Western Standard - December 17, 2024


Smith's Team West strategy shows way on the border

Mentioned
Francois Legault Danielle Smith Mike Ellis Donald Trump Jim Prentice Kristi Noem Keystone XL Gianforti Genesee Gateway Notley Nigel Ford
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Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

173.53

Word count

2,576

Sentence count

155

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

After a trip to the United States, Alberta s Premier Danielle Smith is back in Alberta. She talks about energy supplies in the winter, border security, and her plans for a new border patrol unit. She also talks about the federal government's response to the opioid crisis.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.320 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.
00:00:06.640 My guest this week is Premier Danielle Smith. Welcome to the show.
00:00:11.360 Nice to see you, Nigel.
00:00:12.940 It's great to have you. Premier, you're just back from a consequential trip to the United States,
00:00:19.780 meeting with people who I think you mean to do us good in the days to come.
00:00:25.500 And before we get to that, I just want to ask you the annual question about energy supplies in Alberta when it gets dark and really cold.
00:00:36.300 You just laid off the Genesee coal-fired generating plant, took off quite a large chunk of generating capacity.
00:00:44.240 Are we going to be all right?
00:00:45.860 I am feeling more confident this year than I have in previous years.
00:00:50.200 One of the challenges that we face with our electricity system is that we used to have baseload that was coal that was very reliable,
00:00:58.220 and then it would be supplemented by gas and wind and solar.
00:01:02.020 With the early phase out of coal, which I think was a mistake to move as quickly as the province did, it flipped it on its head.
00:01:09.500 And so when you have all of this intermittent power, that's what's led to the instability in the grid,
00:01:15.340 because when wind and solar come on, they come on in a rush, and when they come off, they come off in a rush.
00:01:21.200 And sometimes it takes a little bit of time to be able to call in the reliable sources,
00:01:27.080 the dispatchable sources of natural gas to be able to bridge that gap.
00:01:30.980 So what we're doing is we're changing the system.
00:01:32.920 My electricity minister announced that we're going to give a preference to those types of power that can be dispatchable,
00:01:41.020 seen as baseload, and that we're going to make sure that we're bringing more of that on with natural gas.
00:01:49.940 And so at this point, we, I think, had another 2,700 megawatts of power come on.
00:01:55.020 So we're not as constrained as we were in previous years.
00:01:57.540 We have more options than we did in previous years.
00:02:00.080 I don't want to say never, because we have had, I think, 15 near failures in the last two years because of the intermittency.
00:02:06.560 But we're moving in the right direction, and I'm very confident that we'll be able to, within the next two years,
00:02:13.340 have a system that people can rely on.
00:02:15.180 That's good news for Albertans.
00:02:18.020 Look, let's talk about the announcement that you made about sheriffs patrolling the Alberta border.
00:02:29.280 You've been meeting the right people in the United States.
00:02:32.540 You may have made reference to meeting Governor Kristi Noem from South Dakota, who is Trump's nominee for homeland security.
00:02:41.280 That would seem like a very apt connection to make.
00:02:44.380 You also have reached out to Governor Gianforti in Montana, and you want to meet with them.
00:02:51.460 And you want to get B.C. and Saskatchewan premiers, Eby and Mo, with you.
00:02:55.820 I think you said that the Montana border with Canada was the longest of any state.
00:03:02.020 That makes total sense.
00:03:03.240 And, of course, you're going to the Trump inaugural, aren't you?
00:03:05.320 Yes.
00:03:06.200 Look, this sounds like Team West.
00:03:09.380 What is there going to be left for Team Canada to do?
00:03:13.380 Well, the West does have a unique set of problems compared to the East.
00:03:17.560 I think in the East, they're certainly more concerned about illegal migration.
00:03:22.560 Part of that is so many asylum seekers have come in through the Toronto airport and the Montreal airport.
00:03:28.040 And I think that if you talk to Francois Legault, he'll be talking about concerns as well that they had with Rocks and Road.
00:03:33.780 On this side of the country, our concern is more about fentanyl, the illegal flow of guns, the illegal flow of human trafficking and organized crime and gangs.
00:03:44.320 So I would say that each jurisdiction has to deal with this challenge in a different way.
00:03:49.720 We know that we've got a fentanyl problem because we've had record high numbers of people dying from opioid overdoses.
00:03:58.000 It got even more acute during COVID.
00:04:00.860 And we're just now beginning to see some of those numbers come down.
00:04:03.880 So that's part of the reason why I got Mike started on this, my public safety minister, over a year ago, saying that we needed to have dedicated sheriff teams for border and for fentanyl.
00:04:13.180 And he was already well-progressed in training people up.
00:04:16.200 So we were able to accelerate this announcement by a few months.
00:04:19.360 And hopefully it will make a difference to the Americans to show that we care about the same things they care about.
00:04:24.160 So when President-elect Trump actually said, look, Canada needs to get its act together on illegal drugs and illegal immigrants,
00:04:33.280 it sounded as if this took the prime minister by surprise, but it didn't take you by surprise.
00:04:38.140 It didn't take me by surprise at all.
00:04:39.760 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.
00:04:49.900 We've had 450,000 people come to Alberta in three years.
00:04:53.240 And we started looking into the numbers.
00:04:55.000 And quite frankly, the feds have lost control over our borders on every front, whether it's too many international students, 1.00
00:05:01.820 too many temporary foreign workers, or too many asylum seekers.
00:05:05.100 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
00:05:15.340 Francois Legault has been talking about that for some time.
00:05:18.160 But all of the premiers mentioned that at the last First Ministers Conference.
00:05:21.580 And we knew that that was a problem.
00:05:22.880 But also on the issue of fentanyl, two of the problems that we've seen are our federal government created the fact that they have pushed this notion of safe supply
00:05:36.740 and that they have allowed for a revolving door of criminals going in and out of our jails.
00:05:42.200 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,
00:05:53.420 but also the devastation that it is causing to those who are addicted to these deadly drugs.
00:05:57.760 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,
00:06:05.520 to tighten things up so that we could keep these guys behind bars.
00:06:08.360 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.
00:06:18.180 So he shouldn't be surprised that these are things that are priorities.
00:06:21.760 They've been things that have been priorities for many of some of the provinces for a long time.
00:06:26.040 Many people can see the logic of what you're saying there, ask the same questions.
00:06:31.980 Why so many people so quickly?
00:06:34.200 Why the relaxed attitude to crime?
00:06:36.780 I have said many bad things about the liberal government in Ottawa in the course of writing opinions. 1.00
00:06:46.140 And yet I have never really thought that they were stupid. 1.00
00:06:50.500 And yet some of this seems stupid. 1.00
00:06:53.020 How does it seem to you? 1.00
00:06:54.720 It seems to me to be ideological, that there's an ideology that by providing so-called safe supply of toxic drugs,
00:07:04.760 that you're going to reduce deaths.
00:07:07.060 It hasn't turned out to be the case.
00:07:08.480 I think what it has done, unfortunately, is given people a false sense of security.
00:07:13.000 And as a result, we're seeing more people try drugs and more people sadly succumb to them.
00:07:17.280 I think that there's this ideology about coddling criminals based on having had terrible circumstances that they grew up in.
00:07:25.560 And, you know, I recognize that we've got to address some of those foundational issues.
00:07:29.640 But if somebody is a violent, dangerous person, you keep them behind bars so that they can't go out again and victimize people.
00:07:37.660 So I think that a lot of it is a misplaced ideology.
00:07:40.800 When things don't work, you've got to try something different.
00:07:43.240 So we need a different ideology.
00:07:46.460 And we've got a different ideology here.
00:07:48.480 We believe that we've got to invest in people, that we can't give up on them,
00:07:52.960 that we've got to approach recovery so that we're dealing with the addiction side of things.
00:07:57.060 But then we've got to shut down some of these fentanyl operations and go after the bad guys.
00:08:01.580 How is the recovery program going, by the way?
00:08:04.620 We don't want to be overconfident because there's a lot of things that we're doing.
00:08:09.540 We're doing virtual opioid dependency programs, we're giving people Suboxone and Sublocate.
00:08:13.480 We're building recovery communities.
00:08:14.760 We've got therapeutic living units, which gives recovery to inmates while they're in our provincial prisons.
00:08:20.760 And we're reconnecting people back to their communities.
00:08:24.220 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.
00:08:34.620 After a year, compared to a previous year where we didn't have that program.
00:08:38.860 And we've seen a 51% decrease in opioid deaths, which is, to me, a real measure of success.
00:08:44.260 These are the kind of things that work.
00:08:46.140 And it gets people on a totally different life track.
00:08:48.780 And that's what we're trying to do.
00:08:49.660 Before we leave the matter of the border, have you talked to Ontario Premier Ford about not obstructing Alberta energy exports?
00:08:57.620 I have let him know loud and clear that Alberta will not be curtailing its oil and gas exports to the United States.
00:09:06.920 We know that the Americans rely on about 4.3 million barrels a day of our product.
00:09:11.940 The Americans as well, they've seen their strategic petroleum reserve decline.
00:09:16.320 They're fighting wars around the world.
00:09:18.100 We would not be seen as a reliable partner in energy if there was any curtailment.
00:09:23.720 And so that is not a tactic that we think would be wise.
00:09:26.320 And it's certainly not something that we're supportive of.
00:09:28.220 Just not on.
00:09:29.480 Is he backing off on it?
00:09:31.040 I hope so, because I think that there are a lot more constructive ways to engage with our American counterparts.
00:09:37.980 What we are doing is demonstrating that we heard loud and clear the border's an issue.
00:09:42.840 We're dealing with it. And we're also making the case every time I can about the impact that a 25% tariff would have on American consumers.
00:09:51.800 And I hope I would urge my provincial counterparts to do the same, because you can make the same case for electricity.
00:09:57.860 You can make the same thing for the same case for auto parts, because they go back and forth across the border multiple times.
00:10:03.760 You can make the same thing on food products, on forestry products, everything that adds a 25% tariff just makes life more expensive for Americans.
00:10:12.320 And I think that that's something that the Americans should know.
00:10:14.800 I bet they're thinking about it.
00:10:17.140 Premier, one of the great political stories of the year is Donald Trump's return to office.
00:10:21.720 But this is 10 years ago, there was a sequence of events that left you in the political wilderness.
00:10:30.360 You know, you famously crossed the floor to join the late Jim Prentiss's PC government.
00:10:35.880 And a lot of people hated you for doing that.
00:10:38.740 But now it looks to me like the people who hated you the most now love you the most.
00:10:42.900 So we did pay a price for that four years of the NDP and a weak Alberta government dealing with a, frankly, a predatory federal government at the time when we needed a strong Alberta government.
00:10:58.240 Had things gone differently and you not made that move, do you think we would be dealing with the same things in the same way?
00:11:05.900 Well, my worry at the time, and it was a bit maybe premature, my worry was that Alberta had changed to a point where it couldn't support two conservative competing parties without seeing a left-wing party come up the middle.
00:11:19.480 And I don't think anybody expected that that party was going to be the NDP at that time.
00:11:24.200 But as it turned out in that election, that's exactly what happened.
00:11:27.100 The PCs and the Wild Rose split the vote and the NDP got four years in government.
00:11:32.180 So with the consolidated party, we won one term.
00:11:36.140 It was not an easy win for the second round.
00:11:38.920 So my point has been that, you know, we sometimes were a big, raucous, noisy, opinionated family.
00:11:47.360 And sometimes we disagree, but we shouldn't let that tear us apart.
00:11:50.660 And so I think that that is maybe part of the reason why my Albertans gave me another chance.
00:11:56.220 And I hope that they stick with it because I think it's important.
00:12:00.320 I think the staying united allows us to be able to address some of these things.
00:12:04.440 As for where we find ourselves today, there was a trend in the world.
00:12:09.500 And it was a trend towards progressivism and wokeism and ESG and DEI, all of those acronyms.
00:12:17.840 And I think what happened is it just went too far.
00:12:20.620 I think when kids started being targeted, that's when parents said, well, what's going on here?
00:12:28.900 This is too much.
00:12:29.800 And that's when I think some of the questioning began.
00:12:32.220 And so there always is that case, right, where people want to be reasonable.
00:12:36.500 They want to be supportive.
00:12:37.700 But when it goes too far, that's when the pendulum comes back.
00:12:41.060 And I think that's where we find ourselves now.
00:12:42.500 But I think, kind of, Premier Notley, there was a weak government facing a very aggressive federal government.
00:12:50.060 In those same years, had you been Premier, how do you think that would have gone?
00:12:55.840 I can tell you we sure would have done a lot more advocacy for a lot of those pipelines.
00:13:01.580 The Energy East pipeline, it was permitted.
00:13:04.900 It was going ahead.
00:13:07.100 But they just couldn't see a way to the finish line after spending a billion dollars.
00:13:10.180 Northern Gateway was approved, and then the federal government ended up pulling the plug on that.
00:13:16.320 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.
00:13:27.580 And so the only way to get that built was for the federal government to buy it.
00:13:32.360 And it got built at five or six times the original price.
00:13:36.040 But we can't keep doing that.
00:13:37.280 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.
00:13:44.100 Because we know that we're going to need more energy.
00:13:46.820 So I think people can see that my style is to say what I mean, mean what I say.
00:13:53.460 And I will fiercely defend our constitutional jurisdiction to make sure that the federal government does not shut in our resources.
00:14:00.740 I think we could have used a little bit more of that in the past.
00:14:03.180 I believe you may be right.
00:14:06.040 Thank you, Premier Smith.
00:14:07.900 And from all of us at the Western Standard, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
00:14:12.580 And good luck at the inauguration.
00:14:14.980 Thank you.
00:14:33.180 Thank you.