Western Standard - Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in conversation with CSFN Director Jocelyn Bamford

00:00:00.000 You ready to get right to it?

00:00:01.740 Sure, let's get to it.

00:00:03.000 Okay, the first question everybody wants to know about politicians is what drove you into politics?

00:00:09.820 There's a couple things. I was thinking about the answer to that.

00:00:13.860 I told a story about when I became politically aware was when I was in grade 8

00:00:20.380 and I had a social studies teacher named Mr. McCarthy and he was teaching us about communism

00:00:26.580 and I came home talking to dad at the dinner table and said,

00:00:30.120 oh, my teacher thinks that communism is just great.

00:00:33.320 Well, of course, dad didn't think much of that and went to the teacher and gave them what for

00:00:38.080 because he's got Ukrainian heritage and didn't think much of what Stalin did to the Ukrainians and the Holodomor.

00:00:44.080 So that's when he realized we needed to get more active talking around the dinner table and so we did.

00:00:49.900 I didn't get, and I guess maybe no surprise, social studies became my least favorite topic,

00:00:54.320 my least favorite subject. I didn't get back into it until I went into university.

00:01:00.520 And even then, I'm sure some of the folks in the room who are in university political science classes

00:01:05.460 having socialist teachers have this experience.

00:01:08.080 I remember doing a paper comparing the NDP to Marxism

00:01:14.860 because they at the time talked about nationalizing the banks and abolishing private property.

00:01:19.080 I said, there's actually no difference than the Marxists.

00:01:21.240 And so my socialist teacher gave me a C- on that and she said she didn't like the fact

00:01:25.680 that I quoted the Alberta Report because it wasn't an academic source.

00:01:31.220 So that was sort of round number two.

00:01:33.760 But I wasn't able to vote until 1992 because I was only 17 in 1988.

00:01:40.860 And so I think that was when I realized because I've got to vote, I better get involved.

00:01:44.340 And I was fortunate to have a progressive conservative club on campus at the time.

00:01:50.340 There was also a reform party club on campus at the time, liberals and NDs.

00:01:54.340 We had one big club's office room.

00:01:56.400 And maybe this isn't an experience that most young people have today either, unfortunately.

00:02:00.940 We all had really good friendships, even though it was cross-partisan.

00:02:04.220 And so I think that that really stuck with me is that you could have robust disagreements,

00:02:09.380 but you could still then be friends afterwards.

00:02:11.960 So that's sort of how I've conducted myself in politics since.

00:02:14.760 But that was the exciting year because it was a leadership race where we elected Ralph

00:02:19.800 Klein as leader of the provincial party in Alberta.

00:02:23.060 There was a federal leadership race.

00:02:24.820 I was a Jean Charest delegate.

00:02:26.520 Kim Campbell won that one.

00:02:27.900 There was a referendum on Charlottetown and then a provincial and federal election all

00:02:31.440 crammed into about 14 months.

00:02:32.980 So when you have that much election experience, you kind of get hooked and it pulls you back in.

00:02:36.880 So that was where I got my start.

00:02:39.400 Great.

00:02:39.760 So let's talk about the biggest challenge that you've overcome in your life.

00:02:44.760 So it could be in your political life, it could be in your personal life.

00:02:48.100 Tell us about that.

00:02:50.100 Well, I was a social pariah in Alberta for about seven years.

00:02:57.360 I made a very unpopular decision, some of you may recall, in 2014.

00:03:04.140 And it came from, I thought, a good place.

00:03:06.600 I knew that in Alberta I was seeing that we were, when you split the vote, conservatives,

00:03:11.480 when conservatives split the votes, the left ends up winning.

00:03:15.300 And so I think what had occurred, there had been so much turmoil and change in the PC party.

00:03:20.060 Jim Prentice, who was, I think, a very well-respected cabinet minister at the federal level,

00:03:25.200 came back to try one last time to save the PC party.

00:03:27.960 I had great admiration for Jim.

00:03:29.440 And we thought maybe we could do sort of a quick merger of the two parties, get the membership

00:03:34.320 to validate it afterwards, and everything would be great.

00:03:36.820 And it didn't turn out that way, of course.

00:03:38.780 I lost my seat.

00:03:40.120 I lost my nomination.

00:03:41.060 And the government was defeated.

00:03:45.360 And we ended up with four years of NDP government.

00:03:47.900 The exact thing I was wanting to avoid, the exact thing I was wanting to avoid,

00:03:51.940 was the left being able to take control of our province.

00:03:54.940 And so I was delighted when Premier Kenney came back,

00:03:58.440 and he and Brian Jean laid down arms, brought the two parties together the right way,

00:04:03.320 and was able to have a chance to come back in to politics.

00:04:08.300 It wasn't easy, though, because when I got kicked out of public life,

00:04:13.000 I decided not to leave it and went on to talk radio.

00:04:15.920 And I can tell you the blue streak that people texted into me

00:04:19.240 for probably the first three months on there was a little bit unpleasant.

00:04:22.560 And it was for about three years that I didn't go to events like this

00:04:26.500 because all of my dearest friends who I'd go up and give the hug to,

00:04:30.160 they would give me the hand or walk away.

00:04:31.940 So it took a long time for me to make amends for that mistake.

00:04:37.020 But I figured that once the opening came into politics one more time,

00:04:43.580 as you know, those of you who are in politics,

00:04:46.280 it just, once you think you're out, it just pulls you back in.

00:04:49.880 And someone had gotten me, I think it was the Western Standard,

00:04:52.120 had gotten me to commit that if the job came open, I'd run for it.

00:04:55.140 So I thought, I'm hooked now.

00:04:56.840 And so I put my name forward, and here I am.

00:04:59.580 And surprisingly, the Conservatives can be very forgiving.

00:05:03.160 And I think we're doing some great things together in Alberta.

00:05:06.340 So I think we'd all love to know what your biggest political accomplishment has been year to date.

00:05:18.620 This may be surprising to you, but it's the work that we've done on health care reform.

00:05:24.760 So I got into, when I first got elected, you have to remember the environment that I was entering into.

00:05:32.400 The left was screaming that the system was going to collapse,

00:05:35.780 that we were in an emergency, a crisis, it was going to fall apart.

00:05:39.600 In fact, we've been hearing that, I think, in every province now for the last two and a half years,

00:05:43.580 that the system is completely incapable of managing surge.

00:05:46.980 And we have now had, in this fall session, so here we were after two waves of COVID,

00:05:52.780 and we had a health system that was still unable to manage surge.

00:05:56.580 Now we had RSV and influenza and COVID all hitting at once.

00:06:00.200 And we saw what happened when the health bureaucrats said we couldn't handle it.

00:06:04.580 They shut down the economy.

00:06:05.520 They put on masks.

00:06:06.300 They put on restrictions.

00:06:07.200 And I thought, we're not going to let that happen.

00:06:08.440 So I fired the entire CMOH because I felt like they just weren't up to giving me the advice that I needed.

00:06:23.200 And I also replaced the Board of Alberta Health Services.

00:06:25.580 And the reason I did that is because we do this a lot in politics.

00:06:29.220 When we want to shield, when politicians want to shield themselves from the fallout of mistakes,

00:06:34.700 it's, oh, well, let's set up a separate agency with a separate board and a separate decision-making model.

00:06:39.240 So when something goes wrong, you say, oh, that's not my fault.

00:06:41.260 That's their fault.

00:06:42.080 But we were going to get blamed for health care anyway.

00:06:44.180 So I figured, may as well put an official administrator in there so I can call them and direct them

00:06:48.800 and reach in and actually make some changes.

00:06:51.880 And I'll tell you what the biggest surprise for me was,

00:06:54.640 is that the civil service, when they have clear direction and they see that there's alignment

00:06:59.380 with their direct boss and the minister responsible and the premier,

00:07:03.280 and you give them clear goals and you measure them and you know that you're going to chop off a few heads

00:07:08.180 if they don't achieve results, they achieve results.

00:07:12.040 And so I can tell you where we're at today.

00:07:14.740 We did a 90-day report.

00:07:16.600 And one of the things that we were experiencing, I'm sure it happens in other communities,

00:07:20.120 but there's this system that has emerged where ambulances have become almost an extension of hallway medicine.

00:07:28.260 So all of the acute care beds are jammed up because we're not efficiently moving patients into long-term care.

00:07:33.340 Which jams up the hallways.

00:07:34.880 And then when the hallways jam up, they just keep patients in the back of ambulances.

00:07:38.600 And there are some times where you end up with a backlog of 15 ambulances sitting there,

00:07:42.740 sometimes for an entire shift.

00:07:44.900 And I have a dear friend who's a paramedic.

00:07:47.680 He told me, I asked him what the worst situation was.

00:07:50.480 And he said that he ended up having to have not only his entire shift there,

00:07:54.260 but then he was relieved by the second crew coming in babysitting that same patient

00:07:57.780 because there was an effective offload.

00:07:59.560 And then the times that I was hearing people spending in the emergency room, up to 29 hours.

00:08:05.740 People laying on the floor because there wasn't additional space for them to go in.

00:08:09.840 And also the surgical backlog.

00:08:12.720 We were doing not a bad job of clearing the surgical backlog that resulted from COVID.

00:08:18.400 But we have way too many patients that are waiting longer than medically reasonable.

00:08:23.240 Right now, we pinned the mark on that at about 39,000 patients.

00:08:28.040 So we set those targets.

00:08:30.020 Reduce surgical wait times.

00:08:31.600 Improve the flow through emergency.

00:08:33.320 And have an efficient ambulance drop-off.

00:08:35.700 And in our 90-day report, and I can tell you it's probably going to be the case at the end of this month,

00:08:40.700 that every paramedic who comes to drop off a patient will be able to drop them off,

00:08:46.380 clean their gear, and leave and get on the road within 45 minutes.

00:08:49.340 We're almost at that target.

00:08:51.500 And the way we were able to do it was that we identified the 16 acute care facilities

00:08:56.760 that were having the problem, and we hired dedicated nursing staff to be able to do the onboarding. 1.00

00:09:02.060 It required us to hire 114 full-time equivalents.

00:09:05.640 And so I'll tell you what happens.

00:09:08.080 I can give you an example because I checked in with my paramedic friend,

00:09:11.120 and I asked him how things were going.

00:09:13.240 And maybe not so well for him personally because he used to be able to do overtime at will

00:09:17.640 because there were all these overtime shifts available.

00:09:20.220 He says, now it's pretty slim pickings for overtime shifts.

00:09:23.780 And I said, well, have you been parked yet?

00:09:25.740 Because he has had a lot of acute patients he's taken,

00:09:28.500 and most of them, understandably, have been a quick turnaround.

00:09:31.680 But he got parked one day last week just giving a routine transfer.

00:09:35.940 And I said, well, what happened there?

00:09:37.260 He said, well, we got parked.

00:09:39.220 And then the supervisor came along and said, what are you doing here?

00:09:42.120 You're not supposed to be here.

00:09:43.300 And they quickly jumped into action so that they could offload the patient and get the paramedic out again.

00:09:47.640 And so that is how the system should work.

00:09:50.220 And that is what is remarkable to me is that didn't require extra resources.

00:09:54.960 It just required applying some business sense, some sort of process steps that you will go through in business to try to isolate the problem,

00:10:04.700 identify the solutions, and step by step solve them.

00:10:07.300 And I should say one more thing because the left is having this big battle.

00:10:10.900 I watch it with Jagmeet Singh, and he's the boss of Rachel Notley because you know how these NDP parties work, right?

00:10:16.380 That the provincial party becomes the wing, the local wing of the federal party.

00:10:20.960 And so when I hear that Jagmeet Singh wants to make health transfers conditional on us shutting down our private surgical centers that are performing publicly paid services,

00:10:31.340 I'll tell you the impact that would have right now.

00:10:34.360 So I mentioned to you that we had a backlog of surgeries outside the medically recommended period of 39,000.

00:10:43.420 Already we've whittled that down to 35,000.

00:10:46.340 So new patients are coming in, but we are clearing that backlog faster, so we're reducing it.

00:10:51.440 Dr. John, who's my official administrator, says at this rate we will have cleared the surgical backlog of people waiting longer than medically recommended within 12 months.

00:11:01.120 And I think we'll be the first province to be able to do that.

00:11:09.600 But part of the way we're doing that is with chartered surgical centers.

00:11:12.960 We can do 300,000 surgeries a year.

00:11:15.440 60,000 of them are being done in chartered surgical centers because they can develop efficient ways of getting patients through so they can do more surgeries.

00:11:23.160 That is going to be key.

00:11:24.160 If we shut that down and took 20% of our surgical capacity out of the system, our waiting list would go up again.

00:11:31.120 One more thing I will just say.

00:11:32.780 I'm sorry.

00:11:33.120 I could talk all day about this, as you can probably tell.

00:11:35.960 But one more thing that you'll find with chartered surgical centers if it becomes controversial in your area is that I think we've become accustomed to seeing hospital builds that start off as a billion-dollar project.

00:11:47.220 And then by the time they're done, they become a $2 or $3 or $4 or $5 billion project.

00:11:51.060 Well, one of the chartered surgical centers that we've contracted with, we pay nothing for their capital build-out because they're just happy having a long-term contract.

00:12:01.660 They were able to take their long-term contract to the bank, and they were able to get private bank financing.

00:12:06.860 So that's one reason why you want to use chartered surgical centers is you can massively expand capacity without having to spend a huge amount of additional capital dollars to do it.

00:12:17.300 But I even went and toured this facility, which can now do 8,500 surgeries.

00:12:21.900 And the doc there said all of our hospitals are designed wrong.

00:12:25.940 So he wanted to design one right, got his brother there.

00:12:28.200 And one of the things that they do is that they have all of the operating bays on the outside and the sterilized equipment and gauze and whatever else that they need on the inside.

00:12:38.300 So any time somebody needs to get something, it's very convenient to get to.

00:12:41.740 Ta-da! Wouldn't that be a smart thing to have in all of our hospitals? 0.74

00:12:44.740 But I did ask him, so how much did this cost you?

00:12:47.640 Because it was an amazing facility.

00:12:49.220 And he told me it was $25 million with an M.

00:12:53.220 So those are the kind of things that we need to, as conservatives, be proud of.

00:12:57.200 We run away from health care.

00:12:59.120 And we should run towards it.

00:13:00.600 Because part of the reason why health care doesn't work is it's being operated in this sort of top-down, only one way to deliver, public-funded, publicly delivered.

00:13:11.200 But we can have private delivery, public funding, stay within the Canada Health Act, and bring all of the principals that we know work in free enterprise to this most expensive service.

00:13:23.200 So that's what we're doing in Alberta.

00:13:24.900 Now that's a great accomplishment.

00:13:28.760 So Section 2, we're going to focus on the media in Canada.

00:13:32.260 And I've got a clip that they're going to play.

00:13:35.000 I'm sure most of you have seen this clip before.

00:13:40.840 I've never been to one of their events.

00:13:43.240 And I look at the appear of Paul Yev saying that he doesn't intend to go to their events.

00:13:47.560 He doesn't intend to have his ministers involved in them either.

00:13:50.440 And I take the same view.

00:13:52.840 But why?

00:13:53.440 You're still not explaining what your views are on the World Economic Forum.

00:13:57.560 What do you find distasteful about it?

00:14:00.340 I guess I find it distasteful when billionaires brag about how much control they have over political leaders, as the head of that organization has.

00:14:08.360 And I think that that is offensive.

00:14:10.320 The people who should be directing government are the people who vote for them.

00:14:14.200 And the people who vote for me and for my colleagues are people who live in Alberta and who are affected by our decisions.

00:14:19.440 And so, quite frankly, until that organization stops bragging about how much control they have over political leaders, I have no interest in being involved with them.

00:14:27.860 My focus is here in Alberta, solving problems for Albertans with the mandate from Albertans.

00:14:32.820 So, I saw that clip.

00:14:35.260 Thank you.

00:14:41.000 So, I watched that clip and I thought, wow, that's how you handle the media.

00:14:46.220 So, let's talk about how do you get your message out to Canadians when we have such a biased media?

00:14:53.900 Having a biased media is not new.

00:14:58.280 I sometimes make this point because I was a Herald editorial writer in the late 90s and I had an assignment to go up and cover the legislature and Ralph Klein was still there.

00:15:09.540 And he used to do this weekly Q&A, just open bear pit session with the media.

00:15:15.260 And I remember being shocked because one of the first questions came from the CBC and he didn't like it. 1.00

00:15:22.160 And he just said to the guy, what a stupid question. 1.00

00:15:25.800 I've never seen such a dumb question. 1.00

00:15:28.120 And he just sort of went on about that for a couple of minutes and, you know, sort of sent a message to the rest of the gallery. 1.00

00:15:33.200 Oh, I don't want to ask the next stupid question.

00:15:34.920 But Klein used to have, I always say, and I never look up what the five, he talked about the five fives of journalism, you know, chaos, confusion, conflict, and so on. 0.98

00:15:44.600 And so, it's always been that way.

00:15:46.940 And so, I didn't expect it really to be any different when I got in.

00:15:50.620 I know that the media has a job to do.

00:15:52.940 I wish they would go back to being fair, accurate, and balanced, which is what I was taught journalism was supposed to be.

00:15:58.960 I don't see a heck of a lot of that out there in journalism these days, unfortunately.

00:16:03.280 But the good news is that I think that we're beginning to see a large number of alternative media that has sprouted off on both the left and the right.

00:16:13.260 I mean, you've got CanadaLands and Taiyi and Observer on the left, and you've got Western Standard and Rebel and Counter-Signal and other, I mean.

00:16:21.680 And the News Forum.

00:16:22.500 News Forum and True North.

00:16:25.160 I mean, I could probably go on and on about all the ones on the right as well.

00:16:28.320 And so, I think that that is allowing for, really, journalism to be what it should be.

00:16:32.540 And it's creating a business model that I think is going to work.

00:16:35.520 Because the business model in mainstream media is offer content for free and then go to big advertisers to sell those eyes.

00:16:45.720 But guess what happens is that then if advertisers get squeamish because of a commentary or line of questioning, they pull their funding.

00:16:54.500 Then, all of a sudden, that shuts down the conversation in media.

00:16:57.360 That's what we've gotten into in this world where everybody is terrified of saying one false word because it could end up cancelling you.

00:17:05.440 Is the corporations who are advertising in mainstream media, they get boycott campaigns.

00:17:10.280 And they get Twitter bombed, too.

00:17:12.240 And they don't have a tolerance for that.

00:17:13.860 But the model that I'm seeing in alt media, which is small advertising that's more localized for small businesses, but also the subscriber model, is far more robust.

00:17:24.640 I think that really is – I can imagine years from now that many of the big names that we see in mainstream media won't exist.

00:17:32.660 But some of the alt names that we just talked about are going to be elevated to being the more prominent news sources.

00:17:38.880 So I still do both.

00:17:40.980 I will still do mainstream media, understanding.

00:17:43.520 They have the job to do.

00:17:44.640 But I also will do alternative media as well.

00:17:47.560 And we also have our own channels that we push out.

00:17:49.640 I have – from time to time, I'll do my own direct podcasting.

00:17:53.360 We do videos.

00:17:54.400 We have robust social media on all of the channels.

00:17:57.480 I've asked all my ministers and all my MLAs to be there as well so that they can push it out.

00:18:01.760 And we do also our own advertising.

00:18:04.580 So we've got – we've got both of our caucus and our campaign is doing advertising on our key messages.

00:18:11.320 So that, to me, is how – I don't look at the media as the way to carry our message.

00:18:16.160 I just – and I don't think we should as conservatives.

00:18:18.540 It's not the media's job to carry our message.

00:18:20.560 It is our job to find a way to break through.

00:18:22.740 We have to be, I think, respectful because there's still so many people who use that as their main news source.

00:18:28.280 We have to be present there.

00:18:29.440 But if we want to get a positive story out about us, we have to do it ourselves.

00:18:34.520 So –

00:18:34.840 So I want to shift focus.

00:18:40.520 You're in the middle of an election campaign.

00:18:43.260 Let's talk about the Alberta provincial election and what your vision is for the province.

00:18:48.420 Well, first, let me say that we've done pretty well over the past number of months.

00:18:57.420 I think people were a bit surprised.

00:18:59.420 I think there was a funny editorial cartoon that has the UCP walking along and a Rachel Notley – or no, it has Rachel Notley walking around and a UCP hand coming out of the grave to grab her foot, which I think gives you an idea of where people felt we were back in October.

00:19:13.640 And we did lose a lot of our base.

00:19:17.100 I think that we did have the movement splitting again is why I ended up coming back in.

00:19:21.840 So we – almost all last year, we were polling behind the NDP.

00:19:27.600 And slowly but surely, despite the relentlessly negative news coverage that I seem to garner, we ended up increasing in the polls.

00:19:36.060 So even one of the more – balanced pollster, maybe more on the progressive side, he's got a poll out today that really has us and the NDP neck and neck.

00:19:44.740 So the good news is that we're finally united as a conservative movement.

00:19:50.820 Now we just have to gain a little bit more ground in Calgary and in Edmonton.

00:19:56.400 And I would say this because this is a challenge for all conservatives is we have to figure out how to win in big cities because increasingly people are moving to big cities.

00:20:07.440 And I understand completely why rural Alberta loves us because our values resonate so well with rural Alberta.

00:20:13.480 We believe in individual freedom and also strong families and multi-generational families, often working a family business, often a family farm.

00:20:23.000 A lot of people are involved in their faith community.

00:20:25.380 Their faith community does a lot of good works in the community.

00:20:28.420 So you've got free enterprise.

00:20:29.600 And then when people do really well, they also give back to their community with philanthropy.

00:20:33.960 Like that is the full conservative vision and it's played out every single day in rural Alberta.

00:20:38.840 Now when you get to larger cities, there's a few more disconnects.

00:20:42.460 The families are not necessarily all together in the same city.

00:20:46.660 And you don't necessarily have generational and family businesses.

00:20:49.240 And you don't necessarily have people who even know their neighbors, let alone getting involved in community groups.

00:20:54.340 So it's a very different challenge in how you talk to an urban audience.

00:21:00.140 So I can tell you I'm a pretty known quantity as my conservative libertarian views since I've been in the public for a long time.

00:21:07.660 But a lot of the vision that we're putting forward is one where we don't just focus on the dollars and cents.

00:21:14.300 I have felt like conservatives say, vote for me and I will cut your taxes, cut your regulation, cut your spending.

00:21:21.280 And we don't really have a vision for what it is that we're going to do with all of those dollars that get generated from taxes

00:21:27.900 other than just hand it over to the same people that the guys on the left hired.

00:21:32.420 And why would we think that we would get conservative policy if we do that?

00:21:36.580 I think what we really need to do is to develop a vision for how we apply our conservative values to the delivery of public services.

00:21:43.960 So I already explained how I would do that in health care.

00:21:47.780 But we will do that.

00:21:49.640 I think we mentioned earlier about the Alberta model for our recovery-oriented system of care.

00:21:59.720 And I want to just give this as another example so that you can see the kind of things that we're doing in Alberta.

00:22:06.720 We know that our people love the law and order talk.

00:22:10.540 But you can't lead with law and order when you've got people who are struggling with mental health and addiction.

00:22:15.340 And we've got a very serious mental health and addiction crisis.

00:22:18.480 Fentanyl is an awful, awful drug.

00:22:20.700 It kills quickly and it kills so many young people in a way that I haven't seen a drug do before.

00:22:26.660 And carfentanyl is even worse.

00:22:28.260 One little grain of a size of salt can kill you instantly.

00:22:31.720 But that's what we've got on our streets in Calgary and Edmonton.

00:22:34.660 And it is just devastating.

00:22:35.940 We've seen a massive increase in opioid deaths, opioid overdoses, and also pressure on our hospitals.

00:22:43.600 So this is what we've done.

00:22:45.100 This recovery-oriented system of care that my chief of staff, Marshall Smith, has pioneered,

00:22:49.140 it takes the view that we don't give up on people.

00:22:52.660 We believe it's our job to try to get them their individual agency back.

00:22:57.320 And so if we can get their individual agency back, then they can go on to reconnecting with family and friends

00:23:01.980 and get on to living a productive life.

00:23:04.560 So our very first recovery community opened up in Red Deer.

00:23:08.100 And it's going to be modeled on just, it's almost like a dormitory.

00:23:12.480 I've gone and visited it.

00:23:13.400 We've got 50 male beds on one side and 25 female beds on the other, separate kitchens. 0.99

00:23:18.320 And it's going to be working therapy.

00:23:20.400 People are going to go and they'll do therapy in the morning and chores in the afternoon or vice versa.

00:23:24.860 They'll learn to cook and shop and do gardening and learn basic skills.

00:23:29.920 And whether it's a month or six months or a year, when they come out, they're going to be recovered.

00:23:34.220 They're going to have a job.

00:23:35.400 They're going to have a community wrapped around them.

00:23:37.180 That, to me, is what success looks like from a conservative applied model

00:23:40.740 compared to what you see up and down the West Coast, the carnage there.

00:23:44.920 I saw Seattle is dying a few years ago.

00:23:47.240 Vancouver is dying.

00:23:48.160 Aaron Gunn has done an amazing video on that.

00:23:51.500 And it, yeah, I think he's here.

00:23:53.420 And so when I see that that's what the left's model is, it's giving up on people.

00:24:00.580 It's safe consumption, now safe supply.

00:24:03.820 And it's not pushing people to get their lives back.

00:24:06.860 So we're going to take a different approach.

00:24:08.020 And then, on the other hand, we're also going to not tolerate public disorder.

00:24:12.040 We have to give respect back to our law enforcement.

00:24:14.860 We have to make sure that people do respect law enforcement.

00:24:17.660 And we know that our law enforcement is there to keep us safe

00:24:21.040 and to make sure that we don't have to cross a doorway and inhale secondhand crystal meth smoke.

00:24:26.080 So that's sort of a combination of what we're doing.

00:24:28.720 But generally, I mean, so I wanted to just explain that other model to you

00:24:32.720 so that you know that in Alberta we are doing an approach where we're applying our conservative values

00:24:38.740 to the delivery of government services.

00:24:41.340 And we believe that because we can do that with free enterprise,

00:24:45.300 with individual choice, with accountability,

00:24:48.820 we believe that that's going to result in better public services,

00:24:53.500 which will allow for us to create a vision that I think will be a lot more compelling

00:24:57.860 to those who live in Calgary and Edmonton who look to see what are you going to do as government?

00:25:03.260 How are you going to solve my problems in health care and education and social services?

00:25:07.740 And I think we've really embarked on that.

00:25:10.080 More broadly, what I want to see Alberta be is just this beacon 0.57

00:25:14.740 that's going to attract people from all over the province and all over the world.

00:25:17.980 We had 13 consecutive quarters of people leaving our province under the NDP.

00:25:23.320 That should tell you something, 183,000 jobs lost.

00:25:26.340 We are now getting record numbers of people returning to Alberta.

00:25:29.660 And what I would love to see, because I noticed that Quebec's population is stagnating,

00:25:33.940 I'm going forward 30 years to a time where Alberta will be the second largest province

00:25:38.360 with the second largest economy, second most populous,

00:25:40.740 and we'll actually have some power in Confederation.

00:25:45.260 So that's where we're heading.

00:25:47.980 Great vision, a great vision for the province.

00:25:51.720 Now let's talk about what you think is the biggest threat to your province right now.

00:25:55.220 The biggest threat is this NDP liberal coalition in Ottawa

00:26:00.040 and an ideological prime minister who has a very hard time understanding

00:26:06.720 that he cannot just issue edicts and have them happen in the real world.

00:26:10.960 We live in a world where we have to have policy that makes sense.

00:26:15.600 And I can tell you, because we did pass the Alberta Sovereignty within the United Canada Act,

00:26:21.760 the Eastern media didn't seem to like it that much.

00:26:24.740 But we felt it was important to educate our federal counterparts

00:26:28.260 about how our country is supposed to work.

00:26:31.940 We are not a unitary state.

00:26:33.800 We do not pass our laws in our province with the consent of Justin Trudeau.

00:26:38.540 We pass them with the consent of the king.

00:26:40.420 We have a direct sovereign relationship with the monarch, and there's a reason for that.

00:26:48.380 It's because when we were established as a country,

00:26:50.300 we decided that there's certain powers that belong to the federal government

00:26:52.780 and there's certain powers that belong to the provincial government.

00:26:56.660 I don't...

00:26:57.560 It's true.

00:26:59.640 So you won't see me saying, gee, I'm going to create my own currency.

00:27:04.600 You don't see me saying, oh, I'm going to set up passport offices,

00:27:07.940 although I'm pretty sure I'd do a better job of managing that.

00:27:14.120 Or taking over the management of the airports,

00:27:17.240 for all of you who've had the misery of going through Pearson.

00:27:20.280 Because it would be absurd, wouldn't it?

00:27:22.320 It would be absurd for a provincial premier to dare to think that she could step in

00:27:25.660 and take over federal power.

00:27:26.760 It's equally absurd for the federal government to think that they can come in

00:27:29.980 and tell our province how to manage our resources

00:27:32.320 and how to manage our electricity and whether we should be able to build highways

00:27:35.360 and whether we should be able to build power plants.

00:27:37.520 That's what their Bill C-69 did.

00:27:39.940 That's what this new environmental approval process has done,

00:27:44.260 is it's not just about interprovincial pipelines,

00:27:47.580 which I recognize as federal jurisdiction.

00:27:49.860 They're controlling all of the development within the borders of every province.

00:27:54.220 This is why eight provinces are on board with us

00:27:56.480 in arguing against it in the Supreme Court this week.

00:27:59.060 And so this is very existential for us,

00:28:01.000 because I can tell you what they want to do next.

00:28:03.340 Having put that legislation in place

00:28:05.000 and asserted that they have the power to pass pretty well whatever they want,

00:28:09.360 they now want to put a cap on emissions on our oil and natural gas sector

00:28:14.520 to reduce emissions 42% by 2030.

00:28:18.580 That's seven years from now.

00:28:19.740 I can tell you it is impossible.

00:28:21.300 That cannot happen without shutting in production.

00:28:23.820 An emissions cap like that is a production cap,

00:28:25.800 and it's a violation of our Constitution.

00:28:27.200 They've talked about putting a cap on emissions for fertilizer,

00:28:31.860 reducing that by 30% by 2030.

00:28:34.580 That would reduce food production at a time that we've got a global food security crisis.

00:28:39.580 And they also want to prevent us from putting more natural gas on our power grid.

00:28:43.700 We're a natural gas basin in Alberta.

00:28:45.880 It makes sense for us to heat our homes with natural gas.

00:28:49.320 It makes sense for us to have gas stoves.

00:28:51.120 It makes sense for us to have electricity that is powered by natural gas,

00:28:55.500 and 90% of it is.

00:28:56.640 The federal government wants to stop us from doing that.

00:28:59.260 We had grid instability this winter.

00:29:01.520 And the reason we had grid instability this winter

00:29:03.540 is because everybody has been so enthusiastic about building out solar and wind.

00:29:08.040 We've got 5,000 megawatts of installed solar and wind power.

00:29:12.260 And on two days in Alberta, it was producing 100 megawatts of electricity.

00:29:18.240 We can't keep on doing this.

00:29:19.620 You can't build out that amount of capacity

00:29:22.040 if it's only going to be operating in a fraction of what you need when you need it most.

00:29:25.980 So that's what the federal government's vision is for Alberta,

00:29:28.740 is that we're going to be operating on unreliable energy

00:29:31.780 that is increasingly unaffordable.

00:29:33.540 And that is crushing to our economy.

00:29:35.680 So when you ask what the biggest threat is,

00:29:39.480 it's the clean electricity regs,

00:29:41.260 and it's the emissions caps that we might see on fertilizer and oil and natural gas.

00:29:46.860 And we're in deep conversation with the federal government

00:29:50.160 so that they know our position.

00:29:51.840 And I should say that it's not because we're operating in opposition

00:29:56.580 to this long-term aspiration of carbon neutrality by 2050.

00:30:01.920 We just think we can reach carbon neutrality a different way.

00:30:05.180 If we export our LNG, that reduces emissions of more polluting fuels elsewhere.

00:30:10.400 And that's one way that we think we would be able to reduce our emissions.

00:30:14.100 We believe carbon capture utilization and storage

00:30:16.600 will ultimately help us to capture and bury or embed it into useful products.

00:30:21.160 We believe that we will be able to use natural gas

00:30:23.540 as a precursor to potentially a hydrogen economy at some point.

00:30:27.120 We've got hydrogen construction happening in our province.

00:30:30.500 Geothermal is also a potential.

00:30:32.820 Small modular nuclear is going to come on stream in Ontario and New Brunswick.

00:30:36.780 I'm watching that with great interest.

00:30:37.920 I'd love to see that.

00:30:38.860 So those are the things that make sense for our economy.

00:30:42.000 And those are the things we could work constructively with the federal government on.

00:30:46.760 But when you have an ideological government

00:30:48.880 that wants to achieve unrealistic targets as quickly as they do,

00:30:53.460 it's just we're on a collision course.

00:30:55.660 And so you're going to see the first of that in the courts this week.

00:30:58.720 But we're really hoping that we're able to convince them to back off.

00:31:03.580 Now, you mentioned a little bit about Alberta's role in Canada

00:31:07.180 and the importance of the resource sector.

00:31:08.860 I know that we're going to be coming close to our time,

00:31:12.300 but I have a couple of questions that I want to get in really quickly.

00:31:15.740 U.S. President Joe Biden is arriving for a visit with Justin Trudeau.

00:31:20.300 And despite Biden's pledge to end fossil fuels in the United States,

00:31:26.340 the U.S. is quickly becoming a world leader in exporting liquefied natural gas.

00:31:30.980 And yet our federal government continues to obstruct our resource sector.

00:31:35.260 Your thoughts on this?

00:31:36.680 What can we do to get our resources to market?

00:31:38.880 Well, I think, and you're very right about the effort that the Americans are making.

00:31:44.480 I just heard that they've approved something in the order of a project

00:31:47.660 that will ultimately result in 20 BCF a day being exported.

00:31:51.860 The project, just to give you a comparison,

00:31:54.260 on the coast that Shell is doing with LNG Canada,

00:31:58.320 I believe is 2 BCF on its first.

00:32:00.360 And then it will expand another two if they can get the second two facilities built.

00:32:05.060 And I think Cedar is also a new one that was approved by British Columbia.

00:32:08.340 And that's another 1.5.

00:32:09.580 So we are only a fraction of where the U.S. is going.

00:32:12.520 But there is an opportunity to do so much more.

00:32:15.560 I've been pleasantly surprised.

00:32:17.760 This is the nice part about being involved in these COF meetings,

00:32:21.180 these Council of the Federation,

00:32:22.540 is you realize all of the premiers have the same view about Ottawa.

00:32:25.480 They just believe that they're just digging into our turf way too much.

00:32:28.700 And that includes British Columbia.

00:32:30.500 They want to develop natural gas.

00:32:32.740 They want to figure out a way to do it that works within their emissions cap.

00:32:36.440 But I think with the kind of things that I've been talking about,

00:32:39.220 but how you decarbonize on the electricity side, we're able to do that.

00:32:44.220 So that's one thing, is we're working in partnership with British Columbia

00:32:47.380 so that we can make a joint effort to say that we need to be pushing forward on this.

00:32:51.780 The other thing that we're doing is I've got a minister of transportation and economic corridors.

00:32:57.140 And so we're looking for a coalition of the willing to start building out economic corridors.

00:33:01.760 Because I think one of the, I'll tell you the difference between the way we currently try to build infrastructure

00:33:08.240 versus what an economic corridor would do. 0.74

00:33:10.420 The way we currently do it is we tell a proponent,

00:33:13.240 oh, you want to build a pipeline?

00:33:15.020 Good luck with that.

00:33:16.160 And then the proponent goes on out and has to deal with all of the landowners,

00:33:19.540 all the First Nations, all of the municipalities,

00:33:21.640 all of the different provincial governments, the federal government,

00:33:23.500 multiple regulatory processes, environmental groups.

00:33:25.800 And then, you know, 10 years later gets told after a billion dollars spent,

00:33:28.960 sorry, we don't think that this has a business case.

00:33:32.020 The alternative would be is if we got our act together as provinces and with our First Nations

00:33:37.980 and let our First Nations lead the route in identifying where the go zone should be for corridors

00:33:44.860 and having joint ownership over it so that we could identify the areas that have historic value,

00:33:51.340 that have religious value, that have environmental value.

00:33:55.160 And then once you've established those corridors, then you go out to the proponent and say,

00:33:58.200 okay, you come and build, you can build here.

00:34:00.400 And so we're looking at developing corridors from Fort McMurray through Saskatchewan, Manitoba to Churchill.

00:34:06.300 There's a potential for us to bring one up in Ontario to James Bay.

00:34:10.260 There's also another option potentially to go down on an existing corridor to get to Thunder Bay

00:34:14.380 so we can get out to the Great Lakes, potentially to go up to Tuktoyaktuk in the north,

00:34:18.520 maybe over to Port-au-Prince Rupert through the northern part of British Columbia.

00:34:22.080 And then the Premier of Yukon is pretty excited about what was an A-to-A proposal following the Alaska Highway

00:34:28.860 that would allow us to build not only a rail line but also other infrastructure going out through Valdez.

00:34:37.440 So those are the things that we're working on is identifying four or five or six different routes that we can take

00:34:42.840 and then just be saying we're open for business.

00:34:45.680 And then that'll put us in a bit of a collision course, I think, potentially with the federal government.

00:34:50.720 But I'm prepared to have that fight.

00:34:53.140 I'm prepared to argue.

00:34:58.500 Because we have some incredible First Nations leaders, Indian Resource Council and the Coalition of Chiefs.

00:35:06.840 And one of the arguments that they've made to me is the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

00:35:11.080 also gives our Indigenous peoples the right to develop resources.

00:35:15.800 It's not just about saying no.

00:35:17.600 And so if we have Indigenous-led projects to be able to get Indigenous resources to market

00:35:26.120 and we're able to partner with them, I think that's going to put a really interesting challenge to the courts.

00:35:30.760 I kind of would dare them to say no to something like that.

00:35:33.540 In a world where we're addressing the environmental issues and we're providing food security and energy security to the world,

00:35:39.840 I think that that's a scrap worth having.

00:35:42.160 Well, we could talk all day.

00:35:48.520 There's so many topics.

00:35:49.980 Our time has come to a close.

00:35:51.880 I wish we had more time.

00:35:53.000 I had many more questions I just couldn't get to.

00:35:55.420 So thank you to Premier Daniel Smith for taking the time to be with us.

00:35:59.940 My pleasure.

00:36:01.680 Thank you.

00:36:04.360 You're amazing.

00:36:06.080 Thank you.

00:36:06.560 Thank you.

00:36:07.440 Can I exit over here?

00:36:08.760 I will.

Western Standard - March 23, 2023

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in conversation with CSFN Director Jocelyn Bamford

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript