Shaun Newman Podcast - #536 - Shane Getson

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

He is the current MLA for Lac St. Anne Parkland,  currently serves as the Chief Government Whip, and Parliamentary Secretary for Economic Corridor Development Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast

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He's the current MLA for Lax St. Ann Parkland here in Alberta. He's also the Chief Government Whip and Parliamentary Secretary for Economic Corridor Development. I'm talking about MLA Shane Getson. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Shane Getson. And I was just, well, first off, thanks for, thanks for hopping in.

Hey, well, thanks for having me. Yeah, I've created a bit of a rule for myself over the last year that I don't let the podcast. bleed into the weekend because I don't see my kids or my wife near enough even though you and and that's going to sound funny to people she's like you're a podcaster Sean like how much do you really work it's like it's funny how hard you push this thing and and then you realize like you know you start doing it whenever somebody can make it right and you're like I just can't give up the weekends like because you know we had intro to hockey this morning we got hockey tomorrow we got this and we got that and you know and you get this and people are constantly asking which is a really

big honor, you know? Like, it's like, cool. I just can't. I got to say no. And then Shane's like, I can, well, you're, uh, second, no, what, what am I calling her? Constituency manager. Thank you. Yeah. I knew there was a title. And would this day work? I'm like, yes, it'll work. Because you'd tease me with Germany and I'm like, all right, all right. I'll make, I'll make an exception. And, and my wife goes, Shane's coming, you know, because I mean, you've been to the house before, you know, and so. And you've got a great family. Your, your, your wife is just outstanding. Well, she's being outstanding today because she's like, you're going into work. I'm like, I'm going into work.

So my wife is the same conversation. So she knew I was coming down here. It's, well, you're going to see Sean. That's okay. But like knock it off. And I didn't tell her this morning, but I also committed accidentally sort of to a big. Well, it's another friend of mine. He's the accidentally sort of a great line.

I'm trying to plain ignorance, but it's not. But there's only so many few Sundays I'll ever take off. Like when you're a politician or at least I am, I'm dumb enough to hand out my cell phone number and my cards. So you literally have. have the Batman hotline. And I try to do these things and catch up with folks. My staff, Kristen, is phenomenal. She's really good at actually trying to book time off for me. And I'm the one that screws that up every time. And my wife is finally, Kristen and my wife are collaborating to say, don't like block out these times, don't do it, everything else. But anyway, I kind of

broke that role for tomorrow as well, because this is a big, huge DeWalli event that's taking place in Edmonton. And a friend of mine worked with him over at Enbridge. He's actually the president of this organization. So for them, it's like Christmas. Like it's, it's, it's a big deal. So quite an honor to be invited into that community to be able to speak and present and talk to them again and sharing some of their festivities as well. I'm forgive me, Diwali, I'm, I'm, I'm illiterate. It's a Hindu event. So basically they've got two of them, Duvali is one. It's kind of like akin to our Christmas and then the other one in the spring is the Easter. So the whole thing behind it, and I've been to a couple events, which is pretty cool to go in there and see that. It's literally

bringing light into the darkness. So they sell. This time of year, it's everything else. And if you look at the crossovers, I think a lot of cultures have the same thing. I mean, we're dark this time of year. You know, I'm Norwegian German descent and all of those customs we have for Christmas are kind of there. The lights on the trees, the light at night, the Yule log, all those type of things. They have similar things. And I think when you get down to it, people have always been fighting against the darkness for a long time.

And dark and desperate times, here's the light into it. And then their spring event, I'm going to mess it up, so I'm not even going to try to say the word. But it's basically like our Easter, it's all color. It's all spring like they're throwing colored chalk in each other. It's a big, you know, big event all night long. It's kind of like a Ukrainian wedding when you got the, you know, the midnight lunch going. It's just like a nonstop thing of doing that. So it's an honor to be invited out.

Yeah, it is. You know, I'm not from that faith and I'm not from that community, but they've really embraced me. You know, so whether it's that farm by stuff or the country politics, it's just genuine, honest people sitting across the table, getting know each other. Well, we've, you know, I was listening back to. December 6th, 2021 today. Oh yeah, that's the, that's the day I cracked my canopy coming down here to see you. Yeah, yeah, you flew in, got stuck here, had supper at the house because I'm like, I'll just get a hotel room.

I'm like, yeah, you get a hotel room, but you're coming for supper. I'm like, don't be ridiculous. That was awesome. I was really nice. I'm like, it's the middle of winter. You're stuck in Lloyd Minster. You're just going to go sitting in a hotel. I mean, I guess it's a oil field.

Yeah, yeah, I realize. But I mean, it's like, I just come over to the house. So you get to, you know, you get the full meal deal, so to speak when you, when you came the first time. And the first time I was talking to you, I was very terrified to ask about COVID. I remember I could hear it in my voice. And it's funny. I said something that I'm like, I think I'd argue with myself at this point. And I said, oh, vaccines are going to definitely be a part of the solution. And I'm, and I'd like to punch that, Sean probably square in the nose because I'm like, here we sit, 23. And there's enough studies and, I mean, you can just go down

the rabbit hole of like all the harm that's been caused because of because of the rollout. because of all the, well, just on and on and on and went, I don't think it's any secret anymore, although, you know, certainly the Gestapo media don't like to shine a light on it, you know? No, it's pretty wild in getting back into the house again. I mean, two years into this, you know, I heard some conjecture from some folks out there

and another, you know, secret sleuth trying to figure out what I did for what motives or anything else. So again, you know, there was a thing I did, it was back in February, so it was after that night. I was down here December 6th. Um, if I rolled a shot clock back, it really started for me our COVID story for my family's 2020. Like we, we got it.

We got it and we didn't know what it was. It wasn't even called that. Um, you know, my wife and my two older kids, they got really sick with it. Me and the younger ones, it was hardly a blip on the radar. And then, uh, you go through that whole year of all the goofiness that was taking place. Um, I didn't tell anyone my vaccine status, but it's quite frankly, it's none of friggin' business. The last thing I need somebody asking me when they're asking me if I want my

burger is my vaccine status. Uh, you know, I'd rather take fries with that never bought into the whole QR code thing or anything else and ardent loud mouth in our caucus. Um, if you asked anybody else not breaching caucus confidence, I didn't leave anything on the table. Uh, hence maybe, you know, might explain some of the reasons for my less than stellar rise in my political career because I didn't get elected to be a career politician. So my father-in-law, um, with the plane, I could fly around and go see him and everything else.

He's a retired doc. He ran the hospital up in La Cle Bish for 30 years. And at that time, we weren't allowed to see people. So I had literally, through some of the media outlets, about a $5,000 bounty in my head. If anyone caught me doing anything breaking COVID rules, well, you know, obviously it'd be a big splash in the media and also some public reward for that too.

This is how bonkers it was out there. So I could whip in the plane, whip up to LaBish and go see my father-in-law to check in on him because he lived by himself up there. And I could see him at the airport. You know, that was still within the bounds. one of the reasons why we did the air tours and everything else. And he looked rough and I'm going, what's going on here?

And he goes, well, I got the shot. Oh, and like he's losing balance and everything else and a couple things. And when I got home after that trip, like I was really concerned about him. And that was back in April, May timeline of that year. And I told my wife, I said, he doesn't have long. Like, we got to get him out of the bush. Like he's, he's going to pass away and she's going, oh, can't be that bad. Oh, it is.

like this is this is how bad and to put it in context I mean he was former airborne too captain the airborne you know gung ho type guy um pretty uh stoic let's put it that way and him and i developed a good good relationship father and son-in-law was never close with my father and he uh he really filled that void like mike was a um very academic man but still down to earth and you could talk to and he would tell me stuff that he wouldn't necessarily say to his wife and kids and those things like we we developed a really really good bond. And, you know, I expressed some concerns and I told my wife, I said, quite honestly, if you're not going up there to talk to him, I'm going to bring him down here.

Like, this is going to be it. So it took about a month. By the time, the family kind of got their stuff in a group, went up there and saw him and they couldn't believe. And then Mike had fallen down and he hurt himself and he ended up the hospital. And then that was the last thing. So we had the conversation and the deal that my wife had made with her father a long time ago was that, you know, she would respect his wishes as long as it could, no matter what, you know, she was the one he trusted with, you know, all the things in his life that he needed to be wrapped up if he ever got sick. It was, wasn't his wife. It wasn't his son. It was, it was my wife. So we brought him down and we moved him in with us over that summer. So

we, uh, changed things around in the house. We did everything we could. Um, you know, he was with the kids. The kids got to see him lots. And, um, yeah, got a, to spend quite a bit of time with them. And there was one episode at night. And during while this is taking place, I mean, of access to information that some people may or may not have had. And I've got kind of like you, you get everybody in their dog sending you stuff, the latest, latest stats from the latest expert.

And you're pouring all for all this. And the most meaningful information I got was talking to a doc of 30 years. And one night he's sitting there and tears start rolling down his cheeks. and that's about 132 in the morning we're talking and he goes, I shouldn't have did it, shouldn't I did it. And I'm thinking he's, you know, you know your end date's coming like he knows full well in the medical condition that he's in. And he had this theory that he had shared with me a few days before that, that the vaccinations

with the MNRA, it literally would accelerate any dormant cancer cells or anything else that you would have. And lo and behold, he became his own labrat as well. all in that regard. So his theory proved out on himself. And he, he says, no, he says, Shane, he says, they, they freaking killed me. Never should have did it. And then he made me promise that I would in government never force anyone into a vaccination. And I gave him my word. So knowing that full well, and then my father-in-law chose made, like he knew how this was going to turn out. So then I had to go in there with them and say goodbye to him.

And he picked his own end date. He wanted to make it to his birthday. And then, yeah, he basically died with his boots on as best as he could as a soldier by choosing his own end rather than going through all the throes of... When is this? This is August, 2021. So we go back into the house and there was a lot of craziness going on. And what I did was I ran all my own serology and everything else. My wife, you know, can I share her medical stuff, but I can tell you full well that there's

no chance in hell I would have ever had my kids exposed to a vaccine. And my wife had a medical background and having her being pressured in that regard. There was lots of lengthy conversations. But the way things were shaping up as a politician, it almost seemed like my voice was going to be taken away. And if my voice was taken away, that meant I couldn't represent 47,000 people. So what I had coming up was my medical for, for aviation. So literally went in and saw my dock, got all that.

So it was October 22nd, I want to believe, in 2021. So I go and make sure I've got a clean medical, so I don't, you know, I got my ticket to fly. And then it was that same afternoon without telling my wife, I go down just down the hall, in my office where there was a COVID injection station and rolled up my shirt sleeve. Now, part of the logic in this, the family lore, here's part of it. Part of the family lore was my wife's Jiddo. One of the kids had swallowed a mothball one time and the kid couldn't talk, one of my cousin, my cousin, or my brother's cousins and Jiddo swallowed a mothball himself while everyone's

looking at him like he's crazy, but he can talk to the doctor. he can say what's going on that that little guy can't. He knows full well what symptoms he'll be having and he did that. I felt so compelled on the position that I held. I felt so compelled as making sure that I could keep my family out of harm's way as a father and as a husband that I would be the one. No one could take away the information I would be presenting or doing anything else because it was my own and I full knew well at that time that it was it was it was me I was

stepping into this again I can tell you honestly my wife was about the ready to lose her mind on me for doing this you know with the research she had done and everybody else and I didn't tell anybody so as far as my caucus members they thought I was still that radical guy out there that was digging his heels and then everything else and little that they know I was mapping everything that was I was going through inclusive of serology that was post-vaccination, inclusive of lunch information, obviously, from I-Corps that I was putting in, inclusive of the testimonies that people were sending to me,

that other folks wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole in my caucus, and I continued to be that lightning run. I kept presenting that, and then obviously some criticisms of AHS that went along the way and everything else and dealt with that. So I was looking back in the timelines, yeah, my symptoms started. I was sick for two days afterwards, but just put on the chin strap on. And for everyone, what he's, what he's, why we're getting, why we're starting right here is because I had Bob on. Bob called you out.

And I was like, like, Shane? I'm like, I'm, you know, I text you. You got to listen to us because I'm like, I don't know. We got to talk about this right off the hop. I'm like, I don't know how else to just not address this. Because I'm like, you know, did the entire thing get played on me? And I'm like, man, that's a wild thought. Yeah.

You know? A freaking chance. So it's funny with some folks out there that have their own ideas. or take conjecture or take snippets here and there. I've never sat across the table from that gentleman. I welcome that any time. He wants to freaking step up to the plate, quite honestly, because it's my story.

It's the things that I did, the decisions I made. And if he wants to play armchair quarterback, maybe he should roll up his freaking shirt sleeve and take it for the team. So by the time that all these different systems or symptoms I was having was basically an autoimmune reaction, by the time I went and saw my dog, and my wife got really concerned.

It was about 20-ish of December. I started getting heart pains and those type of things. My jaw was hurting. I couldn't move my right arm. I was literally having a bunch of things taking place and still kept it to myself. I hid it from my colleagues and everything else. And I still did my, you know, twice a week tests so I could actually sit in the house. I was all in my own pocket doing that going over to eye core, making sure I could sit in the chamber.

And yeah, so Lara told me to go in and see what the hell is going on. So now I go back and see that. Doc, my doc, and he couldn't believe the health changes I had in such a short timeline. And then I start asking him the white elephant. Do you think this might be from the vaccine? Oh, no, I don't know what, maybe it's a rotator cuff thing from what? Well, maybe you're nothing's changed, Doc. This is the only thing that's changed since you saw me from my flight medical going in for

that getting blood tests. So we started running a bunch of different tests. I had a turns out I had a partially collapsed lung. There was, there was a bunch of stuff going on. And then it was right around that first week in January that I started getting all these rashes. So dealing with the other discomfort and those things and arthritic type things and whatever. And then I started getting these rashes on my arm and my legs. And then it was just a few days after that over the period of another week.

Literally, my face had puffed up and everything else. My doc was concerned at this point of how real this was really getting. And he told me if there's, you know, if it gets really bad with the emergency room, but that's where a lot of people had seen those pictures. That's what that started. And I've been healthy my whole life, farm kid, work hard, you know, kind of take care of you. So play hard too, but take care of yourself. And, you know, my wife and I, we have four kids.

So obviously with having four kids, you're in the same spot. You've been in the hospital with your wife before. Some things go well. Some things don't. And to have her looking down at me, being the strong one trying to work through all this was, it was pretty wild. So what they end up doing was prescribing prednisone for me that basically is like a Murphy switch and knocks down your immune system and that was it. So internally, caucus members, including the Premier, were probably a little concerned

having this vocal person had something so visible that how to deal with me now. And I was continually under attack like a lot of folks were. And I mean, think about it, you had a member of the opposition literally going in and hacking in the H.S. Like this is how whacked it was for them trying to find out everyone's status. You had a witch hunt going on. Like it was absolutely bonkers, bizarre a world. And it was the local convoy. The only reason why I didn't make it to Ottawa is because I was in the hospital at that time. So when the local one went out to Atchison, you know, I had an EpiPan with me and I had my son with me in the passenger seat and we took place in the,

in the local convoy. And it was, you know, I don't, don't get too misty eyed too often. That was one of those moments. And it was literally like two years of fighting and everything else was finally breaking that damn that people were coming together. And I kind of told my son, I said, this is the Canada I remember. So we, yeah, we did that. And then all of a sudden it was super hyperpartisan in the media and they were going after me again. And my own party really wasn't defending me. And I thought, screw it.

You want to know? You want to know my vaccine status? Here's my story. And then that's when all of it came out. In February, there was a lady that wanted to do. do a documentary, she was putting one together, and that's when I did that interview. And I thought at this point, like, you want to know my stuff? And again, people made decisions for their own reasons. It wasn't up to me to tell them exactly, but I could say my story. And once I did, I kind of

said it was like Lansing & Boyle. I got people from all around the world reaching out because I was one of the few politicians that was willing to stand up for people and do the right thing. And to hear somebody two years after the fact spout off from the sidelines walk a mile my shoes buddy and then let's let's have that conversation there's another interview i should let you listen to uh regina regina wateil is a phd in statistics from ottawa lovely lovely lady you'd enjoy her and she sounded the alarm in 2020 that please do not go down this road the stats don't add up and everything else and the thing i stare at shane and you probably wonder like well I don't know before I hop to that maybe I should address

and go I can tell you don't like telling that story. Uh, like that's it's a yeah it's something very personal and in the fact you know we have to do this publicly after the fact where people question your honor your integrity. Yeah. I would rhyme a lot of things with truck and we'd be sitting out in the parking lot my normal life but as a politician I have to I have to keep my tongue and mind my manners and be cognizant of the 3D chess match we're playing not marbles in the parking lot like some people have the latitude to perform. Well, it's one of the reasons why I brought you.

You know, I was, I looked at the timeline of everything, right? It was, it was December. I got suggested you come in and I was like, I'm going to get a politician come sit across from me and we had to talk about COVID. Sure. Yeah, I would take that, right? And then it was convoy.

And then it was March of 2022. You're on stage with Daniel Smith. That was kind of a treat for me. I mean, you know, being a new politician up there and having some trust with you, getting to know, and then you had Eric Payne up there, which was pretty cool. And I can't remember the other gentleman. Andremer Murray. Andremer Murray.

So, again, having these type of conversations, right? And, you know, at that time, you know, I can call her Danielle at that time, but I'm still very much stuck on titles. There's a matter of respect when you go from being a person to a position. For the listener, I was supposed to have her on, I think, in two days, and they just pushed me to right before Christmas. So maybe there'll be a Christmas with the Premier. And I'm like, I want to say Christmas with Danielle,

but I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to do that anymore. I mean, I can do whatever the heck I want. You can, but I mean, it's a title. And that's part of it too. Like when you wear the hat as an MLA and I was a sitting MLA, I represent a bunch of folks. And there's something that comes with a, again, I'm being a civilian and whatever.

Say whatever you want. Yeah, say whatever I want. But as a person of the crown, so to speak, yeah, you have to be cognizant of that. it otherwise all this process means nothing. So sitting on the stage with her and even talking about some of the items openly and even some of the misconceptions she may or may not have had, we got to have that in front of a live audience with, you know, 300, 400 people. There was things that she had assertions that she didn't know behind the curtain either. And moreover, why would

she? She was still a civilian from the outside. So there's a thing called a caucus confidence and cabinet confidence. It's not because we want to hide everything from people. There's literally decisions that we make and can do or have conversations that need to be in that, because there's tons of sensitivities around it. You just think about the dollars and cents. You want to talk about insider trading? You want to talk about all your political leaders are looking at on a strategy of how to fight back against Ottawa.

Why would I put that on the cards, all cards on the table until it's time or reformation of the health care system during the campaign from our interview, which is pretty wild. The opposition dug up 45 minutes into a conversation we had two years ago about me wanting to privatize health care. That wasn't the conversation. But they took this sound bite that throws it up on the table. So again, we're playing 3D chess here, John, not marbles in the parking lot. Well, talking about chess, you know, like this is why I bring up Regina Wattiel.

So I interviewed this PhD in statistics. This had to have been like two weeks ago. It was very recently. And she reminded me of Chris Sims, how Chris Sims can just like break things down from the attack. And you're just like, oh, my God. Regina Wattiel. PhD in statistics. And she just went from day one,

everything the government gave us. You could just see like, this is a lie, this makes zero sense, this, this, this. And so I, I hear your entire story

with your father-in-law, correct? Yep. And I see the respect and he tells you, don't force and don't do this. And then you end up taking it because of,

you know, like this immense of like, well, we need to have a voice in there and you go, and if people had given the, if government,

I don't, I don't know, I don't know how to put it. But like Regina Matil was sitting there. She's written a book on it now. I mean, tons of people written books on it. And I used to think, ah, nobody saw this coming. But there's Regina Wattel.

I'm like, when were you doing this? When were you saying this? She's like, uh, like, March 2020? I'm like, screw off. Like, really? Because I mean, in March 2020, I'm batting down the hatches. And Sean is in his under a rock for three months. For three months, I think maybe the world is coming to an end.

and then you come out and you go, hmm. And then, of course, by the time I talk to you, you know, like, that's a full on year and change after that, you're going, ah, I think we're going to get by it. I'm going, well, maybe you're right. And then, you know, in that time you go down, we get the freedom convoy. It actually gets way worse after we talk, in my mind, you know. We go into this dark, dark winter of about three months from when we talked,

where it just kept getting worse and worse, and they're going to do what? And oh, my God. And then the freedom convoy. And, you know, I can never understand why we couldn't get politicians. And I'm saying this before we start. It's not that I single out any one. And for the crowd out there, too, I still don't consider myself a politician. It's the class of politicians why they couldn't solve it.

Why they couldn't just like, and people have its power, it's this, it's this structure, it's that. And what it took was the entire population going or a healthy majority of it, even though they want to say that, going, no more. We're done with this. and now you're seeing all the aftermath that we're, you know, like you got the Coots 4 sitting there and I'm going to park that for a second because I'm going to come back to Regina with Teal and this, why was it and maybe this is because you got things from the federal government, I don't understand this.

Well, here's one thing. Why is it that the Regina with Teals didn't get as much of a voice as the doomsday or whatever it was on the other side? Because I will preface this by Peter McCullough when he first came on the podcast. said this is the Super Bowl for doctors. We are on the front lines and he was taking this like this is as bad as it gets. But now if you listen to McCullough, you know, like he's, you know, he was one of the frontline doctors.

Pierre Corrie is the same thing. All these guys are the same thing. And they just got pushed aside and pushed aside. I don't know. Yeah. So folks think that there's lots of conversations taking place at the political level. Okay, well, how new are you to the system? It's an organization.

It's been an organic thing for how many hundreds of years predating our entire country, so Westminster's system a thousand years. How real do you think politics are? Like, do you think your voice matters? Most people don't even friggin' pay attention. They don't show up and vote. They don't, they're not participating. But the other side is because they know how fragile the system is,

how you can hijack it, how you can put people in places. It's the golden rule. He was the gold makes the rules. When you're paying attention and everyone shows up in those votes and they're getting their people, applied to these boards and your school board trustees are getting there and your curriculum's getting in there and the teachers are in there and and and and we're all playing catch up yeah we've all been playing marbles in the parking lot you we've all been playing marbles

in the parking lot they've been playing chess for a long time like how far back do you want to go down the rabbit hole like all I got to say is you know the conversations you and I have are genuine the conversations that you have with with folks on your podcast they're genuine I might not agree with them. They might not have the same information I do. Moreover, I may not have the information they do, but they're real and genuine. And I would propose that because we've had these dialogues over the last couple of years, because this is that tipping point, that inflection, that finally people are waking up and thinking it's real.

What is concerning for me is that folks apply this other level and think that every organization is the same thing. Is it imperfect? Uh-huh. But like Winston Churchill said, this is the worst thing until you look what else is out there. So if people want to get off the damn bench, participate, be involved, step up, go do it, get involved. And we can have this discourse and you can have these conversations. But to think that as a newly elected MLA, I had the same information as someone who's been an administrator and stuck in an organization behind the wall, not as an elected for 30 or 40 years that might be even intergenerational, good luck.

But the only way, and I honestly believe this, God's honest truth, we had some conversations about a pendulum yesterday, We're out at a panmoire conference in Regina and speaking with another gentleman saying, hey, maybe the pendulum's finally shifting again. And my concern and my cautionary note is it's not going to come back on its own. This is the other side has been planning this forever. We've got this chance because a few things, a few fits hit the shan, so to speak on this. And we've got a chance for people to work together. What they are going to do is try to divide us.

They're going to drop people in behind the lines because they already have them in there. And they're going to start to disrupt it and get us to tear ourselves down again. Again, if you're looking at the right. side of the political spectrum or the honest average person who really didn't pay attention, I can manipulate pretty easy. We're all like a bunch of flipping cats on the floor and you take a laser pointer and whip that around and then somebody stand in the corner like the lady you mentioned and get their attention to talk about something else.

We're all chasing that little light bulb around. And the person waving the light bulb isn't the one of control. The person one leaving the light bulb is working for the one that's in control. Their job is to distract you. So my thing is maybe we got a chance that they actually caught their attention. and somebody heard some sound, we got a different light for us change. Follow us back this way. We got to work together and make sure it's not the best, but let's start working on the same thing. I look at big picture items. Don't tear each other down over a little minutia and talk about

who did this two years ago, who did that. We're right here, we're right now. You've got a team on the field, friggin put them to work and hold us to account. But you can't hold me to account by sitting in the parking lot playing marbles. You've got to stick there. You've got to be in the game with me and you got to know that we're going to make mistakes and missteps. And moreover, I can't do it on your timeline that you can. This is a big cumbersome machine that we're working through. I only get a four-year opportunity of which there's maybe three years to be able to do some of these things. Like it's a big machine.

The machine in behind the system doesn't stop. It doesn't take political breaks. It doesn't take electoral cycles. It's been marching on for years and we're the interlopers. So yeah, get on side and give us a hand here. Energy corridors. Oh, I love it. You know what's funny though?

you go back and listen to me talk to you. I'm like, oh my God, I keep saying hopeful. I hadn't said the word hopeful and, you know, it'd probably been a year, if not two. And I said, you think it can happen that quick? Yeah, I think it can. And here are we sitting in 2023? Two years almost to the date later.

And now you have more information than me. But I look at it and I go, Jack's squad has happened. Really? And well, but. Oh, man. Okay, well, so economic corridors, We had to call it something different. If I called it a transportation utility or transportation economic utility corridor, everyone can kind of put it into a box.

But when we pitch the concept of economic corridors, it means different things to different people. And there's the wisdom in the whole thing there. Because when you start looking at pathways of economics and tying regions together, all of a sudden you take all that other conjecture, the stuff that, you know, people in putting the laser pointer for years on, it's not about pipelines, it's not about roads, it's not about telecommunication lines, it's not about the commodity. in those, it's literally about tying regions together. So since we had that first conversation in economic corridors, we put out a report February 18th, 2022, I believe, so managed to get that out. It was never released. The Kenny organization didn't make that public.

Moreover, didn't drag it to the table in the cabinet room. So we quietly worked with a bunch of different regions and folks that were involved in that. We kept moving the ball downfield. We had, I don't know if you heard, we had a leadership race that was taking place. Didn't know about that. Some of the top candidates, what they ended up presented. It's funny. My first text on, I went back because I wanted to see what my first text to you was on the new phone that everybody texts now.

And my first text was, are you running in the leadership right? Yeah. That was my first one to you. Yeah. Well, if, so there was a couple of ifs on that one. Because again, never planned on being a career politician, you know, didn't and still don't. But where I kind of put it to there. And it was a conversation out with my wife.

And again, it was similar to yours. There was a bunch of folks reaching out to me because there was a, level of trust and knowing full well what that position meant. If there weren't a couple good candidates that I thought I could trust and work with and if my health, like I would have done that if if Travis and Daniel weren't running, even with all the health things I was going through, I would have thrown my hat in the ring and just went on it. But I had health issues that I was still trying to work with to get that back and there was two

really strong candidates. So that's where I kind of backed out of it. But with the leadership race and the candidates, there was a number of them that knew, what my economics corridor report was about. They knew the ramifications of an inclusive of what Germany's expectations were with looking at energy security prior to the invasion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So the candidates that won, there's not by chance that they happen to be talking about economic corridors on their campaign, nor is it by chance that we now have a ministry of transportation and economic corridors.

So as a private member doing that, we managed to get that across the line. and then going in prior to the actual election, we had a memorandum of understanding signed between three prairie provinces to say we're supporting economic corridors, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. So in essence, we've just linked up the prairie provinces. Alberta gets access to Hudson Bay

through the corridor model of what we're looking at. Manitoba can have access into Saskatchewan, Alberta with their hydroelectric potentially, weights and measures, and we start building roads going back and forth and tying these things together. The average person running their truck up and down the highway He doesn't have to worry about three or four different axle weights or dimensional loads or running times or anything else.

We're starting to harmonize this. And then Penwar. So I'm literally down in Boise, Idaho in July of this last year. And I brought up the discussion of economic corridors. So this is literally Alaska, Alberta, Saskatch from the territories, Northwest Territories, Yukon, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, talking about this whole corridor model. So I spent three days whipping around talking about that. By the end of the conference, I had the person. who was leading at speaking up on stage about economic corridors.

We just had the leadership update here. I spoke for three hours, basically, in economic corridors. Now in Whistler in July, we're going to have a half-day session on it, and they also asked me to lead up their whole transportation group. So this is Canada, U.S., and I managed to meet a guy that was his name, Lauren, and he runs a group out of Texas that ports to planes, and it's essentially that same model of trying to connect it all together. So literally when I laid out my presentation,

and it's Texas to Alaska here. So we build these things. And you wouldn't believe the number of people that their eyes are lighting up of how this works. So you might not have seen a corridor announced, but now you've got a bunch of groups out there talking about corridors. And the investment community went from lending cash

to actually investing in infrastructure. And I also gave the model, the economic corridors model to the Consulate General of India. So remind me to come back to that before Sparkle Sox, when you did his infamous flight over to these. What's funny about it, you know, this is,

what I'm learning, you know. I'm going to go back to Julie Panessi. This is like one of the first episodes I ever did on COVID, where, you know, well, first five to ten. And I can't remember if it's just after she lost her job or just before, one of the two. I'm saying, how long is this going to last? And I throw out like three months, six months. Everybody thought three months made you talking.

And she looked at me like, you know, and I've told the story lots on here. Listeners have heard this lots, but she had to look on her face, I wish I could have just put, I should have just taken a snapshot of it and just put it on my, wherever, just be like, you're a dummy and you don't know enough because she's like, decades. And I'm like, really? Oh. And, you know, I come back. And the thing that I always struggle with politics, it doesn't matter the issue.

It always takes time. And so I look at it and I go, 2021. I can make things move quick in a dictatorship. Well, 2021, you go, yeah, no, like, you're saying, hopefully, you're like, yeah, we're going to get this going. I'm thinking in my brain, I'm going, 22, they're going to announce it, 2023, we're going to have shovels in the crowd. You know, I don't know. No, no, but that's the problem where folks get caught up. So it doesn't have to be a new corridor.

So the corridor is, how do I get my stuff from point A to point B? And the most, the fastest way isn't necessarily a direct line. So when I've got First Nation leaders that are sitting out there pitching their own corridors based on the model that we talked about, about that alleviates a bunch of things. So they're literally going to connect things on the on the map. It could be looking at a right-of-way that has partially pipe. You could be looking at existing rail infrastructure. You'd be looking at time.

So the, the idea that you were running with has really started to evolve even since where you started. Yeah, that was the idea from day one. And then once you establish what is, is you connect these regions together. I thought the original idea and forgive me because maybe I'm just, maybe I'm remembering an old conversation. Well, people will remember 30% of what we talk about. Probably.

I thought it was like, I don't know, we'll just say a kilometer wide because I don't remember the dimensions. One railroad to Alaska? And it was just like everything in there. And that way, that was your corridor. Now you have, you could have power. Oh, yeah. I could send you my PowerPoint presentation from three years ago because the model hasn't changed. And it's interesting.

Again, when I talk about corridors, it depends on what people are familiar with. They typically gravitate towards that concept. So if you were a pipeline guy, you would think, okay, it's a pipeline. If you're a railroad guy, you're thinking railway, if you're thinking a highway, and that's, it's always really cool. The thing is it's all of the above. What you're literally finding is a linear conduit that you can put multiple commodities in multiple infrastructure within that, and your event horizon that you're looking at is 70 years of build. So what would I be able to put in this thing for 70 years?

Seven or 70? 70 years of build. Yeah. So as an example, when I'm speaking to Chief Isaac about one route that gets us from basically northern part of Alberta up into Alaska, it was 2,600 clicks of right away. I was looking for two kilometers wide because I could drop a ton of infrastructure in there for a number of years and for strategic purposes too. But I would need about a kilometer of buffer for wildlife, so whether it's Caribou protection or otherwise. So the pitch went really well. There's within a group of chiefs that were in there in this economic development group.

and I was the first one to pitch this idea, this concept to them. And my concern was okay. And you could have built through a lot of distrust over the years that's been built up. So that's the first thing you're stepping into a room like that. So you've got to be not the other, just the next new car salesman coming through. So you have to establish that trust. And when we weren't talking about a commodity or a type and we were talking about the concept, the comment that came back to me was and I'm waiting for it going, okay, there's one problem.

It's two kilometers wide. And I'm going, yep. And in the back of the mind, I'm thinking, okay, freak, I can maybe narrow this thing down to about 750 meters and, you know, look at that and goes, can we make it 10 kilometers wide? Sold. So the concept there is when you look at seven generations out, when you look at most First Nations groups and communities, indigenous, they're, they're always trying to look those generations. So if I look at 10 years per generation, 70 years, if I'm going to do something, if I'm going to do

a disturbance and I'm going to put that in place and spend the money and the time to do it, do it once, then we've established a corridor, the backboard. the backbone, if you would, for those type of items. And now where it's getting really important, when we prior to doing the corridor study, this is predating invasion of Ukraine by Russia. And here's how it played out. So what the media saw was,

the chancellor from Germany comes over here looking from gas. Our prime minister says there's no business model. Come back in 10 years and we'll get you hydrogen. So Germany has to go over to Qatar, signs a contract with Qatar, and then 130 days later, if they've got their receiving stations up and running and they're taking gas.

Why did Germany come to Canada? Because Germany was expecting a yes. The Vice Chancellor Germany reaches out to Christopher Freeland. Christopher Freeland reaches out to Minister Taves. Minister Taves reaches out to me who's working on this corridor model. And he asks, can we get gas to Germany? How much can we do it and work when we go? Told him, here's two weeks.

Give me two weeks and I'll work out some solutions for you. Take it back. Goes up the food chain. Here's the answer. Here's three or four different ways that we can do it. Tell me the volumes and we can make this happen. They were expecting yes. So this recent trip that we took back over to Germany with MLA Rosewell and myself, that was the continuation of that conversation.

We have a lot of interest over in Europe of what we can do, but we have to sidestep the feds. We have to present and represent ourselves. And the economic corridors model is the salient point that everyone can get their heads around of how we do it. Why do you have to sidestep the feds? Because they're a cluster. Like I can't say it in a nice way. And I can look at, there's a couple things I could tell you off camera where I think it is, but as a politician, the closest thing I can say is it's a cluster.

They're not necessarily working in our best interest. Let's put it that way. So there's even to the extent of India. So I'm literally through one of those events, you know, that it was a Canada day events. My friend had me come up and speak. Turned out it was the consulate general from India was speaking at the same event. So him and I kind of hit it off. And one of his staff invited me and I'm on holidays, you know, to your point,

supposed to be in holidays. I get invited to these two other subsequent events, these Indian events, and I'm, you know, fighting the battles at home, but this is, this is a big prize. Like India is a big prize. Fourth largest economy in the world, largest democracy in the world, largest population in the world. I mean, that's a big prize. And we've got a really strong connection to India itself, you know, just with our communities. So when I get invited by the consulate general, I've got to explain to my wife, like, you know,

all of those things. And so she gets it, begrudgingly gets it. So we go to two subsistency. subsequent events. The last one before he was catching the plane, he had back to Vancouver. He invited me for breakfast at his hotel where he's staying at. There was about four or five of us. Layed out the models of what we could do. And all of a sudden, that is taking form and shape. And he says, well, yeah, you can do this, but you'll

never get your stuff built because First Nations are inside. I said, well, here's the corridor model. They want to buy all the oil we can give them. They don't care. They just want to stop having to buy it from Russia. They want to get all the gas we can get them. They want our stuff. They like to work with us. Saskatchewans did a phenomenal thing with all the pulse crops having their guys over there. Our office is closed up during COVID and it was only in one region. One office in the fourth largest economy in the world. We've got to get our heads in the game.

When you're waiting for the feds to go out there and do this, not going to happen. So the consulate general was trying to get their energy minister to come over, you know, was only in a few weeks down the road. It was the World Oil Conference was being held down in Calgary. Modri ended up calling the house back to order. Couldn't get the minister, but we got tons of their industry. guys. That consulate general pulled together those people got him in the room with our folks down in Calgary. This is how this happens. And meanwhile, you got fancy socks goes over there and

accidentally screws up this bad. Like that one smells rotten to me. How do you accidentally do that? And I think he has a large affinity with China. That's my, you know, and I'm going to on the record now and saying that, but there's way too many things lining up that just don't make sense. so you would knowingly try to P.O. A country off that could be one of our largest trading partners. Can I throw something? You can either agree or disagree with me, but I assume, you know, one of the things that's probably hard to understand,

even for a guy like myself, is I just assume, you know, your UCP or you're conservative federally or whatever, and you're all on the same team and you're all working with the same goal. Oh, no. But when you play 3D chess or even, you know, I even see, you know, I hear like Tom Luongo in my ear talking about the United States and the rhinos and all the different things that are, you know, where they've infiltrated the different parties. And it just seems so, well, it's why politics is so probably dirty, to be honest, right? Like you think everybody's pulling in the same direction.

You think everybody in Canada, for the love of God would just be like, you know, Germany comes over. They need things. We have them. It would help our population, like our entire, it would pull unity. It would just pull us together and said, no, we're going to shut that down. And we just keep, you know, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide, divide. And one of the things, you know, that I think it makes complete sense, but it's really, like, funny to say aloud, is just that there's people working against you all the time, whether they're in a different party or the same party.

Well, in some of it, as bad as it sounds, like this is my observation, it comes down to people. Like in business, if we've got a goal and objective and you've got a corporation publicly traded organization, thinking that organization is all homogenous, it runs like the Borg, good luck. There's tons of politics that take place behind those businesses as well. You're beholden to the shareholder to show profits and all those things, but all the politics that takes place behind there, I can tell you full well, I've been in that world. It's the same thing. And then you're- Politics is the same thing as the corporate structure of world. Well, for me, for what I've seen them, served and everyone's going to have their own slant on it.

But that's how I've managed to work through this system. And I'm a bit of an outlier. But when I start to look at it that way, that's literally what I'm doing. I'm laying out and trying to get relationships to be able to put out some set goals and objectives to try to get them dragged up across the line at those times. Sometimes you have to be very assertive. Sometimes you have to be very quiet about things. You have to get consensus. And other times you just run with it until somebody tells you to stop or can't stop you.

And you have to also gain momentum, not only within your organization, you need help outside of your organization to do that. So there's where some of the conversations come in with municipalities, politics. That's where some of that conversation comes into the businesses, et cetera. You need to have kind of everybody pulling that direction for a common goal. Because if you leave it too macro of a model, people tear themselves apart. But if I give you a grand vision of economic corridors, nation building, doing these things for the better interest for 70 years, people can start to go, holy flip. Now, to your point, well, when's it going to happen?

It's happening. But I'm giving you a 70 year event horizon of how this works out. Yeah, you're talking about 70 years and Sean expects us to happen in seven days. But in the seven days category, we had a memorandum of understanding to that concept and that model between three prairie provinces. We haven't seen this forever. Has the, has the NDP, does it matter with the government taking hold in Manitoba? You got to. So far not.

Because the model, the model so far, and we have to sit down across the table with them formally, but the model so far seems to hold regardless of ideology at the top. Because again, it's a seven-generation thing. It benefits so many people. It's not about a commodity or an asset type. It's about literally building the nation again the way it should be. Northwest Canada, strong and free. Tying that in, making sure we have our number one trading partner with us, growing new trading partners.

Globalization 2.0 is being redrawn as we speak. So either we're at the table being part of the solution to it or we're going to be picking up the scraps at the end of it. A lot of people don't like the word globalization there. Well, it's, it's happening. Or globalists or I can tack about 15 words in there. All I can say is fasten up your chin straps because it's happening with you or not. So when I'm speaking globalization, it depends on your definition. Who are my global trade?

trading partners. We have to put, in my opinion again here strongly, and it's, you know, in my mind, it's been ratified in the last couple of years of events taking place. You have to have Fortress North America. When you have North America, that's 100% standing in its own feed, it's got its main critical elements, resources, minerals, rare earth elements when you have the Adoland and Czech, when you have its infrastructure and play, when you're feeding yourself, you can do that with each jurisdiction, when you've got a tight trading market. your defense is sound, North America, you cannot beat that model. Others have been envious of it for years.

So if you're allowing that to be picked apart, so then if you look at your supply chain, your logistics, right now you can't have everything in your own backyard. We can't build it all because we've allowed it to dissipate. But globalization 2.0 is being redrawn as we speak. You're going to have new trading alliances and dependencies that are going to be tied together. You're going to have new packs that are coming up to it. And you're going to have dependencies on like trade. PRATing packs, forgive me.

You're like the one that comes directly to mind is bricks. I just think of Russia and India and Brazil and, you know, in China and on and on. They're backstopping a bunch of things. But where it gets confusing for a lot of folks is that, again, just because you've got some jurisdictions that are signing combats or trade deals with others doesn't mean we can't work with one or two of them within those organizations. So you're saying it doesn't mean we can't work with Brazil or or, or, you know, take your pick, India. But yeah, in India, honestly, that's where we got to go. India is potentially by 2045, they're larger than the U.S. economy. Like if you're going to not pay attention here, this is, think about that, you've got the largest trading ground.

They just landed something on the moon. Like India is a superpower in that region. And quite honestly, I can predict better. What did they land on the moon? Why did I miss this story? Yeah, south side of the moon. They land a little space rover or whatever kind of thing to take. Yeah, like they're literally a nuclear power and they're a space race country.

I did not know that. Yeah. Although at times I have three young children and I'm more worried about doing the starfish with my youngest on the ice. And part of it, it gets a blip on the media here and there and no one pays attention. Well, it's the only thing we get from India these days, you know, is Trudeau had a plane full of cocaine, which was hilarious. And then I had on Rupa Subur Mannion, she's like, no, the guy was being facetious. Like, he was being a smart ass. And then there's no truth to it whatsoever.

I'm like, oh, I'm glad we cleared that up. Because, I mean, if you can't speak the language, which I can't, and he's just saying all these things, you're like, oh, my God, right? And then she's like, no. Like, he was just, and I'm like, oh, okay. But it's made for a funny headline because, I mean, at this point, you know, everything's falling apart for Trudeau and the liberals. Like, it has been an absolute spiral.

And the encouraging part with India, the grown up in the room, they know full well that he does not represent Canada. So, Modri came up with that. And then coincidentally, we had another event that I was at. And it was six ministers and the Premier presented literally to our consulate court down in Calgary. That was a couple weeks ago. So I was there as well with being the Premier's parliamentary secretary for economic corridor development. So I report directly to her.

Is that your title? Yeah, it's one of them. And so the cool part with that is it's also inclusive of international trade. So Sparkle Sox does his little swan dive routine, messes up a bunch of relations on a number of levels, being there again with that same consulate general going, okay, where are we at with us? We're full steam ahead. Like we'll still continue to work with them. They actually invited us to come over in January and February and to continue the conversations.

So the interesting part is that we can sign memorandums of understanding with other state governments or other provincial governments and other countries. We can literally take that show on the road ourselves. Saskatchewan's doing a phenomenal job of it and Quebec has been doing it for a number of years. So if we continue to be assertive, we answer the questions that the folks have. And they had a ton of questions that wrote in the mainstream media items, the some of the conjecture about the solar panels and the wind, fire, and the renewable. So they could ask us directly and get a direct answer back. It always comes down to that conversation.

Are you a proponent of wind and solar? I'm a proponent of energy. So if it fits. At that time, there's no one silver bullet. So if I can use it as peaking or if it sounds like a political answer. No, no, it's a, it's a technological answer. So at Enbridge pipeline company, we had solar panels and windmills. I'm one of the guys that helped build out 350 windmills down in Lethbridge back in 2009 and the Montana timeline now that exists between Montana and Alberta.

So you put your solar panels and your wind farm where you need it and when you need it. But it's a it's a bonus. a base load never has been never will be so when you listen to everybody trying to i mean Germany had to have been fascinating then oh yeah they're treating it correct me if i'm wrong like it is going to be baseload like it is like this is the way we're going to do yeah the world in in 2024 and moving forward the world is suggesting you know like this is a this is a giant argument out there this has been an argument for about for me the last year because i I've been paying attention to it, maybe longer.

But for other people, it's been 15 years, right? Like this argument that renewables, and it's funny what gets classified as renewables, that's a whole... That's the political part. Oh, God, it's a whole other thing. But this solar, this wind, that it can be... Well, I mean, it can work.

It can be the thing. Shane, like, I mean, it's energy. It's great. And it doesn't. So you can't rely on one thing for that. Otherwise, we would have done it years ago. So when you look at what Germany is doing over there and was really cool. So we did a pause on the whole renewables thing because 80% of the investment in Canada was in Alberta in Renewables.

Like it was the Wild West and it still is until we get this ratified. And again, coming back to that corridor model, if I'm playing Sim City and I've got, you know, entire the Pacific Northwest and then tying into Texas, that's the type of thing that I'm looking at here. When you start looking at that overall infrastructure, you start dropping in the assets where you can have them and you start putting it close to. where you have transmission lines as an example. You can't start putting these things. So instead of putting windmills out in the middle of the boonies and then having to build transmission lines out to them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Or sterilizing farmland when we got to feed people?

People can't, if they're not watching, they can't see the look he just gave me where he rolled his eyes at the, like, you know, like let's put windmills in the middle of nowhere and then build out the infrastructure to them. And that's what's been happening. And the other one, too, is folks have been speculating on it because they're not paying commercial value for the property they're putting on.

They're paying ag value. So there's a disparity. There's quite a difference. So literally you've got some good actors out there. Like really, there's some really good solid companies. And then there's a bunch of snake oil salesman prospectors running out doing a bunch of things. And the regulations have not been and the legislation has not been updated to deal with a bunch of this. That's why we're taking this pause to get the regulations and everything right.

Understand what the rules are. So when everybody goes out there, you're building these things in areas that's not going to have a detrimental effect to other things we're working on. like, you know, feeding people trying to bring affordability in line. It's not a one or the other. Baseload is paramount to us. We have to have a steady base load because we've allowed all of this other Wild West stuff to take place. We put our grid at jeopardy.

So taking coal offline at the times that we have, like that was your basic base load right there. And I've been against that from day one. So we made a political decision at the behest of logic and even economics to do that at this point. and then you've brought in gas powered. Okay, great. And then you're going to tax the crap out of that.

And then Gibo, our, you know, Cien Tower climbing protest and minister, I guess, wants to go even a step further in ideology. You can only do what they have in their areas. So seeing all of this was pretty wild, like it was frustrating. Getting invited by the German government to go over to Germany through the conference of state governments. I sit on an energy subcommittee with senators and representatives from the states

from both political sides, also MPP, that's like an MLA down in Ontario, and then Garth and I. So we end up getting an extra seat because there was a Manitoba election taking place in Saskatchewan was in session. So we put our hand up, grab this other seat. The whole idea of that was to bring us over to Germany to show us all the great things they're doing on their transition file. And by the end of the trip, we had everybody asking the same questions. Why are we doing this? What you're doing in Europe cannot be done in North America. Why would we take away all over advantages. So I'm waiting free to start asking me questions. Otherwise, I'll start going into the whole trip and telling you what I saw. Well, the reason we're doing this, you know, beside everything

else, like certain things just, you know, it's funny how the time's just kind of, but I'm like, I sat and I apologize, Garth, I don't want to misstep on my wording because I, I'd never like quoting if it doesn't written or, you know, you can just play the sound clip. But there was, you text to me, we got to talk about Germany. It's wild. And then I, I went and sat in our AGM of our area, and Garth got talking about it, right? It was super cool to hear our MLA talk about, you know, as soon as he said energy corridors, I'm like, oh, my God, it's, you know, it's interesting, right? Because once again, when we first talked about it on here a couple years ago, I don't know, maybe some people knew that, but I certainly never heard

it. There was a lot of people had never heard it. There was people at Garth AGM that it hadn't heard it two years later. So you're like, oh, this is, this is really interesting. And you could see everybody's ears perk up because it's like, we're going to build something. Geez, in this country, we don't seem to build anything anymore. But you come back to Germany and you see what's going on there and everything else. You text me, it's wild. Then Garth stands up there and not so many words says something like, yeah, they wanted us to sign on to this pact. And I'm going, we're going to do what now?

And I'm sure my brother was sitting right beside him. Brother Dust is sitting right there. And we're sitting there and we both had the same look of like, what? And then Dust asked the question. We're not doing that, right? Like, this is, like, we're, you know, we can't do what they're doing. We would all be dead, you know. But here's the thing.

It comes back to the why. Why would we do this? So if I'm sitting at the table and we're having a few beverages and we're playing risk or we're playing, you know, whatever war game you've got, you've got the resources. Risk is a solid one. I like to think that people of my generation, I don't know, do kids play risk anymore, folks? You can get risk on an iPad, so maybe they do. Oh, maybe they do.

Yeah, a battleship or whatever. It's a lot quicker than it used to be. But it's a strategy game, right? So you're looking at the resources and the things you have at your disposal. So now there's a couple ways of winning that game. You can march your armies across the board and you can do that or you can do it by making alliances. And how do you make alliances? Typically, that's politics.

So how are you making these political alliances? So why would I do this? Why would I switch to something that is necessarily untested but I'm looking for my security? So if the security is based on having energy and having energy at my disposal when I need it not being dependent on trade alliances or politics that's diverse and we don't want to be marching armies across Europe again. Oh wait a second. So we don't want to be having that happening.

And how do I start to do this? Well, let's get the little laser pointer out. And let's get the cats running around and let's start looking at this. Do you think that Germany was running out of energy just a couple of years ago? This is their, their history. Like you've seen major wars and conflicts fought over this. So you've had these trade alliances that get fragile. over time because the politics and everything else.

Germany's resurgence and their energy and their growth from the 90s was based on having cheap gas from Russia. I mean, Trump was over there pointing fingers a number of years ago and everybody thought he was a loudmouthed. You told them like you're too dependent. This is going to grenade on you. This is bad. Whatever reason, whether it's forecasting or more politics and behind the scene, that's taking

place. So if I'm looking at it from a risk perspective, you have all the advantages on the board on your side. How do I change you to get you to walk away from those advantages? to make you at the same level as I am. I don't know, maybe the climate might be a crisis. You could get some little pigtail girl from Sweden to come over and freak everybody about.

So again, what's the friendliest thing? I'm going to get you positioned to do something that puts me at a less disadvantage again. I'm going to try to keep leveling the plane. And these are trading partners. These are friends of ours. But you're still within those friends, you're not going to disproportionately take yourself

from the third largest economy and drop yourself down down to the 10th or 12th, are you? So you have to try to level the playing field. So that's kind of laying it out there on the background. Now in North America, we have all the advantages. We have all the minerals and the assets there. Everything that we have, we've got a big area. Like, the other one that was pretty wild to realize is that Germany's not an old

country. It's a new country. It's only 30 years old. Right? Like until we actually went there and this. Well, think about the concept. And I know what's. bonkers and I had to get my head around it too and that's something I came up with so it's a little

left field but the context of sitting there when the wall came down it was east and west Germany those were two countries literally after World War two and the Cold War and everything those were literally two countries did they think of it like that though yeah they literally think that there are new countries from the wall coming down yeah so think of the concept of this as soon as and when you're sitting in in the Reichstad and you're going through this and their new parliament. They have new parliamentary rules. They have a new seating arrangement. They have a new voting class. They have everything is different from what they had before. When the wall came down, East and West joined each other again. That's your new country. This is the first generation that

they've had in the last 30 years that the kids refer to themselves as Germans, not East German and West German. They're brand new country. And Germany has gone through this in their history. And going through one of the war museums in Dresden that we managed to trip around and took a Sunday to do before we came back home. It was so pervasive to me. Like since the 1300s, you've seen these changes back and forth. Napoleon had part of it, and then the Prussians had part of it, and then you had back and forth in the churning.

You had literally feudal states right up until the point of the 1800s. So we think Canada's a young country. Germany is younger than us. When you look at these changes, these geopolitical changes and political changes have taken place. So think of it that way. Like once you get that, your head around that, then things start to make sense.

So you've got this new generations, it's a bunch of 30, some things that some of the old folks are leading them down like this path and it's all based on their heart and principles and minds. They haven't seen these conflicts before. They've 30 years have actually been actually pretty decent. So now you've got this whole country, this whole massive economy that's dependent on that. And that's where the politics creep in.

I literally had a chance to sit beside for half an hour at this one supper with the leader of the Green Party in Germany. And Germany's a coalition party. They call them the traffic like party right now. You've got the greens, the yellows, and the reds. The yellow guy actually took us around. Real nice guy, Michael Cruz, is his name, took us around.

I'm going to stop you for one second. Is there political parties actually called green, reds and yellows? No, that's their colors. It's just the colors. They're colors. Okay. So over there, they call themselves the traffic light government right now because political changes, right?

Their coalition governments always. So when Michael's taking us around walking through and we're asking how fragile and how polarized some of the opinions are, and good guy. And he said, yeah, there's some things that we can't agree to, but we have to, you know, kind of go along with us. Okay. Sitting with the lady, the leader, literally the leader of the Green Party, we're sitting right beside each other. And a couple folks across the table and we're talking back and forth. And I'm thinking this is a phenomenal opportunity. Like I'm meeting a federal leader of Germany. Like this is pretty cool. Having a conversation on our hydrogen file.

Like here's all the things we've done with our hydrogen roadmap. Oh yeah, but you're using blue hydrogen. Well, yeah, like we've been using it in process for last 25, 30 years. Well, you're not carbon pricing. Oh, no, we've actually done that for the last 20 years on our industries. We've always been doing that. Well, you're not doing this. You're not doing that. She knew everybody that were from Rachel Notley all the way through a number of their members to the Trudeau group, but didn't know any of us. So that was the first thing to jump off the page. And I didn't bring up any of that politics, not knowing who she knew. The second side of it was she kept telling us how we had to do wind and solar, how nothing was good unless you did wind and solar.

And finally, when I'm explaining to her, I said, you know, and this is half an hour into it. And, uh, and, and you also talked about our environment plan and what was going on. And, and we have some really good stuff to tell. Like we've got an integrated environment plan that includes all the industries of how we reach, reach our goals and objectives that hadn't been done in 15 years. We've done that as a government. That's all out there. It's all sitting out for people to use. So when you start hitting all these mainstream items and then finally it's to the point that that's not even good enough.

And she won't listen that her climate is different than ours. Like they're literally in Berlin. It's like, I don't know, Vancouver. So all of these elements don't work. And finally I said to her, I said, with all respect, to come to Germany, it took me seven and a half hours to fly here. Four and a half hours to get out of my own country. And we were taking the short route, another hour over top of Greenland, a couple hours over top of the Atlantic. And then it was really easy and fast to get there.

I said, your country is half the size of my province. I have 4.5 million people. You have 85 million people. I'm sitting on the fourth largest known oil reserves in the planet that's producing. I'm sitting on 223 trillion cubic feet of gas. Of the coal that you have, you guys have lignite, we wouldn't even bother mining it. We have the hard coal that you keep talking about the stuff that's hundreds and hundreds of dollars a ton plus all the metallurgical coal. And in our country, we sit on about 80% of that. I produce over 70% of the beef in my entire country comes from our area. I have all the this fresh water. I said as far as our major polluters, they're forest fires. And we just burnt off the size of Switzerland and I still have 62% of my forest left. So quite frankly, with all these things at our disposal, do you think we'd be having the same conversation of Germany had these assets? And she was gobsmacked. It just took away the varnish and the veneer of everything else. That's really where it comes down to is what assets do we have? When I went over and spoke to Michael afterwards. It also, if I may. And we're safe.

is is competency you know I hate the word competency because you know you had to take all these competent checks to be a competent work and all this but like when I when I listen to talk I'm like it takes a person in in the position of being a politician who can say that who can confidently be like uh these things

you know like I mean you know how many other people would have sat there and been like yeah this really interesting yeah well well we'll think about it you know I don't know A. He doesn't want to make a point or doesn't know how to make the point. Well, and there's part of us being on the global stage.

So even with our own consulate when they're talking about hydrogen and we can produce the whole hydrogen, and that was the other point I made. I said, only second to Russia in the world. That's us for the largest amount. We produce the most of hydrogen in our country. We've been doing it for years.

It's a byproduct for us. So tell us how much you need. We'll get it to you. And that's what we should be talking about. We'll help you through your energy transition. But right now, you're poached. You know, and again, she was apologetic for having to get gas. She was apologetic almost for having to use coal.

And she goes, well, how was that received in Canada? We don't care. Like, honestly, it's not a blip on the radar. Their consumers are conditioned. Some people care, but very, very. As a big thing, did you see big riots in the street because Germany had to burn coal again? No. Like, no.

And they're not going to shut theirs until 23. Like, look at where we live, like Shane, where we live. I mean, right now it was plus 12 the other day. I was like, oh, like, is this November? You know? Because what's coming is minus 40. Yeah. And when it turns to minus 40, nobody cares.

Well, it's not unheard of. In my lifetime, I remember day before Christmas out in T-shirts fencing with my dad. Let me be very clear. I'm not putting it out there because I think climate change is going to kill us and warm the planet and we're all going to boil. Like, you know, it's like, no, we're having a great, a great winter right now. Yeah. Anytime you get into November and you, even if it was minus. 10. But there's no snow. It's like, we're winning. Anything past Halloween, then you don't have to

have the kids in snowsuits. That's right. It's a bonus. So right now we're in bonus time. And I'm just hoping bonus time goes to Christmas. And the day before Christmas, we get a foot of snow and you go, oh, we get a white Christmas. Because it was only like, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, I don't know, maybe it's longer than that. Was it 15 years ago? We had a brown Christmas, right? Like we were out on quads riding around and sweater. It was unreal. And you go like, no, this isn't unusual. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I would say it's a little unusual. But like over the course of 10 years, you probably get one year like this, where it's like, you know, you get a late snowfall and you're like, yeah,

farmers are going, we could use some snow though because we need the moisture. And that's in our lifetime, not over 10,000 years. Yeah, well, I know. To me, let's not get too in the weeds of all this climate jargon. And it's like, uh, but so having laid all those things out, Mike drop, speak to Michael and go back over and I shook his hand a second time. I said, I understand now how fragile your, your coalition is. He goes, they want to push industry out of Germany too. Like they don't want to stop.

So there's the balancing act that they're playing on the political side. On the technical side, so we spoke to a number of levels, including industry. So we spoke to the feds, the federal governments and their departments. And then they walked us through their plan of how they're going to transition and move a ton over to EV, how they're going to have more cars on the road that are EV. They're going to start moving a bunch more over to public transit, like doubling their public transit than what they have now. They're talking about how many megawatts they have to save, how you'll have to change consumer behaviors of how to do that.

And they're literally the social engineering is happening to try to do that. To try and get people to switch over to EVs and everything else. Well, and then they're disclosing that to us that here's how you make this model work. And when I ask some basic technical things, and God bless this young engineer that was over there, she was truthful. The politician in the room was wild because they keep looking to the younger generations around them to answer the technical questions, which was interesting. So it wasn't as if it was the other way leading it.

It's almost as if these the ones. And when you look, that's where the power dynamic was in that room at that time. That technical lady, and I kept pushing this female engineer, I said, what's your probability? And that's like, how is this going to work out? Are you meeting your targets? And finally she says, no, we're not. And we don't know that we will.

But because of these other elements, we think we're still okay. Well, the politicians, and again, we're sitting with a bunch of dams from Democratic Democrats from the states, their jaws are hitting the table. They're like, well, what do you mean you're not making your objectives? And then even the group that was bringing us there. So now we're having a technical conversation, not a political conversation. They're not going to hit their objectives. And when you mean objectives, what do you mean?

They're objectives of the targets of reduction in power consumption, the objectives of the fleet production of how many EV vehicles they would have literally the model they're coming up with. But to them, I mean, they're still trying to tracking towards a target in timeline. that was interesting. Then we go into, you know, a state meeting with the state department in the U.S. and then it was a bunch of business folks together talking about these targets, some objectives, how we've already got these packs and these agreements that are assigned and how that's kind of working out. And it's all good. Because again, the Transatlantic Bridge Corporation was put

together after World War II, inclusive of the Marshall Plan to bring everybody back online. And this has been working in the background for years. So it works. The model works. But the key thing to get from the U.S. conversation that was coming out was we have to look at resilience and adaptability. Again, under this whole green narrative, but resilience and adaptability. So if we can get people thinking that way in resilience and adaptability, technically you can start to work towards that pathway. And then the other interesting part was the hydrogen equation. So we go over to our own consulate, our own consulate that's representing Canada, specifically

Alberta, didn't know our file. They knew the highlights of it, but when someone leans into me and goes, Can you really produce hydrogen by 2025? And I go, yeah, we've been doing it for 30 years. How much do you need? Well, you can't get it to us. Don't tell me that. Tell me how much you need, and I'll figure out how to get it to you because that's what we do.

And, you know, tongue and cheek, the other thing I did is I took around a bunch of little Alberta flags. And everywhere I went, I dropped Alberta flags on the table. I had people taking pictures of the Alberta flag and explaining who we were, Texas North, talking about the resources and the elements. And they came away with a different perspective. So now we go over to Tyson Krupp, like this. This was wild.

So Tyson Crups is a massive organization. If you ever jumped in an elevator, look at the name on the door. It's probably a Tyson Crup elevator. The steel productions, engineering model solutions, like tons of stuff. And on the steel side, they make some high quality steel, both for military applications and regular run-of-the-mill road stuff. Because of policy, they're being forced out of them. They have to bring in all the metallurgical coal.

They have to import all that. They don't have it. All they have is lignite there, which is brown coal, which, is 50 to 70% moisture. Like it's not the stuff we have. So they have to import all this. They're going from a coking furnace of which takes your raw ore at the top. You throw in high-grade coal, basically bring it up to temp.

You make everything molten. And also from that, you're also picking up carbon properties from the coal that you're putting in this. So it makes really good steel. Known process, awesome. The new process that is yet to be tested that they came up with is going to use a hydrogen furnace. and then it's going to have to use electrodes, electricity,

because the hydrogen furnace does not produce enough temperature to bring it up to temp. It only brings up to a plastic state where you need it to a molten state. And then you're going to use electricity to do that. Now you have to understand, they're parked, they're nukes. They're not taking nuclear electricity. So it's not that, you know.

So now you're getting electricity either from burning lignite coal or, ideally, again with a green party lady, you're going to get that from doing electrolysis, from windmills, and from solar panels on fresh water. There's a fresh water thing, right? Like we need it for crops and we need it to drink, but they're going to start taking and depleting fresh water supply to produce hydrogen and to use the green energy to do that. And I'm kind of disruptive, like the attention deficit, but when I look at something that's on the wall and I'm looking at literally this furnace, they're not telling me all this. I'm looking at it and I'm going, hold on a second. And I'm interrupting this chief financial officer or chief, you know, executive from their company.

I'm going, can you stop for a sec? You know, you're not supposed to interrupt a presentation. I'm going, is this accurate? Like, is this what you're doing? Have you tested this model? Oh, no, have you done one? No. So this is a brand new plant.

Yeah. Is this accurate in how you're looking at your energy? Yeah. I said you're going to need 15 times more energy than you need or using right now. And the politicians, again, around the table or jaws are almost hitting the table. Well, that's because you're, you're, you're. The thing that's so fascinating about you, Shane, people can love or hate you. It doesn't matter, right?

People can attack you, they can love you, it doesn't matter. It's like when I bring you on and bring on my politician, you're going to get full spectrum. But the interesting thing is your background, right? So you look at these problems and you have industry in your blood, right? You go, well, this doesn't make any sense. I just had on Linda Blade. Okay. Okay?

Linda Blade shocked me. She wrote a book on how trans females are ruining, not just female sports, but all sports. And her background is she was a phenomenal track athlete back in the 80s, saw the doping scandal of Ben Johnson and on and on and on. I've worked with elite athletes, male and female for 30 years. And then, you know, she sees all these trans women, trans females going into the women's sports and everything. and she's just going like this, this doesn't make any sense. So she wrote a book on it. And then she sat in your chair like a week ago.

And she walks in, I've read her book, and the book's good. And it just floored me. No different than Regina Wattiel. There are people sitting in our country right now, or heck in our province, that have such a wealth of knowledge specific to some of the problems that have been created that don't get enough air time to be like, this is why this doesn't make sense. And you're sitting in a room.

where 99% of the people don't even know the question as. They're just like, yeah, it's just another presentation. Oh, this is great. They're going to be all green. It's going to be all green. It's great. And you're a guy with the background to go, wait a second. This doesn't make any sense.

No, because again, the day before we're hearing about the social engineering. We're hearing about trying to change everything over, how we have to use less energy. And your major industry players, you're forcing them to make a non-competitive product that's 15 times at least. at least 15 times more energy equivalents than it is one right now. So it doesn't reconcile. And then when I asked them, and again, I brought it back and said, who's making you do this? Well, we have to. But why?

Government policy? Because we have to fight climate change. So they're being forced in these areas to come up with technical solutions. And I go, how does this work with your cross competitiveness? And now Garth is jumping in. And the other gent who was a Republican from the states, he jumps in and starts asking questions. Where is your market now?

He flips two slides ahead. He already shows that China and India are eating their lunch. If you're going to make your product 10 to 15 times at least more expensive. More expensive. And I'm going, how does this work? Like, why am I compelled to buy from you? I said, you know, two things. Can you move to our jurisdiction?

We're sitting in this? Well, it depends if we're part of the same group or not. What group is that? Well, and this is where we heard about COP 28. What we're going to introduce, what we would like to introduce is a climate club. So then everyone agrees to what energy is, what works within the climate club. The climate club is a buyer. club. You have to negate your values. You come up with what your definitions of energy are. So basically

you hamstring North America. You bring it up to the same equivalency because over there it's 40 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity right now. We're paying 12. So you bring everything up how many more times expensive. Whomever comes on with that model within the club is only trading with each other. There's your globalization 2.0. Everybody else that's outside of the circles trading with themselves at a different economy. So why am I doing that again? When we go over to... Canada is part of it, because we have feds.

So unless the provincial folks show up and start making agreements at the state levels and representing ourselves, the Fed story isn't being represented to the feds of Germany either. So just so I'm clear, I want to make sure I'm getting, because this is, this is...

The federal government is probably going, that's a great idea. We should totally do this. We should totally sign on to agreement with you. We should totally get our values in line and have a climate club. Gee, that sounds like fancy pants socks idea and his, you know, a group of, like, that sounds like their own idea. Like it sounds like they're all speaking the same language. It's not their idea.

It's not their idea. Sure. Sure. But fair enough. But they would talk that language is all I'm saying. And what you're saying is, as a province, you're seeing it when you go out to Germany. You're seeing what they're talking about. You're seeing the things they're trying to align so that we all go the same.

And what you're saying is as a province of Alberta, and maybe as you would put it, northwest, but certainly as Alberta, because whether it's Alberta or Saskatchewan, somebody's got to lead the way of being like, we're a province, we're not beholden to everything the federal government does, and we can sign agreements with you, create this energy corridor. And, you know, Ottawa can do what it wants, but we're going to do what we need to do to protect. Not only your constituents, but the province of all. Alberta, which will in fact... It's North America.

It's U.S. and Canada. Like we're being led down these paths because you've got people that are easily influenced. Again, my comment with the little light beam. These are your politicians that are swallowing this policy. It's not Giebo dreaming this up. Giebo is just drinking the Kool-Aid and he's doing what he's told. He's following this because he actually believes it. That's the scary part.

So when Tyson Krupp is doing this and they say we have to, like, and what happens if you don't? Well, we have to. And then if you say, well, you ask about others that are questioning this, other climate deniers, they immediately close it off. It's like, you know, vaccine deniers. It's like the freedom convoy guys that fly out Canada flag and are all of a sudden protesters because you throw national interest. There's a ton of things that are at play here. And knowing where we're at in the province of working with our other provinces and working with the states and the energy producing groups and everything else, I thought we were on the right track, like I was really sure we're on the right track. after being there, I'm 100% sure we're in the right track.

And this is where we have to represent ourselves. Now we jumped over to another group knows North Rhine, Westphalia, which is like the Alberta, Germany. These guys are awesome. They're the energy hub, the tech hub, industry hub. They're very innovative. We can sign, honestly, MLUs with these guys until the cows come home. We'll figure out the technical issues together.

You know, we've got three or four universities, two big ones arguably that kind of on that side, they have 70. We've got, you know, a couple technical colleges. They have 116. Like they're phenomenal and this is where the coal mining takes place in their area. So asking them the probability of make this happen because they're a state government again. They're they're like us provincial, you know, talking to a state. And again, they're showing me where their transition plan is going and I'm going interjecting.

And what is your probability of failure? Like how much, how much risk are you guys taking on with this? Because I'm not seeing the numbers. Like this is and then the lady she flips to the third screen and she kind of goes 30%. 30% probability of failure that you're not going to have. And I'm tongue in cheek again. I said so. 30% probability of failure of not meeting their goals and objectives for the transition plan.

They don't have the technical issue solved out. They don't have the energy solved. They have a 30% risk failure of improbability right now of reaching the objectives. Meanwhile, on top of all that, the price of everything has gone through the roof because what they're doing costs way more. Correct. So when I said 30% failure, this is where you're at. I said in my world in a boardroom, you bring me a 30% failure.

You're not coming in the room. Like I'm dealing on micro percentages to typically make something work. Like you get it nailed down. It's almost flipping the coin, you know? No, it's worse than that. It's honestly worse than that. And I put it in context. I'm going to take this 200 kilometer an hour train back from Essen, back to Berlin.

You're telling me there's a 30% chance of failure that I'll either derail or die on the way there. Do you want to buy that ticket and sit on the train seat next to me with a 30% chance? I only have 70% chance of making their alive. And when you ask them, well, who's figuring us out? Someone. We'll figure out the technical issues. Well, why are you doing this? Because we have to.

Well, what happens if the public doesn't go along with us? Well, we'll make the policy pervasive so that they're punished until they have to. Does this sound familiar? Yeah. So there's the spooky part. Germany's culture accepts us way easier than we do. We're a little bit bucky out here. There was one.

Isn't that funny to say? Because for a while, we accepted pretty much everything. We did. We're the calm, quiet Canadians. And, you know, honestly, right now you compare us against the U.S. We're going along with this because we're the caring, compassionate Canadians that are becoming socialist. We don't realize it. So those are the things.

I have to interject that. I think we realize it. I think the more I talk to people, the more you just realize we've been in, like, social. socialist state, a version of communism, whatever it is, that has been freer than any other version of it. Yeah. And we're living it right now. And that's in Saskatchewan and Alberta, which is the two. We're the outliers.

Thank you. So the thing that was pervasive with us being there and asking these questions and having those conversations, and they're good folks, like that, honestly don't get me wrong. They're not bad people. They're good people. But what they're doing to come up with solutions for their area or region does not have to be applied to ours. And again, coming back to that point I made with that green leader, I'm sitting over, you know, 1,500 years of secure energy. Why would I do this?

The biggest thing I have to do is fight forest fires. So prevent how many forest fires take place. And then immediately they jump, oh, that's the climate. No, that's people starting fires in a dry year. I can control people because when you looked at what happened on the COVID chart, same climatic conditions, the lowest frequency we've had in 20 years is when everyone was sitting at home like you were saying, waiting for the next shoe to drop. That was our lowest fire season in 20 years.

Nothing climatically changed. Everything that we're looking at, there's a small margin we're caused by Mother Nature. Everything was manmade. I can deal with manmade stuff. But the idea of taking cash, throwing it out the window to change the weather, that doesn't work. If you're looking at resilience and adaptability and building that back into your supply chains and getting these regions to work and not getting hung up on the form of energy,

if I'm looking at a problem, solve the problem. You always step in in this room. You always sell me this little bit of glimmer of hope, you know. There's lots of hope. I'm batting down the hatches and, you know, and the guy just before he occurred a stone, you know, he's a, well, he was the urban farmer, but I don't know. I call him a prepper, right? Like, you know, he's looking at the next 10 years going, it's going to get worse.

Like, it's not going to get better. And you come in here and you always sell me on a little bit of like, it's going to get better. Are you saying it's going to get better? Or are you looking at it going, ooh, table your expectations because it's going to give worse. Yeah, well, it depends what your version of is is. So in my perspective, um, I believe and I have to say this, like I have to believe that because of enough people are working together and realizing what they're going to be sold on here, that they've been sold a bad bill of goods, that that's where it comes into.

So reason being, when we were talking about economic corridors before this is priority the invasion of Russia. We were talking about the Northwest Passage, about being the first time in 10,000 years we can actually navigate that. Talked about 2009, Russia pulls out the EMO peninsula and all of a sudden starts supplying all this gas. 2014, China declares themselves an Arctic nation, pick a portion of the world that they're going to be the Arctic nation in. Then we had some Chinese weather balloons take place. We had Russia and invasion Ukraine. You had the gas supply cut off to Germany. And then in August 5th of this year, we had a joint naval exercise of China and Russia off of the coast of Alaska.

People are paying attention now. China has the large majority of all the rare earth elements that we have. If you're looking at all the batteries and everything else they need, that's them. Even though Japan has 10% of the market, they still get their base elements from China. If you're looking at the nuclear industry, because Russia had a cheap supply of a bunch of tech and also for enrichment materials, we bought into that. 35% of our supply chain comes from Russia. The only thing is not being sanctioned right now, by the way.

However, when you look at the supply chain, there's fragility in the supply chain. rebuild it, put it back together. If I'm looking at that northern part of Saskatchewan, two square miles, two different independent mines, they're running at partial productions right now. They literally can supply US with 97% of their perceivable nuclear energy for a number of years, hundreds of years. We have everything in our disposal. The question is, why in the hell are we not developing our own stuff? Why is it taking us so long to permanent? And why are we falling into a bracket of what energy is being defined by people over in the Atlantic that don't have our resources. So the hope is, and I saw it right at Penwar this weekend by being on the stage for three hours

on three different independent talks, we have the solutions to it. I need to know the timelines. And the spooky part of this is talking to the guy that's running the nuclear side of it, the SaaS power, the energy side, and also the guy that's laying out the rare earth elements because Saskatchewan's doing some phenomenal work on their vertical stack of how they mine this, extract it, produce it, and everything else. the critical element if you take away two things. And here's why I kept pushing them and unfairly to them,

but I'm pushing them on this because as a politician, I need to know this so I can raise the alarm and put it in a way that other people can understand the severity and the consequences of us heading down this path. If Russia was to pull the pin on their enriched materials, we've got two years. That's only how much we have sitting right now in each one of those facilities. They've got two years of a built-up supply

or the lights go off on the nuclear facilities. That's kind of a spooky thought, right? Not for us, but down there, they get a lot of power from there. And Ontario does as well. The rare earth elements, because we're driving towards this whole EV type thing that's going a grenade, like, so all the supply. It's going to grenade. So all the supply that they're looking for, if you're looking for the demand on that side

of it, that's what's driving most of this. If I looked at two basic elements for the, where the rare earth elements and the critical elements, there comes down to two things. feeding people and fighting for people. I have to be able to protect them and I have to be able to feed them. If we take that other draw and demand out of the supply line,

within five years, we could have our supply line lined up. That's only five years. But when you're pushing me to 2035 and all this other BS that they're doing and it takes me 20 years to develop a mine, it takes me 17 years to build a flipping power line, good luck.

Like the math doesn't add up. So if we're talking realism, we need to find a pathway economic corridor, within those areas of where we're establishing where those mineral assets are, we're looking at how we move the energy, what types of energy we're doing, we're looking at the supply chain and logistics. And you apply a special rule within that boundary that all of the regulatory approvals and everything get fast-tracked within there, because we already know what we need to do to approve it, fire up the bureaucracy and say what a yes looks like. Industry then can

invest, they can actually build the stuff and the financial institutions know that this is a full deal. And using Germany as an example, when Canada said there was no business model, they went to Qatar, they got their energy that they needed, and they built their stuff within 130 days. That was a green environment and economics minister that made that call because it was a national state of interest. The world isn't waiting for us to catch up. We've got to figure this stuff out. We've got to work with our American partners. We've got to work with our trading partners that are there that we need it, and we've got to get it done. And I'll love to sell Germany as much gas as they want, as much hydrogen as they want, as much synthetic graphite.

mineral assets, we'll do all that, and we'll ramp things up again. And again, we have to Sean come back to be in Canaanians rather than Cantonadians. Get this stuff done, get our shit together and get in the game and make it happen. I mean, I just go, there's one Shane Getson. How, how, uh, I'm replicating myself. Are you? Yeah, so in the short timeline, again, went from having a conversation to having literally economic corridors etched in a ministry's wall.

We have people now at these conferences, are running with this same concept. I'm literally have been asked to take over the transportation side of this one organization. This is how we do it. And a bunch of the senators from down south are asking me for speaking noise. How do we do this?

Like you're talking about this while we've got to start speaking from the same song sheet. Those other fellows on the other side, they're conditioned to do it. And they've been speaking this way for years. It's up to us now to stop scrapping over the pieces, look at this thing and not let somebody else define what energy is in energy in North America.

nuclear is clean, wind power is clean, hydroelectric's clean, natural gas is clean, oil is clean, carbon capture and storage, that's how we play the narrative with a bunch of these folks. If it's carbon is the issue and I can solve the technical issue with carbon, they'll let me solve it, but it's never been the issue. When I hear intonations from the CBC and everyone else, and they're talking about this whole dismantle the petroleum industry because it doesn't matter what you're doing, it's the forms of carbon. And they've been brainwashed. It's absolutely bonkers. One of these young, young guys sitting over there that was all fired up and he had hairdo like sideshow Bob. So it was tough to take him serious to start off with.

But he's this young 30 something year old think tank guy talking about how they're going to make clean jet fuel, green jet fuel. I'm going, okay, well, this is getting interesting because I know what our guys are doing at the UFA. I know that they're working with Forge. I know they're looking at biodigesters. I know they're doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes using our industry and what we've done.

and we're coming up with some pretty clean options here. And he says, we're going to take hydrogen. That's green hydrogen. Okay, so again, that definition of taking fresh water, wasting it to make hydrogen through electrolysis through that side. And then we're going to take carbon. Okay? We're going to combine it. And we're going to make a hydrocarbon.

And I'm going, or you can't lose 30% of your energy equivalency, and you can just take a hydrocarbon that oozes out of the ground, put it in a nice little tower, a bubble tower, and crack it off in the, top and I can still feed the world. So all you're doing is making the same element I have at my disposal, but taking fresh water to do it. And it's like blank, blank. Like they've literally lost it in that regard. You've got a bunch of folks that haven't executed before that don't have kids that haven't had to care for people that haven't had to do these things. You think that stuff up in the dark, it's wild. Do you think the not having kids is a big part of it? Yeah. Yeah, you take any person, well, I shouldn't say that. A lot of people have

kids and don't give a crap about their kids and their bad parents, take people who actually care about it and have the responsibility that makes things real. When you have to put yourself second or third or fourth or fifth to make sure that those little people you're bringing it to the world have a future and then they're, they don't have a worry in the world and you're taking all the heat and doing it, that changes your perspective and a hurry. If it was just a single guy here running around, fifth, whatever, I wouldn't give a second thought to what I was doing in a lot of things, knowing running that gamut, that's part of it. And the other one, is having to stay up all night to and with the pressure of making something work.

These folks don't know where their stuff comes from. They're just dreaming it up of how they're going to do it. Technically, they can't solve the problems, but somebody else is going to do it because they've never had to do it themselves. That's what spooked me. Who's somebody? And when you ask him, who's going to pay for this cost difference? The government.

The government's going to pay it. Yeah. Who's the government? Blank, blank. You're never going to be able to save up enough for your home. Well, I rent. And then Garth kind of put it to them. Somebody owns the place you're renting.

Who's that? Blank, blank. It was absolutely wild. It was neat to see this. And then at the end of the trip, I'm asking. Unnerving. Yeah, it was wild, right? Like you're in the.

I understand now why you're like, we got to talk about. Oh, we're going to talk about it. Because again, to me, that's the crystal ball of where this is going. If we keep the intonations of what we're doing, that's the path we're going down. Like, come on, folks. We don't need to do that. There's not a gun being held to my head that says we have. have to do this. Lansing Meadows, um, National Historic Park where the Vikings first landed in

North America, northern tip of Newfoundland, first time I go out there and see this because, you know, Viking heritage, you know, Norwegian heritage are country's heritage really cool to go see. And I'm looking out there and they called it Markland back in the day. So Markland was basically big timber and I'm looking out at the tundra and I'm looking at the guy going, what gives here? Like what did the little Vikings log all of this area off? And he goes, well, no. He says, it used to be about seven degrees warmer a thousand years ago. Oh. So the plant life has changed. So when we're running around for all these reasons, I come back to the why. Why are we doing this? If you give industry the challenge, if you say we have to go from point A to point B, have a good reason, give them the

timelines to do it, given the ability to solve the technical challenges, they'll do it. But when I hear by others and nobody know whose others are, so I'm sitting there with this guy at the end and he was kind of the one from this Adelphi group leading us around. And I'll tell you one more thing, too, which was pretty wild. But he's leading us around, and they're always by these others. And I'm going, who the hell's the others? Like, is somebody tracking this in the government and the federal government of who's working on those technical challenges?

And now we're getting to know each other. And he kind of, you know, because, well, he says, I had asked that once too. I'm like, well, what did you get? He says, well, I asked the government. And the government went back in a couple weeks later. They came back and they said it was us. So he says, I'm going to start getting a spreadsheet now and trying to track who's working on these issues.

I'm going, oh, my God. You know, you're, all I can think of is this is my, I said this before we started, and I label it not as an individual, but as politicians. One of the things, it doesn't matter the level municipal all the way up, well, that's a provincial matter or that's a federal matter and everybody takes it kind of, that's kind of the mentality you're talking about. It's like, well, somebody else is going to figure this out. The think tanks make a bazillion dollars coming up with ideas.

It doesn't mean it has to be a good idea. It's up to the politicians and the policymakers to vet those ideas. But if they're not vetted or they don't have the technical ability or if they're being silenced because there's another thing, this thing falls apart. And that's what we're seeing. Every time you test the logic and look at fancy socks there with doing the same thing in the heating oil, take a snow globe, okay, we're on the same planet. We're all in this together.

I shake the snow globe, those things move around. So why is it when I burn diesel fuel on the east coast? It's not as impactful to the snow globe as me burning natural gas. out here in the middle of the prairies. It doesn't make sense. It was never about the climate, ever. And there is the hypocrisy. They're not even hiding it anymore.

That's where people are hopefully saying enough. And it's enough for all of us, the pendulum swinging. Be bold about it. A bunch of people have been keeping their heads down for years. Now step up, start pushing, and get out there. And everything's about timing. So again, coming back to some of the criticisms of the first end, yeah, there's a time and the place to have this.

now knowing full well my own personal story, seeing what was in place, finding a solution to come up with, with problems, because a lot of folks tell you about the problems, they don't have a solution. Here's a way out of it. Here's what we have to do. Don't let them get boxed in and let's keep working together.

A ton of the stuff you won't see it happening on the surface. You'll see a ton of us guys working behind the scenes. And the fruits of our labors will come out if this thing works right, it'll come out about five, ten years down the road because we would have missed eating the bullet that's being already laid out for us. that's um well a ton of people rightfully so can't get past a lot of different issues COVID being a very big one right because obviously there's still people that are reeling from

that lost their businesses there's people running from paraly I mean what I was going to say is paralyzed but I was thinking of Drew Weatherhead sister and what I meant was vaccine injured still having like like I don't have to go on the list people have been listening they've they've heard the stories right and they're going saying, yeah, we got this one wrong, big. And forgive me, what you're saying, I think, you know, as we sit here and we've been talking for a while, is there's another bullet coming. And if we don't get it right, it's going to get way worse.

Am I wrong on that? I think that was the real bullet on a whole long. Is the energy transition of crippling the economy, like driving us into? Yeah, it's a globalization 2.0. Like, again, when it comes down to it, whether you don't like it or not, doesn't matter. It might not like cold weather, but it's coming. You either got a choice to put on a jacket, either got a choice to move all the way out of it, or sit there in the parking lot, yell and scream and freeze to death, like figure it out. So you

might not like it, but it's already happening. Well, this is, this is my thought, you know, just on this side with the CRTC saying we're, you know, we want everybody to register. And we're, you know, and they put it out in a nice way that, you know, everyone's going 10 million. Nobody makes 10 million. It's like, well, actually, that's, that's not true. There are people who make $10 million, and they pretty much allow all of you to hear us have our conversations. And you go, isn't that very, very smart, very interesting little ploy there. And you go, but what can, you know, I sit here, what can you do? It's like, well, you got to start moving because, as you would say, winter's coming.

And whether it happens on November 28th or it happens six months after that, it's coming. So, yeah, adapt and overcome. So you have to be resilient about it. You know, I think Darwin had a great quote and I'm going to mess it up, but it's not the strongest or the smartest of the species. It's the ones that are the most able to adapt to survive. So there's enough of us that have to see it. You can change the weather to a degree,

but you have to understand what's coming for you. And this has been in the making for a long time. So again, there's things that we can do, acknowledge the things that you can and accept the things you can. So we can do what we're doing now for the time we have. The other side isn't stopping. They've been doing this for a number of years, and it's not just on one file. And again, a lot of us can only work on certain things that we're aware of.

The challenges to make sure that people of the same heart and intent get on the areas of their levels of expertise and deal with it. And don't tear down the other person because he's not working on the file that you're an expert in. Maybe understand they're looking at another portion of it because this is a big deal. It was only a year ago when I was literally sitting over at a national conference, the only one from Alberta that was there as a politician. And sitting in a room and it was a bunch of U.S. politicians and I thought I was the only Canadian there. And the course that was taking place at the time, about 80, 90 people in the room roughly,

was talking about misinformation in the media. So there was a couple profs, one from Texas State, another one, California, I think, another politician in the front leading this. And they were talking about the issues that were taking place in communist countries and socialist countries, how they kind of, you know, control the media. They were talking about the AI that's out there that runs these bots, that's misinformation, that's just spamming everybody. And then they started noodling around different ways. And one of the proposals was that you can maybe start controlling your media a bit. Maybe that's what you could do.

So I'm listening to this go back and forth. And there was some compelling arguments for all the reasons why elected officials should stop the misinformation to put truth out there, like with good intent. and I ended up raising up my hand. And at that time, there was a certain CRTC bill that was before the Senate. So I stood up and said, you know what would be a great idea? And they don't know I'm from Alberta at this point. I didn't say where I was from. I said, you know what would be a great idea?

Maybe we should take some cash, set it to the side. We could all pull in. And then we could have our own government newscasting. Like it would be 100% supported by us as taxpayers. And then that way they wouldn't be dependent on any advertising. So then we could make sure that they had unbiased information, and we could make sure that the true story coming up from government was getting lots of airplay.

I said, then maybe what we could do with some of that residual volume of cash, then we can also support and buy advertising and portions of, maybe even fractions of those companies, maybe by portions of those companies, and then have them so they at least have that balance. And now the heads are starting to look at me a little bit different, and they're looking at this is kind of a wild concept. And then once we've got that fully established,

then we could take over the Internet. And what we could say is anything that wasn't in the national interest or wasn't culturally appropriate, well, then we could block it. And maybe that's what we could do to control it. And then everyone's this pause. And I turned and I said, what I'm laying out to you isn't in a socialist country. Well, maybe it is. But it isn't Venezuela and it isn't China and isn't Russia. This is what literally took place in Canada.

And I can tell you how effective it is that you've never even heard that there was a problem until a bunch of guys from my province decided to jump in their trucks, throw some. some Canadian flags up and drive to Ottawa and tell people that there was a problem. And I said in that last bill, this is being proposed in front of the Senate right now as we speak. So I said, we depend on you with the land of the free and the home of the brave. Do not go down this path. Please, I implore you. So it was kind of a mic drop moment. I didn't realize until later I was, you know, approached by this one,

he's a senator from a progressive conservative senator from down east. And he regaled to the story he was sitting beside a little. liberal senator who was in the room. The liberal senator was going, he can't say that. You can't say that. And this guy gives him a shot in legs to stand up and take the microphone then. He's describing exactly what's taken place. And it's not until you have that sobering conversation. You realize how far we've actually gone. How far we've slid. Right. Now this has come to pass. And immediately, I'm not getting news feeds. As a politician, I've been blocked. The premier's site was put down during an election. And think about how, think about this.

Think of how everybody's just like, eh, okay. I actually don't understand that part. I actually don't understand. Eh, that's okay. Yeah, but I can get cat pictures whenever I want. There's like TikTok things that are looking people to stupid things, so I'm fine. I had Sean Buckley on, you know, because they've been trying to pass these different bills and they've been attacking natural health supplements, right? And, you know, me being a younger guy, and I joke about this, older to some, but anyways, uh, I didn't realize.

you know, and what I find out is this been going on for a long time. This isn't the first go around on it. And he said, the thing about natural supplements that gives you hope is so many people use them that when they actually take them away, there's this huge outcry and then they realize, oh, we've got to give them back. Sean, what fixed me for COVID and all the injuries and stuff I had was natural supplements. Yeah. And it was a cocktail of mix depending on where it was at my progression.

It wasn't a magic pill from the pharmacy. It was all natural supplements. And you're honestly, Shane, you're one of the lucky ones. Yeah. Because like I think of Seth Bloom and. his daughter. She's one of the lucky ones. If there is luck in this, folks, I, you know, I just go, she started working with Pierre Corrie's team down in the States because wouldn't you know it at the time there was nothing in Canada. I believe now there is a few different

things that are going on here. But at the time, there was nothing. And they started giving her, like, you know, these cocktails of this is how you're going to get out of it. But I, you know, I had on Kristen Ditzel. But geez, what was that a month ago maybe? and Jamie Killing. And, you know, she's, you know, she has this wonderful, like, I'm just like, man, if the Canadian spirit could take your side of, like, she's been completely screwed, like, you know, screwed. Yeah.

And has such a lovely way of looking at it. And she's tried all the different things. None of them have been able to remedy what has, was happened to her. Right? So, you know, like the health supplement thing is for everyone it does. I don't know what the percentages, but there's a percentage that certainly it doesn't do anything. Well, it doesn't.

Or I shouldn't say it doesn't do anything, but it can't bring them back to where they were. No, and there's things I still have that aren't fixed. Like it won't be in, you know, part of it too is even longevity. Like I've come to reconcile with, I might have chopped about 10 years off my life. There's things I can't do.

There's energy levels I can't get back. Mobility in my arm, I can't get back. In our, in our, I play new and our hockey. Yeah. Right? And they're about 40 guys. two have had myocarditis and now one has had a just got done surgery and it sounds like he's okay and i hope you know we've all been thinking about him brain tumor and you're like well you know

it could be just happenstance could be or you could go well i don't know just sudden adult death syndrome right you know it used to be one of those things god you know what a lucky guy he just passed away in asleep. It was a rarity. Um, kids now, you know, I heard this most recent thing talking, normalizing kids having heart attacks from over exertion on their pedal bikes. Yeah. Are you freaking kidding me?

So yeah, there's, there's the stuff, right? Yeah. Do you think about it? Like, I mean, I don't, you know, I don't mean to go into the, the weeds on that, not the weeds, but just like, how much do you think about that? Because I'm like, you just said like it. Lots. And the, the frustrating part with me, um, with that, like Sean, and honestly, folks

are wired different. ways and you know I've said it on a number of times if anything ever happened to my kids and it was on on the predator side or anything like that with what's taking place there would be no place safe for them in heaven or hell um it's on that same level and knowing full well there's only so much I can do knowing more over a lot that I can't do this is it's uh it's it's it's weighs on me a lot you um you um you said don't attack you know you're focused on the energy because you're like Like, this is serious. A lot of people are focused on the fact that they're still saying,

get your COVID shot. Like, get your new booster. And the thing is, if I go back to what you just said, it's like, don't attack me because I'm focused on, like, this needs to be fixed. But that needs to be fixed, too. Well, let's put it this way. We just had a court ruling. So that decided what we could do or what we couldn't do as politicians

with our chief medical officers. So that's definitive. We've had two different studies that are taking place. Preston Manning was doing one of them for us. 130 page report, correct? So all of those are coming out now, right? So there's things that we can do that's on the surface, and there's other things that we need.

You don't run out with one bullet in your magazine when you're going out to war. You might want more than one round. That's about saying it as loudly but as quietly as possibly. You can only give me so much, I assume, on that. And it's a number of things like that. And again, I'm as chief government whip, I'm still a private member. The premier and I came up with the definition of my role of how it functions.

It's not the same. And everyone like people ask me, what does the whip do? Well, I don't know. I didn't know until I got into it. And if you're okay with me a bit of a sidebar, I'll let you know this one. So after the election and again, you should know by now we can go where, you know, like this is what it is. You know, part of it's to his tongue and cheek, but depending what's out there and what's been going on on your side too. So with that position, I didn't have a definitive answer.

And literally there was four ministries I laid out for Premier. And I thought everybody did us. Apparently this doesn't happen in the world of politics very often. I put in a proposal for each one of those different portfolios of what I would look at, the individuals that I would hire to come in, like literally not from the existing system, who I would bring in which groups, which ones I would use. Here's the main target of objectives. Here's what we could complete during this timeline.

Here's the ones that are going to give us the biggest net back. here's the ones that are the social impacts that we can have and here's the ones for the bottom. Like here's, you know, laid them out four different ministries of which I felt my skill sets could be used. The other one I said to her is, here's my resume. Here's who I really am. So not who I've shown people to be as a politician the last four years because quite frankly, I wasn't coming back.

I was going to do what I could and get out and go back to life as normal. And during that time, I had to be kind of an outlier that they couldn't necessarily know what was going to happen next. So again, with having my face and all the things. that I went through and knowing full well I'd jump in my truck anytime I needed to or jump on a phone if I needed to. It was almost pushing my own organization without being on the outside but pushing as much as I could from the inside. So laying that out saying here's who I am and quite frankly I'm ready for a leadership position now that we're in. Here's the objectives laid that out.

So it kind of backfired on me a bit. She looks at this stuff and it goes, have you ever thought about house leadership? in house leadership being in the caucus and being on that side. I'm like, no. She goes, I think you'd be really good at that. Like, you've ran big project teams and stuff? Yeah. Well, we need a lot of help there.

I said, well, I wouldn't discount it, but I never thought about it. And quite frankly, doing that job is, but here's what I can do. So when she lined up her cabinet and everything else, she calls me up. And then she gave me the whip position. So obviously, I didn't turn it down. I took it, you know, a team player. what you can and contribute and that's that's the goal and objective and that's you know a sign of understanding the bigger picture too so i had a call from speaker koalski so ken kowalski is uh one of my

constituents and a mentor and he was like the longest standing speaker or something in the house so he literally went from the law he days all the way through to Klein and i was honestly a little bit bummed out because i really wanted to grab corridors i wanted to grab forestry or infrastructure or jobs and economy like i could have just lit those portfolios up and uh He says, congratulations and getting the whip. And I'm like, yeah, well, I guess I'll herd cats and, you know. And he goes, no, no. And he says, you don't understand.

That is the most powerful position in caucus. He says, you literally will know everything about everyone. You will be the one that she leans on as a premier to take care of stuff for her. She's when you trust. Because you talk to all. You talked to all. You also, he says, potentially have your fingers in just about every ministry. He says, and he laid out a bunch of things.

He says, and also you'll have a very close relationship with a speaker. So the speaker is on both sides. Like you'll have an understanding of how that works. He says, and plus all the committees that you'll be chairing and taking care of and everything else. So after having that conversation with him, he gave me some recommendations. We had about four or five different items. And three of them I kind of thought how I'd run an organization. Then he gave me that political lens of how that other stuff works behind the, behind the mirrors and the curtain, as it were.

So when Premier and I sat down, we basically talked. about what this position could be. And when I put it out, I said, well, I kind of had some inputs. And she goes, oh, from who? Well, Speaker Kowalski. Really? So we sat down as to, I would say, juniors, comparative to that type of knowledge to come up with how we would run the organization

and what we would do on our side of the fence. And the other thing I warned her before I took the position was, I'm going to run it like I own it. So there's no half measures. Like, you've got to know what you're getting yourself into, Premier. Like, I'm going to, I'm going to run what I can. And she wants that. So that was the deal.

So obviously we've got a few things we work through, you know, as you're getting a new position up and running. But the latitude that I've been given and being tied to her as her parliamentary secretary literally brings me into her world as well on a lot of the international files and those type of items like intergovernmental businesses, who I'm tied to and giving that lens of economic corridor development, it's not just within the province. This is literally tying all that together.

The other thing that she was awesome with is that I pitched, we needed a private members caucus. So we've got a caucus, of which I chair. And then we've got a private member's caucus. So without the ministers there. So the ministers can attend. It's their option if they want to or not. But it is literally concentrating on private members' business.

So allowing our team to work together, bring ideas together. If they've got great ideas, they want for a bill, how to work that. If they're having challenges or issues, then they do that. And I don't chair that one. What I have is a deputy chair. And the deputy chair was voted and elected by all of our caucus members. So MLA, Tanny Yao, he's, he's our, my deputy chair. If I'm not there to run the main meetings or anything else, we work together as a team with my whole caucus group and communications and all the ledge coordinators and all that falls underneath me.

And the entire budget for caucus falls underneath me as well. So that's the organization how we run it. And but Tanny takes the lead in those meetings. So that's, that's how we run it. And then the main caucus, I have everything there and I chair those meetings and I are you enjoying it? Yeah, it's blast. You know, because again, I got to define it, right? Well, two years ago, I felt like...

I was hating life. Yeah, there wasn't... So is... May I just throw a couple things out? And you tell me if it's... You know, the first time you were on, you were under Jason Kenny. Yeah. And the second time, you know, you're...

You know, while we went through it all, you were on stage with Daniel Smith. Then you were supporting Travis Taves. Absolutely. And then now you have Daniel Smith as the premier. Essentially is kind of the timeline. Yeah. And it's interesting because, I mean, obviously she's looked at your talents and went, you'd be good for this and put you in a place that you didn't want to be in.

What I'm hearing is, is that you're actually really enjoying it. Yeah, because I got to define what that role is and I get to bring in my prior life of managing and putting process and procedure and managing groups and team building and all that. So it's like being the general manager and a hockey team. Like she's letting me do what I used to do. And I was giving a ton of this advice for free before on the other administration. because of my, I would propose unpredictability and outspokenness, that, yeah, that was a different organization.

This, this is different. And even to her credit, I mean, I really like her. She's a good manager. Like if people want to start knocking her down on things, whatever, you've got a ton of political fodder. You can throw out there because if she was an outspoken person and also was a commentator to get people talking about sometimes controversial items. But she's a phenomenal manager.

She empowers people. and moreover she holds them to account. When we're in the cabinet room, she's one vote at the table. She's not the other management style. Like I'd said there was an Ottawa style of politics. This is a provincial style of grassroots as much as you can get style of politics. But understanding that there's checks and balances in place too, you don't want your managers within your organizations to just go along and nod their heads like bobbleheads.

So she's not, she's also not just promoting and recommending those, just nod their heads up and down. Like she wants to have an open dialogue. She also challenges but also accepts negative feedback. So again, within that group, you've got a high performing group now that's empowered that can run their organizations and are held to account on it.

And for me, that's phenomenal because that's a high performing organization. Like I keep going back to, to Enbridge is one of the best places I've ever worked. I was given a ton of rope with that organization. The culture was really good. And that's how it ran really well for a number of years. And that's why people have stayed in that organization for a long time.

I'm seeing kind of the same thing here when we start carving this out and seeing how we run it. That's what's happening. And even I put our new MLAs through boot camp. Like I would never go to a job site without having an orientation. So why would I send somebody into the political arena without having an orientation? So we took three days to walk them through that. We took all over LLCs to walk through that. We're actually mapping out our processes.

We're running a budget as if you're running a budget. All those things that we did on jobs and projects. That's how we're running our team. And I even flew around the province and spent time with my new MLAs in their own backyard. Like literally jump in the plane, fly up to someone's airport, have them come out and we sit there for an hour to get to know who they are. Your plane. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got an interesting skill set that you can just hop in the plane and go wherever. On some days I had to drive like I've had a head cold or whatever. But that was the idea on the front end. And then once we got folks on committees and we'll start firing up some of these task forces as well, we'll match up their skill sets with that. So when the premier comes to me and goes, hey, there's something things or issues or challenges going on, I can apply which individual on the team does that. And honestly, it's building up some of that camaraderie as well. So that's how we're running the organization. So not going to lie to you, would never lie to you anyway, but we've got

a good, strong, solid team. And I honestly feel that if something, if I were to get hit by a friggin bus or if I chose not to run again or anything else, we've got a secession plan with this model that works. Policy is thrown through the policy committees first before they ever become a bill. Like literally you've got equal MLAs to to ministers that are presenting in one of these four different elements. So while this thing is being hatched out, it's all ground out internally, not a surprise on the floor with a bill. How much did you pay attention to the UCPA GM? Oh, lots. What did you think of David Parker and Take Back Alberta and everything being, you know, like I think I can safely say this, David, if you're listening, right? Like he puts it out on Twitter.

We're coming. We're making sure they're going to be held to account. We're going to get this person removed. We're going to, boop. I mean, it's been, if there was transparency, at least from my eyes. Yeah. He said it, you know, he said it in public. He said it on everything.

He's like, we're coming. We're done with what's been going on. And we're coming in and we're taking over. Yeah. But taking over is, I sit on the provincial board as well. So I know all the new board members, the president and everybody. We haven't had our first real meetings yet. but this is another project team, where David, being very short-sighted,

doesn't understand his little ripples in every 10-minute sound speech actually has more profound effects than what he can realize, and it actually brings discredit to the organization and how everything works. So if I'm sitting in a meeting as an example with a bunch of consulate generals, and I have a CBC article coming up at the same day we're going to have our AGM, or some individual who is really good organizing and understands that side of it is putting out tweets that he controls a government, how do you think that looks on an international stage if it doesn't make us look like a banana republic?

So the impacts are more than playing marbles in the parking lot. So perhaps, just perhaps, we should be cognizant of that. And David and I spoke right at the AGM. and I look forward to working with everyone who's in the party regardless of whether they're a smaller subfractional group or otherwise because this is a big picture item. So I think a lot of that will come out. I think honestly with Take Back Alberta Group, I've had lots of meetings with them. The challenge I'm putting back to them is don't have a meeting in an area where you don't

invite your MLA. We are the elected. Get your folks out there if you happen to be our political stripe or not. It doesn't matter. And any group that wants to invite me to their meetings, I'd be more than happy to attend right across the province. So again, this is the understanding that we've got a big chess match we're working on here. Don't fudge it up for us with little sound bites because, quite frankly, there's way more at risk than you realize.

Who's, is there, I don't know if you can answer this or not, is there somebody from a bit of different political stripe color that you think in Alberta specifically would be wonderful to have on here? I think everybody. Like honestly, Sean, if you can have someone who, I mean, you and I have developed a bit of a trust obviously over the years, get it. anybody, anybody from a different background is stripe because what you'll see is a different perspective. And quite honestly, what I want, honestly, God's honest truth. We've become too polarized over the years because a lot of this has become people's religion. I don't know how else to put it. If nothing is higher than above you as politics, like everyone else has a higher power typically and if this higher power happens to be your orange stripe, that's a problem. Because

again, seeing some of these behaviors and all you've got to do is go back to, uh, is go back to like the topography of terror. So Garth and I went through that. Like this, yeah, quick, long answer to a short thing, but you have to get everybody on here. Don't be, don't be a, don't get anybody on here. In your mind, what is it, what is it, 87? 87, in total. So in your mind, it's like, well, just start opening the phone book and start bringing on every single one.

Anybody is bold enough to come out and have a conversation, absolutely. But as political, as chief whip, I would want to know which members are coming on and I would, um, I would probably have strong recommendations from my side of who would say what. You know, I tried getting Rachel Motley on. I didn't, didn't imagine that. Obviously it didn't happen. Yeah.

Uh, I had, I've been trying, because I'm really, like, I don't want, like, I'm not a big confrontation guy. You know, some people, some people, you're doing a good job of just asking questions. Right. And bringing people on and talk. And it's, uh, it's, well, you look at, um, Danny P. and how they were billed, or Rachel Notley, and some of the things she said,

I don't know how I couldn't have been a little bit confrontational and still couldn't be if she came on. In saying that, I would give her all the time to talk out her thought process. I wanted Charles Adler to come on. I had him coming on, and he backed out like three days before, which was too bad,

because I'm like, as a kid, I listened to him all the time. And now I watched some of the things he says. I'm like, I just don't know how you get there. I just don't, I'd like to hear about it, though, because I'm like, I think, you know, as you say, we've become so confrontational. And it's only getting worse. And so what's the solution?

Well, and the wild thing that I found, honestly, like you hear the conjection in the states between the republics and the dams, oh, thank God, we're not like that in Canada. We're not so polarized. No, we are. crap. I can have a conversation 99.9% of the times at these conference with a Democratic senator. I can't have those same conversations with an NDPMLA in some of their leadership. I've had really good conversations with some of the new ones coming in.

And again, New Leaf and all that. And my God's honest hope is that we can actually have conversations. I think the NDP MLAs would come on here. There should be some. I might be able to think there's a couple that are actually pretty decent. They're good folks. Like from what I've seen, they're good folks. That would make their way out to Lloyd Minster.

You know, one of the things, one of the things I've appreciated. They don't have independence. One of the things I've appreciated about you is that, you know, and people will make up their own mind. I don't make it up for them. We talk about this lots. I'm not here to be the Pied Piper and let March people to tune. I bring people on. They text me in their thoughts and we have a discussion.

That's all we're doing here is just bringing people on to try and fill some of the gaps. Like, what the heck is going on? And one of the things I've really appreciated about you is every time we do this, you're like, I'll come out. I'm like, man, I like that because this is way better than doing it on some television screen. It just is. I'm not saying that's going to work every single time. But when they're MLAs in Alberta, I'm like, I want to do it. if I were to ever broach the subject of even remotely trying to go down 87 of them.

Wouldn't that be wild folks? Holy diana. But if you were to do something even remotely similar to that, let's just take a fraction of it, 20. Let's say we could get 20 over the course of a year to come on. I want them all in person. I wouldn't do this. I'm not going to do, you know. We're social animals, 90% of our communication, I think, is all nonverbal.

So, and it's the same as when your listenership out there. I mean, with me, I don't know if they've ever seen me lie. with actually seeing a face to this. Usually it's a voice coming through. But people can pick up whether you're BSing or not if you're sincere or whether it's a flash your eye moving. Well, I mean, you just, I just go back to your story. And actors and actresses, some politicians.

Oh, and we take, we take lessons. Like even in corporate, I was put through acting lessons. You were not. Yes. You blew my mind. Put through acting lessons in corporate. If you don't think corporations don't do that. Well, no, I do think they do that.

It blows my mind that you were to put through it. Yeah, it was. So I was kind of an outlier in that organization because I was a contractor the whole time, but they kept giving me higher and higher management positions. So the company put me into this thing first time I ever, first and last time I've ever been exposed to that and I go to this, you know, thing, this training session, whatever, the director I work for suggested I go to this and go to it and there's a bunch of VPs and a bunch of directors and managers and here's an acting instructor.

And really when it comes down to it, it's about communications. So how do you convey a message? So again, we weren't the public relations out facing part. You were managers and directors and presidents, but you had to be on point and you had to do those things. And even hand usage of what would make people more comfortable and welcome and those type of things and how you carry your voice and recording you. Like a lot of us communicate.

You've never seen yourself on camera. But when you actually look at yourself across the desk, when someone's recording you, well, you realize your body posture's off. You know, I'm 6.6.2 and 2.30. it depends who I'm in with which room. And if I go down so I don't intimidate them or I stand up and make your presence. Or when you're talking in the mic about somebody playing marbles. Or make a point.

Yeah, that comes up pretty natural. So you have to be cognizant of those type of items, right? And that's, that was part of it. So what I would suggest for any budding politicians out there too, yeah, go take a look at some little basic level acting courses or communications courses. Where I sit on this side, I guess I, folks, I've never taken voice lessons. I've never taking acting, none of that.

But I do, I am a student. It was one course. It was literally for the record, like a three hour exercise and it opened my mind. I was like, holy crap, this is, this is wild.

I'm a student of watching great performers. And now that I put on events, anytime I go to an event, my brain will not shut off on like watching what they do. They see what they do really well and what they do really bad. Like, I mean, I'm just like,

why are you doing that? Like, why? And then it's like a mental loan. Do not do this. But I've been talking lots about Brett Kissel because he once upon it, you know, sat in your chair as well. And I went and watched him. And I remember thinking going to that show and I apologized to all the folks

for repeating this story. But I remember thinking I'm going to Brett Kistle. And I know it's Brett Kessel songs, but I'm not like, I'm going to break Kessel, right? Like, it's going to be amazing. And I got to host with one of the ladies from town, one of the radio station. So I got the honor of being up on stage, which is super cool. And, you know, we're sitting there.

And I'm watching. And I'm, you know, I'm thinking I'll just take off at 10, you know, after our last little. spot where we get on stage and we do her thing I'll just leave but it was so good the show was so good that it just sucked me back in and every time I thought about leaving I bet you there must have been a hundred people thinking the same thing if you would and he could see it and he would change something and it would suck everybody back in and I didn't wasn't up in the mosh pit or whatever that you know I wasn't standing I wasn't dancing I was just watching and watching

what he was doing to as a as a putting on a show of how a performer, how he pulls people back in. It was a talent. Like, I mean, it was beautiful, you know? Like, and I wrote down a whole ton of things from that because I'm going to put on more S&P presents. I'm going to put on more things where I need to keep people's attention. And to just act like you're going to walk in,

and the first one's going to be, you know, slam, dunk, doom, that was great. It's like, well, I mean, sure, your idea can be sound, but like to not see the little things. and try and just perfect them a little bit. Well, it doesn't surprise me that, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that acting classes or on and on and on it goes, because like you're in a, you're in a, like, speech or like, um, public speaking, if you took a bunch of public speaking classes,

you'd be like, well, that makes complete sense. I mean, you're literally, you should be a strong public speaker in politics. And what do you find? There's a bunch that aren't. Well, a bunch of them have never taken 4-H. Well, and I never took 4-H. I did. So as a kid, that was one of the, one of the, one of the,

of the items was public speaking since you were a little guy. So being able to convey and communicate with people and get thoughts and ideas out there and have that presence and that confidence, it's a big deal. So it's the little things that we take along the way and, you know, the rural kids knock it out of the park every and I just, it's an absolute honor and a privilege when I get invited to go judge these little guys and then give them some words of encouragement. You got to do that? Oh, it's a blast. Like, and honestly, they're, you know, 10, 11 years old, some of them, you got the seniors that are, you know, high school kids getting ready, but the little guys in there, just awesome.

And their level of intellect is increased because they have to do the research and they have to be out there, their outwardness, their motivation to do it, overcoming fears, all those type of things. Like, yeah, 4-H is awesome. And then even if you look at the air cadets and the Army cadets, like there's a bunch of programs out there that are just building great citizens that we don't give enough credit to. And still a lot of cool values into kids. 4-Hs, I mean, in this area, everybody knows 4-H, whether they've taken or not, is a different

story, but very highly regarded program 4Hs for sure. Well, and I wanted, and I was, you know, going to dip out of a rabbit hole here, but what I wanted to do was to try to get the education minister to recognize, because I worked on this careers and education task force. We got a little before the election minister to Ukraine. She implemented five of the 21 items that we came up with. And essentially it was to look at how you look at education as a whole and get kids on their career paths quicker and not on.

on a specific career, but more like an industry kind of level. And then you look at transferable skill sets, the way that you, and no disparity towards teachers, but if you've got a microbiologist, guaranteed they know a lot of more about microbiology than the teacher who was trying to convey a slide or a screen on a bio page. So trying to hook in experts, subject matter experts for resources, not only for the teachers, but allow them to teach and then also to spark the interest of the kids. And then we started looking at some of the training and the schooling that was taking place outside of this conventional, conventional stream. 4H is one of them.

Air cadets is one of them. Like you start looking at all these little organizations throughout there. So now what if, just what if. So, you know, if someone's going to quote me, I'm breaking down public education next or something wild. But the concept is look at the skill sets that are being taught and maybe give credit where credit is due. So physically give credits for kids taking these courses. Give credit for when they're apprenticing and doing these different training. So all of a sudden you start to open this up.

And it doesn't mean that we have to build microcosms of this and each individual brick and mortar building in the school. When you look at the education, the careers, it's bigger than that. And when you start getting those skill sets, then they pay dividends back inside the classrooms as well. And moreover, it brings attention to those organizations that I'm doing a lion's share, a great share of work, getting new citizens out in the place rather than thinking that it's just one stream that that does that. You know, the whole sounds tacky, but the whole village concept, let's pay attention to the rest of the village and give credit there. Before I let you out of here, I got to ask.

Oh, I got to go over the topography of terror. Don't let me forget that one, because the original lead-in was, can you get other MLAs here? I told you I would whip some of them to make sure that who you got on here didn't say anything crazy because I can trust myself and that's crazy enough. But that's part of it on the communications. So it's not whipping people to say you can't say this. It's some of the stuff we talk about a certain timing, but we've got some really cool emilys, and I'd love to get them in front of you so you could grill them and do those things. But as a contrast and a comparator, the NDP, the liberals, they formed a coalition.

Like literally they're extremely socialist leaning that shouldn't be a surprise to everybody. When I say it, I always get in trouble and, you know, it's literally happening in front of our eyes. There's nothing extreme about this. I'll be the extreme one. Anyone who says that's extreme, just turn on your TV or go read a newspaper and you can see it firsthand. I don't know. I have all the things you've said today. That shouldn't be the extreme one.

That shouldn't be the surprise, but it is. So, again, as a political person saying out loud outside of the house, they'll definitely go after me on that. So they are literally a national party that's tied. So when you join the NDP, you're joining a national organization. You get a ticket to ride for free. So Jagg meets your hero, he's your leader. That's it. You've already signed on your party below that in the provincial level.

They're the same. They're tied to the same party. They have a little bit of latitude, but they're tied to the mothership. They are one party. That party has been backstopping a minority government for the last two years, putting us through all this crap. Correct. One socialist party that spans the nation.

It is absolutely bonkers. So folks can't understand the concerns in that. Even seeing some of the new members, like come into the, and the contrasting comparators while, so seeing some of the new members, either heckling or saying things on the record in the house, making reference to my party, so the United Conservative Party. And they're making reference to your leader, Pierre Polyev. Well, no, he's not my leader. Danielle's my leader.

Pierre happens to be a leader of a different political party that I might carry a card to. They're different parties. The Saskatchewan Party is not the UCP. The Saskatchewan party is the Saskatchewan party. It's not the CPC. So there's the difference between the different organizations. And when you look at them, they're like the flipping Borg. They are one group.

They got speaking notes. And if you want to see anyone knows who's harsh on their own political members, it's them. So maybe one of the goals of the podcast, you just get somebody on from the NDP. Oh, yeah. I'll get you some good recruits because I think there's some decent ones. They didn't realize that they've signed under the wrong party. Like, honestly, I'm going to say that and throw the gauntlet down. And there's some decent people that we're not so far apart.

And if you drank that Kool-Aid, I think you're, and they're going to find out over the course of business here over the next bit. We're not so different. What we do is we have the concept on what the issues are and it's typically the approach. So I'm really hopeful that we can maintain and I can establish some of those communications so that it's not so hyper-partisan. But when I see some of the main ones, oh, and here's the other one too. When I see some of the main ones that are actually, in my opinion, polluting the new folks coming in, that's where the system is, fails. And there's going to be a leadership race within the NDP. I can't wait to see that gong show. They don't have fully disclosed type races like we do. They're pretty much all predeterminate

behind. I'm hopeful if they do to believe in actual democracy, like a new Democratic party, not a nearly Democratic party. If they actually do believe in democracy, then let your people actually run and do the same things we do where you have nominations and you have contestants and you really get at But, and I would encourage all of them to pick their favorite leader and then actually campaign with them, not just pick one in the Borg and then the arrest is a farce. And if they have membership out there, maybe their membership should pay attention to actually who's running this. And the other wild one is that we don't have, oh, my cup is leaking. He's taking the long to drink it. I'm going to wreck the table.

You'd be booting me out of here. The other thing, too, is we don't have corporations sitting on our boards in comparison. So when you have unions that have key positions on those boards, they're given that they sit on the board of directors. You don't have a separation between the two. So it'd be like me having Suncor has an established, and I don't mean nothing against Suncor, but take a company, right?

Walmart. Walmart has to sit on my board. We don't have that. So the comparator and contrast is wild between the two organizations. So you're saying in the NDP on their board, they have a union rep sit on their board. Yeah, it's designated. it in their rules. And this is what you should do. Get your readership to go out there.

Follow the rabbit hole down on the type of democracy they believe in. And then you go to Wikipedia and then you see that it's pure socialist democracy. That's what they believe in. It's a certain offset. I can't tell you off what it is, but it's right there. Like it literally says it within there. And then on their configuration, their structure of their party, they have designated, like it's not like invoked em, or out. They are absolutely written in there that they shall bow shall have. I think it's two or three positions that are literally held by union members, which are non-voted, right? They're allocated.

So there's all this stuff, and then they're, they're the ones that are throwing stones in the glass house. Like, it drives me wild, but here it is. And then depending on the day, they may or may not own up to it. Is that your topography of terror? No. The topography of terror is wild. I'm like, we might be, this might be, you know, I'm feeling very, uh, all right?

Well, you break it up into a couple chunks, but it's good to get here, right? Come on, folks. I release five, the, Podcasts a week, Shane. This is, it will just be episode 536, I believe. That's bad. This thing's breaking apart. So, yeah, when we were going to Germany, we covered off the political side and

all those things, which was pretty interesting. But I've been to Germany three times now, and a couple of times it was down in Carl's Russo through Frankfurt and over there. Thanks, brother, do want to wreck your table? Now you get a nice cup with a little mashup on it. That's kind of cool. I like that. Like, have you been over to Berlin?

Um, I've been over to Europe back when I was in high school and then I was in like, uh, flew through there when I was playing hockey. So that's, uh, that's 10 years ago now. Okay. Yeah. So the last couple times I was there, I was working with a company by the name of Tilos. It's a linear scheduling company. This is going back in the day. So it's kind of cool. You have a schedule program like Primavera or Microsoft project, except it graphs it out on a time and a location schedule. So you literally get a chart. You can look at where your things are going with the speeds of them are, which direction they're going. And you're going. on a linear right away. So it was developed for rail. We used it for pipeline. Really cool. So that was down in Barbaria down on that side. First time I've been to Berlin. We're literally flying over there while world events are taking place.

And we were wheels down on October 8th. So October 7th happened while we were in the air when Hamas, that terrorist organization, decides to take paragliders and then kill a thousand people, not at once. They kind of hunted them down across the desert and while they were doing this and then abducted a bunch of people, over 200 people, and took back to their side of the wall, whatever they were deciding to do with them. And when this starts to hit home is that when we've got U.S. senators and representatives, the one U.S. senator, it was her two constituents, was the mother-daughter, U.S. citizens

that were abducted. So this is happening during our trip. And we're getting newscasts that aren't the same stuff that was on the CBC here. we were getting, I would suggest a lot more gritty and raw information that was coming out while we're sitting in Europe because it's literally just over the pond when you look at the things on the area. So we were seeing those events unfold. There was one of the members down there was an NDP member.

We kind of got some respect worked out over that week and a half of being there. But we literally walked at the same day past a Holocaust monument. Like literally when you're walking there, it was really profound. You're walking past this monument and it's on the way from the U.S. consulate over the Canadian consulate and walking along the Brandon Gate is right there. You walk past this thing and you see some of the marks. And then you see the marks on the ground where the wall was physically, where the wall was. And then you walk by this one area and it was just heavy emotion. Like I don't know whether people believe in this or not, but I think some of the stuff that we feel or people's emotions can impart themselves.

in areas or locations, like whether it's a, you walk into a church and you kind of feel an uplifting feeling or you walk to a graveyard and you feel a feeling, just being on the edge of this thing and while these events were unfolding, you just felt this, this kind of grief and this thing, at least that's how it imparted on me. And this NDP, MLA, or MPP, I should say, she kind of described, started describing the same emotions, which I thought was pretty wild. So again, and we're people. And she's describing some of the heaviness. And she started talking.

She had read about this area. And it literally, it starts out to kind of at ground level. And what they look like is tombstones, or I should say, coffins. And if you walk down into this, there's a big swale in the center of this area. And it's almost like two acres of this. And it's all concrete. And the deeper you go into this thing, the deeper the tombstones become, the coffins. They're literally piles, basically, of concrete.

So when you walk down onto it, you get this repressive feeling of, everything, the walls are coming in on you. And the only way you can find your way out of this maze is walking in between all these coffins. So kind of profound, right? And her translation was on the art and those type of things. I didn't walk down the center. We were hoofing her to the next thing, but you're looking in this. And you can see people walking within those areas and they bring school groups out there.

So you can walk through. And the one thing Germans don't do is they don't shy away from their history. Like they're open with their history of what worked and what didn't. So you see these school groups going there. You see these kids, you know, they're kind of typical kids. from around and you see the ones that are coming out and there's tear streaks like just being in that area so I took some pictures of it and and did that and we went on our way and took some pictures of the brandon wall or brenn gate when we were there and those type of things and that night I got more of the

news feed of what was going on and and I honestly felt compelled to talk about that and to say you know if you know someone in your community because I reached out to a couple folks I work with that there were of Jewish faith just to check in on them because there wasn't a lot of lot going on or coming back, but just being there and feeling that and trying to understand what they may or may not be going through, just that one little phone call was so uplifting for them that they felt they weren't neglected that they, the people weren't afraid to talk to them. Like it was just bonkers, you know, thinking of the difference of two days made of jumping

on the plane seeing them and then the events unfolding while you're there and to reach out back home and to see how they were feeling. So I compelled people to do the same thing. It might be the simplest little thing. But it might mean everything to them. And Kenny, his brother was over in that area at the time. And fortunately, he was out. His synagogue down in Montreal subsequently was burnt.

Jamie and her family, they were all safe, thank goodness. But again, on this trip, one of the senators I'm with, chances, those are the two American citizens that are taken. So this was profound. The next morning we're having breakfast, and the MPP goes, well, it's a good thing I didn't post anything on that site because, you know, there's a lot of bad things and connotations about Palestine and everything else. And I'm going, what?

She goes, well, yeah, you know, so I didn't post anything. And here I am the conservative going, well, I posted. I said immediately, here's this thing. Here's how it made me feel. She was, well, what do you think people say about that? And I said, I don't honestly care. I said, people actually kind of like me. You know, it was kind of the tongue and cheek thing.

I said, they know me well enough. If I'm posting something, it's from the heart. It's not meant as a political statement. It's meant as here's what took place. And she goes, well, I don't know about that. Like, you know, she started almost. backing Hamas and I was very definitive. I said they're terrorists full stop. There is no politics to this. They go in paragliders and shoot citizens. There is nothing that you have to

support this very clear. You know and subsequently being back here, I've made statements in the house and to that effect as well. Like this is this is not the folks of Palestine. This is a terrorist organization that's taken over that country and are doing these horrendous things and for some reason we think we can hide behind it. So that was profound to me. It was. It was a terrorist organization. wild. So Garth and I had that day and we went to the topography of terror. It's literally where they had the SA and the SS headquarters. They have all the records and documentation there. You look across the way and there's literally the Luftwaffe's headquarters of where they built this thing and their architecture is wild and it's, you know, from a civil

engineering or architectural standpoint. Like I mean, these are impressive structures and everything else. And that's currently the Ministry of Finance like they actually are on that building. On the site, there's literally the wall. There's a section of the wall there. So I've had the fortune of, and you're not supposed to, so whatever, I put it on Facebook anyway, but there I am leaning over a thing touching the wall where so many people were trapped behind. And if they even got that close, they would have been killed. Like that connection with history. And when you walk through, we had a historian take us through and show us some of the pictures of what was taking place. And unbeknownst, when you're going through and you look at a picture, you kind of have

your own interpretations, but when you actually get to that next level of academia and you have someone who's, that's their background as a historian, asking you to look past what's being presented on the front, look at what's happening in behind, and then look the changes over just a short period of time of how that crowd is reacting. And one of them that stood out was some very conventional Jewish folks, some of the rabbis that were, you know, the Orthodox Jews. They had the, you know, the long hair and everything else in the dress. And they were taken out, and this is at the onset of when these things started taking place. They're conditioning a population at this point. So they took them out and they publicly shamed them walking through the streets. And you could see

different reactions on people and behind it. And then they started showing how this took place over two to three to four years. It went from some people being kind of shocked and looking at this to some people being apathetic towards it to some people encouraging it openly. And when you look at the organization, it wasn't a huge organization to force people into this. What they made very clear to us was that you had an idea in a group and they pushed it down from the top. But moreover, it was organic from the bottom. They empowered people that had these prejudices or they had these beefs with people and then you started teaching them certain things in schools. And then kids were brat on their own parents for not saying what the teacher said.

And then it just started empowering them. This fed all the way through that until the horrific events. Seeing what's taking place in the media, seeing how people are being agitated and turned on each other. To me, that was one of the spookiest things of seeing part of history ever. And it literally is happening again if we allow it. So why is Israel important? Why are these things taking place? Why is it important for you to have somebody who has a different opinion than me?

Because we can still talk. And if we can still express it, and this is what the historian had said to, we lose everything when we lose that ability to have an open conversation and disagree. When it has to be so ideologically driven or we have to agree on everything, that's where we get into danger. So I would give my life to make sure that somebody could express themselves openly and disagree with me. My concern is some of the people I'm seeing on the other side wouldn't share those same beliefs. And that's where we get into it.

So you might not agree with me. You might not like what I have to say, but I'm going to say it. And I will fight to my last bit to make sure you have that same ability to disagree with me. well i've really appreciated you uh making the trip here and doing this and i um you know i don't know the the the the the podcast has um brought interesting people into this room and uh some of those people come and never come back others come fairly often and others you know kind of like dip and weave and whatever else um sir i appreciate you uh i don't know, I would say somehow I've impacted that to where you come in here and you speak very freely.

And maybe you do that everywhere, but I don't know, I've been able to harass you, but just about any thought that comes into my mind today. And there's a lot of people that I don't feel that comfortable to do that with. There's a lot of nerves there. And I remember, as I told you, listening in 2021, I was very like, oh, man, I'm going to ask, you know, this guy, this. And somehow you've given me, you know, even on the draft. here you say you ask whatever you want to ask like just fire away let's go there's

going to be a few things I can't talk about but other than that just fire away and I feel like man I guess we'll wait and see what the audience has to say because they always tell me whether or not they picked up on things and everything else or whether they got questions and but I feel like you know you've been very open on a lot of different things and are really putting forth some seriousness to some certain things going on and alerting people and just appreciate you making the drive and doing it in person and making time for it you can understand why I broke my, well, I think people can understand why I break one of my cardinal rules on a weekend for Shane, because we don't do this all the time. You know, it's, it's been a while

since you were back in here and to have you come and do it and, you know, feel like there's something really we got to talk about, which I think we've talked lots about. But I appreciate you doing that. So before, what we're going to do is we got this, we got this new, this new thing here. And we've been switching over to substack for an extra five, ten minutes. So, um, How does that work? What's the deal with substack? I've seen a pop up once in a while. Sure.

So what we've been wrestling with is this question of like, I'm not making giant money podcasting. I'm making enough to survive, which I want the entire audience to know this. This isn't a question of where I'm trying to guilt you into anything. I don't want that. What I want to know is, what would shame pay for?

What would whatever audience member, wherever you're sitting and listening, this, what would you pay for? Do you tune in this every single day? Is it once every blue moon? Like, what would I, what would I be willing to pay for for Joe Rogan, right? Kind of thing. And when he switched to Spotify, that was a real gut check time because I'm like, oh, I really don't want to, and I know you can do the free version, I know you can. But over time, I went, I really want Joe Rogan. I really want a bunch of different things. And so I've been buying, I've been paying for Spotify for some time. Elon Musk and Twitter, he turned on the pay thing. And I went,

A lot of people were upset by that. But I went, do I believe he's doing good things? Yeah, I do. And so now I pay for Twitter. And I have my own thought process down the road of that. So we've been trying to figure out what this audience wants. I really want to engage it because I don't want to build something they don't want. That makes zero sense.

I'm like, let's build. We can do anything, folks. What do you want? Let's just try it up. So we started with Patreon. And I didn't like Patreon, but I had Tom Longa, who's a very popular. guest on here say you know you just got to stick with it be consistent and he goes Patreon's been really good to me oh interesting and then we talked about Jordan Peterson

being booted off of it and he made some very valid points so we tried Patreon people just weren't enjoy it so then we put out the question well where would you like it to be and people immediately said I don't like Patreon because they screwed over Jordan Peterson not to mention a whole bunch of other people I can't support something that doesn't support freedom said oh okay fair enough okay so where should we go substack substack substack I'd already started it. I'm not a giant writer.

But the thing with Substack is now you can release, you can even podcast on there if you want. And so we started releasing exclusive content there. Just because they can pledge money there, which doesn't get taken out of their account right now until we turn on the paid portion. It's just like, let's play around with some things. Let's just have some fun.

And then the next question became with subs. So what we do now with guests is we've taken, I've just slowly been doing this, is we've taken the Crude Master final question. It has been mainstay since the, very beginning. Ask me about the pension plan. And we've moved it over. Sure, we can do that on that. We can certainly do that on substack. Yeah. So we've, we've, we've slowly started to transition the very end of the podcast with most guests. I would say 80%, maybe a little under that, I don't know,

somewhere in there where we go, we're going to hold you on for substack. So people really enjoy the podcast and they want to get a little exclusive thing that will be nowhere else. It's on substack. And the hope is, you know, over time, you build it in a way that people are like, this is worth giving you a little bit of money for. Because it all adds up. Because, you know, like I can't go and demand that I get 10 million, you know, like the CRTC, $10 million for just having a podcast. I'm sorry, that's not the way it works.

Yeah. And so we've been really working with that. And so this is the question we just asked this week is like, so what do you want? Do you want to, you know, let's put it this way, Shane. This is what we've been flirting with. What if I could get Shane, you know, one of the. is, is what if I could get Shane Getson, and I'll singeally you out, to come on to a private Zoom call? And the only way you can get access is if you're a paid member to Substack

and you get a link the day before or whatever the week before, and then you come on with me and Shane, and it's a private meeting where you can ask Shane whatever you want. And it's just access in a different way. It's an interaction in a different way. Or is it a different way where I say a week before Shane comes on, Shane is coming on in a week and on his substack portion, we'll talk about your questions. We'll pick the top three, if you would. Is that something?

Or is there something else that I have never even thought about that some guests, some audience members going like, you got to do it this way, you got to do it this way. I just don't know what it is. But I want that level of like,

I want to pay for that because that makes sense. And if we can find that, then you're supporting what I want to do. I don't have to, And I want to make it very clear. I'm not struggling, but I'm not a world beater either, right? I would love to just have the ability to do a few other things.

The problem is, is it costs money. Like, everything costs money. It just so. The affordability, everything's going up to. And part of it is, you know, we pay inadvertently for CBC, whether we like it or not. Yes. And then part of the other one is, now that the news, media outlets, we're all getting choked off. How the hell do you do that?

And moreover, to your point, if we're going to have. the ability to do open conversations in this kind of market, the cards are all stacked against you right now. So I think that's a neat idea to have. I would throw it out any time that anyone wants any no BS political answers of what's happening that I can divulge on our side of the fence, or if there's people I've ran across before or two, I would totally open it up. And to put it in context, there's this whole lobbyist organization that makes a gazillion dollars a year that they have these accesses, whether people like it or not. it's an industry. They basically do the same thing with all the politicians and connect people together

and they'll charge you $100,000 to probably show up at some sponsored event where these guys can get people to happen to stumble in and talk to them for 10 minutes. Like it's crazy. So the fact that you're willing to open it up to a breadth of people and have it kind of like on a donation type service or anything else, folks should understand the value of that. There's a lot of folks that compete and to have their mainstay businesses make a done of money doing it. And here you are doing it for monochrome of it. So well worth of value, I believe, from my side, I'll take it back in noodle as well and see what we can do to help out for that. Because again, for us to do advertising, get things out, like I'm really fortunate I have the little newspapers.

Like I write a weekly article of what matters to you. And our challenge is trying to break that bubble as well is how do I talk to people that isn't censored? There's no other way to put it. When I give an article to a mainstream media outlet, it gets half. backed up or they're trying to catch me in some bait and switch or some trap thing and then run off with it. We're your format. The reason why you get this latitude and this open conversation is because I trust you and your audience. I trust what's there. And I trust that the opposition's

going to grab whatever sound bites and I don't care because to get to it, they've already had to listen to me for an hour to get to that point. The other side is too, the folks that out there that need to know most trust you as well. Like when I'm walking across the tarmac at the cold like Aero Show, which, I mean, this kind of choked me up too. It was wild. Parked my plane there was part of the display. I'm handing out little stickers of, you know, made in Alberta Strong and Free to the kids and stuff. And Hand went out to this little guy and the little rubber airplanes, this little foam gliders that I kind of put together. And, you know, part of that in a handout. And his dad kind of looks up and goes, are you Shane Gatson?

Yeah. And I'm wearing sunglasses in the ball cap. And, you know, I'm thinking, oh, God, this could go one or two ways or if not. And he says, I heard you on the Sean Newman podcast. I'm like, really. And it was a good thing I had my glasses on, like, honestly, because this just choked me up at that point. He goes, God bless you for getting on there and saying what you did. He says, because of that, I started engaging and started. And he says, I know it's about the kids. And I was like, oh, man. So to have that ability to have that connection with people, to me, that's, yeah, that's huge. And then my little articles in the newspaper, like 30,000 people read that. I had a little guy came up 13 years old and wanted to meet me and shake my hand and thank me.

I had folks that were, because I, the one that started on there, and I've told some politicians, you've got to lead with your heart on some of this too. If you want to connect with people, you're going to have to take that risk not to be the polished Teflon person because, quite frankly, people are tired of it. And if you're strong enough in your own skates, you should be able to do it. My son had brought back some items. There was a friend of his in high school that was flirting with suicide, and it was tough. And he grew up an abusive household.

and my father was not a nice person, let's put it that way. And being a politician, and this is during COVID and everything else, you're trying to reach people and help them through that. And you'd ask, you know, how does it weigh on you? It weighs on me pretty friggin' hard of what you can do. So I put it out there of some of the things and challenges her. I was, there's no sexual abuse. There was none of that.

But physical abuse, mental abuse, absolutely. Like three bags full. Like that, that was my whole childhood. growing up and trying to keep my brothers, my younger brothers out of that fray. So I exposed some of that in this little article. And the thought was if I could, if I could let folks know that it will get better, like we've all been through stuff. We might not talk about it.

We don't necessarily carry a little real red wagon of shit that we went through. I think most conservatives use that, put it down, use it for whatever thing and then deal with it, move on. But if I could share that with somebody and if it could just, help them. So it was a big risk. And my wife has kind of going like, holy crow, Shane, like they can just lamb based you for this. They can do this and do that. And I thought, you know, I'll screw it. It's worth the risk. Because if it helps someone, if it helps some 17 year old kid to realize that it gets better, like you just, you just kind of get through it, man. Then it was worth

it. And it was. It helped out a number of folks. And it had even a couple town counselors came up and talked to me about some of their stuff. They went through as kids. And then it got a whole group kind of working together. And so every time I write one of these little articles every week, there's some piece of me in there. And it seems to resonate with folks. Like I might not be the most polished guy and I hope I never am. But if that's what your show is doing and that's allowing some of those things to come forward and if you need an alternate revenue to make sure that you're there, Sean, within reason obviously, yeah, I would, and this is God's honest thing, I'm not trying to do a pitch for you. But there's a reason why I,

I would drive six hours for a two-hour conversation with you because I know it's going to get out to the right folks and I know it's going to help someone. Well, you're speaking very highly of me and I appreciate that. And I always throw it back to the audience because I've been shoulder-tapped a lot and it's really, I don't know, I don't have the words, but where people come up to you in different parts of the province

and, you know, they're like, because of you, you know, I survive COVID and I'm like, Well, it's funny because of you, I survive COVID. You probably text me and I was getting harassed by different things or even just my own thoughts on where I was at. And it was because of all these lovely people that tune in that I survive COVID. It's no, you know, I got a great support group, got a lovely wife, amazing kids, everything else. But that's why I try and enlist them in trying, you know, we can go anywhere you want.

You want me to talk to 87? Do you want me to talk to 8? try and track down 87 MLAs. That seems a little bit insane. But it's like, if they were like hardcore, no, you got to do this. It's like, well, maybe I do. You know, like I, I, uh, some days I feel like I'm at the helm of this thing, you know? Yeah.

Other days, I know I'm not. Whether that's God or whether that is this the people tuning in. I know I got like, I'm like, I know this thing's going to succeed because I've, I've, I've given up trying to like control the conversation. I've given up trying to control a lot of things because every time I try to usually blows up in my face. And even further than that,

I've been stepping on a lot of verbal landmines, I call it, where you just, like you say something and you think the conversation is going this way and you're like, uh-oh, and we go the complete opposite way. It makes for very interesting podcasting. I'm not going to lie, like sitting in this seat

and having all these different people come in here has been a ton of fun, a ton of fun. I just didn't realize it could take so many different paths. I had no idea that that was possible. And so when we get to this point, it's like, well, I don't want to put my energy into 50 things. I want to put my energy into one thing that the audience,

and right now, me and Jack, the guy from St. Louis, that's been working with me, I'm like, I don't want to do 50 things. I don't want to have people suggested locals. They've suggested different ways on the website and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, listen, we're going to do substack. We're going to try it out. We're going to try out this one thing.

We're going to focus in on it. This is what we're going to do. So within the bounds of substack, how can we give you something you want that you're willing to even just come over to to leave this realm? Because you found this. And I know how pissed off I was

when Joe Rogan left Applepaw, I guess, went specifically only to Spotify. It took me three months. Think about that. Think how insane that is. To just be like, all right, I'll download Spotify. It's so easy, but it's something wired in your brain. So I know what I'm asking of audience members right now.

Like, listen, I want you to come to a different platform. I want you to be engaged. I want it to be something that once you get there, you're like, oh, this is super cool. What is that? I don't know. We're going to try it out right now because we're going to tell you that the rest of this is going to substack, which means we're going to pause briefly, and then we're going to start right back up, and I'm going to ask him about Alberta Pension Plan and what he's positive

on in the future. So that's substack. So come on over with us, folks, to Substack. Oh, this is exciting. This is what's out in the media right now. And man, is there lots of fur flying? And I can't wait to talk about what's real and what's not.