Western Standard - Smith emerges as the unofficial opposition to Mark Carney

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:22.260 of the Western Standard. It's Thursday, May the 9th, May the 8th. Joining us now is David

00:00:28.680 night leg and he's no stranger to the western standard on this show good to have you back

00:00:33.480 david great to be here ah it's uh david um newly elected prime minister mark carney has just

00:00:41.640 returned from paying his respects to us president donald trump now we usually introduce you by terms

00:00:50.360 as a strategic advisor to the alberta government and also to energy into the energy industry

00:00:58.680 You saw what we all saw with Mr. Carney.

00:01:04.700 How would you have advised his advisors if you had been given the chance

00:01:10.400 before he went to what appeared to be a friendly but unproductive meeting?

00:01:16.800 Well, I know a couple of his advisors.

00:01:19.040 One of the best advisors that he has is former Ambassador David McNaughton,

00:01:24.580 who was the man who actually saved the USMCA from Christian Freeland's complete fumbling of that.

00:01:32.880 And actually, the president mentioned that at the time.

00:01:35.720 So I think one thing to keep in mind about that meeting,

00:01:38.000 whenever you advise somebody, you have to look at the context,

00:01:40.540 the audience, and what you want out of the discussion.

00:01:42.880 Those are the three key things.

00:01:45.300 And that is a tough, tough audience.

00:01:48.080 You've got the American public watching.

00:01:49.940 If you want to see how not to play it,

00:01:51.820 And I'm not sure that, I mean, I'm sure Zelensky's advisors would have, I actually saw a picture

00:01:57.200 of Zelensky's advisors when that meeting happened, that absolutely epic meeting between J.D.

00:02:03.380 Van Zelensky and the president, and I saw the advisor actually put their head in their

00:02:08.160 hands, you know, and so I'm not sure that it was the advisors that fumbled the ball

00:02:11.640 as much as Zelensky, and I have deep sympathy.

00:02:14.520 A lot of people go into these meetings, sleep deprived, everything that they are hoping

00:02:18.560 for hangs in the balance, and the U.S.

00:02:20.340 president has extraordinary power.

00:02:21.820 And this U.S. president uses that power for tactical advantage. So let me say this. I think that he was well advised. There is in the Twitter universe, which is never a good read on reality, but in the Twitter universe is a lot of people that say that he, you know, elbows down, kissing the ring.

00:02:39.840 How embarrassing and what a contrast to the way that he ran the campaign on this elbows up kind of, you know, I think, sadly, geriatric version of a defensive posture, frankly, after a decade of weakening the economy under a liberal party that had left the cupboard bare.

00:02:58.180 So I think when you go into a meeting with the president and he has most of the cards, you play it the way that he played it, which is to be as diplomatic and charming as possible and to reassert the friendship, especially following this election.

00:03:11.460 Here's what I find ironic about that, though.

00:03:13.760 Stepping back from advising his team, I'm sure his advisors laugh thinking about me being in their cohort.

00:03:19.200 but what i find it ironic about that is that one of the best single um advocacy strategies of the

00:03:29.240 past three months in the united states that has had the most effect of the people that i know and

00:03:33.680 as you know i was down at the inauguration we talked about some of those dynamics yes was

00:03:37.600 danielle smith's work spade work in making sure the americans knew we were their friends but also 0.59

00:03:43.620 making sure that they knew the fact base over and against things the president said out loud like

00:03:47.840 that they don't need our energy.

00:03:49.060 She knows that's false.

00:03:50.520 She knows that's a strategic talking point

00:03:52.280 or negotiating tactic,

00:03:53.340 but she's addressed that very effectively

00:03:55.480 with almost every member of that cabinet.

00:03:57.420 And they all know the fact base

00:03:58.960 around Canadian energy.

00:04:00.680 What I find unbelievable

00:04:01.860 about the current situation

00:04:03.200 is that our mainstream media

00:04:05.600 played along with this temptation

00:04:07.840 by some, particularly in the East,

00:04:09.940 to treat the advocacy work

00:04:11.860 that Danielle Smith was doing

00:04:13.160 as some sort of betrayal of the country

00:04:15.320 because she was directly representing

00:04:17.160 actually the industries that are under her purview, which is energy, which also happens to be

00:04:23.540 the lion's share and the most important portion of the export GDP that the country has with the

00:04:28.980 Americans. She's been doing it for three months. She did a phenomenal job of standing up for all

00:04:33.400 of Canada and making the point again and again that the $200 billion surplus is actually a result

00:04:39.140 of energy, not a result of the other trade factors. And she did all the work, but she got

00:04:45.160 very little credit and when you see mark carney doing what i think is the right thing and and

00:04:51.640 you know as a huge contrast to the way that he ran the campaign very much kissing the ring and

00:04:56.280 being a charmer which i think is fine and part of the job uh the the same eastern mainstream press

00:05:04.840 that was uh calling out danielle smith for a much more reserved and frankly a much more definitive

00:05:11.240 defense of Canada again and again in the engagements that I saw. Mark Carney gets a free pass and she 0.70

00:05:18.520 doesn't get hailed as somebody that's really stood up for the country. I think the double standard

00:05:22.300 going on in the way that we approach the Americans, this White House and the economic questions

00:05:28.100 is extraordinary. And I think the Liberal Party has to answer for that. And I think that the

00:05:33.160 current negotiations between the prime minister and particularly Danielle Smith, who I see as

00:05:38.860 the emerging counterpart to the Prime Minister

00:05:40.780 in the Canadian political spectrum right now,

00:05:42.880 even more so than Pierre Polyev in this moment,

00:05:45.740 is going to be structured around more and more of the mission

00:05:49.360 that she is standing up for the industry

00:05:51.600 that has the only hope of giving Canada an economic momentum.

00:05:56.120 Well, let's go to that.

00:05:58.140 Ted Morton, I mean, you would be very familiar with Ted Morton,

00:06:01.560 and certainly our readers are,

00:06:03.140 had what I thought was an important article

00:06:06.300 in the Western Standard yesterday.

00:06:08.080 in which he was drawing attention to the commonality of interest, surprisingly, between Mark Carney and Daniel Smith.

00:06:18.720 And the way he reasoned it, I'm probably bastardizing his argument, but this is a long one.

00:06:24.280 Ted will forgive you for that.

00:06:27.160 Maybe.

00:06:28.200 Well, essentially what he's saying is that we have our point of view of West here, and it's very well articulated, I think, by Premier Smith.

00:06:37.680 meanwhile here we have a newly elected prime minister he has walked in it won't be a surprise

00:06:44.240 to him the mess of the economy that's been made was made at a time when he was closely involved

00:06:49.760 with advising the uh the outgoing prime minister justin trudeau who famously wasn't really

00:06:56.720 interested in the economy and so now he's looking at a bare cupboard and there are things that he

00:07:03.760 wants to do but he needs money to do them and in fact has already committed to what i think is an

00:07:10.080 outrageous uh quarter of a trillion borrowing campaign um you know inflation more inflation

00:07:17.120 here we come yeah he needs to make some money what could be better and alberto wants to get his

00:07:27.440 energy industry moving again yeah is there a commonality of interest which could actually

00:07:33.200 take the country forward yeah it's called going back to the constitutional structure of canada

00:07:38.700 as a federation of independent provinces that have the autonomy to build their industries

00:07:45.340 because they're closest to those industries ottawa does not understand the energy industry

00:07:50.220 never has uh that's been part of the narrative the grand sort of narrative of the country but

00:07:57.340 the country is unified by johnny mcdonald in response to what he saw as the obvious territorial

00:08:03.140 absorption of canada if we didn't do something to create pan-canadian industrial commerce and the

00:08:09.220 federalist structure that canada has is is built differently from the united states and the

00:08:13.620 provinces have far more power than an american uh state has uh we're built on a different set

00:08:19.460 of assumptions and it's been a decade of the liberal party of canada working against the

00:08:24.980 constitutional architecture of the country the way that it was intended to run

00:08:28.660 And when you look at Premier Smith's four demands, those four demands are effectively saying, we want the federal government to just stick to the constitutional architecture as it exists and as it's understood and has been understood, aside from this interregnum of this last 10 years of climate alarmism driving deeply uneconomic decisions, deep, deep debt spending, consistent deficits.

00:08:58.040 And I think that what's happened...

00:08:59.100 Mr. Carney was all about all this stuff, though.

00:09:00.920 Mr. Carney backed the idea of deficit spending.

00:09:03.120 He has an instinctive Keynesian approach,

00:09:05.840 like a lot of technocratic, bureaucratic people do.

00:09:08.800 He's also greener than the carpet here.

00:09:12.680 Well, he's been mugged by reality.

00:09:15.060 He's been mugged by reality.

00:09:16.320 You cannot...

00:09:17.240 Have you really been mugged, or is he just saying what he needs to say?

00:09:20.200 Well, if you can open the national balance sheet and look at it

00:09:24.100 And see any plausible way that you're getting out of the current economic crisis that his government, under his advice for the last five years, has painted the country into without realizing that the only seriously large global asset base is energy.

00:09:40.180 The number two export GDP that we've got, and we're a very export driven country, 77% of all our exports go to the United States.

00:09:49.440 He's already said this is an existential crisis, but it's deeply existential if you make cars, which can be replicated in the United States.

00:09:57.440 We don't have a homegrown industry.

00:09:58.680 These are these are secondary plants for American producers.

00:10:02.140 If you make aluminum, which depends on bauxite, which all comes from the United States.

00:10:06.800 Right. We have a set of rolling crises that are coming out of this Trump trade negotiation where he's very serious about reshoring a lot of industries from around the world.

00:10:19.180 And a lot of those industries are our targets in Canada right now.

00:10:24.700 One industry that is not a target because it can't be a target because it is so autonomous is energy.

00:10:30.940 And Canada is a global energy superpower.

00:10:33.700 hour. And when Mark Carney got into the campaign, he realized very quickly that in order to run a

00:10:39.100 campaign that would be effective for all Canadians, you needed to sound talk and act like a 0.97

00:10:43.360 conservative. So he very quickly adopted core conservative platforms, including what was the

00:10:48.380 previous ballot question, which is the carbon tax, conceded that immediately. The next question was

00:10:53.400 anybody with just introductory economics 101, realizing that we're the worst in the OECD all

00:10:58.740 of a sudden except for one other country on capital gains let alone our productivity which

00:11:04.220 were also worse in the OECD uh had to immediately reverse that so after you adopt enough conservative

00:11:10.360 policies you start thinking to yourself if the consensus between me as a liberal leader running

00:11:16.580 for prime minister and my adversary Pierre Polyev is basically that I need to adopt as many parts

00:11:23.560 of his platform as I can to start reversing this lost decade, then you start thinking

00:11:28.640 hard and you're putting yourself on track to start to realize that there is no option

00:11:34.160 but to start to go down the path of what Alberta is asking for.

00:11:37.580 Premier is not asking, the mainstream media is using this language of demands.

00:11:42.400 She's not making demands.

00:11:43.880 She's asking that the federal government go back to the original structure of Canadian

00:11:49.660 federalist architecture, period.

00:11:51.760 There's no special demands.

00:11:53.560 There's nothing unique about what she's asking for.

00:11:56.400 She wants tidewater access. 0.79

00:11:58.600 That should be obvious.

00:12:01.940 She wants there to be a reduction of these insane regulations that are contradicting the Constitution and moving federal jurisdiction into provincial jurisdiction.

00:12:12.500 She wants there to be a suspension of, you know, the idea that we use export taxes as an additional form of tax against energy, right?

00:12:20.320 these are baseline expectations of an open free democracy now those demands which aren't demands

00:12:27.560 but those you know they even what she had the four point program that she's laid out and said

00:12:32.420 this is what we need to do there was actually nine points and i think she's edited them down to four

00:12:36.040 yeah but it's based on or is congruent with a letter that the industry put out yeah i think

00:12:43.700 there might have been some 39 38 38 38 your research is better than mine 38 ceos of major

00:12:52.740 alberta energy companies yeah who said this is what's going to happen can you talk about that

00:13:00.180 letter and relate it to what the premier is saying and then i'm going to take you to

00:13:06.360 mr carney's forthcoming visit to to the west yeah i'm glad to see he's doing that the letter

00:13:13.300 uh is written uh well worth reading for your viewers the the letter is very specific

00:13:20.300 that the context of this letter is in 2015 the energy industry new new charismatic young

00:13:27.940 prime minister justin trudeau came in made some nice sounds about cooperation and and

00:13:34.520 governing one canada the industry listened to him the industry was responsive to saying look

00:13:40.260 we've done a lot for the environment where we can be consistent with your climate goals your

00:13:45.160 environmental goals and the development of energy and this economy we're going to work with you

00:13:49.640 we're going to form a collaborative approach to you and to the new government and we're going to

00:13:55.140 prove that this is one country and we can achieve these things not make a false choice between

00:13:59.860 energy the environment and economic growth well fool me once right that same energy many of the

00:14:07.840 same leaders that were there during that period are not going to let that happen again. It's a

00:14:12.960 decade later. They're a decade smarter. They've been through one of the toughest periods in the

00:14:17.220 energy industry. They got no love from Ottawa during that period. Any other industry in this

00:14:22.560 country catches a cold and Ottawa is quick to try and find capital to support them. The energy

00:14:29.600 industry is constantly at war with bureaucrats that are operating under this liberal NEP framework

00:14:36.100 of climate alarmism which is not scientific it's deeply ideological and now they know it

00:14:41.300 so what's happened with that letter uh is mark carney is now seeing the books being mugged by

00:14:47.140 reality you don't think he saw the books in the last five years i think he saw the books but i

00:14:51.140 don't think he was prime minister it's more fun to be an advisor than to actually have to leave

00:14:56.740 but now now he's got to walk into a room and actually take decisions he's got to go down and

00:15:04.500 and deal with the U.S. president that's about to hollow out several of the core industries

00:15:08.280 in the East. If you ask the street, how do you think Canada's auto industry is going to do?

00:15:15.500 How do you think Canada's steel and aluminum industry is going to do?

00:15:19.020 It's a cold shower. This is not a happy time for core industries in Canada. But if you look at our

00:15:25.340 agriculture, you look at our energy, you look at our fisheries, you look at our timber, you look at

00:15:29.600 our mining, the potential we have for mining, the key impediment that you see to the rapid

00:15:35.260 development of those industries and our ability to go global with those industries is 100% and

00:15:40.000 only Ottawa. No one else in the world is imposing restrictions on Canada except for the federal

00:15:46.400 government in Ottawa. And so what those 38 CEOs have said in different terms is we are CEOs of

00:15:55.180 an industry that is totally global. We are CEOs that operate around the world all the time.

00:16:01.000 These are massive, massive companies, the biggest in Canada, aside from the banks.

00:16:05.560 And we are telling you that you need to make these eight changes. And if you don't make those

00:16:09.440 eight changes, it's not going to work. You're not going to have an economy. And I think what's

00:16:14.320 happening is when the captains of industry are starting to take the gloves off, they hate doing

00:16:19.380 this, by the way. They're not by nature. They've chosen a private sector. I was talking about

00:16:25.140 Well, the rules are they're playing contact sports in the private sector.

00:16:29.380 They didn't sign up for the Machiavellian shades of gray around how you manage politics.

00:16:35.080 But as they engage with politics, they are now coming in with gloves off and they're making it very clear.

00:16:41.220 We're telling you what you need to do.

00:16:43.220 And these 38 CEOs, if you if you stack up the assets of those 38 CEOs command and control in this country is the prime minister.

00:16:51.320 you better take it deadly serious because this is not a time for anything but complete realism.

00:16:56.380 The good news for Mark Carney, having been mugged by reality, is this is paint by numbers.

00:17:01.720 You can do all eight things that those CEOs ask for. You can do all four things that Premier

00:17:05.960 Smith has asked for. And it doesn't cost anyone else in Canada a thing. It only grows the economy

00:17:12.380 for everybody. It only grows the tax base for everybody. It only secures a more confident

00:17:18.000 and happy and collaborative and integrated federation.

00:17:23.120 He's got to manage Quebec separatism,

00:17:25.240 which is longer in the tooth

00:17:26.680 and has a much stronger cultural element to it.

00:17:29.780 Alberta instincts for independence,

00:17:32.360 I wouldn't say separatism,

00:17:34.300 and we can talk about that,

00:17:35.220 but Alberta's instincts for independence

00:17:36.820 are born completely over the fact

00:17:39.560 that this province carries the rest of the country

00:17:42.340 and over the fact that Ottawa refuses

00:17:45.440 to recognize that, talk about it,

00:17:47.020 or represent that in the way that they negotiate on these issues.

00:17:51.140 And so I think the game has changed.

00:17:52.700 Danielle Smith is clearly stating things

00:17:56.660 that people in her constituency are saying to her.

00:18:01.400 Between 25% to 35% of the province,

00:18:04.360 depending on who's measuring it and the kind of question they ask,

00:18:06.820 are today saying we would rather pursue an independent version of Alberta

00:18:10.080 outside the current structure.

00:18:11.040 So let me just ask you about that.

00:18:12.820 I mean, that's quite wide, but how deep is it?

00:18:15.020 When we were talking, when you see your team lose a game,

00:18:21.480 and I said, I'm done, and then I'll go back there next week

00:18:24.380 for another game.

00:18:25.560 So is that anger got enough horsepower to actually take it somewhere?

00:18:35.220 Well, I think you never want to be held prisoner by your analogy.

00:18:39.200 I think that the idea of separation is an odd idea

00:18:42.240 when it comes to geography.

00:18:43.220 Alberta can't move anywhere. There has to be ties. I think that what people are expressing,

00:18:50.220 I think there is disappointment, not necessarily specifically around the electoral outcome. I

00:18:58.160 think that the issue is that a lot of people feel that there's a set of assumptions that were made

00:19:04.760 in the last 10 years out of Ottawa that are just so wrongheaded. They're anti-scientific. They're

00:19:09.400 deeply ideological. They don't reflect a Canadian consensus. They reflect a very narrow base

00:19:14.240 of a liberal NDP left consensus on a false trade on energy and the environment. And in light of

00:19:22.240 that, they're saying, well, if this is going to persist, the problem for Prime Minister Carney

00:19:26.980 is you've got a picture of him and then behind him, you have, it's like a lineup of the usual

00:19:31.780 suspects of everybody that did damage in very specific ways to the Alberta and the federal

00:19:36.560 economy and talk down to us yeah yeah but they're they talk down because they're insecure they're

00:19:42.740 they're at odds with you know they complete these domestic politics but they're odds with the rest

00:19:46.900 of the globe and this is what the press doesn't do a good enough job to my mind holding them

00:19:51.900 account to canada has fallen on every index you can possibly look at we've just we've just collect

00:19:58.880 crime way up drug trade way up criminal and terrorist cartels operating fully well-known

00:20:06.840 laundering operations way up uh reversals on almost every major economic criteria at worst

00:20:14.920 in the uh in the g7 the last five years worst in the oecd on uh the productivity trend to

00:20:21.600 2030 out to 2060. They're using weasel-y talking points like net GDP to GDP, which is a fake talk

00:20:32.020 talking point. People are tired of it, but the rest of the world looks at this and just says,

00:20:36.260 we can just ignore Canada because it's its own version of a basket case. It doesn't make any

00:20:40.360 sense. It's deeply politically correct. It's deeply morally self-righteous, but they want to

00:20:45.780 be self-righteous in hotspots in the world, but they don't fund their military and they don't show

00:20:49.640 up they don't do the job they they want to be self-righteous to the americans of what's happening

00:20:54.280 but they've got a fentanyl crisis that's killed 50 000 young people in canada in 10 years and they

00:21:00.360 pretend that it's not a crisis and they give lectures to the americans i'm only finding

00:21:04.280 45 kilograms of fentanyl across the border when we crush one super lab and it's got more than that

00:21:08.920 sitting on one counter yeah so so i think i think the country has to reckon with the fact that we

00:21:15.240 We are not going to turn our economic situation around without global capital saying Canada

00:21:20.120 started to get its act together.

00:21:21.620 And for the new prime minister, the best way to do that is listen to the 38 CEOs that are

00:21:26.920 in the one industry that is most global, that is most accessible to global capital, that

00:21:31.940 can double itself in the next five to 10 years, and that can continue to fund the rest of

00:21:36.200 the country.

00:21:36.960 And then take away all these green rules that are not imposed in other countries that also

00:21:41.900 care about climate against agriculture against mining against forestry and against energy and

00:21:48.000 we'll start to see this economy turn around and we'll have enough cash flow to fund the things

00:21:54.500 that we have as priorities without needing to borrow another quarter trillion dollars and pass

00:21:59.460 two trillion dollars of debt on to our kids almost out of time david which is highly regrettable but

00:22:06.020 I need to take you back to your advisor role.

00:22:10.360 Mr. Carney has arranged a meeting with the premiers in,

00:22:15.420 I believe it's in Saskatoon on June the 2nd.

00:22:20.020 Yeah.

00:22:23.120 This is obviously reaching out to the Western premiers

00:22:30.880 and Western voters.

00:22:32.420 what should he what should his message be in that meeting

00:22:38.200 look i think his number one message should not wait for that meeting yeah i i think that this

00:22:48.200 this temptation by the federal government to try and create theatrical moments of

00:22:55.020 being beneficent to the West is tiresome. It makes no sense at all. He needs, Danielle Smith

00:23:02.420 needs a deal team and please, please make that deal team people from private industry that have

00:23:10.440 some people from her cabinet on it. Do not make that deal team government bureaucrats and only 1.00

00:23:15.940 politicians. We need, we've got extraordinary people that know how to run deals. They need

00:23:20.780 to be a part of this process. But she needs a deal team. He needs a deal team. They need to get this

00:23:26.140 done. But for Mark Carney, it should be easy. Almost everything that's being asked for is a

00:23:31.160 simple return to constitutional-based federalism that unleashes these markets and synergy. The

00:23:36.940 biggest issue that Mark Carney has is not the premiers that he's going to meet in Saskatoon.

00:23:41.580 It's this very small, extremely activist base out of mostly Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa

00:23:49.220 that are deeply committed to green alarmism

00:23:52.340 that has set the country back by a decade.

00:23:55.060 And it's been reflected in his own public statements

00:23:57.460 about every business needs to show me

00:23:59.280 that they believe in going to a net zero transition by 20.

00:24:02.540 These things are no longer,

00:24:04.080 no one believes this anywhere else.

00:24:06.080 And it's led him down the wrong path

00:24:08.620 in terms of economic development and growth.

00:24:10.420 It's also meant Canada's been completely out of the picture 0.94

00:24:12.780 in terms of shipping cleaner energy

00:24:14.300 into the coal-fired economies of India and China.

00:24:17.340 so for him to create a grand strategy i don't think it should wait for moments like this where

00:24:22.900 these sort of this formal theater they should get to work there should be one-on-one phone calls

00:24:27.760 there should be two deal teams meeting there should be discussions about whatever the issues

00:24:31.300 are they constrain alberta alberta is ultimately going to start to ask for the same deal quebec has

00:24:36.480 we can fund our own pension for about six percent right we don't need to be funding it at the same

00:24:42.380 level that they cross subsidize this other parts of the country we can take care of our law

00:24:46.880 enforcement. No problem, right? We've got all the capacity and more than enough economic firepower

00:24:53.620 to completely run Alberta separately in the same manner that Quebec does. That's a framework that

00:24:59.740 works within the federation as conceived by our founders. And that's a framework I think Mark

00:25:04.580 Carney has to endorse. He endorses that framework and gives Alberta more obvious autonomy. And he

00:25:09.660 allows the 38 people that are actually running this economy and producing the wealth that will

00:25:14.260 pay down that debt, and he's letting them expand 2x. He's going to do more for the planet by

00:25:19.900 allowing that LNG to get out to the coal-fired parts of the planet, but he's also going to do

00:25:23.040 more for this country. And that shouldn't wait for any more grand announcements.

00:25:26.980 You know, he's known that for a long time. Let's hope that he's had this Damascus Road 1.00

00:25:32.880 experience when he opened the books and said, oh my goodness, you know, now this can't go on.

00:25:37.640 We are out of time, David, but once again, I find your insights just amazing.

00:25:44.560 Thank you so much for coming on.

00:25:45.560 Thanks a lot.

00:25:46.560 Pleasure.

00:25:47.560 Do it again soon.

00:25:48.560 Okay, look forward to that.

00:25:49.560 All the best.

00:25:50.560 Okay, thank you.

00:25:51.560 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

00:26:07.640 Thank you.

Western Standard - May 09, 2025

Smith emerges as the unofficial opposition to Mark Carney

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