Shaun Newman Podcast - #1089 - Rob Anders

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Rob Anders is a former Canadian politician and one of the founding members of the Conservative Party of Canada. He represented the riding of Calgary West in Alberta as a Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2015, initially with the Reform Party, then the Canadian Alliance, and finally the Conservatives, having been elected at age 25 to succeed Stephen Harper. Known for his staunch conservative positions, Anders advocated for lower taxes, opposed foreign aid to countries without religious freedom, and was a vocal critic of China’s human rights record. 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] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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This is James Lindsay. This is Vance Crow and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Happy Wednesday, everyone. Happy Humpty. How's everybody doing out there? The road trip continues and we got into Aspen Crossing there a night ago. and so far, full steam ahead.

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Let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guests are former politician and founding member of the Conservative Party of Canada. I'm talking about Rob Anders. So buckle up. Here we go. Well, welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Sure. Thank you.

And Rob Anders sitting across for me. Absolutely. So first time you've been on the podcast. And so what I love to do with new guests is just tell the audience a little bit about yourself. You know, I can read a lot on the internet, but it's usually better coming from the guy himself. Yeah. Well, I've run into three political parties. So I started off with the Reform Party with Preston Manning and took over from Stephen Harper.

It was his seat previously in Calgary West. And then after that was Stockwell Day with the Canadian Alliance. And then finally, Stephen Harper when he came back as leader of the Conservative Party. So 18 plus, 18 and a half years in Ottawa as a member of parliament and worked at the National Citizens Coalition before that, which was Canadians Against forced unionism. So we did a project there and worked on the fundraising of the Reform Party. Hired Pierre Pahlia when he was 14 years old.

I was 22 to work on the phone bank for the Reform Party. What was Pierre like at 14? Keene, he tried to join the board of Preston Manning's Riding Association in Calgary, Southwest. And there's a lot of people who jockey for positions on the Manning board. So he didn't get on, but a lady that he and I both know who worked in the Harper PMO and issues management and whatever, Kristen phoned me up. And she said, is this young guy, I think he's got potential, they didn't let him on the board? Could you see a-bel get? In politics, is it like the NHL where you see an up-and-coming?

You can tell. So what at 14 is telling, you know, in hockey, it's pretty simple, right? They can skate, they can shoot, can they read the game? Yeah. Yeah. At 14, you can see that in politics. Yeah, for sure. Because A, if they care, if they love social studies, if they have social skills, if they love history, if they're quick learners. And Pierre came in, we let and listened to the other callers for an hour, and then we said,

stuck him on the phones, and within the first two hours of calling, he brought in credit card donations. For a 14-year-old kid, that's pretty good. And so you know he's got some savvy. You know, he wanted to join a board at the age of 14. That's a lot. So when you look at the last election, to me, he looked less than political savvy, or was reading whatever he thought was going to work when a lot of us are like that ain't going to work? Well, my read on the last election was that him and Jenny Byrne, who was the campaign manager, or de facto, whatever, had basically taken out Trudeau, right? And if Trudeau had still been around for last week, he would have won on the landslide. Oh, massive. It would have been rivaling what Brian

Mulroney did when he did the big sweep in 84, right? He might have even beat Brian Morrini on a percentage, right? So, I mean, it's huge. But what happened was they cut off Trudeau's head before they could take him down during the general election. And then the liberals brought in Mark Carney and for the most of the Canadian population it was a tabular rassah was a blank slate and so they didn't know about him wanting to allocate 150 trillion dollars with a T to the green agenda and know about him and the biggest swindle in history with regard to the London banks and what was going on in terms of how couldn't they know that well you know people a lot of times they're shallow there's a lot of complicated issues

that people just aren't going to go into the depths of during the middle of a campaign. Like most of the decision-making in a campaign happens in the last three weeks. Like when I worked on Senator Inhoff's campaign in Oklahoma, we raised $4 million. We spent a million dollars in the first two years of the election cycle. And then you spend a million dollars in the three weeks leading up before E-Day, which in this case is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. And so for those final three weeks here, million dollars, million dollars, million dollars. But the two years leading up to it, you're figuring out with focus groups, what do people care about, what are the inflection points, what are the hot buttons, what you're going to run at what gross rating point and what medium market, whether it's Tulsa or Oklahoma City, etc.

You use snodgrass polling to figure out how your indices are going day to day on rolling thunder, polling tabulations and stuff. You're figuring out what is it I'm going to talk about for the last three weeks of the campaign that's going to win it for us. Because we started off at a two to one disadvantage in terms of fundraising and name recognition, anything else. But Inhoff, I mean, this is an American thing, was talking about how this election was about God, gays, and guns. Now, I've never heard any Canadian politician talk about an election that way, but you can down in Oklahoma at the Roy Rogers Cowboy Hall of Fame and all the scrum of media cameras

and everything else, and we won, right? Beat them by two to one. So that's what you're doing is you're figuring out what is it that people care about that's going to shift their vote in the final three weeks of the campaign. Well, I don't know. Yeah, I stare at you and I go, you're a guy who has immense knowledge in this area. So I'm about as green as it gets or maybe I'm slowly learning. But the issues in Canada seem pretty evident at this point, right?

Like they just seem evident. And I would say they're pretty evident for all Canadians. But you being where you were and who you are probably have. a different thought process on it than I do, right? To me, the issues just seem so stark, right? Like, you go, oh, in Canada, nobody'd ever talk about, forgive me, God, gaze and guns. And then I go, I don't know, it feels like we're getting to a time where that seems more realistic than not.

Right. Like, I mean, you just go talk to people and, sure, they're worried about housing and the cost of living and things like that. there are certain things going on in our society that are undermining our society. Oh, massive. And politicians are, they seem slow to the uptake on it. It's like they're waiting for the polling to say, oh, it's time to talk about this now. Instead of just talking about it.

Yes, sometimes, like my whole career, I was often ahead of the curve. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you're talking about the bathroom bill that allows men to use women's bathrooms, When I was talking about this issue over 10 years ago, a dozen years ago, people were like, oh, what do you care about that? It's only once people start to realize, oh, this is the thing and women are getting raped and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, where they go, oh, hold on a second. We don't like the fact that Susie is competing against Jeff and swimming or rugby or whatever. And, you know, Susie's getting a bloody nose because, you know.

She's fighting a man or they're playing basketball against a man. It's like they put it in, not realize. a year to 10 years down the road what it actually means. Yeah, that's right. So sometimes, you know, you have to be careful that you're not too far ahead of an issue. I spent most of my career talking about things that were going to be a problem, but not everybody saw right away. Like, right now I go around at the Stampede Barbecues talking about human organ harvesting.

You know, I was working with Falun Gong 25 years ago when they were first being persecuted by Zhang Zemin in China. Now people are like, oh yeah, right. They're charging $30,000 for a cornea, $180,000 for a heart, $60,000 for a liver, $130,000 for a liver. And they get it now. But sometimes it takes them a while before they catch up to the issue, right? So like, you know, a politician can campaign on 100 or 1,000 different issues. but your job is to figure out the three or five during the writ period in the final three weeks that are going to resonate that are going to make the undecided voter vote for your party rather than

the other guys sure i i don't disagree with that i just in the case of pierre right during covid to me it seemed just pretty evident even if you if you didn't think there was anything wrong with the vaccine. Let's just say you were kind of like, I don't know, there's a ton of science there and I can't figure it out. The lockdowns, the isolation, no schools, the mass, everything. Yeah. And yet it took time for a politician to be like, oh yeah, we shouldn't have done that. That was sad. He's not the prime minister. He's the official opposition. From where I sit, that should give you leeway to go out and do the things and talk to the things that are, harming your civil, your people.

You got things like made. Yeah. I mean, you know, most people are like, okay, you're 95 and you just want to pull the plug, I guess. But then you get the two-tiered track system. You get all this down to where we get to such insane levels where you got a mental health issue and we're even considering that. It's hard to even fathom we could get there.

And to not talk open right, right from the. beginning about that? No, fair comment. You know? Thank God for Ron DeSantis and Christy Noem and the people who bucked the trend on that stuff. Sure. We didn't have enough of them, right?

I mean, Jason Kenney was jailing pastors right, left and center. It was egregious. I helped author the petition to help remove him from office, right? And yet, he and I were both part of the snack pack. You know, we first got to Ottawa type of thing with the reform party. But yeah, no, we were sadly lacking politicians that were willing to stand up on the COVID stuff. It took way too long.

I recently shot off an email to Dean Allison, who was a colleague of mine in the House of Commons from Ontario. And he and I used to work out in the MP gym together in Ottawa. And I was like, thank God. Well, I got to interview Dean a couple weeks ago. Yeah, thank God you're actually starting to open this up and talk about having an inquiry into it, right? Because it's long overdue. Well, I mean, the citizens led an inquiry in it, right? The National Citizens Inquiry has all the information you could ever want and then some.

Yeah. And it's all just sitting there. It's a book. Go read it. be like, holy crap. And I'm sad to see that like a guy I backed Derek Sloan, you know, for example, a lot of those characters have been ostracized, right? Max Bernier, I give Max huge credit, right, that he was, you know, at those marches,

freedom marches in Montreal, etc. I was at the stuff here in Calgary, but thank God that Max and people like that were doing it in Quebec, which had an even worse curfew situation than anything Alberta faced. And they voted back in their government. Yeah. They did it. You know, like that's what's always so special to me about a lot. Alberta. You look at everything it was done to any population in Canada. Yeah. And the only one to bucket

was Alberta. I, you know, we did polling on this issue. And we were doing it in conjunction with some of, you know, our clients, Justice Center, etc. John Carpe. And what we found was that 82% of people in Tabor, Alberta, God bless Tabor, thought the truckers were heroes. The opposite of that was north of Ottawa where the bureaucrats live in the Quebec side, which was Hall Elmer, Quebec. And that was like 60-some percent were totally fine with seizing everybody's bank accounts who contributed to the truckers. That was the polar opposite of the country, Tabor Alberta on the freedom side and Hall Elmer, Quebec on the lockdown side. So on my road trip, I should go there. If the bureaucrats will give you an honest take on what their thought process was, but that's what we

found. Even if you, even if you go back then, that's what they thought. Chances are they think starkly different to a lot of what we think out here right now. Yeah, that was the epicenter of lockdown, COVID crazy, top down government, whatever, absolutely. And we pulled from coast to coast. And Tabor, Alberta, God bless it, was the most freedom-loving, you know, pro-trucker and the lockdown and the jabs stuff going. Right. And we fight those battles still today here in Alberta. Like I got phoned up by some communications guy in the UCP a year and a half ago and was like, hey, Rob, aren't you excited that, you know, now we're going to make the jabs

voluntary for six-month-old kids, you know, excited? I said, what are you talking about? This is like thalidomide, right? Like, once you know it's bad, once you know there's adverse reactions, quit it. Like, you think that by allowing them to voluntarily put this into their children, you're going to avoid the liability, like stop it, right? And they're like, ah, you're just like Todd Lowe. And I'm like, yeah, well, good on him. I'm glad there's somebody inside cabinet who's talking about this. And Shane Getson, right?

And as another guy, he actually suffered adverse reactions as a result and spoke out about it. Thank God. Good for him. You know, we needed more of those politicians. Absolutely. How do we get more of those politicians? Because one of the things people think is, well, I don't know if they, it's just that politics is an interesting game to watch. Sure.

It's not for the faint of. heart. Sure. Thick skins. Yep. And you go, most everyday folk don't want to put themselves through it, don't want to put their families through it, and yet you look at the direction Canada's currently heading and maybe you have different thoughts, but a lot of people want a better class of politician and I think we can both agree one going in isn't going to do anything. No, you need a whole group of them to go in. I think of Kaelin Ford when I had her on, you know, the multiple times. she's been on the show, she looked at it like, you know, it's going to take a new generation to come through and really change politics. I don't know if that's the course correction

that would need to be happened and multiple people all at the same time, or if you have different thoughts. I have tremendous respect for Kalin because we've done human rights stuff about the Chinese human rights abuses together. And so she's bright and she's great. You know, part of the problem is, I remember one time I was talking to a whole bunch of pastors who came to visit me in Ottawa. And we were in the Shawno Sullivan meditation room. used to be called a prayer room and that was a comment. And they said, what can we do? And I said, well, if you have a son and he says, I want to become a youth pastor, you go, amen, that's great. And if you have, you know, a son who says, I want to get involved in politics, dad. Oh, I don't know

about that. That's a lot of mixing water with your wine. That's a lot of compromise, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, no, no, we, need good people in the public square because if you don't have good people in the public square, the bad people take over. No doubt about it. That's how it works. And there's a lot of people with a lot of agendas and access to grind in the public square. And so you need to have good people who get in there and get involved. And yeah, I mean, have I suffered seven charges from the CRA? Have I suffered attacks by the media? Have I been slammed and slandered in the CBC? And, you know, I've absolutely Sure. But that's the cost to doing business.

Like if you want to impact the public agenda, then we need people to step up to that. That's why you need to have a Kalin Ford reenter politics and run, or a John Carpe to jump into it, or a Shane Getson to stay. Or, you know, et cetera. Like, you need these people inside. Because otherwise, you're guaranteed to have your society run by bad actors. Guaranteed. You've been from the West standpoint, right, going back to the reform days. Like the reform, I think, showed that it was a popular idea, maybe beyond a popular idea.

And as the idea of the reform, when I read about it, because obviously I was not paying attention to politics back then, born in 86, right? So, you know, the days of the reform, I was not worried about politics. But when I read about it, I go, that's a sound idea. And then a sound idea got amalgamated with what is the current idea. which a lot of people, specifically in Alberta, go, this is our problem. In order to get in and be government, you have to give over a lot of what needs to be done to the east and the two sides that don't see Canada is the same, right? They're very polar opposites in a lot of things.

When you go back and look at the journey of the reform and then amalgamating and becoming that, you know, do you go, man, we should have stayed the reform? Or it was just inevitable? I was one of the MPs that maintained we should have stayed the reform party exactly the way we were. I fought for that at the conventions in terms of the name and constitution and various things. The beautiful thing about the reform party was these were a lot of people who were independent actors, right? When you looked at a Myron Thompson, right, he was going to wear his cowboy hat and be Myron Thompson, right? art hangar beautiful calgary police service anti-corruption great cop honored to serve with you know

etc you had men that were self-made the darrell stinson's who was a minor you know these these guys ted white who sold a telex business was independently wealthy and worth multi-milliones and corporate real estate and stuff like that these were guys um who they weren't ass kissers they weren't greasy pole climbers, they weren't that type of politician. And it was beautiful to be in a caucus of those people because they were independently minded. And to give Manning his credit, he was good with recruiting those people, right? You have to have a leader who's okay with people being willing to tell the emperor he's not wearing clothes, right? You have to be willing to have a leader who's willing to push the envelope and allow the MPs to, you know, talk about immigration, talk about crime,

talk about issues that are controversial. And Manning allowed us to do that, right? But as the party went on and it became the Canadian Alliance and then it became the Conservative Party, you had more and more of these ones who were, oh, you know, the guy's been a municipal politician. They know his name. Yeah, maybe he's not that ideological, but let him run for us because he has name recognition in the area and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they got safer and safer. Because as we got to the point where we could govern, then you had people who were like, oh, I want to be at the trough. want to be in there when we become government, right? But with the Reform Party, especially the candidates we had like an 88, these guys didn't think we stood a snowball's chance and help,

but they did it because they believed in the cause. And so those types of candidates are beautiful because they're true believers, you know, and you have to have a leadership that's okay with people in the caucus who might challenge them, who might say at a caucus meeting, well, I disagree with you on that, and here's why. You know, very few leaders I've seen are good at handling even constructive criticism. And that's sad because that's what a caucus is supposed to be. They're supposed to be able to tolerate that type of dissent and to hear the feedback from the grassroots. And so you sometimes get those people and they're beautiful and special and, you know, you need to get more of those types of people involved in politics for sure. You don't need to wait a

generation. You just need to have a generation that wakes up, right? And I think in Alberta, what I've seen for the United Conservative Party and the Mitch Sylvester's in the Dennis Modries and the, you know, the David Parkers and all that organization that's going on, is you've had a number of people who seized control of these boards and have the party executive and said, yeah, we're not going to put up with what we put up with before. We're changing things. And we're going to have a referendum. We're going to talk about independence, talk about pensions, talk about corporate taxes, you know, etc., etc.,

good. You know, we need that. You need to have an open, frank discussion about where Alberta is going and what we need if we're going to stay in this. You know? Lots of people think the word would be agenda, right? You're a guy who's, I mean, your career of being on the inside, for lack of a better way of saying it. Sure. Yeah. Okay.

I believe there's an agenda going on. I mean, directing us to 2030 or Paris Climate Agreement. Right. Lots of these different. That's a real thing. Depopulation. That's all real. 100%.

Well. Yeah. It's all real. Well, I guess I just go, what are your thoughts on the actual agenda or is that the agenda? Well, I would say there's different agendas. Like, I'll tell you my agenda. Sure. Okay, my agenda is freedom, right?

So I look at Wyoming, okay, and it's the lowest tax state in the lower 48. It competes with Alaska in terms of how big the oil rebate is in Alaska. But like in Wyoming, they have no state income tax and they have the lowest combination of value added taxes and also fuel taxes. Beautiful. Now, Wyoming doesn't have a big stadium and it doesn't have a ballet and it doesn't have like an orchestra. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with this bare bones minimalist libertarian style government, right? Awesome.

Fantastic. That's my vision of Alberta, right? I mean, I want to keep government small, taxes low, pro-gun, you know, freedom, etc. But there is obviously people who believe in this 2030 stuff and everybody's going to be driving electric vehicles and they're going to be driving electric vehicles and they're going to restrict how much water you use and they're going to tell you what you can eat and you know blah blah blah blah blah blah blah right and you can't have guns and you know and i don't agree with that so there's there's a real worldview battle going on right and somebody like mark carney who says i want to allocate 150 trillion with a tea to the green agenda that's four and a half times the u.s national debt that's a hundred

times the canadian national debt from we took over from droo right that's not just his money that's not just Canada's money. That is like world money that he wants to allocate to that. That's a control freak. When you want to allocate $150 trillion to that agenda, you're a control freak, right? You're a banker who's gone wild

on environmental globalist, you know, world economic forum ideology, right? And I think that stuff needs to be stopped. And what I would advocate to somebody like Pierre Paulyev is figure out what it is that Toronto hates about Mark Korn. because he is a top-down, authoritarian, arrogant guy who doesn't even like the liberals inside his own caucus, and beat that drum until the cows come home.

Because if it resonates in Toronto, it'll resonate in Vancouver and in every place else you need it to be so that you can get rid of this guy. That's my take on what Pierre should be up to. You go back to the men and women's bathrooms. Yeah. You know, from a decade ago. Yeah. Why did they allow that to go through? Well, if you want to really understand the depth of that transgenderism,

there is Michael Smith was an activist back in probably in the 70s. And there's a Republican member of Congress who wrote, sorry, read his letter. He created a manifesto, okay? It was like a transgender manifesto. And one of the congressmen, a Republican congressman, actually read it into the record back in the 1980s. You can look it up, Congressional Record, Michael Swift letter. blah blah, blah, manifesto. And you read it. And it's very clear that they've got an agenda, right, this transgenderism stuff, to blur the lines between male and female and, you know,

all this hoo-ha that's going on. When you read it, you realize how far they've come. Now, nowadays, if you were to talk to somebody, you know, and say, well, what about this? They would laugh it off and say, wow, that's just a joke, you know. But no, it's, that's a real thing. And unfortunately, this, allowing boys to beat up girls in sports, and allowing men to use women's bathrooms and these hormone blockers, these chemicals that they use on kids and these transgender surgeries paid for by taxpayers. That's all part of it. That's all part of it. And it's sad. And I think, you know, we need to fight that stuff because, you know, if somebody who's 30 years old decides they want to go ahead and, you know, castrate themselves,

okay, if you do it on your own dime, that's your business. But I, I, I, um, I just don't, I just don't, I think in history, we'll look back at these moments and say, we were using taxpayer dollars to mutilate kids, you know, and allow girls to get beat up in sports. There's nothing right about that. It's messed up. It's gender role reversal, right? I mean, some of the great historians, you know, Edward Given to climb and follow the Roman Empire, Arnold Toynbee, you know, study of history, William Durant, you know, etc. And his wife these great macro historians understood that the civilizations usually go down and fall because they basically subvert themselves. The enemy is within. You know, Cicero talked about that in the Roman

Republic, right, a long time ago, the idea that the enemy is not those at the gates, you know, in our situation, is it the communist Chinese, is it the Islamic jihad, is it, you know, whatever, Iran, whatever, is it Russia, is it Putin, whatever? Well, really, the most feared, is the one that is within inside the city gets, that whispers in the common language of the people of the polis of the city, and literally undermine it and subvert it from within. Those are the most dangerous elements by far. Well, and it feels like in Canada we have that. Oh, absolutely. Well, there's so many aspects of this. I mean, when you have a bureaucracy that because of affirmative action is allowed to be filled with all sorts of foreign operatives, right? The Canada Revenue Agency, for example,

that. You have the United Front for China has 575 different front organizations, whether it's the Confucian institutes or etc., operating in our universities. They send their doctors over here to learn how to use our immunosuppressant drugs and our surgical techniques and how to mess with people's definition of brain death so they can extract organs off of political prisoners there. We're complicit when we allow them to have cadaver art that's displayed at, for example, at the University of Calgary and it's paid for with taxpayer dollars and those are actually the bodies of political prisoners. We're like we're contributing to this stuff. We're allowing it to happen. We're condoning it, right? I was shocked when I fought the bathroom bill in the House of Commons

that we didn't have more MPs, you know, we should have defeated that on second reading. Obviously Randall Garrison or somebody like that can bring it up in first reading, but the idea that the broad swath of the members of parliament, you know, at that time, wouldn't vote that down, knowing that allowing men to use women's bathrooms. And frankly, let's say it, like some of these guys are disturbed, you know, to go ahead and commit sex crimes, etc. against women and bathrooms. It's just wrong.

It should have never been allowed. Right. So we need to have more decent people with common sense that are not politically correct, to run for office, to get involved, to be on boards, to seek nominations, to sit on party executives, etc. It's happening in Alberta. God bless Alberta, but we need to have it happen in other places in the country too. Well, we've seen, you know, I think of the Conservative Party, but it's probably, it isn't just the conservative party, it's probably all parties. Like, in order to become a nominee for your area, you've got to go through the process of a political party.

And I find there have been lots of votes spoken people try. Yes. and then be when you're not allowed. Yeah. So how do you get around? I think there's a lot of people that fit the bill of what you're talking about that have tried and then get, no, you're not allowed to run it. Oh, you raised all that money?

That's great. We're going to take your money. See you later. Thanks again. We're going to take you off on some technicality. Nope. So like from population, it just seems like there is more and more every day the will to be exactly what you say.

Oh, let's just get in. let's change it. Then they find out, wait a second, you've got to jump through the hurdles to get to where you even names on the bill. So that takes out some of the most

staunch people that are against some of the things going on. That is true. Okay, so now you take that population, you throw it over here. Then there's a few who get in. Then they're kind of on an island, so to speak, because they've found a way to navigate it.

That's right. But you've got to navigate the process even to be on there. That's true. True. Then you get in. Now you've got a lot of your, let's call them colleagues who didn't get through, got taken out in the process.

So I think for the average person they're going, wait a second, it feels like the only way we're going to get this is if we start a new party. We go down the way of the reform or take your pick, the wild rose here in Alberta. But then the process takes a long time. This isn't, you know, maybe, I guess my brain's being really. reframed on what a long time actually means. But then what happens from my eyes is you start a new party, and then they're for sure going to infiltrate and put disturbers in there to make sure that

it can't get off, because now we'll split the vote. We'll cede the voter base with all these ideas of, oh, don't be voting there because that'll be scary, news scary. And so I see from a lot of the public, they're just almost apathetic. to the entire process now because of what's going on. So you want the new people. Yes, but we're going to screen them to a level which a lot of them can't get through. Well, politics is not a sprint.

It's a marathon. Marathon. Right? So, you know, I was involved with the Reform Party where we were miffed with the Tories, right? We didn't like the goods and services tax. We didn't like the stacking of the Senate. We didn't like the CF18 contract going to Bombardy rather than Winnipeg and other. blah, blah, blah, blah, but the list goes on.

We didn't like them being soft on crime, you know, getting rid of capital punishment. Like, there's a whole bunch of issues. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this hasn't been overnight. This has been a long journey. Yeah. So what you do is you say, okay, well, we're going to take a staunch, good common sense, conservative. We're going to run them for the nomination.

If they don't win the nomination, okay, maybe we're going to run them as an independent. Maybe we're going to run them as a Christian Heritage Party candidate. We're going to run them as the Reform Party or the People's Party or the whatever to suck away some of the votes to say, you know what, you didn't allow a good person to run. so we're going to punish you. And then the other thing is in in maybe they run for a different level of government. They'll run for provincial and if the same thing happens, okay, fine, you know, but the other thing as well is municipal, okay? You can have those people run for municipal office. There, you just put down a deposit, get 100 signatures, you're good to go, right?

There's no party executive, there's no Puba, there's no leader who has to sign off on it, right? So then that person gets elected municipally, well now they've got a platform and they've got name recognition, it's much easier for them to now run for, say, for example, a municipal non-s, sorry, provincial nomination or federal nomination. So there's ways that can be done. Is it arduous? Can it be arduous? Absolutely. But then the other thing is when we talk about the agenda, you have people that are progressive, that are whatever globalist, you know, whatever transgender, who try to control and control the bottlenecks, the choke points in the process, right? Okay. Well, then get your people into control the choke points in the process.

right like I was talking to a guy just in the last couple days who is involved with get out the vote and vote identification whatever he helped carrielyn finley win the conservative leadership race in british columbia and i said to him i said well you know you're probably going to be involved in the ucp nominations here and he says yeah and i said well what's that going to look like you know are they going to be taking people who are independent minded and say they're not welcome or are we going to tip the scales the other way or what's going to go on and he said well i know your concerns I share your concerns and he said, I'm going to try to make sure that as many independent money people get in as possible.

Yeah, I've seen the, what would it be, the form to submit in order. And one of them is, you know, talking about freedom groups. Yep. It's a funny thing. And I'm sure they justify by like, well, we're not a freedom party. Right. We're not an independence party. Right.

We're for being a sovereign Alberta and United Canada. I can just hear the political talk. talk of how you talk yourself through that. And yet, you know, there's a ton of people that have been a part of, I mean, think of the darkness that COVID was, how many people that you want to run fought against COVID? Yeah. And that would put them in a select group of, well, do we want these people? No, you're exactly right.

And let's face it, there are people inside that caucus and that cabinet. They're guarding their own asses because they feel liability with regard. to some of the stuff they were involved in part of, right? Not an unfair comment, given what went down. And so we just have to keep on maneuvering, right? Whether it's... I think that's... Sorry, I think that's what...

Coming from the hockey world, you know, and certainly staring at the NHL and seeing the moves being made and everything. I didn't realize... Now, it's maybe a poor example, but I didn't realize when I first started into discussing politics, following politics, getting to interview the Premier and, you know,

the Shane Getsons, the list goes on of different MLAs. Just how much it resembles hockey and that you have to be strategic. And, you know, I would have, you know, in a younger, a younger Sean would have probably said, we need everything. But I see it as now, it's, it's, it's the, it's a, it's a marathon.

It is a long journey. And even if you won tomorrow, you're going to be fighting the next fight. Yep. And that's going to kin, well, I mean, I look at all these books and I go, what do they teach you when you read them? They've been fighting a different or similar type of fight throughout all history. Sure. Like, this isn't, it's just our day, but you can go back and read others who've had their own versions of it in their own history.

Yeah. Like I think of an example of, you know, Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. He became prime minister. And there was an ir, there was an uprising. in Ireland at the time. And they elected an Irish nationalist into the House of Commons. And the king, King George at the time, said over my dead body, will that Irish nationalists sit? And Wellington said, well, I think that's unwise, sir. And he said, no, I want you to turn from away and have another election. Well, they did. They had another election and an even

fiercer Irish nationalist was elected with an even larger majority. And they burned effigies of the king and destroyed the crown post offices and everything else. And Wellington came back to the king. and he said, well, I did what you asked, and look what we have. And the king said, hold another election. He says, well, sir, I'll tell you what. I won't be doing that. I can resign as your prime minister, and then you can hold another election. The king said, well, that's preposterous.

You know that the Tory government will fall. He says, right. So the Irish nationalists will sit then. And King George agreed to it because he realized that if he lost Wellington, he would lose the country. And so he allowed the Irish nationalist to sit. And so the thing that I would say with regard to Quebec, because I've had people asked in my board and years past, oh, why do we allow those blockies to sit, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Well, because if you don't, the repercussions are probably worse, right? And I would say with regard to Alberta independence, and I would say this to Daniel Smith, if you don't allow people to run for the nominations that are part of your party. It'll blow up in your face. Exactly. Yeah. I remember watching. Listen to the grassroots.

I remember watching, forget, me who was the, well, he probably still is the block leader that was on stage with, you know, the national debate for who's going to be the next prime minister. And he had the block and the green, the conservative, the liberal and the NDP. And they asked a question. And the block leader said, I don't want to be prime minister. Don't even ask me. And I remember thinking, what the heck is he even there? This makes no sense. Like, I'm trying to make sense of this. And the further you get in, you just, you know, and start to understand and educate yourself on politics. and how it operates, you're like, he's there because the powers need him to be there.

And once you understand that, then you go, oh, Alberta or anywhere in out Canada, for that matter, if organized, can have the exact same thing. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the Reform Party was that at one point in time, at least in my eyes from what I can see. Oh, 100%. I remember having a conversation with Bill Blakey, who's since passed away, but he was the dean of the parliament at one point and should have been the leader of the new Democratic Party. He was a tall 6'5-imposing Scottish gentleman with a barrel chest who gave a great question and question.

He was a great parliamentarian. And I remember him talking to me one time and he said to me, you were the NDP of the right. Why would you guys ever give that up? Because you were able to influence the agenda. We changed the debate on Kyoto with Bob Mills, you know, etc. We turned a lot of things. We got them to balance the budget, which they would have never done without us, you know, etc., etc. And so I think the Reform Party brought a lot to the table and changed the nature of the debate in the country.

It was wonderful. And I would have been happy to stay with the Reform Party. I was fine with that. Manning had aspirations to become Prime Minister, et cetera, and so wanted to change it over to the alliance. And in doing so, lost it to Stockwell Day, ironically. But Bill Blakey made a good point, right, to stick your ground and to articulate your position on behalf of your region or your region. ideology or whatever is a good thing. And I think Jay Hill and I have a similar perspective on this. He came in, you know, we were jockeying for who was going to be official opposition with the block

of I bickwa, right? But over time, when you deal with the block and I dealt with them, some of them were on my floor in the House of Commons where my office was in West Block. And you realized, like, they said to us years ago, right, you had these guys who were like, why do you pay taxes to Ottawa? Why do you not do your own pension? Why do you not, you know, do your own EI? Why do you, you know, and these blockis were telling me this, you know, two decades ago, you know, and they were right. Alberta was a patsy. We were, we were subsidizing socialism across the rest of the country, you know. Why were we overpaying pensions by three billion a year, paying in corporate taxes at eight billion a year, overpaying for employment insurance to the tune of hundreds of millions, over-contributing 12 billion a year, doing equalization, losing three, $321 billion over all that time.

Had we actually stood up and said, no, we're going to do everything that Quebec does, plus we want to have greater control over immigration like Manitoba and Quebec do, et cetera. The leeway, the leverage that we would have had to shift the country away from that socialist mentality would have been tremendous and we should have done it. I remember when Diana Blancy and I were articulating for a change in the Canada pension plan. Martin wanted to take it from a 5.5 contribution rate up to a $1.5.5 contribution rate up to 9.9. And we didn't like it. We had Scott Reed at the time, who was a researcher for us. He's a brilliant member of parliament. His family owns Giant Tigers, probably most independently wealthy

members of parliament, very well read. And he said, why don't we do a pension system like what they do in Chile that was recommended by Milton Friedwin, the Chicago School of Economics, where you have a self-directed fund. Let's pick a number. Let's say, you know, you put in 3%, your employer puts in 3%. You have a total 6% that's saved in your pension. You could do the same in AI. You put in 3%, your employer puts in 3%, now you've got 12%. If you were like my father, you never collected a day of employment insurance in your life, you'd have 12% of your entire savings, right, over your lifetime as whatever it was, whether you were janitor or president of a company, whatever, saved up. It's a beautiful system. Chile, as a result, had one of the

best soundest financial systems in Latin America. Imagine if Canada had that. Imagine if Alberta had that. Way better than the Ponzi scheme that the Canada pension plan is. You know, And we had Ontario at the time with Harris that didn't want to do it. Quebec was out. All we needed was Ralph Klein to not go on side with raising the contribution rate from 5.5 to 9.9. But because Ralph Klein and Manning, Preston Manning didn't get along, Ralph didn't do it. Had we not gone along with it?

I know. I know. It's heartbreaking because we would have a way better pension system as a result of it. Okay. So two men from Alberta, like the West, Ralph Klein, Preston Manning or almost put up as the

Wayne Grexke's of politics. Sure. And what you just said is because of personal differences they didn't do something that was smarter. You know how sad that is to hear? That is, it's heartbreaking.

There's a lot of heartbreaking stories in politics. So one of the things I have, since COVID, I've tried to wrap my brain around. Yeah. Because I'm like, there are great ideas

all across the planet on how to do things properly so everyone benefits, people benefit, government benefits, corporations benefit, the environment benefits. Sure. Why are we, and by we, I mainly mean politicians, so resistant to that. Is it because the population wouldn't be on side for it? Or is it because of what you just said, personalities clash? And then they're like, Mom, I'm not supporting that guy and his idea, even if it means the betterment of your population. Yeah, there's a lot of egos. Like politics,

is television for ugly people, right? Like, there's a lot of, really. Like, it's a lot of rock stars, want to be rock stars who can't play a guitar or sing, right? Like, that's, that's politics, right? So, unfortunately, you get a lot of that. But the beautiful stuff is, is the ideas, right? Like, that's, so like, for example, we talk about some good ideas. Florida. Florida allows you to have your principal residence safe from creditors coming after it. They can go after other assets, but not after your principal residence. Why does Donald Trump, Why does Madonna? Why does Sylvester Stallone have their residence?

Because it's pretty self-black, right? It's pretty self-explanatory. Exactly, right? Because they have the principal residence that's untouchable. Great. Brilliant idea. As a result, I'm going to get all the world's billionaires, millionaires, trillionaires. Great idea.

Thumbs up, right? You have a bunch of states in the United States that have no state income tax, seven of them. New Hampshire, Tennessee, you know, Florida, Wyoming, Washington. I mean, hockey fans get it. Why go play in Florida? Pretty self-explanatory. Exactly. They get it.

Yeah. I had a friend of mine who was a U.S. Marine that helped remove Noriega in Panama, right? And one of the things he had was he said, well, if 10% is good enough for God, it's good enough for government. So no tax should be about 10%. Brilliant idea. Right? It's biblical. It's great.

It's fantastic. Right. So there's these types of things that you can do that protect people, protect private property. right um yeah i i you know we obviously i like the gun laws a lot of times in the united states better than they are here you go to idaho okay which is just almost directly south it's a beautiful state right you go to i go to a gun show in idaho and i pick up a 1911 right i can slap that sucker on my hip and walk around i don't need a license i don't need a registration nothing i can protect myself it's hunky donkey canada used to be that way

Right. But we allowed the federal government to just get in and machinate and the end of the day. Like some of the earliest gun laws we had were concerned about the Thienian raids because there were these Irish nationalists that might rise up against the British Empire, right? And then it was, you know, duck lake and batosh. And you can't allow natives to have, you know, you know, rifles, you know, with barrels with rifling on it. Because then they might be more accurate than the soldiers, right? And the Northwest Mountain Police. whatever, right? Or, you know, when there was the big scare with the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, you know, it was Arthur Mien who came in on behalf of the Borden government and said,

oh, well, we got to register handguns. And so, but because that's private property, just like your truck, right, it was early in those days. It was the province. It was Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia that issued the first handgun licenses. Alberta and Saskatchewan refused to because they don't believe in it, Right. And then later on, because of the depression and because of the size and the scope of government and the big new deals that were introduced in Canada and the United States, all of a sudden government grew and they got in with their machinations on the criminal code and anything else. But licensing and registration of something like a fire aren't more of a truck, that should still be provincial. That should not be a federal thing. We've allowed them to morph into areas that they have no business in. But there's things that you can do to set Alberta up with firewalls. right to make sure like if Alberta did its own corporate taxes its own pension its own employment insurance you know its own immigration you know etc etc just on four or five key issues everything that Quebec's already got beautiful and then I would add to that

I would say I don't I don't want them telling me through environmental regulations that I no longer have mineral rights that earn a spanning platform no I want to have power of a selection of judges So what's, like, when I read Firewall Letter, et cetera, like this isn't new information? No, I feel like this is about as old as it gets. You know, obviously it's not 100 years old, but I'm sure if you go back 100 years, I could read some things on Albertan saying things and you'd be like, holy crap, they were talking about that. So what, like, I think politicians and political nerds would tell me there's no political well. political will.

I mean, all these seem pretty almost, I dare say, common sense. Sure. And you go, so what political will, to me, it's actually an opposite thing then. We lack a political backbone from the people in office to just go do it. Oh, yeah. A lot of times your politicians are far more cowardly and whatever than the general population. It's like, let me give me an example. One of the best town halls I ever took in.

was when Diana Blonsey was a Reform Party candidate back in the 90s. We had an accountant by the name of Dave Amundsen, who since passed away, God rest of soul. And what he did is he took the entire federal budget, which basically is like a telephone book with a bunch of gobbly group and propaganda. Sure. He boiled it down to an eight and a half by 14 legal-sized piece of paper

on both sides. Okay, so an eight by 14, both sides, with everything line randomized. You could boil a federal budget down to that. And what he did was, we gave everybody a copy of that. And then we broke up into groups, let's say eight or ten people at a group. And everybody had a choice.

They could either vote to say we're going to cut it by 25%, 50%, 70%, 100%. We needed that time to cut the budget by 25% to balance it. And then we brought them all back together. They loaded it all in the computer, added up the numbers, you know, figured out what was going on. And meanwhile, Diane gave her song and dancer talking, you know, about being a candidate or whatever. And by the end of it, that group of people, those several hundred very average people in Calgary, Alberta, had cut the federal budget by 50%. Had balanced it and created a surplus. And that was less cowardly and more direct and whatever than what the politicians in Ottawa were capable of doing.

So a lot of times, you know, when it comes to issues like capital punishment or guns or immigration or, whatever, the population is actually better than your elected representatives. Your elected representatives are probably tending toward lawyers, probably tending toward elitist, probably tending toward globalists, you know, etc. But the people at large are generally far better on the issues. So, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said in Canada and Alberta's example to move to more Swiss model, right? The Swiss have direct democracy and they vote on a lot more things when they go

to vote for their Canton elections. you know, and I think it's a great way to go. Takes it out of the hand of the politicians, put it in the hands of the people. So then is it, like they talk about the, you know, Trump would say, draining the swamp, what is that? That's the bureaucracy that surrounds the politicians. You look at the money, the corporations and giant things that I probably can't even begin to understand and their interests in cutting the federal budget by 50%, I think.

Yeah, it's doable, but there's going to be. corporations and people out there that are going to fight vehemently against that to make sure it doesn't happen because of where that loose money is gone. Part of the problem is you need to have politicians that are elected to have managerial experience. Let me talk to that. So we have a politician who I hope is still with us, but he's retired. Steve West. Okay, he was from my area. There you go. You know him. All right. That man probably was in charge of maybe five or six different departments when he was there under Ralph Klein as a minister. And he would cut those anywhere from 30 to 70 percent. The average was 50 percent. He would go in,

and he called it going Rambo. He would meet with the deputy minister and he would say, okay, I want to have a letter on my desk tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. You can spend the whole day doing it. That's fine. And I want to have 50 percent reduction in the costs of this department. And we're going to do it in a year and have it on my desk at 8.m. If you can't do that, then you have your letter of resignation, your choice, which one it is. And in one department, he had to go through five. You know, the deputy minister, the assistant deputy minister, etc., etc., until they got somebody who understood.

If I don't do this, I'm out of a job. I'm out of a job, right? And he did that. And God bless him, because as a result, Alberta eliminated our deficit. We actually got rid of our debt. We paid back Ralph Bucks, right? Steve West was the guy who delivered, you know, the Alberta advantage. You know what's crazy? I've never interviewed Steve West.

You got to interview Steve West. Before he dies, hopefully, I hope he's still alive with us. But he's a great guy. As far as I know, Steve West is still alive. Yeah, I hope so. He's a wonderful, he deserves a statue. If any politician in Alberta deserves a statue of Steve West. Right.

So you need that type of person, right? And just one man like that was able to write about six different departments in the Klein government. Right. So you need a guy like that. And ideally, you need several, right? Like we had a senator, Senator Braley. Okay, very smart, savvy business guy, ran the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger Cats, right? Very successful business guy.

Had guys involved, you know, buddies of his in auto-packed and cars and, you know, everything else. I sat with him on a scrutiny of regulations committee, it was a joint committee of the House and the Senate. I used to sit and have breakfast with him in the East Block cafeteria. And that guy was a business genius, right? He would say, ah, well, you got something to the Federal Business Development Bank, it's about $6 billion in assets? Okay. What you do is you say, all right, you know, in the first three months, we're going to cut it back from having, you know, let's say 12 different regional offices, just having four in the various regions. Then the next three months, we're going to cut it

back to one office, probably in Ontario, Ottawa, whatever. Then after that, we're going to sell off all the assets you can sell off to the charter banks. And by the time we get to the 12 month, it's done. That's a corporate business guy. He knows how to take a ridiculously bleeding, bloated government bank that has worse lending restrictions than the private sector banks do that is basically involved in political correctness, etc. He knows how to right size it. He's a business guy, right? But somebody like him, because of the Duffy scandal and all that type of stuff, $100,000 years a senator was a joke to him and he wasn't fully utilized for what this guy could do. So he was there for a year or two, resigned, went back to business.

But those are the types of people you need. If you want to right size government, you need people with a Millie type of mindset in Argentina, right, and with the managerial executive ability of like a Senator, you know, Braley or Steve West, etc., to go in to do it. In Canada, do you see somebody of that? Well, we have them. We have the Steve West, we have the Senator Braley's, we have these guys. But you also have to have politicians with spines that are willing to utilize those people, right?

Like Braley was there. he could have been utilized. He would have been happy to cut a department to zero in 12 months. Absolutely. Right. But he wasn't another example, Maxim Bernier. Okay. When Maxim was there, the cabinet was asked to cut their departments by 10%. Max said, okay, I'll cut it by 20. Good for him. It wasn't allowed to. Why wasn't he allowed to? Because it's too much, too fast. You see what I'm saying? Like you have to have people, if you got a guy who's willing to run with the ball to the end zone, let him do. it. And there are people like that. Like, Flaherty was actually a bigger fiscal hawk than Harper was.

Right. He was the one who didn't like Mark Carney. He was the one who opposed some of the stuff he was doing. Right. Because Mark Carney was the one who sold off all of Canada's gold bullion, right? Like in 1965, Canada had 2,500 tons of gold underneath the Bank of Canada in the vaults, underneath Spark Street in Ottawa. Had we not had it announced, Canada would have had the the third largest gold reserves in the world after the United States and Germany. It would be the third largest standing gold reserve in the world. Bigger than China, bigger than Russia. Right?

But it was all sold off. Right? We have nothing to back the currency. No silver, no gold bullion, what's certain? The only thing we have is in mince to mint coins. That's it. So when you look at Mark Carney and you go, he's obviously a clever guy. Smart, yeah, sure.

But a smart guy in a very dark way because... Once again, I sit here, I'm just an average guy. The more I learn about precious metals, I go, I can't see those going down anytime soon. And I mean, we just came off a giant run where you talk about, forgive me, third largest reserve? Third largest in the world. Canada would have the third largest.

Would have had, would have had the third largest reserve. And anyone who spends an hour of research, it might even be less, would go, yeah, we should probably hold on on this. Like, I mean, full stop in the next, when did that occur? 1965. Because once you start to go off. No, no, no, but Carney didn't sell it off in 1960s.

No, no, he sold off that stuff under Harper, so 2000-ish, 2000. So 20-some years ago, not even then. Let's say in the last 20 years, is that safe? Yeah, well, for sure. In the last 20 years, he sold off. And anyone who spent an hour? of research. Would have known that was a horrific idea.

And I don't think Carney didn't know that. Oh, he knew exactly what he was doing. Right. So if he knew exactly what he was doing by selling off all the gold. Can I tell you why? Yes. Yeah.

So when you're the banker that he is, when you do that, you know you are destroying the currency. You know that. There's no question about it. And you know that you are creating the crisis and the panic condition to bring in central bank digital currency.

Because if you don't have gold or silver bullion... So 20 years ago, he was going, the only way we're... I mean, I'm ad living here for the audience, but you go, if we get rid of our precious metal stores, what we can insure in in 20 years is the central bank digital currency. Because we will create a panic

when our money has nothing to back it. Correct. You understood we were doing. You perfectly understood what you were doing. And I guess what I find important for myself in the audience to understand is that's what you're up against. You're up against, you know, there's people in there, Steve West, who come in and they are a battering ram and just knock things over. And you're talking about he deserves a statue, absolutely. But on the flip side, strategically you're up against people who want to undermine everything. I mean, you're talking the currency, but what a country is.

And we've been seeing that. You know, you could argue, you know, by eliminating the store of value, that open up the door for the immigration doors to be flooded open. Well, there's a whole bunch of things that are part and parcel of this, right? If you destroy a country's currency, you destroy its banking system, you either commit depopulation through giving people a bunch of jabs that are giving them, reactions and cancers and everything else and you import a bunch of people who don't have a respect for our sense of tradition of Magna Carta and the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera.

You're destabilizing a civilization. You're literally setting on its side. So when you take that thought process out as far as you can go with Mark Carney, where does he want Canada to go? Well, it's that globalist world economic forum, you know, idea that you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. And, you know, like Randy Hillier did a great example of showing his chickens, you know, because he was an MPP in Ontario and showed that, you know, the chickens are all in the coop and you just go and you steal the eggs, you know,

tape the thing and they're none the wiser. And that's kind of how these control freaks view human beings, right? Oh, you can't travel into London at certain times you're going to get fined. You can't renew your license. It really comes down to freedom versus control, right? That's what this ultimately comes down to. And somebody like Carney who wants to bring in a central bank digital currency and spend $150 trillion on green energy and all, it's control. You're a control freak.

Right. Like, let's just dabble into the green energy thing just for a second. Sure. Right. So already you have brownout issues, right? We shut down coal plants in Alberta, insanity, right? We have a thousand year supply of coal, right? And then when you say, not only we're going to shut down this cheap abundance,

source of coal energy, but we're also going to try to force everybody to buy 2030 or 35 or whatever to drive an electric vehicle. Well, you damn well know we don't have the electric capacity for that. You know that with brownout's already happening, you're going to be driving people into an energy shortage and electricity shortage. That's the inevitable consequence of what you're doing, but it gives you control because you can then shut it off or turn it on depending on what you like or dislike about their personal proclivities or their political persuasion or whatever. I mean, to understand this, all you have to do is look at Communist China. They have the most advanced digital currency in the world, the digital yuan, right?

And through that, if you criticize the government, you can, through your depleted social credit score, not buy a plane ticket, not buy a train ticket, not get a bus ticket, not apply for a government job, not get government benefits, etc. It's an incredible repression and suppression and control of the population. And if you have a politician, whether it's a Justin Trudeau who says he likes their basic dictatorship or a Mark Carney who says a country run by engineers, watch out because that's a control freak. Daniel Smith knows all this. I've had talks with Daniel and I think sometimes she wonders,

is Mark Carney more of a globalist environmentalist or is he actually a pragmatic banker? And I've said to her. Well, I mean, once again, I go research the man for what? Let's just go a little longer than an hour. Let's say you had to spend a week. Daniel Smith, when she was on the show back before she was ever any part of the UCP, after she had gone off 630, Chad. It says openly on the podcast that there will never be another conservative federal government.

So if you come to that conclusion, you go, you've done a lot of research. You've been following this just as closely as probably I have. But for longer, she was the leader of the opposition, a lot of different things. And so I sit there and a lot of people sit there and watch her and you go, you're fighting something that she has to know is leading us to a place that we don't want to be. And then she sits there and goes, damn, when you got signed, those are brighter days ahead. they've announced is it a corridor or is a pipeline to Ontario right different things like that

then the critics will say well yeah but look at it the public's gonna pay for it you know it's 44 billion basically government money that's gonna get the one to the west built and we all know the government's gonna overspend that by billions maybe tens of billions maybe that's even light and you go she has to know all this

and yet the referendum coming up, she's been very strategic in what she's done and said, and she's very much for Alberta remaining in Canada. And yet you see what you're up against. And lots of the politicians, political, engaged people I follow, they just can't, because the more you get engaged with it, the more you're like, I don't know, staying in this doesn't make a whole lot of sense at this point. And yet, you know, like Daniel Smith is as smart as they come. I've seen it firsthand. She's not a dumb lady. She's well read. Anytime people write her office, oh, she's just not thinking about it. I'm like, no, that's not true. I've seen very few strategists like her, or strategists, sorry.

She understands what she's doing. It's whether or not she's surrounded by influences, I'm sure she is. At the end of the day, if people have trouble with leaders, they often say, oh, it's the people that surround them. Well, at the end of the day, it's the leader who allows those people to surround them, right? So at the end of the day, it's the leader who ultimately gets blamed. At first, people say it's the ones around, but ultimately it's the leader. Okay. I think she is smart. She's well-read. She's erudite. She's a policy walk. I know all these things. I agree with that. I think the problem for her is that she has to be careful. She's not too much of a people plays her. And what do I mean by that? I know.

I don't make Andy Peers happy. I know I don't make liberals I don't make NDPers happy. Yeah, and I don't suffer that, right? Like I don't go, oh, if only Nahedon and she liked me and, you know, if only Justin Trudeau liked me and only, like, I don't worry about that. And I don't think you can, you know, in that job, you know.

You have to deal with your base, you got to dance with the one Brungia, right? And those people and take back Alberta are the ones who gave her the premiership, right? And so keep those people happy, right? Focus on Calgary, taking back Calgary. But, you know, I don't worry about making Toronto happy or Montreal happy or Ottawa happy. Like that's not, it's my business, right?

And I would argue in order to fix Ottawa or Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver, you have to fix Alberta, right? Like Alberta has overpaid $321 billion. dollars. We have facilitated, we have subsidized, we have condoned socialism in the rest of the country. The reason why they have the incredibly generous 1042 EI programs that they do that subsidize them to be unemployed for 42 weeks of the year, or, you know, fill in the blank on daycare in Quebec, or whatever, whatever crazy, crazy government program where we're overpaying and pensions and the rest, like whatever. Okay, whatever.

That's our fault. We allowed us to be a thieved out of all this money. Had Alberta been much more responsible, like my block colleagues were saying decades ago in the 1990s when I first got elected as a Reform Party MP

and said, why? Why do you give all this money to Ottawa? They were right. We shouldn't have been doing it. We should have blocked the pension going from 5.5 to 9.9. We should have done individual accounts. We should have got out of, you know, we should have pulled, like, let's take the policing

example for just a second. Alberta had a provincial police force from 1916 and 1932. Previous to that, we had the Northwest Mountain Police. Once we had implemented the APP, it was actually more successful even than the Northwest Mounted Police was. And then after when the Depression came along in 1932, we went back to now the rural Canadian Mounted Police. Well, Ontario, when they have the OPP, it costs $10,000 to $20,000 less for every OPP officer than it costs for an RCP officer. No, I'm just saying, like, you know, you can't tell me that by us doing it locally, it's going to cost us more.

The evidence just isn't there, right? Whether it's the Alberta police example from 1960, 1932, or it's the KPMG study about the Ontario Provincial Police Police. versus the judge, you just can't justify it, right? You just can't. So on so many things, if we've done our own thing, not only would we be better off and not have over-contributed on pensions, et cetera, et cetera, but we would have, it would have been better for the country because we wouldn't have subsidized socialism. So when you come back to Daniel Smith, you went Daniel Smith and then you walked into NDP, Montreal, Toronto, etc. and you were talking about pleasing people.

Yeah. Are you pointing out then that Daniel Smith wants to be publicly viewed as everyone's leader, essentially, like a public pleaser? Is that what you're pointing out? Well, yeah. The problem is if you're a leader and you want to walk into a cocktail party and have the CBC like you. Okay. Or no joke, or have Justin Trudeau like you. Sure.

Or have Evan Solomon like you. or have Abby Lewis like you, well, that's a problem, right? Because they've got a different worldview. It's an entirely different worldview. Yeah. Right? I can get along with them as colleagues on a given issue. Oh, sure.

You can treat them like a human being. Yeah, absolutely, right? You know, sure. But why would I, why would I sacrifice my supporters in their worldview and their privacy or their property or their children's futures, etc just to be liked by those people right I don't that's that's not that's it shouldn't be why politicians there that's not I don't think well I mean on a smaller scale because certainly I'm no premier of a province when I first started the podcast 2019 I joke I was the the bell of the

ball because I was just talking to hockey players and sure and community pillars and very wasn't fluff but now when I look back at it probably was fluff, but I enjoyed it. It was, it was talking to, uh, just people about their lessons they'd learned in life. Mm-hmm. And when I started bringing on people in the middle of COVID, I was ostracized from a lot of my community. Now, the people who enjoyed it, welcome to the end, no, no doubt about it. The people who still don't like it. They, they can't even make eye contact with you. It's a very peculiar, feeling to understand you've stepped across something that they deem that I don't know almost

like you shouldn't even be talking about this right like yeah there were and so as a leader I can understand going in wanting everybody to want you in there but the problem is is we're not talking about the tax rate of 5% to 9% and in fairness I understand by doing that where it led to We're talking about it. And if Danielle is sitting here, she'd go, well, I am getting rid of, you know, men and boys and women's sports and stuff like that. I am pushing it back on made, you know. But when you're talking about the financial portion of it is, everybody in their dog in Alberta knows that we should just control our things. Absolutely.

That doesn't seem like such a shocking idea. And then, you know, well, we got to do a study on it. We've got to do panels on it. We got to, well, why? All the data is just sitting there. Let's just move forward and get going. So many of these things should have been done so long ago. Like let's just talk pensions, for example.

We're over-contributing $3 billion a year, right? That means we, because we have a lower unemployment rate than we have a greater participation rate, you know, in a younger workforce, all this type of stuff, the oil patch being what it is, we collect $3 billion more than we pay our seniors. and pensions. And that goes to subsidize seniors across the rest of the country. Good for them, but not good for our seniors and not good for us. And if we had an individualized account,

like what they had in Chile, they still have in Chile, right? We would be so much further ahead. Oh my gosh. Like you're a smart guy. You're in the top 1% of the population that cares about these issues because you're going around talking these people, etc. I'm in the top 1%. I've been elected. I was one of 100,000 people that got to represent my people in Ottawa, right? And if I said to you, what's your return on investment? What's the ROI for your CPP? People don't know. I said, how much did you contribute last year?

How much have you contributed to your lifetime? What's your net nest egg you put in? I don't know. Because it's a Ponzi scheme. It's garbage, right? But if you go down into Chile and you go to Santiago and you knock on the door and you say, hey, out of curiosity, what was your ROI on your pension savings last year? How much did you put in last year?

How much do you have an aggregate they know? Because it's an individualized account. Right? How much more valuable is that? Right? And you could choose. Do I want to put it into gold? Do I want to put it into silver? Want to put it into treasury bills? Want to put it into bonds? Would it put into mutual funds? Great. Whatever. I'll even go so crazy. I'll let you roll the dice on the stock market. Right? But it's yours. Right? But the minute you give it over to government, right? That's the problem. Like something, this is something Canadians can be proud of. Unfortunately, it's historical. We had the longest running free banking system in the world. From 1817 to 1914, the beginning of the First World War, if a bank in Canada, like the CIBC or Toronto Dominion or Bank of Montreal, had enough gold or silver, it could print its own currency. And they all had an established rate of what they would have in reserve, just in case there was a draw on, etc.

And that currency was respected not only in Canada, but all the way down to the Caribbean and all the way over to the mother country in the United Kingdom. Beautiful stuff. It's 97 years, the longest running free banking system in the... world and it wasn't government controlled it was because there was real silver and real gold backing it up and then because of the war we allowed the government to come in and mess with that and print money and that's a mistake you know i got two questions i've been asking everybody

as i go you know like you're in the early days of the road trip but the first and we've we've covered you know a lot of albert of politics but you know with october 19th you know, although months away, it's not that far away. Oh, sir. Your thoughts on a referendum on, half a referendum on independence. But regardless, an independence referendum, that question being on the bill, your thoughts on it. I want Alberta to vote for independence.

And the reason I want that is because for so many different issues, whether it's pensions or EI or corporate tax collection or immigration or selection of judges, or environmental regulations or firearms regulations, or any of these things, we would be better off doing our own thing. Right? And in doing so, we would not only make ourselves better off, if we discipline the rest of the country, because the rest of the country has been relying on the golden goose

that's laying the golden eggs and taking from the oil patch and not respecting it by allowing it to build the pipelines and everything else that we need to do to have this economy thrive. Like Alberta has more natural gas pipeline than the rest of the country, blind, right? And yet we're allowing this to be dictated by Ottawa. It's ridiculous, right? Calgary clears the second amount of corporate paper in the country after Toronto. It's ahead of Montreal, it's ahead of Vancouver, etc. Had we implemented a flat tax, or actually, never mind, we had a flat tax on a client, had we implemented what Richard Magnus wanted to do as the MLA for

Calgary North Hill and eliminated provincial income tax when he wanted to do that, okay? There would been a sucking sound of billions of dollars coming from everywhere else in the country to come to Alberta because it was a land of freedom in terms of not having a provincial income. We could have done it at the time. The royalties was coming in off of oil and gas was big enough we could have done it. It would have been a game change. It would have been an inflection point in Alberta and Canadian history. But we ought to do those things because it sets the agenda not only for Alberta but for the country. And I would argue North America, I think with Alberta independence, If Alberta vote for that, it not only sends a signal to the rest of Canada, but it sends a signal to North America and the world over what can be done.

Conrad Black was right when he said that if Alberta voted for that, it would be a petro state. And that's not a bad thing. Like a Kuwait, like a Saudi Arabia, like a Norway, like United Arab Emirates, we would be a powerhouse. If we wanted to have our currency in Canadian dollars, which is foolish because there's no bullion backing it up, Okay, we could do that. If you wanted to adopt the American dollar like the Bahamas does, you could do that. If you wanted to have an Alberta currency, it's built up by gold where the Americans buy our oil and natural gas and gold. Okay, we could do that. If we wanted to have a petro dollar, like what the United States was from 71 to now, we could do that. We would be further ahead. One fun one for you that has nothing to do with politics. Taking my family across Canada, they're coming along for the road trip. And so I've been asking people if they have a favorite memory of camping, whether it was, you know, as a kid or, you know, you've been to lots of different places. Maybe there's a memory or a place that you're like, man, this moment. Well, you know, I spent time in junior forest wardens, which is like an Alberta government subsidized version of the Boy Scouts.

They basically want guys to, you know, get signed up in the Forest Service to jump out of helicopters and stuff. I wasn't that crazy. God bless them for doing it, but with engines on their backs fighting for firefighters, God, God rest their souls. But I had a lot of fun with those characters, you know. I mean, we camped in minus 26 up at Long Lake, and we learned how to build lean-toes and skeet shooting and rifles and all that type of stuff. But a lot of cross-country snow-showing and cross-country skiing that I, Larry and Donna Dunn took us on a lot of long uphill, like telemarking paths and stuff. But that was in my junior high years. And I think those are probably my fondest memories of camping.

And when you look back, what is it about those memories? Well, they certainly taught you self-reliance. Like if you're camping in minus 26, that's some tough stuff. You know, and you wake up with all the ice crystals around your, you know, sleeping bag and stuff like that. And you learn a lot. You learn a lot about orientation and, you know, how to look after yourself and not get frostbite and everything else. And a lot of stuff with guns.

Like I had my first firearms license and I was 14 and that was because of Hunter education and all those things. Right. So those are fun memories. Appreciate you doing this and being open questions and everything else. It's been an enjoyable little chat. And hopefully it's not the last one, you know. I'll be back in Alberta soon enough. But thanks for let me into your house and in this room because this room is people probably can't fully grasp the magnitude because they can't see it all.

but it's an impressive little room you have here. A lot of books. Yeah. Thanks again, Rob. Thank you, sir.