Western Standard - December 17, 2024


HANNAFORD： Smith's Team West strategy shows way on the border


Episode Stats

Length

14 minutes

Words per Minute

177.23204

Word Count

2,574

Sentence Count

143

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

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

In this episode, Alberta s Premier Danielle Smith talks about her recent trip to the United States, her plans for a new border patrol unit, and the challenges facing Alberta's energy grid when it gets dark and cold in the winter.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 good evening western standard viewers and welcome to hannaford a weekly politics show my guest
00:00:24.080 this week is premier danielle smith welcome to the show nice to see you nigel it's great 0.83
00:00:29.760 to have you. Premier, you're just back from a consequential trip to the United States,
00:00:36.160 meeting with people who I think you mean to do us good in the days to come. And before we get to
00:00:43.620 that, I just want to ask you the annual question about energy supplies in Alberta when it gets
00:00:50.080 dark and really cold. You just laid off the Genesee coal-fired generating plant, took off
00:00:57.040 quite a large chunk of generating capacity. Are we going to be all right? I am feeling more
00:01:03.720 confident this year than I have in previous years. One of the challenges that we face with
00:01:08.740 our electricity system is that we used to have base load that was coal that was very reliable
00:01:14.080 and then it would be supplemented by gas and wind and solar with the early phase out of coal which
00:01:20.820 I think was a mistake to move as quickly as the province did. It flipped it on its head and so
00:01:26.220 when you have all of this intermittent power, that's what's led to the instability in the grid,
00:01:31.800 because when wind and solar come on, they come on in a rush. And when they come off,
00:01:36.020 they come off in a rush. And sometimes it takes a little bit of time to be able to
00:01:40.780 call in the reliable sources, the dispatchable sources of natural gas to be able to bridge that
00:01:46.620 gap. So what we're doing is we're changing the system. My electricity minister announced that
00:01:51.440 we're going to give a preference to those types of power that can be dispatchable, seen as base
00:01:58.560 load, and that we're going to make sure that we're bringing more of that on with natural gas.
00:02:06.340 And so at this point, we, I think, had another 2,700 megawatts of power come on. So we're not
00:02:12.140 as constrained as we were in previous years. We have more options than we did in previous years.
00:02:16.480 I don't want to say never, because we have had, I think, 15 near failures in the last two
00:02:21.380 years because of the intermittency. But we're moving in the right direction. And I'm very
00:02:26.320 confident that we'll be able to, within the next two years, have a system that people can rely on.
00:02:31.600 That's good news for Albertans. Look, let's talk about the announcement that you made about
00:02:40.420 sheriffs patrolling the Alberta border. You've been meeting the right people in the United States.
00:02:49.780 You may have made reference to meeting Governor Kristi Noem from South Dakota,
00:02:54.800 who is Trump's nominee for Homeland Security.
00:02:57.780 That would seem like a very apt connection to make.
00:03:00.820 You also have reached out to Governor Gianforte in Montana,
00:03:06.160 and you want to meet with them,
00:03:07.860 and you want to get B.C. and Saskatchewan premiers, E.B. and Moe, with you.
00:03:12.200 I think you said that the Montana border with Canada was the longest of any state.
00:03:18.280 That makes total sense. And of course, you're going to the Trump inaugural, aren't you? Yes.
00:03:22.600 Look, this sounds like Team West. What is there going to be left for Team Canada to do?
00:03:29.800 Well, the West does have a unique set of problems compared to the East. I think in the East,
00:03:35.240 they're certainly more concerned about illegal migration. Part of that is so many asylum seekers
00:03:41.580 have come in through the Toronto airport and the Montreal airport. And I think that if you talk to
00:03:45.600 Francois Legault, he'll be talking about concerns as well that they had with Roxham Road.
00:03:50.180 On this side of the country, our concern is more about fentanyl, the illegal flow of guns,
00:03:55.760 the illegal flow of human trafficking and organized crime and gangs.
00:04:00.720 So I would say that each jurisdiction has to deal with this challenge in a different way.
00:04:06.580 We know that we've got a fentanyl problem because we've had record high numbers of people dying from opioid overdoses.
00:04:14.120 It got even more acute during COVID.
00:04:17.280 And we're just now beginning to see some of those numbers come down.
00:04:20.280 So that's part of the reason why I got Mike started on this, my public safety minister,
00:04:24.640 over a year ago, saying that we needed to have dedicated sheriff teams for border and for fentanyl.
00:04:29.860 And he was already well-progressed in training people up.
00:04:32.580 So we were able to accelerate this announcement by a few months.
00:04:35.500 And hopefully it'll make a difference to the Americans to show that we care about the same things they care about.
00:04:40.180 So when President-elect Trump actually said, look, Canada needs to get its act together on illegal drugs and illegal immigrants, it sounded as if this took the prime minister by surprise, but it didn't take you by surprise.
00:04:54.540 It didn't take me by surprise at all. I mean, we have seen as well in this province, when we did our Alberta's Calling campaign, we were surprised at how many people took us up on that.
00:05:06.240 We've had 450,000 people come to Alberta in three years, and we started looking into the numbers.
00:05:11.520 And quite frankly, the feds have lost control over our borders on every front, whether it's too many international students, too many temporary foreign workers or too many asylum seekers.
00:05:21.760 And so we've been calling on the federal government to rein it in and to develop a more sensible approach to bringing in a sustainable number of newcomers. 1.00
00:05:31.740 Francois Legault has been talking about that for some time,
00:05:34.580 but all of the premiers mentioned that at the last First Minister's Conference,
00:05:37.980 and we knew that that was a problem.
00:05:39.820 But also on the issue of fentanyl, two of the problems that we've seen
00:05:46.420 are our federal government created the fact that they have pushed this notion of safe supply
00:05:53.140 and that they have allowed for a revolving door of criminals going in and out of our jails.
00:05:58.580 It has created carnage on our streets, not only frustration from our law enforcement because they will go and get a bad guy and then he's back out on the street before they've even filed the paperwork, but also the devastation that is causing to those who are addicted to these deadly drugs.
00:06:13.980 So we have been fighting on a couple of fronts with the federal government to change the law, the C-75 that loosened things up, to tighten things up so that we could keep these guys behind bars.
00:06:25.060 And we have also been promoting a recovery-oriented system of care, which is in direct opposition to the kind of things that we've seen federally.
00:06:34.580 So he shouldn't be surprised that these are things that are priorities.
00:06:38.160 They've been things that have been priorities for some of the provinces for a long time.
00:06:42.060 Many people can see the logic of what you're saying there. I ask the same questions. Why so many people so quickly? Why the relaxed attitude to crime? I have said many bad things about the liberal government in Ottawa in the course of writing opinions. And yet I have never really thought that they were stupid. And yet some of this seems stupid. How does it seem to you?
00:07:10.680 It seems to me to be ideological, that there's an ideology that by providing so-called safe supply of toxic drugs that you're going to reduce deaths.
00:07:23.440 It hasn't turned out to be the case.
00:07:24.880 I think what it has done, unfortunately, is given people a false sense of security.
00:07:29.240 And as a result, we're seeing more people try drugs and more people sadly succumb to them.
00:07:33.680 I think that there's this ideology about coddling criminals based on having had terrible circumstances that they grew up in.
00:07:41.960 And, you know, I recognize that we've got to address some of those foundational issues.
00:07:46.040 But if somebody is a violent, dangerous person, you keep them behind bars so that they can't go out again and victimize people.
00:07:54.220 So I think that a lot of it is a misplaced ideology.
00:07:57.180 When things don't work, you've got to try something different.
00:07:59.440 So we need a different ideology.
00:08:02.860 And we've got a different ideology here.
00:08:04.900 We believe that we've got to invest in people, that we can't give up on them,
00:08:09.360 that we've got to approach recovery so that we're dealing with the addiction side of things.
00:08:13.520 But then we've got to shut down some of these fentanyl operations and go after the bad guys.
00:08:17.800 How is the recovery program going, by the way?
00:08:21.520 We don't want to be overconfident because there's a lot of things that we're doing.
00:08:25.920 We're doing a virtual opioid dependency program, so we're giving people suboxone and sublocate.
00:08:29.880 We're building recovery communities.
00:08:31.020 We've got therapeutic living units, which gives recovery to inmates while they're in our provincial prisons.
00:08:37.180 And we're reconnecting people back to their communities.
00:08:40.960 But my public safety minister, Mike Ellis, shared with me an amazing statistic that we follow people out of our corrections facilities who'd gone through recovery after a year compared to a previous year where we didn't have that program.
00:08:55.040 And we've seen a 51% decrease in opioid deaths, which is, to me, a real measure of success.
00:09:00.740 These are the kind of things that work. And it gets people on a totally different life track.
00:09:05.180 And that's what we're trying to do. Before we leave the matter of the border,
00:09:08.520 have you talked to Ontario Premier Ford about not obstructing Alberta energy exports?
00:09:14.300 I have let him know loud and clear that Alberta will not be curtailing its oil and gas
00:09:21.180 exports to the United States. We know that the Americans rely on about 4.3 million barrels a
00:09:26.980 day of our product. The Americans as well, they've seen their strategic petroleum reserve
00:09:32.300 decline. They're fighting wars around the world. We would not be seen as a reliable partner in
00:09:37.120 energy if there was any curtailment. And so that is not a tactic that we think would be wise. And
00:09:42.780 it's certainly not something that we're supportive of. Just not on. Is he backing off on it? I hope
00:09:48.160 so, because I think that there are a lot more constructive ways to engage with our American
00:09:53.520 counterparts. What we're doing is demonstrating that we heard loud and clear the border's an
00:09:59.040 issue. We're dealing with it. And we're also making the case every time I can about the
00:10:03.440 impact that a 25% tariff would have on American consumers. And I hope I would urge my provincial
00:10:10.780 counterparts to do the same because you can make the same case for electricity. You can make the
00:10:14.640 same thing for the same case for auto parts because they go back and forth across the border
00:10:19.540 multiple times. You can make the same thing on food products, on forestry products. Everything
00:10:24.660 that adds a 25% tariff just makes life more expensive for Americans. And I think that that's
00:10:29.560 something that the Americans should know. I bet they're thinking about it. Premier,
00:10:34.000 one of the great political stories of the year is Donald Trump's return to office. But this is
00:10:39.280 10 years ago. There was a sequence of events that left you in the political wilderness.
00:10:44.960 You know, you famously crossed the floor to join the late Jim Prentiss' PC government,
00:10:51.960 and a lot of people hated you for doing that.
00:10:54.960 But now it looks to me like the people who hated you the most now love you the most.
00:10:59.960 So we did pay a price for that.
00:11:03.960 Four years of the NDP and the weak Alberta government dealing with, frankly,
00:11:08.960 a predatory federal government at the time when we needed a strong Alberta government.
00:11:14.600 Had things gone differently and you not made that move,
00:11:18.540 do you think we would be dealing with the same things in the same way?
00:11:23.000 Well, my worry at the time, and it was a bit maybe premature,
00:11:27.340 my worry was that Alberta had changed to a point where it couldn't support
00:11:31.820 two conservative competing parties without seeing a left-wing party come up the middle.
00:11:35.840 And I don't think anybody expected that that party was going to be the NDP at that time.
00:11:40.500 But as it turned out in that election, that's exactly what happened.
00:11:43.280 and the PCs and the Wild Rose split the vote, and the NDP got four years in government.
00:11:49.160 So with the Consolidated Party, we won one term.
00:11:52.520 It was not an easy win for the second round.
00:11:55.060 So my point has been that, you know, we sometimes were a big, raucous, noisy, opinionated family,
00:12:03.580 and sometimes we disagree, but we shouldn't let that tear us apart.
00:12:07.060 And so I think that that is maybe part of the reason why Albertans gave me another chance,
00:12:12.420 And I hope that they stick with it because I think it's important.
00:12:16.880 I think staying united allows us to be able to address some of these things.
00:12:20.840 As for where we find ourselves today, there was a trend in the world.
00:12:25.900 And it was a trend towards progressivism and wokeism and ESG and DEI, all of those acronyms.
00:12:34.100 And I think what happened is it just went too far.
00:12:37.000 I think when kids started being targeted, that's when parents said, well, what's going on here?
00:12:45.300 This is too much.
00:12:46.220 And that's when I think some of the questioning began.
00:12:48.620 And so there always is that case, right, where people want to be reasonable.
00:12:52.900 They want to be supportive.
00:12:54.080 But when it goes too far, that's when the pendulum comes back.
00:12:57.440 And I think that's where we find ourselves now.
00:12:58.900 But I think, under Premier Notley, there was a weak government facing a very aggressive federal government.
00:13:06.460 In those same years, had you been Premier, how do you think that would have gone?
00:13:12.200 I can tell you we sure would have done a lot more advocacy for a lot of those pipelines.
00:13:17.960 The Energy East pipeline, it was permitted, it was going ahead, but they just couldn't see a way to the finish line after spending a billion dollars.
00:13:26.580 Northern Gateway was approved, and then the federal government ended up pulling the plug on that.
00:13:32.680 I would say that one of the things that is so frustrating is that the only project left standing after cancellation of Keystone XL was the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
00:13:43.980 And so the only way to get that built was for the federal government to buy it.
00:13:48.760 And it got built at five or six times the original price.
00:13:52.560 But we can't keep doing that.
00:13:53.680 We've actually got to find a way for the private sector to initiate a project, get the permits and be able to get it completed because we know that we're going to need more energy.
00:14:03.200 So I would I think people can see that my style, my style is is to say what I mean, mean what I say.
00:14:09.880 And I will fiercely defend our constitutional jurisdiction to to make sure that the federal government does not shut in our resources.
00:14:17.100 I think we could have used a little bit more of that in the past.
00:14:20.480 I believe you may be right.
00:14:21.960 Thank you, Premier Smith, and from all of us at the Western Standard, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and good luck at the inauguration.