00:00:00.000Today we'll hear the other side of the story in the world of conservative politics in Alberta.
00:00:04.500I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:16.900Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the program.
00:00:19.500So last week, as you probably saw, you may recall we had Brad Tennant on the show.
00:00:23.660Brad is a former president of the United Conservative Party in Alberta.
00:00:26.800He's also a former senior campaigner and staffer for Premier Jason Kenney.
00:00:31.400And we had him on to talk about the situation in Alberta, the leadership review against the Premier and why he finds himself in that position.
00:00:38.680So as you may expect, Brad defended Premier Kenney and predicted that he will easily survive the upcoming leadership vote that is happening in Alberta.
00:00:47.280Well, today we wanted to revisit that topic, but also to hear the other side of the story in Alberta.
00:00:52.940So also coinciding with that interview, last week, I think it was the next day, a familiar face re-emerged into Alberta politics, announcing her intention to regain a seat in the Alberta legislature.
00:01:04.220And if Jason Kenney is indeed ousted as leader of the party in this leadership review, she has announced her intention to run as leader of the party.
00:01:11.720Of course, I'm talking about Danielle Smith.
00:04:55.980Like, so much of the COVID policy just makes no sense.
00:04:58.360I was talking to a friend and her parents live in Ecuador.
00:05:01.220And they were just told to get the first vaccine available.
00:05:04.140And the vaccine that they took was the Russian vaccine.
00:05:06.220But that doesn't allow them to travel.
00:05:07.820So they're protected, in theory, against COVID, even though, as we know, so many people are vaccinated.
00:05:13.680But they can't come to Canada to visit their daughter and their granddaughter because the vaccine that they took doesn't align with our standards.
00:05:21.880And so many people are stuck in the situation.
00:05:24.220Danielle, you raise a good point about how if the U.S. is actually facing food shortages or the threat of that, that could create a huge opportunity for Alberta.
00:05:33.980Well, I'll just revisit quickly the interview that I did with Brad, because we talked about the decision that was made by the UCP brass to change the leadership review vote against the premier from in-person, as it was scheduled to be in Red Deer, to a mail-in ballot.
00:05:50.800And so when that change happened, I know a lot of people were sort of crying foul, like, you know, the ability of transparency and how it's going to work logistically.
00:05:57.920Brad made the claim that having that many people, I think there was 13,000 people who registered to vote and probably many more would register in the weeks leading up to it, would have just been impossible, like, even just in terms of finding parking to go into the convention center.
00:06:12.560And so he claimed that there was the only option was to go to this mail-in ballot.
00:06:16.420So I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond to that and let us know what your thoughts on that rationale is.
00:06:22.560Well, I think the premier knew he'd lose if he ended up going into that in-person vote.
00:06:27.460He was recorded on tape saying that normal leadership reviews, people roll in the day after having had a bender and they just mark their ballot and there's a few grumpy people and then it's really just a matter of routine.
00:06:39.000But this clearly is not a matter of routine to have this many people sign up, prepared to pay $100 and drive multiple hours to get to a single voting station.
00:07:03.120So because they were charging, they could have hired people to man the stations and had multiple ballot stations.
00:07:08.260So be that as it may, what the constituency presidents wanted from the beginning was to have a vote in every single constituency so that it would be made accessible.
00:07:16.320And there were all kinds of reasons why the leader's office argued against it at that time.
00:07:20.420I think at a bare minimum, what they could have done is created ballot stations in eight of our major centers.
00:07:26.300We've got a population based in Fort McMurray, Grand Prairie, over in the Lloydminster Cold Lake area, Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary, and then, of course, in the south, and Red Deer in Medicine Hat and Lethbridge.
00:07:37.240And if they had allowed for 80 ballot stations, then they could have had more people be able to vote within a pretty quick driving distance.
00:07:46.540My main concern with mail-in ballots, because I've been through this before with the Wild Rose, is that it is fraught with problems.
00:07:54.080It's very difficult to get the ballots out in a timely way, marked and returned in a timely way.
00:08:00.320Because rural addresses are often different than their mailing addresses, sometimes things go awry, sometimes things don't show up, sometimes they get lost in the mail.
00:08:10.340I remember commiserating about this with Corey Morgan, who's in the media as well now, because he was in the office after the vote came in.
00:08:19.800And there were weeks, sometimes months, where errant ballots would turn up in the mail.
00:08:25.680So I'm really worried that you're going to see a lot of disenfranchisement of rural Albertans wanting to vote in this process.
00:08:32.680And I'm worried that it's not going to have the credibility if you end up with hundreds or even thousands of ballots coming in after the fact, people are going to question the result.
00:08:41.760And that's not what you want out of a leadership review.
00:08:43.820You want a solid mandate for the leaders so that they can have the confidence their party is behind them so that they can go forward.
00:08:50.200I just fear that this is going to be a bit of a schmozzle and they made a mistake.
00:08:53.500I was calling on them to return to an in-person balloting like I just described, but nobody asked me what I thought.
00:09:00.620So I guess we'll see whether or not my prediction of it being a bit of a mess turns out to be the case.
00:09:08.800Like there's already, living through COVID, there's a huge decrease in trust in institutions, just given the fact, like we were talking about, the fact that so many of the rules are contradictory.
00:09:17.300There's so many hypocritical people who are making the rules.
00:09:20.720When it comes to the U.S. presidential election in 2020, the fact that they allowed mail-in ballots in so many of the states led to this crazy situation.
00:09:29.540We didn't know the winner of the election for a week after election day.
00:09:33.000Usually it's determined that night or the next morning.
00:09:35.440And because of that, there's so many Americans who just don't trust the outcome of the election.
00:09:39.920They don't think that Biden actually won.
00:09:41.700And so you're right that changing the rules this close to the game will lead to a lot of people contesting the results.
00:09:49.760I want to talk about the sort of underlying issues, though, Danielle.
00:09:52.600Why do you think that so many people on the conservative side of the equation in Alberta are so dissatisfied with Jason Kenney?
00:10:01.860Why is it that so many people are calling for him to be removed as leader and a premier of the province?
00:10:06.700I think there's three main groups that are unhappy with the premier's leadership right now.
00:10:12.300And first of all, I should say it's certainly not uniform.
00:10:14.580I mean, I was a supporter of the premier up until very recently, up until he made the decision to bring in vaccine passports in September of 2021.
00:10:27.400But he has done tremendous work on attracting business to Alberta.
00:10:32.600He talks about some of these big name investments coming here, Dow Chemical with a net zero petrochemical plant.
00:10:40.160You've got Infosys, emphasis of growing tech sector investment that's happening in Calgary, Air Sprint, that is going to be a net zero hydrogen plant.
00:10:49.240We're going to be at the hub of a new hydrogen economy.
00:11:00.420But the problem was that there were just too many flip-flops on the issue of vaccination.
00:11:05.860I think people expected, especially because we're so close to the United States, that we would see Alberta, at the very least, follow the same lead that we're seeing in the red states in the U.S., principally Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem, but more recently, John Abbott and others, is that there's a different approach that you can take to protecting people.
00:11:26.660Ron DeSantis, back in the first summer, actually, he did do a lockdown, just like everyone else did in April.
00:11:33.600But then he started reaching out to the medical community and found the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay Bhattachary and Sinatra Gupta, Martin Koldorf and Scott Atlas.
00:11:43.780And he held press conferences to say he was switching gears, he was going to do focus protection, he was going to make treatment with monoclonal antibodies widely available, and he was going to allow for life to get back to normal.
00:11:56.080And so I was watching that saying, okay, Alberta's got to be the next one.
00:11:59.580And instead, just when we should have been going in that direction, we ended up being hammered with a vaccine passport.
00:12:06.460He tried to call it something else, a restriction exemption program, but it was a passport.
00:12:11.320Nonetheless, he closed down and kept targeting restaurants and gyms for some reason.
00:12:17.520He rejected the idea of focus protection.
00:12:21.180The kids have been in and out of school, in and out of sports, in and out of being able to have cohorts.
00:12:27.000And I think the big issue that we have now is that they won't recognize natural immunity.
00:12:32.700And by doing so, you've got people, I think he could have solved this problem.
00:12:36.120So especially now that we've had Delta and Omicron and this new variant that is just spreading like wildfire, if people are getting a natural level of antibody protection from exposure, then we should acknowledge that.
00:12:47.640We should be pressing the federal government to allow for that to be the ability to get on planes and to recognize that for cross-border traffic.
00:12:57.260So I think that the premier could do a lot more on that.
00:12:59.420The other part of the problem is that he just continued with the same language that we see out of Justin Trudeau, calling it initially a crisis of the unvaxxed and pitting vaccinated people against unvaccinated people when it was clearly not true.
00:13:14.720Everyone has the same potential risk of getting this virus.
00:13:18.780And so we need to really be moving to a test and treat type strategy, which they are doing in the United States.
00:13:24.340And I think it was unnecessary because unnecessary division.
00:13:26.920And when the premier says that the people opposing him are extremists and lunatics and bigots, he's not showing much empathy for what people have gone through over the last two years.
00:13:37.360There's a lot of people who are really hurt that they've had friendships break down and family break down and fighting with grandparents and siblings about whether or not to vaccinate kids and not being able to see their kids hockey game, not being able to travel, not being able to do their business.
00:13:55.120Some getting fired from work still like these are these are things that are perplexing to most Albertans.
00:14:01.120They never would have thought that that would happen here.
00:14:03.820And it was really only the freedom convoy that caused the premier to change direction.
00:14:09.580He was initially saying he wasn't going to end any of these restrictions till the end of March.
00:14:13.960And fortunately, with the pressure, he ended up switching gears.
00:14:17.720And I think people are grateful for that.
00:14:19.900But why did we have to go down this road in the first place?
00:14:24.020But the third thing is that there is a real sense that this is a premier that isn't putting Alberta first.
00:14:29.200He's had lots of opportunities, especially with the equalization referendum, to demonstrate that he's going to get tough with Ottawa.
00:14:35.500We should collect our own personal income tax.
00:14:37.120We should have our own provincial police.
00:14:38.460We should collect our own employment insurance.
00:14:39.940We should start talking about whether we should create our own Alberta pension plan.
00:14:42.960All the things that Quebec already does, because there's a hard line that we have to draw.
00:14:48.080The federal government now, especially with the alliance between Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh, they have Alberta in the crosshairs.
00:14:57.380They want Alberta, our energy industry, to reach a ludicrously aggressive target, 42% of emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030, seven and a half years from now.
00:15:09.520At the same time as they're expecting us to be the principal funder of all of these grand national schemes for child for daycare and for long term care and for pharmaceutical care and for dentistry.
00:15:20.520It's got to be a hard no at some point.
00:15:22.620They can't just keep on pummeling our industry and then expecting us to pay the lion's share into the these national programs.
00:15:29.220And we've got to start pulling that back and acting like Quebec saying, no way you stick to your knitting.
00:15:34.100You've got a lot of knitting to stick to.
00:15:35.480You've got defense commitments through NATO.
00:16:45.200So I'm kind of wondering if you could give us a little bit of a prediction or analysis of whether you think that he has the numbers to survive
00:16:52.580or whether you think that this is the end of his time as premier.
00:16:55.820Well, it's certainly an advantage to him that it's now a broad-based vote of all members.
00:17:00.560I think there's 55,000 members that signed up.
00:17:04.740And that's a huge amount of interest because I think they were as low as 10,000 at the beginning of the year.
00:17:10.080So they really had, the party really was demoralized.
00:17:14.060So it has been energized and it really could go either way.
00:17:17.140But the main thing is that we need to have strong voices pushing him to go in the direction that we always thought he was going to go.
00:17:23.440I mean, remember when he first launched into his campaign, he got in the big blue truck and drove around rural Alberta and promised the grassroots guarantee.
00:17:32.620And so I haven't seen any evidence, actually, of grassroots decision-making.
00:17:37.340I haven't seen any evidence that MLAs are given any autonomy to raise issues.
00:17:42.420And so those are the reasons why I'm entering as an MLA is that I've done the job before.
00:17:46.960I know how this province historically has treated its frontline MLAs.
00:17:52.120And we don't do things the Ottawa way.
00:17:53.820I mean, the Ottawa way is everything centers out of the prime minister's office.
00:17:58.540And then there's the guys in short pants that go around badgering and bullying everybody to fall into line with whatever comes out of the leader's office as an edict.
00:18:06.360The way we operate in Alberta is that we allow for our MLAs to go out into the community, hear what the issues are, raise them to caucus.
00:18:14.620If the issue is big enough in caucus, then the minister is charged with resolving the issue.
00:18:21.580And then if the minister can't resolve it, then it gets kicked up to the premiers.
00:18:25.700And so this Ottawa-style top-down politics where MLAs have no role and are just expected to sit down and shut up is not what Albertans expect.
00:18:35.400And so if I can be a voice in helping to create the balance of what it is this province should operate like so that we can get better decision-making, that's what I'm going to do.
00:18:45.680So the way that – I don't know if this is accurate.
00:18:47.380The way that the media has characterized your reentry into politics is that it's sort of almost a divisive move that you're challenging the leadership of the premier and that you're sort of announcing your intention to run as leader.
00:18:59.300We saw Jason Kenney himself dismiss your candidacy in a press conference.
00:19:05.080And then a Twitter account run by United Conservatives said that you had – I'll just read what they said.
00:19:14.200I've always found it surprising that two people whose only track record is losing general elections somehow feel that they have the answers.
00:19:20.780The Western Standard characterized that as nasty tweets from Kenney's crew.
00:19:24.940So I guess my question to you is, do you see yourself as a divisive figure in the UCP?
00:19:30.400Do you see yourself as someone who could potentially fracture the party?
00:19:34.100Or are you someone who could continue to unite conservatives in Alberta?
00:19:40.640Like, I think that the premier acts very undignified sometimes when he doesn't take – I mean, I've been advising the government over the last year on a whole variety of policy issues.
00:19:50.700I've hosted him for his first event coming out of COVID the first time over a summer.
00:19:55.580So there really isn't much point in trying to make me the enemy.
00:19:59.200I just wanted to put my name forward because people were asking me to.
00:20:01.860People were saying, why don't you put your name on the ballot on that April 9th vote?
00:20:05.860Because there's a lot of confusion about what a leadership vote is.
00:20:08.380And so I just wanted people to know, absolutely, if there is a desire to change leadership, I'm prepared to put my name forward for that, as is Brian Jean.
00:20:16.560I mean, as will probably be a dozen other people.
00:20:19.700You can't really run for a job that isn't open.
00:20:21.920You can only run for a position that may be.
00:20:24.080So that's why I've devoted my efforts to Livingston-McLeod.
00:20:27.480The thing I'd say about my riding in rural Alberta, and this is really important, is if you look at the poll results that you were citing, the NDP is already ahead in Edmonton.
00:20:37.760And so we fully expect that they will sweep Edmonton as they did last time.
00:20:40.560There's only one UCP cabinet minister there, Casey Maddow.
00:20:44.680In Calgary, they're also polling ahead, which means they will win probably enough to form government with Calgary and Edmonton alone if these trends continue.
00:20:54.500But even worse and more surprising to me is that the NDP are polling at 32% outside of Calgary and Edmonton in rural Alberta.
00:21:03.020And in my area in particular, if there's a vote split, like there was before, they have a very strong candidate who ran last time from a prominent ranching family.
00:21:12.520The government bungled its release of the coal policy changes.
00:21:16.420And there's a lot of really angry people down here.
00:21:18.380I'm trying to run under the UCP banner because I want to keep all of the various conservative factions under one umbrella.
00:21:24.980That's what I learned from the events of 2015 is that we're at a point now in Alberta where there is such a strong united progressive movement coalesced around a capable leader and a formidable leader in Rachel Notley.
00:21:39.440There's not very many politicians who've lost government and managed to keep their job to win to fight another day.
00:21:47.280But the fact is that if we do see the Wild Rose Independence Party gain ground or Brian Jean decide to create a new party or Todd Lowen or Drew Barnes,
00:21:57.840those are other names here that have been kicked out of the UCP caucus talking about creating a new party.
00:22:02.080If we split the conservative movement five ways, this riding in rural Alberta is at risk of going to the NDP.
00:22:09.900So I want to do what I can because I have friends in the Wild Rose movement.
00:22:14.480I have friends from my former PC days.
00:22:16.740I was a PC for many, many years before joining the Wild Rose for six years.
00:22:21.220And because the constituents came and asked me to run, that's why I felt like I could be the one to make sure that this riding stays in this column as opposed to going NDP.
00:22:32.520And I think that's a very real threat and concern in other parts of rural Alberta.
00:22:37.240Yeah, that's such an interesting perspective.
00:22:39.260I wanted to ask you a final question here, Danielle, about this CBC opinion piece that I saw written by a well-known Mount Royal political scientist named Dwayne Bratt,
00:22:49.020where he is talking about your political comeback.
00:22:52.680He wrote that time has not healed the wounds of the 2014 betrayal, as he calls it.
00:22:57.560You cannot come back from something like that.
00:23:00.520So first of all, I want to get your take as someone who's worked in the media and politics as well.
00:23:04.900What do you make of the CBC publishing opinion pieces or that political scientists who are often cited as outsiders and people that are neutral writing opinion pieces accusing you of betrayal?
00:23:17.140And then also, what's your analysis of that claim that you betrayed Wildrose members and that you can't come back from that?
00:23:25.580Well, I'm not a political scientist like Dwayne Bratt, but if he was to go look at political history, he would see that it's about 50-50.
00:23:33.020It is true that half of people who have changed parties have not been able to get reelected.
00:23:39.040And my recollection is that about half of people who did switch parties were able to get reelected.
00:23:44.160Probably the most prominent example from history is Winston Churchill, who's changed parties three times.
00:23:49.400So it's not necessarily the only deciding factor on why people choose to cast their ballot.
00:23:56.640And I don't think Dwayne Bratt was a Wildrose supporter.
00:24:01.040So I don't think he was particularly hurt by my decision in 2014, but there were a lot of people who were hurt.
00:24:10.940I took a lot of heat when I still wanted to play a role in public life, which is why I immediately went back on the radio when I was given the opportunity to do that.
00:24:19.860And I spent six years talking to people about the decision.
00:24:24.020I spent six years reacquainting them with me.
00:24:27.260I spent six years learning a lot about the concerns that they have.
00:24:31.320And so I've talked to many, many people since I made the announcement.
00:24:35.320And even before then, they said, yeah, I was really mad at you, but you won me over on the radio.
00:24:39.640And so that's what I'm going to bring to it.
00:24:42.640I spent almost six years interviewing on every topic under the sun, interviewing everyone I possibly could on a whole range of issues.
00:24:51.420I also found that the call-in section was my favorite part because that's when you got to have some really raw stories being told about the decisions that were being made and how it was impacting real people.
00:25:03.220And so I developed, I think people thought of me more of as an opposition leader last time I was in elected office because that was the job I was hired to do.
00:25:14.160But I think that people need to be respected.
00:25:19.020You need to be gentle with people because especially now, people are very damaged.
00:25:22.600And we need to be trying to chart a course that will bring everybody together.
00:25:26.680There's been so much division over the last couple of years.
00:25:29.740And so I have a bit of a unique perspective having played that role for the last six years.
00:25:34.260So I know that there are some who want to pretend that my whole career just exists from the brief time that they saw me in politics a few years ago.
00:25:46.940I've been a business advocate for an Alberta-wide organization talking about some major investments that our private sector makes and helping them to try to navigate through the regulatory process.
00:25:58.500I've been giving speeches all over Alberta for the last number of years, hearing from different communities and groups and trying to take their issues forward.
00:26:07.420So I was on the front line dealing with all of the shutdowns of restaurants over the last few years and having to manage payroll and staff through that period of time, too.
00:26:17.840And the fact that people have come forward asking me to run.
00:26:20.900I think that Dwayne Bratt may still bear a grudge.
00:26:24.600But I can tell you that a lot of my constituents are willing to recognize that people make mistakes.
00:26:29.600As long as you understand and learn from them, then they're prepared to give you another chance.
00:26:35.320I mean, the human story is a story of redemption.
00:26:37.520We allow people to come back into public life after they've made amends.
00:26:41.360And I guess we'll find out if people think I've made enough amends.
00:26:44.640Well, you come from a unique perspective as well that you cross the floor, switch parties from one party to another that are now merged together.
00:27:29.780Thank you so much, Danielle, for joining the show.
00:27:31.580It's been great to hear your perspective, great to hear more from you.
00:27:34.980And I hope that you are able to have the impact that you're setting out to have, because certainly the way that things have been run over the past few years, the mindset that has led us down this dark path and some of the most draconian policies that we've ever seen in our history that needs to change.
00:27:50.340It cannot be the same mindset, the same thinking that gets us out of this mess.
00:27:55.440We need new perspective, fresh new thinking, and we need fundamental change across the board, federally, provincially.