Shaun Newman Podcast - #224 - MLA Shane Getson

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

A Canadian politician who is the current UCP-MLA for Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland in Alberta. He is an owner of Major Projects Consulting Company, a Civil Engineering Technologist & Private Pilot.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Like the podcast? Support here: https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday. Hope everybody had a great weekend wherever you're at. Us, we picked up our Christmas tree finally. And if you are looking for one here in the town of Lloyd Minster for sure, make sure you stop down and help out with the kinsmen. I've got to give a shout-out to those guys. They've been a big supporter of a lot of the different projects that I've put on in the years.

And it's a good cause. Go down and grab yourself a tree. hopefully, you know, I'll split the audience here. I'm curious, real or fake, shoot it to the text line. If you're a real or fake tree person, I'm all real. I love the smell. I'm not worried about the mess. We do have hardwood floors, so that does help a little bit.

Now, on with the show and not so much about the tree. We are in December, and the snow was flying, and it was a little bit chilly. I'm not going to lie this morning. But first off, Carly Clause and the team over, Windsor Plywood Builders, of the podcast studio table talking about wood. These guys just got it going on. They got some great slabs that are going to make a definitive point of any room. Anyone who comes into the studio, they see the table and they're like, holy dinah.

And you know, you think about the table now, it's a few years old. I'm not dating it. I'm not saying, Mr. Carl, I need a new one. I'm just saying it's a few years old. And yet you walk in, you look at it, you go, Oh, yeah, that's nice. Everybody's got to give the old feel to it. So if you're looking for a table, a river table, to be exact,

where they put the epoxy in the middle and they stick two slabs of wood together, head on over to Windsor Plywood. I mean, if you're also looking for mantles, decks, windows, doors, sheds, just stop in, see the crew at Windsor Plywood. Go on their Instagram page, do a little creeping, creeping. Or give me a call, 780-875-9663. Mortgage broker, Jill Fisher,

her name says it all she probably serves the areas of like mr bonnyville cold lake and vermilion and she's looking forward to working with you for all your mortgage needs of course in these hectic times if you were buying a house renewing your mortgage etc nobody loves the paperwork like i i can't find one person who enjoys paperwork except for the people who are trained in it and they make it as easy as possible sign here sign on the dotted line we'll get you fixed up and we'll find you the best rate that's jill fisher 780 872 2914 or stop in at her website jfisher dot c a clay smiling and the team profit river uh i get to see the building today i'm excited because i want to see how far they've come since the last little tour i got

of course they're moving into their new building here hopefully beginning of january and i'm certainly going to tell you all about that when it comes they got uh their phase one cast custom walnut cabin tree uh should be in i'm hoping like i'm just looking forward to the new smell we all know the new smell. You walk, oh, yeah, that looks good. That smells good. Well, Prophet River, new building aside, specialize in importing firearms from the United States of America to Canada. They take care. You want to talk about paperwork. Who wants to do that paperwork? They take care all the paperwork for you. They make it easy, peasy for you. They get the gun from there to your hands. Of course, also stop in storefront and see some of the amazing different pieces they got there.

They got a giant. They got a giant. They got a giant. selection, great staff. And I mean, Clay's just, you got to meet Clay. Clay's a beauty. And his ball hockey skills are subpar if you're listening, Clay. I'm kidding. He's a pretty good defenseman. Just go to Profitriver.com and check them out today. I don't know. I must be a little silly today, a little goofy. This has been going on all morning. I almost get sidetracked all the time. I'm in good mood for a Monday. It must be the hopefulness that came out of today's episode, maybe. You're going to hear that word a couple times, which hasn't been there in the last, in the last couple months, I don't think. But as far as Profit River goes, see, I'm on side

tangents. What the heck is going on? I'm not even going to remove this. It's, it's Monday. Hope everybody's having a great day. If you're looking for guns, you're looking for ammo, you're looking for accessories, go to Profitriver.com, check them out today. They are the major retailer of firearms, optics, and accessories serving all of Canada. Trophy Gallery, downtown Lloyd Minster. I got my new, my new mugs. and they look sharp. That's all the handiwork from Trophy Gallery. Clint and his team,

they make everything look personal, personable to your company, your image, and I think with Christmas, literally around the corner, the kids were asking about it this weekend when Santa coming. You know, you got your employees, you're looking for something to do for them.

I'm just saying maybe some travel mugs. You could get some pretty sharp travel mugs. I would go to trophygallory.com. And take a look at the, giant selection they got on there and talk with clink because they got they got tons of selection tons of different ideas that can be all personalized to you or your company and then of course if you go in into store he's got a bunch of signed memorabilia you know just saying maybe you're looking for a uh a different to sign jersey or a sign picture some oiler stuff you know blue jay

stuff that type of thing he's got some cool stuff going on so stop in a day trophy gallery dot or of course their storefront here in Lloydminster. Jen Gilbert and the team for over 45 years since 1976 the dedicated realtors of Coalbilt Banker, Cityside Realty have served Lloyd Minster in the surrounding area. They offer Star Power providing their clients with seven-day-a-week access because they know big life decisions are not made during office hours. That's Coldwell Banker, Cityside Realty for everything in real estate,

24 hours a day, seven days a week. Give them a call 780-875-3343. If you're looking for outdoor signage, head no further than the team at Reed and Right. They do, oh man, they make the S&P look very sharp. They've done everything in the podcast studio for a wall quotes, my logo, the frosted glass, and of course outdoor signage. So if you're looking for any of that, give them a call 306, 8255-3-1.

And Gartner Management is a Lloydminster-based company specializing in all types of rental properties to help meet your needs. There's currently 1,800 square feet of an open space here in the building. So if you're, you know, just maybe one person, you got a little office, that's all you need. You can have a little room. That's easy, nice and easy. If you got multiple employees, they got space set up with multiple offices. Give them a call and find out more today.

780, 808, 50, 25. And if you're heading in any of these businesses, make sure you let them know what you heard about it from the podcast, right? Now, let's get on to that T-Barr-1, Tale of the Tape. He's a Canadian politician who was elected in the 2019, Alberta, James. general election to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta representing the Electoral District of Lac Saint and Parkland. He's also been a resident of Parkland County for 10 plus years, a husband for 16 plus years, father of four, owner of major projects consulting company, a civil engineering technologist,

private pilot, and raised on a mixed farming operation, cattle custom pasturing, logging, and sawmill west of Chip Lake. I'm talking about MLA, Shane Getson. So buckle up. Here we go. Hi, this is Shane Getson, the MLA for Lax-San-Parkland, or as I like to call it, God's Country. And you're on the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today.

I'm joined by Shane Getson. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping in. Well, appreciate coming down here, and I don't often get to Lloydbone. I do. It's always an adventure. Is that what today's been, a little bit of adventure? First off, you're going to be here at this time. Second off, you're going to be here at that time, and it just kind of gets delayed, delayed, delayed.

Then we get here, and now we have technical issues. We found away. Yeah, it's kind of like the energy sector. I mean, we always know it's hurry up and wait in the patch, so it's no different. The nice thing about this is the weekend. The weather is pretty decent. We're just going to be running out of daylight. And as being a politician, until you can turn that phone off or people don't recognize you,

it's tough to turn them away and they've got questions. And Sean, to your point of being down here, there's lots of questions out there about a lot of pressing things to folks. So the last thing I would do is brush them off and not take the time that they deserve. So apologize for being late? No, absolutely not. There's no apologies necessary. That's life rate now, isn't it?

Now, before we get going too far into it, I would really like you to just maybe give a little bit of your backstory. There's going to be a lot of listeners across our country, some from other countries that tune in, have no idea who Mr. Shane gets and is. So could you maybe give a little bit of a backstory and currently what you're doing just so everybody's kind of up to speed? Sure.

So I'm just a farm kid from Alberta. You know, that's where I start. It kind of makes my wife roll her eyes once in a while when I go that way. But I'm really proud of being just a farm kid. Growing up out in that wildwood country out there, my grandpa came out and settled there, shoot around 1918 out in that area. I grew up in a mixed farming operation back in the 80s when it was a very recessed economy. So you learned how to stretch things, learned how to make ends meet.

We had logging operations, a small sawmill as well, to supplement the cattle side of the things. And then I don't think I'm smart enough to be a farmer because those folks, I mean, they have intestinal fortitude and the ability to make things happen. So what I started looking at was civil engineering and I ended up becoming civil engineering technologist. In the summertime when I was 16, I went and worked for a small patch paving company in Edmonton. And then when I decided to go to college, the two owners made a spot for me and brought me into the front office and started teaching me other business. And then from there, I ended up joining a company by the name of Leadcore Industrial, and I became one of their project coordinators. And the first major industrial project I was on was up in the Diamond Mine in the territories,

building the Acadie Diamond Mine, was up there for a couple of years. And then stuck around Ledcore for a number of years. Developed an acumen for pipelines, fiber optics, the industrial side of the thing for facilities. Ended up branching out in 2003, started my own consulting company. and went and worked for in Canada on the Sagdi facility in the Air Weapons Range, was there for a couple years, and then ended up getting into pipelines, long and the short of it. And I say I went to Northern Alberta Institute of Technologies, went to college, but where I went to

university was at Enbridge and started out as an analyst, and when I finished there, I was an acting director and senior manager of project execution field controls, and worked very well with that group for a number of years and projects all over North America. as part of their controls council, their procurement council as well. And we did specialty projects. So anything from transshipment rail facilities to high voltage power transmission lines, troubleshooting and a bunch of the systems on those things, project recovery. When projects went sideways, we got dropped in to fix things, make it right,

to recover them, get them back on schedule. So process those things, lots of forecasting analysis that was taking place. And it was going all well and good, Sean. And then one day my wife said, well, you're spending about six days, a month at home, the rest of it, you're off in the states and wherever else across the country, you know, managing these jobs and taking care of it. If you want your keys to work in the door, you might want to reconsider that. So at that point, it was a gut check, ended up taking a contract with TransCanada and was their general manager of pipeline

construction there. And then projects started getting canceled. And it was all due to regulatory and compliance issues. So it changed in the governments at the time. That's rolling around about 2014. And I found myself in a precarious spot where projects that should have had absolute certainty were getting delayed for reasons that were uttered far control. And then I started getting interested in politics at that point. So understanding that if, you know, we couldn't fix it from the outside, maybe I'd better look inside. And then, yeah, so the long road, long, long story or for a short question was how I got there

into politics now. I'm an elected official. I'm an MLA. For those folks in the States, I'm a, congressman by the same context of how that works. So there was an election process in my area. I started paying attention to it. Helped from the outside in one of these constituency associations. The candidate that was elected, who won his nomination, was deselected, and we were left in a precarious situation in our constituency of having no one to run against the existing

sitting or the incumbent ag and forestry minister. And I was asked by folks in my community to step forward and I did. And here I am two years later. I was elected. And now I'm an elected member of the legislative assembly of Alberta. Well, I said this before we started. I'll reiterate it. I think, hey, you got a really cool story on how you kind of fall into politics, right? It's not like this was, you know, the dream.

You know, you've been working at this for 10 years to slowly get into politics. You kind of fall into it. And I think we could use a few more people to fall into politics. Because I like, you know, and people are going to get to hear firsthand. But I like how your brain works. And certainly your background in the industry,

everyone who's tuned in from our two great provinces, you know, we sit right on the border city. You're going to hear that and go, oh, let's hear what this man has to say. So, you know, you wanted to start with the energy corridor. So why don't we start there and we'll see where we get to, and we'll try and keep us on time so that we can get you back home safe in the daylight. Well, we'll see what we can do for time. But if the conversation goes, just roll with it, Sean. Again, it's not an off and a chance as a politician. We get a chance to sit down and have an outlet like this. So unfortunately, the farmers can't change the weather and with us politicians, we can't change the media either. So this is a good opportunity. I really

appreciate that. So the energy corridors, so essentially what you've got folks is a pipeliner, someone who did linear projects across North America that finally got elected because I got frustrated with our projects getting canceled and delayed and everything else due to regulatory compliance being the squeaky wheel inside. So there was Scott Moe, so shout out to Premier Mo. He led First Minister's group and all the premiers in the province agreed that we needed energy corridors across the country. And so they had this agreement. And Alberta is one of the first ones that are acting on it. Saskatchewans spool up one of their groups now as well. So with my background in linear construction and major projects, I was the squeaky wheel on caucus. So I put together

a proposal. It went into the Premier's office. He acknowledged that, recognized it. We did this thing called the Fair Deal panel, so that went around asking Albertans what some of the critical items that they wanted. Energy corridors came back to that. And then also in our economic relaunch, I was named as the MLA who would lead a task force on economic corridors, so not just energy corridors, the actual economics of tying together areas. So by the time the mandate letter came out, Nothing's quick in politics. We ran out about a year and a half on the shot clock, basically, by the time all that took place. And the mandate letter came out to also include a rail study in the province of Alberta,

and then to look at how we tie these economic corridors within the province, interprovincially, into the U.S., and then globally. So how do we do that? And that's where I was very fortunate under Minister Schweitzer and Jobs Economy and Innovation to spool up the project, have a budget, go out and grab some really good people that were out there. and the whole idea from this with a project experience was to not just to have another report. So when I wrote up the scope for this, it was literally to have project deliverables and executable plan that we could take care of a lot of the issues and challenges we had.

Do fulsome stakeholder engagement. First Nations have to be at the table on this. So it's a paradigm shift with some of the ways that we've done projects in the past or looked at it for policy. And make sure that we have really good representation right across the board. So we had a college professor, you know, he's part of it that did his whole work. So shout out to Kent Fellows down in Calgary. His whole area that he works in his corridors, so it scooped him up. There was another gentleman by the name of Fred Gallagher.

He was with Canadian Vitality Pathways. There's another think tank group that's been working on this. We scooped him up. Tom Franchum, vice president, a number of engineering companies, scooped him up, brought him forward with us as well. Tom Raptus is another gentleman that worked on major projects. And he started at Exxon, ended up over in Enbridge, I mean, one of those type of guys, those characters. Lisa Wardley was the other team captain that we put out there from the north, you know, a 30-year politician, a municipal politician working specifically in the north

and all the challenges they have. Corridors are part of it. And then a bunch of other folks and a consulting team. So pull them together, broke them out into three separate groups. Any effective project I've ever managed, you break them out and you empower people. It made Tom, Lisa, and Owen Darvin Dernie was the other gentleman to another policy guy that's been around forever. So notwithstanding, lots of other folks were part of the team, but those are the ones that kind of make sense, I think, for the listeners, when you start gluing together, both folks that have political input have been working on this for a number of years, and then they have line of sight.

And we broke it into the geographical regions being treaties, six, seven, and eight. And we had First Nation chiefs part of our table as well that were within those areas. So we're down to the final bit, and we're getting ready for some recommendations. And I'll take a bit of a pause for you to ask me a question, so I'm just not rambling on. and I'll tell you about some of the things that are coming to the table and when we talk about economics versus pipelines or corridors or energy corridors. Well, I don't know if I'm going to give you a brilliant question by any stretch of imagination. I guess where my brain first goes is just like,

it's nice to hear that there's some constructive things being done because, you know, I mean, the common person in this area here is, you know, we had pipelines getting canceled, left, right, and center. Never going to have a pipeline in the ground ever again. My buddy of mine, two's wherever he's at. He would break down all the bills that the federal government's been thrown out. I can't do that for you because I'm just not that type. 69 and 48 are the biggest ones.

Right. And so you just go, like, what are we doing? You know, like, we have this brilliant group of people across the entire country. And I'm very, you know, I'm a hometowner, right? I mean, I love the two provinces. Live now in Alberta. But, I mean, grew up in Saskatchewan. heck, I live in the border city, right?

So you get to see how tight these two provinces are. And it certainly extends further than that. But we got a bunch of brilliant people. Give them a problem, and they'll solve it. Absolutely. Over and over and over again. You got a problem with this? We'll go solve it.

When we want to do that, go solve it. I mean, that's what the planet has, and specifically here. So to hear what you're talking about is really cool, because I think we've been lacking a lot of hope in a long time, right? All we do is just get kicked and kicked and kicked. I guess, so my question is going to be, what are your thoughts then? And this is kind of a curveball because at the end of the day, you know, there's a lot of people thinking Alberta or Saskatchewan or both should go off on their own. It should be energy independent, independent from all of Canada and just be their own spot because to hell with everybody else.

Well, I think the cool part with looking at Saskatchewan, Alberta, I mean, you look at the same. the demographics were kind of cut from the same cloth in a lot of regards. You know, it's that prairie attitude. You make it happen, you get it done. The biggest challenge that we have isn't overcoming challenges. The biggest problem that we have is the rulebook keeps changing on us. And hence the political slant and why I got in there. So you have to stop things from changing on us. The fact that you see TMX going from a $9 billion to a $12 billion project to 26 to 30 on the federal government has to buy it. Like to me, what happens is that it shows uncertainty in all jurisdictions. Some have told me, you know, the work in the circles down in New York

for the financial side of it, that Canada has the same risk tolerance as Venezuela does. So that should really sink into folks when you can't have any project certainty because the rules keep changing on you and you're looking at a very different country. It's quite frightening. You're telling me that they're saying we are the same as Venezuela? Risk tolerance. So if they were to build a project in Venezuela and they were to throw cash at it to have project certainty, the potential uncertainty applied to the Canadian model could be a very strong comparator. And that's to sink in, right? When you put it in that context, if they can't trust us because we keep changing the rules,

it's a big issue. Now there's a ton of cash out there for infrastructure spend. President Biden, I think, is allocated about a trillion dollars. So there's lots of folks that want to do these jobs. But the problem is the complexities of working within our political, regime in that context and the fact that we seem to be pulling each other apart as Canadians depending on which jurisdictions and these competing interests, that's the issue and the challenge. And that's at the federal level.

Politically at the municipal level, we can, or the provincial level, we can get along pretty decent. The municipal guys actually do way better than all of us, that they're connecting these cities between rural and urban municipalities. They can get it. So the biggest challenge that I had was changing people's mindsets on what an economic corridor is. And once we start talking about that, it simplifies it. So it's in essence, and it's going to be kind of goofy. Find out where your existing pathways, where your existing

corridors. So if I look at the CP rail line along the TransCanada Highway, most of our population lives in that latitude. It's not by coincidence. It's because that's what bound our nation together. That's where you had your trade, your commerce and everything else. And then you start looking at some of the other pathways. So in our area, Highway 2, Highway 16 that runs through, those are other natural connectors. When you look at down in Lethbridge and we have the crossings into the states, those are again natural connectors. When we look at the pipeline corridors that they exist, so they'd be coming out of the Edmonton area slanting here towards, you know, Camrose and towards Lloyd and then hitting a hard south and heading up into North Dakota and back into Minnesota and

Superior Wisconsin and those areas, those are natural corridors that are existing. When you look at the railroads, again up north when they start moving the product and why Kansas, City and CP Rail are both, or CN and CP, we're both competing for Kansas City. Those are natural corridors. Where we have to look at is the economics. So what do you have and where does it have to go to? So when I start looking at ports of interest, so different areas where we have trade relationships, we've never fully flexed treaties that we have in place, again, that would be the U.S.,

number one partner to the south. But when you look at Europe, we're not really taking advantage of that and we're not taking advantage of Asia. So if anyone out there has had delays on trying to buy their laptop for Christmas or trying to get stuff for the kids and seeing a ton of prices come up, it's because Long Beach is completely backlogged with bringing off freighter traffic. You've got Port of Los Angeles as the same issues. Well, people have seen the ports with all the ships just hanging out there doing nothing. Well, and it drives the cost from moving one of those sea cans from Asia coming into a North American market from $2,000 not so long ago to $20,000 to $40,000.

and it doesn't have any sight of uncoupling itself until at least 2023. And then you throw a natural disaster in place where you have mudslides, which nature happens. It's happened before. It'll keep happening along those lines. And you've got choke points. It shows the frailty in our typical logistics. So the economic corridors connect that.

You find existing routes and then where you want to be. So what do you want to be when you grow up? And the whole concept behind the linear corridors, if I was to look into Alaska as an example, I would route that corridor typically from that Edmonton area tied into Fort McKay, and then I would slant it up in towards the Northwest Territories, and then I would end it to the Yukon towards that CarMax area, and then I would do a crossing over into Alaska. That would then get me into three or four different ports. So Anchorage being one of them, they're down about 40% in volumes. We can literally push a ton of product both going inbound and outbound.

So not just bitumen, not just grain, not just. It's higher value add products. where it really starts to change the paradigm is that because of those trade routes, we can get you your stuff from Asia into the North American market about 10 days quicker. So all of a sudden, Alberta becomes that hub

where every piece of cartage hitting the North American market comes through our back door. And we can make full advantage of our free trade zones, full advantage of our agreements, utilize rail to start it out, define the corridor on either side,

and we're talking like a 10 kilometer wide swath, essentially. You take care of the Caribou issues because you have your one kilometer buffer in either sides. You take a look at hydroelectric communications, pipe. Don't get fixated on the commodities, but you have this. This is what we're talking about in these economic corridors. And just by that one little train, you know, moving multiple cartage and people and things back and forth,

we could see a 17% uptick in our province just on gross bottom line GDP. The Yukon and the territories, it changes it insurmountably, 40 to 60% uptick, because now they can get their mining assets to market, and they can also get their natural gas things to market, plus their liquids. So we have to start trading this back and forth, and then the hydroelectric. We have to build our electrical system from the south going north, but we are the south for the north. So just start bringing your power lines down south

and start energizing our northern parts of the province, truly connecting people together where they've traded for a number of years by solidifying and formalizing those routes. you know this is something new to the podcast for a while this sounds kind of hopeful and i gotta be honest the last little bit i mean we haven't we haven't breached covid subject yet and i'm sure we'll get there but this i mean how feasible like is this is this like coming in a year is this still got to be voted on is this still got to go through the 40 different red flat or you know the red tape everywhere we go, or is this like actually feasible? And can Albertans, Westerners expect

something like this sooner than we think? I believe it is. So again, being a project guy, I have 15, 16 months left. When it comes to politics, there is no certainty on the next election cycle. There's no certainty if the voter has a bad hair day and doesn't show up. So everything I've done is executable to set it up for the context that, and here's the paradigm shift as well. typically you have industrial proponents so the project guys will go out there they'll find that route and then they spend all that capital blood sweat and tears in the front end trying to get project certainty get even convinced this is where they need to go and invariably seems to fail because of all the other consequences we talked about in the dynamics changing when i talk about these corridors

being pre-existing what i essentially do is turn the bureaucracy on its head what i want is to conceptually through this task force to say here's your pathways Here's where they kind of go. Here's what we want to put within them. Say yes. So essentially what you're doing is all your pre-work on the front end, all your stakeholder engagements, your financial participation models that you have into it.

You also do all your environmental impact assessments. You do that all up front, essentially pre-approve it. And then what you do for industry is you slide it across the table and say, hey, build it like this within these areas. You basically are pre-approved. Industry has a massive appetite for that because that's what they're trying to do on their own, but they're literally trying to boil the ocean.

If we fire up our bureaucracy and start becoming Canadiens again instead of saying can't to everything, literally this opens it up and it fast tracks those elements. When you've got the U.S. that is literally looking for radical collaboration in their own words, they're looking to bolster their presence in the north. Alaska is far away from where they need to be as far as a hardline connection to the Midwest. This fits within that narrative, that northern context. when you start looking at Tuck and the ability for Tuck to Yacht Tuck now that the Northwest Territories is able to produce gas in that area in that region.

Three ice breakers, they start moving this to the Asian market. The ice up there that we're experiencing from Stefan King, a director of the National Coast Guard, so I've been dealing with him. The ice studies up in that area in the region are now seasonal ice. It's no longer 40-year-old ice. It changes everything, and we have to get on board with it. So, yes, I'm pretty stoked about it, Sean, as you can tell. I'm caffeinated now, thanks to you know, thank you.

to you as well. But these are things within our reach. Where I would also go with that is that because we're so convolated, I don't know if it's because of the British model or we become lazy over a number of years or we've just built up this, I don't know, process that is cumbersome. It needs to be deb bottlenecked. I would propose you take the same concept on each one of these corridors as you have with a port authority and you have a couple present members from, let's say, a jurisdiction of Saskatchew, Manitoba and Alberta, Yukon territories, maybe a couple, two, three people on those. And then they also tie within the ports, the port authorities themselves. So what they're doing is acting like a concierge service. They can reach in with all these other jurisdictions

within their different departments. They can motivate and make sure that this is going forward in that context. They can also then connect with foreign trade offices. So when we start being a global player again and really connecting the dots, this is where this model really takes off. It'll be one of, you know, spoiler alert, it'll be one of the recommendations to move this forward. And again, just in the process of the consultation going through and finding out how, It is to pick up the phone and talk to another jurisdiction. This is what we need to alleviate that. It's all paper.

Just get the paper set up, just set the rules so they were set in place, and then allow industry to come on with the equity and make it happen. Once again, I'm going to say this again. It feels very hopeful. Like, it feels like, you know, like a very, I'm a firm believer in, you know, don't give me problems, give me solutions, right? This feels like, wow. I think I can speak for all my listeners. Geez, we've had a lot of people on here talking about how weird society is and how things can't seem to happen.

And, you know, to the north, that's been brought up a ton by a lot of smart people. Nothing's ever happened. But none of them ever got involved in politics either, in my opinion. Well, now you've got a few project people that are politicians. We love to work ourselves out of a job. I would love nothing better than to have these quarters up in the right. You don't want to be a politician the rest of your life? Being a public pinaata, if it's for the common good and for the right reasons.

I mean, a lot of us stepped out of our normal lives for a reason and serendipitously or a good lord above or however it worked out. We're here doing the best we can with imperfect circumstances. But the whole thing is to make this happen, to put something in place that's tangible for our next generations, for our kids to become Canada again. What we really should be is the Northwest strong and free. So when you start looking at the difference between Eastern Canada and Northwestern Canada, yeah, there are a lot of cultural. They don't know we exist in a lot of things. and nor do we care about them anymore. It's just one of those things.

Love their country. I've worked all across it, but there are regional differences. And when you start looking at the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, so Penwar, includes Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Alaska, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Alberta and Saskatchewan, that is literally the 11th largest economy in the world.

So the states had a wonderful thing that they were blessed with. Trade and commerce going north and south with Mississippi. We don't have that. So everything we build needs infrastructure. But again, with the paradigm shift, first time in 10,000 years that we've seen us repeating the cycle, the ice is actually getting thinner. We can actually have the Northwest Passage. You don't need the Panama Canal anymore. I can get you to Asia and Europe and it all comes through Northwest Canada.

That's massive. And the fact that we have all these plethora of resources that we haven't developed that are sitting literally at our fingertips, And I gave you a comment earlier offline, so I'm dealing with the Albert Industrial Heartland. And where you've got Sherrod, Gordon, or Sherritt, I guess, has been up there for a number of years. They used to have a mine out in Quebec that they pulled their cobalt and nickel from. Well, they've mined that out, but they're still world-renowned for processing minerals and metals and high-quality metals. They literally have to get their product right now. They're concentrate from Cuba.

The cobalt and nickel for Fort Saskatchewan is coming in from Cuba. And then because of the trade barriers are in place between the United States and Cuba, Cuba with communist countries for a good reason. We can't sell into that market. So you literally are pulling stuff all around the world. Or we can maybe just pull it from the Yukon or the territories, which is just right in our backyard. We can solidify that.

Plus all the rare earth elements. We have all of that. This brings me back to this guy named Quick Dick McDick from Saskatchewan of me got talking this is probably a year ago. Like if we had what would the regular person with their head on their shoulders do to bolster their country. Well, you'd start working together, right? And you would, I don't know, look at the resources you have and build off that.

And we got them all sitting here. So the difference is, is certainly not Quick Dick, sorry, quick, and certainly not Sean Numer. Neither of us are in politics, right? So we get to talk about it. What's cool about what you're doing, Shane, is you're in it and you're hopefully, you know, geez, I'm using that word a lot. People are going to be having to check their ears here today.

But it feels like maybe there's some hope that we're going to get back to what we've been doing. For all my life up until the last, I don't know, there was this guy named Trudeau who came in and really messed some things up. And I know that's going to offend a couple listeners, not very many, if they're turning in. But, I mean, overall, the last five, six years have been pretty strange, to say the least. and coming from this part and knowing all the people here and how they've made their lives, how they, you know, blue-collar community. And to just get kicked over and over and over again,

it's pretty cool to hear what you're talking about because it just feels like, here I go again, it feels a little hopeful like maybe good days are ahead of us. It is, but don't take it for granted. And again, the only reason why you got me here is because of things went sideways. I couldn't build a 135-kilometer water pipeline displacing using processed water from pulp and paper

to use it for frack instead of having, you know, for fractionation downhole up in the duvenate the montany instead of using freshwater. So the Alberta utility board and AER couldn't decide who was going to manage it at the time. So they both decided to and push the project off a couple of years. So 70 people of mine couldn't work. We couldn't put contractors work and we couldn't stop wean ourselves off of using freshwater. This is how ridiculous it's become. So is there hope? Yeah, there is. And when you have folks that work together and have a common interest that you're looking at building and binding and talking about the things that that can make us better. Absolutely.

It's hopeful. And that's where I keep saying that phrase, become canadianes again, not can't. Why do we find every reason to trip ourselves up? You know, the enemy has been identified. It's us. So stop arguing about the little things. Start talking about the big things that bind us. And let's put it in context.

The other one where we're getting hammered all the time is our environmental social governance. So some folks make light of it and it's getting overused lots. It's actually a good thing. Believe it or not, We're the best in the world at it. When you tie in another one, I'm going to put this over your listeners, economic environmental social governance. You tie the economy and the economics into what we do,

way better than anywhere else. Hydrogen is a big file that we're working on, and it ties in with blue hydrogen, natural gas. 2018, Japan does a study, says, hey, we're going out and we're becoming a hydrogen economy. So they go out to all the jurisdictions in the world and they say, okay, blue hydrogen and green hydrogen, where are the best ones? Canada comes up, Alberta, as number two in the world,

for getting the lowest value, lowest cost, blue hydrogen to the market. Russians beat us, but we're number two to Russia, but we have this. I got to ask a really dumb question. What's the difference between blue and green hydrogen? Oh, cool. Well, blue hydrogen kind of comes from conventionals. Green hydrogen would come from just strictly green energy sources in the front end. So if I had a windmill producing hydrogen, that would be green. If I used existing technology using carbon capture and storage, sequestration, and I used it from an existing stream like natural gas or one of the other items we have, that would be blue hydrogen.

Yeah. Okay. So we lose out to Putin because, you know, he doesn't care about the environment or human rights. I'm okay with that. So when you've got Australia and Saudi coming over to Canada, they're the ones producing it now and they're giving it to Japan, when you've got Australian companies coming here wanting to invest in Canada to produce blue hydrogen. And when you look at them pre-prescribing this train set that hasn't been built yet

in concept to move this, this cartage and this product, that's why. We're closer to those markets. We have a plethora of it. We can do all the carbon capture storage. Three jurisdictions in the world with the geology works out. We're sitting on top of that. That's where we're at. And we're sitting on the world's

what is the second or third largest known reserves for petroleum products. Life after bitumen isn't going to mean that we're stopping bitchement. It means that we're going to use it for all the stuff that we need it for for manufacturing, roads, asphalts, all those type of things. We have the transitional fuels. We have the people that can do it. We just got to get our stuff to market.

And we're allowing others to hijack. that narrative to block us in our stuff. You imagine as a kid sitting there on all this ton of Lego, Lego's going out of style and you can't play with it with any your buddies, but somebody else is getting all their Lego set out before you because you're sitting in the sandbox by yourself, that's us on our energy because we keep getting tripped up, fighting amongst the stupid things and allowing the other groups, the action groups that are out there being paid for by our competitors to make sure that we keep messing around and around the sandbox rather than supplying the world with the energy it needs.

Hmm. That's super cool. Very interesting, to say the least. And I think, you know, it comes back to no matter what it is. When you actively divide the population on anything even such as energy, what you're talking about is a way to like pull everybody back together. And that's all we need to do. We just need to find a way to get the... You ever want to freak people out and get them fighting them out something emotional. Logic goes out the window. But when you approach the problem, Again, coming back to the problem, the problem is logistics. So when we talk about the logistics and then you talk about the economy, the economics of moving stuff and getting it to those markets, then we can get the motion parked on the table and start talking about solving a problem. And that's what we're really good at in the north. All right. Well, I had this guy named Mike Kuzmiskis. Geez, I say his name a lot on here. He's the CEO of ICOR Labs, right?

So me and him, you know, he was a former engineer. So me and him get talking about COVID, right? It took me half an hour to get you here, but I'm going to pin you here for the remainder of time because I just look at it and I go, what we, me and him discussed is, you know, geez, if I was in the Alberta government, this is exactly what I'd do right now

because we've been in this thing for almost two years and we're still struggling on how we're going to get from here to out of this where people stop yelling and screaming at each other, and we got mandates and we got passports and we got all this stuff, And all of us know it doesn't work. Like, I mean, it's not stopping a virus from getting through. It just isn't. But that's here and there.

What we got to was, what we do is the old school. We put a whiteboard. We'd bring in a couple of engineers, doctor, professor. We build a team with different backgrounds, smart people with the common goal of how do we get out of this? Obviously, vaccinations is going to be one of it. But what are it going to be the other things that help us get out of it? How do we get out of this? And then we'd have the whiteboard, and we put the problem up, and we'd let him go to work and see what came of it.

We kind of chuckled at it because he goes, that's not politics, they'll never do that. But here I got a guy sitting in me, telling me how you just need to get to the solution and away we go. Well, you're sitting in there. You're actively, what are your thoughts on where we are right now? And how do we get out of this sucker? Well, I better call a place to get my hanger for my plane tonight because this is a long conversation. So shout out to Mike and I-Corps again as well. So when I start, again, similar background with technology and doing those things, engineering background, yeah, I came across I-Corps.

And Mike and I have now exchanged emails, and he's provided me. Thanks, Mike. Shout out to Mike at I-Corps for giving me some empirical evidence. Hey, Mike, I'm just saying, it might be high time you started sponsoring the podcast, right? The amount he gets blabbered above. Anyways. So what I-Corps managed to do for me personally as an elected is I want to. empirical evidence.

So I want data. I'm one of those data guys. So when we're running these projects and you're putting forecasting models and together you're looking at risk mitigation as one of them, you're looking at contingency models, you'll do Monte Carlo simulations. You'll run a ton of thing.

You'll run schedules and you'll run what if schedules. So all of these kind of conditions. What folks have to understand is the politicians do not run the healthcare system. AHS is a separate entity. Essentially where your tax dollars go and how Alberta Health works, where are the insurance company.

They send us the bill and we pay it. So let that one sink in for a bit. So when we're talking about policy, you're being advised by an entity that, like many boards, like the Apega, you've had the public give in trust the authority for a bunch of these organizations over a number of years. So when somebody has a stamp out there, they'll totally get it. They live with whatever their calcs are for a number of years. And the authority on that is literally their board. So as professionals, that's arm's length from the politicians.

Because quite frankly, the best used car salesman can become a politician. You don't get elected on your resume. You get elected on your impression, you leave with people, and how many people show up that date of vote for you, literally. And I can say that because I'm that guy. You're the used car salesman. Yeah, essentially, right? So I ran on my resume and I used it as a comparator between what I could

and what I would bring to the table versus others. A lot of folks are very frustrated with the NDP at the time in my area as all across the province. And I would submit that you've got a lot of people that aren't politicians for the first time ever that stepped forward to help out where we could. So again, coming back to that model, folks have to understand your arm length. There's also this other level of bureaucracy, which is a bit of frustration, but at the same time, it's almost like a failsafe. You've got the folks that work for the government physically and the bureaucracies that kind of chug along in these different departments for a number of years. The electoral cycle swings in and out. And literally, you don't want the pendulum to be able to slam against one side or go back to the other.

You want kind of a steady state, nudge it along versus, you know, hard left and no corner and slam around like a race car. You want it to drive down the road like a big tractor trailer, moving everybody predictable, getting to where it needs to go. Might take a few routes here and there are differences, but literally doing that context. So between the professional boards and the bureaucracy, they're kind of arms lengthen a couple things. When it comes to health specifically, there's triggers that folks have to understand. we're not in normal circumstances. And I would submit that no one ever at the point in time would have allowed this. If we were back in the legislative assembly saying here, special conditions,

we're going to enact this act and we're going to say emergency conditions and everything else, if you would have told me two years ago that we're going to be two years into this, I don't think a lot of us would have voted for that. What we did do is voted for those temporary measures to be in place over a given time with those corrections to take place. So that kind of sets it up from the background. you've got professional organizations and inclusive of crown corporations that are independent of political influence for the most part what we do as politicians is we try to impact policy policy changes now you have professionals in those fields docs virologists whoever happens to be part of those organizations coming to us as politicians and when you take that genia of the bottle they then get added another layer of authority that they wouldn't normally have in certain circumstances so now you've got that level of authority they're the ones that are guiding us and saying, here's what works, here's what doesn't. And to their credit,

nobody knows the right answer yet. We're in the middle of this. So I think we'll have one hell of a lesson learned at the end of this. And then we'll have a ton of policy that comes out of it. We'll make a bunch of changes. There'll be tons of social changes. Hopefully it doesn't go too far off the rails. I've seen a lot of things that cause concern out there of where and what and how people are going. And a lot of it's based on fear and not knowing. And it's a mistrust. And reasonably so. How do you trust things that keep changing the narrative and everything else? So the, the rambling that I'm doing here is kind of setting the stage of where we're at. So how do we take information that Mike has from ICOR to look at serology and to bring that in? I've done that. So ICOR

provided me the information from October 3rd up until November 14th. It shows the serology test from the population that they had sampling to. I think it was 14,000, something like that. Albertans rolled up their shirt sleeves and took a blood test. Went off to the Mayo Clinic. That information came back and it showed some interesting trends. So the population pre-vaccinated, And everyone has to understand, too, the vaccination that we have is for alpha strain. It's not for Delta. So the efficacy of it is, you know, like last year's Chevy on the parking lot. So it kind of looks the same, but it's changed a bit from what's out there.

So that's what people are rolling up their shirt sleeves and taking. And what it shows is, it shows that the severe outcomes seem to be less with that. And it shows when you do the serology on that, that I think it's upwards, Mike, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's 70% of those that are double vaccinated show a 250. So in a scale of zero to 250. And 250 being very good. 250 is the highest. So 0 to 250, that's where it goes.

70% of the double vaccinated population has that. There's also a scatter chart that shows those that didn't declare or the data wasn't there. And it shows those who aren't. About 17% of the unvaccinated population shows hitting 250. So you've got a coverage between all that. And I would propose that there's a bunch of folks out there that have been exposed to it, have had, you know, going back as early as 2019 when we saw a lot of these early cases, shot clock rolls around the spring of 2020, all of a sudden, the fit hit the sham,

and we're understanding this COVID things out there, and we're all nervous trying to catch up. So if we ignore the serology, you're ignoring a ton of stuff, and that's why you've got your medical communities. There's so at odds right now because the serology shows that with an exposure of three months, roughly, you should be peaking pretty high, your body's kicking over. What it doesn't show if it's like two years ago, and that's where your T cells would actually start to show that data. Unless, as an example, you have an individual who was exposed to it, got through it before they knew what it was. It wasn't a recorded case.

And then roll up their shirt sleeve and take a shot. And all of a sudden, their virology, or the serology is going off the charts. That then proves it out. And there's tons of data out there as well. But what you have is all this churn. Nobody can believe what's happening because the science community hasn't landed on it. You've got different jurisdictions trying to pull different levers and different points. populations, and here's where we are, trying to make the best information that we have based

on the data that the AHS group wants to look at compared to other jurisdictions that they find as reasonable, put a predictive model in place, and those politicians, get all that information, and then we're trying to talk about it and push it along, and then you've got a select group of politicians that actually sit at the table and ultimately make those decisions in the cabinet in the pick committee. The rest of us, you know, free radical MLAs are running around trying to make sense of this, and then trying to have those conversations. conversations and influence it. And because of all that process, I became one of the six MLAs that sits on board with Minister Coffing. And we have these discussions at least once a week talking about what ifs and what are the next scenarios and we're trying to work through these problems. So again, you have all these moving parts. You're getting imperfect information and you're trying to make best judgments on that. That's where we're at. I don't know if you even gave me an answer. You're a pretty good politician.

Holy crap. Well, the question is how do we encouple this? Well, the, how do we get out of this? Okay. I'll give you a quick answer on that one. Sure. Change your health care system. So everything comes down to tolerance and risk. So when I'm looking at the real big issue is the population. Okay, yeah. But here, okay, change the health care system. Yeah, change the health care system. But how realistic is that?

It's realistic. What's the intestinal fortitude, though? So I can make a lot of changes and I can do that, but how is public opinion formed? So here's where the politics and the mainstream media gets in place. As soon as I say private, well, we're up in arms, we don't want that. As soon as I say alternate, well, we don't want that. And let me give you an example. We already have a private health care system. As soon as your doc does work in his office that isn't within a hospital, that's, you know, over simplification.

That's private. when we got into it. We don't call it private. But it's private, right? Right. The doc charges AHS. He doesn't work for AHS. Yeah, but this comes back to what we talked about off air very early on.

And I won't put words in your mouth, but essentially politicians get voted in on public opinion. Public opinion gets formed by media. And so media has painted the word private in this country is a very taboo, bad thing. Big time. And so what you're talking about is, is it doable? Yes, it's doable. The problem is you got to get media to side with you on it, because if they don't, it's going to be an uphill battle. Because what they're going to do is you're going to put a war of attrition against you, which you probably can't win.

And guaranteed the next political campaign, if we had, you know, pipelines, jobs, and economy, guaranteed one of the slogans would be health care, COVID, and economy. I mean, that's what it comes down to. So people have to understand we can fix it. You have to look to other jurisdictions that have done it. UK has an interesting model, Norway has an interesting model. Heck, the U.S. has an interesting model. So we have to understand this. So my father-in-law is, well, he's passed now this summer, but he ran a hospital for 30 years. So he's former airborne. He's a dock, Rand-Laklabish, his chief of staff. So over the last 20 years of being married to his daughter, I've had tons

of conversations prior to getting to politics. You have to understand those old docs when they started switching into Medicare. A lot of his old profs were from Europe, and they warned those docks, don't do it. Because what's going to happen is it's failed in Europe, and here's the issues why. It's like selling you that Chevy that's off the parking lot and then give you unlimited warranty no matter what you do to it. So if there isn't some skin in the game from the person who's driving that, the warranty only goes so far, then it's a bad thing.

The other thing was they didn't conceive everything under the sun being part of Medicare. What they looked at was the mainstay and the items that were of critical import. If you had cancer, that's kind of a big deal. if you had a heart condition, that's kind of a big deal. How about diabetes? That's kind of a big deal. If you need a wart remove from your toe, should everybody pay for it? So it's got this big cumbersome thing.

And it's a money machine. We spend $21.9 billion to defend our country. So all those women and men out there are the soldiers that fly the planes, the pilots and the seats, are different interests involvement with NATO, defending the North, being out there when we need them, 21.9 billion. In health care, in the province of Alberta, we spend $23 billion a year on health care. Plus, because of COVID, we basically put another $3 billion into the pocket to deal with COVID to make sure that the $23 billion, the big system, doesn't ever have an issue. This is huge cash. So here's my frustration as being a project guy.

$26 billion. I'll build you a train line all the way out to the UConnor. in Alaska and I'll get all that deep seaport access. I'll give you a 17% uptick in your GDP. $3 billion. I'll build you a pipeline from Fort McMurray to to Edmonton, probably a 20 and a 36 inch. We can get pretty close to getting that done for you. I can put thousands of people to work.

This isn't insurmountable. So it's a ton of cash. It's not a matter of not spending the cash. It's how you spend it and how you do in your system. So I would propose if we want some intestinal fortitude, look at alternate models. Look at potentially moving those alternate models outside of the mainstay health care system, run it as a pilot project,

allow that clean sheet exercise where people from the health care community come in, outside people come in, those other jurisdictions. We run a proof of concept, find the lessons learned from that, try to start making those efficiencies come back into the big system, and then that's where you actually get something. And it gives people an Alberta alternate health care system. If they choose to go on that stream, we'll figure out the financials on it. If you just go out and have a chit or you have a credit card

or whatever comes back in the health care system, or maybe I don't have them forbid, you throw on 100 bucks a month of your own stuff if you want your wart remove from your toe. Like start getting these things out of the mainstay. And then you see how efficient this thing becomes. Then it'll reduce your surgery times. Then it'll take a lot of these items that are being performed in the hospitals in a lower cost setting that can be formed just as efficient.

Then you really start to see things. So how do we unravel COVID? Give me my health care capacity. What's your risk tolerance for how many patients you can have and how many ICU beds? ICU beds come back down to anesthesiologist, nurses. What is the nurses really constrained on? The people that are working part-time full-time shifts, plus their training, not allowing cross-shift training,

and going back to the old model of a trade-type model where you could take people, give them those given skill sets, apprentice them underneath the chief ones, and allow that to be a force multiplier. The enemy is identified, it's us, its process, its fixation on the way it is now. We need to radically change. If I'm putting a pipeline together, we do a hydro test.

I'll do all the weld, the radiography on it. I've got everything tied in. We've done the coatings. We done the jeeps, we got this thing in the ditch. I put water to it and I pressure testing over capacity to make sure that there's no leaks or drop in pressure. We knew that the healthcare system was having issues when we first got into this because of the weights and the delays. COVID was the pressure test and it's popping leaks everywhere. If we don't recognize that, if we don't fix it, we're hamstringing the entire economy

and we keep pouring cash into a calcified cash hungry monster that will not change nor is it motivated and change unless we inject new ideas into it. You think you're in for a short political career. I tell you what, I think you're in for a long political career. I don't know. It's if I'm crazy enough to do this again. So part of it is, maybe as being a project guy, you work yourself out of a job. But I hear what you're saying.

And listen, one of the great things about long-form conversation. And maybe I, I give politicians a bit of a rough time, right? Maybe if more of them went on forums like this, and maybe they do, in fairness. Maybe if in our country, in our area, if there was more of it going on where you could actually have somebody clearly speak about the problems we face right now and get given the time to talk about it. Oh, holy crap. We do have some smart people, but the problem is extremely complex.

It's a big animal. And again, we've walked into this. We're seeing the pressure test right now. and how do you control your population to make sure you don't crash the system? But when the system that you're concerned about crashing is then causing more harm than it is good for the population, then we have to have that gut check. And that's where we're at, we're at those crossroads. And we really need to look at this with eyes wide open, drop the conjecture,

drop the partisanship, look at how we can figure out to solve the problem and be open to new ideas without having this jumping up and down and claiming bloody murder that we're trying to kill the system. We're trying to make sure that it's there forever. And when we look at our policies and our procedures and how we want it to be, I think this is an inflection point for Canada. I think it's an inflection point for Albertans. Really be cognizant of what this is. You can't shut down one of your major economy elements.

I can't pay for it anymore, but yet you want everything 100% guaranteed paid by somebody else. And all we have to do is look federally to that. You've got a prime minister that spends more than every other prime minister combined. Money's going to run out sometime and who holds our debt. You know, I want to make sure that I'm clear on this so that I'm getting it right. Myself, included with a lot of people, want to be really angry at the government of Alberta for mandates for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to speak to one that's very close. She's been on the podcast.

Hudson Suva was the little boy in the school bus who was unconscious when they found him, when he gets, you know, heartbreaking story. He's healthy, happy, you know. But that's a terrifying thing. And you're in an area where a lot of the rural schools, there's a lot of riding in the bus. That's what we did as kids. I was thankful. Or at the time, as a kid, I was upset. I always wanted a longer bus ride.

I was the first one off, right? But, I mean, now, with that going on, I want to be really mad at politicians because as soon as you hear that story, and now it's been brought to light with the Alberta government, I guess, me as the, just the peasant, the commoner, the minion, whatever you want to call me, I'm just a plain Jane regular Joe guy. I go like, I don't understand how tomorrow, boom, they just don't make the change. Like, you guys sitting there go, this is done. We're on a bus, check, just done.

But I think you can give me some insight into why that isn't why it, or that isn't how it happens. And maybe the anger shouldn't be directed your way. Well, you know, it's to the point. holds the pen, writes the history. But to get to the history, you had to have the sword first to win the battle to be able to hold the pen. I mean, it's that chicken and egg principle. When it comes to Hudson, MLA Roswell. Yeah, Garth. Yeah, Garth, you know, God bless him. He stood up and he told us about it. There was a number of us and I've made several statements since then and inclusive with Minister Copping as well that this policy is flawed. Most recently, I did a member statement on, you know, vaccination polies for children and for mask mandates. So to me, again, first principles, when I'm running projects. And you have to understand the Westray mine disaster, there was a bunch of coal miners killed. You know, this is going on a number of years. What was found of that total inquiry was that management looked the other way when it came to safety issues. So the legislation that was changed that went right across the country was that you can no longer, and I'm very, very much paraphrasing this,

you can no longer as a manager not be held accountable for safety infractions. So if somebody on one of my job sites had an incident or a fatality and I knowingly turned my head away from it or there was another incident that we didn't do a lessons learned from. It wouldn't be a matter of if I was going to jail. It would be for how long. So when I look at these things, that's how I look at. When it comes to personal protective equipment, yeah, I get it. I've got the H2S alive certs. I've done all the training as well. As a manager, I never really went into the vessels. I sent people into harm's way, so I sure as the hell wanted to know about it. And when I'm on these sites, want to know about it, you know, the fall protection and all the rigging, everything else that we do.

We do tons of work on that. Trench boxes and the ditches. We know our call before you dig, you know, your locations. I mean, it's nonstop. Safety, safety, safety, safety. That's what the patch gives us because you mess up. She can go sideways. And it's a safe industry.

So when I'm asking people, and this is again, the medical community is telling me this. And think of old Hawkeye and Pearson. Anybody remember, you know, exactly, right? So you think about them, funny characters, you know, kind of crazy environment. they're going at, they're still scrubbing up and they got somebody else putting their masks on. The last thing that the clinician does is contaminates the field by touching their face. So we've got how many people out there who are never trained that are putting masks on their face because it's not the thing that's not the barrier.

It's one of the elements that helps with it. And a lot of it's unconditioning. When people put a mask on, rightly or wrongly, they're thinking about everything else of what they should be doing. So we're conditioning people. Now, everybody, it drives me bonkers. I see people that sneeze and pull down their mask and sneeze out in the open and then put their mask back up. I see people grabbing it and on stuff. I've seen them wore it inside out and

backwards. I've seen one guy wearing a mask that I wouldn't clean up my boots if I walked through the feedlot with. Like it was that dirty hanging on his face. So you've got all of these elements and now you throw it on to kids. And in Hudson's case, from my understanding, little guy, long school bus ride, tired, or you know, it's hot. I wrote a school bus for 45 minutes as a kid too. Meanwhile, you've been in a classroom all day long. You didn't have to wear a mask. You jump on a school bus, which is, in my argument, 100% is a cohort. It's probably your friends and neighbors that are down the road. You guys end up playing after school sledding and doing everything else. You get onto the bus. You're in a tube for the next hour. You're blowing air all around.

And oh, by the way, this little mask, they're not doing anything with it. That's more effective than what Hawkeye and Pierce could do in an operatory theater. They're not the same level of use for that PPE. So with that, that's what I'm saying, make it a cohort. End it. Common sense has to prevail. When the issue of having a personal protective piece of equipment, has more risk than what you're trying to solve, it does not make sense. Yank it off. And again, the context I have, if I were in that circumstance on a job site, and I caused a worker to lose consciousness because of a piece of personal protective equipment,

and I put them back out there to do it again the next day, and a fatality happen or any long-term injuries or effect, I'm going to jail, not a matter of how long. I'm going there. It's just a matter how long that I'm going there. So with this, we're bringing it up to the minister. we're trying to push again, AHS to change the policy.

And that's the frustration with all this. But once again, it's not Shane Getson, who gets to decide the policy. No. Or a group of Shane Getsons, it comes back to AHS. Yeah, we have, you know, electoral representation,

electoral democracy. You know, I have the voice for about 50,000 people, which is kind of spooky when you think about it. So I have to work for the ones that have the same opinion as me. I have to work for the ones that may have voted for me election. I have to work for ones that voted against me in election. and I have to work for ones that didn't show up at all.

So again, if I was to go back to polling, I would be the tail wagging, the dog asking what everybody thought, based on information the media is feeding them or whatever they are formed opinions on based on even less perfect information than what I have. So when we're making these decisions, we literally go into a boardroom in the way I put it, and the way I operate is in a boardroom.

It's not typically on social, jumping on a stand, jumping up and down. So that's why you won't hear me doing that. But I work in the boardroom, and it's very much anyone who's in the industry understands. You've got some fur flying and you've got some dust and you're doing all those things and you're trying to shape and form.

But ultimately, somebody has to make the decision. They've got to live with it. And all we can do is those MLAs is trying to influence and bring it forward as much until a point when it's not working and you start putting people in harm's way and then it comes down to your morals and ethics. So again, with our party, we have free vote.

If I want to vote against public or public or the government policy, I can. The only thing is typically like a money bill because that's a vote of confidence. So we wouldn't bring down the government because I didn't agree with, you know, 50 bucks in one pocket or $100 in the other in a ledger account and a cost code. So you have to pick your battles. And I think that's where a lot of us are at.

We're trying to compel common sense to make a recovery again and start putting these things back in the bottle. Yeah. I think, you know, when you bring up the, if you knowingly put people in, in harm's way after you've been taught, right? You talk about jail. Yeah. Well, out on the workplace, I've brought this up a couple times. You know, we're taught to recognize hazards, right? That's why you do hazard, hazard is this, hazard ID.

That's right. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt. That's right. And so here, I just go like, you know, the podcast has been really interesting the last couple of months, and I'm sure the listeners can attest that. They've been a lot of interesting, relatively no-name people. and now they've become bigger names because of what they're talking about

but to me it's just like oh there's a red flag oop there's another red flag oh there's another red flag and we just keep strung along acting as a population as elected officials everything like there's nothing wrong we got her blind here and nothing going

meanwhile like I mean we'll just use the Suva story with Hudson right it's like that's a pretty giant red flag and the fact is And I can personally attest this. And I know Hudson's mom brandy can attest this too.

The people that reached out after that episode was from all over Alberta, all over Saskatchewan, that had similar stories. And here's the crazy thing. I was the guy saying before that, I mean, yeah, on a bus, closed circuit, you know, like nice, that's where they're saying transmission happens. You kind of get why they got to wear a mask. But I didn't even think about, you know, the five-year-old who can't stay awake for that, right? because they're tired out.

I'm coaching U-7 hockey for the first time. The best coaching advice I got was not about drills, not about anything. It was, remember, these kids are five and six. Half of them are starting school for the first time ever in kindergarten. And the other half are going to school full-time for the first time ever. So they're going to be tired out. So just like understand that.

And you're like, oh, I don't really thought about that. So here I am a parent, got a five-year-old. Here's this Hudson story. And the entire time, up until that point, I was like, I know, it makes sense. And then you hear that and you go, oh, yeah, I thought about that. So I'm here to give a little bit of grace to everybody, right? Because me and Brandy talk, but now here we sit and we're like two months past us and

it still hasn't changed. And I come back to my oil field training and I go, heads are going to roll here if any kid gets hurt because not everybody listens to this podcast. Not everybody's going to hear Brandy's story. And there's tons of parents that don't think just like I did that it's that big a deal. And they're seeing their kid sweaty and, you know, flushed. And they're understanding, but they're trying to follow the rules. We're a rule-oriented society.

Or civil society and it's rules if it separates us from the animals. I mean, you can go back to a bunch of things, but until the rule doesn't make sense anymore. So when you're working on rules, and, you know, again, this is former life, right? You'd come up with policies and procedures and running job sites and all those type of things and even how you spend the cash and how you let contracts. So it's a guideline. Like when you put specifications in place, there's some absolutes, but most of it isn't an absolute. It's a guideline.

So it's an empirical truth until it's proven otherwise. So now that we have a step from the theory into showing a potential risk that's come to fruition, that in my context and the old world, that's a near miss. What we've just near missed, what should be throwing the red flags? We didn't have a fatality. We had a near miss. Don't have a fatality. don't have some little guy out there with brain damage because we think that the best thing that we can do to prevent this is to have an artificial barrier between them and their oxygen.

Like I'm a mother of four and I'm getting a lot less political with this than what I normally would. But yeah, it's raising red flags all over the place. So whoever out in the H.S is making those policies, get off the bench and do your job. Because we're going to keep talking about it. We're going to keep pushing. But ultimately it's up to you. In our environment, you'd already be going to jail. stop it.

Yeah, well, listen, I'm no politician. I don't have to be political, right? I can say, well, I don't know. I've been penalized enough. I've been yanked from YouTube a few times for having conversations and voicing my concern. That's a whole different topic in the censorship world, which is becoming stranger and stranger as we go along. I just go back to the industry we're in.

What's going on doesn't make sense. I'll even take it simpler, right? as adults, our job, especially as parents, is to protect the little ones, right? Like, we can think, we have brains in our head, and this fooled all of us. And I'm being very simplistic about it. To me, a lot of us just went, no, it's okay. But now we know it's not. Although rare, it ain't that rare when you start getting texts from all over the province saying they're seeing this, right?

It's rural busing systems. It's a length. It's a duration. They're little kids. they can't stay awake. And yet, nothing's changed. That's blowing my mind because it's like, well, what does have to happen

for it to change? And I've thought my anger was going to be directed towards this guy. I can take the head. That politician doesn't know any better. Yeah, I mean, that's part of it. Well, and Garth, you're right.

Garth, a tip of the cap to Garth, because Brandy even talked about it, how quickly he picked it up and talked about it at the next meeting. and let everybody know. But I think, you know, here is all of us public, you know, just common people going, like, what are the politicians doing? Like, figure it out.

And when I'm learning right now, and I've had lots of listeners say this, but sometimes I'm dense. And sometimes I just needed to have it said to me by a politician, I guess. And I go, oh, this isn't you guys screwing around. This is somebody else. And the anger needs to be directed where it should be. Because honestly, they need to make the change. Like, it just needs to happen. Like, they do a press conference every bloody week.

Make the press conference make the change. Well, have the press ask the question. Well, no, but they got to be allowed in the building to ask that question. Well, and therein lies part of the issue. So when you're talking about the, you know, again, I'm going to speak a little off cuff here. But the problem with politics is there's too many politicians involved? I'm an elected representative.

I'm not a politician. I know it's a minute distinction. But the way I look at it, again, is I'm that regular guy that stepped out of my life. saw something, wanted to make a difference, enough people said, okay, I trust that guy for the next four years to be my voice. That's what I'm doing. I never got into this to get reelected. There's a lot of people out there like that. There's other ones that are career politicians. It's a different industry. So when they're basing everything on public opinion, which is polling, so they'll poll to ad nauseum, that opinion oftentimes is formed by what people believe or read or goes down the rabbit, So if you take that link out of the equation, we're pretty decent as conservatives. I'm doing the ground game. The air game, good luck.

Like, I'm 6'2.2.2.30. I kind of walk into a room. I'm not the biggest guy, but usually I don't get unnoticed. It's not like I'm that wallflower in the corner. Unless it comes to the media, I'm absolutely invisible. You will not hear the good news stories. You will not hear when I'm talking about corridors. You won't even hear me doing a public press announcement when we have the Opperty

International Air Show taking place. place, nor the $2.5 million we pulled together through grant funding to make sure that we've got water lines in place. Maryland and Nat, too, Sturgeon County calls this press conference together. It's one of the first things we're coming out of the gate. She and her speech is thanking me so much for all the advocacy that I did. The Steve, maybe, the guy from Edmont International Airports is thanking about it. We just 12 hours found out that we managed to scrape it together enough cash to get the Alberta International Air Show off the ground. I do this press for it's the first time. I've got people excited. The guy from CTV News is asking me like 10 or 15 minutes of

What I see for vision? We talk about corridors, aerospace, aviation, all that stuff. And then I'm thinking, this is great. We finally broke it. This is good. This is good stuff. Next day, I wasn't even announced that I was there. So you tell me, how are people's public opinion being formulated and where are they getting

their information from? I'm good at the ground game. I talk to you. This is the ground game. I go to an area where there's people there or town halls. That's the ground game. That's where we're good at. The air war has been taken away from us.

And people are fixated on the air war. Man, it's got to be strange. Oh, that's bizarre. I didn't believe it until I got into it Nike mean you hear about it and when you know former Prime Minister Harper who my opinion best best Prime Minister we ever had you know

just in my lifetime just phenomenal and a fundraiser and the first time when I started hedging around the outside edge said you know your battle guys isn't going to be with the opposition it's going to be with the media I mean this is three years ago yeah I get it now

there's some really good journalists and a lot of it come down to small town small town flavor, it's still there. And I'd asked one gentleman from the Marathorpe freelancer. Because again, younger journalist, this guy didn't have to be guarded around and I could talk to and everything else. And I asked him, I said, what's the difference? I mean, I go to call up the CBC or the CBC's asking for something in Edmonton.

I don't even answer their call. Like, you barely give them three words, they'll piece together something and it won't be anything you talked about. Like, it's pretty frightening, quite honestly. And he says, it's all about clicks. He says, in rural areas, we have to see those people on the street and we have to do that every week, so we still have to be on there. He says, really what it comes down to with the other bigger organizations, they're trying to sell the story and bad news sells. So if they take

something out of context, make it a big flare-up or left, right and center, they're going to run with it. And it's, I've never seen it. I never would have believed it until I got into this. I'd argued early on that corporate media, I've been corrected on that lots lately because lots of people label it, mainstream, whatever. And now, I'm getting, you know, got great listeners, smart, smart listeners, smarter than me. They correct me. So corporate media. Let's go with corporate media.

I argued at the start that they were like dying a slow death, right? Like my generation and certainly younger than me. And of course, are there problems with social media and all these different things on how you gather you media? Sure, sure. But there's obviously problems with corporate media too. I mean, we just have to, I mean, all of us admit it, but they don't like to seem to show that there's a bias there. But anyways, when this all started off,

you saw a giant uptick, I would say, and people paying attention again. Why? Because this was terrifying. Absolutely. You go back to when this first broke, and, you know, the NBA, the NHL, all these giant things are shutting down.

You're like, what is going on? Little old Helmon and St. Walberg, at the time we're in the Saskalta final senior hockey is getting shut down like this is this is hitting every corner of the world and uh all of a sudden there's a huge uptick and i'll even speak to myself well let's turn on the news let's see what the heck's going on right and they haven't let go of that why because probably it's helping sustain what they do the problem is now is we're in this weird loop of like well we can get out of this but you know media control of a lot. Why would they, where's the incentive to be like, guys, it's going to be okay? Well, if

as soon as it's okay, everybody stops paying attention. I feel like a ton of people have stopped paying attention already. They're looking for regular conversation again to come back and give us some hope and, like, let's get out of this. But there's still people dying. They're still, it's like, yeah. And the other thing too is we got to realize we're not a one-trick pony. So COVID is happening. Yeah, it's bad. We're going to get out of it. Uh-huh. How we're going to get up it? Don't know yet. But we, we're going to get up it. But we got to start rolling on with it. And vaccinations were that stop gap. That was a bridge to to bias time. So let's build the capacity. Let's make sure we do that. So the system that we pay so

much for gives us the latitude to be free again. What do you get what do you got to say for the vaccine pass parts? Don't like it. Like I'm totally against it. Same as the QR codes going across the country. Don't like it. I don't have one myself. I refuse. I'll walk a mile on the other man's shoes every day of the week. Don't like it. If it's a short term gap, but again, I come back to that context, nothing so short term as temporary. I mean, it's going to be around for a while. Why? Why do we have that? The United States, they don't have it. There's only six states in the entire United States that actually have something similar that they put in place. Large majority put in legislation that would not allow it. The other ones are sitting on the fence, but they

haven't pulled the trigger. So why do we, as Canadians, embrace this? That's a deep question, honestly. Why do Canadians embrace it? Is it, is it Because we're rule-oriented, because we follow, right? They get out first and they say, guys, this is the way we're going to do it. They get the media to push it. And all of a sudden, we all think it's law and we're just like, oh, okay, whatever, and we'll just carry on.

I would hazard to say a lot of it comes down to how we became Canada in the first place. We didn't revolt against the Queen. No, we were given it. Yeah, we signed a treaty. So down the states, they kicked out Old King George and then they dusted it up amongst themselves. Like it's a different culture. And God bless the states and the folks I worked with over the years. You know, one of my grandfathers came up from North Dakota, moved up here.

So my other grandfather, I mean, our family came from East Friesland in 1791. So we were around before 1867 down in Tignish in Prince Edward Island. We actually have our own family graveyard down there in a church. So Getsons have been around for a long time. But there's a fundamental difference between my cousins that live north of the border and the ones that are down in Boston or in Texas or in the Dakotas. And again, as Canadians, we're very polite. We're very British when you look at those type of things.

The states is different, but you'll see a polarization too between Republican states now and democratic states. They're going through a similar inflection. But God bless the states, the states themselves still have enough autonomy and authority to push back. Here, Alberta and Saskatchewan are the most conservative provinces in the country. But we far pale in comparison to a very conservative state in the state. dates. So it comes back to what people are doing where we've had it good for a number of years, right? If all the rules do the things, everything's good, pay your taxes, show up and vote, pay it's all good. We've had it really lucky until you get to an inflection point of,

okay, what's enough? You know, what's enough? Where's your line? People got to figure out where it is, what's real to them, and get involved in politics, not just the throwing stones from the bench and making me into the public piñata for all your misery. Get off the bench, get involved. That's what I did. And by the way, I won't be around to do it for you forever. I'm a project guy. I'm working myself out of a job. And if this country is going to stand, come back to that whole thing, be Canadiens again. Yes, COVID's a distraction. What else are you doing about it? Quit sitting on the sidelines and bitching and moaning about it. Get off the bench and do something. Because I'm not going to be out here taking the shots for you sitting out front while you're beating

my back and I'm taking all the hits from the front too. It won't happen forever. So you're going to wear out a lot of people and we'll all get painted with the brushes, and just another politician. I took a 60% pay cut to come and do this. My family has been under nothing but pressure since day one with us. My name is out in the social media where I never existed. For what? To do the right thing for the time I have.

And I'm going to continue to do that. I'm going to continue to say those things. I'm going to continue push inside because it's the right thing to do. Do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. So other folks, you better step up, fasten up your chin straps and get in the game here because we need you. Well, I appreciate you coming. I really do. I understand now why our mutual friend.

I said, I think you two will get along because what you're talking about resonates a lot with me. Obviously, doing what I do, I certainly know my fair share about arrows being thrown at you for opening up discussion

in such a controversial time. Before I let you out of here, I got to do the crude master final... You know, it started out as very, final five. I got to think about this when I sit down with Heathrow here this coming week. We got to have a little discussion about it because it started out as the final five, five questions and, you know, how to end it off and everything else. And then, you know, COVID hit. Well, not COVID hit. I started doing COVID-style topics and having these doctors,

these really high where they give you like 32 minutes and you're like, well, I don't got five minutes to ask, you know, these questions. So turned into the final question. At this point, I'm too late for the shot clock anyway. I'm never going to make it home in time. So you want to, going over time using the hockey vernacular we're good well here here's here's the final question for as a guy who's been around the world seen lots of different um cultures places people etc if you could sit down right now throw on the headphones sit across the table and ask the questions instead of uh answer them whose brain would you want to pick right now who would be the guy you're like man I really want to know how you think on what we're seeing and how we get out of it.

Stephen Harper. I mean, we have some access to him. He's one of the most underrated conservatives, literally. I mean, there's an organization, it's an international organization conservatives. Mr. Harper sits at the head of that. You know, I've had the privilege of meeting with him as caucus and having him in our room. There's a statesman. There is somebody that's trying to do what he can to get us out of this.

That's the current figure of our time. There's, you know, other people that are media outlets and everything else, but this guy, he's smart, cool, collected, sees the big picture, and is doing what he can for Canada still, even though he's not our prime minister. So that's the guy we should start paying attention to. We've got some hometown heroes, and we're not paying attention to them. The whole COVID context and everything else, there is no right answer on that one. Like, honestly, there's things that we've got to push back on.

There's things that I believe people are going out in fear. Don't let your fear control you. use your head, look at the other side of the perspective, get away from the social media, turn off the television for a couple of days, and see if your mood changes. Start looking at the little things in life. Start doing that.

But yeah, that would be one person I'd tap into. Yeah, he'd be an interesting perspective, certainly. Yeah, yes. Certainly with even his job history on everything. His record? I mean, look at it. So I was down in the States, and we had, the Canadian dollar was on par.

I mean, he skirted us out of a financial crash. Absolutely. Kept us above water in that. Guided us through that. He was the one that was working on these energy corridors and trying to streamline that process. We had all these trade agreements signed. He was setting us up for success.

And what we've seen happen, I mean, wow, what a contrast. Some guy is more concerned about the color of his socks that he's wearing than, you know, what's going to happen next. It goes and puts in a truth and reconciliation date. and decides to skip it, go to Tafino. And doesn't get harassed, you know, it gets harassed by that. But, I mean, like, that should have been on the cover of every page, front page of every paper, every paper.

Yeah. And, you know, and so again, I send you that clip. I think it was back to October 19-ish 2019. I mean, we were just, we've, as an elected official, I've seen three federal elections already in the time that I've been elected. Like, put that in context. In the last two years, we've had three federal elections and how it worked out. And, you know, I kind of put it in contrast that,

the representation that we have were laughed out on the world stage. We are. No other world leaders take this guy serious. Like you have to put it in that context. So that's what we, as Canada chose, rightly or wrongly, that's the process. That's what it is. You always respect the voters always right. But that's where you're opening up some of those comments about the difference between East and West and what we do.

In the West, we're fundamentally different. And we should embrace that. Quebec did a bunch of things that, you know, they recognize they're different. The Maritimers, you know, heads off to all the first. folks down in P.E.I. and Nova Scotia and our Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, you know, there's a different culture and a different makeup there. And I would propose that that's what makes us really special as a country. You can recognize those things, but don't fix it on your differences to the context where with this current group, it seems like those differences are the

things that are meant to divide us, not bind us. And with everything that we have going out out here, the only way we steer ourselves out of this, I would go back again to those economic corridors, start talking about what we bind and what we do together, how we do trade and commerce, look at where your markets go and then take a cognizant step to build up the north. That is our global position. That's our global advantage. You know, God was blessed us with all that stuff at our disposal and we haven't done it. And I'll bring it in the context.

So I had, it was a 2012 when you had the hell or high water. It was a major flood down in Stampede. At the same time I had my engineering teams coming up from Wichita, New Orleans, and some folks in from Colorado. So bring them up to Edmonton. We're doing this engineering review on a project. We're building down the States. Take them down to Stampede. Great exposure, right? So you got all the Mardi Gras crowd, everyone else from down there. And they couldn't believe all the stuff. And the fact that Calgary turned that thing around in hell or high water. We got that stampede back and going. The other thing is the guys, they're looking at that. So they got this big fabric and they

looked at the landscape around us. They're going, this place is absolutely beautiful. Like, you know, the whole Eskimo thing, right? About living in Ingloos and however we have that. And then they're going, well, where's the frontier? What do you mean the frontier? Well, we thought you guys were in the edge of the frontier. Well, no, that starts a little few hours north still from here. And then the other one comes out, why haven't you guys built this up more? Why haven't you done more? Like, this is incredible. Like, you have all this stuff. Why isn't this bigger? So when you've got folks from other jurisdictions that are our largest trading partner that have also traveled internationally done those things and they come up here for the first time, they see what we've got and they see

this absolute, beautiful hidden gem, you know, God's country. I say that all the time. Why haven't you done anything with it? So that comes back to the question. Why haven't we? Why haven't we developed it more? Why have we done a reasonable, responsible way? Why are we not paying attention to the North? And again, it's because we don't have to.

We've got such a big country with all the resources along those original economic corridors. We don't have to. Our largest trading partner superpower is right to the south. We don't have to. We've been lazy for a number of years. But it's time to get off the bench, fasten up your chin straps, put on the work boots, get some nation-building projects together, figure out the problem that's causing North America all the issues. all the backed up container ships

that can't get their product into Port to Los Angeles everything else. Swing all that stuff up north. Get the trade and commerce going through our area. Tie in your largest partner so it has that national defense perspective

in place so they can take care of China and Russia or now sovereign Arctic nations on our own back doorstep. If that doesn't make people think you should, that have that global plane and are literally hamstringing the energy for the planet for the next number of years. Go back to that for a second.

Go back to China and Russia on our back door. If that doesn't make you think, expand on that for a second. Well, so here's an inflection point. So, and it was pretty cool. So I had, in one of the days I was, you know, sick at home. So spool up and start to look at how China changed.

So the last 40 years of how they went from an inflection point of being a have-not country to changing where they're at. And it was one gentleman that came in in power. What he wanted to do is decouple the education. So that was part of it. So give your countrymen access to education the best. people get education, fire up the universities again. At that point in history, they were very much inward looking. The Communist Party had dropped everything down and said this is the way it is. The rest of the world is bad. He also, so then he opened it up so not just Communist Party members were getting selected.

It was whoever was the smartest getting into universities. Build up your workforce, educate them. Next part is he went on a trade mission all around the world and saw how all these other economies were thriving and theirs wasn't. They were still plowing fields with oxen for crying out loud and heavily based on that. So then when he looked at was, okay, we've got this philosophical thing of how we should run the country, but they're failing us. And if we keep doing this, it'll keep failing. So what he looked at was some of the trading zones. Let's put a little bubble around these areas and let's see how it can work, whether it's the farming context or whether it's manufacturers of goods and whether it's trading right across the harbor with Hong Kong.

So how do we do that? And that's what he did. They built these pilot projects, again coming back to the comment on health care. They built the pilot projects. They allowed these trade and commerce to start to flourish. they did it within a bubble. So it was all contained and controlled. And then they allowed those bubbles to flourish.

That's how they built up the economy. The other inflection point was Tiananmen Square. So back in the 80s, I believe it was, when that moment happened, you see one university student standing up and holding up and stopping a brigade of tanks. Yes. At that point in history, China spent about as much on their national defense program as we do. So is Canada, $30,000 a billion dollars roughly. You know, it's 21 in change right now.

but at that point in period, $30,000 or $30,000 a year. I mean, the massacre that took place after that was catastrophic. I mean, just absolutely horrific. But that really made the Communist Party of China go, holy crow. Now their current status span is $340 billion. So they took our cash through all the trade and commerce. They built up their defense. They are the largest population on the planet.

You take all of Western Europe and North America, where about, I don't know, maybe equal to China. So now they're having that. They want to expand outwards. the Belter resources play. That's taking place. That's happening right now. They've declared themselves an Arctic nation because they want the trade routes.

They're investing heavily in natural gas, along with the Russians, in our own backyard. They have gone out and bought a bunch of countries. They've done all this stuff. December 11th of last year, I was sitting on Wilson Center Institute, and they were talking about the North and what that meant to the United States. There was five brigadier generals on there, guys that ran in NATO, Theodore, in Europe, current commanders up in the area. And they had a few points that really were sobering. They know that the next battlefield, they don't pick it.

It's going to be in an Arctic-type condition. It's either going to be in our backyard or pushing towards the Himalayas, because when you look at the expansion of where that's taking place, they need to bolster up Alaska. They need to make sure that that is there. The technology on weapons are big depth and distance that we have of the Arctic. It no longer makes sense because you can literally pop up a submarine through the ice and the speed of the missiles that can reach us now are six to seven times faster.

than they were before. Like this is all literally tech that's taking place. The world is getting smaller because of that and they're on our doorstep. So when the U.S. is looking at that, the grown up in the room is saying, okay, the Arctic is a big deal. That's why the F-22s are stationed up there. That's where they're throwing in a whole battalion of the F-35s. That's why they're trying to develop an Arctic ethos. They're trying to figure out the supply chain. They're looking for radical collaboration with Nordic regions, Norway, Scandinavia. They kind of get it. So they're looking at developing that tech. And they need access to communications and energy. And we happen to be the closest thing in that conduit right up to that area.

That's why this is of critical importance. And that's why China and Russia want that. And that's why Russia's building out their shipping fleet of 17 big merchant ships that run on natural gas. They're basically quasi icebreakers. And then developing this megalith of this big nuclear powered icebreaker that's going to go through there. Suez Canal, you don't need it. Just run through the north. That's what's happening with us.

And we keep jumping up and down protesting pipelines. keep jumping up and down, talking about the next health wave, and this stuff is happening all around us. That's a lot. Yeah. You know, and that terrifies me when you have who we have leading us, right? Our military guys get it. You know, and you've got the general that sits up in the Northwest Territories that runs north. 80% of his career was in the U.S. Air Force as a Canadian.

80% of his career was in the U.S. Our military guys get it. Our politicians don't. Harper got it. That's why he was putting efforts in. to the Arctic, the current guy. Why? This is, is it because the population of Canada doesn't want to know about it, listen to it,

care about it? Like, why isn't this more of, I don't know, a concern talked about? I mean, it's not saying war is coming, but... We've never had to fight for our freedom for a number of years. Everything we did was proxy somewhere else. The United States woke up when the 9-11 hit. I mean, I was sitting out in the cold leg air weapons range when that happened. You got to see how much hardware was literally near when we were doing that project.

No one has been as close to it. Now, our folks that went over and deployed to Afghanistan, they get it. There's a whole new group of warriors out there that understand this. And that's why you can see the impact of when the states pulled out of Afghanistan, of how much that tore at them. They kept crazy in the sandbox. We're letting it in our own backyard because we have been safe. We have been protected for years.

You know, we had something offline talking about the difference, resilience between someone who lives downtown Edmonton that can walk down to the Starbucks or anything and have a grocery store and then hands reach versus the guy that's out in the middle of Zama that hits the ditch and he's on his own for about five or six hours and you have to start a fire and you have to figure out how it works oh and you better have a flare gun with you oh yeah and you might want to have a rifle with you too because he might be there for a while complete different narrative versus greater Toronto area we've we've become so urbanized that we forget this that safety has been there all of these things and the folks and the men and the women

And even the whole concept of defunding the police just drove me bonkers. The people out there that keep you safe at night, you want to take away their, their wherewithal. Canadian borders and customs, you want to underfund them so you can take away my AR-15 from me or my SKS or whatever else my favorite hunting rifle is. You want to take that. Oh, yeah, plus paint ball guns and pellet guns. You want to take that all away from us because you're going to save us from what?

They're too safe, too comfortable in those little cocoons. and unfortunately, typically in history, and you're the history major, not me, typically there's an inflection point with something gets really bad before it gets worse, and then it's going to get better after that. But not until the wolf was at your door

while you figure it out. There is hardship, and we're trying to avert it. Tons of us are working to make sure that those same folks are safe. But honestly, I think the snowflake never been spank crowd, they're in for a rude awakening

because if everybody else just walks away from the table they're on their own, who's paying for it? You're no longer in mommy and daddy's basement. You're on your own. So you better get your ideals reconciled with realities and the rest of the world, they're hungry for it.

Even in the context, again, of that capital deployment, if we don't get jurisdictional approvals rapid and quick, people are going to spend their money elsewhere, build a bell's and we're going to be sitting here in the dark on a pile of stuff that everybody wanted 20 years ago. Is there anything we can do to help? Yeah, get involved. I mean, obviously, I love to... You're doing a great job.

I like to say this is helping, or I hope it is, right? Because knowledge is power, right? Like just understanding, right? Like, huh, this has been an interesting little chat. And I know the people sitting around or driving, I shouldn't say that, nobody's sitting around. Tons of people are on their way to work or whatever. But I mean, everyone's going, huh, this has been, you know,

we've covered a lot of topics, a lot of things that you have a unique insight on, right? That normally, you know, is just speculations for a lot of guess, right? but is there any way the common person obviously getting involved right if you've got the skill set to to become a politician get involved get going the energy needed to push on things but i mean as a general population there's a ton of energy you just sit in there right now she and they want to help they just it's like where does the energy go everybody needs a cause so you know one of the things that when you look at it if you can't find an enemy for somebody people find it on their own and typically they'll turn inwards so i'm actually

asking people to become Canadians again. Talk about the possibilities. Talk about the future. Change your narrative. Like stop tearing each other down. You know, never in our history have we had such an access to communication, but we don't talk to each other anymore. Start talking about the positive. Start making those plans and those goals. Start paying attention to the, literally the BS that's out there. Come up with your own decisions. Do your own research. Don't be so quick to judge others. And oh, by the way, politics matters. You don't have to be a politician. Get involved. You know, tons of folks are asking me, well, what are you going to going to do about the premier and I tell them it's the same thing they would. I have one vote as a

UCP member. That's it's not rocket science. Like here's how bonkers it is when it comes to politics. Show up. By your membership, show up and vote. It's an easy process. And when you're looking at people, take the time to go to a candidate's form. Take the time to talk to them. If you find somebody that's an actual leader in your area, maybe help prop them up and say, hey, you don't have to do this rest of your life, but I don't know, step up for four years and see what you can do, because there's only going to be a few people left. And this is a perfect venue for that. So all of the keyboard warriors out there, step up to the plate and absolutely get behind the person in your area or be that person. And one of the other things I'll say here too is the

social fabric for our small communities. And I wrote a little bit of an article on this. And I'm doing them weekly now just to try to get that message out in the local papers. It's always the usual suspects. So you'll see a bunch of people, you'll show up these different events. It's the same founding families that are there. It's the same volunteers that show up and they seem to be involved in two or three other things. So God bless them. They're doing that. Don't be critical of what they're doing. Jump in and give them a hand. And to the folks that get entrenched in those areas, the other side of it is let new blood come in. Don't, don't strangle it. Don't struggle. Don't love it to death. Let people come in. So you need that that grassroots thing again where we're connected,

we're working on community and it has to spread out provincially and gradually as well. Well, you know, you go back to tough times, create strong leaders, right? And then strong leaders create easy times and easy times, you know, and you get the wheel going, and that's what, that's, you know, kind of one. The interesting thing, and I was telling you this when, when I picked you up, is, you know, like, I'm 35. And for 30 of my years, and I've said this before on here, I didn't pay attention to politics. I didn't need to, right? Like, I just didn't need to. I'm learning right now. I'm learning a great lesson is, I didn't understand, and this probably sound really stupid to a lot of people. I didn't realize how important politics was.

I just, you know, when, when things are rolling along and you got a good job and, you know, you talk about, you know, you go to the hockey game on Saturday night and you're blah, blah, blah, blah, right? We go down that road. Things are good. You just don't, you just don't care. I just don't care. I just didn't care. What was the point? And now you go, man, I can't believe how important politics truly is. which seems assonite, honestly, it just seems crazy to say that that sentence aloud because obviously it's important, but it is extremely important. You know, there's a lot of people, and we have, you know, one thing that gives me hope, first, is a guy like yourself.

There's lots of good people getting involved because they see that they need to get involved, right? Certainly. So I think that's, I think that's evident. So I think that's another cause for hope that good people. people are getting involved and there's lots of great people involved. Here's a question for you. You're a UCP guy. A lot of people think it cannot be done within the UCP. A new party, a new formation has to come in because the old guard is an old guard and it cannot be changed within it.

What's your thoughts on that? Yeah. So to put it in the hockey vernacular, here's how conservatives are wired. We're like Montreal, Canadian fans. When the team's performing, well in the ice will give them a big round of applause and when they're performing, even at a home game poorly, we'll boo them. That's how conservatives are based. So when you look at the two different schools of thought and unfortunately we've become very polarized right now, you have a socialist or a capitalist type idea. So there's two different schools of thought and I'm oversimplifying it. But in groups and organizations that have and foster freedoms, rights, responsibilities, accountability, all those type of things and freedom of thought and expression, it's very easy

for us to get cross-threaded with each other. Because you've got a ton of of people, you know, you have thoroughbreds, right? They're out there. They're all individuals are running. Nothing more so powerful than when you get a bunch of team of thoroughbreds putting a harness and pulling the same way. So we're on worst enemies in that context. We're like everyone's big brother. Like I was always harder in my two younger brothers and I was anybody else that ever came out and worked with me because they had to be better and they were never going to get a free pass. If anybody else in those crews knew those kids that were out there working for me or on part of my crews or hired in a company, they knew that they earned it,

that they never got anything for me for free. And that's how I was talking. So when you look at that family setting, you have to understand of how you were raised. That's who you're making to be that next group of leaders or followers of what they believe. The other side, it's like the Borg. You know, I'm oversimplifying, so I'm going to insult a bunch of people, but it's a collective group think. So it's easy for them to go along that, and it's easy to have someone to point as a common enemy. We're really good at being successful of forming that when we have the common enemy and then we tear each other apart. Because again, we're our big brothers and our wars critic.

So I've thought about that too, of which party or would you do it again? You're rebuilding. I honestly believe that there's tons of leadership in that party that are sitting around the table that oftentimes, again, coming down to being invisible, you've got a bunch like me that are just sitting there. They'll never get a press release because the other side doesn't want you to know at home crowd, how strong of a team we have. Now, the other thing is we have free votes. We will talk and we will openly criticize if in the boardroom context that some aren't going along with it. The other side sees that as opposition or the potential that they're tearing each other apart. No, actually, we're just having a very frank, frigging conversation and getting getting at it to make

ourselves better. So do I think that there's a better party out there? No. I think that we have a chance. We pulled together two groups. Great. The one thing I said in caucus, you're all in the same boat now. So throw away those other team jerseys used to had, either grab a bucket or an oar because you're in the same boat together.

So get at her. And that's the goal. And we'll also do a thing called follow the leader until there's a new leader. That's what you do. That's what good teams do. We have a process for doing that. It's not going to be out in the public opinion. You're not going to see a bunch of MLAs throw a shoe and do that.

It's going to be the membership. So if you want to be part of a party, if you want to be part of the change and the difference, stop trying to tear it down from the outside. It's easy to oppose everything. It's way tougher to get in there and do it. So now we've reached this point. We'll have a leadership review. My request for everybody out there, whether you like the leader or you want a different one or anything else,

get out and buy a membership. And having a leadership review is a good thing. Every other premier or conservative premier embraced these. Ours is as well. We've already set a date. Give them a review. That's what it's about. Make sure you've got the best players on the ice.

And make sure you've got some common things. pipelines, jobs, economy. What's the next one going to be? Healthcare, COVID, economy. We're hitting it on all cylinders in the economy. All the changes we did. Minister Taves is a rock star, in my opinion. I mean, the guy is just the epitome of an Albertan cowboy

that also embodies oil and gas. It also embodies the farming side of it and is just a financial wizard and has the intestinal fortitude to do it with class, with style, and with poise. He's pulling us out of it. Those policies are taking effect. I'm literally dealing.

So on the, you know, I'm not going to go on. You got me going here. When we're talking about diversification, when I look and I start getting into aerospace aviation, so you know, I flew my own plane down here. I'm involved in that. And part of the reason why I did that was as a farm kid, I always looked at the sky. I thought, wouldn't that be cool to fly? And then the second part was, you know, understood that you could.

And then the third part was my wife giving me the final nudge and saying, and stop talking about it, go do it. And then the part was really the pitch was so I could get home to my family when I was away from home, take away those seven hours. drives and, you know, put it down to an hour flying time. So I can get here from my place to Lloyd in an hour versus three and a half hours of driving. That's why it makes sense. So when I'm passionate about the aerospace, it inspires people. But the other thing in our economy, because of our industrial complex and all the STEM learning that we have, all the engineering, everything else

that's behind it, 80% of our transferable skill sets can be applied to aerospace. So let that sink in, 80% of the skill sets of the population we have out there right now. I only have to do is tweak you up 20% and you're full-fledged in aerospace. aerospace and aviation. I literally am dealing with the company that wants to come here. They're the same, the parent company put up the Galileo satellite systems over in Europe, GPS for Europe.

They want to come here to Alberta to build satellites and the launch vehicles to build rockets. Sean, we can literally be space cowboys. We're sitting on the industrial complex that can transfer all those skill sets. Are you talking Clint Eastwood? Well, I mean, that's, That's my pitch.

And the company, they get a kick out of it. They're pretty sophisticated. And they had, you know, me with pretty grassroots. And I'm all over it. Yeah, this is doable. So money's there. Everything's sitting on the table. We just got to step through and grab the brass ring.

And that's what we can do. So we're hitting on all these cylinders. You've got investment coming back. You've got Dow doing all this work. Yes, we're back. Oil and gas is not going away for a number of years. Well, transition for sure. But you still need to make the world go around.

And we can make other stuff with it. And you can do all this. And we're sitting the gateway. to the north. All of that stuff is right in our backyard. We're the envy of the world, but we can't realize it. So that's why, I believe, with all of that, why in the hell would you tear apart that team to start over again to go back to freaky-deaky socialism 101 and lose even more ground that we've lost? Well, because in the meantime, you know, we started with a guy named Mike. Well, that guy named Mike is living in Mexico now. And we probably

both know a handful of people at least who are gone and they were all smart people they saw what's going on and he went i want out of here so all this is is very interesting to me because i'm like it's been a long time since i've had somebody come on that's been very positive about possibly the direction ahead or the direction ahead or whatever we want to call it the problem we got right now is society is divided right i mean we got that group that group sucks let's get that group let's make them so they can't function in society. Oh, they don't want to get their kids vaccinated. We're going to make it so their kids can't function in society. And we're going to have it so that, you know, they can't play sports with the other kids because they're dangerous and whatever else, right? That's where we're

at right now. All these ideas you got, I'm like, oh man, I forgot what hope feels like. You know what listen? We don't know each. The listeners should know. We met each other like three and a half hours ago, right? So I'm a guy, Shane, that helped the Health Foundation raise a bunch of money. I haven't talked about this. I don't know why I'm going to talk about this because I want it to do really good. I really want it to do really good. But I got pulled from it because of opening up dialogue around, you know, bringing on doctors and professors and everything. It's their own prerogative to do that. and I respect them for wanting to distance themselves and everything we, you know, it's what it is. But what it does is it creates a bigger division among the population than pull it back together.

I said this to Ron McLean once upon a time. You know, if you've gone down with Don, it would have pulled this back together. By putting a wedge in there, you started to drive us apart because that was a huge part of the Canadian society, was that, right? So the problem we got right now is we got all this, like, great ideas from you. And the reason I'm going on this little bit of a tangent here is I was the guy that helped raise, you know, and I'm, let me be very clear. I do not want to say that I'm the reason it happened. I just that I really believed in it. A bunch of money for the hospital.

Then we did this thing called Bike for Breakfast, which raised $300,000 and change off an idea of bike to Quick Dick McDade. And it was just a group of random people came together in Lloyd and raised money for Lloyd schools and 57 kilometer radius And within a month, it was just like lightning went off. It was doing really good, really good. And I've said this, you know, lots behind closed doors. I've kind of changed as a person over the last little bit because of what media and society's doing. We're just growing farther and farther apart. So I love all your ideas, but we've got to solve the biggest problem. here and the biggest problem right now although you'll argue with me and probably say it's the economy and everything else it's like the economy means in my opinion and love to have this discussion because I'm probably wrong it probably is the biggest thing but it means shit in my opinion if we can't fix what's going on in society and our in our family the building blocks of this beautiful nation

and all of nations is family and right now families are falling apart I don't know how many times on the text line I get another text of of a wife and a husband or whatever. It's happened three times this week where they're just like, you know, they're arguing and media isn't helping it. I'm trying to, I hope I'm trying to help, but maybe I'm just making it worse. I can't figure it out.

And, you know, if we can't fix that problem, all these beautiful ideas probably aren't going to mean nothing. I agree. But here's the other thing, too, and I'm not going to argue with you. I agree, but it's both. And it's in the same context where, you know, I rolled up in my little airplane, four-cylinder and got here and you roll up and you're in your Ford and I'm not going to hold it against you, drive fords, but it's okay. It's leases

a pickup. And my uncle, they're laughing right now because I've got a cousin who's a Ford mechanic and another guy became a programmer and my uncle is absolutely head over heels at his son works at a Ford place and the other guy who has this little business. But Brad, but Brad, shout out and you Brad works on Ford's, you know, so it's a funny thing. But the context is you've got an eight cylinder engine out there, you don't run it on one cylinder, even though your eco comes down and it'll save you some gas. And you still got to get down the road together. So if you fixate on one issue, then it falls apart. And that's the whole team concept. So I'll have a finger in a certain area. I'll be predominantly leading on the economic corridors because I've been given a project to do, which is really that longer range reaching thing, plus the aerospace dealing all that as well, part of the Strategic Aviation Council now, which is pretty cool. Pulling that side together so we can, get this COVID genie put back in the damn bottle. Because life after COVID, and I was honestly hoping for all of that this summer, if the capacity would have stayed where it was supposed to be,

we would have made it through the fourth wave. Like honestly, yeah, there's a lot of challenges there. And I made my comments openly about leadership management and how that works and what you do when you're performing and how you've got the smartest 2% of our intellect forecasting or crash at the same time you're allowing it to happen without course correction is beyond me. So I agree with you on the family fabric. My biggest concern on the whole REP program and where we're going with this

was that we're going to cause more people harm in effect by trying to get them to the stopgap and how much are we going to do to tear people apart. I had one constituents call me up. And this is, I mean, it's polarized effects. And again, I have to deal with everybody. That's for $50,000, right? This one lady calls me up and she's ripping on me, how we've messed up everything, just wants me to admit

that I'm the one that caused all the problems of COVID. I mean, retired, lady sitting out in a nice lakefront property, you know, and that's her position. I've got another person out there, blue-collar guy's trying to make ends for his family and is going to get pushed out of work and then has to make this hard decision because of a company policy. Our government did not put that policy in place. We put this REP, half-pregnant program in place to facilitate it and allow businesses

to take the brunt of it. My opinion was wrong. It got us a means to an end, but the concerns that we're seeing back to the family element, that's what you're seeing right now. it's polarizing people and nothing worse than people that are fearful and don't know and have these freedoms taken back they just want it over with. So again, when we're doing that, it's not without consideration. It's how do you, it's a means to an end. And I would argue my position's been pretty clear all along is that I think we've gone too far in a number of things.

Hence my point at the start of it, I don't follow the REP program. I don't have a Q card pass thing. I show my proof of vaccination. or not proof of vaccination, I should say, proof of serology or my negative COVID test. That's what I choose to do out of own personal expense and, you know, whoever's going to pick this up in the opposition is going to go after me, nonstop, nonstop because I do that. And it's to make sure that folks have that choice.

Those that chose to get vaccinated, those that chose to do all those things, I also support them. But that's your decision. I'm not the doc. I'm not going to tell you what's right for you. I'm not going to tell you what's right for your religious beliefs or anything else. I'm here to support your decision. decision, but I am not going to ask you to do something that I wouldn't. And that's where I'm at.

That's how I was raised. That's how the successful people that I got mentored by in projects taught me. And I believe that. And there will be a point where people get to a point their own personal decisions of what it's worth. You know, it's almost like the road to hell is paved through good intentions. And the other thing is if you're walking through hell, keep walking, get through it. Stop fighting when you're there. That's where we're at. So again, we've got to get this pulled back together. People stop fixating and all the issues that are challenges, start finding it what binds us together, and then start dreaming about those good things. That's what we've got to dream and hope for and build for, because this, it is going to end. It is going to end. Every other pandemic in history has

ended, by the way. All you have to do is pick out your history books and look at how it worked out. It's going to end. But in the meantime, figure out what you're willing to give up to do that. And moreover, who you're willing to harm to do that. Look at yourself in the mirror first. Don't go down that road and understand that people are doing the best that they can with the information they have and they're trying to make the best decisions they can. So give people some slack. Take away the emotion, unplug for a while and think about it. The person that you might be yelling at is not so different than you. I think that's a good way to end. Honestly, I think that's a we've got to find our way back to grace. We've got to find our way back to humility.

Learn how to their empathy, walk a mile on somebody else's shoes. Because Everybody's just trying to do what they believe is right. Now there's a portion that aren't. You know, so I watched with my son there last night and, you know, American sniper and the conversation that the dad has with the boys at the table and not so dissimilar. So you watch out for the wolves. You be the sheep dog and you sure as a hell don't be a wolf in sheep's clothing. But they are out there.

This is something throughout a history and time. There are those that will give you disinformation. It's up to you to figure out who's giving you the real goods or not. So be careful and critical. There are ones and there's always going to be a polarized idea. But it's up to you. You figure it out and step back, drop the emotion, turn on the logic, and start to work on things collectively together again.

We can all get behind. It'll go a heck of a lot better for everybody. If you want to, yeah, they'll set up to make us fail. It'll tear us apart. So be smarter than that. Well, I appreciate you coming on and doing this with me. is a bit of a rigmarole today, but this has been, honestly, this has been really fantastic to sit with you and meet you.

You know, I don't sit down with too many politicians. It's not by design. It's not by design. I don't know. I just, you know, it's something that I dip my toe into very cautiously, right? Because you never know where the conversation is going to go. And I'm pretty open. I'm pretty frank about where I sit.

and everything else and people can hold that for me or not, but I'm willing to admit I'm wrong quite often and willing to see where I've come to get here. And I wish all of our politicians, I wish politics was set up more like that, just be like, ugh, we were wrong. Like we thought we had best intentions, but it didn't work, and so now we have to adjust.

And I think a lot of people, the opposition would eat that, you know, eat your lunch for that, but who cares? At the end of the day, me, Joe Public, just look at it and go, like, it'd be nice to just hear some honesty, openness and let's go here. Like we need to figure this out.

And I appreciate you coming on because you've given me a lot of that and you've given me a bit of hope and some positivity, which honestly in today's world where we sit, we're lacking a lot of that right now. It's been a lot of divisive issues and a lot of anger and a lot of zero hope on where we're heading. Well, and that's part of it. And, you know, to folks out there too, I'm not all sunshine and all the pops either. Like a lot of these hard conversations take place right at home.

I've got four kids and a wife there too. And, you know, we look at this and that was the gut check. So when all the politics came up, it was me looking to my kids. So if there was a chance, if I had an opportunity to try to change things for the better for them and I didn't do it, like, that's on me. So I'm willing to take the hit, and my family was willing to take that hit for four years to be able to do it for folks in our community or for a country and for a province. and you know I'd be away in these projects and my son at the time because I was going through Minnesota quite a bit through Minneapolis you know one of those connectors down on that end so a lot of the Christmas shopping for about three years was all you know the sports the college

teams down there and all the kids are sporting jerseys and and bouncing around these projects and I wouldn't have changed that for the world it was it was awesome it was a really good part but my kids would ask me about that like what was it like being and you know you fill in the blanks and I say it was great and here's what here's what they had but you know what We live in the best province and the best country in the world. And it was tough for a number of years to try to get back to that. I know we're in the best province. We're not quite the best country that we used to be.

We need to pull that back together. And we need to say it honestly and genuinely. So folks out there are they struggling with it? You're not alone. But I think it's worth fighting for. I think it's worth compromising for sometimes too. I think it's worth rebranding and repackaging and doing all those things. And, you know, you never go full nuclear before you actually get.

get it and you have to be in a position of strength when you bargain. And we're in a precarious situation right now that we've been put in both financially and a lot of things. So we're challenged. So you've got to pick your fights and your battles and you have to be strategic. We're playing chess here. So let's set the board up for success. Let's do those things.

If we've got to eat that bad taste and sandwich that might have come off the shop floor, yeah, grease on your hands and everything else get through it because that good turkey dinners at the end of it. And we're going to make sure we set it up. And let's keep our kids at a harm's way. Yeah, like we have choices, those little guys out there for the last couple of years. When you see grownups panicking, then kids really have an issue. If the grownups can kind of keep it together, you know, that's it.

So that's on you. Be strong enough, have that enough strength to make sure that the kids feel safe, even though the world's falling apart, you know, be that duck in the water, your feet are going a thousand miles an hour, but it's calm and cool and collected, do that for the kids. And let's make sure we're doing it for the right reasons. And again, we've got a lot at stake here. So pull together, hang in there.

It's been one rocky ride. And we've got to keep working on the big things and don't sabotage ourselves. So I'm looking for people's help genuinely. And again, you can tell in the inflection of my voice, it's a personal thing. We struggled ourselves as a family. A lot of those things. Long-time friends that are torn apart about this. And, you know, you think you've got things.

I feel like the friggin public pinata. You know, you pull into a room and everyone's all happy to see. And then you realize that they're pulling out a stick in a blindfold and you're the pinionate in the room. Because everyone wants to beat on something right now. It's frustrated and it's tired and it's what I signed up for. But, yeah, there's going to be something worth this for everybody at the end of it. So don't let it slide, get off the bench. And if there is somebody out there that's trying to do a good job, maybe get behind them a bit.

Don't tear them down. I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming this way and giving me some of your hard-earned time. I appreciate it. Thanks for the Avenue and look forward to doing this again sometime. You bet. Hey folks, thanks for tuning in today. Appreciate you stopping in and listening all the way to the end.

If you're still listening, make sure to like and subscribe. Believe me, it helps. And I want all you find folks to check out my new website, Sean Newman Podcast.com. I want to know what you think. Text me, message me on social media, whatever you want to do, whichever easiest for you. I always appreciate your guys' thoughts.

And finally, if you want to support the podcast, check out my Patreon account in the show notes. So just scroll down and whatever app you're in, in the show notes. There's a Patreon link. And if you want to subscribe and help support what I'm doing, I would appreciate any help from you. Regardless, I think you guys are awesome. And thanks for tuning in today.

We'll catch up to you Wednesday.