00:01:18.300Well, in Canada, under Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau before him,
00:01:21.860We became used to industrial announcements really being government announcements and a kind of crony capitalism where a company would agree to open a plant typically in Ontario or Quebec, but only if there were massive, quote, investments by taxpayers, typically federal taxpayers and those in Ontario.
00:01:41.640I think, for example, of the tens of billions of dollars shoveled into electric vehicle battery plants, I think before that of wind turbines.
00:01:50.580And so it is almost like seeing a unicorn in the wild to hear of an announcement that
00:01:57.080is 11 figures in size of private sector investment that didn't need a major projects office,
00:02:06.560didn't need a intervention by the prime minister to assist us.
00:02:12.560And so it is that Meta, once called Facebook, has announced a $13 billion data center to
00:02:19.660be built in Alberta. No government money. In fact, the numbers being bragged about are the amount of
00:02:26.300money that will be paid in taxes, in salaries, in construction, in maintenance. I think it's the
00:02:32.780first industrial piece of good news that I've seen in months. Joining us now to talk about this is
00:02:37.840someone who knows both about investments and finance, but also about how hard it is to bring
00:02:44.360investment back to Alberta once they've been spooked. He used to work for the premier of
00:02:49.000Alberta and has created Alberta Investment Companies. I'm talking about my friend David
00:02:54.440Legg, who joins us now from the Stampede in Calgary. David, great to see you again.
00:03:19.420Well, a data center is a huge stack of chips that allow you to provide the pathway you need for massive amounts of computing power to be processed to support all of the applications of computing power.
00:03:36.560The most important application now is AI, which basically is infrastructure for almost any corporate operation, and particularly for any sort of very solid natural language-based application like law, accounting, analysis, advisory work, et cetera.
00:03:54.180So it's the backbone of a modern data-driven economy.
00:03:57.600And that's one of the things that makes the announcement so exciting, because it's not just that somebody's investing in Alberta.
00:04:02.180It's that the investment they're making is the 21st century version of bridges and airports.
00:04:08.840You know, this is something that takes Alberta into the next century.
00:04:13.820And a lot of other jurisdictions are refusing to have data centers because they don't like the consumption of water.
00:04:19.060But Ezra, you know, this data announcement from Meta, first of all, a couple of fun facts about this.
00:04:23.600This is only the tip of the iceberg. The 13 billion is the first announcement.
00:04:27.740It doesn't cover what the total investment will be.
00:04:30.820So there's more to come. The second thing is the meta announcement is part of a massive ecosystem development based on a series of policy changes that have been made over the last four years very quietly that is making Alberta into one of the number one jurisdictions in all of North America for data centers.
00:04:51.160And you'll see another 20 in the works already working their way through the municipal governments here. So it's not just that meta is a big deal. It is a huge deal.
00:05:00.200It's going to become even bigger over time.
00:05:02.100There's going to be other announcements within the meta framework, but it's also a very important catalyst for an entire ecosystem of data centers and development of electricity.
00:05:12.620And the minister is announcing a very big expansion of the electrical grid in the province as well.
00:05:17.920But I'll tell you the other thing that's interesting about it.
00:05:20.500And we spent four years from 2019 to about 2024, making a lot of changes in the Alberta regulatory environment, tax environment.
00:05:33.620You know, one of the first things we did was cut the corporate tax from 12 to 8.
00:05:37.280And within only four years, we were making more tax receipts from the lower tax rate than we were making from the higher one.
00:05:43.880And, you know, across Canada, there's so many opportunities to unlock free market opportunity investments with the largest companies, best companies in the world.
00:05:52.980And one of the things we did with that economic strategy that I worked on for then Premier Kenny and, you know, now Premier Smith is running it and doing a great job is we have these incredible natural advantages in the energy that we've got.
00:06:07.820And the biggest deal that we did that spent about took about three years was the Dow deal.
00:06:12.080I don't know if you remember that, but it's taking our gas molecules, splitting them into ethylene, and then using that as the basis for development of advanced materials with one of the best chemistry companies in the world, Dow.
00:06:25.560And that was a $16 billion all-in announcement that included $2 billion from Linde Corporation and other big companies.
00:06:31.800And we had air products come in around that.
00:06:34.240we've had a lot of an ecosystem of industrial development, and none of it has required the
00:06:40.000Alberta government to put taxpayer dollars in. This is all risk capital, but it's not risk capital
00:06:45.040from some random company. This is the best company in its category in the planet choosing to be in
00:06:50.480Alberta instead of being in Louisiana, Texas, or Ohio in the Dow case. Choosing to be in Alberta
00:06:55.180in Metta's case instead of being in a place like Iowa or one of the states that's competing very
00:06:59.220heavily. And what we're doing with Meta is we're taking gas molecules and we're converting them
00:07:05.040into data through the process of just powering these enormous data centers and turning that
00:07:11.780power into computing power that then is used to accelerate the part of the economy that we think
00:07:17.220is going to be one of the fastest growth elements of the economy. And a lot of this is being developed
00:07:22.280by, you know, dozens of people that no Albertan will ever meet.
00:07:25.600But, you know, from ministers to investors to people that, you know, went out and worked
00:07:31.800on some of the problems that Meta was having along the way.
00:07:35.020And all along the way, Alberta was being responsive to this great company, Meta, and
00:07:39.380refining our policies and refining the environment we're operating in so we became the most
00:09:08.940And what's interesting is there's two things happening. One is Invest Alberta, which you know is the agency that I created when I was working for Premier Kenney. That agency is an absolute copy of the Irish Development Agency, which set the gold standard globally for taking a small country which is almost the same size as Alberta and using, you know, in spite of it has very limited resources compared to Alberta, built a massive technology hub in Ireland using only tax strategy.
00:09:37.860You know, and you see examples of this. Singapore is a great example of this, a little island state with very few natural resources and a problem with water and surrounded by swamps and antagonistic next door neighbor, Malaysia, no natural assets except one deep water port.
00:09:54.880And they've created the highest per capita income of the planet and the most advanced city in the planet.
00:09:59.680You see this in Abu Dhabi. You see it in Hong Kong. You see these jurisdictions that have taken very little resources, natural resources, and created these economic superstructures that are the envy of the world. They're also very safe places. They're also places where people can take home more of their income than they give to the government.
00:10:20.540And so what's really interesting to me is why can't Canada be the best place in the world to invest or build a business or raise a family?
00:10:30.320And, you know, I think when you ask that question, you look around the world at best practice examples for foreign direct investment or economic development.
00:10:38.560We found one in Ireland. We've copied some of it.
00:10:40.780And one of the keys to that economic development strategy is going to the best companies in the world and saying, look, we've already got some of the best energy companies in the world.
00:10:50.860We've got some of the best infrastructure companies in the world right here in Alberta.
00:10:54.440But we'd love to build a diversified economy rooted in technology, rooted in advanced materials.
00:10:59.980And we'd like to talk to you, Dow, about what it would take to win against Louisiana, Texas, where you already have a lot of assets and it's easy for you to build another one.
00:11:08.000What would it take to win that business here in Alberta and show the world that the best, most sort of complicated, hardest to build assets and the intellectual property that comes with those and extraordinary economic momentum that comes with those could be built here instead of somewhere else in the planet?
00:11:24.140And the more that you do that work, the more you found out that Alberta could be any place in the planet, any place.
00:11:29.480And you also know, like one of, I had four guests early in the stampede here, and one of them is the chairman and CEO of Linde Corporation, Sanjeev Lamba.
00:11:38.000And I said to Sanjeev, you know, I'm going to be on a podcast with somebody. I was talking with Rob Breckenridge about the MOU. And I said, Sanjeev, you know, there's a question in the air in Canada right now, which is that there's this debate, this referendum that's going to happen in Alberta. There's going to be nine questions about things like immigration policy and choosing judges and law.
00:11:59.060But the last question is going to be on, do you want to have a referendum about independence?
00:12:04.120And Sanjeev's company has put more than $2 billion into Alberta in the last four years.
00:12:09.360And I've worked with his team on that.
00:12:11.500And some of that's related to their big client Dow and what they've committed to and built.
00:12:15.880And he said, you know, it's interesting to hear that.
00:12:19.020You know, we'd like to discuss that further, how you think that would work.
00:12:22.640But the bottom line is people actually have this sense that if you're the kind of jurisdiction that spent a lot of time with them rationally trying to build the conditions for them to invest here the same way that they do in places like Singapore or Connecticut or England or Abu Dhabi, right?
00:12:42.900When you work with them like that, they actually think these guys have their act together.
00:12:46.800If they have to have a family debate around what the best structure for their position in Confederation is, go ahead, have that debate.
00:12:55.240And we will be interested in the effect that that could have on our assets, of course, and on our investment.
00:13:00.960But they don't fundamentally believe that the investment they've made in Alberta is at risk at all.
00:13:05.580They just think that whatever the structure of the kind of constitutional arrangements will be, will be what it will be.
00:13:10.800They don't want to actually engage in those debates if you're careful not to want to be seen to be having a perspective on it.
00:13:16.880But the idea that there's some sort of like fear factor in the investment community putting capital in Alberta versus anywhere else in Canada, I could tell you what the fear factor is.
00:13:26.980The fear factor is observing the disaster of watching a government take over an asset like TMX and absolutely blow out the numbers in a way that makes it totally impossible to imagine ever privately funding a pipeline.
00:13:39.580Right. TMX is a global disaster in terms of somebody that's an investor looking at a country saying, I'd like to build that.
00:13:48.560You know, Kinder Morgan got bought out and the government showed that they cannot build anything that's economical.
00:13:53.680Yeah. And and, you know, I think that the real the real flight of capital has been the flight of capital across Canada.
00:13:59.780And the one place that's an exception to that is Alberta.
00:14:02.080But in the last three years, Invest Alberta has drawn more capital into Alberta than Ontario, Quebec, B.C., and the rest of the country combined, right?
00:14:12.240And that's not because we're good at marketing.
00:14:14.980It's because we have a strategy that speaks to the best companies, asks what the conditions are to get them here.
00:14:21.180And what we find out is they need certain policy changes that actually end up being eminently reasonable and great for Alberta, great for Albertans, and great for the ecosystem that that company represents.
00:14:30.880And once they make that decision, right now, you know that across in boardrooms across the states, which is principally where the super scalers are, Amazon, Google, Meta, all these places are looking at the Meta deal and saying, now we're interested.
00:14:45.120You got to find out why they chose to do that.
00:14:47.380We need to figure out if we need to choose to do that.
00:14:49.500Alberta just got on the short list of 20 major industrial projects in the last two days because everybody that's got to present something to their board now has a no fault reason to make sure that Alberta is one of the jurisdictions that's on the list.
00:15:00.880And that's the power of the Dow deal. That's the power of the meta deal. You know, we do a lot of smaller deals, but those big ones with the global sort of sort of industry defining decision makers are going to create a lot of momentum for Alberta.
00:15:14.320And just in the last two, three days, having a lot of conversations with existing and potential investors here, there's incredible excitement about lower, cleaner, simpler regulations.
00:15:26.780I still think the Alberta corporate tax rate could drop by a couple of points that we'd make even more capital in the public fisc off of the economic momentum that's generated by these companies, realizing that this is a place that continues to change to make the environment for building a business better and better every year.
00:15:43.360very interesting point i mean everyone knows that facebook is a leading company by almost any
00:15:48.780measure so if facebook's due diligence says this is the winner then a lot of other companies are
00:15:54.980saying either what do they know that we don't or that's a pretty good confirmation to follow like
00:16:00.680like for them to to plunk 13 billion down like you say it's a signal to others the smartest people
00:16:07.820in the world or some of the smartest people in the world have given it a green light you know
00:16:12.240there used to be a saying no one ever got fired for buying ibm as in you're safe now facebook has
00:16:18.000shown you're safe to go to alberta but let me say something on the countervailing side because
00:16:23.340about a week ago i saw a video made by wab canoe who's a fairly popular premier uh partly because
00:16:31.060he's so unusual in his social media style like he's got a shtick to him and he's got a bit of
00:16:36.300sense of humor. But here's a clip of him saying he was canceling a data center in Manitoba pretty
00:16:45.240much just because. We're not going to move ahead with the data center in Il-de-Shane because there's
00:16:50.840a big threat to the environment and not much benefit to the economy. I reject the idea that
00:16:57.460we have to be slaves to surveillance capitalism in order to participate in the modern economy.
00:17:04.740And so the message to any company out there should be, if you want to have a thoughtful, human-centered approach to technology, come to Manitoba, because that's what we're interested in.0.66
00:17:17.240So you've got Wob Canu, who just killed a huge deal for his province.
00:17:52.960That's two-thirds as much as the city of Edmonton.
00:17:56.480By the way, I think that's actually true.
00:17:58.900But that's sort of the point about Alberta is it has an enormous amount of energy, whether it's natural gas,
00:18:03.340whether we're bringing in a uranium for from our cousins in saskatchewan so i'm seeing what i'm
00:18:10.620not going to call it a snobby response wab canoe was sort of looking down his nose at at data
00:18:15.940centers but i think there's sort of a populist distrust of big corporations that really got
00:18:21.140deepened during covid when you have a huge company and people are mad at facebook for censorship
00:18:26.320reasons i still am so you have distrust of mark zuckerberg distrust of super big companies0.75
00:18:32.060distrust of ai distrust of huge data centers which i think china is helping to whip up because i0.82
00:18:39.040think china wants to beat the west at computers and data and so i think they just like there's0.79
00:18:45.640a big op going on with iran and qatar online i think china does not want the west to go big on
00:18:54.040data centers so although this is good news from employment energy alberta i think there are forces
00:19:00.060out there that would kill this deal if they could what do you say to that luddites luddites
00:19:07.140they're threatened you know that i'll tell you the tell in wab canoes little video first of all
00:19:13.800i'm tired of his cutesiness his people are are impoverished by his terrible policies0.61
00:19:19.940he plays on this like cutesy shtick it's embarrassing he uses these with these weasel
00:19:26.040words that i find disgusting right i do not find him funny i do not find him entertaining
00:19:31.960he's destroyed the the prosperity of his own people and he's pretended it's because
00:19:37.000he's got some ethical insight into how bad it is to have prosperity and growth from free markets
00:19:43.360he used the language surveillance capitalism right talk about a data center right now if you
00:19:49.900unpack that you know that's coming straight out of the dark sort of sort of basement of this weird
00:19:55.660leftist antagonism this antifa level antagonism to the reality that has just dawned and it's
00:20:02.000starting to dawn in canada dawned other places you know years ago that the entire environmental game
00:20:07.560was to basically watch the west you know self-defeat any of its economic growth by attacking
00:20:15.460the energy that was the basis for that economic growth and you saw this with the anti-fossil fuel
00:20:20.880stuff. You saw it in the 70s and 80s with the antagonism to nuclear, which set us back a couple
00:20:26.520decades in sustainable, by the way, carbon zero energy nuclear. And it's reactive. It's deeply
00:20:35.860pessimistic about capital markets. And it's going to set Manitoba back. So he, with a stroke of a
00:20:43.820pen, which is totally anti-democratic, has decided that he's against something, that actually he's
00:20:49.700utilizing the assets that consume this data to tell his story right so he's this social media
00:20:55.900guy that's his way of processing policy using exactly the thing that's consuming all the data
00:21:01.300that he now wants to have not in his backyard so he's going to keep doing his tiktok videos or his
00:21:05.760instagramming or his facebook or whatever his particular social media strategy is but he just
00:21:10.780wants all of that stuff to be driven with infrastructure that exists elsewhere benefiting
00:21:16.000other other communities benefiting other other uh markets and so you know look i understand and
00:21:22.520you and i both share concern with the idea that a social media culture becomes vapid and that
00:21:28.640people stop thinking for themselves and that people start swallowing the uh you know and i'm
00:21:34.140less concerned about capital surveillance because that tends to have market dynamics to it although
00:21:37.940i still think it's problematic i understand some of the language that that comes from but
00:21:42.080I'm far more concerned about government surveillance. It's run by bureaucrats that tend to be default set to the left and to decide that hate speech is anything that doesn't conform to their particular worldview because they can't make those arguments in the public square.
00:21:56.720So they want to isolate those arguments and make them verboten in the public square by using language that is the kind of language that Canoe is using.
00:22:08.340And I think it's problematic at a lot of levels. So with Wob Canoe, my response is horseshit. I don't think that there's any chance that that guy has thought through the economic impact of denying, you know, it's like hearing a guy in the 1800s decide that we're not going to have, you know, ports and bridges here because that's a form of surveillance, port capitalism. It makes absolutely no sense.0.95
00:22:31.300It kind of sounds sexy in sort of that freshman college, you know, your first time reading French critical theory and so now you've got a perspective.
00:22:40.200This is not the Panopticon that Lacan or Derrida or Foucault were concerned about, right?
00:22:46.520It's a data center that's going to take energy that's currently unutilized and make it into something that can help your universities do advanced research on supercomputers.
00:22:55.520And now you can't do that in Manitoba, but you're going to do it in Alberta.
00:22:58.300For Leslin, I think there's something else going on.
00:23:00.400And I think it probably ties a little bit to some of the skepticism that you see on the right in the United States that's resulting in some antagonism locally to the way the data centers are being executed.
00:23:13.380And actually, I'm hugely sympathetic to that.
00:23:15.260I don't think you just say, look, go anywhere, get a government grant to do it and build your thing here.
00:23:20.600I think there has to be conditions where you're very clear about who all the stakeholders are, what their interests are, and how you defend and protect those.
00:23:27.080And that's what Alberta has been doing for four years.
00:23:46.800But once you've done them, the point is you create the conditions for there to be ongoing development, and you're going to see a lot more data centers.
00:23:53.300And I'll tell you this, Ezra, in five, 10 years, the difference between the province that has 30 or 40 incredibly powerful data centers providing an architectural and infrastructure backbone to a data economy is going to be thriving.
00:24:10.520And every other business wants to build that depends on data is going to want to be in a place where you've got highly secure access to the fastest processing speeds in the world.
00:24:18.900And there are whole industries that will be born out of the fact that we've built that infrastructure.
00:24:36.180I'd like to know, because I do, with you, respect Leslie Lewis.
00:24:38.820I'd like to unpack why she's taking the position of being skeptical out of the gate.
00:24:43.600You know, is that rooted in a very specific view on energy utilization?
00:24:47.960Is it rooted in skepticism about these super scalars and the effect, you know, the second order effects on our culture of having a social media driven culture?
00:24:56.720I mean, there's a lot of important critiques to have, but I wouldn't I wouldn't transfer the critique over the negative effects of social media on our culture and the coarsening of our culture into the infrastructure of data centers required to do a thousand other things that don't just relate to social media in the way that a lot of these companies are understood.
00:25:15.440Yeah. You know, there's an interesting wave of right wingers who are a little bit more socialist on the economic side. It's a reaction, I think, to the success of true communists from Zoran Mamdani and even the popularity of communist killers like Luigi Mangione, who murdered that health care executive in New York a year or two ago.
00:25:36.540So you can even see it in sort of J.D. Vance when he says, well, Milton Friedman's economics don't really work anymore.0.61
00:25:43.640Like there's this vibe – I'm calling it a vibe because I don't think it's deeper than an aesthetic feeling.
00:25:59.840And I want to give her absolutely the best benefit of the doubt.
00:26:02.700And I think sometimes in political life, we sort of talk out our ideas out loud, like we think out loud, and we don't want to stop people from raising ideas.
00:26:13.140But I think her ideas could merit a direct response.
00:26:19.160You can reply, and then I'll read the second if you've got the time to do it.
00:26:22.000She says, before the government celebrates another AI announcement, Canadians deserve to know how this data center will actually be built when Canada is already facing serious constraints in energy infrastructure, grid capacity, engineering capacity, and skilled labor.
00:26:37.000AI data centers require enormous amounts of reliable power, specialized construction, advanced cooling, transmission infrastructure, cybersecurity, and technical expertise.
00:26:44.980After 11 years of failing to build the energy infrastructure Canada needs,
00:26:48.080the government must explain whether this project is truly viable
00:26:51.180and who will ultimately own, control, and benefit from the infrastructure if it proceeds.
00:26:56.380Now, my instinct is most of those are business questions for Meta to worry about.
00:27:03.020I appreciate your concern about will you find workers.
00:27:05.540Those are good problems to have, but that's my reflexive response.
00:27:10.980It sounds like you've been thinking about this project for years.
00:27:14.060I've been thinking about it for about two days.
00:27:16.120So give me your deeper response, and then I'll read you her second tweet.
00:27:20.360Well, I think her tweet betrays a misunderstanding of what's going on.
00:27:24.300This is not for the government to do anything but respond to economic forces with really successful policy initiatives, which is what this government has done.
00:27:33.460You know, Nathan Neudorf on infrastructure worked at, and some private guys like Brett Wilson was involved with this and helped solve some problems with Meta.
00:27:43.580Nate Glubish, who's Minister for Innovation, took it up.
00:27:46.800Rick Christians, who's the CEO of Invest Alberta at the time when AWS first came in and was starting to build here, that's where we really developed the strategy.
00:27:55.480And I was senior advisor to Rick and the team at Invest Alberta when they started to work on what are the policies that needed to be passed that would answer for these questions so that the public, when they found out about it, would understand what a positive this was.
00:28:10.060and Meta needed to work on a few things
00:28:12.300and Alberta needed to work on a few things0.99
00:28:13.960same thing had happened during the Dow negotiations0.95
00:35:25.780The government's paying them $20 million a year to rent that gravel pit.
00:35:31.340And they gave them one year's back pay rent, $20 million a year.
00:35:36.480The purpose of it is not to launch rocket ships.
00:35:40.160The purpose of it is to spread around $20 million a year to all the right liberals.
00:35:45.220So all the things you've described, you are thinking like, well, success is the goal.
00:35:50.360putting a rocket in the space is no no it's not it's the it's the busyness it's the churn it's
00:35:57.860the back and forth it's taking care of all my lobbyist friends on that that's the purpose of
00:36:02.660it it's a totally different mindset and it wouldn't surprise me if as you you prophesy that
00:36:09.760there will be more data centers coming to albert i think you're probably right and i think it'll
00:36:13.620i know i know i'm right on that that's uh that just is what's happening right now you might see
00:36:18.700a call for a data center tax you might see the same sort of antipathy that we've had towards
00:36:26.180pipelines be projected i mean you'll have a bernie sanders style we have to stop this
00:36:32.720you'll have the left the left hates the left hates this stuff by the way as they're like it's coming
00:36:37.860this will be the new pipeline protest stuff but one of the reasons they're so worried about it
00:36:42.700is because it does consume an enormous amount of energy which we have in massive abundance
00:36:47.260And we're converting that energy from like latent molecules sitting in the ground into data compute that allows people to do the most extraordinary scientific discoveries in our universities.
00:36:58.560And if you want a great trade, figure out all the steps it takes to take gas molecules that have been sitting in the ground late and turn those into scientific discoveries at universities.
00:37:14.580I mean, if you give a bunch of crazy engineers free reign, they're going to come up with crazy ideas like putting satellites in space so that people can talk to each other across the planet.0.95
00:37:23.960And eventually that thing they dream up that everybody thinks is dumb, 10 years later, is worth $2 trillion.0.91
00:37:30.020And there's a bunch of guys in Austin.
00:37:31.680Have you ever looked at the numbers of how many billionaires and, you know, Deca and Centi millionaires and millionaires are in Austin just from SpaceX?
00:40:54.860Tell Leslie when you see her, because I know you probably will before me, but she's got an open invitation to Calgary.0.95
00:41:01.040We'll show her why she's wrong on this one.
00:41:04.280That tweet that I just read to you got a lot of feedback, especially from Albertans saying, butt out, we don't need, this is none of your affair.
00:41:12.140And she got a lot of attitude readjustment from pro data center people.
00:41:20.800And let me read it to you because you can see it's slightly less combative.
00:41:26.160I mean, it shows that she's listening.
00:41:28.540Let me read her second tweet, which she wrote shortly thereafter.
00:41:32.800She said, I welcome Alberta's success in attracting Meta's investment.
00:41:36.700A project of this scale demonstrates that Canada can compete for world-class AI infrastructure when government creates the right investment conditions.
00:41:45.300My concern has never been with Alberta's initiative.
00:41:47.220My concern is that after 11 years of federal policies that have delayed major energy and infrastructure development, Canada has made it far more difficult to attract and support innovation.
00:41:56.680I think she retracted pretty much 99% of her prickliness, which is good.
00:42:01.420I mean, we want people to adjust their views when more facts and arguments are brought to their attention.
00:42:07.440And listen, I'm glad she has that point of view.
00:42:10.340Have you seen any reaction to this announcement from Evan Solomon, Mark Carney, the people who love to take credit for, quote, investments?
00:42:19.960Have you seen any official government reaction to it from the feds?
00:42:25.540Look, Alberta's – I had a drink last night with a guy who's a major investor in mines and mining.
00:42:34.820And he said, you know, David, I've been coming to this Calgary Stampede for 12 years.
00:42:40.380He said, this is the most optimistic electric place I've ever seen.
00:42:46.540And he said that the momentum here is extraordinary.
00:42:50.040So if you think about it, Ezra, the MOU got announced.
00:42:53.140There's a lot of skepticism in the patch about that MOU.
00:42:55.720But the thing that people love about the MOU is it's highlighting all the questions that people want to have debates about in the province.
00:43:02.480And so the MOU added enormous kind of momentum to the province.
00:43:07.120Second thing is the announcement of the shield pipeline that will go from Hardesty all the way to Sarnia.
00:43:15.300I think we're going to end up having at some point a strategic petroleum reserve in the salt caves in Sarnia.
00:43:20.800I was thinking about writing an op-ed about that.
00:43:23.280I'll find a good liberal friend to write that with.
00:43:35.440I think we should build the energy superpower across the country.
00:43:39.300And I think that refining in Sarnia and that capacity to store a massive amount of strategic petroleum in reserve to allow price stabilization across the industrial heartland in both Quebec and Ontario, you know, supported by Alberta and the energy side would be phenomenal.
00:43:55.140Well, you know, that that announcement from the premier and Doug Ford went out.
00:44:00.140That's another pipeline. You just got people feeling like, look, it's not perfect.
00:44:05.640There's a lot we'd want to tell some of our liberal cousins.
00:44:09.220I think the problem for guys like Evan Solomon and others is so much of this stuff has come off for people as performative.
00:44:15.760Yeah. You know, the meta deal took four years of really hard work, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of working out the strategy, a lot of different ministers working together.
00:44:24.800The premier has got a bunch of ministers. It was Nate Horner, who's in finance now, Jason Nixon, you know, Nate Glubish.
00:44:32.660It was Nathan Newdorf doing great work. You have have now Sigurdsson.
00:44:38.300Like you've got a lot of people that had to work together, didn't take all the credit for themselves, had to figure out a bunch of stuff,
00:44:44.940but had to show up on time, had to attend a bunch of calls, had to solve a bunch of stuff that was basically just dealing with admitting the private sector knows how to do a bunch of things.
00:44:54.500government doesn't know how to do and by engaging with the private sector effectively and figuring
00:44:59.440out what the principal views that would result in the best outcomes for the public from building
00:45:05.360this infrastructure in alberta instead of letting it go somewhere else would be and make those
00:45:09.800trade-offs and have those arguments and debate those with meta and meta is not a warm bath these
00:45:13.580are tough guys they're smart and they know exactly what they want they're going to get what they want
00:45:17.640and and alberta has been really solid at defending the public interest and getting what it wants
00:45:21.900So the concern that's sort of embedded in what Leslie Lewis did as an initial reaction is well understood. And she's a patriot and a great person. I sense from her text that what she really wanted to do was use the opportunity to throw a punch at the federal government. And I have a lot of respect for that.
00:45:38.940But this wasn't the best way. This wasn't the right text. This wasn't the right structure to do it. And I think there are other places to throw a punch.
00:45:50.660But right now, let me say this. I think that the prime minister and his team are realizing that for a decade, he came out and said that this environmental, kind of performative environmentalism of the last decade, which the prime minister, Carney himself, was a part of creating.
00:46:07.080But that performative environmentalism is over.