Rebel News Podcast - March 16, 2026


EZRA LEVANT ｜ Could it be true？ Are the Liberals really ahead federally in Alberta polls？


Episode Stats

Length

34 minutes

Words per Minute

165.0643

Word Count

5,763

Sentence Count

418


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. I find it hard to believe, but when six different polling companies in a row say
00:00:04.300 it, maybe I should put my disbelief aside. They say that the federal liberals are now competitive
00:00:10.380 in Alberta. I don't want to believe it. I don't even know if I do believe it, but we'll have a
00:00:15.160 hearty talk about that and provincial polls with my friend, Lauren Gunter, the Edmonton Journal.
00:00:20.060 That's ahead on a feature interview on Rebel News. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber
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00:01:13.000 today.
00:01:27.720 Tonight, could it be true? Are the liberals really ahead in the polls? Federally? In Alberta? It's March 16th
00:01:35.400 and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:36.680 You're fighting for freedom!
00:01:39.920 Shame on you, you censorious bug!
00:01:52.040 Well, I'm certainly not an expert in oil and gas, but about a decade ago, I really did a deep dive as
00:01:57.840 an amateur into the oil sands. You might recall I wrote a book called Ethical Oil, The Case for Canada's
00:02:03.820 Oil Sands. In fact, a copy of it is over my shoulder here in our studio. And I tried to learn as much as I
00:02:09.960 could. What is the difference between a resource and a reserve? What is production like? How do you make
00:02:16.120 oil? So I was really starting as an amateur, even though I was born and raised in the
00:02:20.440 province of Alberta, I had no connection to the oil patch. One of the things I learned very early on is the
00:02:25.360 difference, if I may, between an oil reserve and an oil resource in place. What does that even
00:02:30.540 mean if a country or a company says they have a million barrels of oil in their reserves? It
00:02:38.780 doesn't mean they have it like in a gas tank. That means they can see it, they can detect it,
00:02:44.340 they can measure it, it's in the ground, and at today's oil prices, with today's technology
00:02:50.260 and today's regulation, it could be produced. That's called an oil reserve. And you actually
00:02:55.640 have to be pretty stringent to prove you have it. Because remember, you're often selling your
00:02:59.940 company stock to investors, and you have to be able to prove you have certain reserves. Otherwise,
00:03:06.320 you could be, you know, misleading your investors. Resources in place is a little bit different.
00:03:13.860 That could be oil that you know is there, but at current prices, it's not affordable and economic
00:03:19.360 to produce it. Just last point on this, and you'll see why I'm emphasizing it in a moment.
00:03:23.880 So Alberta's oil sands have about 170 billion barrels of oil reserves. They're there, we can
00:03:33.520 see it, we can measure it, we can prove it. And at today's prices and technology, you can produce it.
00:03:38.860 But there's another, get this, 2 trillion, with a T, barrels of oil that we can see are there.
00:03:47.560 They're just not affordable yet with today's technology. There's a lot of oil. Now you know
00:03:51.400 the difference between resources and reserves. That little lesson I just gave is a lesson I think
00:03:56.440 we need to teach the energy minister of Canada, the liberal named Tim Hodgson, because he said the
00:04:01.600 strangest thing the other day. As you know, the war in Iran is causing the price of oil to rise.
00:04:07.540 There's questions on whether the Straits of Hormuz, this narrow passageway by which an enormous chunk
00:04:12.360 of the world's oil sails from the Persian Gulf to the world, if Iran were to block ships,
00:04:17.840 blow them up, deploy mines in the water. So different countries in the world are doing
00:04:23.940 something about this. They're producing more oil. And the United States has a massive strategic
00:04:30.020 petroleum reserve, which is just what it sounds like. It's huge underground caverns actually,
00:04:36.880 where oil is quickly produced and released into the public to moderate the price of oil every day.
00:04:44.620 Canada does not have a strategic oil reserve. We don't have a huge tank of it. At any given moment,
00:04:53.420 there may be a hundred thousand barrels that is being held in tanks that's waiting to be put in
00:04:58.320 the pipeline. The reason I say all this is that Tim Hodgson, trying to chime in with the world's
00:05:04.900 oil producing power, says Canada and our company should release our reserves. Brother, what reserves?
00:05:14.280 Do you mean produce the reserves that are in the ground, the 170 billion barrels that we know are
00:05:19.520 there but haven't produced it? You are the reason, Tim Hodgson. You and the liberal government are the
00:05:26.300 reason we have not produced an extra billion barrels because you blocked all the pipelines. It's a little
00:05:32.200 bit of chutzpah. And I see a column by my friend, Lauren Gunter, in the Edmonton Journal just today,
00:05:39.500 Canada energy exports still crippled by liberal, lost liberal decade. Quoting Tim Hodgson saying
00:05:48.500 that we could become one of the largest suppliers of liquidified natural gas in the world. How bizarre.
00:05:56.400 Joining us now to talk about this and the energy minister's international puffery is our friend,
00:06:03.900 Lauren Gunter himself. Lauren, great to see you again.
00:06:06.000 Good to see you.
00:06:07.160 What do you make of the fact that Tim Hodgson is sort of strutting around as if Canada is going to be a
00:06:11.740 major player here? And yeah, we are an important producer and export of oil and gas, but he's sort of
00:06:19.080 saying things he can't quite follow through on. And it's his party that's locked in the oil and gas for a decade.
00:06:26.840 Yes. And say we did have 50 million barrels sitting under the ground in some giant cavern somewhere similar to
00:06:38.520 the way the Americans do. It's always fascinating to me the way the Americans pump oil out of the ground and then
00:06:44.600 pump it back into the ground for their strategic reserve. But say we had a strategic reserve like that, how are we
00:06:51.600 going to get it to market? That's one of our big problems now. We don't have pipelines. We can use rail cars and we do,
00:06:58.880 but we're almost at maximum capacity all the time on rail cars. So it's one thing to say, hey, yes, we're prepared to jump in.
00:07:08.720 But as you said, we can't just dip into some giant reserve we have. We have to pump more. That's lesson
00:07:18.620 number one. And then we have to have some way of getting that stuff we're pumping out of the ground
00:07:24.520 to market. And we don't. Our pipelines now are at near capacity. And there's talk now in the last week
00:07:33.700 or so about reviving the Keystone XL pipeline. That would be lovely, but it doesn't solve our
00:07:39.880 biggest problem, which is we cannot get our oil from Canadian oil sands and Canadian oil fields
00:07:46.180 directly to export terminals where we can send it to Asia or Europe without first having to sell it at a
00:07:56.840 discount to the United States. Right. You know, I only learned the fancy word monopsony,
00:08:03.160 not monopoly. Monopoly is when there's one place you have to buy everything from. A monopsony is one
00:08:09.720 customer. And the trouble with a monopoly is you're paying more than you should. The trouble with a
00:08:15.220 monopsony is you're paying less than you should. You're getting paid less because it's only America
00:08:21.280 who could buy it. So every barrel of oil you can sell on the open market, suddenly America has to
00:08:27.440 pay us world oil prices to compete. So it's so healthy. Not only are we diversifying the market,
00:08:32.560 but we're getting more for our money from the Yanks. And it was the liberals who killed those
00:08:37.760 dreams. It's a bit of chutzpah. Do you think Tim Hodgson is well aware that he doesn't, he's not
00:08:45.260 accurately describing reserves and well aware that it was Justin Trudeau who said there's no business
00:08:50.340 case for LNG. Surely he's got to know if you and I know that I would imagine the energy minister
00:08:55.040 knows that too. Well, yes, except, you know, the federal bureaucracy and the liberal caucus is full
00:09:03.840 of people who will tell the ministers what they want to hear. And they may even themselves be blinkered
00:09:13.320 by what is truly happening. You know, they may have, as you said, they might have confused a
00:09:19.840 strategic reserve with a resource. They might have confused where this stuff is all the time, how easy
00:09:27.460 it is to get out. And, you know, sure, theoretically, we have a lot of oil. We are the third or fourth
00:09:35.500 largest producer of oil, or could be the third or fourth largest producer of oil in the world,
00:09:41.500 behind only Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and maybe Iran. And we have a ton of it. But we can't get at it
00:09:53.340 because, as you said, the liberals killed every pipeline that came along during their 10 years
00:09:58.980 under Trudeau. And so let's say we do want to chip in our part. Maybe, and as Hudson says, maybe we do
00:10:08.060 want to become one of the biggest players in the world in LNG. We're six to 12 years away from that.
00:10:17.180 You don't, you can't phone out pipelines or us and say, hey, can you deliver one of those pipelines to us
00:10:23.720 and we'll start pumping stuff through it tomorrow? You know, they haven't changed the regulatory
00:10:30.120 and approval processes. They haven't gotten rid of the Impact Assessment Act, which, which we have
00:10:37.580 called many times the No More Pipelines Act. They haven't done any of that. They haven't got their
00:10:43.220 major, the major projects office, which we have not heard of one iota since Carney brought it in last
00:10:51.120 year. The major projects office does not have a pipeline in any of its major projects. So do I,
00:11:00.000 that's the whole point of the column this morning, is it? I don't think these guys are really serious.
00:11:05.780 They talk about all this stuff, but they're not doing anything concrete to try and get our oil there.
00:11:12.780 You know, I was, I was looking at some stats today. Again, when I wrote my book, Ethical Oil,
00:11:17.080 the US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia were each producing about 10 million barrels of oil a day.
00:11:24.460 That that's like 10, 15 years ago. Now American domestic production is 14 million. And if you
00:11:31.760 include other petroleum liquids, it's actually 20 million. Like under Trump, they've gone nuts
00:11:38.520 with production. It actually was even growing under Biden. I have to give him some credit.
00:11:42.300 Here's what scares me, Lord. When the United States basically took over Venezuela,
00:11:50.780 you know, in two hours, they, one of Trump's first things he said is we're going to, we're here for
00:11:57.300 the oil. Like it was almost like a Noam Chomsky horror movie come true. Trump said, yes, we are here
00:12:04.280 for the oil. And he's welcomed American companies. And he's, I don't know exactly where that oil is being
00:12:10.040 sold, but America's running it now. And a lot of the Venezuelan oil in the past was destined for
00:12:16.520 those same refineries in Texas, because it's a really heavy oil that Alberta oil was going to go
00:12:22.500 to. So you got Venezuela in literally as a province of the United States. I don't know what you even
00:12:29.600 call it. It's being run by, I don't know, the State Department of the United States. And I don't
00:12:34.400 know what's going to happen to Iran. But theoretically, it could be that that Iranian oil
00:12:42.380 is going to come back on the legitimate market. So you could see oil being filled by Venezuela and
00:12:49.520 Iran. It's on a legitimate market now. Iranian oil accounts for about 40% of the oil that China
00:12:57.500 consumes. They buy that legitimately. There's nothing impeding them from, from buying it. And the
00:13:03.200 Iranians are quite happy to ship it all to them. And, you know, there's India buys an awful lot of
00:13:09.980 Iranian oil. It buys Russian oil too. We have a tendency to get quite focused on what's happening
00:13:16.260 in the West, Western Europe and North America. But we shouldn't always worry about that. We should be
00:13:26.580 looking for markets other than Louisiana and Texas. But what happens is there are 26 oil refineries in
00:13:36.120 the American Midwest. 25 of them are hooked up to do heavy oil like we have. So we pump all this oil
00:13:45.440 down there. Most of it goes to the American Midwest. They refine it for domestic use, but they take their
00:13:51.900 lighter, sweeter West Texas intermediate. And they sell that to the world at a premium. So, you know,
00:13:58.180 this is something that Stephen Harper said within the last month, is that we are not, we're not being
00:14:07.160 mean to the Americans, like Trump keeps saying. We're not ripping off the Americans. We are selling
00:14:12.540 them a commodity at a discounted price, which then allows them to make even more money from their own
00:14:19.240 economy. And so, you know, all of this is extremely complicated. I mean, getting oil out of the ground
00:14:26.200 and pumping it to market is incredibly complicated. I went one time to a tank farm in Northern Alberta,
00:14:35.800 where there were within these three giant tanks, there were 12 different products that had come out
00:14:43.120 of the oil patch. And each of those went down a pipeline, one after another, with machinery that
00:14:51.140 goes between the two products and cleans the pipeline. As product number one goes down, cleans out the
00:14:58.000 pipeline, product number two comes in, then product number three comes in. I had no idea it was that
00:15:03.360 complicated. Right. But there are all sorts of people who understand how all this works. And they think
00:15:09.220 that Canada is just absolutely foolish. The Truro era green regulations cost Canada about $400 billion
00:15:20.420 in investment in the oil and gas infrastructure and resource extraction. It's hard even to conceive
00:15:31.380 of how much damage they did. Yeah. You know, I was in Calgary when the Prime Minister Mark Carney met with
00:15:38.820 Alberta Premier Daniel Smith to talk about the so-called MOU, Memorandum of Understanding.
00:15:44.260 And it was so vague. And the final deadline for the possible construction was 2040.
00:15:51.380 It was in there. Whereas Alberta's obligations to the Fed started immediately.
00:15:55.860 I was skeptical then. I don't know how many months have passed. I'd have to look it up. But the only news
00:16:01.940 I've seen come out from the pipeline industry is Enbridge, big pipeline backer that had the northern
00:16:08.820 gateway that Trudeau killed. They're saying there's just too much risk here. We're not proceeding.
00:16:13.460 So I don't, I mean, maybe there's people behind the scenes. I mean, I don't know people. I don't know
00:16:19.300 the CEOs in those companies, but there's no public emanations on this other than Enbridge saying,
00:16:25.460 no, thanks. I don't think that MOU is going to do anything. I think it was just a fake, a deke.
00:16:32.420 Unfortunately, I think you're right. I sat down one time and tried to figure out how much money
00:16:38.020 Canadian pipeline companies had put into the pipelines that were canceled by the Trudeau
00:16:45.300 government. So you can say Energy East was canceled by the Trudeau government. It was done in a clever
00:16:52.900 way so that they didn't have to take direct responsibility for getting rid of it, but they
00:16:56.660 did it in Northern gateway. They, they just did it in. Like they said, no, you're not going to be
00:17:02.660 able to do this. And then Keystone XL, which they kept saying that they were in favor of,
00:17:08.340 they didn't lift the finger to try and convince them. Because you remember it started under Obama.
00:17:14.100 Obama wasn't going to give the export permit to allow the oil to come across the line. Trump,
00:17:20.500 I have no idea why in the first term, Trump didn't do more. And then Biden, of course,
00:17:25.300 just said, no, you're never, ever going to be able to do this. So I tried to figure out,
00:17:30.500 and I think it came to about $7 billion that Canadian oil companies had spent trying to get
00:17:37.780 pipelines built. Wow. And so of course they have a nasty taste in their mouth. Of course they don't
00:17:42.740 want to try for another pipeline. And especially because this federal government doesn't say things
00:17:49.620 like, Hey, bring us a proposal. We're looking to get pipelines built. Let's get going. Let's,
00:17:55.300 you know, and all they're talking about too, and I made this point in the column this morning,
00:17:59.940 all they're talking about too is another pipeline to the west coast. There's an enormous market
00:18:06.580 off of the east coast, both for liquefied natural gas and for our oil, but they're not talking about
00:18:12.900 a pipeline over there because who does that upset? It upsets Quebec. And so if you have 44 seats that
00:18:21.140 the liberals do in Quebec, and you're afraid you're going to lose some of them, if you build
00:18:25.460 a pipeline across Quebec, you don't even talk about it. They don't even mention.
00:18:31.060 One of the things I learned when I wrote Ethical Oil was that the largest refinery in Canada is not
00:18:35.300 in Alberta. It's in New Brunswick. It's the Irving refinery. And it takes oil, not only from the
00:18:41.940 States, which was unusual, I didn't know, but from OPEC. In fact, the oil that comes up from the
00:18:47.140 States is often dropped off in Maine and pumped up to Montreal. I'm not sure the path it takes now.
00:18:54.260 I might be a little bit out of date, but that Canadian refinery that serves Atlantic Canada
00:18:59.860 and New England has foreign oil in it, the largest refinery in Canada. And that's what Energy East
00:19:06.420 was supposed to fill. You had this beautiful pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick, which
00:19:11.300 would have cheaper than OPEC oil. It just breaks my heart. And I don't know.
00:19:20.100 Here you have these smug Quebec politicians who say, no, no, no, no, we will never take
00:19:24.820 Alberta oil. It's dirty oil. We must never take Alberta oil. Well, they take about 700,000 barrels
00:19:31.620 a day of Saudi and Venezuelan oil. It comes in tankers up the St. Lawrence Sea, up the St. Lawrence
00:19:39.140 River. Tankers, yeah. Yeah. Tankers are safe, but pipelines are safer. Yes, of course.
00:19:44.580 They prefer the Saudi. I remember a few years ago, we put up a banner outside the mayor of Montreal's
00:19:51.860 office. And we said, Denny Coderre prefers conflict oil from OPEC to ethical oil from Canada. Oh,
00:20:00.500 they hated that. By the way, they put a lot of pressure on the billboard company
00:20:04.180 to have it taken down. It was quite a fun little thing we did. Well, you remember too that they
00:20:09.380 released over a billion, is it liters or gallons, I can't remember which, of raw sewage into the St.
00:20:18.100 Lawrence. But no, no, no, no, no, no. We mustn't, we mustn't upset the pristine waters of the St.
00:20:24.740 Lawrence. Or what was it? Is it, is it Norwals that they have that they were worried about?
00:20:29.700 Right. That's, I'm glad you reminded me about that. That's right. They,
00:20:33.700 they pollute, it's shocking what they did. And this was approved by the liberals. Hey,
00:20:37.860 I want to ask you a question about polling. I want to, you wrote an article a couple days ago about
00:20:43.700 the United Conservative Party being in the lead in the polls. I want to talk about that.
00:20:47.940 But I want to ask you about a phenomenon that I don't understand. And it's not just one polling
00:20:53.060 company, which you could write off as a rogue poll or maybe a methodology, but a number of pollsters,
00:20:59.220 including some that I pretty much trust, have suggested, strangely to me, that the federal
00:21:06.020 liberals are doing fairly well in Alberta these days. And when I saw the first poll, I scoffed.
00:21:13.060 But after five or six polls, I, I mean, I can't dispute the science. I mean, maybe all the polls
00:21:19.300 are wrong, I guess. Have you seen those polls and what are you making them?
00:21:22.660 Yes. And you know what? You have to accept that the only people right now who are doing anything
00:21:30.500 concrete in dealing with Trump and dealing with any of the other trade issues are the liberal.
00:21:39.220 Pierre Polyev sat for an entire year and said nothing about Trump, not a thing about Trump.
00:21:49.140 And so he's allowed the liberals to fill all of that empty space.
00:21:53.940 They look like, I mean, if you and I start to examine things they're doing, like they're talking
00:21:59.060 a good game about pipelines, but they're not building any. They're talking a good game about
00:22:04.820 housing affordability, but they're not building any. We can go through all of the issues that are
00:22:10.660 important to Canadians and show that the liberals aren't doing anything, but they are the only ones
00:22:15.300 who are talking about these things. And I think that that's having an impact.
00:22:19.220 Yeah. It's a pickle for a conservative because, um, especially if, if, if you in any way
00:22:28.340 have used the style of Trump, you're lumped in with Trump and it's tough for a conservative to
00:22:34.660 push back against America. You don't even have to use the style of Trump.
00:22:36.820 The most of the legacy media will brand you as a Trumpist, even if you, uh, don't stand up for
00:22:45.300 lefty. That's right. Yeah. It's a purity test. I mean, look what they're doing to Wayne Gretzky
00:22:49.060 and other sports, you know, hockey players. If you're not actively denouncing Trump while playing
00:22:55.700 a sport in the United States, you're like Wayne Gretzky is a Canadian hero, almost on par with Terry
00:23:02.340 Fox. And yet he has been denormalized because he's not bashing Trump because he dared to have
00:23:07.620 a photo taken with Trump. It's, it's sort of incredible. This, um, two minutes of hate
00:23:13.380 directed at Trump or anyone Trump adjacent. I think that's what happened to Jamil Giovanni,
00:23:18.020 the conservative MP who went down there. Uh, how dare you? I mean, he may.
00:23:22.420 Okay. But if, if I was Polly Evan, I knew what the pitfalls were. I'd have told him not to go.
00:23:27.380 Yeah. Like whether or not he, he had things to say and he has people, his contacts, for instance,
00:23:35.620 with JD Vance, the vice president, I don't care if I am Pierre Polyev and I know we're being slammed
00:23:42.340 on this and I haven't said anything on my own. Uh, I'm going to say to Giovanni, do not go. This is
00:23:49.220 just too hard to explain away. Yeah. Hey, I want to talk about Alberta polls because there's quite a
00:23:55.220 difference if the liberals are doing well in Alberta. And I don't even want to say that the
00:23:59.460 liberals are ahead in Alberta because I don't want those words to come out of my mouth. I don't want
00:24:02.900 to speak them into existence. I don't, I don't think that's true, but they're doing better than
00:24:08.420 they have. And I think an election, if there actually was one would clarify the mind pretty
00:24:13.220 quick, but provincially, I mean, Danielle Smith, I think is doing some very interesting things.
00:24:18.500 She's walking some fine lines pretty well in my view. Now, look, look, I'm out here in Toronto. So
00:24:24.980 what I get is I'm out in Alberta a fair bit, but I think she's handling, uh, sovereignty and
00:24:31.220 independence fairly well. She's enabling the democratic system, but she's not championing
00:24:37.220 it, but she's not denouncing it. She's bringing in lots of small, but thoughtful things like bringing
00:24:44.260 in the new, I think they're calling it Jordan Peterson's law, the rule that you can be a
00:24:48.420 professional lawyer, doctor, engineer, psychologist, and not be fired for having incorrect politics.
00:24:56.660 Like that's what happened to Jordan Peterson at the Ontario College of Psychologists or whatever.
00:25:02.180 So she's bringing in niche things like that, that I think are pretty great. I think pumping up the
00:25:07.460 Alberta sheriffs is pretty great. So she's doing lots of little things that make people feel good.
00:25:11.940 Yeah. Right on. You get them. And, and she's often saying, well, what Quebec wants, we want.
00:25:17.220 That's my theory. Now, am I just being manipulated by the social media I consume? What's the truth?
00:25:23.380 I think that's exactly what she's doing. And she has to walk a fine line because she has an awful
00:25:28.500 lot of people in her core, uh, who would lean towards independence. Uh, and so she cannot disparage
00:25:39.460 that. I mean, I have had those feelings myself over the years. I, I, you know, I'm so tired of being
00:25:46.020 dumped on by liberals from a great height from central Canada. I've entertained the idea that
00:25:52.580 it would be nice to just leave. So she has an awful lot of that in her base that she has to deal with.
00:25:59.140 And I think she's doing it very smartly. Like she came out a month ago, a month and a half ago now with
00:26:05.380 all of these referenda we're going to have this fall in Alberta. Uh, and the, the one that's gotten
00:26:12.660 the most attention is denying social benefits to people who are neither permanent residents nor
00:26:21.140 legal immigrants nor Canadian citizens. It's a, it's a reasonably small number of people,
00:26:28.100 but I think it's very important to say, look, if you're here illegally, you know, the federal
00:26:34.180 government puts out ads in foreign language newspapers around the world all the time saying
00:26:39.620 Canada has free healthcare and free social service.
00:26:44.020 Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. It's like they're, they're inviting more people to cross over
00:26:48.500 Roxham road. You know, and by the way, there's other, we've talked a little bit about Quebec today.
00:26:54.100 And I think part of the Quebec political brand is not just being progressive, but being holier than
00:26:59.700 now to some of the other, uh, provinces, including those cowboys in Alberta. So I don't know if they
00:27:05.380 would call themselves a sanctuary, you know, not like the sanctuary cities, sanctuary province,
00:27:10.900 because Quebec is actually getting a little bit irascible on immigration too. In fact,
00:27:15.140 of all the provinces, they're the least afraid to be politically correct. But it wouldn't surprise me
00:27:19.060 if there's other provinces that would mock Alberta for this, to which Danielle Smith could say,
00:27:24.340 Hey, we'll buy you a train ticket. Go down there. They'll pay for you.
00:27:27.620 Yeah. There is the inequity of it. Quebec is as restrictive as any other problem on who it will
00:27:37.460 accept as immigrants. And it has been given the power to say by Ottawa. So what Smith said in her
00:27:46.180 speech about six weeks ago was that she wanted the same power for Alberta that Quebec has. Well,
00:27:52.020 suddenly, oh my goodness, the CBC, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star. Oh, she's a racist. Look
00:27:58.100 at that. She's just like Trump. She's doing only what Quebec has been allowed to do by the federal
00:28:06.820 government. And they have matched Quebec initiative for initiative for initiative. And it has just driven
00:28:14.420 Ottawa and the central, the Laurentian elites nuts. But I love it. And I think that it's starting to be
00:28:22.820 seen in Alberta as something that she's done. So the UCP is ahead of the NDP province-wide 49 to 36%.
00:28:31.380 They're ahead by 13 points. That's a big gap. But when you look at where they're ahead of them on issues,
00:28:39.220 there are very, very few issues where the NDP even come close to the UCP. So that means when you
00:28:44.260 start running an election and you're talking about issues, you're already starting from a real big
00:28:49.540 head start. And the one for me that I loved the most was Abacus Data did some very significant polling
00:28:58.420 on Alberta. A thousand person sample, which for a provincial-wide poll is a lot of people. In rural
00:29:07.460 Alberta, the UCP gets 70% and the NDP get 15%.
00:29:12.740 Yeah. Well, that's how the whole province used to tilt almost, maybe not Edmonton. Back in the day
00:29:17.940 of Ralph Klein, that's where the NDP were.
00:29:21.620 But the NDP are only as ahead of the UCP in Edmonton, by the same margin that the UCP are
00:29:29.700 ahead of the NDP in Calgary. So they don't wipe out the UCP.
00:29:34.580 Right, right, right. You know, let me just say one quick thing about Quebec before I want to ask
00:29:39.140 you more about polls. I noticed that when Alberta talks about independence, it's treated with a
00:29:47.540 derision and a condescension by the central Canadian elites, Laurentian elites, in a completely
00:29:53.140 different way than when Quebec does it. Here's a stat I shared with our viewers before. About two
00:29:58.980 weeks ago, there was a by-election in Quebec, Chicoutimi, I think, and the Parti Quebecois,
00:30:04.260 the Separatist Party, won it. And that's, I think, the fourth in a row. So you have four
00:30:09.940 separatists in a row, and I could find only one story on the CBC website, and it was just a straight
00:30:14.980 up. Here's what happened. No commentary piece. Whereas you have this apoplexy about the same
00:30:20.580 vibes in Alberta. For Quebec, they get the Clarity Act. They get the rules on the referendum.
00:30:26.260 Everything's fine. They're exercising the democracy. But if you even talk about this in the West,
00:30:31.940 you're called a traitor. They use the word traitor. There was the word Nazi that was used the other day.
00:30:37.780 And I think that reaction to Alberta independence, I think Danielle Smith is very wise to avoid it.
00:30:44.980 How about Naheed Nanshi? And by the way, I just should disclose that 30 years ago,
00:30:49.620 he and I were debate partners in university, which is pretty funny. You had this right-wing Jew
00:30:54.420 and this left-wing Muslim as debating partners. We got along pretty well, but we knew we didn't agree
00:31:01.780 on a single thing. And Naheed Nanshi, he's the NDP leader. And funny enough, Danielle Smith was in
00:31:06.740 school at the same time with us too. Naheed Nanshi is trying to work on this independence angle,
00:31:12.340 and that's probably a good idea for him. How's it working out for him though?
00:31:15.540 You know, he's solidifying his base. That's pretty much all he's doing. You're not picking
00:31:19.860 up any support that I can see from beyond the NDP base. The NDP base in Alberta now is somewhere in
00:31:25.940 about a third to 40% of the vote. And that's public sector workers, it's teachers, it's activists.
00:31:38.820 Together they now form about 35% of the vote in the province. And they're strong behind the NDP.
00:31:46.500 Yeah. But, uh, so Nanshi is playing to that base and he is, he's keeping them in the fold. But, uh,
00:31:55.460 but even this latest abacus poll showed that 25% of people who voted NDP in the last election
00:32:05.700 could be convinced to switch parties. 25%. That's a pretty good sized number. It's not huge,
00:32:11.700 but it's a pretty good sized number. Whereas among people who voted for UCP in the last election,
00:32:17.300 it's under 17%. Yeah. So Danielle has done a very good job of, uh, of getting the base together,
00:32:26.340 keeping it together, despite the fact that there are disparate elements in that UCP base that don't
00:32:32.260 always see eye to eye. You know, it's sort of funny. I know both of these characters from back in the day,
00:32:37.860 I haven't kept in touch with Nanshi, but I have with Danielle Smith. And I would say this, um,
00:32:42.500 policy is part of it, but personality is part of it too. And I think Danielle Smith,
00:32:49.300 partly I think because she spent so much time on talk radio, I think she's, she comes across as, uh,
00:32:55.140 someone you could talk with, even if you disagree. This is how it looks to me. And Nahid Nanshi,
00:32:58.980 who's very clever, very bright, I think he can slip into sort of a condescension. And even the tone
00:33:05.700 comes across as smarmy. And I don't think I'm saying that because I oppose him on issues.
00:33:09.860 I think he just sort of lapses into a kind of sneer, um, and his mannerisms. Whereas I think Smith,
00:33:17.060 so if it comes down to personality in a campaign, it often does. I don't know. I, I'm, I think these
00:33:22.260 are pretty good polls. Am I wrong in my assessment? No, I think that's right. I think when Nanshi was
00:33:26.900 mayor of Calgary until 2021, uh, nearly his whole last term, he was convinced he was the smartest
00:33:34.660 person in any room he entered. Yeah. And that showed and people couldn't stand it. Yeah. Uh,
00:33:42.900 Notley, uh, used to have a higher rating in Calgary than Nanshi does. Well, she was,
00:33:49.620 Rachel Notley was never the mayor of Calgary. So being mayor of Calgary is supposed to be a big thing
00:33:55.380 for Nanshi with the NDP. And I think it's, I think generally it's, it's either, uh, it's either even,
00:34:02.820 or it's actually been a detriment to the NDP. And he, he does not play well at all outside of
00:34:11.380 Edmonton and Calgary, not at all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I remember, I think he's the same man he
00:34:18.500 was in, I mean, we've all grown and changed a bit, but I think his core, his core personality
00:34:24.260 remains what it was when he was a student activist. Lauren, it's great to catch up with you. Thanks for
00:34:30.100 the Alberta briefing. It's sort of heartbreaking to me that the whole world gets to sell its oil,
00:34:34.500 including Venezuela, but Alberta is, uh, corked up for a decade or more. Great to catch up with
00:34:40.180 you. Thank you, my friend. Likewise. There he is, Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton
00:34:45.380 Journal. Well, that's our show for today. Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel
00:34:51.060 World Headquarters, see you at home. Good night and keep fighting for freedom.