The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben asks Alberta Premier Danielle Smith if Quebec will get on board with pipelines

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Guests and Topics: Ben asks Alberta Premier Danielle Smith if Quebec will get on board with pipelines Guest: Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BenMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show and in this time that we're living in there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of nervousness. My next guest has been speaking with such confidence and with such, in my opinion, a

depth of knowledge and pride in her province and pride in Canada, that it has elicited, at least in me, a deep sense of reassurance and confidence. Please welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Welcome to the show, Premier. Nice to talk to you, Ben. Thanks for having me again. So what was your immediate reaction when hearing about the tariffs going in place, levied against this country by Donald Trump? Grave disappointment and lost opportunity.

There's just so much that we can do together as an integrated economy, whether it's on oil and gas, critical minerals, the auto sector, chemicals, food, to see that the Americans are prepared to compromise that was gravely disappointing after all the work that all the premiers did on trying to prevent the train wreck from happening. Now they're watching what's happening. Their stock market's in chaos. They have 170,000 job losses so far this year. It's only going to get worse. Gasoline prices are slated to go up 40 cents a gallon.

And I think that I think they're realizing all of the things that we were trying to warn them about. So I don't know if that'll cause them to switch gears completely. But it's too bad it got to this point in the first place. Yeah. And until we get back to a point where we can work together, we have to take action on our own to either defend Canada or to apply pressure on the Americans. And you've taken the measure of no further purchases of US alcohol through the AGLC until further notice. Any other measures you're considering? There's a few things. So that is the most immediate impact all of the provinces can have

because we can all just turn off our ordering system. So if you think about Alberta, we buy about $292 million with the US product each year. We're only about 12% of the population. So we know that every province acting in concert on that is about two to three billion dollars. We've also suspended our purchase of new VLT machines. That's about 95 million dollars and I've directed my departments, all of our agencies, our school boards, our municipalities to buy local, buy from Alberta, buy from Canada, buy from any nation in the world that honors its free trade commitment. And so we'll see what kind of impact that

that has. But that we have no choice but to do that because the tariffs have the effect of reducing the amount of Canadian goods going to the United States. We don't want our own businesses to be harmed. So our call to action is let's support our own Canadian businesses, let's make sure they're not harmed by using our purchasing power. We can do that as government, but I hope that Canadians do the same thing. Now, premier Doug Ford of Ontario said that as of Monday, he will be applying a 25% exit

tax on the electricity that we sell to the states. I believe he keeps the lights on to 1.5 million homes and businesses in three states. Would you consider anything like that on Alberta oil and or gas? No, I mean, I'm part of it is I think Ontarians and Quebecers need to understand is that that would harm them.

We have the luxury in Western Canada being able to have our own supply supply but Ontario and Quebec don't. All of their oil comes to them by way of the United States. Line 5 goes down through Michigan and if we start playing games with the price of oil and natural gas it could potentially cause the lights to go out and the heat to turn off and the gasoline pumps to be empty in Ontario and Quebec and I just don't think that that is a wise policy. I don't want to hurt my fellow Canadians. So we're not going to do that, but we are going to act where we know that there is a

reasonable replacement for goods and services. I will say just on that note, if we'd built Energy East, then Ontario and Quebec would be able to rely on getting the products from Western Canada rather than via the United States. So I think that one's off the table. Well, let's talk about pipelines for a moment because Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet claims Europeans, they don't want Canadian oil and gas. First of all, do you believe that? Second of all, do you believe we need to find more partners to purchase our oil and gas? And if Quebec is going to be a sticking point, saying no pipelines through

the Quebec territory, can we just go around them? Can we build into Hudson's Bay? Well, let's let's look at this first off, the block wants to split the country up. So it's there in their interest to sow chaos and division. And I'm so pleased that Tim Houston has called them out on that Nova Scotia premier. He's doing great work on that. Secondly, he's wrong. I can tell you as intergovernmental and international minister as well, I've had a parade of people coming through my office from Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and on and on, all talking about how can we get more Canadian product to our markets. So he's just incorrect. He has an ideology. It's an extreme left ideology. We've been the victim of that for the last 10 years. But I think people are now beginning to

understand that you can't run the world, an industrialized economy, on solar, wind and batteries alone. You need to have base load power that comes from a liable energy. We've got it. And we're reducing emissions across the board on all of our products to make it a more attractive product than any of our competitors. So we're going to be very active in finding those new markets. And I hope that what we can do is find a pathway through Quebec that Quebecers can support. I know that it's hard to go through Montreal. And so maybe we find an alignment that's closer to Quebec City or closer to the region where Quebec's own natural gas resources lie so that Quebecers can develop their resource and have a new revenue stream. Maybe we talk about building another

refinery in a more northern Quebec so that those high-paying value-added jobs go to Quebec. So I think as long as we talk in terms of how Quebec will benefit, I think we can get a deal. And I don't really think that the block is going to be very influential on that. The media ended up losing ground with the position they've taken. Well, there are a lot of fronts in sort of breaking down inter-provincial trade barriers. Tim Houston, as you said, he's been a leader on that file. He said he's by default wants to be an open, an open province. Doug Ford jumped on board immediately. It sounds like you are as well.

Do you think that the desire to break down interprovincial trade barriers is getting to a point where we won't be able to stop its momentum and are sticking points like supply management going to derail this thing? I would say that the premier is, it's been amazing to me because I've only been premier for just over two years and there has been some turnover. But no matter who's at the table, it is such a constructive table to be at.

Ten different premiers from the provinces, three from the territories, all different parties and every single time we've come up with significant communicates where we find common ground. So I think that with the chaos happening at the federal level, us not knowing who the Prime Minister is going to be, I mean we've got one today and different one a week from now and then another one that may be six weeks from now, we need the stability of the premiers working together. So that's why I think you've seen us taking a leadership role and it's going to be many of the, I think other premiers are going to take the same approach on

mutual recognition. And when it comes to supply management, I found with great interest that the US is doing a call out. They want the price of eggs to go down. They want more eggs being sold to the United States. Maybe we've been so protective of supply management here. Maybe we should start looking at how we might be able to get more of those products to the US for our mutual benefit. That may be a pathway forward.

Going back to the States for a moment, it's hard to negotiate when you don't know what is actually driving the people on the other side of the table. And I was very bullish on the idea of confronting the issue of fentanyl and our porous border. And I said, if Donald Trump is going to be the one to highlight that, then that's a good thing. But I don't believe it is about fentanyl. I don't believe it is about Fentel. I don't believe it is about the border. You've been in those meetings. You know, the work that is being done

has been done. The money that's been poured into those issues. And yet here we are still with these tariffs on the table. What do you think this is really about? I can tell you he needed a pretext to be able to violate our free trade agreement. And so I think it is plausible that we have a problem with opioid deaths and everyone is to blame for it. I mean, the idea somehow that you'd have to believe that America doesn't have cartels and doesn't have organized crime and doesn't have their own drug problem to think that the only way it gets solved is the actions of Canada and Mexico. I think that's unrealistic. What we do know from the work we've

done at the border is that there's a lot of cocaine and crystal meth and guns and human trafficking coming up from America. So this is a two-way street. And if we want to solve this problem, we've got to work together on it. But I do think that he needed a pretext in order to violate the free trade agreement. And now I was just doing a Fox News hit this morning. And a minute before I came on, we heard that because of the chaos in the US market, Howard Lutnick may be talking about a reprieve across the board on all USMCA covered goods until April the 2nd. So just keep watching Truth Social throughout the day because it's going to change five minutes from now. But that's

the potential for what we're having today. But it is terrible to have this kind of uncertainty. Absolutely. It's very sad not to be able to rely on a trading partner that we've had such a good relationship with for so long. Yeah, we have skirmishes. Yeah, we got problems. Let's get to the table in the context of renegotiation and solve them rather than send this kind of tariff for which benefits no one. Premier Danielle Smith, thank you so much for your time today. Hope to talk to you again soon. You bet.

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