Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ What can Albertans learn from the UK's Brexit referendum？

00:00:00.220 Wow, what a smart guy. David Legg joins us for the entirety of today's show. If you don't know who he is, well, he was operating behind the scenes as the man brought in to normalize Alberta after Rachel Notley, the NDP premier, was finally thrown out.

00:00:15.440 Here's an example. He was dispatched to the world's financial capitals to let them know Alberta was safe again. The NDP was gone.

00:00:23.220 He really helped rebuild the place. I'm going to talk to him now about the future of Alberta. Will it go independent? Can Canada be saved?

00:00:32.200 Very interesting conversation, if I do say so myself. I'd like you to get the video version of this podcast. It's called Rebel News Plus.

00:00:39.140 Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month, and we rely on that to pay our bills because, as you know, we take no money from the government, and it shows.

00:00:53.220 Tonight, what can Albertans learn from the Brexit referendum of a decade ago? A feature conversation with David Legg. It's February 25th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:17.200 Shame on you, you censorious bug.

00:01:23.220 Every voice has a moral authority in our democracy, and it's the day where it's a great leveling. A billionaire and a peasant each have one vote, and that's what's so exciting about the looming referendums and citizen initiatives in Alberta.

00:01:43.580 But I think there's some voices that have risen to the top in terms of the quality of their thinking, being philosophical, being well-informed, and I'm looking for voices like that in the debate over Alberta's future.

00:01:56.200 And definitely one of those people is Keith Wilson, the senior lawyer who actually was the lawyer for the Freedom Convoy of Truckers in Ottawa.

00:02:04.720 He's now become sort of the go-to legal mind on the pro-independence side of the debate.

00:02:13.660 I'm delighted to say that we put Keith Wilson and today's special guest together for an amazing debate a few months ago in Alberta.

00:02:22.780 Our guest today is someone I met when I was a student at University of Calgary.

00:02:28.000 He was at University of Lethbridge, and we met each other in a battle against a communist students' union, which was a really great way to meet.

00:02:35.720 And he went on to high heights in international business and investment, coming back to Alberta after Jason Kenney defeated Rachel Notley's NDP.

00:02:44.580 And he had the heavy duty of telling the world that, no, Alberta hadn't gone mad, or at least it was returning to sanity, and that the world's investors should return also.

00:02:55.480 Without further ado, let me introduce to you someone whose thoughts I really listen carefully to because there's so many deep thoughts there in our world of shallow soundbites.

00:03:05.760 It's a pleasure to spend some time with David Legg.

00:03:08.100 David, great to see you again.

00:03:10.180 Hey, great to see you, Aaron.

00:03:11.400 How's it?

00:03:11.880 Now, you're in London today.

00:03:13.520 You're always flying around, and that's one of the things you did for Canada, for Alberta, is you would fly to these investment capitals of London and Germany and New York, and you would say, guys, Alberta's back.

00:03:24.800 Give us a minute on that, because I think that that's an untold story of what you did, not very flashy, was behind the scenes, trying to tell the world not to give up on Alberta.

00:03:36.840 Yeah, you have to be behind the scenes if you want to get things done sometimes, you know, which is not typical in politics, as you know.

00:03:42.400 I think sometimes political perspective benefits from being dramatic, public, and framed.

00:03:50.560 But what we were trying to do at the time was ensure that the world knew that, in spite of these ESG rules that were coming through the large insurance firms and banks,

00:03:59.980 that Alberta not only was the best, most ethical source of energy in the world, but it was incredibly smart investment for people to be making for long term, for a lot of reasons.

00:04:09.900 But we had to battle two things, Ezra.

00:04:12.220 For one, we had to battle, you know, a green fringe politics that had somehow taken hold largely through Davos and had kind of become part of the Liberal Party and NDP consensus that fossil fuels were bad.

00:04:25.440 And we also had to deal with the fact that we were replacing an NDP government that had let Alberta's brand slip, and it actually worked against Alberta's standing in global financial markets.

00:04:39.180 And so one of the things, I had some good friends from HSBC, which had redlined Alberta oil sands, and we restructured that relationship through a negotiation process, through CEO Noel Quinn at the time, and the CFO Ewan Stevenson.

00:04:54.580 And we did the same thing with Barclays. And so we started to unlock better value capital for Alberta industry by taking the actual Alberta story, not the character that had been created by the left and that the Liberal and NDP parties that adopted about Alberta.

00:05:11.540 And this is one of the things that I think is at stake in the conversation right now. Alberta, you know, creates the most wealth in the country. It leads the nation by a long shot on job creation.

00:05:21.640 Alberta, by instinct, is a conservative province. It has cut taxes, reduced regulation. And as a result, it has grown jobs 3.8% in the last year. The rest of the country is 0.6%. And what's funny is you see a Liberal Party that has antagonistic policies to all of that growth, citing that growth as a sign that Canada is healthy right now.

00:05:45.060 And what I want to keep pointing out is, you know, policies have, ideas have consequences and so do policies.

00:05:51.580 And we created a policy environment that I think Premier Daniel Smith has picked up on and taken to the next level in terms of making Alberta a great place for global investment attraction.

00:06:04.120 Something we started with the Invest Alberta structure, something we, you know, I worked very hard on the blueprint for the Indigenous Opportunities Corporation to take Indigenous equity participation in major projects out of the category of sort of corrupt chiefs. 0.89

00:06:21.580 And corrupt middlemen into a category where money could be lent to take stakes in projects that would benefit all Albertans and share the wealth with communities that tend to be poor but are land rich.

00:06:35.820 And so, you know, we got a lot done during that time. I think Premier Smith is building on that.

00:06:41.760 And I think right now, a lot of the themes of that economic autonomy and independence and the ability to move past the, you know, the disruptive and often antagonistic style of politics that's happened in Canada's Federation because the East is resentful of Alberta's momentum has is now starting to play out.

00:07:03.480 But I think, as you know, I have an enormous amount of respect for what he's done to defend the civil rights and the, you know, the representation of the truckers.

00:07:15.660 And I shared that with him. But I think that there's ways that Alberta can achieve autonomy without going the route of full separatism.

00:07:25.040 And that's something I think obviously we're debating. And actually, I'm in London right now.

00:07:28.180 I have a good friend of mine who was part of the Brexit conversation at the time and is currently quite prominent in the conservative movement here and is going through the same thing we went through back in the day of, you know, will it be conservative or will it be reformed conservative and then conservative again with that reformed DNA?

00:07:45.780 And I think the latter is what's going to happen. But there's a lot happening, not just in Alberta, but around the world as people look at what are the policies that actually lead to prosperity for everybody and the most broadly shared prosperity.

00:08:00.340 And I think that, you know, what we're seeing in the UK right now with reform and conservative post-Brexit, what you're seeing in Alberta right now is reflecting a much broader international movement that's happening all over the world towards a more conservative framework.

00:08:14.140 Because it just leads to more, you know, individual freedom and prosperity.

00:08:19.480 You know, Boris Johnson, who's a larger than life character, he was the mayor of London, he became the prime minister on the conservative banner, he's a journalist, he's, he's one of a kind, he's got that shocking hair, and a great sense of humor, great vocabulary, great style.

00:08:36.380 Yeah.

00:08:37.240 But if you look at him on the issues, he was for what they call net zero, like he was a bicycling environmentalist that he would boast about. He also was a mass immigration guy. So on two key issues, I think he was on the wrong side. And if you look at the reform UK now under Nigel Farage, he's taking the opposite point of view on both those issues. And he's attracting some defectors from the shrinking conservative party.

00:09:04.220 I think you're right to draw an analogy with how reform and conservatives split in Canada, and then recombined a little bit stronger. Can I ask you a question about the UK? Because you're there now, you spend time there, you know, I think about the Brexit referendum, which sneaked up on people because it was regarded as a, almost a joke. It was the government's way of saying, fine, we'll give you your referendum, you'll lose. And then can we please stop talking about it?

00:09:33.500 Like, that's how it felt. No fancy people supported it. All the institutions were against it. And what do you know, it won. I mean, Nigel Farage was leading it, but he didn't have a very big army other than ordinary people. Everyone was against it except the people.

00:09:49.580 Can you give me some thoughts on Brexit, what it meant for the UK? And then I want to spend a little bit of time, if you don't mind, asking you what lessons Alberta and the rest of Canada can learn about Brexit, including how the campaign went down. So that's a lot there, but take it away.

00:10:07.280 Well, so three things come to mind. First one is immigration and asylum fraud is a very important part of what's happening in Canada right now. I think that the sort of status anxious, you know, consensus in Ottawa has simply not picked up on.

00:10:29.540 And they think that people that are trying to address that issue are being closet racists or whatever the language is.

00:10:36.660 And as a result, they're misunderstanding the way that people think about their security, their safety, common sense, etc.

00:10:43.580 And I think you're going to see that come up in some of the referendum questions that the premier is going to put on the ballot. But I also think it's part of what people felt in the UK at the time, which is we have a nation that used to stand for something.

00:10:58.100 It used to represent something great, something that we all believed in, something that we hoped for, for our kids especially.

00:11:03.740 And what we've done is we've let that not only slip away from us, but it's become cynical.

00:11:11.040 And I think that what happened with Brexit that's very interesting for Alberta is that the polling never picked up on the fact that there was a huge swing vote of people that actually felt very strongly that it was impolite to say you supported Brexit.

00:11:24.740 It was uncool. But deep down, they were more concerned about the status of England and what it had become under a Brussels bureaucracy that refused to respond to hook-handed terrorists that were then treated like asylum seekers that could not possibly be deported from the UK.

00:11:41.960 And they'd overridden the UK on that.

00:11:43.760 When they ran polls on that stuff, it was those things by families who had had sons that had gone to war and sort of tried to defend the country.

00:11:51.020 And you had these European human rights courts, and you've seen this happen in Canada right now, that were working against every form of human rights inside the UK by insisting that known terrorists were allowed to operate, even though they were connected with complete atrocities.

00:12:09.200 And I think that life is larger than economic logic.

00:12:12.720 And I think for a lot of people, what's happening in Alberta is very similar to what happened in the UK under Brexit, which is this sense that it's not simply about whether or not we can, you know, the UK can do fine economically if we disentangle from Brussels in certain ways.

00:12:28.800 It was this much deeper sense, which was like when we had the European Economic Union, you know, under those conventions, everybody loved free trade.

00:12:39.800 It was working really well.

00:12:40.960 But why did it have to become a center-left bureaucracy that suddenly started to have to overrule normal British rule of law on a bunch of things inside their community?

00:12:52.000 And I think you see some elements of that right now at play in what's happening in Alberta.

00:12:57.640 And I've said this in a couple of podcasts, Ezra.

00:12:59.900 I think that the East and some of the polling numbers are completely misunderstanding that if you ask people certain kinds of questions on this, in polite society, they'll say, yeah, absolutely, I'm against separatism.

00:13:09.560 I'm against separatism, right?

00:13:10.840 And I, you know, made the mistake of debating the great, much smarter than me, Keith Wilson, on a stage in front of, you know, a couple thousand people that are feeling the pain of being in an economy, in an environment that's in decline, and knowing that Alberta, without having to fight its own government in Ottawa, would be on an upswing and not facing some of these challenges.

00:13:34.840 And so I understand and I completely empathize.

00:13:37.540 And Keith and I, as you know, had a debate very much around tactics for autonomy and decision-making that would lead to prosperity rather than simply, you know, having this sort of binary disagreement.

00:13:48.500 But I think that Alberta has an enormous population of people that if asked the question, you know, do you think that Alberta should try autonomy in a formal way, in the way that we restructure a lot?

00:14:01.360 There's going to be a very strong hidden vote that says, yeah, I want to try this.

00:14:04.840 Partly because I think a lot of people want to see how Ottawa is going to react to a sentiment that says, now you've got to actually get serious about solving some of these federalist problems you've created.

00:14:15.220 I think the answer is for all provinces in Canada to have full federal structure, very similar to what Quebec's got.

00:14:22.520 I think that's the direction that this is going to go and probably end up.

00:14:25.600 But I think along the way, when you look at what happened in Brexit, and I expect that the team that wants more autonomy is going to start using some of the same framing that was used in Brexit in order to achieve popular support for that.

00:14:41.080 We're going to be talking a lot more to our British cousins about what happened, how it worked, and what to do about it.

00:14:49.160 You know, in the UK, I followed it a little bit because I didn't think it had a chance.

00:14:53.960 I remember first hearing about it.

00:14:55.200 I thought, boy, this sounds like an obscure project.

00:14:57.060 And it was sort of the same time as Donald Trump.

00:15:00.860 It was a little bit before him, if I'm not mistaken.

00:15:03.320 And it was just sailing through under the radar like Trump was at first.

00:15:07.560 Everyone thought Trump was a joke.

00:15:09.540 They thought it was a PR stunt to build his brand.

00:15:12.560 They didn't realize that he was connecting with people.

00:15:15.360 And I think Brexit was the same way.

00:15:17.060 In the UK, though, I think it was more of a class divide.

00:15:20.880 Working class Brits, ordinary folks, white folks, to be candid, felt they were being left out and were being ignored.

00:15:27.060 Whereas the fancy cosmopolitans in London loved the idea of dashing over to the continent for a weekend.

00:15:34.860 In Canada, the divide, it's a little bit classist, but I think it's more geographical.

00:15:40.360 So I don't know how you resolve it because there's an antipathy in Ontario and Quebec towards the West.

00:15:48.780 Not everyone, of course.

00:15:49.600 There's wonderful people in Ontario and Quebec who actually love Alberta and they love it for its characteristics.

00:15:55.340 But I just saw in the Globe and Mail today some headline about Mark Carney made all these concessions to Alberta.

00:16:02.540 And I thought, what concessions?

00:16:04.520 He put a bunch of barriers.

00:16:06.500 Allowing Alberta to produce its oil is a concession.

00:16:10.360 That's a gift.

00:16:11.600 That's a hardship.

00:16:13.480 And I thought they would never say that about a car factory or the dairy sector.

00:16:19.340 And I don't know how you solve that divide because just the economics and the geography, how do you overcome that?

00:16:28.040 How do you get the prime minister of the country to stop kicking Alberta when it's down?

00:16:33.100 Well, look, it's the last decade under the Liberal Party of Canada, and they were informed and advised directly by Mark Carney for years.

00:16:44.200 You know, I think one of the things that I would love to see, I think Mark Carney could do three things that would not just be a matter of placating the sentiment that wants autonomy,

00:16:56.020 but actually addressing some really fundamental issues economically and culturally, the first thing I think he needs to do is apologize for that op-ed he wrote, calling the truckers seditious.

00:17:07.020 That was a horrific op-ed.

00:17:09.440 It was wrong in every way.

00:17:11.120 It was illegal.

00:17:12.000 It was unconstitutional.

00:17:13.080 And, you know, Christian Freeland and the cabinet members that went with his idea that you need to follow the money and use terrorist financing, something they had failed to use for years.

00:17:25.700 Suddenly they're using it against Canadian citizens instead of known terrorists.

00:17:29.220 It was a horrible time.

00:17:30.640 He was the architect of it.

00:17:31.780 And if you're going to give speeches at Davos about, you know, the lies that need to be confronted by stopping the, you know, by insisting that there's power to the powerless,

00:17:43.120 if you're going to give speeches quoting the great Vassilav Havel, you better live by it.

00:17:46.860 And if you wrote an op-ed attacking people that were trying to make ends meet because they're truckers and they were tired of these,

00:17:52.800 what turned out to be completely unscientific and very quickly dropped mandates after the Freedom Convoy had the, you know,

00:18:01.060 the courage to go and challenge this government directly in the only way they knew how, right?

00:18:05.860 For them to be mocked by the Eastern establishment, for someone in Mark Carney's power to write a note that is completely wrong and unconstitutional,

00:18:15.500 calling them seditious, he needs to come up with an apology saying,

00:18:18.240 I said the wrong thing about my fellow citizens who were hurting, who were trying hard,

00:18:23.520 who were the ones that delivered everybody's packages for two years there in Muskoka when everyone was working from home.

00:18:29.920 And they were the first ones to say that our long dated failed COVID mandates that everybody else was dropping around the world except us were overdue to be dropped.

00:18:39.360 And we refused to listen to them.

00:18:41.020 They did the right thing and came here in protest and I was wrong and they were right.

00:18:43.820 If he offered that kind of leadership, that kind of humility, that kind of power to the powerless,

00:18:50.620 voice for those who had the courage to confront the lie at the time, you know, then I think that would go a long way.

00:18:57.300 I think the other thing he's got to do is drop the C-69 and C-48, the tanker ban and the no new pipelines bill

00:19:04.960 and make sure that Alberta can start to create opportunity, society again for all of Canada.

00:19:11.360 Right now, Alberta is funding Canada.

00:19:12.980 Alberta is the one economy, the one economic engine that makes this country actually work.

00:19:18.200 And the insistence on not recognizing that and not unlocking these, I think, you know, obviously self-defeating policies

00:19:26.380 is going to perpetuate the idea that Alberta can do better on its own.

00:19:32.140 And I think there's a huge number of people that do not want separatism and sort of observe the obvious thing that you can't separate from geography.

00:19:40.140 I think what we need to do, and this is a personal thing, but I would like to see us change the language of some of what we're talking about.

00:19:46.820 I think we need a new architecture in Canada to allow Alberta to be prosperous, to allow it to pursue its autonomy.

00:19:52.800 I think Alberta can be the Monaco of what Monaco is to France. 0.95

00:19:56.920 I think Alberta can be the Monaco of North America and Canada, left to be able to create a much more progressive and inclusive economic opportunity society.

00:20:08.000 And I think if Mark Carney would unlock that, all of Canada would benefit.

00:20:11.020 But there's a very strong cultural dynamic that you're referring to that took place in Brexit that just seems like it's very tempting in the East. 0.52

00:20:23.360 And you see it in these bizarre headlines like the one you're referring to, that this is some kind of beneficent thing that he's agreed to do in MOU.

00:20:31.380 This is the only country in the world with this level of natural resource wealth that is so deeply self-defeating.

00:20:38.400 This is the only country, it's the bottom of the G7 right now.

00:20:41.800 And if Alberta wasn't involved, we'd be developing nation status in terms of our GDP.

00:20:46.640 They've completely created a massive economic and deep security crisis by their complete mismanagement of asylum and immigration fraud at a scale that is now devastating the economy.

00:20:59.380 They're working on these bizarre free speech, hate speech, misinformation rules that are basically politicizing and criminalizing natural political dissent and mainstream views that disagree with their leftist perspective on a variety of issues.

00:21:17.140 You know, this is not a government with the mandate that Mark Carney has.

00:21:21.540 And I think a lot of Canadians of goodwill were hopeful.

00:21:24.320 This is a guy that will replace Justin Trudeau, be able to bring some economic logic back to the country so we can quit losing so badly.

00:21:31.480 And instead, we see a year of what I think has been, you know, some positives, but there's nothing of substance so far that's addressing the issues that I think are really animating the reason why a lot of Albertans say, I think we can do better.

00:21:45.280 And if we have to do better on our own, we'll do it on our own.

00:21:47.840 And I think that doesn't necessarily mean separatism, but it certainly means a lot more autonomy to build an opportunity society that's not deeply indebted and, you know, running under some bureaucratic sclerosis that is preventing us from actually building a society that our kids will want to be part of.

00:22:05.680 You know, I remember the moment in, I think it was 2014, 2015, when the New York Times itself acknowledged that Canada's middle class had exceeded America's middle class in terms of wealth.

00:22:20.760 And I almost couldn't believe it because my entire life, Canada was a little bit of a poorer cousin, but there was this moment where, no, we were actually ahead of things.

00:22:30.840 And now the Globe and Mail, I just criticized them a moment ago, so I'll praise them now, did a fairly deep dive into how Alabama, which when you just say it, it's got this cultural connotation of being poor and, you know, undeveloped.

00:22:45.060 That Alabama is now wealthier than most of Canada, and if you were on an individual basis, and that's just in terms of per capita GDP, there's also purchasing power.

00:22:56.720 You can buy a house in Alabama if you're 25.

00:22:59.780 You can't buy a house in Toronto or Vancouver if you're 25.

00:23:02.860 And I don't know, I mean, that's why I think the boomers love Mark Carney's, because they already have a house, they already had their work, they're sort of coasting now, and I don't know, I just, I'm worried about where Canada's heading. 0.96

00:23:20.840 And I think a lot of Albertans are looking at the mess that Mark Carney is creating and saying, we don't just want to separate from the long-standing problems in Canada, we want to get away from that guy who thinks our future lies with China and anti-Americanism.

00:23:38.260 Like, I think everything that Mark Carney does that's irritating to, quote, conservatives, it pushes more people towards Alberta independence.

00:23:46.280 Yeah, look, I think that there is a deep cultural divide in the country that stems a little bit from the fact that Alberta is doing so well economically.

00:23:59.640 And this sounds ironic to people, I think, because people feel like Alberta is, you know, restive because it's got some, you know, economic frustrations.

00:24:08.540 If you look at Canada over the last decade, the degree of impoverishment of the country, one of the things that's hidden just how bad it is, is that this government, very much like the NDP in Alberta, has borrowed more money than all previous governments combined.

00:24:23.880 The debt, the whole of government debt, because a lot of our people forget a lot of our debt in Canada isn't just federal debt, because we have policies on, like our healthcare and our education is actually run provincially.

00:24:36.280 So we have 110% of our GDP is debt in any given year.

00:24:42.960 People don't understand how serious that is, how bad that is.

00:24:46.160 You look at what's happening in places like BC, you look at what's happening in Ottawa with the $1.5 trillion in debt, the largest deficit, aside from, you know, extreme sort of deficit issues this year, under a guy that has no plan that's actually changing the fundamentals of the economic growth strategy.

00:25:03.820 And in the midst of all that, Alberta is growing, doing exceptionally well.

00:25:08.880 And I think that as people look at that, there's a cultural divide.

00:25:12.000 It's not just about economics.

00:25:13.140 It's also about what are we as a nation?

00:25:16.320 You know, why are we so insecure out east that we have to pretend that the 10 years of decline are Donald Trump's fault?

00:25:24.600 We know they're not Donald Trump's fault.

00:25:26.260 You know, he wasn't around for most of it.

00:25:27.920 We know that the, you know, the Americans aren't the ones that are responsible for 300,000 people defrauding our asylum system.

00:25:35.300 They're not responsible for the complete loss of control over where Hamas has blood and the IRGC agents are in the country right now.

00:25:42.460 30,000 deportees lost track of.

00:25:45.500 I mean, the level of incompetence is so unbelievable that some people, when I post some of this stuff, people say, well, it's got to be intentional.

00:25:54.400 How could anybody possibly be doing this if it's not intentional?

00:25:57.340 I don't think it's intentional.

00:25:58.560 I think that it is just careless.

00:26:01.080 It's a deeply careless approach to things because the country has been lucky.

00:26:06.980 And one of the ways the country is lucky is that we're right next door to the United States and most of us live within, you know, with proximity to the U.S.

00:26:13.740 and so our economy is, you know, almost 80% trade down to the United States.

00:26:18.660 Their economy is only 12 or 13% trade up to us.

00:26:22.860 So there's, you know, that's one area in which we've become sort of a trust fund nation.

00:26:27.380 The other area in which we've become a trust fund nation is Alberta creates all this wealth that gets transferred into provinces that don't feel the natural economic pressure.

00:26:36.980 Of having chosen a left-wing government or left-wing governments.

00:26:40.420 And so you've got places that are completely economically untenable, like Quebec, that aren't forced to deal with that problem because Alberta is transferring 21, 22 billion dollars to them to help, you know, move them past the need to ever be realists about energy security.

00:26:59.700 And so I think what's happening in Alberta is people are reaching a point where they're saying, I want to call time on all of this.

00:27:04.740 I don't believe that we should be in bed with the Chinese and acting antagonistic and elbows up to the Americans.

00:27:11.940 I think the Americans need to know that we're strong and we're going to argue our own incentives and our own interests from a position of strength.

00:27:19.460 But I don't believe that being in bed with the Chinese helps us. 1.00

00:27:22.380 I don't believe that we have to be recklessly incompetent on immigration.

00:27:25.820 I don't believe that terrorists should be marching in the streets and creating an uncomfortable environment for the Jewish community of Montreal, Toronto.

00:27:31.340 A lot of people have had it with that cultural decline.

00:27:35.400 They've had it with the U.S. having the lowest crime rate, lowest murder rate in 125 years under a guy that's removing people that shouldn't be there in the first place and having Canada's violent crime spiking to the highest point ever.

00:27:50.560 These are the things that start to make people say, I don't know how it's all broken exactly, but if you're putting in front of me a referendum question that says, do you want change?

00:28:01.240 Do you want to take back control?

00:28:02.600 Then I'll do that.

00:28:03.300 And that's what Dominic Cummins did with the Leave campaign that took people by surprise in Whitehall and across the elites in the country.

00:28:12.220 He just basically realized people had had it with the cultural decline of the U.K.

00:28:17.440 They'd had it with an elite that never had to live with the consequences of their decisions in terms of tax, the grooming and rape gangs.

00:28:25.300 You know, this is the life that people were having to live with.

00:28:28.340 And every time they tried to protest something, they were called a racist or, you know, the fathers that were trying to deal with their young daughters being groomed and kidnapped were being the ones that were put in jail.

00:28:39.060 So that was what was happening in the community at large.

00:28:42.720 And that was the conversation people were having.

00:28:45.000 In Canada right now, people are having conversations about this B.C. human rights fascist, this woman that had this guy arrested.

00:28:53.620 They've had it with this.

00:28:54.860 They've had it with people that are kids that are being put on SSRIs and losing their minds and shooting people and police, RCMP that never arrested the guy because they're worried about being called transphobic.

00:29:06.260 And then when the damage happens, they want to blame OpenAI for not alerting them earlier to his bad posts as if they would have done anything about that.

00:29:14.680 People see through this stuff and what they see is a corrupted, sad, defensive, status-anxious elite that doesn't know how to actually build something.

00:29:25.900 And instead of actually making the hard steps to build consensus and build something in the country, they'd rather run against a caricature of a U.S. president that's unlikable.

00:29:34.920 And I don't think people find that satisfactory.

00:29:37.720 It's just so hollow as a philosophy of what we can be as a nation.

00:29:41.720 And I think when people look at the debt, they look at what's happening with the immigration and asylum fraud.

00:29:46.340 They look at some of the dynamics around what's happening in their schools.

00:29:48.860 They look at this bizarre abuse of the idea of human rights to go after people that have mainstream opinions on sexual identity and what kids should be told in schools.

00:29:58.840 And they just say, you know what, I don't like the direction the country's taking right now, and I want change.

00:30:04.040 And if you're telling me I can't get that change federally, but I can get that change provincially, you're tempting me now.

00:30:09.680 Now, I might not believe in separatism.

00:30:11.960 I might believe there's a way to have autonomy without breaking out of the country.

00:30:15.240 I don't believe that you can separate geography.

00:30:17.600 We need a new architecture.

00:30:19.200 But whatever that thing is, that sentiment will be expressed and felt in the fall in a very specific way.

00:30:26.420 And I think the premier is doing some good things, putting some of these issues on the table at the same time as the referendum.

00:30:32.980 I know there's debate about that right now.

00:30:35.180 But I think that Albertans are not easily scared by elite consensus.

00:30:40.940 I know that, as you know, I know that being, you know, Jason's principal advisor and, you know, he and I had different views on some of the COVID stuff.

00:30:50.340 But our base doesn't tolerate, you know, those differences for long before they act to shift them.

00:30:56.440 And I think that Alberta will be the one province that continues to save Canada from itself by growing the economy, by dreaming, by building, by creating.

00:31:06.660 And if Ottawa continues to choose to stand in the way of that, then there will be fundamental change.

00:31:12.100 It's either this fall or it'll come in a different form later on.

00:31:15.280 But I think that move towards economic and cultural autonomy is gaining steam.

00:31:22.020 I mentioned you're in the UK and that got me thinking about Brexit a bit.

00:31:25.520 And then you mentioned the name Dominic Cummings, who is a, I would call him a kind of amateur philosopher, as well as a political strategist.

00:31:36.660 He was an advisor.

00:31:38.320 He was involved in the Brexit campaign.

00:31:40.560 He was with Boris Johnson trying to fight the bureaucracy.

00:31:47.420 He was on the Leave side, the Remain side, which was the, you know, the no vote.

00:31:53.260 They actually called their campaign Project Fear.

00:31:56.440 That was actually an internal phrase they used.

00:31:59.740 And it was, let's make people so afraid of a future outside of the European Union.

00:32:04.420 And they tried their best.

00:32:05.680 I don't know if Project Fear would work super well in Alberta because Alberta knows that it's so wealthy.

00:32:11.800 You know, you could scare people a little bit about their pension, maybe.

00:32:15.520 I can't really think of other things because everyone in Alberta instinctively knows they're going to be better financially.

00:32:21.680 But there's a second part that they sort of had in the UK, but I see a big time in Canada.

00:32:26.920 I'm calling it Project Sneer.

00:32:29.580 So there's Project Fear, which is, I'm going to make you afraid you're going to lose your pension.

00:32:33.920 Project Sneer is the entire Laurentian punditocracy.

00:32:41.100 And I shouldn't pick on Andrew Coyne, but he's the most rabid of them.

00:32:45.080 It's just constantly denigrating the word traitor and treason.

00:32:50.340 I don't know if you saw this, David.

00:32:52.880 Two days ago, the Parti Québécois separatist politician won a provincial by-election.

00:33:02.120 That's the fourth Parti Québécois separatist in a row.

00:33:06.420 Four in a row.

00:33:07.540 And I searched the entire CBC website.

00:33:11.540 I found one tiny story written completely straight, just a little, oh, by the way, the PQ one.

00:33:18.260 Why is it that the sneering is directed at Albertans who are saying, hey, stop picking on us.

00:33:25.140 Stop stealing our stuff.

00:33:26.100 Stop blocking our oil.

00:33:27.820 But you have a separatist in Quebec.

00:33:30.340 If you mention them at all, just report it straight.

00:33:33.500 The Project Sneer, tell me a little bit about that and what would Dominic Cummings do to fight Project Fear and Project Sneer?

00:33:42.660 Well, I'll tell you what he did do with Project Fear is he decimated the elite opinion by realizing he's relentlessly focused on data.

00:33:52.280 And he's a believer, actually, there's a similarity between Peter Thiel's philosophy of mimetic thinking by the philosopher René Girard

00:34:01.960 and some of what you read in Dominic Cummings, actually.

00:34:04.540 And so for, you know, for the nerds in the crowd, it was interesting to look at that.

00:34:10.620 But I think that one of the things that the elite was shocked at was they knew when they saw the results of Brexit

00:34:18.460 that there were a lot of smart traders, bankers, lawyers that had voted leave.

00:34:24.520 And they were stunned by it.

00:34:27.940 And what I think happened was people started to realize life is bigger than economic logic.

00:34:33.520 Life is about the kind of society you want your kids to inherit and what that society looks and feels like.

00:34:39.140 And I think that the problem that Andrew, I have respect for, I used to read his stuff all the time.

00:34:46.980 I think he and I come at things from a very different perspective, but I think that the issue that Andrew has

00:34:53.000 and the issue that a lot of people that would reflect Andrew's opinion have is actually they are fearful.

00:35:01.200 They know if they have any grasp of the economics of this country at all, that if Alberta does –

00:35:07.860 and I'll tell you this because I worked on APP.

00:35:10.260 At the time when I ran the numbers on APP, I went into Travis Tave's office and I said, Travis –

00:35:14.980 just to explain, by that you mean the Alberta provincial pension?

00:35:18.720 Yeah, Alberta taking back and controlling – the way Quebec has a pension plan – 0.81

00:35:24.180 sorry, I'll give some background.

00:35:25.600 So one of my thoughts when I came back, I came back from running strategy for a global bank.

00:35:29.940 And Jason had said, come back, be the finance minister.

00:35:33.100 And I came back before I would be resident for long enough to have been elected.

00:35:37.040 And so I focused on just working to try and achieve our economic strategy from within the government.

00:35:43.020 And we had six or seven pillars that we looked at.

00:35:47.540 We had a segment-specific strategy around what we would do with our airports and airlines

00:35:51.200 to create the kind of autonomy that Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai had created.

00:35:55.580 And we knew that Alberta had some of the same landlocked characteristics in their case.

00:35:59.540 You know, they had a large country around them that was antagonistic, like Hong Kong has with China

00:36:08.740 or, you know, Singapore had with Indonesia and Malaysia and Dubai had by being landlocked.

00:36:14.600 And we looked at all those strategies, how we could deploy them in Alberta.

00:36:17.440 And, you know, as we were sort of building that economic superstructure up,

00:36:23.480 one of the things that became increasingly apparent to me is Alberta actually runs the economy of Canada

00:36:30.820 in a really fundamental way.

00:36:32.120 And if you look at something like the Alberta pension plan, if we simply said the following,

00:36:37.160 it's a thought experiment.

00:36:38.360 What if Alberta just said, we don't want much, we just want exactly what Quebec has.

00:36:42.480 And it's a federation that's constitutionally managed.

00:36:45.420 And so we're just going to take all of their powers.

00:36:46.940 So we will have, instead of having a federally run bureaucracy on the law enforcement side,

00:36:51.740 like the RCMP, which used to be very proud, but now it's very kind of, you know, DEI-focused

00:36:56.520 and politically correct.

00:36:57.460 What if we had just had an Alberta-based, much more accountable law enforcement system

00:37:02.880 that actually took rural crime seriously?

00:37:05.100 You know, what if we funded that ourselves?

00:37:07.780 What if we had our Alberta pension plan here instead of just the way the Quebec pension plan happens?

00:37:13.460 So what if we took the assets that Alberta contributed to CPPIB and we took those out?

00:37:18.940 Now, when I started to do that thought experiment, I looked at some numbers.

00:37:21.660 And the thing that became evident immediately, Ezra, is that Alberta clearly owns at least 45%

00:37:27.520 of the Canada pension plan easily.

00:37:30.320 I think it's actually up now over 50.

00:37:32.460 And when I first floated this, I ended up talking about this at C.D. Howe Institute.

00:37:38.580 And somebody quite prominent in the pension world said, look, you're going to unravel the entire

00:37:42.460 hockey sweater of Canada.

00:37:44.500 And there was a chairman of a bank there who came up to me afterwards and gave me his card

00:37:47.880 and said, we have to sit down and have lunch and talk.

00:37:50.180 That's when it started to dawn on me, Ezra.

00:37:52.380 Project FEAR is interesting because I think it's a form of projection.

00:37:56.720 I think in Alberta, I think in Canada, Project Senior and Project FEAR is a smart guy like

00:38:01.860 Andrew Coyne, senses deep down in his very agile, economically informed, you know, deeply

00:38:08.840 federalist mind.

00:38:10.720 He knows Alberta has the wherewithal to actually do this, get away with it and print it. 0.98

00:38:16.100 And if that happens, if you unlock Alberta and Alberta is in a position where it creates

00:38:20.660 a direct sort of trading relationship in the United States and it's unlocked fundamentally,

00:38:26.000 we will within 20 years become the single most wealthy democracy in the planet, no holds

00:38:31.740 barred.

00:38:32.020 It's impossible.

00:38:33.380 We have 5 million people and we have $5 trillion worth of assets.

00:38:37.680 Qatar is, you know, this incredibly wealthy place.

00:38:41.580 We have as much oil, we have as much gas as Qatar.

00:38:45.060 We have more oil than the entire United States and Russia and China combined.

00:38:50.040 We haven't even mapped a geological, full geological survey of our mineral wealth.

00:38:55.060 This is, this is the wealthiest democracy on planet earth.

00:38:59.440 Nothing is even close.

00:39:00.520 And I think guys like Andrew and others instinctively, even though they won't ever admit it, understand

00:39:05.640 this is a place where you could actually build, you know, we've got the same, when I set up

00:39:11.100 Invest Alberta, I set it up on the pattern of Ireland, partly because if you look at Israel 0.99

00:39:16.140 and you look at Ireland, two of the best sort of most capital intensive places that did a

00:39:21.760 great job of attracting international capital.

00:39:23.940 I looked at those two models and we built Invest Alberta on those models.

00:39:26.980 And when you look at Alberta, Alberta can be five times wealthier than Ireland easily.

00:39:35.260 We have far more natural wealth in Ireland.

00:39:37.460 We've got a very similar sort of population structure.

00:39:40.060 We have, we have all this potential.

00:39:43.180 And if you were to say, what are the three or four things keeping you from reaching your potential?

00:39:47.860 You know, the top three of the top three would be federal government interventions that prevent us

00:39:52.680 from just doing the things that we want to do naturally, which they would ultimately benefit from.

00:39:56.200 So at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, so what's, what is the motive of Andrew in being

00:40:02.340 so resentful over Alberta separatism, but so accommodating of Quebec separatism?

00:40:07.600 What is this cultural sentiment in the East that is so antagonistic?

00:40:12.960 And it's been, you know, there's something in that DNA when you look at these old posters

00:40:17.020 that you see of, you know, back in the middle of the centuries, political posters of Alberta

00:40:22.700 being resentful over, over federal control.

00:40:25.580 I think the big difference now is Alberta is reaching escape velocity.

00:40:29.120 And anybody close to the Canadian economy knows just how bad it's gotten.

00:40:33.640 And that if you take Canadian economic numbers, and you strip out Alberta, Canada falls.

00:40:39.920 It's already at the bottom of the OECD.

00:40:41.980 If you, if you take Alberta, and you say Alberta without Canada, it is a, it is an extraordinary,

00:40:48.220 fast growing, highly competitive middle power globally.

00:40:52.160 If you take Alberta out of Canada, Canada no longer has Alberta, and Canada continues

00:40:57.020 to pursue this heavy red tape, extreme bureaucracy, extreme debt.

00:41:02.480 And again, people have to calc the debt on both the provincial and the federal level because

00:41:07.380 of the way we're structured federally.

00:41:09.300 You know, you have a country that can't work mathematically without Alberta funding things.

00:41:13.960 And so I think that what you're seeing in Project Fear and Project Sneer is the Project Fear

00:41:18.940 is actually the fear of people that get close to the numbers, or just their intuition about

00:41:23.640 this, they start to realize these people could actually pull it off.

00:41:27.980 They could actually do it.

00:41:29.560 They could separate.

00:41:30.960 And if they did, the Canadian experiment would be over.

00:41:34.500 And so I think the stakes are much higher than people are willing to admit.

00:41:37.960 And they're going through the five phases of grief, or whatever that framing is.

00:41:43.620 And I think denial is the first one.

00:41:45.800 And I think they're starting to realize mockery kind of helps them feel better because it's

00:41:51.720 a form of denial.

00:41:52.860 But as you get closer and closer to what this is, and again, I don't want separatism.

00:41:56.540 I want a restructuring of the architecture of Alberta in Canada.

00:42:00.640 But my restructuring of the architecture of Alberta in Canada pivots off of Ottawa being

00:42:06.320 willing to make Alberta as autonomous as Quebec, plus some other things.

00:42:10.200 And right now, the signal that they're sending, even under this new prime minister, is they're

00:42:14.500 totally unwilling to do even the most rational middle steps.

00:42:18.380 And so they are in a position where you're going to start to see this get hotter and hotter.

00:42:24.400 You're going to see people like Andrew get angrier and angrier, because the closer you get to

00:42:28.140 that moment, and what they don't realize they're doing, like that Globe and Mail and some of the

00:42:32.360 things Andrew writes, is they're just lighting a fire under the middle of the road, people.

00:42:37.020 And I really believe you're going to see something very similar happen to Brexit if Andrew and

00:42:41.360 the Globe and Mail keep it up, which is they're trying to play to their Toronto Cocktail Club

00:42:45.260 crowd, and they're not doing a job.

00:42:47.800 They're not doing the right thing.

00:42:49.540 They're not fairly interrogating what the issues actually are that are splitting the country

00:42:54.540 right now, because they don't want to offend their friends in Ottawa.

00:42:57.780 And by not doing that, they're missing the point.

00:43:00.720 And by missing the point, they're going to continue to create a scenario where more and more

00:43:05.620 people that are in that large range in the middle, like they were in Brexit, are going

00:43:09.380 to say, you know what?

00:43:10.760 If you're giving me the choice between continuing with this failed status quo of another lost

00:43:15.600 decade culturally and economically in this country, or trying something new, even if it's

00:43:20.660 not perfect, or even if I don't like the way it's framed, I'm willing to try something

00:43:24.640 new.

00:43:25.040 And I think they don't understand just how deep that middle vote is.

00:43:29.040 I can tell you right now, as I've said this on a few things recently, I'm talking to people

00:43:34.420 that no one would ever guess would say, if you ask me to vote, I'm going to vote, you

00:43:40.080 know, that we just try something totally new here.

00:43:42.320 And no one's saying, I want separatism.

00:43:44.020 What they're saying is, nothing in this federal structure is working.

00:43:47.840 The whole thing is broken, and I want to reset.

00:43:51.360 And that's what a lot of people are going to vote for.

00:43:53.120 And they're going to see the way this question is framed is a little too much for them.

00:43:56.720 But they're going to be willing to try it as a way of forcing the entire country to

00:44:00.880 have a real debate about its future.

00:44:03.380 You know, Matt Jenner, who is the name of a longtime conservative MP from Edmonton, who

00:44:09.380 apparently had some family issues announced last year he was going to take some time away.

00:44:14.700 And then suddenly announces he's a liberal.

00:44:17.860 And suddenly, he's sitting next to the prime minister in parliament.

00:44:21.540 Suddenly, he's on a junket with the prime minister, someone who doesn't even live in

00:44:24.820 Alberta anymore.

00:44:25.700 I understand he's moved to BC.

00:44:27.780 And it's an outrageous story of floor crossing for no principled reason, someone who should

00:44:33.020 have resigned and had a by-election just because he – and maybe there's some personal

00:44:36.600 things we don't know about him.

00:44:37.960 And I'm just saying, fine, go resolve them, but don't take a seat.

00:44:42.180 But here's the independence angle.

00:44:46.360 That riding was Alberta playing by the rules.

00:44:49.680 Okay, you don't like what's happening, so elect your alternative.

00:44:52.560 Elect someone who will advocate for you.

00:44:55.820 And Matt Jenner won.

00:44:57.360 And then in some backroom deal that we don't know anything about, we don't know what the

00:45:01.700 inducements were.

00:45:02.620 There obviously were some.

00:45:04.860 It's – there's a do-over.

00:45:07.260 There's a form of cheating.

00:45:09.500 And so if you're saying to Albertans, suck it up, stop complaining, know your place, you

00:45:17.700 have no legitimate grounds for complaint.

00:45:20.940 And then when Albertans do that and say, okay, fine, we'll be good boys and we'll vote the

00:45:24.580 way we're supposed to do, good boys and girls.

00:45:26.720 And then we win under those rules.

00:45:28.180 And then they just – it's like the other team says, oh, you actually won under our

00:45:33.680 rules?

00:45:34.400 We're going to – there's other rules we didn't tell you about until now, which is we

00:45:38.620 get to have private meetings with your MPs and bribe them to refute your clearly demonstrated

00:45:44.880 democratic will.

00:45:46.180 That – I should tell you, Rebel News, we track a lot of our stories and our polls and

00:45:51.600 things like that.

00:45:52.360 That Matt Jenner thing was the white hot issue.

00:45:57.200 And because it's not just a floor crossing.

00:46:00.580 It's proof that there is no winning in this system.

00:46:04.600 Because if you do win, surprise, there's this special move we have that we didn't tell

00:46:08.840 you about until now.

00:46:10.480 And I don't know.

00:46:12.100 I just found that deeply depressing because I've always believed in the democratic system.

00:46:17.220 I've always believed in the legal system.

00:46:19.160 And apparently Mark Carney does not.

00:46:20.580 And the jubilation – here's what gets me – is the entire Eastern commentariat, their

00:46:28.000 takeaway is, ha, Pierre Polyev certainly has a lack of leadership abilities if we're

00:46:32.560 able to bribe his MPs away.

00:46:35.500 This shows that Pierre Polyev is a poor leader, but Mark Carney is a brilliant leader because

00:46:40.840 you see he's – what did he say?

00:46:43.180 I know how the world works.

00:46:45.000 I think that Matt Jenner thing is a deeper explosion than perhaps Mark Carney realizes he's

00:46:52.500 detonated.

00:46:55.420 Yeah.

00:46:56.100 Look, I think that if you – you know, you and I have been close to politics for a while,

00:47:02.240 and I think that you've seen moments where the tension between some of the differential

00:47:08.740 interests in matters of conscience, matters of your constituency, and matters of country,

00:47:15.940 that's kind of been the classic political philosophical debate for a long time.

00:47:20.660 You know, there are times where you have to say to your constituents, I know that a majority

00:47:25.500 of you may disagree with me on this call on abortion, but this is who I am.

00:47:29.140 And I'm going to take this vote, and you can throw me out in the next election.

00:47:32.660 That's a conscience issue over against your constituents, and you are making that argument

00:47:39.180 because of the moral code of the country or what you're hoping that the moral fabric of

00:47:43.420 the country will be.

00:47:44.580 And constituents often will say, okay, I understand.

00:47:46.640 There's a certain limited number of issues that you just have to vote your conscience on

00:47:50.360 as an individual, and I'll go with that.

00:47:52.120 Then there are issues where you say, look, my constituents might be full of a lot of freedom-loving

00:47:56.460 hippies here in Nelson, B.C., but I am going to vote that we go to war and we defend our

00:48:01.560 interests in the following way.

00:48:02.980 And I think the country needs this, and I'm willing to make the call, and I'm willing to

00:48:07.340 deal with the upshot of that.

00:48:10.240 And I think there are other issues where you say to your constituents, you know, the rest

00:48:16.680 of the world is against us, but we're farmers.

00:48:19.940 And you know what?

00:48:20.660 I'm going to vote that we move on this and that we tariff that and that we do this because

00:48:24.880 that's who we are.

00:48:26.080 And you might be the only guy standing up in parliament and your constituents love you

00:48:29.120 for it because they know you have their voice.

00:48:31.720 You represent their interests in a unique way.

00:48:34.180 And I think, you know, you see this in Locke and Burke and all the political lawsuits used

00:48:37.920 to write about what it means to actually represent people's interests and your conscience and your

00:48:42.480 country in different ways.

00:48:43.480 And your job as an elected official is to constantly be navigating those trade-offs in a way that's

00:48:49.520 ethical and rooted in a principled philosophy.

00:48:53.020 What you see happening right now with this idea that we can just nab the extra vote when

00:48:58.060 we want it and whip it is a complete violation of all three.

00:49:02.680 And party structures exist to kind of be the decoder ring of those things.

00:49:07.360 So a party structure exists to say, look, on the margins, if you vote for this person,

00:49:11.960 the reason they're flying the conservative flag is they're going to tend to be more conscientious

00:49:16.580 about these issues, a little stronger on the fiscal issues, a little more libertarian on

00:49:20.500 these things, they're going to want to vote, you know, and that's going to be different

00:49:23.340 from the liberal candidate.

00:49:25.160 Imagine you're the liberal candidate that ran against Matt Genaro.

00:49:29.060 You know, you're sitting there saying, I stood by this stuff on a principled basis because

00:49:32.600 I'm the guy that stands up in a mostly conservative riding.

00:49:35.720 And year over year, people hate me for it, but I stand for what I think.

00:49:39.380 I want a society that's more focused on equality than liberty.

00:49:43.000 OK, that's my view.

00:49:44.000 I'm a liberal, right?

00:49:46.060 I stand strong for these things.

00:49:47.740 You know, I believe one day people will see it my way. 0.96

00:49:50.880 And this clown basically hijacks your party's platform when it's convenient for him for personal 0.95

00:49:57.080 purposes and uses it to advance himself for the moment and denies the people that voted 0.95

00:50:03.140 for the conservative party, which, by the way, people aren't voting for Matt Genaro.

00:50:07.140 There's voting as much for Pierre Polyev as Matt Genaro.

00:50:09.860 So the narrative around this, the kind of winner take all cynicism about being able to take

00:50:16.140 the system after the fact, you know, take on the system after the fact by getting some

00:50:20.300 it's literally like you're playing this game.

00:50:22.480 It's a hockey game.

00:50:23.320 And halfway through the game, some guy drops a bag of cash next to your defenseman.

00:50:28.140 He skates over, changed jerseys, goes back on the ice and takes your guy out in the corner.

00:50:32.500 The whole team is like, what is this?

00:50:34.340 What is this?

00:50:35.140 Right.

00:50:35.480 The fans are disgusted by it.

00:50:37.260 I think the problem the liberal party has is there's an expectation at a hockey game

00:50:42.020 by the liberal party and the conservative party that makes moments like this feel uncomfortable

00:50:46.620 because we're supposed to be somehow better than this.

00:50:49.060 There's something about the game itself and the way the game itself is supposed to be played.

00:50:53.200 And I think a lot of people instinctively feel that there's something fundamentally not

00:50:58.040 right about this horse trading resulting in you just coming on side for the sake of that

00:51:03.400 extra vote.

00:51:04.040 And if this is the way they want to play it, this is the way they want to trade it, trading

00:51:08.180 on, you know, the human weakness of somebody as weak as this Matt General guy, his lack

00:51:13.740 of loyalty, his lack of integrity, his lack of an understanding of what a political philosophy

00:51:17.700 and being a conservative is supposed to mean.

00:51:20.080 Then I think people are going to increasingly say, going back to our previous thing, the country

00:51:24.260 itself is broken.

00:51:25.680 A prime minister that thinks that this is some kind of like card trick way of getting

00:51:31.220 ahead does not make me feel like I live in a nation that's got the right kind of democratic

00:51:36.580 ethos.

00:51:37.840 And you might be NDP, liberal, conservative, doesn't matter.

00:51:41.080 People will feel like this isn't the way we want this country to actually operate.

00:51:46.520 And Ezra, I think the issue that a lot of people are going to run into is I talk to, you know,

00:51:51.040 family members, others that don't necessarily have the conservative political perspective

00:51:55.760 that I have, right?

00:51:56.900 Because they have lives.

00:51:58.080 They're not political nerds.

00:51:59.780 But they don't feel like they can walk downtown and feel safe right now, right?

00:52:06.600 They don't feel like, yeah, they are disgusted when, you know, the Jewish guy they went to

00:52:13.340 college with is like, I feel more comfortable moving down to the States right now.

00:52:16.760 I'm really, really worried, right?

00:52:19.740 You know, you've got so many conversations happening underneath the scenes.

00:52:23.640 And again, I don't think a lot of people are calculating this through politics.

00:52:27.400 I think there's a lot of people that will vote liberal next time again, but they're not

00:52:31.940 happy with what they're seeing in downtown Toronto and who's marching around.

00:52:35.140 And they don't love it when they find out that the immigration crew has lost control of 1.00

00:52:39.800 30,000 people that are supposed to be deported, including 3,000 people with terrorist

00:52:44.460 affiliations, and they know that there are these violent acts being directed to the Jewish

00:52:49.760 community.

00:52:50.880 People start thinking, this is wrong, and I want it fixed.

00:52:53.740 And I think it's above politics.

00:52:55.100 It's beyond politics.

00:52:56.020 This is about creating a society where our political differences can be managed through

00:53:01.340 a framework of, you know, a just, good society where people are competent and they're doing

00:53:06.840 the right thing.

00:53:07.560 And I think liberal party sort of desire to maintain power, including the card tricks with

00:53:14.820 guys like Matt Gennaro, or the use of language that kind of tries to wrong foot the premier

00:53:20.100 at the same time they're doing an MOU with her to try and keep her on side.

00:53:24.180 You know, this stuff is getting old for people.

00:53:26.580 I'll say this one thing, Ezra.

00:53:28.360 I hope that conservatives don't get divided amongst themselves by allowing these liberal card

00:53:35.220 tricks to start to force people to get antagonistic towards Pierre or antagonistic towards Premier

00:53:41.160 Smith or antagonistic towards each other for having a difference of opinion on, do I want

00:53:46.020 to vote for separatism or do I want to vote for a restructuring within the structure of

00:53:51.160 the federation, right?

00:53:52.500 Like, I think the great thing about the conservative movement is we know how to have hard hockey fights

00:53:59.200 and still go out for the beer afterwards and have the conversation.

00:54:02.620 And that is the strength of the movement.

00:54:05.240 That's what keeps it vibrant.

00:54:06.920 We were involved back in the day when reform was challenging the conservative consensus

00:54:10.760 nationally, and we were on the outs. 1.00

00:54:13.040 Everybody thought we were buck-toothed idiots with our plaid shirts and our guns out in the 1.00

00:54:17.000 prairies, and we were racist and all that stuff. 1.00

00:54:20.020 And then pretty soon, we are the decade-long governing party of the country.

00:54:24.380 I think that the ability of the conservative movement to continue to renew Alberta and to

00:54:30.840 continue to renew Canada as a country is its most power, is its superpower.

00:54:36.900 And we do it by not being politically correct, and we do it by having the debates in good

00:54:40.740 faith.

00:54:41.440 And one thing I really hope as we're having this very intense debate about Alberta is that

00:54:46.640 we don't allow the left and we don't allow the Liberal Party to let these card tricks and

00:54:51.540 this shallowness, especially in light of their complete mismanagement of the country, divide

00:54:56.480 a conservative movement, the policies of which would help regenerate Canada and bring it back

00:55:01.060 to its glory.

00:55:02.580 And certainly, we have to do that in Alberta, which is the place that I think we have the

00:55:06.860 most natural governing party status.

00:55:09.700 Yeah, I would say that Pierre Polyev and Daniel Smith are the two people, perhaps paradoxically,

00:55:15.940 doing the most to keep Alberta in the country.

00:55:19.420 A hundred percent.

00:55:20.260 A hundred percent.

00:55:22.500 It's like what I used to say in the UK about my friend Tommy Robinson and about even Nigel

00:55:26.240 Farage when they tried to, there was this move afoot, I hope they've abandoned it now,

00:55:30.320 to use lawfare against him to try and, you know, remove him from the public sphere, like

00:55:36.400 they tried to do to Donald Trump after 2020.

00:55:38.460 Yeah.

00:55:38.640 And my view about Tommy, Nigel Farage and others like that is these are the last hope to keep

00:55:45.800 demoralized people in the system, hoping they can use the system to win.

00:55:51.480 And if you were to martyr, God forbid, Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage, those people would

00:55:58.120 be gone and the system would fall apart.

00:56:00.200 They are the last connection to this rotting system of millions of people.

00:56:04.720 And I think that it's crazy that they are being attacked when they're the ones holding it

00:56:09.880 together.

00:56:10.240 David, we've had a great conversation.

00:56:12.780 I realize an hour has gone by and we've taken so much of your time.

00:56:15.980 I hope we can continue this conversation another day.

00:56:19.440 This certainly is not going away.

00:56:21.100 October 19th is closer than we think.

00:56:23.320 Thank you so much for being with us today.

00:56:24.700 Thanks again.

00:56:26.800 See you soon.

00:56:27.620 Great to see you and look forward to having you back in our shores soon.

00:56:31.780 There he is, David Blagg, former senior advisor to the premier of Alberta, now working in the

00:56:37.720 private sector, but still very much caring about our country and our province.

00:56:42.020 That's our show for today.

00:56:43.540 Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,

00:56:47.460 good night and keep fighting for freedom.

00:56:54.700 We'll see you soon.

Rebel News Podcast - February 25, 2026

EZRA LEVANT ｜ What can Albertans learn from the UK's Brexit referendum？

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