The Alberta Project - July 18, 2025


Micheal Wagner on the 1980 election and NEP


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

230.88164

Word count

474

Sentence count

1


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the National Energy Program and the devastating effects it had on Alberta's economy and the people who were hurt by it. I also talk about the reasons why it was such a bad policy and how it hurt a lot of people.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 and so during that uh federal election the liberals decided to uh campaign you know to
00:00:06.320 increase regional divisions to encourage regional divisions through their campaign they can't they
00:00:09.760 campaigned essentially against alberta saying if you know if the eastern provinces will vote us
00:00:14.320 back in we'll put alberta in its place we'll make sure you know um you get your proper or
00:00:19.040 subsidies for your um you know for your energy and things like that so this was very unique in
00:00:23.280 canadian history because generally speaking the federal parties try to uh enhance national unity
00:00:28.720 like to discourage regional divisions and bring the country together like that's what they
00:00:32.160 normally would do but here we had you know the liberal party of canada deliberately exploiting
00:00:37.120 regional divisions and encouraging regional divisions as a way of getting back into power
00:00:40.800 and at work and so you know because of that visit very divisive campaign when pierre was
00:00:45.840 re-elected in february of 1980 people in the west were very angry about that especially alberta we
00:00:49.680 knew what was coming something bad was coming and a few months later in october pierre brought in
00:00:54.800 in the national energy program which just devastated Alberta's economy you know it was
00:00:58.960 it was basically a federal power grab over the energy industry over the energy industry more
00:01:03.140 than ever before but it really devastated Alberta's economy like thousands of businesses were lost
00:01:07.760 thousands of people lost their homes thousands of people well I don't know exactly how many people
00:01:12.200 lost their homes but it was a very large number but thousands of people did lose their jobs
00:01:15.280 and actually just this year you know in the traveling and speaking I've done I've run into
00:01:19.420 people who can tell personal stories about how devastated their family was or people they knew
00:01:25.060 by the national energy program in fact i i was in an event last week where the organizer told me he
00:01:29.620 like he was a child at that time he said he remembers his father weeping over the financial
00:01:33.880 losses of their family due to the national energy program and like this is like this is kind of
00:01:38.180 malicious on the federal government's part you know they knew that they were harming alberta
00:01:41.420 you know when people lose their jobs or their businesses because of a national
00:01:44.620 disaster or something like that you know you can understand that but but this was a deliberate
00:01:49.200 policy of the federal government to hammer Alberta and people were hurt and like I say you can talk
00:01:53.340 to people today some people who were hurt personally or their families were hurt like
00:01:57.040 their dad lost their job you know this harmed a lot of people and you know it's burned in
00:02:01.780 the memory of a lot of people and it should be.