EZRA LEVANT ｜ Could it be true？ Are the Liberals really ahead federally in Alberta polls？
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Summary
When six different polling companies in a row say that the Liberals are now competitive in Alberta, maybe I should put my disbelief aside. I don t even know if I do believe it, but we ll have a hearty talk about that and other polls with my friend Lauren Gunter, the editor of the Edmonton Journal, on a feature interview on Rebel News.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. I find it hard to believe, but when six different polling companies in a row say
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it, maybe I should put my disbelief aside. They say that the federal liberals are now competitive
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in Alberta. I don't want to believe it. I don't even know if I do believe it, but we'll have a
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hearty talk about that and provincial polls with my friend, Lauren Gunter, the Edmonton Journal.
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That's ahead on a feature interview on Rebel News. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber
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Tonight, could it be true? Are the liberals really ahead in the polls? Federally? In Alberta? It's March 16th
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Well, I'm certainly not an expert in oil and gas, but about a decade ago, I really did a deep dive as
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an amateur into the oil sands. You might recall I wrote a book called Ethical Oil, The Case for Canada's
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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
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could. What is the difference between a resource and a reserve? What is production like? How do you make
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oil? So I was really starting as an amateur, even though I was born and raised in the
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province of Alberta, I had no connection to the oil patch. One of the things I learned very early on is the
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difference, if I may, between an oil reserve and an oil resource in place. What does that even
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mean if a country or a company says they have a million barrels of oil in their reserves? It
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doesn't mean they have it like in a gas tank. That means they can see it, they can detect it,
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they can measure it, it's in the ground, and at today's oil prices, with today's technology
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and today's regulation, it could be produced. That's called an oil reserve. And you actually
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have to be pretty stringent to prove you have it. Because remember, you're often selling your
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company stock to investors, and you have to be able to prove you have certain reserves. Otherwise,
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you could be, you know, misleading your investors. Resources in place is a little bit different.
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That could be oil that you know is there, but at current prices, it's not affordable and economic
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to produce it. Just last point on this, and you'll see why I'm emphasizing it in a moment.
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So Alberta's oil sands have about 170 billion barrels of oil reserves. They're there, we can
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see it, we can measure it, we can prove it. And at today's prices and technology, you can produce it.
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But there's another, get this, 2 trillion, with a T, barrels of oil that we can see are there.
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They're just not affordable yet with today's technology. There's a lot of oil. Now you know
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the difference between resources and reserves. That little lesson I just gave is a lesson I think
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we need to teach the energy minister of Canada, the liberal named Tim Hodgson, because he said the
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strangest thing the other day. As you know, the war in Iran is causing the price of oil to rise.
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There's questions on whether the Straits of Hormuz, this narrow passageway by which an enormous chunk
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of the world's oil sails from the Persian Gulf to the world, if Iran were to block ships,
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blow them up, deploy mines in the water. So different countries in the world are doing
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something about this. They're producing more oil. And the United States has a massive strategic
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petroleum reserve, which is just what it sounds like. It's huge underground caverns actually,
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where oil is quickly produced and released into the public to moderate the price of oil every day.
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Canada does not have a strategic oil reserve. We don't have a huge tank of it. At any given moment,
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there may be a hundred thousand barrels that is being held in tanks that's waiting to be put in
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the pipeline. The reason I say all this is that Tim Hodgson, trying to chime in with the world's
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oil producing power, says Canada and our company should release our reserves. Brother, what reserves?
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Do you mean produce the reserves that are in the ground, the 170 billion barrels that we know are
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there but haven't produced it? You are the reason, Tim Hodgson. You and the liberal government are the
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reason we have not produced an extra billion barrels because you blocked all the pipelines. It's a little
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bit of chutzpah. And I see a column by my friend, Lauren Gunter, in the Edmonton Journal just today,
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Canada energy exports still crippled by liberal, lost liberal decade. Quoting Tim Hodgson saying
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that we could become one of the largest suppliers of liquidified natural gas in the world. How bizarre.
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Joining us now to talk about this and the energy minister's international puffery is our friend,
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Lauren Gunter himself. Lauren, great to see you again.
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What do you make of the fact that Tim Hodgson is sort of strutting around as if Canada is going to be a
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major player here? And yeah, we are an important producer and export of oil and gas, but he's sort of
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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.
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Yes. And say we did have 50 million barrels sitting under the ground in some giant cavern somewhere similar to
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the way the Americans do. It's always fascinating to me the way the Americans pump oil out of the ground and then
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pump it back into the ground for their strategic reserve. But say we had a strategic reserve like that, how are we
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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,
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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.
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But as you said, we can't just dip into some giant reserve we have. We have to pump more. That's lesson
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number one. And then we have to have some way of getting that stuff we're pumping out of the ground
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to market. And we don't. Our pipelines now are at near capacity. And there's talk now in the last week
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or so about reviving the Keystone XL pipeline. That would be lovely, but it doesn't solve our
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biggest problem, which is we cannot get our oil from Canadian oil sands and Canadian oil fields
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directly to export terminals where we can send it to Asia or Europe without first having to sell it at a
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discount to the United States. Right. You know, I only learned the fancy word monopsony,
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not monopoly. Monopoly is when there's one place you have to buy everything from. A monopsony is one
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customer. And the trouble with a monopoly is you're paying more than you should. The trouble with a
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monopsony is you're paying less than you should. You're getting paid less because it's only America
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who could buy it. So every barrel of oil you can sell on the open market, suddenly America has to
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pay us world oil prices to compete. So it's so healthy. Not only are we diversifying the market,
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but we're getting more for our money from the Yanks. And it was the liberals who killed those
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dreams. It's a bit of chutzpah. Do you think Tim Hodgson is well aware that he doesn't, he's not
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accurately describing reserves and well aware that it was Justin Trudeau who said there's no business
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case for LNG. Surely he's got to know if you and I know that I would imagine the energy minister
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knows that too. Well, yes, except, you know, the federal bureaucracy and the liberal caucus is full
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of people who will tell the ministers what they want to hear. And they may even themselves be blinkered
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by what is truly happening. You know, they may have, as you said, they might have confused a
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strategic reserve with a resource. They might have confused where this stuff is all the time, how easy
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it is to get out. And, you know, sure, theoretically, we have a lot of oil. We are the third or fourth
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largest producer of oil, or could be the third or fourth largest producer of oil in the world,
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behind only Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and maybe Iran. And we have a ton of it. But we can't get at it
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because, as you said, the liberals killed every pipeline that came along during their 10 years
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under Trudeau. And so let's say we do want to chip in our part. Maybe, and as Hudson says, maybe we do
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want to become one of the biggest players in the world in LNG. We're six to 12 years away from that.
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You don't, you can't phone out pipelines or us and say, hey, can you deliver one of those pipelines to us
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and we'll start pumping stuff through it tomorrow? You know, they haven't changed the regulatory
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and approval processes. They haven't gotten rid of the Impact Assessment Act, which, which we have
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called many times the No More Pipelines Act. They haven't done any of that. They haven't got their
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major, the major projects office, which we have not heard of one iota since Carney brought it in last
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year. The major projects office does not have a pipeline in any of its major projects. So do I,
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that's the whole point of the column this morning, is it? I don't think these guys are really serious.
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They talk about all this stuff, but they're not doing anything concrete to try and get our oil there.
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You know, I was, I was looking at some stats today. Again, when I wrote my book, Ethical Oil,
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the US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia were each producing about 10 million barrels of oil a day.
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That that's like 10, 15 years ago. Now American domestic production is 14 million. And if you
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include other petroleum liquids, it's actually 20 million. Like under Trump, they've gone nuts
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with production. It actually was even growing under Biden. I have to give him some credit.
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Here's what scares me, Lord. When the United States basically took over Venezuela,
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you know, in two hours, they, one of Trump's first things he said is we're going to, we're here for
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the oil. Like it was almost like a Noam Chomsky horror movie come true. Trump said, yes, we are here
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for the oil. And he's welcomed American companies. And he's, I don't know exactly where that oil is being
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sold, but America's running it now. And a lot of the Venezuelan oil in the past was destined for
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those same refineries in Texas, because it's a really heavy oil that Alberta oil was going to go
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to. So you got Venezuela in literally as a province of the United States. I don't know what you even
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call it. It's being run by, I don't know, the State Department of the United States. And I don't
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know what's going to happen to Iran. But theoretically, it could be that that Iranian oil
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is going to come back on the legitimate market. So you could see oil being filled by Venezuela and
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Iran. It's on a legitimate market now. Iranian oil accounts for about 40% of the oil that China
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consumes. They buy that legitimately. There's nothing impeding them from, from buying it. And the
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Iranians are quite happy to ship it all to them. And, you know, there's India buys an awful lot of
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Iranian oil. It buys Russian oil too. We have a tendency to get quite focused on what's happening
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in the West, Western Europe and North America. But we shouldn't always worry about that. We should be
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looking for markets other than Louisiana and Texas. But what happens is there are 26 oil refineries in
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the American Midwest. 25 of them are hooked up to do heavy oil like we have. So we pump all this oil
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down there. Most of it goes to the American Midwest. They refine it for domestic use, but they take their
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lighter, sweeter West Texas intermediate. And they sell that to the world at a premium. So, you know,
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this is something that Stephen Harper said within the last month, is that we are not, we're not being
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mean to the Americans, like Trump keeps saying. We're not ripping off the Americans. We are selling
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them a commodity at a discounted price, which then allows them to make even more money from their own
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economy. And so, you know, all of this is extremely complicated. I mean, getting oil out of the ground
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and pumping it to market is incredibly complicated. I went one time to a tank farm in Northern Alberta,
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where there were within these three giant tanks, there were 12 different products that had come out
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of the oil patch. And each of those went down a pipeline, one after another, with machinery that
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goes between the two products and cleans the pipeline. As product number one goes down, cleans out the
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pipeline, product number two comes in, then product number three comes in. I had no idea it was that
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complicated. Right. But there are all sorts of people who understand how all this works. And they think
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that Canada is just absolutely foolish. The Truro era green regulations cost Canada about $400 billion
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in investment in the oil and gas infrastructure and resource extraction. It's hard even to conceive
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of how much damage they did. Yeah. You know, I was in Calgary when the Prime Minister Mark Carney met with
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Alberta Premier Daniel Smith to talk about the so-called MOU, Memorandum of Understanding.
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And it was so vague. And the final deadline for the possible construction was 2040.
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It was in there. Whereas Alberta's obligations to the Fed started immediately.
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I was skeptical then. I don't know how many months have passed. I'd have to look it up. But the only news
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I've seen come out from the pipeline industry is Enbridge, big pipeline backer that had the northern
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gateway that Trudeau killed. They're saying there's just too much risk here. We're not proceeding.
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So I don't, I mean, maybe there's people behind the scenes. I mean, I don't know people. I don't know
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the CEOs in those companies, but there's no public emanations on this other than Enbridge saying,
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no, thanks. I don't think that MOU is going to do anything. I think it was just a fake, a deke.
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Unfortunately, I think you're right. I sat down one time and tried to figure out how much money
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Canadian pipeline companies had put into the pipelines that were canceled by the Trudeau
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government. So you can say Energy East was canceled by the Trudeau government. It was done in a clever
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way so that they didn't have to take direct responsibility for getting rid of it, but they
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did it in Northern gateway. They, they just did it in. Like they said, no, you're not going to be
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able to do this. And then Keystone XL, which they kept saying that they were in favor of,
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they didn't lift the finger to try and convince them. Because you remember it started under Obama.
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Obama wasn't going to give the export permit to allow the oil to come across the line. Trump,
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I have no idea why in the first term, Trump didn't do more. And then Biden, of course,
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just said, no, you're never, ever going to be able to do this. So I tried to figure out,
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and I think it came to about $7 billion that Canadian oil companies had spent trying to get
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pipelines built. Wow. And so of course they have a nasty taste in their mouth. Of course they don't
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want to try for another pipeline. And especially because this federal government doesn't say things
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like, Hey, bring us a proposal. We're looking to get pipelines built. Let's get going. Let's,
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you know, and all they're talking about too, and I made this point in the column this morning,
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all they're talking about too is another pipeline to the west coast. There's an enormous market
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off of the east coast, both for liquefied natural gas and for our oil, but they're not talking about
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a pipeline over there because who does that upset? It upsets Quebec. And so if you have 44 seats that
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the liberals do in Quebec, and you're afraid you're going to lose some of them, if you build
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a pipeline across Quebec, you don't even talk about it. They don't even mention.
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One of the things I learned when I wrote Ethical Oil was that the largest refinery in Canada is not
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in Alberta. It's in New Brunswick. It's the Irving refinery. And it takes oil, not only from the
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States, which was unusual, I didn't know, but from OPEC. In fact, the oil that comes up from the
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States is often dropped off in Maine and pumped up to Montreal. I'm not sure the path it takes now.
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I might be a little bit out of date, but that Canadian refinery that serves Atlantic Canada
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and New England has foreign oil in it, the largest refinery in Canada. And that's what Energy East
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was supposed to fill. You had this beautiful pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick, which
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would have cheaper than OPEC oil. It just breaks my heart. And I don't know.
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Here you have these smug Quebec politicians who say, no, no, no, no, we will never take
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Alberta oil. It's dirty oil. We must never take Alberta oil. Well, they take about 700,000 barrels
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a day of Saudi and Venezuelan oil. It comes in tankers up the St. Lawrence Sea, up the St. Lawrence
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River. Tankers, yeah. Yeah. Tankers are safe, but pipelines are safer. Yes, of course.
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They prefer the Saudi. I remember a few years ago, we put up a banner outside the mayor of Montreal's
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office. And we said, Denny Coderre prefers conflict oil from OPEC to ethical oil from Canada. Oh,
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they hated that. By the way, they put a lot of pressure on the billboard company
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to have it taken down. It was quite a fun little thing we did. Well, you remember too that they
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released over a billion, is it liters or gallons, I can't remember which, of raw sewage into the St.
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Lawrence. But no, no, no, no, no, no. We mustn't, we mustn't upset the pristine waters of the St.
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Lawrence. Or what was it? Is it, is it Norwals that they have that they were worried about?
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Right. That's, I'm glad you reminded me about that. That's right. They,
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they pollute, it's shocking what they did. And this was approved by the liberals. Hey,
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I want to ask you a question about polling. I want to, you wrote an article a couple days ago about
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the United Conservative Party being in the lead in the polls. I want to talk about that.
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But I want to ask you about a phenomenon that I don't understand. And it's not just one polling
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company, which you could write off as a rogue poll or maybe a methodology, but a number of pollsters,
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including some that I pretty much trust, have suggested, strangely to me, that the federal
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liberals are doing fairly well in Alberta these days. And when I saw the first poll, I scoffed.
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But after five or six polls, I, I mean, I can't dispute the science. I mean, maybe all the polls
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are wrong, I guess. Have you seen those polls and what are you making them?
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Yes. And you know what? You have to accept that the only people right now who are doing anything
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concrete in dealing with Trump and dealing with any of the other trade issues are the liberal.
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Pierre Polyev sat for an entire year and said nothing about Trump, not a thing about Trump.
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And so he's allowed the liberals to fill all of that empty space.
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They look like, I mean, if you and I start to examine things they're doing, like they're talking
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a good game about pipelines, but they're not building any. They're talking a good game about
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housing affordability, but they're not building any. We can go through all of the issues that are
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important to Canadians and show that the liberals aren't doing anything, but they are the only ones
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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
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push back against America. You don't even have to use the style of Trump.
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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
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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
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directed at Trump or anyone Trump adjacent. I think that's what happened to Jamil Giovanni,
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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,
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with JD Vance, the vice president, I don't care if I am Pierre Polyev and I know we're being slammed
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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
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difference if the liberals are doing well in Alberta. And I don't even want to say that the
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liberals are ahead in Alberta because I don't want those words to come out of my mouth. I don't want
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to speak them into existence. I don't, I don't think that's true, but they're doing better than
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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.
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She's walking some fine lines pretty well in my view. Now, look, look, I'm out here in Toronto. So
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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
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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
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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
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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
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lot of people in her core, uh, who would lean towards independence. Uh, and so she cannot disparage
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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.
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And I think she's doing it very smartly. Like she came out a month ago, a month and a half ago now with
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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
1.00
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
0.99
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
0.59
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
00:29:12.740
Yeah. Well, that's how the whole province used to tilt almost, maybe not Edmonton. Back in the day
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
1.00
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,
0.60
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,
0.57
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.