Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in conversation with CSFN Director Jocelyn Bamford
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
190.19519
Summary
In this episode, I sit down with former Alberta premier Brian Jean to talk about how he became a politician, how he got into politics, and what it's like being a social pariah in a province where people don't want to talk politics.
Transcript
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.
00:01:33.760
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.
00:01:56.400
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.
00:02:27.900
There was a referendum on Charlottetown and then a provincial and federal election all
00:02:32.980
So when you have that much election experience, you kind of get hooked and it pulls you back in.
00:02:39.760
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.
00:02:50.100
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.
00:03:06.600
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.
00:03:29.440
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.
00:03:45.360
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,
00:04:31.940
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,
00:04:46.280
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.
00:04:59.580
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.
00:06:07.200
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.
00:06:42.080
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
00:06:51.880
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.
00:07:16.600
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.
00:07:34.880
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,
00:07:47.680
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
00:07:59.560
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.
00:08:12.720
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.
00:08:35.700
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.
00:08:51.500
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.
00:09:02.060
It required us to hire 114 full-time equivalents.
00:09:08.080
I can give you an example because I checked in with my paramedic friend,
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.
00:09:25.740
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.
00:09:39.220
And then the supervisor came along and said, what are you doing here?
00:09:43.300
And they quickly jumped into action so that they could offload the patient and get the paramedic out again.
00:09:50.220
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.
00:10:46.340
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.
00:11:15.440
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.
00:11:24.160
If we shut that down and took 20% of our surgical capacity out of the system, our waiting list would go up again.
00:11:33.120
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?
00:12:44.740
But I did ask him, so how much did this cost you?
00:12:53.220
So those are the kind of things that we need to, as conservatives, be proud of.
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.
00:13:28.760
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.
00:13:43.240
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.
00:13:53.440
You're still not explaining what your views are on the World Economic Forum.
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.
00:14:10.320
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.
00:14:41.000
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?
00:14:58.280
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.
00:15:22.160
And he just said to the guy, what a stupid question.
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.
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.
00:15:46.940
And so, I didn't expect it really to be any different when I got in.
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.
00:16:25.160
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.
00:17:13.860
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.
00:17:40.980
I will still do mainstream media, understanding.
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.
00:17:54.400
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.
00:18:04.580
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.
00:18:22.740
We have to be, I think, respectful because there's still so many people who use that as their main news source.
00:18:29.440
But if we want to get a positive story out about us, we have to do it ourselves.
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.
00:18:59.420
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.
00:19:17.100
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.
00:20:29.600
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.
00:21:49.640
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.
00:22:20.700
It kills quickly and it kills so many young people in a way that I haven't seen a drug do before.
00:22:28.260
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.
00:22:35.940
We've seen a massive increase in opioid deaths, opioid overdoses, and also pressure on our hospitals.
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
00:23:04.560
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.
00:23:13.400
We've got 50 male beds on one side and 25 female beds on the other, separate kitchens.
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.
00:23:35.400
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.
00:23:53.420
And so when I see that that's what the left's model is, it's giving up on people.
00:24:03.820
And it's not pushing people to get their lives back.
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
00:24:41.340
And we believe that because we can do that with free enterprise,
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?
00:25:10.080
More broadly, what I want to see Alberta be is just this beacon
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.
00:25:51.720
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
00:26:33.800
We do not pass our laws in our province with the consent of Justin Trudeau.
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.
00:26:59.640
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.
00:27:17.240
for all of you who've had the misery of going through Pearson.
00:27:22.320
It would be absurd for a provincial premier to dare to think that she could step in
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.
00:27:39.940
That's what this new environmental approval process has done,
00:27:44.260
is it's not just about interprovincial pipelines,
00:27:49.860
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.
00:28:01.000
because I can tell you what they want to do next.
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
00:28:21.300
That cannot happen without shutting in production.
00:28:23.820
An emissions cap like that is a production cap,
00:28:27.200
They've talked about putting a cap on emissions for fertilizer,
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.
00:28:45.880
It makes sense for us to heat our homes with natural gas.
00:28:51.120
It makes sense for us to have electricity that is powered by natural gas,
00:28:56.640
The federal government wants to stop us from doing that.
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.
00:29:22.040
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
00:29:41.260
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
00:29:51.840
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.
00:30:32.820
Small modular nuclear is going to come on stream in Ontario and New Brunswick.
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.
00:30:48.880
that wants to achieve unrealistic targets as quickly as they do,
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
00:31:08.860
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.
00:31:38.880
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.
00:31:54.260
on the coast that Shell is doing with LNG Canada,
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.
00:32:09.580
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.
00:32:17.760
This is the nice part about being involved in these COF meetings,
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.
00:32:32.740
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
00:33:10.420
The way we currently do it is we tell a proponent,
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,
00:34:00.400
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.
00:34:58.500
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.
00:35:17.600
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,
00:35:53.000
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.