The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben speaks with Jean Charest & Jason Kenney about Quebec & Alberta's role in this election

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Ben speaks with former Premiers Jean Charest and Jason Kenney about Quebec and Alberta's role in this election Guest: Jean Charest, Former Premier of Quebec and Former Deputy Prime Minister Guest: Jason Kenney, Former Premier of Alberta and Federal cabinet minister 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

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And as always, you may be listening on the radio, you may be listening on the iHeartRadio streaming app, or you may find us in podcast form. We like to throw up as much content over the course of a day as possible. Just search up Ben Mulroney or the Ben Mulroney show on your podcast platform of choice and have at it. You know, if you'd ask me a few months ago whether national unity would have been on the election docket as a priority, as something we should be paying attention to a few months ago, I would have told you you were insane. But here we find ourselves with Alberta musing about what could come after a liberal election and the thoughts that perhaps national sovereignty

is indeed a threat looming on the horizon. Someone who knows very well about the perils of a national sovereignty debate is our next guest, the former premier of Quebec, Jean Charest. Mr. Charest, welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Ben, a real pleasure to hear your voice. So I was caught off guard by a piece in the National Post where Danielle Smith had written a letter to François Legault, the Premier of Quebec, suggesting that they form some sort of common front for greater provincial autonomy within

Canada. In a letter she was proposing something called provincial autonomy and you know I this is something new to me what do you make of this letter this outreach I think it's very good news I really really think that that's a positive signal in terms of how the country works you know one of the consequences of this whole story with Donald Trump, Ben, is that it's going to force us as Canadians to look at how we operate our economy and make, I think, really have a hard look at ourselves. But also, Ben, it includes two other things. One is what position we have in the world and what we want to do. And the third one is how we operate our federal system of government. In my view, we have a good solid federal system but it's as though the

provinces and the feds have lost the operating manual over the last few years. I say this and it's not just because you're the son of Brian. I worked in Brian Mulroney's government. I mean the relations with the provinces were pretty good. I mean not just good, they were outstanding. We did a lot of things and a lot of changes and but there has to be leadership on that and they want to have to engage and that the Premier Smith would reach out to Premier Lézot means that that if Quebec and Alberta works together great things can be done for the country. Well, indeed, and one of the striking things is, I've always viewed it, maybe this is a novice perspective,

but you would know more than I, that Alberta sometimes, the priorities of that province run counter to what we're told by the leadership in Quebec. And I think specifically about pipelines. They are very important for Alberta to get their resources to our coasts so that they can develop their economy and by extension the Canadian economy.

And then we hear from people like Yves-Francois Blanchet saying these are not in the interest of Quebec. And I have to wonder whether this rapprochement between Quebec and I have to wonder whether this rapprochement between Quebec and Alberta is an effort to perhaps, I don't know, get the two provinces to see that they do have things in common. They can work together specifically on these nation-building initiatives like pipelines. Like pipelines and let me speak to one very very relevant example. We have a free trade agreement and we're able to secure a free trade agreement with the

United States because of the support of Alberta and Quebec, even if in the 1988 election campaign Ontario then voted against. The aggregate vote in Ontario was opposed to free trade Quebec and Alberta together were the two key provinces that made it happen which is the for me the most salient example of how we can get great things done. Now, Yves-Francois Blanchet, let me let you in into something about Blanchet. He's a separatist, right? He knows exactly what he's doing when he denounces oil and gas and pipelines. He's poking a stick in the eye of the rest of Canada and Alberta

to try to irritate them and promote the separatist cause. And the sentiment on this issue has changed a lot on Quebec. There's a lot of leadership in Quebec who understand very well the necessity, the urgency for us to build infrastructure, including pipelines to be able to sell our energy to the rest of the world. And so Blanchette is doing this deliberately. Yeah. But other people in Quebec have to speak up and we're seeing more and more of that happen to favor this kind of project.

Well I think people have to remember and it takes me a moment every now and then to remember that even if he were to win every seat in Quebec he does not speak he doesn't form government in Quebec. François Legault is the premier but give me the lay of the land and give the listeners of the show the lay of the land of where voters are swinging or looking to place their votes in the next provincial election because I've heard that the the Parti Québécois is in its ascendancy and possibly looking to form the next government. Well let me run through that. The government now is a

government of la CAQ. It's a coalition of federalists and separatists led by Francois Legault, who's a pretty rapid separatist and says, I'll suspend my belief and lead a government that is going to be sort of a coalition government. He's in his second mandate. They've made a lot of unpopular decisions. By the way, allow me to brag a bit. When he was elected in 2018, after 15 years of provincial liberal government, and in good part led by me, he inherited then a $7 billion surplus. Surplus. I mean, you're never going to see that, and that's because I've always been a fiscal conservative and we govern very tightly. His last budget clocked in with a deficit at almost $14 billion. This guy is a spender. Now, in the next election campaign, they become very unpopular. It's

the second mandate. High chances they will be defeated. The Paxi-Quebecois is seen as the parking space in the alternative. But the PQ continues to say that if they're elected, they're going to hold a referendum in the first mandate, which no one in Quebec wants. No polling says it would want that. And the Liberal Party of Quebec is in the middle of a leadership race right now, and they're going to choose, they have very good candidates, they're going to choose a new leader by the 14th of June. And then you have the extreme left party called Quebec Sadi Daya, which doesn't exist anywhere else in North America. And these are very extreme left party called Quebec Sadi Da'a, which doesn't exist anywhere else in North America.

And these are very extreme left wingers who are also out there and unpopular. So chances are it may be a minority. If it's a minority, it'll be interesting because everyone will be at play. And this election will happen by an October, should happen in October of 2026. So you know, you have seen firsthand and you have fought for the Federation

up against some pretty sophisticated separatist organizations and movements and people with deep roots in Quebec. So what do you make of the call, or I don't know if these are accusations, that Danielle Smith in Alberta is stoking those separatist tendencies in her own province. I mean, I tend to believe

that that's not what she's doing at all. She's recognizing that those things exist and she's doing her best to create the conditions where they would be diminished in the future, but recognizing that they are there. Well, you're quite right. She has to deal with that. You know, dealing with a separatist movement is like fishing, salmon fishing, and pulling in a 40 pound salmon with an 8 pound line.

And you can pull it in, but you've got to be very careful. So a separatist movement is very much based on emotion and I think Danielle Smith is doing her best to deal with that. But at the same time, Ben, people in Quebec and I certainly a number of leaders in Quebec understand the frustration of Albertans who when they were trying to build a pipeline to diversify their markets and sell it to Europe or Asia didn't get a lot of help from the rest of the country. And now that we're in a debate in a crisis with the United States over Trump and tariffs and that people raised the idea of imposing an export tax on energy that they're irritated by that.

Yeah, well we're gonna Mr. Premier we're gonna have to leave it there but I want to thank you so much for giving us so the lay of the land on the Quebec side of the equation and after the break on the Ben Mulroney show, we're going to be joined by somebody who knows a thing or two about Alberta. Former Premier Jason Kenney joins us after the break on the Ben Mulroney show. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for joining us. We don't know how you listen.

You may listen on the radio, you may listen through a streaming app, or you may listen to us in podcast form. I don't care how you listen, I'll take you any way I can get you. And in our previous segment, we spoke with former Quebec Premier Jean Charest. And now we're gonna go to the other side of the country with another former Premier,

the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, who was also a cabinet minister. Mr. Kenny, welcome to the show. Good to be here, Ben. I'm glad that I can bookend the show with a leader from Alberta and a leader from Quebec, because that's really the topic of conversation that I find really fascinating today with Danielle Smith's outreach to Francois Legault of Quebec, talking about building sort of a provincial partnership between these two important

provinces in Canada, I want to get your sense of what you think could come from deepening a relationship between Alberta and Quebec. Well, that's not a new concept. Peter Lawheed and René Levesque had a alliance of sorts back in the during around the time of the Patriot of the Constitution of the early 1980s but Quebec and Alberta have always been the traditional defenders of the Constitution as originally conceived as a federation with a division of powers and have always been

a little skeptical of Ottawa overreach into how that Federation works so there has been a traditional alliance. In fact, the night I was elected premier in 2019 with a big majority, I spoke in front of my victory party with a bunch of pretty well-liquored up Alberta conservatives in French for five minutes. That was a bit of a risky gambit. I used that national platform to say to Quebecers, hey, let's renew that relationship, that partnership as the defenders of the Constitution of federalism, of respect for the provinces, but let's also be partners in prosperity. Quebec benefits about $13 billion a year from equalization payments, which overwhelmingly

ultimately comes from Alberta's energy sector. So I said, look, we don't begrudge you that. We're generous, but help us develop and sell those resources. That means oil and gas pipelines. I went took that message to Francois Legault just a couple of weeks after becoming premier. He said, okay, I can't work with you on oil, but I will on gas. And he shut down all the gas, he turned against LNG. So let me just say, Quebec has not always been the most reliable strategic partner for Alberta.

But we seem to be in this era of Trump tariffs, looking inward and how can we succeed and optimize sort of Canadian success within our own borders and I saw a poll recently that suggested that 60% of Quebecers now support the idea of pipelines despite what the leader of the the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, tends to say and not that he has a say in this but I've got to wonder whether this is part of Danielle Smith's plan. If I can show common cause with my analog in Quebec on issues, say, of us supporting Quebec with regard to their secular law challenge at the Supreme Court, then maybe that might open the door to even more dialogue on these vital infrastructure plans for the entire

country. Well, if that's what she's doing, I certainly don't agree with the principle of it, because Albertans believe in pluralism and the idea that you can ban somebody from working because they're wearing a cross or a yarmulke or something is to me offensive. So I would be taking the opposite side of that. But you know, look, as I say, Quebecers are practical people. And by the way, the kind of people who vote for Legault's party are the people in the suburbs, in the regions. They drive F-150s. They drive Ski-Doos in the winter.

Quebecers have a history of being, you know, explorers and resource workers. So the notion that all of Quebec opinion, you know, Ben, there's this expression in Quebec, la pense unique, monolithic thinking that comes out of like these lefty bohemian types in the plateau, in fancy parts of Montreal. They don't define the thinking of the whole province. Regular, ordinary, Moussoum-et-Dame-sulamand, ordinary Quebecers, they want economic security, opportunity, affordable energy, and I think they can see Alberta and Alberta's energy resources as a huge advantage to them in that regard. I am in conversation with Jason Kenney, the former Alberta premier, And Jason, it does seem like there's an increasing amount of daylight between the conservatives and the liberals in this federal election campaign

on the subject of these national infrastructure projects like pipelines and Mark Carney coming out just a couple of days ago, saying that a liberal government would not get rid of Bill C-69, which you've had a lot to say about in the past. So it's really hard for me to understand the liberal policy on resource development, where he says one thing to Danielle Smith and then something else in front of the press. What's your take on it? Yeah, well, more problematically, he says one thing in Western Canada in English and another thing to Quebec in French, which of course is the ultimate sign of a federal politician who's faking it to make it.

You know, I think one thing people want is the real deal, somebody who says it like it is in both languages, in front of whatever kind of audience. And you know, I've known Pierre Polya for, well, since he was 16. He worked on my first campaign when he was in high school. I can tell you, he's consistent on these and other issues. As Premier, when Trudeau brought forward this Bill C-69, the so-called Impact Assessment Act. I'm the guy who branded it the No More Pipelines law because what it did was to create an endless, never-ending environmental approval process at the federal level which hijacks provincial areas under the Constitution like regulating natural resources and which politicizes the process by

allowing the cabinet to override the decision of an independent regulator. Now I know to ordinary folks that's not like the kind of issue that comes up around the kitchen table but the flight of investment from capital, the declining prosperity of our country, the fact that we have the worst growth rate on a per capita basis in the developed world over the past decade, these things are all linked to the lack of certainty and speed. We have the third largest oil reserves in the world, third largest natural gas, second largest uranium, the largest potash.

So we have huge critical minerals. We haven't even moved a shovel on the Ring of Fire in Northern Ontario. And since this law came into place in 2019, not one major project has been approved, as I predicted, which is why I sued the federal government, went up to the Supreme Court, who agreed with Alberta's position, my position, that it was an intrusion into the Constitution. The Supreme Court of Canada said that it was an unconstitutional law. So my message to Mr. Carney is you don't have a say in this anymore. The court has spoken. You have to repeal this law to comply with the Constitution.

And by the way, when did the—how did the Liberals get off on pretending to be the great You have to repeal this law to comply with the Constitution. And by the way, how do the liberals get off on pretending to be the great champions and custodians of the Constitution when they're in violation of it? This is no different than Trump saying he's going to ignore certain court decisions. I only have a couple of minutes left, but I'd love to dovetail off of that into the conversation about sort of growing resentment in Alberta that may or may not turn into a sophisticated separatist movement. I mean, this pipeline thing, if the polls are to be believed, Mark Carney and his Liberal government or party could sweep into government, in which case Alberta may not have the ally

that Danielle Smith says is required in order to tamp down on that movement. You know, you've made your life in Alberta. What are you hearing on the ground? Well, Ben, there's always been a small minority who play with the idea of separatism. And sometimes in the polling and just in the chatter, that gets louder and bigger to maybe somewhere around 30 percent. But most of that is kind of a proxy for just deep frustration with bad Ottawa policy. And let me tell you, when your dad was prime minister and when Steve, certainly when Stephen

Harper was prime minister, there was little or no talk about Alberta separation. Justin Trudeau did a lot to drive divisions in this country. He openly campaigned against Alberta and its largest industry. When Mr. Carney supports a cap on oil sands emissions, it's basically a cap on production. So he says he wants to basically eventually shut down Canada's largest industry. So these are really sensitive issues. I don't think Alberta will ever separate. The Albertans, the vast majority of Albertans are proud Canadians. Huge numbers of Canadians from across the country, but we need fairness. Thank you very much, Jason Kenney.

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