David Legg was the man brought in to normalize Alberta after Rachel Notley was finally thrown out of office. He was dispatched to the world s financial capitals to tell them that Alberta was safe again, the NDP was gone, and that the world's investors should return. He really helped rebuild the place, and I m going to talk to him now about the future of Alberta.
00:00:00.220Wow, 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.
00:00:15.440Here's an example. He was dispatched to the world's financial capitals to let them know Alberta was safe again. The NDP was gone.
00:00:23.220He 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?
00:00:32.200Very 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.
00:00:39.140Just 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.
00:00:53.220Tonight, 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.
00:01:23.220Every 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.
00:01:43.580But 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.
00:01:56.200And definitely one of those people is Keith Wilson, the senior lawyer who actually was the lawyer for the Freedom Convoy of Truckers in Ottawa.
00:02:04.720He's now become sort of the go-to legal mind on the pro-independence side of the debate.
00:02:13.660I'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.
00:02:22.780Our guest today is someone I met when I was a student at University of Calgary.
00:02:28.000He 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.
00:02:35.720And he went on to high heights in international business and investment, coming back to Alberta after Jason Kenney defeated Rachel Notley's NDP.
00:02:44.580And 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.
00:02:55.480Without 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.
00:03:05.760It's a pleasure to spend some time with David Legg.
00:03:13.520You'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.
00:03:24.800Give 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.
00:03:36.840Yeah, 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.
00:03:42.400I think sometimes political perspective benefits from being dramatic, public, and framed.
00:03:50.560But 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,
00:03:59.980that 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.
00:04:09.900But we had to battle two things, Ezra.
00:04:12.220For 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.
00:04:25.440And 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.
00:04:39.180And 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.
00:04:54.580And 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.
00:05:11.540And 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.
00:05:21.640Alberta, 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.
00:05:45.060And what I want to keep pointing out is, you know, policies have, ideas have consequences and so do policies.
00:05:51.580And 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.
00:06:04.120Something 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.
00:06:21.580And 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.
00:06:35.820And so, you know, we got a lot done during that time. I think Premier Smith is building on that.
00:06:41.760And 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.
00:07:03.480But 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.
00:07:15.660And I shared that with him. But I think that there's ways that Alberta can achieve autonomy without going the route of full separatism.
00:07:25.040And that's something I think obviously we're debating. And actually, I'm in London right now.
00:07:28.180I 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?
00:07:45.780And 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.
00:08:00.340And 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.
00:08:14.140Because it just leads to more, you know, individual freedom and prosperity.
00:08:19.480You 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.
00:08:37.240But 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.
00:09:04.220I 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?
00:09:33.500Like, 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.
00:09:49.580Can 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.
00:10:07.280Well, 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.
00:10:29.540And they think that people that are trying to address that issue are being closet racists or whatever the language is.
00:10:36.660And as a result, they're misunderstanding the way that people think about their security, their safety, common sense, etc.
00:10:43.580And 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.
00:10:58.100It used to represent something great, something that we all believed in, something that we hoped for, for our kids especially.
00:11:03.740And what we've done is we've let that not only slip away from us, but it's become cynical.
00:11:11.040And 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.
00:11:24.740It 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.
00:11:43.760When 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.
00:11:51.020And 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.
00:12:09.200And I think that life is larger than economic logic.
00:12:12.720And 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.
00:12:28.800It was this much deeper sense, which was like when we had the European Economic Union, you know, under those conventions, everybody loved free trade.
00:12:40.960But 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?
00:12:52.000And I think you see some elements of that right now at play in what's happening in Alberta.
00:12:57.640And I've said this in a couple of podcasts, Ezra.
00:12:59.900I 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.
00:13:10.840And 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.
00:13:34.840And so I understand and I completely empathize.
00:13:37.540And 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.
00:13:48.500But 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?
00:14:01.360There's going to be a very strong hidden vote that says, yeah, I want to try this.
00:14:04.840Partly 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.
00:14:15.220I think the answer is for all provinces in Canada to have full federal structure, very similar to what Quebec's got.
00:14:22.520I think that's the direction that this is going to go and probably end up.
00:14:25.600But 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.
00:14:41.080We're going to be talking a lot more to our British cousins about what happened, how it worked, and what to do about it.
00:14:49.160You know, in the UK, I followed it a little bit because I didn't think it had a chance.
00:16:13.480And I thought they would never say that about a car factory or the dairy sector.
00:16:19.340And I don't know how you solve that divide because just the economics and the geography, how do you overcome that?
00:16:28.040How do you get the prime minister of the country to stop kicking Alberta when it's down?
00:16:33.100Well, look, it's the last decade under the Liberal Party of Canada, and they were informed and advised directly by Mark Carney for years.
00:16:44.200You 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,
00:16:56.020but 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.
00:17:13.080And, 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.
00:17:25.700Suddenly they're using it against Canadian citizens instead of known terrorists.
00:17:31.780And 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,
00:17:43.120if you're going to give speeches quoting the great Vassilav Havel, you better live by it.
00:17:46.860And 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,
00:17:52.800what turned out to be completely unscientific and very quickly dropped mandates after the Freedom Convoy had the, you know,
00:18:01.060the courage to go and challenge this government directly in the only way they knew how, right?
00:18:05.860For 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,
00:18:15.500calling them seditious, he needs to come up with an apology saying,
00:18:18.240I said the wrong thing about my fellow citizens who were hurting, who were trying hard,
00:18:23.520who were the ones that delivered everybody's packages for two years there in Muskoka when everyone was working from home.
00:18:29.920And 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.
00:19:12.980Alberta is the one economy, the one economic engine that makes this country actually work.
00:19:18.200And the insistence on not recognizing that and not unlocking these, I think, you know, obviously self-defeating policies
00:19:26.380is going to perpetuate the idea that Alberta can do better on its own.
00:19:32.140And 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.
00:19:40.140I 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.
00:19:46.820I think we need a new architecture in Canada to allow Alberta to be prosperous, to allow it to pursue its autonomy.
00:19:52.800I think Alberta can be the Monaco of what Monaco is to France.
00:19:56.920I 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.
00:20:08.000And I think if Mark Carney would unlock that, all of Canada would benefit.
00:20:11.020But 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.
00:20:23.360And 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.
00:20:31.380This is the only country in the world with this level of natural resource wealth that is so deeply self-defeating.
00:20:38.400This is the only country, it's the bottom of the G7 right now.
00:20:41.800And if Alberta wasn't involved, we'd be developing nation status in terms of our GDP.
00:20:46.640They'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.
00:20:59.380They'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.
00:21:17.140You know, this is not a government with the mandate that Mark Carney has.
00:21:21.540And I think a lot of Canadians of goodwill were hopeful.
00:21:24.320This 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.
00:21:31.480And 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.
00:21:45.280And if we have to do better on our own, we'll do it on our own.
00:21:47.840And 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.
00:22:05.680You 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.
00:22:20.760And 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.
00:22:30.840And 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.
00:22:45.060That 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.
00:22:56.720You can buy a house in Alabama if you're 25.
00:22:59.780You can't buy a house in Toronto or Vancouver if you're 25.
00:23:02.860And 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.
00:23:20.840And 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.
00:23:38.260Like, I think everything that Mark Carney does that's irritating to, quote, conservatives, it pushes more people towards Alberta independence.
00:23:46.280Yeah, 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.
00:23:59.640And 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.
00:24:08.540If 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.
00:24:23.880The 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.
00:24:36.280So we have 110% of our GDP is debt in any given year.
00:24:42.960People don't understand how serious that is, how bad that is.
00:24:46.160You 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.
00:25:03.820And in the midst of all that, Alberta is growing, doing exceptionally well.
00:25:08.880And I think that as people look at that, there's a cultural divide.
00:25:45.500I 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.
00:25:54.400How could anybody possibly be doing this if it's not intentional?
00:26:01.080It's a deeply careless approach to things because the country has been lucky.
00:26:06.980And 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.
00:26:13.740and so our economy is, you know, almost 80% trade down to the United States.
00:26:18.660Their economy is only 12 or 13% trade up to us.
00:26:22.860So there's, you know, that's one area in which we've become sort of a trust fund nation.
00:26:27.380The 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.
00:26:36.980Of having chosen a left-wing government or left-wing governments.
00:26:40.420And 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.
00:26:59.700And 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.
00:27:04.740I don't believe that we should be in bed with the Chinese and acting antagonistic and elbows up to the Americans.
00:27:11.940I 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.
00:27:19.460But I don't believe that being in bed with the Chinese helps us.
00:27:22.380I don't believe that we have to be recklessly incompetent on immigration.
00:27:25.820I don't believe that terrorists should be marching in the streets and creating an uncomfortable environment for the Jewish community of Montreal, Toronto.
00:27:31.340A lot of people have had it with that cultural decline.
00:27:35.400They'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.
00:27:50.560These 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?
00:28:03.300And that's what Dominic Cummins did with the Leave campaign that took people by surprise in Whitehall and across the elites in the country.
00:28:12.220He just basically realized people had had it with the cultural decline of the U.K.
00:28:17.440They'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.
00:28:25.300You know, this is the life that people were having to live with.
00:28:28.340And 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.
00:28:39.060So that was what was happening in the community at large.
00:28:42.720And that was the conversation people were having.
00:28:45.000In Canada right now, people are having conversations about this B.C. human rights fascist, this woman that had this guy arrested.
00:28:54.860They'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.
00:29:06.260And 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.
00:29:14.680People 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.
00:29:25.900And 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.
00:29:34.920And I don't think people find that satisfactory.
00:29:37.720It's just so hollow as a philosophy of what we can be as a nation.
00:29:41.720And I think when people look at the debt, they look at what's happening with the immigration and asylum fraud.
00:29:46.340They look at some of the dynamics around what's happening in their schools.
00:29:48.860They 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.
00:29:58.840And they just say, you know what, I don't like the direction the country's taking right now, and I want change.
00:30:04.040And if you're telling me I can't get that change federally, but I can get that change provincially, you're tempting me now.
00:30:09.680Now, I might not believe in separatism.
00:30:11.960I might believe there's a way to have autonomy without breaking out of the country.
00:30:15.240I don't believe that you can separate geography.
00:30:19.200But whatever that thing is, that sentiment will be expressed and felt in the fall in a very specific way.
00:30:26.420And I think the premier is doing some good things, putting some of these issues on the table at the same time as the referendum.
00:30:32.980I know there's debate about that right now.
00:30:35.180But I think that Albertans are not easily scared by elite consensus.
00:30:40.940I 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.
00:30:50.340But our base doesn't tolerate, you know, those differences for long before they act to shift them.
00:30:56.440And 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.
00:31:06.660And if Ottawa continues to choose to stand in the way of that, then there will be fundamental change.
00:31:12.100It's either this fall or it'll come in a different form later on.
00:31:15.280But I think that move towards economic and cultural autonomy is gaining steam.
00:31:22.020I mentioned you're in the UK and that got me thinking about Brexit a bit.
00:31:25.520And 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.