Shaun Newman Podcast - #1061 - David Knight Legg

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

David Knight Legg is a Partner at Serendipity Capital, where he leads fundraising, client engagement, and capital formation initiatives. A seasoned strategist and investor with extensive expertise spanning global finance, government, and technology, he previously served as the founding CEO of InvestAlberta, driving the province’s international investment strategy, and as Principal Advisor to the Premier’s Office in Alberta. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, a Master’s in Law from the University of Oxford, and a Master of Public Administration from Queen’s University.Watch the Cornerstone Forum 26’https://shaunnewmanpodcast.substack.com/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Expat Moneyexpatmoney.com/worldwar3Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Brett Weinstein. This is Tom Lomago. This is Bruce Party. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is Dr. Pierre-Core. Hi, this is Frank Paredi. This is Danielle Smith.

This is James Lindsay. This is Vance Crow and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast. Folks, happy Tuesday. How's everybody doing today? Well, let's get right into it, shall me? Shall me? Shall we?

Shall we? Yes, shall we? How's everybody doing today? Yeah, I'm feeling all right. I got no complaints on this side. I mean, we can all complain, but who's going to listen? Probably nobody. All right, let's look at the old silver wagon today, shall we?

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And they remain the best way to protect your hard-earned savings at a time of high inflation, or at least times of high inflation. Silvergoldbull.com. That's where you're going to find it all. Or you can go down the show notes and text or email, Graham, for more details. Any questions you have around investing in precious metals, all right? You can check them out at silvergoldbill. dot CA again the charts are there everything's there rec tech power products for over 20 years rec tech

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Oh, my God. Ever-changing world of information technology. Got like a case of the yips. Holy moly. It can be overwhelming to say the least. Reading ads can be overwhelming to say of the least. It seems like on a Tuesday. They can take care of that for you.

That's planetcom, leaving you to do their thing while you New Year's and it's just going to carry on. Yeah, I'm talking about websites. I'm talking about internet security. I'm talking about all that stuff. go check out the shan newman podcast.com. That's Planetcom's handywork. And the new store where you can buy t-shirts, all that good stuff. That's Planetcom.

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It's 40 days until we leave for the big trip. Yeah, I don't know how we got there, but 40 days as of today. So it's coming fast, and I want to keep bringing this up. As we go across Canada, across East Coast, the United States, and elsewhere, as we get closer, you know, maybe you're listening from Manitoba. Maybe you're listening to Quebec. I don't know. If you got somebody in your community you want to nominate, I think of it as, you know, when I first started out, I got to do about four. 49, 50 interviews from the Lloydminster community.

Some of them, people would argue, are my best interviews ever done. You know who that is in your community, okay? As we roll through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and East, if you got somebody you're like, man, you should have, and maybe it's somebody who does their own show, maybe it's a big name, or maybe it's just, you know, the old guy from down the road that has been living life. I'm curious in your thoughts.

I want you guys to nominate people from your community. I'd love nothing more than to, you know, throw out some community pillars from across Canada. I think that'd be a ton of fun, and you know your community is better than anyone. So shoot me a text, nominate some people from your community. I've been having lots of people throw out some big names. I'm all for that. But if there's somebody in your small community, you're like, man, this would be somebody to have on. I'm all for it.

So throwing that out there. I'm going to keep talking about it. We leave in 40 days. So get the submissions rolling, okay? If you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Rumble, X, Facebook, Substack, make sure to subscribe, make sure to leave a review. Make sure to share with a friend.

I tried not going for a six-minute intro today, but man, it has been a case of the yips, a case of the Tuesdays. Happy Tuesday, everybody. Let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is a partner at Serendipity Capital. He also served as the founding CEO of Invest Alberta. I'm talking about David Knight Legg.

So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by David Nightleg. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Great to be here, Sean. Well, I want to start with you on the Spencer Pratt, okay? I'm like, you know, when I first started, David, it was, you know, if it was somebody

off in the East Coast Hockey League playing and he was having a great season, I could see my brain getting wrapped around. Oh, yeah, we probably should talk. about this. Then I fall into this political realm and you keep sending me things on Spencer Pratt and you're not the only one. I've been seeing it on my my feed and I'm like, okay. And I'm like, I guess now that I'm a politics junkie, we got to talk about the LA mayor race and I just chuckle about it. But you see something there. Let's start with Spencer Pratt. Maybe give people the story of what's going on in L.A. Okay. So they kind of understand where we're going with us.

Yeah. Well, look, the great thing about the story is this is a story about a long shot. I mean, this is a guy who should have, you know, no chance at all ever in politics generally and especially in the machine politics of a Democrat-controlled city like Los Angeles. And yet, he is now the most talked about most popular guy in the race for the Los Angeles mayor's office. that's like running in Chicago as a Republican, right? Los Angeles is a place that's completely controlled by the Democratic Party of California. You only serve in the mayor's office when the party decides you're the next one in line. That's the way it's always worked. There's no other options. And this guy's coming to nowhere. And the knock on him has been, this is some reality TV guy.

I'm not very up to speed on reality TV. So I can't place him. I don't know where he sort of fits. in the constellation of U.S. show business. But let me tell you this. He lost his house in the Palisades fire. His parents lost their house in the Palisades fire. Both had been removed from insurance after paying in for, in his parents' case, 40 years.

And the mismanagement of that fire, very similar to the wildfires in Alberta, which is when I began to follow some of the things he was saying, was extraordinary. You know, the governor and the mayor wanted to blame it on climate change. but they'd left the reservoirs empty. They had had a problem with the fire structure itself. They had hired the wrong people to do the work, and they had allowed these things to burn.

It never should have happened. They should have been doing the forestry management early on exactly the same thing that happened in Jasper, exactly the same excuses, and this guy lost his house. So that's a great story, but that's not enough to make you the mayor of Los Angeles. Anyway, about a month and a half ago,

he captures the imagination of a lot of people, partly because he's just such a long shot and he's going for it. And then the smart creatives in LA start writing AI generated ads on his behalf. He hasn't done a single ad that's AI generated, but if you look at some of these ads, they are extraordinarily well produced. And I've clipped a couple of them just so people can get to see what I'm talking about. But not only have the ads gone viral, but what it's done is it's led people to have a really hard conversation. about do we have to watch the slow suicide of thousands of people on drugs that are provided by their own government in public, creating a completely malign environment, destroying the urban environment for kids, making places unsafe to walk or do anything?

Like, does this, do we have to live like this? And that conversation is not a conversation that's restricted to Los Angeles. That's a conversation people across North America and in other parts of the world are having. Is there any reason why these NGOs should be clearing millions of dollars and charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bed that a drug addict doesn't even use? Well, he's being suicided slowly by hard drugs that are provided by his government under this misguided idea of safe supply. So the themes in Los Angeles are themes that are really important in Canada and across the states. And to see a guy who's registered himself as a Republican now going from like single day. digit, low single digits to 22% versus the incumbent mayor, Democrat mayor at 25% and watching

people completely light their hair on fire and lose their minds as he just runs ad after ad after ad. And did you see this latest thing I posted? They took these stencils and they power washed. Yes. This city would be this clean if you voted for such in the grime on the city streets. And so what's going to happen? The only way the city can remove those ads is by cleaning the street. I mean, I worked, as you know, on Jason's campaign. I came back to work on that to remove the NDP. We're destroying Alberta economically. We won a landslide. Campaigns are really hard, and it's really hard to stay organized around your messages, stay on point and win that momentum. But if you took a guy and said, you're going to run as a Republican in Los Angeles against the

machine of Democrat politics in the state of California. California, and I'm going to bet that you pull more than 5%, I'd say you're out of your mind. This guy has a chance of winning it. I mean, he's literally changed the entire game. He's earnest. He's well-spoken. And all of the knocks against him that have come out saying he's just a dumb reality TV star. What's he thinking?

He's way ahead of himself. The simple fact that a lot of people like me observe is, if you're capable of running a campaign this sophisticated and tight and smart and sharp and responsive, then you're sophisticated enough to tap the right people to be able to do the managerial stuff that's currently falling apart in L.A. And what a lot of people in L.A. are asking is, why not? Why not give this guy a chance? You know, what could go wrong? It can't get worse than this situation with human excrement everywhere. Needles in my kids, parts, my wife's car being stolen, crimes going unreported. And so every Every time that a story comes up saying, you know, this guy's being unfair, the crime's not reported, you can see immediately in the response to people have to saying, have you ever tried to report a crime to the police?

Like they've stopped caring, you know? And none of the crimes in the homeless cabinets even get called out. So there's a real, I'll tell you this, at a baseline, at a minimum, this guy has completely changed the national conversation. He's totally changed in Los Angeles. I've got a lot of friends down there. I love L.A. and everybody is planning to vote for this guy. And you can count on one hand the people that would admit voting for Donald Trump. And, you know, I don't know anybody down in L.A. right now that's not saying it could be worth. Like even diehard Democrats, like, no, no, this guy's a clown. But he's right about this, right? I mean, it's incredible. So it's worth watching.

I mean, to the extent that you're, you were comparing it to sports. I mean, this guy is like, I don't know what the equivalent is. This is like a guy that's been playing baseball signing up to play for the Oilers and making the starting line. I mean, this is craziness. In political terms, this beats every odd twice, right? Well, so Spencer Pratt, for those who recall, and I certainly do because once upon a time, he was on the hills. and forgive me, folks, that was in, I don't know, my heyday, I guess, of playing junior hockey and then going off to college. And I thought he was a jackass.

Full stop. I've seen clips of him. He's terrible. Yeah, he looks like a terrible guy. But I mean, also that's reality TV, right? Like, I mean, it's kind of what sold it. And he was a big reason the hills, he caused a lot of drama there, right? Let's just go full stop. I'm not going to go down my reality TV watching of a younger man. But you go, you know, it's shocking to you. I don't find it that. I mean, I guess I do find it shocking.

This is why it's such an interesting conversation between the two of us, right? You're a guy who looks at it and goes, I can't believe he's winning there or not winning there, but polling well, right? He shouldn't have got more than 5%. I'm like what? City folk don't sit around and go like, yeah, it's getting pretty bad out here. we'll just keep doing the same thing like a little injection of common sense

and having maybe a bit of a backbone to just say some common sense things. Courage, sure. Like, I mean, is that so shocking? Don't we think people in, say, Eminton aren't seeing the problems that are going on and they just want somebody to stand up and say it? Are the people that, or the person that says it,

are going to be attacked? Well, certainly they're going to be attacked, David. But isn't it time? Like, I mean, I see. Lloyd Minster, right, a small city, and we see the homelessness problem in the drugs. I mean, isn't everybody getting ready just for somebody to stand up and go? Yeah. We have a problem. Maybe we should just address it.

Yeah. I think you're right. And I think when you see somebody breaking through the noise in the way that this guy has, I will say something that's kind of interesting from, for the, you know, the political addicts listening. which is there's a longstanding theory that every political movement that breaks through has at the heart of it a unique capability with the new medium, right? And so that was true of FDR on radio, it was true of JFK on TV, the Nixon debate, one by a fraction. It was true of Reagan with going back to radio, but also direct mail. It was a big Reagan thing, you know, that they broke through to people.

It was true with, you know, email lists. I think that was Bush, Obama nailed it on the social media. His team just took apart social media and knew exactly how to play it. Then you had, you know, Trump came in and he nailed it on podcasts. People couldn't believe it. You know, he went on any podcast and then he sent his team out on all the podcasts. So you had people that had nothing to do with Trump, like RFK Jr., who was well loved by California yoga mums who hated Trump, were voting for the guy on that podcast that was sort of narrowcast to them, right? And you had this incredible media.

And I have to say, I think Spencer Pratt is a touchstone of what's going to happen in politics when you can really narrowcast, smartly narrowcast using AI. And the most interesting thing about it is his own campaign is not doing these AI ads. These AI ads are being done by people that are accessories to his campaign that want to help out. Smart Creatives. LA's got a deep pool of smart creatives. The quality of the ads are is insane. But the creativity in the campaigning, the creativity in that ad work and the way that they, if you look at the timing of that one ad that I clip that's got the three guys at the barbecue,

that is scripted so smartly, right? Not that Omega or anything. You know, like they, they hit California. you, perfect. I swear I've been to that barbecue, right? Like, that is so perfect that everybody says, not not that a meg or anything, right, as sort of the prequel to what's going to come next. You know what's coming next. They're going to vote for them. So anyway, I think it's, I think it's fascinating to watch. But whether he wins or loses, the most interesting thing is the point you're making. It's the courage to have the hardest conversations and to have those conversations

in a new way that moves beyond this fake idea that it's compassionate to allow people to slowly suicide themselves with government provided hard drugs and pretend that giving NGOs a massive amount of grift to sort of preside over that, protect it, and be backed by drug gangs is somehow some strange form of modern compassion. It's the worst form of the hunger games I've ever seen. It's totally destructive. It's lawless. It's disgusting.

And the fact that it's endorsed by a series of interlocking incentives that people seem too scared to attack or break is horrible. And we worked really hard on trying to break that in Alberta, as you know. And, you know, there's great people that are still working on that. And I think, you know, the extent to which we just see it called out, a lot of the bad ideas in the world are all over the place. And so when you see one place do it right and call it out and try and make it right. then it's just good for everybody that's wrestling with that same problem. So I'm rooting for this guy, whether he wins or loses, to have changed the conversation on homelessness, drug addiction,

and what we're going to do about it, mental health. Well, when it comes to the mediums, and you listed off several presidents that have used different mediums to speak directly to the public, I go before Donald Trump, sorry, in the last election to Daniel Smith. When she was running for the UCP leadership, what she did was she went around to all the podcasts of Alberta. They tried framing it by her talking too much and saying things, but they didn't learn. And the one that always shocked me was Pierre Poliav.

Well, he was in the last election cycle. I totally agree. I totally agree on. Everything signals you should be on everything and go talk. walk and open up, right? And now he's playing that game. But it almost feels, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it isn't too little too late. But now you have a liberal majority. And the public seems like they've turned on Pierre. Once again, this is just an Albertan staring at it. I could be wrong. But, you know, everything showed that you should go on all these podcasts, right? Like, this is the new medium. You need to get your voice heard by. all these different, you know, like Donald Trump made it popular because he went on everything. He went on places. I'm like, why is he going on there?

And then you go listen to the conversation and it was interesting. He did Rogan for three hours. Well, I'll tell you what it tells people is anybody that you're talking to has to present themselves as they authentically are. You can't script. I can't script a line, right? I can try and memorize something I wanted to say to you. but that'll come across as so can people will think that guy's a joke right i mean there's an authenticity that comes through in a podcast format that you can't fake it to make it and everybody

knows that in politics everything is scripted the speech you give is teleprompted the framing of your ads is completely you know you're playing an actor and so people want the authenticity of somebody they want to see who that person is they'll judge for themselves and i think i think i agree with you 100% I think Pierre was very ill-advised on that corner of the campaign, and I think it would have made a big difference to a lot of people. Ironically, I think it would have made a big difference to a lot of the people that ended up being the wildcard demographic of boomers, because the boomers were kind of left to their own devices, because I think our team thought, well, they always mail it in for us. And what they'd forgotten was actually, you know, the fear factor that the

Liberal Party is going to play on because they couldn't run on their record, running against Donald Trump's an insanely popular thing to do, but particularly with that cohort. And how do you combat that if you're Pierre? You can't. You've got to have better conversations and you've got to have specific conversations with American podcasters in particular about the Trump effect and about what it means to be Canadian and define it in that sense. Because when people look at that, they would say, even if I don't 100% like every answer

he gave to every question he had on Rogan, I really like the fact that he had the courage to show up, to defend Canada, to talk about what was going on with a guy that's going to have three million regular listeners, right? And you would have just said, and I think a lot of people would have given him the credit for putting himself in the lion's den. Instead, I think his team thought, well, Rogan is considered a right-wing guy. They listen to kind of the CBC view of who these people are, you know? And as a result, they kind of tried to play it safe. because they thought they were sitting on it. Which is wild because the CBC literally attacked them the entire campaign.

I know. So why would you listen to them? I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. Sean, we've got a problem as conservatives in that sometimes we forget why we're in the game and what we're fighting for. And so we lose our courage to articulate what it is we stand for. It's almost like because the cultural zeitgeist has become so far left, we're scared that people will feel like we're embracing. some right wing approach on things and that will lose us the popular person vote, right?

Or they'll be able to play it against us. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you say and don't say publicly in ways that need to be understood using messages that are structured enough to give people a clear sense of what the truth is and not allow yourself to be completely caricatured by your enemies, right? 100% agree with that. But you and I are making a judgment and I think we're both pretty informed. and we have the same judgment. He should have gone on Rogan.

He should have gone on a dozen other podcasts. Because the fearlessness that I think he has as a person and the conviction that he has as a person shows through in that context. In other words, it would be to his benefit to have been on this podcast because it would have revealed a lot about who he is. And so I think you're right.

And I think now he's doing it. It's good. I'm glad he's doing it. But you're right. There was a window of opportunity to really define yourself when it would have been courageous to do it. Now that you're doing it,

it's it's kind of pro forma because there's not an election on and nobody's throwing stones through your window so correct well and you go back to trump everybody points to rogan i never i don't like that that uh interview to me was like i don't know vanilla the one though the one that stood out to me was actually theo vaughn i went why the heck is you doing theo vaugh and we went on theo vaugh and this is true of any podcast i think right like you you you think you know what you're getting out of Most, right? Oh, this host is going to ask these sort of questions. It goes on Theo Vaughan, and Theo Vaughn starts talking about cocaine and drugs and all this stuff.

And it was probably addiction. He talked about losing his brother to. Correct. It was probably the, it was probably for me, listening to a lot of Donald Trump and the lead up to that election. I would have never thought it would be his best interview. And now I sit here and I go, it was probably his best interview because it actually felt like it was a real answer. And so you go, oh, you got to go on Rogan. You got to do all these big.

It's like, actually, you got to do a whole bunch because you never know which one is going to have that moment where you get asked such a, I would never ask that question. But in fairness to myself compared to Theo, I don't have the drug addiction, all this stuff behind to talk about. Right. So I would never even think to ask that question. Yeah. Yeah. And it revealed a point of humanity in the present. who's an easy guy not to see that in because it allowed him to talk in a very natural way

that they clearly hadn't planned on talking about his own brother's death as a result of alcoholism, right? And I think there's a real, if I remember correctly, so I think there's a real kind of intriguing quality to this stuff. And, you know, one of the things I think is happening with the Spencer Pratt thing that's very interesting to me is when was the last time that the best ads that are, getting like 20 million views came from somebody who's not even connected to the campaign who just put the ad out there and the ads gone completely viral to vote for Spencer Pratt.

And when his opponent was appearing on CNN and said, you know, this AI slop is not showing the respect to Hollywood, the CNN interviewer said, well, you know, he's not producing these ads. They're being produced by other people. He's just forwarding them when he sees one he likes. And she was just so flat-footed. I mean, how do you deal with that? Like your campaign crowdsources its own creative messaging?

I mean, there's something really interesting going on there. And I think it's partly related to the link or the thing that made me think about it when you're talking about that unique moment between Theo Bonn and the president was, I think a lot of people are. hurting. A lot of people are hurting. A lot of people have a friend or a neighbor who's son died of a drug overdose or know somebody that's got mental health issues or knows somebody that, you know, had something terrible happen because of the violent crime, the rapid growth in violent crime. Or, you know, there's just a much, there's a very personal quality to a lot of the political topics that people are talking about when you talk about things like addiction, mental health, homelessness, and what's happening in the cities and, you know, some of the vagrant related

crime. And so I think there's something about these particular topics that, you know, as you know, I'm a guy that gets fired up about getting the corporate tax rate down to 5%. So I think that'll lead to much broader base prosperity. But no one's going to write an AI political ad, they're going to spend five days on perfecting for that, right? I mean, they might, but unlikely. But if, but if you start talking about getting back to the streets that, you know, used to be the places where people could really live their lives and enjoy themselves and feel comfortable with their kids being out at night, then you're moving people. You know, you're moving people because people have a personal connection to these things. And I think you're right. I think the

podcast permits conversations that otherwise won't happen at that. authentic level. And I think the response to some of those things that you're seeing in the Pratt campaign is, you know, is a new sort of evolution in the way these things are going to go. Well, when you talk about people hurting, I mean, go the last 10 years, maybe it's long, well, I know what's longer than that, but if we just go to the last 10 years, or more or less people hurting more, I mean, that's full stop more. So you'd think if you're having the courage to talk common sense, you're going to enlist a whole bunch of people because it's never been easier. And it gets easier by the day to create anything with AI,

to be creative from your cell phone slash what other tech you want to pull in. And it becomes easier by the day to do exactly what they're doing for Spencer Pratt. Not to mention, LA is an interesting case because of the amount of creative people that are sitting there going like, what is going on in our city? But I mean, that's literally across the board. The difference with Hollywood or I guess L.A. is what you point out with the creatives. That's different than say, I don't know, probably Chicago or, you know, up here in the north,

Eminton. Yeah. But, you know, I think, I think we're going to see. I think this is going to start to happen in the next of the while. I think there's going to be a lot of creativity around what's happening. the independence movement. I think you're going to see a lot of very creative thinking because people want to express their best view of a particular idea or argument. And actually it creates a way to contain that and distribute that's widespread. And you know, you crowdsource creativity. You're

going to get a lot more interesting options. And as they kind of float out there, the ones that take off virally, it's it's like, you know, you can go hire an agency for, couple million bucks and pay them to come up with concepts and they'll deploy six really smart people against that and they'll poll test those and stuff where you can have you know 30,000 creative people coming up with their own concepts and writing country Western songs about independence and and one or two of those is going to hit a couple million takes and that's going to be the one that succeeds and captures people's imagination well what you're talking about is the way things have been done

versus the way they're about to be done. And one of the things I just wrote down is, well, what do they talk about more right now? You've got this billion dollar a day machine. Yeah. And what's it being taken apart by? Drones and simple, I know it's not simple tech, but it's a lot more cost effective tech, right?

That's the way war is changing right in front of our eyes. And when you bring it to politics, you're watching, well, you could go out and spend millions of dollars and ads or you could just find a way to talk common sense and leverage. I'm not saying they aren't paying for their own ad team to go out and do some of this, but you're going to find some guy who's doesn't feel comfortable walking down the street in the middle of the day because of what's happening right in front of them. And he might spark something and go do it because it costs him $10 to go do. And if you can hit that emotional take from him, watch out. The world is is full.

of possibilities in 2026 if you look at it from a positive light. Yeah, I do. And this is the thing that I find so encouraging. If you love politics and you watch it all the time, you've got every right to walk around feeling pretty depressed all the time. But you see something like this and you recognize there's a viral kind of common sense emerging in the last place you would ever guess it would emerge. L.A. L.A. And emerging with kind of a creative fris-on and hopefulness and desire for change and an articulation of a lot of arguments that are conservative by people that are not conservative, which is when you know that actually it's a really good idea. You know, this is in Texas where people are defaulting to conservative ideas because that's

the status quo. This is L.A. where people have lived with a status quo that is no longer working. They want to reinvent the place they live in ways that are coherent to principles that make a lot of sense. And that's just really encouraging because it just means there's something about humanity that at some point just says enough's enough and starts to change it. And I think we're at that point in Alberta too. I think there's a lot happening right now in Alberta that's going to be. well let's talk about it. Remaking the way that we operate as well as a problems.

Let's talk about Alberta, right? You get the 300, I mean, it has been pretty fast pace over the last little bit. You had the 300,000 signatures collected, then the court says, yeah, no. And then you had Daniel Smith give her address with the latest question, I think being added to the referendum, which is still confusing. me because it feels like it's a two-part. I don't know how you answer yes or no to it, one way or another. You have people out with their pitchforks on both sides, I might add. Right? Like, I mean, the full mainstream has come down on her as being, you know, flaming separatism. Meanwhile, if you're pro-independence crowd, you think she's betrayed you.

It's a very interesting time and place to sit back and watch, David. I don't know what you see. Well, look, I think we have to separate. the politics of how people feel about the Premier from the specific questions themselves. I really like the Premier. So I'll just, you know, come clean with my editorial bias. I think she's doing a phenomenal job. I think that she is navigating this really well.

And I know I'm to your point, the only guy that seems to think that right now. Like the Independence guys don't like it, the federalists guys. But look, I think that, you. Here's one thing, Sean, that I think people forget about Alberta, which is, Albertans have always been populist federalists. Every movement, Peter Laheed, Preston Manning, the West wants in. It was never framed as we've had it with this busted experiment called Canada and we want out. It's always been framed within an all-Canadian approach to how we want to.

we want to see Canada become a better country by making it a place that Alberta can actually have a far better relationship to the rest of the country. And so if you look at the, if you look at, you know, back in the 90s, the conversations that were being had by Preston Manning, the things that would have been, could have been adopted at that point would have fundamentally remade Canada in a better way. I think just. a better way, right? Forget the direct effect on Alberta. I think that I think that we have a completely broken representation system with the current Senate. I think our Senate is a complete joke. I think that, you know, we have a broken representation system when the seats that go into the

government don't map to the population base of the places those seats are being structured from, right? So there's a series of things you just say on Democratic principle if you had a blank slate, you wouldn't structure it in a way that provided a huge bias against the places that remain underpopulated and typically economic backwaters and then punish the place that has the fastest growth for 20 years and is the economic frontrunner. You'd sort of want whatever policies are kind of indigenous to those places to start to be carried across the country. And the reflection of that in every democratic system has been representation by population, which has always got proportional population relative to the population base.

Alberta doesn't have that right now. That's crazy. It just doesn't make any sense. It should have. Our Senate, if a Senate operates the way it's supposed to, and we're not going to go back to an aristocratic Senate, then our Senate should look like the American Senate, which is specifically saying we need forms of representation that aren't purely tied to popular will and population. size. We need a form of representation that's tied to geographic representation that could need a rebalancing so that we don't just allow dictatorship by the majority all the time. And so we're going to have a clean Senate structure where there's, you know, in Canada's case, call it eight senators from every province, no matter how big or small. And they're going to elect them. And those

senators are going to figure things out. And they're going to be an extra layer of protection on things that might just go through the house by majority. Okay, that's good. Now, you've got some balance. Right now we've got in some ways the worst of all worlds in that you don't have a coherent framework that's kind of works, right? You have something that's kind of creating these tensions in the system. And so those were the things that back in the 90s, Presumannock kept saying, we should fix these things. We should do something about this stuff. We should address these. Because as long as these things hold, the incentives aren't in place in the east to do the right thing by Alberta. We just don't have the vote power to actually push people to do the right thing.

And if they have the ability to continue to get themselves elected and not do the right thing for a key part of the country that is the energy engine of the country, then ultimately this thing's going to fracture, right? There's going to be fissures that form and they're going to break. When things break, they break badly. So Manning was talking about all this back in the day. And now you've got somebody who grew up in that kind of reformed tradition, led the Wild Rose Party, has been part of the sort of the populist West idea.

And she's saying the same thing. She's saying, I want there to be a strong Alberta within the United Canada. It's federalist populism, right? And she's promoting that. And at the same time, she's got to be responsive to the populist requirement and the political expectations of the province. And I think that she's right to say there are five big issues in immigration, four big constitutional issues, and one big referendum issue. And when this completely inept disaster of a judge, Shaniel Leonard, decided to override obvious law in order to make a political point, right, and put her thumb on the scale of the whole thing and say, you know, I'm going to allow a small group of people to veto. the express democratic intention of a huge number of people based on my personal conception of what

consultation looks like on a preliminary democratic activity that isn't even formed to the point where you can consult on it. This is insanity. So one of the things that I think the Premier is responding to at this point is who are these judges? Who do they think they are? First of all, that's cluelessness with respect to the law. It's not even academically coherent, right? She's just making it up. goes along. And this is happening in many judgments in many cases. And you've got a Supreme Court justice that has a bust of himself in the Supreme Court. The degree of embarrassment I feel about our country sometimes and we allow this kind of clownishness to go on and not see a major newspaper just demand that that fool take down a statute to himself in our Supreme Court

is extraordinary to me. Richard Wagner. What a total disaster. Where is it? Where is it? Where's the statue of Cicero. How about Seneca? Plato who wrote the laws, right? No, we've got Richard Wagner, the former commercial real estate from some second tier law school, second tier law firm who happened to sort of bureaucrat kiss asses weight to a point where he gets named and now he's putting a bronze bust of himself in there. Look, if the guy had showed any humility and any sort of discretion in front of the law, being what the law is much bigger than him, I'd respect it. The idea that Canadian citizens need to walk past a bronze statue to the shrine of Richard Wagner, the commercial real estate dude from Montreal, is a total embarrassment of a G7

nations, a shock. We have a problem with our judges, and it's reflected in this judgment. And the premier, I think, has to respond to it by saying, this judge who decided, I'm in it with a wave of my little magic wand, decide that Albertans will not have this conversation or take a vote on this issue, the Premier was in a place where she was able to say, no, now that you said that this is not going to happen,

I'm going to say, here's what's going to happen. We have two large groups of Albertans that have said we want to have this vote, right? Two. And they're on both sides of the equation. So I'm going to write a question that says, should Alberta remain a province within Canada

or commence a fair process of holding a binding referendum? right is that question perfect no and i agree with you i would frame a different way is that question a betrayal of anybody i reject that i reject well it's a ridiculous statement to think it's a betrayal of anyone when 400 000 people signed we want to stay and then 300,000 others in the crappiest of conditions got signatures to say i want to go yeah i mean i can't figure out media well i mean i kind of do you kind of get it but i mean like they're they're framing it as this this wild band of people but everything you've just talked about.

Senate's broke. Judges, what are they thinking? Except I think any person sitting in Alberta and I would argue across Canada sits back, David, and goes, oh, she's going to put her thumb on the scale. I mean, we've been seeing the judges put their thumb on the scale for the last five years. So why would it change all of a sudden on this one? Yeah. And look, I think that one of the questions Albertans are going to vote on is about judges. Should the province have more power to select judges? That's going to be the first constitutional question Alberta's vote on. And I can't wait for that vote. Because I think people are getting tired of unelected bureaucrats that are called judges being appointed by people that have political antagonism to Alberta, appointing judges that share their antagonistic ideology towards Alberta

into positions where they can decide against the prevailing will of the people of Alberta. We had this clownish judge in Calgary decide that the laws that were passed dealing with these gender dysphoric kids needed to be thrown out on her view. Like that's insanity. Who is she? What on earth is she thinking? Right? her politics are her own politics. Those are personal. A judge doesn't have the right to have a personal

individual political veto on the will of all Albertans. That's not the way it works. She can go ahead and run for office and then represent her own unique view on gender dysphoria and what we should allow kids to do. So if she wants to see kids clinically castrated by drugs or scalples before they're at an age when they know what the hell they're doing, she can go ahead and make that argument. She's going to lose it to more than 80% of Albertans who have already pulled on this extensively and don't want boys and girls sports because it's unfair and it kills girls sports. And they don't want kids being put in a position where they can be diluted into thinking the natural gender dysphoria that they feel at certain stages can be morphed into something where they

commit decisions that mutilate their bodies in a way that's irrecoverable later in life. So that judge has a viewpoint. Fine. What's she doing judging against the will of the people? This is not right. It's not, by the way, it's not what the law is for. Right? And people like Justice Leonard, like that judge, continue to override the express will of people because they're acting in a political way that gives them a sense of power. It's a violation of the law, right? What they're doing is a violation of the law. If you want to hold them accountable, you can talk about holding them accountable, but the problem is they're put there by Ottawa. And they're put there by. by people that do not share for whatever reasons the views that the majority of Albertans have about kids and how we want kids to be free to express their sexuality without damaging themselves permanently for life. Right? And the fact that some ideologue who happens to be placed there by friends from Ottawa decides she's not on point with what we think is her problem.

But she doesn't get to override a democratic process for how laws get made or how they get interpreted and how they get. And we shouldn't have to, every time we want to do something, in this case, saving the lives of kids and spelling out what the rules are around how we're going to treat gender dysphoria, we shouldn't have to always have to go back and redo the laws to satisfy one judge that thinks they have a veto over democracy. They don't. So I think the premier is well within her rights to have said, okay, Shaniel Leonard or whatever, whoever this person is that sort of finds an illusory of course. First Nations right from some ban that's a bunch of political activists that get tons of money from a federal government to be political activists. Right. It's so corrupt. It's so bad. And it's a violation of democracy. And so she's responding by saying there'll be a 10th question.

But what I'm really interested in, Sean, is what do you think the answer is going to be to the first nine, right? And I think Ottawa is scared of the first nine. And I think they're scared of Danielle Smith. And I think they're scared of direct democracy. I was on the morning commute show with Greg Brady, and he was asking me, what do you think? And I said, what's everyone so scared of? I got a question. What if, what if everyone in the morning commute in Toronto was asked their opinion on the first five questions on immigration? Right.

What if everyone was asked? Is it okay for people that are non-residents to be using the schooling and housing and medical benefits that Canadians are trying to wait in line to get access to. They're not even resident, right? This is insanity. And Albertans are going to vote, and I think Albertans are going to vote in huge majority saying, no more of that. And the clowns that lost control of immigration in Ottawa are scared to death of a bunch of people in Alberta saying, you don't have the capacity or the will to actually do your job. You've lost control of our country's borders. We used to have 15,000 people in an asylum line being carefully

vetted over a year-long process. We now have over 300,000 people not being carefully vetted, and they are completely raiding the benefit system of this country. And we've had it, and that incompetence is being taken full advantage of by the criminal cartels and terror cartels, which means Canada now, in 2015 we had single digits terrorists trying to cross the border to the United States. Now we're over 80% of every terrorist interdiction going into the mainland United States is coming from Canada. Where have you read that recently? Right? What are we doing as a nation? And so Albertans are saying, you know what? We've got this idea. Since you clowns can't seem to manage things, we're going to step in and we're going to start to tell our government what

we think of the following things relating to immigration, right? And by the way, it's not because we're racist. Do you know who hates the immigration fraud worse than anyone? New Canadians. They can't stand it. Why do the Sikh moms hate the immigration fraud? Because the Kalistani terror cartels are after her son and trying to recruit him into doing their bidding with the drug trade, right? That's why the Sikh moms hate it. You know who hates the total disaster and asylum? everybody that came here from a country and wanted to become Canadian and is integrating

as a Canadian hates the fact that this clownish government is so incompetent they've allowed 300,000 fraudsters to come in and you can see YouTube videos where they're instructing you how to commit fraud against this naive, corrupt system, right?

YouTube videos by Indian ganglords, right? This is insanity. And what's happening in the rest of the country? Everyone's like, I guess we have to wait until they get voted out. And Alberta's going, no, you know what? We grew up with the expectation that when you fail, we vote. And if you think that you can get away with holding us off for five years

and then convincing boomers to elect you again, we got something called the referendum was coming up in the fall. And we're going to vote on nine things because we believe in direct democracy. Now, you can choose to ignore us. You can choose to do whatever you want. You can tell us we're racist to vote about your complete incompetence and immigration. But, you know, you can only tell you could only tell, you could only tell, you can only sell so many seat guys that were driving trucks during the Freedom Convoy that they were

racist for so long before it got embarrassing, right? Right? I mean, well, no, 100%. This is Alberta. They freedom convoys, a white nationalist, whatever, on and on and on. And, you know, it's funny when I was walking around Ottawa, I ran into a ton of immigrants that were thankful that it had come. And then there were other immigrants that were in.

in the Freedom Convoy, as you're pointing out. So it was just you don't actually want to know because if you wanted to know, you'd just go talk to the people and find out. When you talk about this referendum, David, I'm curious, right? All these questions. Yeah.

You think Albertans come out, they vote, whatever the percentages, right? Let's say 70% are all for all the stuff. What happens? I mean, under the Kenny government, they voted on equalization. What did that actually do? Because there's a ton of Albertans that are fed up.

They don't think just signaling again that they're upset with the direction of Canada is going to actually change anything. Look, I'll tell you, you know, we had 387 promises in that Kenny policy phone book that we gave away to everybody, including the media. But by the way, we're told not to. I was told, don't give it away because they're just going to find it. find little ways to like use quotes to to try and assassinate those policies. We gave it because we thought that it was the right thing.

It was transparent. But it's also consistent with the same ethic we're talking about. People deserve to know what you intend to do. And then they, they deserve to see what you intend to do with it. I think Jason had a lot of things he could have done further if he'd remained in the rule. You know, we got about 90% of those things pushed through. oddly, partly because of COVID, because we just kept going in and working when COVID was going on.

We never did the stay-at-home thing, right? We cranked away and we got a lot of stuff passed. And right now, Alberta is the number one economy in Canada by a long shot. We have the most jobs in the country. We have more jobs in the rest of the country combined. We have the highest foreign direct investment in the country. We've got the highest educated workforce in the country. We've got the highest net income in the country,

the highest startups in the country. We completely reversed the four years of total decline under the NDP. We restructured a bunch of things to help generate more investment in the province. I helped structure the Indigious Opportunities Corp, not as giveaways, but so that the right groups could borrow capital, deploy it, pay back the interest on the capital, and get the principal in equity, right? I mean, we did a lot of stuff to just unlock growth in the process.

province and get it moving. And when I debated Keith Wilson on the independence thing, the principal point that I made to him was 90% of what we want that makes our lives better or worse is fully within our control right now. 90% of it. Conservatives have got to look themselves in the mirror and ask, what are you doing to take back Edmonton from the current chaos of its current administration, what are you doing? What are you doing to lead in a place that's clearly been in decline because of a series of terrible policies that prevail in that place, right? How did we get five years? You know, when I was in Reddue debating Keith, I made the point to the group. I said I was working as a banker in Asia when I got the call from Jason saying,

would you consider like resigning for a few years and coming back and working on the economic dev stuff or being the minister of finance? You know, if they don't call the election early, you can run and be minister of finance. And it stuck with me because both my brothers were unemployed. I could not believe that Alberta had allowed the NDP to have the keys to the family car. I mean, that was insanity to me, right? How did that happen? And one of the points I made in Red Deer is I don't think there's a wrong answer here.

I have huge respect for Keith. And I share with Keith and Keith knows this, 90% of his ambitions for Alberta that, The debate that we've had is very much around the process of how we get there. But the point that I'd make is 90% of what makes our lives better is within our control right now. You want to clean up Calgary, clean up Calgary. There is no federal statute standing in your way from cleaning up Calgary, getting rid of this drug zombie problem that you see in some of the corners. Now, if there is a problem, then let's work on that. So, you know, one of the, Keith is like, you can't keep having the amount of patients you have.

for getting to the point where we can do these things, right? And he's partly right on, I mean, I have moments where I'm like, you know, Keith makes a very good argument. But, but, you know, if you get tired of a politically correct, inactive, out of shape, RCMP that shows up and doesn't deliver and you want to say, you know what, there's an example of an Ontario provincial police. We need that in Alberta. Let's do the same.

Let's do the same. Let's get on with it, right? So a good way to put it is either directly or through a series of smaller steps, Alberta needs to keep asserting its independence, not as a theory, but in the practice of the laws that we pass, the policies we pass, but also the people we elect. And one of the big issues we've got as conservatives in Alberta is we've got to win the hearts and minds that help us win the seats. I cannot believe a guy like Corey Morgan is doing some soft light infomercial type thing. about, you know, being all together with the Federalists. I'm going to speak with Jason Kenney. I'm like, what are we talking about?

That guy's got one job and one job only as a liberal MP. It's to go straight to Ottawa and say, I represent Albertans and you've got to drop the tanker ban that insanely doesn't let Alberta take its energy to Asia where it's desperately needed, but still allows tankers from Saudi Arabia to deliver their energy to go back in the East. That level of complete and total self-defeating policy by the East has got to go. And it's got to be fought by the one guy that happens to be the liberal MP from Calgary Confederation. So what's he doing, going to an event to try and do hogs around being federalists? His job, if you want to create federalism in Alberta, is in the insanity of a tanker ban.

It's the only thing like it in any energy superpower in the world. No one else would do something that stupid. End it. It's your government. David, sorry. What guy are you talking about right now? Corey Morgan. Like Western Standard, Corey Morgan?

No. No, it's sorry. Am I getting the name wrong? Corey Hogan? Is it Corey Hogan? I'm assuming it's Cory Hogan because I'm like, I don't think we're talking about this. Oh, that's hilarious.

Yeah, I'm banged on. I'm like, Corey Morgan. Corey Morgan sent me a note on the, I apologize to Corey. That's hilarious. No worries, Corey. I got your back here. I thought I would just clarify.

He's getting fired up. Corey Hogan. Geez. Corey Morgan's a rock star, and I apologize to him for getting him mixed up with Cory Hogan. Corey Hogan. Okay, the message of what is in our control, okay? Let's just stick on that for just a second.

Okay. I agree with you. Let's go out and control what we can control. And so that's what a group of Albertans did. 300,000 of them signed. Then it gets shut down in the court. Lukassik doesn't get shut down in the court. What message is that sending to the people that are trying to control what they can control?

Here's the, this is what you have to hit. Here's your threshold. It's been given to them. They go out. And a ton of them, I talked to a ton of them, David, said, if they'd known how much work it was going to be for that, four-month period, they probably wouldn't have signed up, but they signed up. They went into it. They do all this work. And then overnight, and I know it's a judge. I get it. It's not Daniel

Smith going. This is, it's a judge. But the system that has been set against them says, oh, you think you're going to try and control this? Uh-uh. Not under our watch. And all of a sudden, now you have at least 300,000. It's probably more than that. I guarantee it's more than that. they're now going while we can't even can't like they gave us a way to have our voice heard and then you're going to go while daniel smith's putting it on the referendum no she's not i mean it's a question that even us two guys sitting here staring at politics we can go that is the most confusing question i've ever heard is am i voting yes am i voting no because as it sits everything she talked about in that address i'm like if you answer yes to the first part are you answering yes to the

second part because they conflict and likewise the answer no. You got to tell me, I got to know. Is the question a yes, no question? Or can you just check the first one or the second one? Because the way I read it is should Alberta remain a province within Canada or commence a process of holding a binding referendum? You're right. If you say yes, you got two positives there.

But if you don't think Canada should stay, sorry, if you don't think Alberta, right? Okay. Should Alberta remain a province of Canada? There's going to be 300,000 people that are going to say no. Right? Let's not factor in how much that represents in the population, just the 300,000. Or should the government of Alberta commence the legal process required on it? I mean, maybe you could, maybe you can make an argument that if you, the first part you think no, you think no to it all.

we want out. Well, I think you're right. Look, I think there has to be a clear question. And, and perhaps the question just has to come down to, you know, the obvious question, if you're going to ask the second question, it preempts the first question, right? So I would just say, the referendum is, should Alberta initiate a process holding a binding referendum on the future of the province and the country? That's the question, right? And that's a question I like a lot. Here's another thing I'll tell you. And I've said this in Toronto, people are shaking their heads. I'm like, a lot of people are going to vote for that question.

A lot. A lot of people that don't want to fundamentally separate from Canada are going to vote for the question, should Alberta commence or hold a process for a binding referendum on the future of Alberta and Canada? I know dozens of people that are federalists that are going to say, yes, 100 percent, we need that debate. and the reason they want that debate is because, A, they're not afraid of having that debate. Like me and Keith are happy to have a debate over ways and means, basically, right, to get to a place of great autonomy for this province. It's a ways and means debate for he and I. But I'll tell you, if people are asking, should Alberta commence a legal process to hold a binding referendum? I'll tell you right now, you can't look at that many people saying, I want to hold the binding referendum.

Those are people that took the time to go out and sign up for it. I mean, you know, that's that level of keenness. I don't know what percentage of the voting population that is, but if you just do normal demographics, you say there's four million people. There's a couple million that are voting population. You're talking about, you know, a huge number of Albertans saying, we've got an issue, we have to resolve, we got a fight, we got to. gotta have. When I look at the 300,000, it was roughly 10% of the voting population. Yes, if you add another 400,000 under the Lucassie group.

And I'm assuming those are two different groups. Right. So now, well, guaranteed they are. Yeah. And guaranteed they are. And so now you're at like 20 to 25% of the voting population, not those who voted, the voting population have said, we need to have this question resolved. We need to move.

And what do you love about Albertans? They're spirited. They're going to talk about these things. Yeah. And they want to have it resolved. I don't care what Canada, like, I do care what Canada says in the sense that lots people listen to the show. And I think they should want to have this resolved as well.

100%. Including Cory Morgan and Cory Hogan. I think we have to have a debate with Corey Morgan versus Cory Hogan after what I just said. I think that's to happen. One of the other things I want to talk to you about Yeah Was yeah I've seen

And I think lots of Canadians have seen You know Mark Carney say oh We're getting We're gonna we're gonna transform the economy And we're gonna do it like Lickety split right We're gonna flick a switch from way it goes

Yeah Then you see energy I don't know People from different oil companies etc. Come out being like, we are falling behind. We are beyond behind.

Yeah. You're a guy that comes from that, that world. Knows that world well. Your thoughts on, on Canada as a whole, trying to signal, hey, we're doing everything great.

We're going to be a leader in energy. We're going to be an energy superpower, all these different things. And then the people who are actually in that industry coming out and being like, you guys aren't even consulting. us. Like you're, you're, we're, we're losing all the investment. Yeah. Look, I did the Dow deal. And in the process of doing that deal, we had to sue the federal government for their crazy plastic ban because

it was written in a manner that, well, it was it wasn't even written. It was, it was using consumer protection legislation under the SEPA Act to basically outlaw the development of advanced materials by calling something plastic. You know, plastic. Plastic. You know, plastic. as a polymer is used in absolutely everything, right? The inside of every spaceship in Tesla is an advanced material from a gas polymer. And this is what the left always forgets, is an enormous part of the barrel of oil is every advanced material we've got, most of the clothing in the world, a lot of the, you know, everything that's not made of fur, teak, or wood, you know.

So I think we've got a fundamental problem. in that the legislation that was passed for a decade under the Liberal Party is at war with the development of Canada's core resource base. And there's no other way to put it. And that was what I was saying about the tanker ban. If you want to create unity in Canada, get rid of the five or six rules that are specifically dividing the country specifically on the economic engine that's in Alberta. right those rules are directed specifically to attack the hydrocarbon industry of canada and canada is an energy superpower and if the prime minister is dead serious right now about lighting up the economy he's just got to get rid of stuff that's not working that tanker ban has no purpose it doesn't protect the environment

if it did they would ban tankers of equal size from saudi arabia coming in on the east coast right it doesn't protect anyone. All it does is constrain Alberta's rapid growth as an energy superpower. Ottawa has a chip on its shoulder because Alberta under, you know, Confederation has the rights to that energy. Alberta standalone is the wealthiest democracy in planet Earth. Nothing's even close. We have we have about 12 trillion dollars worth of assets just sitting there. We've got four million p you just over four million people. We have as much gas as Qatar. We produce as much gas as Qatar. We got more oil than Russia and the United States. We have so much that we haven't even got a geological map of all the minerals. We don't even know where all the underlying gas is. We've got forests. You can fit the

UK into Alberta six times, six times. And you know, you look at, we're basically about the population size of Ireland, except we're wealthier than any other nation in the entire world. By a long shot. Like not by a little, by a long shot. It's the wealthiest place in the planet, right? That's Alberta. So what's the problem? What's the problem? We're able to transfer so much wealth that we can carry all of Canada on our back and not even think about it. Right? We're that wealthy. And yet, for a decade, we fought the most unbelievable anti-science policies trying to constrain the growth of the core industry that creates that wealth. Right. And it's constant. And so I think that there's only a couple ways that this goes down. One way is we change those

insane rules. And I think a liberal prime minister is the best chance of changing those rules. And I was very hopeful that this prime minister would be the prime minister to do that after he got rid of the carbon tax, some other things. But none of these rules is doing anything for the environment. That's the other single most important point. Only in Ottawa could you possibly believe that a tax is going to support global emissions in a way that China's rapid development of coal-fired electrical grids won't destroy in under three months, right? There is no program in Canada that holds a candle to the deployment of five times the total coal-fired capacity of the rest of the world combined that China is rolling out right now. There's nothing Canada can do. Canada could shut itself down tomorrow and China's increase in emissions would surpass all of Canada's carbon footprint in a couple years.

Right. So if you care about global emissions, none of these rules can. constraining Alberta's development of the fuels, many of which would help China clean its grid. Our natural gas would create such a huge dent in China's emissions that it's more than the entire carbon footprint of Canada in perpetuity. So the one thing, so this is the irony for Ottawa if you really cared about the planet and you wanted to do just one thing. You would ship as much Canadian natural gas to displace the coal-fired grid of China as you possibly could and you would remove global emissions at scale, at a scale far greater than the entire carbon footprint of

Canada. But in the process, you would make Alberta the wealthiest place on Earth. Yeah, but when Alberta is the wealthiest place on Earth, Canada's the wealthiest place on Earth. It's that much wealth. So here's the thing. We have, we're the wealthiest place in the planet. We can easily carry 40 million people that can live wherever they want in Canada. But what's been happening is we've been fighting our own federal government who has a chip on their shoulder about fossil fuels. And you've got these people like the Catherine McKinnas and others of the world, just complete failed politicians that continue to hang on with both hands to this Al Gore 1980s climate alarmism stuff that's completely unscientific. But is filled with a lot of

self-dealing conferences where you can go and make money telling people how to be greener and pushing policies that make absolutely no difference in a world where China and India are trying to move another billion people out of grinding poverty into the middle class. China is not making the world, is not admitting because they're bad people. They're admitting because they've got 800 million more people to move into the middle class and they're going to do it come hell or high water. India's doing the same thing. So is Indonesia. So is Vietnam. Vietnam's got at least two times more people in it than all of Canada, right? But they don't have our resources. So where are they going to get the resources from to run one of the world's great manufacturing nations from us or not from us if we

choose not to be in the game. But it could be from us. So the opportunity for Alberta to start to become the global superpower for energy that it needs to be is extraordinary. And that the failure to do that and actually the act of attack against that by the federal government is one of the biggest own goals ever in history. It's a complete failure for the country. And it's a complete failure for the country and it's a complete failure for Alberta. It's rooted in sad, small-minded domestic politics. And so we have to reverse that. We've got to reverse it a lot of different ways. Now, to your point about what happens when Albertans vote for things, they don't happen, one point I'd make is sometimes they don't happen right away because there's a lot going on

that you have to kind of structure to make sure that things can happen. I was very for us having a lot more autonomy in control over our pension. But you had to get a lot of a lot of stuff fixed before you could pull that file out of the vault. And I think, you know, I respect Daniel's team, but they pulled that file out too early. It's premature. And we weren't ready for prime time. You weren't able to take Albertans with you on that journey to, you know, pension autonomy. Could we? Absolutely. Should we? 100%. Will we? Yes. One day we will. But, you know, a lot of those experiences have what left me with saying, I 100% love Keith. I want to see this conversation happen.

I want the conversation to be had to happen in good faith. And it will happen in good faith. It's Alberta. By the way, Sean, you know this better than anybody being a great athlete. You know, you don't end a conversation anywhere, but especially in Alberta by calling someone a racist for questioning something. That's how you start a fight, right? I mean, I never played hockey at your level. But I'm from southern Alberta.

We played enough hockey with enough guys. And I had a good Chinese buddy that played with me, Brigh Yi. And, you know, so of course, naturally people threw a couple names around, which is a great excuse for us to clear the bench and fight on behalf of other people being racist. But Bray was under no illusions, a bunch of Southern Alberta guys. Everyone just wanted to have a good fight because we were pretty much usually losing the game anyway. And so that was a good way to vent. But you don't, these questions about what's happening with immigration are going to happen.

It doesn't matter if the East wants to find hints of racism. Albertans want to have those debates. And Albertans from every race want to have those debates openly and freely. Same thing with constitutional stuff. And same thing with this referendum. I agree with you. I think that question, if I had the question right, needs to be reframed. But look, I think it's healthy.

This is a healthy democracy. It's not only the richest democracy in the world in terms of late in wealth, it's one of the healthiest. And I'm fine that the East is lighting their hair on fire over the fact that we're going to ask people some hard questions. But I don't know what they're scared of. I really don't. And I bet a lot of people in Ontario would love the opportunity to have those questions

ask of them. Probably it's spreading, right? Yeah. One thing, although Carney got rid of the consumer carbon tax. Yeah. You still have the industrial carbon tax. Heck, in the agreement they just talked about, $130 per ton by 2040, I believe, if I remember it correct. So while we say, oh, they got rid of the carbon tax, Chris Sims is screaming in my one ear right now going, boy, wait a second, this guy didn't get rid of the carbon tax.

He shuffled it around. Chris is right. Chris is right. He didn't. In fact, it's going up six and a half times. So is that a suicide note? Yeah, it is. Nobody's going to put money into a country that does that. to themselves. No one. Here's the thing. Government to government. Governments, I did deals on behalf to the government. I signed a bunch of MOUs. It created Invest Alberta in order to facilitate doing deals that would make big industrial companies and funds feel comfortable like they had our backing to invest into Alberta. And we raised a lot of money that way over $30 billion. We drove a lot of jobs over 20,000 jobs. You know, and Keith, who's the current CEO, is doing a great job growing that.

And there's Robert Hernandez, his chair is going to be pushing it hard. So we're going to keep doing those deals. But governments don't build economies. They don't. They have to get out of the way. They have to write really clean, really clear rules, and then they have to be as small as possible. And, you know, the reason to have government involved in some industrial deals

is because the regulatory constraints on industries and on people financing industries are so onerous these days that unless you have government committing to it as well, people have a question mark, it will prevent investment actually being made. It's important to have signals from government that they're not going to stand in the way. But an MOU between two levels of government means nothing on building anything. Governments don't build things. You know, companies build things. Not to mention companies hire people.

So if governments turn around and say, not only are we, you know, we're going to agree to do this, we're going to agree to do this on the assumption that we're going to raise a tax on it by six and a half times, then a lot of global capital is going to say this is a long-term, not a place that's serious about, you know, raise a capital. But again, the thing that I want to emphasize for my liberal friends out east is that tax will do net zero for the planet and for global emissions, right? That tax makes no difference to the planet. All it does is hamper and hamstring Canadian energy production. And the world needs more of what we've got unless, of what Russia has.

We got to go compete with China against Russia. I just had an op-ed come out in the National Post this morning. You can check that out. But basically, it's my pitch for saying why Canada needs to build the Northern Gateway just to provide the heavy crude to replace what China just lost from the U.S. Navy taking out Venezuela's heavy crude. They just lost 500,000 barrels of heavy crude that's Venezuelan. Alberta, because we're the luckiest place in the planet,

always has the identical chemistry of that Venezuelan heavy crude. And we can provide it at the exact amount of volume that was just lost from Venezuela, 4% of seaborne supply to China. We can provide that with the Northern Gateway as spec, 565,000 barrels, so have access capacity in that pipeline. That would give us $15 to $16 billion in revenues, thousands of jobs, a close sort of soft power, hard power tie to China instead of us constantly being cap and hand to them. We'd actually, you know, the shoe would be on the other foot. We'd be shipping things to them. They'd badly need it.

And we'd have some leverage with our American cousins that are loving the fact that because our liberal government will let us build anything overseas with all these rules, unless they want to buy another pipeline like they did the TMX and overpay to build it, right? Then the Americans are the net beneficiaries of all these rules. they just keep taking whatever we've got and reselling it to the world with the markup after buying it from us on the Western Select discount. So Chris was right to getting your ear on that. He's totally correct.

But those are the things that are within the power of the Prime Minister to change immediately. Those announcements, if the Prime Minister turned around and said, I'm going to get rid of five bad ideas that have prevailed in this country for over decade, these are the five. You know, there would be such a love in. he would become a consequential, historically significant, Prime Minister figure because he would have created... I won't hold my breath, David.

I'm sorry. I won't hold my breath here. Because that whole party is enthralled to a set of failed green ideas that aren't scientific. And I don't know why they are. Sure. But on top of that, even if they... Okay, then look at the other part of this world and the bureaucracy

that has been set up to ensure that nothing is built. Okay, we're going to build a pipeline. First Nations... has to be consulted. And you're going to go, well, they're going to go because they're going to make lots of of money off of it. It's like, don't hold your breath. There isn't a whole lot going on in that saddle.

I mean, they just got a petition shut down. The fee simple title, the petition in Alberta shut down. That's independent. I wouldn't look. I think you, yeah, sure, but then you look to BC and you look at the fee simple title. Oh, the under-riff stuff. Yeah, that's going to be interesting to see how our Supreme Court happens that. again, you just...

Well, now we're back to the judges. Better judges. We're back to the judges and we think all of a sudden something's going to change. I mean, I sit here and I go, we're waiting on the judges, but if we go right back, full circle, the start of our conversations, we're talking about the judges, the Senate, all these different institutional powers that are working against Canada. Right.

Specifically, I heard of it. When I debate that, Keith's like, what part of this? I'll tell you, Sean, this is the person. that, you know, I've got a couple friends like Ethan are just like, your problem is you got away for too long. And then you came back to to help out do your thing, love you and respect you, but you haven't been in the trenches as long as we have fighting this stuff. The lunacy runs deeper than you think. You know, it just doesn't make any sense anymore. Like your optimism is not well-founded, bro. I mean, that's the language I get from people, right? And that's why I think, that's why I think, um, Danielle was very right to say, we're taking these

things to referendum. That's consistent with who she is. And I think conservative perspective, I think she's right to answer the, the judge activist, trying to be a politician with saying, we've got to, now the government has got to stand up for the people that wanted to express their will because this judge is misreading the laws stands intentionally, politically. And so, you know, we're going to have this referendum in spite of this judge because the judge can't rule against the government doing it. We'll see if we get another question there.

You should, I really think we should get Cory Morgan, Cory Morgan and Corey Hogan on there together. Because I know they got different views on this and I think it would be great for you just to say, Corey, and then ask whatever question you want and see what happened. Well, that's assuming they'd come on the podcast. You know, once upon a time when you were last time, you're like, Jason Kenney should come on. I'm like, we should make that happen. I don't see it happening, but maybe he would. And here we sit. You know, like I've had my own roadblocks of trying to get the other side to come on.

I assume they look at the list of people who come on and they go, this guy will never give me a fair shake. And that's funny because I try my best to allow people to express their thoughts and their concerns and everything else. That's what I've developed over time. And yet, as I've developed it, one of the major flaws in it is a certain portion of the population of leadership, etc., looks at it and goes, I don't want to, I don't think I want to go expose my views there. Right. Look, people have the right to call it like they see it. And I just think that it's healthier for all of us to get it. partly i think we have to have some humility just as humans and know we're going to get it we're

trying to get it all right all the time but we're going to get it 80% of the right 80% right 80% right most of the time and that margin is is figured out or refined in the course of real conversations sean i salute you for doing it it's not an easy job i don't i don't disagree on getting at 80% of the 80% right most of the time the problem is is in the 20% it feels like all the big issues are in the 20%. Yeah, right? Like, I just go back to the petition. Like the let the, there's 300,000 Albertans that want this to go. So then they're going to say, and I can hear Daniel says, well, we're going to have a referendum. But then we can both agree. The question doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now as it sits. So are they actually getting their say or no?

No, they're not. We point to BC and we go, well, they'll eventually get it right. We'll see which way the court rules. Okay. So you're telling let's wait. Oh, let's. let's wait, okay, and see what the courts say. But the courts continue to do things that is complete insanity. And we go, okay, so in five years, we just get more confirmation that they're insane or they're ideologically captured or whatever it is. Yeah, but there's also a short run long run considerations. And I think one of the things is conservatives that we need to get better at is we need to have a view of the, you know, take the U.S. example. The U.S. had a massive issue with judge activism, and some guys got entrepreneurial and started the Federalist Society and just defended basic precepts of a conservative view of the law as it stands, you know, constitutionalists.

And over time, have graduated thousands of lawyers with a contrarian view to sort of the leftist, you know, law as policy approach to things. and that's made a huge difference in in America. But some of those, some of those trees you plant policy-wise take years to grow. And that can lead to a lot of frustration. But, you know, we've got to be doing stuff today that's going to make a big difference a little while from now. You know, conservatives have got to really be careful right now, my view,

which is I hear rumblings of this kind of antagonism to the premier and a desire to like walk away and she betrayed us and all this other stuff. And I'm just like, are we going to do what we did before and let the NDP come in because we've decided that we're going to cross our arms and stay home or we're going to fight amongst ourselves? Because if you're looking for a better, you know, a politician ready to lead than a Jason Kenny or a Daniel Smith, two very different people. But these are good people.

And if you want to sort of say, let's do it. and 80-20 on where they're going to get it right. I think Daniels did a phenomenal job. Everybody knows I came back to help Jason get elected. We won in the landslide. We got a lot of those policies done. I did that for Alberta. I wasn't doing that for Jason. Jason's doing stuff for Alberta. Now, he and I have a different view on many things. We don't share the same view on a lot of things. So when people tell me, oh, you know, he betrayed, I'm like, look, I had a very different view than Jason did on COVID and how to approach it, right? A very different view than a lot of people on a lot of things. But the point is, you played a team sport. I played a team sport. If you and I

were playing a sport together, we could disagree on some stuff, but you can be guaranteed. You would never ask yourself if I would grind in the corner when the time came and vice versa. And I think that's what we got to get back to as conservatives. I think we've got to get the unity required to go into that referendum and answer those 10 questions. in goodwill, but there's an enormous opportunity in those 10 questions being created by the Premier's office. It might not like everything she's saying. There'll be other fights. You can have a leadership review. But I think as Conservatives, we really got to start thinking about what are we going to do today that's going to prepare the bright young legal mind of the future that

will be the great constitutional judge that will help us think better about how we manage these things? like what are what are the steps that are being taken now that start to create a Canada that is more prosperous because there's better policy ideas that are better communicated and we're winning elections because we're winning hearts and minds in a new way and to me that's the real challenge of the moment that's the thing Keith and I talked about in red deer is how close the election was to allowing the NDP to get back in again I just can't believe that's happening and sometimes it's our own team's expectations and unless we get what we want. We've had it. We're going to stay home. We become purist. And the problem with that is, as you know, you only win the games you grind for, right? And you got to have, like, if you had a summer where you drank too much back, your dad's farm and you got to get back in shape, it's going to be freaking painful. It is painful. Yes. I've been there, done that. Yeah, you have. And you don't, you don't want to do that. And when it comes to day. And it's six weeks of keto and training every day. And it's horrible, right?

But when we come, David, when you go to Daniel Smith, I look at it and I go, she's doing what she's always done. People are upset on both sides, which I just chuckle about. She's doing what she's always done. She's positioned it in a way of letting Albertans have their say, right? A court steps in and it makes a mess of it all, which I think was predictable. And my own court, she overrised it. And when I look at it, you go, if you want to send a clear message to Daniel Smith, if there had been no Thomas Lukassik, 300,000 people would have been a clear message. The problem is there's 400,000 and we can argue, not us, but like people can argue about the 400,000, how it was collected, the fact it wasn't challenged by First Nations, etc.

It's the status quo. The status quo got 400,000. To change that got 300,000. And so she has, she governs everyone, not just one subset of the population. Right. Yeah. And so she's sticking to the middle. And if you watch her track record, I could be wrong.

The media drums up that she's this far leading premier, but she's not. Everything she's done has been almost in the middle, has it not? And so I actually agree with you that, you know, here sitting talking about this. There's rumblings because there is rumblings of getting her out that she's betrayed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But they're the same rumblings that are happening on the other side that by having a referendum on a question of should we have another referendum on independence, she's a full-blown separatist and everything else.

And when you just take a step back, it's like she's actually just standing where she's always stood. And if there had been a million people signed either way for one side of the question, it probably would have been enough to say, I think they've spoken. That hasn't happened. Now there is 25% roughly, 20% of the voting populace of Alberta that said, we want to have this on a referendum. So she's putting it on a referendum and people can get upset about the question and everything else.

I'm upset because I just don't see it as a clear question. And the question you'd already talked about, I'm like, well, actually that question actually makes sense. And would be a clear signal to whether or not to proceed to a referendum. I mean, it's so many jumps and everything else. It's just like clarify your question, put it on the referendum so that in October, there actually is a clear direction of where people want to go. Yeah. Yeah, look, well, I think they'll get there if that question is sort of a, you know, an initial take on it.

They'll get there. And I think this is a debate that has to happen. Canada needs to be shaken up. It really does as a country. You know, it's the bottom of the G7. It's the bottom of the OECD on GDP per capita. They keep coming up with these weasily ways of trying not to look like it's terrible, but using net debt to GDP, which is hilarious.

No one uses that for any reason because it's... Only the government and the CBC try to frame Canada as getting better. There's no statistic right now that I've found that makes it look like Canada's been getting better, including we lost at the Olympics, which, I mean, what else do we come together on as Canadians, except for when Sidney Crosby wears the Canadian jersey? I mean, we lost that too. So in the last 10 years, we're only getting worse. And they try and frame it all these different weird ways, which makes zero sense to anyone. So when you say Canada needs a shakeup, yes, it does. Yeah, and Alberta's going to be the natural place where the shakeup originates.

It's just the way it happens, right? It's the way it is. It's a bunch of independent-minded ranchers and people that don't mind having a viewpoint and making it clear. I think in the process, we've got to just make sure that we keep a fair amount of unity on the conservative side. The thing that I cared a lot about when I was working with Jason and we're working on the economic comeback, is. And I like the point you made that the Premier has to work for all of Burtons, no matter what their particular vote was. But I think that in the next sort of few months, there's going to be a lot of really heartfelt debates going on. One of the things that I think is

going to be fascinated to watch is who deploys the Brexit strategy of taking back control and who deploys kind of the Pratt strategy that we've been seeing of just making the arguments much more creatively and in a way that's fun and brings out people and kind of breaks down the arguments in specific ways. The other thing that I think is going to be really interesting is if you said to me, you know, what would you think is the most productive way to spend the next couple months? I would leave the independence debate to smarter people than me that have been in the game longer, and I would go straight at the discussions of the immigration constitutional referendum pieces and be like, those are the ones that are absolutely shaping people's lives today now,

and those are the ones that will end up being litigated in court with the federal government in important ways. I want to definitely see Albertans say enough with these judges that are deeply unqualified. being given positions of power and then acting like, you know, vice viseroys that are just sort of deciding, I guess, it will of people, how they want to read the law that day based on their own personal preferences. It's such a violation of the way that it's, it's literally like some guy wearing the referees jersey, taking it off and like, you know, going after the puck himself, throwing the net and deciding that that's the game, right? You're like, this is bizarre. These guys are supposed to be calling balls and strikes, and they're trying to get in there and swing at the ball. And it's gross. It's a violation of their role.

They haven't earned it. And I want to see that referendum used to say, provincial government is going to start selecting KC's for Alberta. So we got a lot of, we're going to have a lot of wins come out of this if we handle this the right way. I guess that's the punchline. And the right way means a course. we're going to be respectful of each other and have a decent fight, but we're not going to avoid the fight. And the right way also means walking away from this with five or ten wins that established Alberta's independence on things like immigration, federal program opt-outs, judges, and the AAA Senate.

100%. Let's go. And so what I'm fired up about is, well, everyone in Ottawa sort of fixated on the, should we have a question of whether we should have a referendum. Knock yourself out on that, right? I want to see us vote all the other stuff across the eye. I mean, I'd be like, give me nine and number 10's up to you. Give me all nine. Number 10's up to you. Those first nine are critical.

Those first nine are amazing. And I'm super proud that those are on the table. David, appreciate you coming on and doing this. and appreciate you Sean Yeah until next time Okay take care