which allows, we're this huge country, 10 different provinces plus the territories, huge, huge country.

00:24:36.840 Relatively small population and the provinces are all different.

00:24:42.000 And the question is, you know, do you want to be governed by people who live and work in your province, who go to the capital, or do you want to be governed by people that you've never heard of, they've never heard of you, they live in Ottawa.

00:24:55.200 Again, at the risk of being politically incorrect, at least for those of us in the West, everybody in Ottawa in the bureaucracy there is bilingual, we're not very bilingual out West.

00:25:06.840 Federalism, the ability for the different provinces to be self-governing, I think, has been a big part of the success of Canada.

00:25:15.560 The charter changed that, and Trudeau did it on purpose, that he brought in a set of new rules enforced by, ultimately by one body, the Supreme Court of Canada, which the prime minister gets to make all the appointments to.

00:25:32.280 Six of the nine judges come, three from Quebec, three from Ontario, appointed by the prime minister.

00:25:38.700 They make the rules now, and now, you know, I was around in the 80s when this happened.

00:25:46.580 Historically, the Supreme Court of Canada avoided policymaking and judicial activism.

00:25:51.660 There was a deference to the elected governments, but that all changed in the first decade.

00:25:56.960 It hasn't stopped now.

00:25:58.040 So, in effect, what the charter has become is what I said in the piece, that is disallowance in disguise.

00:26:07.600 Remember, again, at Confederation in 1867, the MacDonald wing of the founders wanted a much, much stronger central government, and they gave these powers of disallowance and reservation to the federal government.

00:26:21.880 Within 30 years, those fell into disallowance, because they were simply inconsistent with the nature of Canada, our diversity, our size, and everything else.

00:26:32.700 And so, this ability for Ottawa to reach out and veto provincial legislation they don't like was taken away.

00:26:40.200 Unfortunately, the charter has brought that back, because the judges have interpreted the charter in such a loose way, they can basically get any conclusion they want out of almost every charter case.

00:26:55.260 And, of course, then there's the Court Challenges Program, which I mentioned, which funds the groups that liberals like, who want legislation, liberal legislation.

00:27:04.260 To Stephen Harper's credit, he defunded, he stopped funding the Court Challenges Program, but as soon as Trudeau came back in, he started the funding again.

00:27:13.880 So, the liberals fund the groups on the left, the woke group, the identity politics people, the people who can't win, can't win these political victories through elections, provincially.

00:27:29.140 But the Court Challenges Program gives them the money, they go to the court, they go to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has been appointed by prime ministers, and they get the policy result they want.

00:27:40.780 So, from a point of view of federalism, it's really disallowance and disguise, and it's been, again, a really bad deal for those of us who think that all Canadians are best served if the decisions we have to live with are made by people in the provincial capital who come from our neighborhoods, who understand our problems,

00:28:03.160 who know about shortage of schools, who know about shortage of schools, water issues, traffic issues, employment issues, job issues, housing issues, not people in Ottawa, who've certainly, again, out west, people who've never even been out west.

00:28:20.440 They're, and I'm including in this both the bureaucrats and the Supreme Court judges.

00:28:25.980 That's, that's, Canada did better before that, I think we can do better again, and I'm hoping with, well, we haven't talked about the federal leadership race, conservative party leader, but I'm certainly hoping some of the candidates there will embrace the idea of a more decentralized Canada going forward.

00:28:49.220 Well, so, I recently had Brian Peckford on the show, and he was obviously one of the signatories, a former premier of Newfoundland, and he, he criticized your piece in the National Post with a letter to the editor.

00:29:03.220 And the argument that he made on the show, I don't want to misquote him or anything, but he basically said that the, the letter of the charter, the, the words written in the charter are not being properly applied at this point.

00:29:15.220 He, he pointed out a few key phrases that he felt were being, that the reason that the charter is sort of in disarray and it's not upholding our liberties in the way it should is because of the lack of adherence to what was, what was intended in the charter.

00:29:32.120 And, and, and you, you talked about it in your piece a little bit about how the federal cabinet chooses the Supreme Court.

00:29:36.700 You know, you, you mentioned how these, these, these Supreme Court justices don't understand Alberta.

00:29:40.680 They, many of them haven't even been to Alberta.

00:29:43.160 In the U.S., there's a culture of, you know, a Republican president specifically appointing conservative judges who will have a more literal reading of the, of the Constitution to ensure that, that, that, that the conservative values are upheld.

00:29:57.980 You know, you mentioned Stephen Harper and how he, he eliminated this program and Trudeau brought it back in.

00:30:03.440 One of the criticisms I have heard of, of Harper is that he didn't appoint conservative justices and that, that we, if, if we had that culture of, of making sure that the people that conservative governments appoint to the bench are going to have a more literal reading of the charter, it might be better.

00:30:18.920 The charter itself isn't, isn't that bad.

00:30:20.460 It's just the way it's been interpreted.

00:30:21.820 I wonder if you can comment on that.

00:30:23.180 I think one weakness of the Harper decade was that he did not use to full advantage his appointment power of the Supreme Court.

00:30:35.120 And there's some explanations for that.

00:30:38.720 More generally, back to Peckford's letter, he's right.

00:30:43.900 The premiers, the provincial premiers, of which he was an important player, they put in the notwithstanding clause.

00:30:50.140 The notwithstanding clause allows the provincial government or the federal government to say, if the court makes a decision striking down one of their laws, that they think the decision is either wrong as a matter of legal interpretation or an unacceptable policy, you use the notwithstanding clause and the decision still rests with the provincial government.

00:31:10.200 But that was there, but that was there, but that was there, section 92A, not in the charter, but also part of the package, provincial control over natural resource.

00:31:23.360 That's all there, but it's been watered down and distorted by, I would argue, I would agree with him, judicial misinterpretation.

00:31:32.380 So, I guess you could say he's right that what's happened in the 40 years since 1982 is because of a misinterpretation.

00:31:44.800 But I guess my comeback would be, yeah, that's the reality we're living with and it's been bad.

00:31:50.620 And going forward, we have to deal with that reality and fight to change it and get back to a different types of judges on the court.

00:32:01.720 We haven't talked about that.

00:32:02.800 But also provincial premiers that, and hopefully a prime minister, doesn't think all, every problem has to be solved in Ottawa.

00:32:13.920 You know, the one size fits all approach that the liberals and the NDP seem to like.

00:32:19.480 Right, Ted, well, I appreciate your time.

00:32:21.080 Final question for you, since you mentioned it.

00:32:22.940 What are your thoughts on the conservative leadership race?

00:32:25.660 As an Albertan, do you feel like Alberta issues are being properly addressed?

00:32:29.840 And do you have hope with this batch of candidates that one of them will be able to be Justin Trudeau?

00:32:35.960 I'd like to think so.

00:32:37.380 I think it would be no surprise to you or your listeners that my favorite is Pierre.

00:32:44.780 I've known him for a long time and have appreciated his outspokenness as a member of parliament.

00:32:52.920 And so I'll be supporting him in the leadership campaign as well.

00:32:57.440 But I think he'll be a voice for energy security.

00:33:01.880 I think they all will.

00:33:02.980 I don't think that I'd be surprised if only Pierre is strong on that issue.

00:33:12.180 And I think provincial elections, federal elections, both sides of the border, Europe.

00:33:18.580 I think, remember, voters are also consumers and homeowners and housebuyers.

00:33:25.600 And right now, consumers are getting hosed badly, particularly your generation, the younger generation.

00:33:32.200 People like me, hell, I get a CPP check now.

00:33:35.060 I got a pension.

00:33:35.980 You know, I'm OK.

00:33:37.520 And I bought a house, you know, for under $150,000 in Calgary in 1982.

00:33:44.640 I sold it three years ago for almost a million dollars.

00:33:48.700 So voters are consumers and particularly your generation, I'm optimistic, are going to say what party is going to build a stronger, more reliable, forward-looking economy for myself and my kids.

00:34:03.300 And I'd like to think that's going to be a conservative, not a conservative party in Alberta and the Conservative Party of Canada in Ottawa.

00:34:14.100 OK, well.

00:34:15.460 Hopefully with Pierre, but I'll support whoever wins.

00:34:19.280 Well, I think that's a very optimistic tone to leave the interview on, Ted.

00:34:24.140 I really appreciate your time.

00:34:24.920 I forgot to mention you're the former Minister of Energy in Alberta and the former Finance Minister as well.

00:34:30.600 So we really appreciate your time.

00:34:32.280 I have all the scars to show for it.

00:34:36.380 Live to tell about it.

00:34:37.820 All right.

00:34:38.180 That's Dr. Ted Morton.

00:34:39.180 Thank you so much for joining us.

00:34:40.400 I'm Candice Malcolm.

00:34:41.140 And this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

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Juno News - May 26, 2022

Why did Alberta Premier Jason Kenney get ousted？

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