Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Why top companies are choosing Alberta： David Knight Legg on Meta’s $13 billion move

00:00:00.000 hello my friends wow wow wow feature interview with one of the smartest guys around david

00:00:05.460 leg we're going to talk about the massive new data center that meta is building in alberta

00:00:10.640 why the socialists hate it why china hates it and why the federal liberals were simply not involved

00:00:17.720 a big interview today but first let me invite you to become a subscriber to rebel news plus it's

00:00:22.680 the video version of this podcast there's one little video i play in the middle of our discussion

00:00:28.560 that you've just got to see with your eyes.

00:00:31.220 And so for that, please get Rebel News Plus.

00:00:33.640 It's the video version of the podcast.

00:00:35.680 Just go to rebelnewsplus.com.

00:00:53.280 It's the biggest investment in recent Canadian history,

00:00:56.800 But no Liberal cabinet ministers were involved.

00:01:00.300 It's July 9th, and this is The Ezra Levant Show.

00:01:03.140 You're ready for freedom! 0.73

00:01:05.960 Shame on you, you censorious bug! 0.89

00:01:18.300 Well, in Canada, under Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau before him,

00:01:21.860 We 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.

00:01:41.640 I think, for example, of the tens of billions of dollars shoveled into electric vehicle battery plants, I think before that of wind turbines.

00:01:50.580 And so it is almost like seeing a unicorn in the wild to hear of an announcement that

00:01:57.080 is 11 figures in size of private sector investment that didn't need a major projects office,

00:02:06.560 didn't need a intervention by the prime minister to assist us.

00:02:12.560 And so it is that Meta, once called Facebook, has announced a $13 billion data center to

00:02:19.660 be built in Alberta. No government money. In fact, the numbers being bragged about are the amount of

00:02:26.300 money that will be paid in taxes, in salaries, in construction, in maintenance. I think it's the

00:02:32.780 first industrial piece of good news that I've seen in months. Joining us now to talk about this is

00:02:37.840 someone who knows both about investments and finance, but also about how hard it is to bring

00:02:44.360 investment back to Alberta once they've been spooked. He used to work for the premier of

00:02:49.000 Alberta and has created Alberta Investment Companies. I'm talking about my friend David

00:02:54.440 Legg, who joins us now from the Stampede in Calgary. David, great to see you again.

00:02:58.840 Great to see you, Ezra.

00:03:00.000 You know, this announcement sort of sneaked up on, I think, a lot of people. It's not like

00:03:03.840 oil sands or pipelines. It's always in the national conversation. Tell us a little bit

00:03:09.180 about this new data center that $13 billion is what I see reported. What does that mean? First

00:03:16.860 First of all, what is a data center?

00:03:19.420 Well, 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.

00:03:36.560 The 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.

00:03:54.180 So it's the backbone of a modern data-driven economy.

00:03:57.600 And that's one of the things that makes the announcement so exciting, because it's not just that somebody's investing in Alberta.

00:04:02.180 It's that the investment they're making is the 21st century version of bridges and airports.

00:04:08.840 You know, this is something that takes Alberta into the next century.

00:04:13.820 And a lot of other jurisdictions are refusing to have data centers because they don't like the consumption of water.

00:04:19.060 But Ezra, you know, this data announcement from Meta, first of all, a couple of fun facts about this.

00:04:23.600 This is only the tip of the iceberg. The 13 billion is the first announcement.

00:04:27.740 It doesn't cover what the total investment will be.

00:04:30.820 So 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.

00:04:51.160 And 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.

00:05:00.200 It's going to become even bigger over time.

00:05:02.100 There'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.

00:05:12.620 And the minister is announcing a very big expansion of the electrical grid in the province as well.

00:05:17.920 But I'll tell you the other thing that's interesting about it.

00:05:19.760 It's the point you made.

00:05:20.500 And we spent four years from 2019 to about 2024, making a lot of changes in the Alberta regulatory environment, tax environment.

00:05:33.620 You know, one of the first things we did was cut the corporate tax from 12 to 8.

00:05:37.280 And within only four years, we were making more tax receipts from the lower tax rate than we were making from the higher one.

00:05:43.880 And, you know, across Canada, there's so many opportunities to unlock free market opportunity investments with the largest companies, best companies in the world.

00:05:52.980 And 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.

00:06:07.820 And the biggest deal that we did that spent about took about three years was the Dow deal.

00:06:12.080 I 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.

00:06:25.560 And that was a $16 billion all-in announcement that included $2 billion from Linde Corporation and other big companies.

00:06:31.800 And we had air products come in around that.

00:06:34.240 we've had a lot of an ecosystem of industrial development, and none of it has required the

00:06:40.000 Alberta government to put taxpayer dollars in. This is all risk capital, but it's not risk capital

00:06:45.040 from some random company. This is the best company in its category in the planet choosing to be in

00:06:50.480 Alberta instead of being in Louisiana, Texas, or Ohio in the Dow case. Choosing to be in Alberta

00:06:55.180 in Metta's case instead of being in a place like Iowa or one of the states that's competing very

00:06:59.220 heavily. And what we're doing with Meta is we're taking gas molecules and we're converting them

00:07:05.040 into data through the process of just powering these enormous data centers and turning that

00:07:11.780 power into computing power that then is used to accelerate the part of the economy that we think

00:07:17.220 is going to be one of the fastest growth elements of the economy. And a lot of this is being developed

00:07:22.280 by, you know, dozens of people that no Albertan will ever meet.

00:07:25.600 But, you know, from ministers to investors to people that, you know, went out and worked

00:07:31.800 on some of the problems that Meta was having along the way.

00:07:35.020 And all along the way, Alberta was being responsive to this great company, Meta, and

00:07:39.380 refining our policies and refining the environment we're operating in so we became the most

00:07:43.780 attractive jurisdiction.

00:07:44.860 When you solve for a big company like Dow or you solve for one of the best companies

00:07:48.320 in the world like Meta, then you create the environment where you just see economic growth

00:07:52.140 flourish. And you're going to see that happen with data centers in Alberta.

00:07:55.700 There's so many interesting things there. You mentioned US locations that would have been

00:08:00.760 competitive. My mind turned first to Ontario and Quebec, which have a larger population.

00:08:07.580 They have more universities. Toronto is actually a bit of a tech capital in its own right. So for

00:08:13.020 meta to make the choice to go to alberta is very interesting it's probably a an energy energy

00:08:19.460 choice a tax choice i and what's interesting is some people are saying this independence debate

00:08:25.540 is causing a higher risk profile for the province well i guess meta didn't think that was the case

00:08:30.740 where they thought if there was independence that data center is still going to be there it's but i

00:08:36.280 just keep coming back to the fact that the last time we heard 13 billion dollars being spent

00:08:41.100 It was some goofy grant to, I don't know, Volkswagen to build electric vehicles that, you know, why are we giving money?

00:08:48.660 It was giving from taxpayers to companies.

00:08:51.340 It wasn't companies putting this kind of dough into Canada.

00:08:55.160 I don't know.

00:08:55.520 This is – it certainly is a happy change.

00:09:00.820 Why don't – why do you think it didn't go into Ontario somewhere or Quebec somewhere?

00:09:06.740 Well, look, there's a few reasons.

00:09:08.940 And 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.

00:09:37.860 You 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.

00:09:54.880 And they've created the highest per capita income of the planet and the most advanced city in the planet.

00:09:59.680 You 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.

00:10:20.540 And 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?

00:10:30.320 And, 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.

00:10:38.560 We found one in Ireland. We've copied some of it.

00:10:40.780 And 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.

00:10:50.860 We've got some of the best infrastructure companies in the world right here in Alberta.

00:10:54.440 But we'd love to build a diversified economy rooted in technology, rooted in advanced materials.

00:10:59.980 And 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.

00:11:08.000 What 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?

00:11:23.040 What would it take?

00:11:24.140 And the more that you do that work, the more you found out that Alberta could be any place in the planet, any place.

00:11:29.480 And 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.

00:11:38.000 And 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.

00:11:59.060 But the last question is going to be on, do you want to have a referendum about independence?

00:12:04.120 And Sanjeev's company has put more than $2 billion into Alberta in the last four years.

00:12:09.360 And I've worked with his team on that.

00:12:11.500 And some of that's related to their big client Dow and what they've committed to and built.

00:12:15.880 And he said, you know, it's interesting to hear that.

00:12:19.020 You know, we'd like to discuss that further, how you think that would work.

00:12:22.640 But 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?

00:12:42.900 When you work with them like that, they actually think these guys have their act together.

00:12:46.800 If they have to have a family debate around what the best structure for their position in Confederation is, go ahead, have that debate.

00:12:55.240 And we will be interested in the effect that that could have on our assets, of course, and on our investment.

00:13:00.960 But they don't fundamentally believe that the investment they've made in Alberta is at risk at all.

00:13:05.580 They just think that whatever the structure of the kind of constitutional arrangements will be, will be what it will be.

00:13:10.800 They 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.

00:13:16.880 But 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.

00:13:26.980 The 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.

00:13:39.580 Right. TMX is a global disaster in terms of somebody that's an investor looking at a country saying, I'd like to build that.

00:13:48.560 You know, Kinder Morgan got bought out and the government showed that they cannot build anything that's economical.

00:13:53.680 Yeah. And and, you know, I think that the real the real flight of capital has been the flight of capital across Canada.

00:13:59.780 And the one place that's an exception to that is Alberta.

00:14:02.080 But 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?

00:14:12.240 And that's not because we're good at marketing.

00:14:14.980 It's because we have a strategy that speaks to the best companies, asks what the conditions are to get them here.

00:14:21.180 And 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.

00:14:30.880 And 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.

00:14:45.120 You got to find out why they chose to do that.

00:14:47.380 We need to figure out if we need to choose to do that.

00:14:49.500 Alberta 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.

00:15:00.880 And 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.

00:15:14.320 And 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.

00:15:26.780 I 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.

00:15:43.360 very interesting point i mean everyone knows that facebook is a leading company by almost any

00:15:48.780 measure so if facebook's due diligence says this is the winner then a lot of other companies are

00:15:54.980 saying either what do they know that we don't or that's a pretty good confirmation to follow like

00:16:00.680 like for them to to plunk 13 billion down like you say it's a signal to others the smartest people

00:16:07.820 in the world or some of the smartest people in the world have given it a green light you know

00:16:12.240 there used to be a saying no one ever got fired for buying ibm as in you're safe now facebook has

00:16:18.000 shown you're safe to go to alberta but let me say something on the countervailing side because

00:16:23.340 about a week ago i saw a video made by wab canoe who's a fairly popular premier uh partly because

00:16:31.060 he's so unusual in his social media style like he's got a shtick to him and he's got a bit of

00:16:36.300 sense of humor. But here's a clip of him saying he was canceling a data center in Manitoba pretty

00:16:45.240 much just because. We're not going to move ahead with the data center in Il-de-Shane because there's

00:16:50.840 a big threat to the environment and not much benefit to the economy. I reject the idea that

00:16:57.460 we have to be slaves to surveillance capitalism in order to participate in the modern economy.

00:17:04.740 And 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

00:17:17.240 So you've got Wob Canu, who just killed a huge deal for his province.

00:17:21.300 Not this big, but a big one.

00:17:23.480 And it sort of had like, I don't like data centers.

00:17:26.440 That's not the kind of business I like, as if there's a line of companies going into Manitoba.

00:17:32.580 Leslyn Lewis, who I like.

00:17:34.260 She's got a lot of good values, and she's very strong.

00:17:38.580 She had a skeptical tweet today saying, I might be persuaded, but I'm a bit worried about this.

00:17:45.220 And I saw a Globe and Mail reporter say, oh, this is going to use so much energy.

00:17:50.540 It's this many gigawatt hours.

00:17:52.960 That's two-thirds as much as the city of Edmonton.

00:17:56.480 By the way, I think that's actually true.

00:17:58.900 But that's sort of the point about Alberta is it has an enormous amount of energy, whether it's natural gas,

00:18:03.340 whether we're bringing in a uranium for from our cousins in saskatchewan so i'm seeing what i'm

00:18:10.620 not going to call it a snobby response wab canoe was sort of looking down his nose at at data

00:18:15.940 centers but i think there's sort of a populist distrust of big corporations that really got

00:18:21.140 deepened during covid when you have a huge company and people are mad at facebook for censorship

00:18:26.320 reasons i still am so you have distrust of mark zuckerberg distrust of super big companies 0.75

00:18:32.060 distrust of ai distrust of huge data centers which i think china is helping to whip up because i 0.82

00:18:39.040 think china wants to beat the west at computers and data and so i think they just like there's 0.79

00:18:45.640 a big op going on with iran and qatar online i think china does not want the west to go big on

00:18:54.040 data centers so although this is good news from employment energy alberta i think there are forces

00:19:00.060 out there that would kill this deal if they could what do you say to that luddites luddites

00:19:07.140 they're threatened you know that i'll tell you the tell in wab canoes little video first of all

00:19:13.800 i'm tired of his cutesiness his people are are impoverished by his terrible policies 0.61

00:19:19.940 he plays on this like cutesy shtick it's embarrassing he uses these with these weasel

00:19:26.040 words that i find disgusting right i do not find him funny i do not find him entertaining

00:19:31.960 he's destroyed the the prosperity of his own people and he's pretended it's because

00:19:37.000 he's got some ethical insight into how bad it is to have prosperity and growth from free markets

00:19:43.360 he used the language surveillance capitalism right talk about a data center right now if you

00:19:49.900 unpack that you know that's coming straight out of the dark sort of sort of basement of this weird

00:19:55.660 leftist antagonism this antifa level antagonism to the reality that has just dawned and it's

00:20:02.000 starting to dawn in canada dawned other places you know years ago that the entire environmental game

00:20:07.560 was to basically watch the west you know self-defeat any of its economic growth by attacking

00:20:15.460 the energy that was the basis for that economic growth and you saw this with the anti-fossil fuel

00:20:20.880 stuff. You saw it in the 70s and 80s with the antagonism to nuclear, which set us back a couple

00:20:26.520 decades in sustainable, by the way, carbon zero energy nuclear. And it's reactive. It's deeply

00:20:35.860 pessimistic about capital markets. And it's going to set Manitoba back. So he, with a stroke of a

00:20:43.820 pen, which is totally anti-democratic, has decided that he's against something, that actually he's

00:20:49.700 utilizing the assets that consume this data to tell his story right so he's this social media

00:20:55.900 guy that's his way of processing policy using exactly the thing that's consuming all the data

00:21:01.300 that he now wants to have not in his backyard so he's going to keep doing his tiktok videos or his

00:21:05.760 instagramming or his facebook or whatever his particular social media strategy is but he just

00:21:10.780 wants all of that stuff to be driven with infrastructure that exists elsewhere benefiting

00:21:16.000 other other communities benefiting other other uh markets and so you know look i understand and

00:21:22.520 you and i both share concern with the idea that a social media culture becomes vapid and that

00:21:28.640 people stop thinking for themselves and that people start swallowing the uh you know and i'm

00:21:34.140 less concerned about capital surveillance because that tends to have market dynamics to it although

00:21:37.940 i still think it's problematic i understand some of the language that that comes from but

00:21:42.080 I'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.

00:21:56.720 So 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.

00:22:08.340 And 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

00:22:31.300 It 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.

00:22:40.200 This is not the Panopticon that Lacan or Derrida or Foucault were concerned about, right?

00:22:46.520 It'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.

00:22:55.520 And now you can't do that in Manitoba, but you're going to do it in Alberta.

00:22:58.300 For Leslin, I think there's something else going on.

00:23:00.400 And 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.

00:23:13.380 And actually, I'm hugely sympathetic to that.

00:23:15.260 I don't think you just say, look, go anywhere, get a government grant to do it and build your thing here.

00:23:20.600 I 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.

00:23:27.080 And that's what Alberta has been doing for four years.

00:23:29.760 And it's been a debate.

00:23:30.640 There were a lot of points at which the meta discussion was getting close to being derailed.

00:23:38.300 Stampede last year had a conversation with a few of their senior executives, and there were some real sticking points.

00:23:43.500 And so you have to work those things through.

00:23:44.860 These deals are really hard to do.

00:23:46.800 But 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.

00:23:53.300 And 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.

00:24:10.520 And 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.

00:24:18.900 And there are whole industries that will be born out of the fact that we've built that infrastructure.

00:24:24.440 It's not just meta and data centers.

00:24:26.380 This is the backbone for superhighway infrastructure that you can put huge projects and platform projects through.

00:24:34.580 And that's what makes it exciting.

00:24:36.180 I'd like to know, because I do, with you, respect Leslie Lewis.

00:24:38.820 I'd like to unpack why she's taking the position of being skeptical out of the gate.

00:24:43.600 You know, is that rooted in a very specific view on energy utilization?

00:24:47.960 Is 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?

00:24:56.720 I 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.

00:25:15.440 Yeah. 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.

00:25:36.540 So 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

00:25:43.640 Like there's this vibe – I'm calling it a vibe because I don't think it's deeper than an aesthetic feeling.

00:25:49.600 Let me read to you.

00:25:50.460 I have it on my phone here.

00:25:51.520 Here's what Lesley Lewis had to say, and I'd invite you to respond.

00:25:54.440 Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

00:25:55.660 So she made a couple of tweets.

00:25:57.520 And by the way, I really like her.

00:25:59.400 Yeah, me too.

00:25:59.840 And I want to give her absolutely the best benefit of the doubt.

00:26:02.700 And 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.

00:26:13.140 But I think her ideas could merit a direct response.

00:26:16.560 Let me read – she's got two tweets.

00:26:18.480 I'll read the first.

00:26:19.160 You can reply, and then I'll read the second if you've got the time to do it.

00:26:22.000 She 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.

00:26:37.000 AI data centers require enormous amounts of reliable power, specialized construction, advanced cooling, transmission infrastructure, cybersecurity, and technical expertise.

00:26:44.980 After 11 years of failing to build the energy infrastructure Canada needs,

00:26:48.080 the government must explain whether this project is truly viable

00:26:51.180 and who will ultimately own, control, and benefit from the infrastructure if it proceeds.

00:26:56.380 Now, my instinct is most of those are business questions for Meta to worry about.

00:27:03.020 I appreciate your concern about will you find workers.

00:27:05.540 Those are good problems to have, but that's my reflexive response.

00:27:10.980 It sounds like you've been thinking about this project for years.

00:27:14.060 I've been thinking about it for about two days.

00:27:16.120 So give me your deeper response, and then I'll read you her second tweet.

00:27:20.360 Well, I think her tweet betrays a misunderstanding of what's going on.

00:27:24.300 This 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.

00:27:33.460 You 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.

00:27:43.580 Nate Glubish, who's Minister for Innovation, took it up.

00:27:46.800 Rick 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.

00:27:55.480 And 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.

00:28:10.060 and Meta needed to work on a few things

00:28:12.300 and Alberta needed to work on a few things 0.99

00:28:13.960 same thing had happened during the Dow negotiations 0.95

00:28:15.960 so Leslyn's

00:28:18.400 first tweet there

00:28:19.640 I think betrays this sad

00:28:22.020 reality of Canadian politics

00:28:23.920 which is she's asking the government to

00:28:25.980 explain something and that just

00:28:28.060 that just shows how far down

00:28:30.300 the road we've gone from being a free

00:28:32.200 market open economy

00:28:33.720 where the government's creating Alberta was creating

00:28:36.240 the conditions for an announcement from Meta

00:28:38.260 where META will proceed with these things

00:28:40.440 and they will bring their own energy over time.

00:28:42.440 They'll develop that in collaboration with PEMB and others.

00:28:45.300 And you'll see the development and expansion

00:28:47.220 of the electrical grid as a result of these things.

00:28:50.460 And I think the momentum that having META come in

00:28:52.860 and say, we want to build a 13 billion

00:28:55.040 is the tip of the iceberg as it's going to be

00:28:56.680 a much higher number than that, actually.

00:28:58.480 But we're going to start with the $13 billion

00:29:00.820 external infrastructure piece.

00:29:03.060 That's our first announcement.

00:29:04.520 But what's happening is now Alberta is saying,

00:29:06.120 okay, now we're going to be a global player

00:29:07.640 the data center game we're going to have some of the fastest data capacity and compute deepest

00:29:13.020 compute in the world right here in Alberta and Canada who would have thought we're doing that

00:29:17.220 with some of the best guys but now we've got 20 other people coming in and you know that there

00:29:20.860 are going to be you know that the other huge players are going to be taking a look because

00:29:25.740 we're now creating economies of scale an economic platform that makes us more attractive than other

00:29:32.600 places in the United States or anywhere else in the world and Alberta can continue to do these

00:29:36.740 kind of deals so i think i'd encourage leslin to pick up the phone and talk to minister joseph

00:29:41.600 scow who's a great guy leading the economic development file that invest alberta ultimately

00:29:45.840 you know reports into and works on she talked to nate glubish all conservatives all working

00:29:51.020 on this stuff trying to figure out how do we build the next generation economy in this province

00:29:56.580 off of some of the existing assets we have and when you have as much great clean ethically made

00:30:02.140 energy as we've got, you know, $15 trillion worth of it, you can take a very, very tiny

00:30:08.160 fraction of that and use that to create an entire compute infrastructure that then can

00:30:13.260 be used to expand to service 30 or 40 other entire industries at a scale that is totally

00:30:20.580 competitive globally and exceeds anything else happening in the country.

00:30:25.500 And so the point to Leslin is this is enabling a free market in a place that was overtaxed

00:30:31.100 been over-regulated for a while. And as we remove some of those regulations, we pass some policies

00:30:35.840 to clarify the opportunity for that industry. That industry will thrive. And when that industry

00:30:40.360 thrives, it has this multiplier effect on other industries, self-reinforcing other industries.

00:30:46.100 You want to do ag tech? Well, now you've got some of the fastest data bandwidth in the planet,

00:30:50.120 right? You want to build capital markets, trading desks in Calgary? Well, these will be some of the

00:30:55.360 fastest best most linked uh trading platforms in the planet and and that's what makes it so

00:31:01.880 exciting it's an infrastructure investment that's being made privately instead of going to the

00:31:06.560 farmers and the moms and the nurses and the farmers saying we're going to take 50 billion

00:31:11.580 dollars of your hard-earned money that you paid at these crazy 50 rates over years and we're going

00:31:17.120 to give it away to like nordic companies that basically don't have the capacity to compete

00:31:21.660 with china or tesla and we're going to do it because fashionably we want to be seen to be

00:31:25.980 environmental and we think evs down environmental which they're not and then we're going to lose it

00:31:30.540 all in four years and then we're going to blame economic conditions and donald trump and then

00:31:35.580 we're going to answer that problem by after failing to compete with tesla with an ev failed

00:31:40.840 thing we're going to borrow more money from the nurses and doctors and firemen we're going to

00:31:44.520 give it away to telesat which is a poor man's version of of space uh of starlink and then

00:31:51.160 when that doesn't make any sense to anybody in the markets because no one will buy telesat stock

00:31:55.860 in any normal company we're going to go in and take a a um you know gravel pit we're going to

00:32:01.440 call it a launch pad even though there's never been a rocket on it and we're gonna give that

00:32:05.000 a billion dollars because we're just we don't have launch capacity because everyone's saying

00:32:08.460 well telesat can only get its 98 satellites in the air if it uses spacex to do it so how does

00:32:13.260 any of this make sense so we're going to now have a launch pad with no rockets yeah and the satellites

00:32:18.600 aren't going to be made by us like what do we what are we doing why are we competing with spacex

00:32:22.880 and and start link you know like what's going on why are we doing with taxpayer dollars

00:32:27.440 if this makes any sense at all as here's here's the alberta solution right if you're all if you're

00:32:33.780 if you're in alberta and you get to run ottawa for a day i wish then then you might just go to

00:32:40.980 SpaceX and say, hey, we want to have low-Earth orbital satellites providing extraordinary

00:32:46.620 seamless internet coverage to our entire north, all of our rural communities across the entire

00:32:51.820 country. We've put $3 billion, more than the entire market cap of Telesat in grants and loans

00:33:02.460 into this company that's worth half the amount of grants and loans the federal government has

00:33:06.800 given them and and we know that you guys have have launched almost 10 000 orthorbital satellites

00:33:12.200 these guys have a white paper to launch 98 in about three years uh and we're given three billion

00:33:17.820 dollars why don't we give you three billion dollars you just give us in perpetuity northern

00:33:22.040 rural coverage uh on a starlink basis and and we'll do a deal as a sovereign with you right

00:33:28.560 yeah we can do it tomorrow tomorrow every rural community in this country could be switched on

00:33:34.120 and hooked up and we would have all the benefits of the infrastructure of immediate internet access

00:33:39.600 for every small trading post and family community and school in the north so the point is if your

00:33:45.600 goal as a government is to say no some things require government expenditure and one of them

00:33:49.940 is we want to link everybody up in these remote communities then why not do that with the best

00:33:54.560 country company in the world that does it better than anybody else why invent this weird sad

00:33:59.360 Laurentian credentialed crowd that can never get anything in the air, that can never deliver

00:34:04.520 anything on time, that managed to always lose the money and then retire and live in St. Kitts.

00:34:10.440 Why do we have to deal with these people? Why not invite the best company in the world and say,

00:34:14.400 Canada would love to make Tesla run some factories here. We'd like to have Starlink

00:34:19.200 have a base, have a star base in the north. That's what we're doing in Alberta. We're

00:34:25.460 saying to Meta, we're not going to come in and say the government wants to build data centers.

00:34:29.140 We're going to ask the best guys in the world to come and build them and what the conditions would

00:34:32.200 be. And then we create an ecosystem around that. And Alberta will flourish as a result of having

00:34:36.780 that infrastructure based here. And the government, to Leslin's point, will be out of the picture.

00:34:42.140 It'll create the conditions and then step out so these companies can come here and compete with

00:34:46.040 each other. You know, the favorite part for me of the press conference announcing this data center

00:34:51.360 was the lack of Evan Solomon, the AI minister.

00:34:57.360 And you know that it's real

00:35:01.580 because you talk about that little space station.

00:35:05.180 My colleague Lincoln Jay and I went out there

00:35:06.880 to Nova Scotia to try and find.

00:35:08.620 Did you really go there?

00:35:09.620 We went out there.

00:35:12.160 You're such a...

00:35:13.540 It's hard to get to.

00:35:15.640 And the last mile...

00:35:16.320 I bet it is.

00:35:16.920 Actually, we couldn't actually get to the gravel pit itself,

00:35:19.940 but we could see it.

00:35:21.360 Is it a security?

00:35:23.060 You know, we studied the deal.

00:35:25.780 The government's paying them $20 million a year to rent that gravel pit.

00:35:31.340 And they gave them one year's back pay rent, $20 million a year.

00:35:36.480 The purpose of it is not to launch rocket ships.

00:35:40.160 The purpose of it is to spread around $20 million a year to all the right liberals.

00:35:45.220 So all the things you've described, you are thinking like, well, success is the goal.

00:35:50.360 putting a rocket in the space is no no it's not it's the it's the busyness it's the churn it's

00:35:57.860 the back and forth it's taking care of all my lobbyist friends on that that's the purpose of

00:36:02.660 it it's a totally different mindset and it wouldn't surprise me if as you you prophesy that

00:36:09.760 there will be more data centers coming to albert i think you're probably right and i think it'll

00:36:13.620 i know i know i'm right on that that's uh that just is what's happening right now you might see

00:36:18.700 a call for a data center tax you might see the same sort of antipathy that we've had towards

00:36:26.180 pipelines be projected i mean you'll have a bernie sanders style we have to stop this

00:36:32.720 you'll have the left the left hates the left hates this stuff by the way as they're like it's coming

00:36:37.860 this will be the new pipeline protest stuff but one of the reasons they're so worried about it

00:36:42.700 is because it does consume an enormous amount of energy which we have in massive abundance

00:36:47.260 And 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.

00:36:58.560 And 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.

00:37:09.160 And that's what data centers do.

00:37:10.780 They're magic.

00:37:12.300 And that's the beauty.

00:37:13.240 That's the beauty of the economy.

00:37:14.580 I 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

00:37:23.960 And eventually that thing they dream up that everybody thinks is dumb, 10 years later, is worth $2 trillion. 0.91

00:37:30.020 And there's a bunch of guys in Austin.

00:37:31.680 Have 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?

00:37:39.260 I mean, it's thousands.

00:37:40.080 yeah and so you want to say okay what what if what if instead of austin what if that was red deer

00:37:44.680 yeah and people are like they laugh but then i'm like but why not yeah like let me ask this simple

00:37:49.980 simple question why not yeah why can't starbase be outside red deer what is it are canadians

00:37:55.720 incapable there's a question i had the other day somebody said well tanker band i said let me ask

00:37:59.720 you a simple question this is a burning question because this is the kind of question you get when

00:38:02.700 you travel overseas if you're in singapore people say you know what's really interesting what is

00:38:06.700 this tank a bad thing canadians don't back themselves to be able to like ship stuff like

00:38:11.460 everybody else in the world does yeah you suddenly realize they look at us like we're handing like we

00:38:16.020 look like this sad country yeah it has suddenly decided we're incapable of traversing environmentally

00:38:22.040 sensitive areas like everybody else in the world does all the time and you ultimately have to just

00:38:26.440 explain no it's not that it's actually that these things in canada have become a political football 0.51

00:38:30.720 they're used to score political points or or they're used to do the anti-robin hood they're 0.51

00:38:35.040 used to rob the nurses, doctors, teachers, and everyone else pays taxes of their tax money and 0.86

00:38:39.980 give it to the rich, right? Who are the connected, the politically hooked up and the people that can

00:38:45.320 get ahead of what that next performative policy will be. And when you double click on it, you just

00:38:50.620 say there's no way a gravel pit that was trading hands three years ago into people that are

00:38:55.240 politically connected suddenly became worth, you know, 200 million bucks over a few years. Like

00:38:59.980 that's obviously draft but in alberta i think the good news is ezra the more that we do this the

00:39:06.420 more industries we do this in i mean watch for defense defense is going to be another great one

00:39:11.100 that i'm super excited about a lot of people don't know why alberta is going to be a defense

00:39:15.820 and aerospace center but it will be and it'll be that in about five years you're going to see the

00:39:20.260 groundwork slowly get laid now and the same kind of strategies are going to happen but we've already

00:39:25.120 had i mean there's a lot of quiet announcements that have happened we saw how de haviland moved

00:39:28.980 to calgary airport that was part of a strategy you saw lufthansa move to calgary airport people

00:39:33.660 often don't know that because it's that's the that's the you know the big uh reworking and the

00:39:39.400 after uh servicing of these planes there they've quietly moved in from germany we're going to have

00:39:44.700 in in five years you watch the space there'll be another announcement like this that will suddenly

00:39:48.900 define that we've gone from like the half dozen small data center announcements that we've had

00:39:53.720 that no one paid attention to to suddenly the biggest best guys on the planet of the six

00:39:57.840 super scalers saying we're making our biggest commitment in alberta it's the best place in the

00:40:02.160 world and we're only going to announce the first 13 billion but there's another four or five of

00:40:07.360 those coming from these guys and the same thing is going to happen in defense same way it happened

00:40:11.320 in advanced materials with down we've had about five or ten other firms in that same part of

00:40:15.500 alberta and so what i'm excited about is this is a model that i believe ultimately is going to be

00:40:20.880 adopted by the other provinces and guys like wab canoe that are making his people poorer and trying

00:40:26.100 to be cute and making it about himself and hiding behind these weird weasel words like surveillance 0.84

00:40:30.720 capitalism as an excuse for shutting down the infrastructure his province needs to finally

00:40:35.680 start to get ahead is tragic and guys like him that are playing these games you have people like

00:40:40.660 oh he's he's going to be like a trudeau and i'm like i think he already is like that yeah and the

00:40:45.980 fact that that might work for a few people is sad but i don't i think people are getting over that

00:40:50.420 I think Manitobans deserve far better. 1.00

00:40:53.520 And Leslie needs to come to Calgary.

00:40:54.860 Tell Leslie when you see her, because I know you probably will before me, but she's got an open invitation to Calgary. 0.95

00:41:01.040 We'll show her why she's wrong on this one.

00:41:04.280 That 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.

00:41:12.140 And she got a lot of attitude readjustment from pro data center people.

00:41:18.140 So she wrote a second tweet.

00:41:20.800 And let me read it to you because you can see it's slightly less combative.

00:41:26.160 I mean, it shows that she's listening.

00:41:28.540 Let me read her second tweet, which she wrote shortly thereafter.

00:41:32.800 She said, I welcome Alberta's success in attracting Meta's investment.

00:41:36.700 A project of this scale demonstrates that Canada can compete for world-class AI infrastructure when government creates the right investment conditions.

00:41:45.300 My concern has never been with Alberta's initiative.

00:41:47.220 My 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.

00:41:56.680 I think she retracted pretty much 99% of her prickliness, which is good.

00:42:01.420 I mean, we want people to adjust their views when more facts and arguments are brought to their attention.

00:42:07.440 And listen, I'm glad she has that point of view.

00:42:10.340 Have you seen any reaction to this announcement from Evan Solomon, Mark Carney, the people who love to take credit for, quote, investments?

00:42:19.960 Have you seen any official government reaction to it from the feds?

00:42:25.040 No.

00:42:25.540 Look, Alberta's – I had a drink last night with a guy who's a major investor in mines and mining.

00:42:34.820 And he said, you know, David, I've been coming to this Calgary Stampede for 12 years.

00:42:40.380 He said, this is the most optimistic electric place I've ever seen.

00:42:46.540 And he said that the momentum here is extraordinary.

00:42:50.040 So if you think about it, Ezra, the MOU got announced.

00:42:53.140 There's a lot of skepticism in the patch about that MOU.

00:42:55.720 But 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.

00:43:02.480 And so the MOU added enormous kind of momentum to the province.

00:43:07.120 Second thing is the announcement of the shield pipeline that will go from Hardesty all the way to Sarnia.

00:43:15.300 I think we're going to end up having at some point a strategic petroleum reserve in the salt caves in Sarnia.

00:43:20.800 I was thinking about writing an op-ed about that.

00:43:23.280 I'll find a good liberal friend to write that with.

00:43:25.740 But I think we need that as a nation.

00:43:28.480 And I think our heartland, our industrial heartland is still in that region.

00:43:33.720 You've got great refining in Sarnia.

00:43:35.440 I think we should build the energy superpower across the country.

00:43:39.300 And 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.

00:43:55.140 Well, you know, that that announcement from the premier and Doug Ford went out.

00:44:00.140 That's another pipeline. You just got people feeling like, look, it's not perfect.

00:44:05.640 There's a lot we'd want to tell some of our liberal cousins.

00:44:09.220 I think the problem for guys like Evan Solomon and others is so much of this stuff has come off for people as performative.

00:44:15.760 Yeah. 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.

00:44:24.800 The premier has got a bunch of ministers. It was Nate Horner, who's in finance now, Jason Nixon, you know, Nate Glubish.

00:44:32.660 It was Nathan Newdorf doing great work. You have have now Sigurdsson.

00:44:38.300 Like 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,

00:44:44.940 but 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.

00:44:54.500 government doesn't know how to do and by engaging with the private sector effectively and figuring

00:44:59.440 out what the principal views that would result in the best outcomes for the public from building

00:45:05.360 this infrastructure in alberta instead of letting it go somewhere else would be and make those

00:45:09.800 trade-offs and have those arguments and debate those with meta and meta is not a warm bath these

00:45:13.580 are tough guys they're smart and they know exactly what they want they're going to get what they want

00:45:17.640 and and alberta has been really solid at defending the public interest and getting what it wants

00:45:21.900 So 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.

00:45:38.940 But 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.

00:45:50.660 But 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.

00:46:07.080 But that performative environmentalism is over.

00:46:08.980 It doesn't work.

00:46:09.680 It's done nothing for the planet.

00:46:10.980 It's set us back economically.

00:46:12.220 It feels like they're trying to turn the page on that, which is good.

00:46:15.560 I think that what I'd love to see is the federal government just saying, look, it looks like

00:46:19.600 there's a model here that we should look at, which is instead of just taking this massive

00:46:24.320 amount of public money that we don't have that could be spent on really important critical

00:46:28.120 services and throwing it at performative ideas like EV plants or low-Earth orbital satellites

00:46:35.780 that are subscale or gravel pits that we're going to pretend are launch pads.

00:46:39.860 These things are so obviously just loss-making for the public,

00:46:44.400 and it's depressing for people,

00:46:46.140 especially if the same guys doing that are actually actively supporting

00:46:49.860 regulations that prevent the people that really build these things

00:46:53.080 from being able to build those things in Canada

00:46:54.900 and sending them to South to build them in the States.

00:46:57.520 And I think as they look at the number of kids with advanced degrees 0.57

00:47:00.840 that have left the country and are almost all going to the U.S.

00:47:03.720 to build their dream companies now,

00:47:06.600 the amount of foreign direct investment

00:47:07.880 that's fled the country,

00:47:09.640 the amount, and Alberta is the only thing,

00:47:12.120 you know, without Alberta right now,

00:47:13.640 Alberta, Canada on a per capita GDP basis

00:47:16.620 is now poorer than Mississippi.

00:47:19.000 It's very hard to overstate how bad it's got.

00:47:22.420 There's a guy here, the one liberal

00:47:24.280 that's sort of an MP here,

00:47:25.680 he made a, he put up a post saying,

00:47:27.620 you know, on a per capita income to GDP basis,

00:47:31.600 Canada is actually better than the United States.

00:47:33.720 So I looked into that. I thought that's really interesting. You know what I found out, Ezra?

00:47:37.080 In 2015, the per capita income of Canada was 63% better than it is today. These guys from 2015 to

00:47:45.620 now, it's still better slightly because of sort of the extraordinary top layer of the U.S. wealth

00:47:51.520 curve. But even on that per capita basis, or sorry, on that median basis, that median,

00:47:58.960 we're still slightly better but we're still decreased by 63 percent from where we were in

00:48:03.400 2015 so even our advantages have been eroded by these by these extraordinarily bad statist

00:48:10.180 industrial policies so i'm look love leslie lewis she got this one wrong i think in my in my humble

00:48:16.860 opinion but um i think the good news is when we start to see these things land it's sending a lot

00:48:22.320 of signals which is the most important thing happening in the economy right now is not the

00:48:26.680 honest debate about the best architecture for the canadian federation and alberta's place in it

00:48:31.240 that that debate embeds probably 20 or 30 very important debates that should be happening right

00:48:37.900 now and you and i you hosted that debate between me and keith where i was trying to highlight

00:48:41.400 you know a dozen of the core issues that i think are related to that idea that debate about

00:48:46.040 independence but it's certainly not making that big a difference in the investment judgments and

00:48:50.840 decisions of some of the smartest people on the planet and i think we're going to see more momentum

00:48:55.240 than ever coming in here this is great to catch up with you thank you for breaking away from the

00:49:01.300 stampede to spend some time with us and um i'm surprised not to see you here i mean i've got

00:49:06.320 i got uh i got a black cowboy hat and i've got some sunglasses for you so you can go incognito

00:49:13.100 that's right you can ask you can you could cause trouble as usual but you could do it with a little

00:49:18.800 bit of that uh Toronto panache well listen we're gonna have to change out that fancy suit you're

00:49:23.680 wearing for something with stripes on it i look forward to getting back out there thank you my

00:49:27.620 friend keep in touch and uh thanks for i i really learned a lot about the about the whole strategy

00:49:33.360 today and i thank you for that great okay speak soon edward right on there he is david leg

00:49:38.380 investor strategist and super alberton stay with us your letters to me next

00:49:43.740 hey welcome back your letters to me about richard martell who allowed himself to be plucked from the

00:49:57.540 house of commons and given a taskless thanks in the senate first letters from wolfmoon walks who

00:50:04.240 says honestly it's just heartbreaking to watch canada's legacy media applauding every move of

00:50:08.680 marks Carney, no matter how corrupt his decisions and policies are, while simultaneously casting

00:50:14.340 shade on Pierre Paglia for no reason whatsoever. Our legacy media is bought and paid for with our

00:50:18.980 taxpayer dollars, and Carney uses it to the max to spread his corruption. Yeah, it's rather

00:50:24.040 depressing to me. I mean, when you bribe someone, isn't that the story? Rather than, ha ha, ha ha,

00:50:31.400 Pierre Paglia sucks to be you because one of your team was bribed away. I mean, aren't you 0.89

00:50:37.820 missing the center of the story, which is the bribe?

00:50:43.200 Sill Zeppelin says, more reason not to trust the liberals and the conservatives.

00:50:47.940 The conservatives are a bunch of turncoats. 0.99

00:50:50.020 While it certainly isn't great to see them being bribable, I noticed that many of the 0.98

00:50:57.000 ones who were bribed didn't earn their nomination the hard way. 0.85

00:51:01.720 Remember I talked about the complicated, I used that word, the Rube Goldberg machine.

00:51:05.760 that's what these super complicated machines are. I don't know if you know but about 30 years ago I

00:51:11.640 ran for office briefly. I had to win the nomination for what was called the Canadian Alliance and then

00:51:17.240 I was going to run but Stephen Harper needed the seat etc etc. My point is I went through the

00:51:22.140 process of going door to door convincing hundreds of people pouring my heart into it and so frankly

00:51:29.520 that was one of the reasons I didn't want to step aside for Stephen Harper is I had invested so much

00:51:35.080 of my heart and soul and time and energy and promises. Whereas many of the people who were

00:51:41.300 bribed away were given it as a star candidate, including Richard Martel, including Michael Ma.

00:51:48.780 These were people that, you know, Pierre Pauliev says, I'm giving you this. I'm giving you that.

00:51:54.880 They didn't have to earn it. And so maybe it's easier for them to be bribed since their heart

00:52:00.520 was not invested in winning it.

00:52:02.980 It's just a theory.

00:52:04.460 That's our show for today.

00:52:05.220 What do you think of David Legg?

00:52:06.160 I thought he's so smart.

00:52:07.260 I didn't know he was so deeply involved

00:52:08.600 with this project.

00:52:10.380 Until next time,

00:52:11.360 on behalf of all of us here

00:52:12.540 at Rebel World Headquarters,

00:52:13.660 to you at home,

00:52:14.240 good night,

00:52:15.320 and keep fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - July 09, 2026

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Why top companies are choosing Alberta： David Knight Legg on Meta’s $13 billion move

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