Western Standard - The Danielle Smith Show - Monday, April 18, 2022

00:00:00.000 well greetings friends i'm back nice to see you i'm probably a little

00:00:29.360 bit rusty because I haven't been doing talk radio for over a year now. I have done a few live

00:00:36.000 streams, which I've enjoyed doing with you on my Locals page, which is the only place on social

00:00:40.820 media that I'm engaging with people these days. And so I wanted to explain a couple of things to

00:00:47.500 you about why I decided to relaunch the Danielle Smith Show, why I did it on Western Standard,

00:00:52.480 and what I hope to be able to accomplish here. So you are more than welcome to send me emails

00:00:56.960 and texts and just engage with me throughout the course of our show today. If I have time,

00:01:02.980 I will answer some of the questions that you have. A few of them have come in

00:01:05.920 on Locals, which is, if those of you who want to follow me there, it's daniellesmith.locals.com.

00:01:11.620 What I love about the medium, and this goes to as well why I did leave some of those other

00:01:16.760 social media mediums, is that it seems to me it's a lot more respectful. This is the thing I always

00:01:23.040 tried to bring to my show is that I truly believe that we can have a respectful conversation that

00:01:30.220 you can agree you can listen to people who have different viewpoints and disagree with them but

00:01:35.360 you don't have to it doesn't have to be hateful doesn't have to be angry so I don't like the tone

00:01:39.420 that I have seen emerge over the last year and a half and uh part of the reason that's part of the

00:01:44.220 reason why I decided to see if I might be able to inject a new tone I know that you may be surprised

00:01:49.280 by that because simultaneously I've announced that I'm going back into politics. So let me see

00:01:54.080 if I can deal with this in sequence. Part of what we're going to do with this show is I'm going to

00:01:59.340 have a, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm going to deal with top issues of the day, daily news

00:02:07.260 stories. And so I have way more material than I could possibly get to today, but I do want to get

00:02:13.120 your feedback. So danielle at daniellesmith.ca is the way to email me at any time if you want me

00:02:19.680 to address something in the next show. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm just borrowing from Dave

00:02:24.580 Rubin, who I have enjoyed listening to and watching for many, many years now. He is a gay 1.00

00:02:31.420 registered Democrat from California, recently moved to Florida for freedom, and he has left

00:02:40.200 the left and is now one of these voices of of reason and he left over wokeism and he does an

00:02:45.960 awful lot of conversation about that and so i i joined his platform uh on locals and locals got

00:02:52.280 purchased by rumble so rumble is the alternative youtube so we'll i haven't got a profile set up

00:02:58.360 there but i will in any case uh you can send me topics and we will address those throughout the

00:03:03.640 course of the next number of days but what dave rubin would do is he does these little quick hits

00:03:09.240 little 30-minute segments where he deals with three issues of the day. I will attempt to do

00:03:13.760 that. And then on Saturdays, we're going to have a long-form interview. My first one may surprise

00:03:20.280 you, but maybe it shouldn't. My first one is with Gord Tolk. And Gord Tolk runs a little group in

00:03:25.400 Red Deer called Libertas. But more importantly, Gord Tolk planted the seed with me all the way

00:03:31.860 back in probably 2010 about how to reform our healthcare system. And I want you to hear from

00:03:38.200 him directly because he has got this brilliant idea that begins with health spending accounts.

00:03:43.920 As you know, I'm a huge champion and fan of health spending accounts. So that is going to be

00:03:47.760 on Saturday. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you get me and only me for 30 minutes. Saturday,

00:03:53.260 we're going to do a long-form interview. We'll see how that goes. Like maybe there'll be

00:03:56.120 opportunities throughout the course of the week that I'll want to interview a newsmaker. And if

00:04:01.480 there's a particular thought leader or newsmaker that you want to hear from, I like those long-form

00:04:05.620 interviews and so i will take your suggestions on that as well but before i get to the issue today

00:04:12.020 because i wrote about the alberta first initiative in my newsletter this weekend and i want to map

00:04:18.100 out for you how i think we can assert ourselves within confederation and get independence from

00:04:24.820 ottawa and develop our resources and have autonomy and have enough wealth to be able to pay for all

00:04:30.900 of our social programs and not feel like we have to go begging to ottawa every single time we want

00:04:35.700 something done it was a brilliant idea that was given to me by the organizers of the uh the

00:04:41.860 canadian blockchain consortium they asked me months ago if i would moderate their conference

00:04:47.220 this week on april 20th and 21st and i said yes and then i left my last job and got into politics

00:04:54.580 and i said do you still want me and they said yes so i will be there i know michelle rempel is doing

00:04:59.860 a video for introduction. She's getting quite keen on the cryptocurrency space. I hope Pierre

00:05:06.280 Polyev also puts in a video, quite frankly, because he has also said that Canada should be

00:05:11.520 the blockchain capital of the world. And I think Alberta should be the center of that. And I'll

00:05:16.220 tell you why in just a couple of minutes. Doug Schweitzer is going to be there, the economy and

00:05:21.020 jobs minister, as well as Nathan Glubish, who is the service Alberta minister. So lots of interest

00:05:26.300 in blockchain and what it means. And so I know that many of you may have got glassy-eyed when

00:05:31.400 I talked about Bitcoin and blockchain in the past, but I am hoping I can connect some dots for you

00:05:37.320 so that you can see why it is so fundamentally important to our future prosperity that we

00:05:43.400 embrace this new technology and why conservatives can be the leaders on that. So let me talk to you

00:05:48.720 a little more about that. But before I get into that main topic, I want to address two issues

00:05:54.940 that always come up, it doesn't seem to matter where I go. I am asked the questions,

00:06:01.700 why did I leave talk radio? And why did I leave the Wild Rose? So I may as well just deal with

00:06:06.680 those. Some of you will, this will be repeat information for you, but let me tell you anyway.

00:06:12.080 So why did I leave talk radio? It's not because people were mean to me. I can handle people being

00:06:17.500 mean to me. I really can. The reason I left talk radio is I felt that there were two things going

00:06:24.040 on, that in this new woke world that we find ourselves in, with woke capitalism and stakeholder

00:06:30.700 capitalism, there are a whole ton of areas that you're now no longer able to talk about. Otherwise,

00:06:37.720 you can risk not only deplatforming, but reputational ruin and destruction. And I felt

00:06:44.520 like it was a little too perilous to be on a daily show doing three and a half hours per day,

00:06:49.820 where you kind of have to deal with the issues as they come up. Because, you know, from time to time,

00:06:53.720 like to interview guests who take an alternative perspective because to me that's the only way that

00:06:57.480 you can learn in life is you got to listen to people who disagree with you but that i thought

00:07:01.640 would put me in a perilous situation of facing a complete cancellation and when i started seeing

00:07:09.080 some of the progressives getting cancelled like wendy mesley at cbc and jessica mulroney and even

00:07:17.240 like brian jesperson i don't know if he took a couple of weeks off but man alive did he ever

00:07:21.960 get blasted on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, because I guess it was perceived that he didn't

00:07:27.200 defend one of his producers strongly enough on the air. But come on, dudes, like we've got to be

00:07:33.340 able to allow for people to have reasonable discussions, reasonable disagreements without

00:07:38.560 jumping down their throat. So I'm hoping I can bring a little bit of that in this medium. The

00:07:42.680 other reason that I was concerned about the direction mainstream media has taken, and I've

00:07:48.180 mentioned this to folks who are in mainstream media, is I feel like they've just taken way

00:07:52.580 too much direction from the social media outlets like Jack Dorsey at Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg

00:08:00.380 at Facebook and Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google and YouTube. They

00:08:05.760 don't have journalism degrees, so they shouldn't be dictating what it is that we decide to talk

00:08:10.200 about. And so there have been alternative platforms that have now cropped up in the last year and a

00:08:15.220 have. I've been delighted to see Western Standard, and I'll talk more about them. True North,

00:08:20.600 Rebel Media does some good work. But also on the left, we've got the Taiyi, you've got Canada 0.97

00:08:25.680 Lens. Like I try to read and watch as broadly as possible. And so I'm not going to do anything 0.83

00:08:31.480 that is outside the mainstream because I'm a mainstream person. But I think that the mainstream

00:08:36.320 conversation has become too narrowed because of the influence of those three big tech giants.

00:08:43.180 I still don't know all the reasons behind that, but I'm hoping that we can have a more robust and more fulsome conversation on a greater range of issues.

00:08:51.360 And that's part of my concern.

00:08:52.740 The other concern I have, and I wasn't as concerned about this before, if you want the truth, when I was in the mainstream,

00:09:00.660 is that this bill coming through that would regulate the Internet in the same way that the radio and broadcast television is regulated through the CRTC.

00:09:09.280 I am now gravely concerned about that, because what seems to me happened during the last two years of COVID is that there is this, I don't know if it's a convention or if it's just the bullying tactics that happen with the CRTC.

00:09:24.420 I think what happened is that mainstream broadcasters in radio and television were basically told that their licenses would be at risk if they didn't toe the party line, toe the government line on a whole range of issues.

00:09:37.440 And I think that that is part of the reason why we haven't had a fulsome discussion about COVID.

00:09:43.260 And it's not just me saying that.

00:09:44.640 I'll see if I can dig up the interview I saw recently with the head of BBC.

00:09:50.760 He said that that's exactly what happened in Britain as well, is that they were basically told you can't say put anything on your airwaves that contradict the official government line.

00:09:59.800 Otherwise, it will be called misinformation and you may not get your licenses renewed.

00:10:04.460 So if they create that same environment for news outlets like Western Standard or True North or

00:10:10.880 others, that's going to create the same, I think, lack of full information and free speech. So

00:10:15.380 I hope that doesn't happen, but I'm going to pay much more attention to that bill as it winds its

00:10:21.720 way through. So that is a reason why I left the talk radio airwaves. Now I am back on the talk

00:10:27.060 airwaves, but in a bit of a different format. So we'll see if I can continue on without being

00:10:33.440 canceled. We live in hope. The other question I often get asked is, why did I leave Wild Rose?

00:10:40.120 There's so many reasons. But you know, the main thing that I sort of internalized is this. It

00:10:48.260 didn't matter to the reasons why I left. What matters is people are still very angry with me

00:10:55.100 for how I left, and rightly so, because let's face it, I was elected to be the leader of the

00:11:01.680 official opposition. And I took that role very seriously. I was a very strong opposition leader

00:11:08.080 when Ed Stelmack was premier, pointing out the things in the direction I think he was going

00:11:12.920 wrong, particularly on the new royalty framework. And in the end, it turned out that we were quite

00:11:17.780 correct, because when Alison Redford got in, she very quickly changed the new royalty framework.

00:11:22.200 So we had some successes there. But then, of course, Alison Redford had all kinds of issues 0.93

00:11:27.460 of questionable decision making around the use of taxpayer dollars. And we had to raise those 0.97

00:11:34.020 issues. And then ultimately, she was replaced by her caucus as well. So when Jim came back,

00:11:39.980 I think you expected me to do the same thing, that I was supposed to hold him to account as

00:11:43.940 official opposition leader, and that I was supposed to make him prove to us that he was going to be

00:11:49.140 different. Because ultimately, he wasn't able to prove to us that he was different. The coalition

00:11:55.060 blew apart. And it took Brian Jean and Jason Kenney to try to heal the movement and bring

00:11:59.920 it back together again. So I think now a couple of things that I would recognize out of what

00:12:06.380 happened during my Wild Rose days. One is that the grassroots members of a party are the ones

00:12:14.280 who determine who their leaders should be and the direction the party should go. Absolutely, 100%.

00:12:20.180 no matter how much of a role I had in building up the Wild Rose, the Wild Rose was built by

00:12:26.620 its grassroots members. And I just would make you mindful of that because no leader has the

00:12:33.840 ability to say, I built this party, therefore I can take it out again. And that includes the

00:12:38.780 present leader as well. It is ultimately up to members to decide if they believe that that

00:12:44.700 leader can help them go into the next election, is going to be consistent with the values that

00:12:49.600 members want to espouse and is electable that's going to be a decision on may the 18th i will

00:12:54.480 try not to delve into that too much might delve into it just a teensy bit um so the other thing

00:13:00.640 that i would i would say is that we should now realize that alberta has changed fairly

00:13:06.880 substantially that it is no longer the type of province where we can just slap a conservative

00:13:13.840 label on a party and expect that it's going to win. It's also a province where we now have a

00:13:20.560 unified left-wing vote behind Rachel Notley. It's quite remarkable what she's been able to do,

00:13:26.880 if you want the truth, to go from being premier to opposition leader, stay in that position,

00:13:32.640 and now live to fight another day to contest it. And I don't see a replacement for her. She doesn't

00:13:38.160 seemed she seems to have caucus solidarity behind her she um hasn't lost any ground since the last

00:13:44.320 election she's still been pulling in the 35 to 40 range so imagine what happens so you've got

00:13:49.200 a consolidated progressive movement under rachel notley and if you end up seeing the ucp blast

00:13:56.800 apart to smithereens so that you've got a brian gene led party and a paul him and led wild rose

00:14:03.040 and a todd lowen led conservative party and a drew barnes led rural party if you end up with all of

00:14:09.200 those factors i just think that is going to be a recipe for a vote split in an ndp government

00:14:15.360 so this is part of the reason why i've decided to enter back into politics by seeking the

00:14:22.080 livingston mcleod nomination for the ucp there's a there's a few a few things i i have to wonder

00:14:29.840 how different life would have been you always sort of have a question of the path not taken

00:14:36.320 so the path not taken for me was that i had considered getting into politics in 2006

00:14:42.720 when my mla the pc richard magnus stepped down in the writing of the time it was calgary north hill

00:14:50.240 and it became calgary klein that's the writing currently represented by jeremy nixon i had

00:14:55.280 considered doing that and then i got into business advocacy instead and rob anderson bless his heart

00:15:02.160 he initially was trying to convince me to join the pcs and back ted morton and that he felt we

00:15:07.600 would be better off trying to change the party from within i of course went in a different

00:15:11.520 direction and the rest is uh history now we can change the ucp from within that's what i have

00:15:18.720 since learned as well is that the the conservative party is very different depending on who the

00:15:24.800 the leader is, depending on the culture and character of the party, depending on the autonomy

00:15:29.160 of its grassroots members and its grassroots and local MLAs. And so it seems to me that the UCP is

00:15:35.400 the right vehicle. I went to the AGM back in November of last year, and I saw all my old

00:15:43.280 friends from my PC days and all my old friends from the Wild Rose days debating together at the

00:15:47.920 mics. And it seemed to me that the merger of the two parties has been successful. The direction

00:15:54.020 that has been taken in the last couple of years, though not all bad, has created this division. So

00:15:58.760 if I can do my part to try to keep the movement together and solidify the vote in my area down

00:16:05.840 in Livingston-McLeod, then that's what I'm going to try to do. So that's part of the reason why I

00:16:09.520 want to return to politics. And I am prepared to just be a regular old MLA because I loved being

00:16:16.740 a regular old MLA. There's a few things that I just want to put on the table because this to me

00:16:23.280 would allow for any political leader to go very far in politics and keep caucus solidarity.

00:16:29.560 One of the things I did appreciate about Jim Prentice, rest his soul, was that when we were

00:16:35.200 trying to prepare for my transition into the new role, the thing he said is, what are the three

00:16:42.980 things that are most important in your constituency? And I've named three things. We had a high river

00:16:50.180 dry dam project that was very similar to this over-constructed dry dam project being proposed

00:16:57.740 for the Springbank area to protect Calgary. It was put forward by Del Terras. No one liked it.

00:17:03.240 So we went and did a little helicopter tour of the area. And Jim said, okay, we're not going to

00:17:08.000 do that. We did something else instead. And our mayor, Craig Snodgrass, along with the council

00:17:13.960 in High River, works like you wouldn't believe over the last eight years. Now, High River's

00:17:18.900 100 protected now we've got everything done because we got that kind of buy-in that's what

00:17:23.540 i think was missing unfortunately in calgary is that there if you could get 100 buy-in on an issue

00:17:29.540 calgary would be protected now too so that was one thing the other thing was the disaster recovery

00:17:33.620 program i don't know if you truly appreciate how terrible the disaster recovery program was i

00:17:40.260 remember when uh they finally figured out this was the process where because a lot of uh of the water

00:17:47.380 flood damage was not covered by insurance it had to be covered by a government program and so what

00:17:53.060 what happened though is that you'd put in your application and then it things would disappear

00:17:59.940 and there was no case management and different people would get back to you what the world was

00:18:03.460 going on well when they finally did the analysis they found out what was happening is that somebody

00:18:07.700 something would arrive at a person's inbox be typed into the computer they'd press print and

00:18:12.740 and then it would go to another person's inbox.

00:18:14.920 There was like 51 process steps

00:18:16.780 to get a file through to completion.

00:18:18.960 And so again, that's another one that Jim managed to fix.

00:18:22.200 He met the bureaucrats and he said,

00:18:23.400 look, do this like in a normal insurance program,

00:18:26.140 give people 75% of what the estimated adjustment value is,

00:18:29.780 make them give the receipts afterwards

00:18:31.040 and let's get on with it.

00:18:31.960 So that was important.

00:18:33.160 The third one was the Okotoks waterline

00:18:35.400 and sorry, my friends in Okotoks

00:18:37.020 wasn't able to get that one for you,

00:18:38.540 But that is the absolutely essential role of an MLA, is to go out, identify the issues that are in their area, bring them to caucus, have a discussion with the cabinet minister.

00:18:51.480 If it's important enough, elevate it to the premier.

00:18:54.320 We've got to flip the decision making process on its head.

00:18:56.920 And I hope I am able to do that because, as you know, I have a little bit of experience getting my voice heard.

00:19:02.400 And the other part, too, is when I look at the United States, two of the elected representatives that I admire the most, Rand Paul and Jim Jordan, are just two guys who want to do the best job that they can being an elected representative.

00:19:18.420 So we'll see whether or not I have some success on that.

00:19:21.080 Now, of course, once we're in the rip period, I got to leave the airwaves.

00:19:26.160 And the same thing for the news forum.

00:19:28.080 They said that Dean Allison is an elected MP who does a show on the news forum.

00:19:32.400 that's the other televised show that I'm on. So that's sort of the rules here, that you can't

00:19:37.760 be actively campaigning while you're doing this kind of job. So I promise you, I just wanted to

00:19:43.280 give you the context. I'm not going to turn this into a platform for my campaign. What I will turn

00:19:48.960 it into a platform, though, is the things that I like to write about and talk about. And more

00:19:53.460 recently, this weekend, I did my newsletter on what I'm calling the Alberta First Initiative.

00:20:01.580 I think it's important for us to talk about this because it connects with a few of the other things that we've been discussing.

00:20:06.860 We've been discussing what is going wrong in the province.

00:20:10.440 And I think, unfortunately, the premier has misdiagnosed it a little bit.

00:20:14.840 He seems to think that the only concerns that people have are related to his COVID response.

00:20:22.200 And I would have to tell you that that's a portion of it.

00:20:25.080 Absolutely.

00:20:25.480 But the bigger portion is when are we going to finally put Alberta's interests first?

00:20:33.340 We keep, the hits keep coming.

00:20:35.540 And when you look at what happened 10 days ago with Environment Minister Stephen Gilbeau

00:20:41.260 approving an offshore oil project in Newfoundland and Labrador, and then writing a letter to

00:20:49.120 Sungor saying, sorry, I don't think that your oil sands project is going to fall within

00:20:54.160 our emissions cap even though sun core is part of a group of five companies called the pathways

00:21:00.000 project that have committed to being net zero by 2050 and the way they want to do it is by building

00:21:07.120 a carbon dioxide trunk line and trucking down their co2 to a site in cold lake where it can

00:21:15.760 either be buried in our deep caverns because we've got ton of poor space for burying co2

00:21:21.920 or create a hub where that co2 can be turned into useful products and you wouldn't believe if you

00:21:27.680 have watched me on um on the last podcast i've been doing over the last year and a half i have

00:21:31.920 been spending a ton of time on how alberta can get to net zero and how we can be net zero faster

00:21:38.320 than anyone else and one of the things that is so exciting about it is all the carbon technology

00:21:43.440 that is developing to allow us to take co2 and turn it into carbon nanofiber which is going to

00:21:50.160 to be a replacement for steel a highly durable construction material turn it into cement so that

00:21:56.640 we can create a more durable concrete turn it into industrial minerals right now they're using it to

00:22:02.160 make soap but there's all kinds of products that you can make once you've turned it into mineralized

00:22:06.480 form you can turn it back into polyethylene so you can turn it into a circular economy approach

00:22:11.680 to plastics you can turn it into ethylene which is alcohol there's even a company called airco

00:22:17.680 which takes a pure stream of co2 and turns it into vodka so the the really the pathway forward

00:22:24.960 on being able to develop these kinds of products is limitless suncores committed to it as are the

00:22:30.240 other partners in the pathways project so why in the world would our environment minister

00:22:35.520 say arbitrarily i'm sorry this isn't going to allow us to meet our international goals as hokum so

00:22:41.840 we keep as i say the hits they keep on coming and so this is part of the reason

00:22:45.760 why we just need to put the country on notice that we're not going to do it this way anymore,

00:22:51.380 that we're going to put Alberta first, and that there is a strategy for us to do that.

00:22:55.640 Now, I have to connect this. This is a lot to try to take in on one day. Maybe I'm trying to

00:23:01.100 be overly ambitious. But because I'm doing the blockchain conference this week, my brain is

00:23:07.500 going to explode, I know, with all the things that I'm going to learn on Wednesday and Thursday.

00:23:11.460 So I want to give you a little bit of a piece of where I think this whole conversation about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is going and the seed that was planted with me, with the organizers from the Canadian Blockchain Consortium, about how Alberta can leverage this and take responsibility over our own development of our own resources, but also become the center of cryptocurrency, of blockchain and of blockchain mining.

00:23:41.460 And it's going to be, I think to me, this is absolutely the answer. But to get there from here, because everyone has a different level of knowledge, I think I need to play for you a real a portion of a video that was played at the Bitcoin 2022 conference a couple of weeks ago.

00:24:01.940 and it was Peter Thiel. Now Peter Thiel, I'm saying his name right, was the founder of PayPal

00:24:07.420 and what he wanted to do was to create an alternative system for doing transactions

00:24:13.200 and alternative currency. It's funny to hear him talk in this full video and I will post the link

00:24:20.400 to the full video so that you can watch it because there's a number of different videos that come out

00:24:25.180 of this conference that you'll be interested in. But one of the things that I think is important

00:24:29.780 is that he realized all the way back in 1999, this new world that would be developing.

00:24:38.300 We have a very strange relationship with money. And part of what I commented on in my newsletter

00:24:44.000 this weekend, you can sign up, by the way, for my newsletter at daniellesmith.ca so you can receive

00:24:47.740 it each week. One of the things that I commented on is if you look at our constitution, the federal

00:24:52.540 government is obsessed with currency and controlling money and central banking. And yet at the same

00:24:59.100 time, we keep getting told that the love of money is the root of all evil and all of these terrible

00:25:05.320 adages. So we've got this strange relationship with money. Whereas if you go into the Bitcoin

00:25:10.640 and blockchain world and even hear what Jordan Peterson has to say about it, money is really

00:25:15.720 just an expression of our life's work effort put into productive form to develop value for somebody

00:25:22.900 else. It's wealth creation at its very root. We used to have a barter system. So if you had three

00:25:28.780 goats, you'd be able to trade them for a cow. But as we got more and more specialized and

00:25:33.160 diversified, it didn't make much sense for us to continue that kind of bartering system.

00:25:38.600 And so we developed gold and silver. But, you know, walking around with gold bars and silver

00:25:42.280 ingots is not very convenient. So then we ended up with a ruler who would put aside some gold and

00:25:48.980 silver and issue paper that was legal tender so that it became more convenient for us to be able

00:25:53.900 transact business with each other they blew apart the gold standard in the 1970s i know that many

00:26:00.140 many people still think that our currency is backed by something it isn't it's backed by nothing it's

00:26:05.180 backed by government promises and as we've seen the government is very very irresponsible especially

00:26:10.860 in the last two years about how they have been charged with that task the kind of money printing

00:26:15.340 that we've seen is extraordinary and i i've known from the time of my economics degree with dr frank

00:26:22.540 Frank Atkins teaching me econ 203, that you cannot keep on printing money, having too much money

00:26:29.640 chasing around after too few goods without it leading to inflation. It's obvious that was going

00:26:34.740 to happen. That's the situation we find ourselves in. So what do you do? Do you just fall victim

00:26:40.500 and just sort of hope that some country is going to emerge with a sound monetary policy? The

00:26:47.460 Americans have been going down exactly the same path as has Europe. What are you supposed to do?

00:26:51.900 do we all have to take Russian rubles or Chinese yuan? Well, that's not an option either.

00:26:58.080 So what is it that is emerging as the future option? And it's Bitcoin. I know it's crazy

00:27:05.720 to say that because it didn't even really exist more than a decade ago. The very first Bitcoin

00:27:11.920 purchase was 10,000 coins used to buy two pizzas at Papa John's. So that was $40. Now, if you do

00:27:21.340 the math on what 10,000 Bitcoins are worth today. That was like a $95 million pizza.

00:27:27.900 But this is, I guess, what has happened is that now that Bitcoin is a trillion, close to a trillion

00:27:34.940 dollar market cap, it's one of those types of commodities that is now here to stay. What's

00:27:41.720 going to happen in the future? I guess that that remains to be seen. But I think that this is part

00:27:46.560 of the reason why you hear politicians like Michelle Rempel and Pierre Polyev and even our

00:27:52.760 own provincial ministers talking about it is that it's now too big to be ignored. I just want to

00:27:58.260 play for you this video because I think a lot of you are very nervous about digital technologies.

00:28:05.120 You're nervous about digital ID. You're nervous about digital currencies. And I want to try to

00:28:10.780 get your framework to change a little bit on this because there are two ways that you can look at

00:28:16.140 digital currencies. One is a digital currency that is controlled by a central banker, which is

00:28:22.840 directed by a central government. And as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, yes, that's something

00:28:28.120 that we should be very concerned about. Because if you have that kind of currency, where the only

00:28:34.000 way of transacting goods is use the Bank of Canada, denominated Canadian currency, which can be

00:28:40.320 tracked and used to nudge you in certain directions, and where you've given a power to a central

00:28:45.780 authority to turn on and off your bank accounts, as we've seen is possible in the last couple of

00:28:51.600 months, then you have every reason to be concerned about that. But there's also the other option,

00:28:56.800 which is what Bitcoin provides, which is decentralized currency. And I don't think

00:29:01.860 you're going to be able to eat all this up in one bite, but I want you to try to understand that

00:29:06.500 we're not going back to a world where we're going to be bartering goats for cows. It's just,

00:29:12.120 it's not practical. We're not going back to a world of a gold standard or a silver standard

00:29:17.560 either, because we now are at a point where the entire market for gold and silver is only a

00:29:25.680 fraction of what the stock market is. And so there's just not going to be that kind of adjustment,

00:29:31.400 I don't think. I don't think you're going to end up seeing central banks all of a sudden decide to

00:29:35.040 start up buying gold and silver in North America or Europe. And so what is the alternative? Now,

00:29:42.120 I want you to hear what Peter Thiel had to say back in 1999, because, man, this guy's a visionary.

00:29:47.800 He predicted where we would be today. And so I want you to hear with his own words how he opened

00:29:54.260 up his presentation at the Bitcoin 2022 conference. Now, this is where Laura comes in, who is working

00:30:00.740 busily behind the scenes to get a video up. And I'm waiting to see if she does. You know, 0.99

00:30:08.420 technical difficulties, right? Please stand by. I think she's got it here. So this is from these

00:30:14.080 physical dollars to electronic dollars. I think the basic technology is going to take place on

00:30:20.640 the internet. I think the specific platform in the emerging world is going to be on a cell phone

00:30:26.920 platform. If you look at the numbers, there are about 260 million, about 150 million online

00:30:33.340 desktop-based accounts today. That number is projected to grow to about 350 million in the

00:30:40.980 next five years. However, with respect to cell phones, internet-enabled cell phones,

00:30:45.600 they're just getting rolled out right now. They already have some significant penetration in

00:30:49.640 Japan, in Finland, in Sweden. They're getting rolled out in Western Europe, the U.S. next year.

00:30:55.800 The numbers are projected to grow from about 10 million internet-enabled cell phones today

00:30:59.500 to about one billion in five years. In five years from now, everybody who is a member

00:31:06.440 of the middle class in the emerging world and in the developed world will have an internet

00:31:11.640 enabled cell phone. And this sort of a cell, in China, the numbers projected to be going

00:31:16.360 to go to something like 300 million cell phones, most of which will be internet enabled. These

00:31:21.480 people will have access to their bank accounts, and it will be very easy for them to move

00:31:28.020 money into an account in a safe jurisdiction where the banks are not politically controlled

00:31:34.840 and they will basically be able to completely dollarize the economy. There will be no need

00:31:40.720 to have any rubles or an NIMBY and it will be non-traceable. No matter how illegal the Chinese 1.00

00:31:46.060 communist government says it is to hold U.S. dollars, you will have a password on your cell

00:31:50.660 phone and the only way to stop this process would be literally to shut down the telecommunications

00:31:55.160 network and that's the kind of choice governments like china india some of these other countries are

00:32:00.680 going to face they will either have to shut down telecommunications network and make it illegal

00:32:05.240 for you to own a cell phone or they will have to basically uh give up the kind of monetary

00:32:12.120 sovereignty they've had and the enormous power that they've been able to wield as a result of

00:32:17.240 this kind of sovereignty over the last uh many many years isn't that remarkable so he was predicting

00:32:24.680 that over 20 years ago and that is essentially what we have right now i mean we've all gotten

00:32:29.400 used to using our cell phones to pay we put our credit cards on there or access to our bank

00:32:34.760 account or use apple pay and then you go to a vendor swipe it and it's done so the infrastructure

00:32:41.400 is already there but we're still using the traditional currencies what what bitcoin does

00:32:47.160 is it allows for you to transact in an alternative currency that is as he mentioned not controlled by

00:32:53.880 a central bank that is untraceable that you essentially hold your bank account on your phone

00:32:59.640 which is a little bit different than how we access all of those other payment mechanisms

00:33:03.960 now i knew we were going to run out of time for today i think i'll give you guys some homework

00:33:09.080 and here's the homework i'm going to assign for you i would love for you to go and check out some

00:33:14.840 of these bitcoin 2022 conference videos so first of all the keynote address by peter thiel because

00:33:21.640 that will give you a framework for how we should be thinking about this approach and this move to

00:33:28.280 cryptocurrency and bracing it not necessarily as an alternative but as an augmentation to

00:33:35.880 what we are already doing and it creates a competitive market and which will put some

00:33:40.440 discipline on our central banks again put some discipline on our government to have sound

00:33:44.920 monetary policy so i need you to watch that i also need you to watch jordan peterson he does

00:33:51.000 a keynote fireside chat also at the bitcoin 2022 conference and i'll see if i can pull a little bit

00:33:55.960 out from him next time around because one of the things that that he observes he talks about how

00:34:01.640 important it is for us to have that kind of autonomy over our our own money so that it can't

00:34:09.000 be deflated in the or inflated the way the government is doing and it can't and we can't

00:34:12.840 be not locked out of our our wealth the way we've now seen that central banks are allowed to do

00:34:17.640 so he talks about that but one of the things that got him interested in cryptocurrency is he looked

00:34:23.080 at all of the characters that are lined up against it and saying that it is uh uh irrelevant or that

00:34:32.120 it is a scam or that it is and there's all you just see the whole gamut of of criticisms for

00:34:39.000 and he said you know what if those guys are opposed to it that's probably a sign that i

00:34:43.320 should be paying closer attention to this so watch what jordan peterson has to say about it as well

00:34:48.200 this is the opening step of where we're going to go this week because there's a whole strategy that

00:34:54.360 we can use in alberta for how we could embrace cryptocurrency embrace bitcoin embrace the bitcoin

00:35:02.840 mining center uh sector and really open our doors to have bitcoin mining taking place here which

00:35:09.640 gives us the ability to create a new market, develop our natural gas resources, as well as

00:35:16.720 have new export products. So I'm going to wrap that up in a bow for you, but I'm not going to

00:35:20.380 do it today. If you want to see a copy of my newsletter, maybe you should just sign up for it

00:35:26.540 because once you've signed up, I tell you how to access it on my website. I'm not really all that

00:35:30.340 interested in having it shoot out to the entire world because as I've told you, the social media

00:35:36.480 environment these days is kind of hostile to um to i think a full and fair discussion of ideas

00:35:44.160 and so i just prefer for people to sign up to my newsletter who actually care what i have to say

00:35:49.920 because this is how free speech should work i tell you what i think and then you are free to

00:35:54.320 unsubscribe if you don't like what i have to say but that's it for me for today i see that i have

00:36:00.480 a huge number of posts that have come in sorry i wasn't able to get to those today it's just

00:36:05.360 setting the framework for a much broader discussion. I should finish by thanking Derek

00:36:10.960 Fildebrand for giving me this opportunity. Derek, which is sort of an interesting historical footnote,

00:36:17.520 let me just put on this. If you go into the offices of the Western Standard, you will see

00:36:22.400 on the wall that there is an archive of old news magazines in print form. And that is because

00:36:29.760 ezra levant and my ex-husband sean mckinsley started western standard in the print form all

00:36:35.440 those years ago and i kept every single copy because it was a delight to see it and i just

00:36:42.160 didn't have the heart to throw it away and so when derek restarted western standard i said this has

00:36:47.520 got to this is the home for it so you can see the archive i told him we've got to find a way to ink

00:36:51.760 out my name because it was printed on on the face of this you have to understand what the history

00:36:56.800 is there too. And Derek Fildebrand as well. He launched a recall campaign for me back in the day

00:37:04.160 when he was so upset with me for leaving the Wild Rose and joining Jim Prentice's team. And

00:37:10.160 I'm just, this is just a proof positive that time heals all wounds and conservatives, you know what,

00:37:16.680 got a lot more that unites us than divides us. And we got to talk more about those things that

00:37:22.840 unite us. That's it for me for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. It's Danielle Smith. This

00:37:27.180 has been the Danielle Smith Show. We will be back at this again on Wednesday at 9am. Talk to you then.

Western Standard - April 18, 2022

The Danielle Smith Show - Monday, April 18, 2022

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript