The Paul Wells Show - Can Rachel Notley's NDP govern Alberta again?

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

In May, Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley will get a shot at becoming Premier again. Paul meets Rachel in Calgary to discuss her vision for the province and the prospect of facing off against a united conservative movement. She also talks about the opioid crisis, the federal healthcare deal, the future of the energy industry and dealing with Ottawa.

Sure, Rachel Notley has already been the Premier of Alberta, but winning that time was almost easy. This time it's going to take some work. There are no easy answers, and we have to do what we do best, which is roll up our sleeves and just get back to work. This week, my conversation with Rachel Notley on her past and Alberta's future. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. In 2015, when I was writing for a magazine with a travel budget, I took a hard look at the election polls and told my editor that I'd better get on a flight to Calgary. It felt like something was happening in Alberta.

But even then, the article I wrote was framed as, could Jim Prentice actually lose? Could decades of conservative rule in Alberta actually be coming to an end? of Conservative rule in Alberta actually be coming to an end? If he did lose, and if a Conservative era did end, that would mean Alberta was about to elect a new Democrat as Premier. But I hardly dared to write that part out. It sounded too weird. Rachel Notley did win that election, and then she lost the next one, and for similar reasons both times. A historic collapse in the price of oil had overturned every assumption of Alberta budget makers. Alberta's been in let's try this mode for most of a decade now. And Notley had another advantage back then. She was running against a thoroughly divided right.

Jim Prentice's Conservatives and the Wild Rose Party split that end of the vote, with less than 30% of the vote each to 40% for Rachel Notley's NDP. That's not going to happen this time. Jason Kenney did get one big thing done on his way to becoming Premier, and that was to unite the Conservatives and the Wild Rose. That's why, even after a difficult first few months in power, the latest Premier, Danielle Smith, will be very hard to beat. Edmonton's going to go NDP. Most of small town and rural Alberta

will go to Smith's United Conservatives. So Notley needs to do very well in Calgary to have any hope of winning, which is why she met me there in Calgary for our conversation. This was my fourth interview with Rachel Notley over the years. She's smart, confident, and not careful. There's an edge to her. Her father once led Alberta's NDP. She's been doing this all her life, and it shows. We always have a good talk. This was no exception. Rachel Notley, thanks for joining me. Happy to be here. We're in Calgary.

You're spending a lot of time in Calgary lately. I am spending a lot of time in Calgary. And I guess, you know, you weren't in Red Deer on my way through, but we have been spending a lot of time in Calgary. It's, you know, obviously Alberta's biggest city and we've got a lot to talk to voters about here. And we're very excited about the opportunities. And we've got an incredible group of candidates who are very excited about their opportunities. And I've actually been down here quite a lot, pretty much since the last election, really. We've made it a very concerted part of our plan to hold ourselves accountable, to be down here almost weekly, to make sure that we do a better job of building relationships, stakeholder relationships, lines of communication with

a range of folks, as well as that sort of ground organizing stuff, just to make sure that we are fully part of the city's zeitgeist, for lack of a better term. Okay. And we're talking at the beginning of March. I'm not entirely sure when people are going to be hearing this. But just a couple days ago, you announced that the party announced that they're moving the campaign headquarters down here from Edmonton, where it normally is?

Well, I mean, we didn't really announce. It's sort of been a not well-kept secret is more the dynamic. And to be clear, we're just setting up campaign headquarters as we speak. But yes, historically, we've run the campaigns out of Edmonton, separate, of course, from the campaign offices that you would see

in the individual constituencies, of course. But yeah, we've decided to run the operation from Calgary since we know we'll be spending a lot of time down here. Election day is the beginning of June? It is May 29th. May 29th. When you lost, it's funny, I've got these superstitions. I hate reminding you that you lost an election. That's okay.

I'm aware. Yeah. And I nearly called you premier when you came in. Although if Daniel Smith were here, I'd call her premier. That's all right. Was it a deadlock certainty that you would stick around until the next election, the last time? Pretty much. Yeah.

I mean, back in the day, it was kind was kind of amusing actually because in the first i don't know six to twelve months after the election uh at every press conference i was at or every second press conference i was at a reporter would ask me are you sticking around i would say yes i'm sticking around and then there'd be another headline notley commits to sticking around and it'd be like okay like how often do they have to hear this to believe that it's true? But, you know, I would say, maybe in the in the first couple of months, I was sort of thinking about things about, you know, what I wanted to do. But, you know, there's a lot of different things that contributed to the very early decision that I made to stick around for another run. not the least of which was just some

of the outrageous decisions taken by the Kenney government almost as soon as they were elected, the UCP government almost as soon as they were elected. And I was not a fan. And I thought, you know, we have to make sure that there's no narrative that the NDP is no longer a relevant competitor for government and we need to make sure that these folks take seriously the voice of many many Albertans who didn't vote for them and who are going to very much regret their vote for them very soon after and we could see that coming and so it was really important to make sure that there was a credible alternative there for folks. And so with that in mind,

and of course, with the support of my colleagues and many other Albertans, I decided to stick around. We're going to talk about what, you know, the sky's the limit and what that means in terms of your re-election prospects. But let's talk a bit about the floor. what that means in terms of your re-election prospects. But let's talk a bit about the floor. Has Alberta's relationship to the NDP changed in such a way that the NDP is now, you know, a force indefinitely forward whether or not it wins elections? You know, I'm a bit superstitious. You talked about being superstitious early on. And, you know, I grew up watching my dad as leader of Alberta's NDP and the sole member of the NDP caucus for the first decade of his career and then subsequently becoming leader of the official opposition with two people, himself and one other person, and then watched, you know, the party lose all their seats in 1993 about a decade later. So my view has always been that a new Democrat in Alberta has to work two or three times harder than just about any other politician. And I don't think it does us

any favors to ever forget that. And I don't just mean that campaigning, but I also mean it in terms of governing and representational work. And so I think as long as that work ethic continues, we'll always be a feature and we will earn the right to always be a feature on Alberta's political landscape. But I do think we have to always earn it. Do you like campaigning? You're basically campaigning now. Yes, yes, yes, I am.

I mean, you know, there's some things about governing that I liked better. There were some things about legislating that I like better. There are some things about campaigning that I like better. They're all very different. Depends on the day. But, you know, I feel good about what we are campaigning for. I feel very driven by what we're trying to achieve. It matters to me. And of course,

I'm really proud of the team that I've got around me and very happy with the team around me. So, you know, for the most part, I'm pretty happy to campaign. Yeah. The budget came out, you delivered your reaction to it. And a lot of your kind of discourse around the budget and around the current political moment is that you're not super interested in litigating the questions that led to your election or to Jason Kenney's election. That where most people are is the current moment, the last several weeks, the next several weeks. In that frame, you can't run as somebody who's already been the premier. You can't run as someone who's proven she can do it, or at least not to that extent. In the larger sense, you know, and I've had this conversation with other folks publicly and privately, I think it is actually important,

you know, in this kind of context, this sort of political conversation that we're having here, to acknowledge that it's really important to think about why it is we didn't win in 2019, and to take to heart some of the lessons that Albertans wanted us to take from the election outcome. And so it's not so much that, you know, we're walking away from it, or I don't want to talk about it. The context in which I was talking about, listen, you know, Albertans right now, as a whole, not political observers, not commentators, not politicians themselves, but regular folks tend to be more preoccupied with what's more or less in front of them. And, you know, not too far behind and not too far ahead, because that's how regular folks live their lives. That's sort of the point that I'm trying to make, that it's incumbent on us to obviously take to heart the

lessons we've learned through loss, because I think often that's one of the most effective ways to learn things. But as a politician now going into a campaign and someone who wants to earn people's votes, I don't think most Albertans want us to be talking about, well, you know, the budget in 2016. Yes, it is true. Royalty revenue in 2016 was $3 billion. And today it is $20 billion. And, you know, it's a much bigger challenge to manage a budget in the former situation as opposed to the latter. That's great. I can have this conversation with you. But when I'm talking to somebody in the doorstep, they don't really want to hear about that. They want to hear about what we're going to do to help them get access to a family doctor. And they want to hear about what we're going to do to make sure that their kids

can actually get their teacher's attention in their grade five class so that they can actually learn those major math steps that happen in grade five that plague you for much of the rest of your secondary career if you don't figure those things out. And so that's what I mean by just sort of being in the place where most voters are and trying to put their concerns front and center. Why is Danielle Smith the premier today? And why do all the polls say she's got a decent shot at still being the premier next July? much catered to the concerns of a very small group of people within the UCP. A bunch of concerns that are very much, I would say, offside with the views and the priorities of mainstream Albertans. But because she was coming in from outside, she, I guess, had the luxury of doing that. And then

those folks signed up en masse to an otherwise somewhat uninterested UCP and kind of took it over. And so that's why she's premier now. I mean, that's how it happened. In terms of the polls, you know, polls come and polls go. They go up, they go down. There's a whole bunch of polls out there right now that range considerably in terms of what they are predicting the outcome will be. I find polling most helpful to help us figure out sort of some of the issues and the state of mind of voters, that kind of thing. Trying to parse, you know, a plus four or minus four difference in horse race between the different pollsters. I mean, it's fun for observers for sure, but it's not really how you drive your campaign.

The situation now is very different from 2015. When you became premier, you were running against a divided conservative movement. In fact, there's never been a united conservative movement in Alberta has never been defeated. What you're trying to do now is harder than then. And you say that the economic, the sort of macroeconomic circumstance is different now from then. What's the story about Alberta that forms the setting for this election? story about Alberta that forms the setting for this election? Well, you know, that's a really good question. I think that Alberta is, first of all, it's changing a lot from what I might characterize as the caricature that some folks from outside of Alberta tend to envision in their mind when they think about Alberta. I would say definitely

one of the people who learned that lesson the most was actually Jason Kenney. I think he really didn't have a good understanding of what Alberta was when he came back from Ottawa. So Alberta is changing. It is a highly multicultural province. That's something that is often underestimated by many, many observers. Calgary is, I think, the second most diverse city in the country now. It is younger. It is very well educated. It's quite cosmopolitan. And it is actually, depending on how you define urban, arguably the most urbanized province in the country.

how you define urban, arguably the most urbanized province in the country. So that is one thing about Alberta that people tend to overlook. Now, that being said, the other thing about Alberta that is very real is that we have a long, long history of a very strong economy driven by the oil and gas sector, where not only people working directly in oil and gas, but those people who work ancillary to oil and gas are able to do quite well financially as a result of that industry. And the people of this province went through a really serious shock in 2015-16 with the drop in the price of oil. None of what, even what Jason Kenney experienced in 2020 didn't come close to what that drop in the price of oil did to the Alberta economy over two or three years over the course of our term in government.

But either way, that's not relevant. What's relevant is the people. And people struggled. And they were. And they were anxious, and they were worried. And they were looking for a solution. They were offered an easy solution by Jason Kenney. I think they soon came to realize that, you know, or some people start to realize that there are no easy answers. And we have to do what we do best, which is roll up our sleeves and just get back to work. Because that's another thing about Albertans. You know, statistically speaking, we work more hours in any week than people in the

rest of the country. And we are a hardworking province. And I think that once people got over the idea that there was no magic bullet, they started just doing what they do best. So that's where we were. And then, of course, COVID hit. That was sort of on top of a kind of grief that the province was experiencing that a lot of people maybe hadn't really taken into account. And so when you put those two things together, you get, you know, a pretty animated

electorate, for lack of a better term, on multiple sides of the conversation. But I don't think it's fair to make generalizations about Albertans, because I do know a lot of the strong themes that continues to run through this province in terms of the optimism, the youth, the entrepreneurialism, the level of education, the cosmopolitanism. These things are also a big part of our province. And so I think that's why it's not a good idea to simplify one's view of the province. There are also in Alberta, especially in Calgary, a lot of what I would call kind of traditional red Tories

who used to be quite comfortable in the Conservative Party and have never been entirely comfortable with New Democrats. For sure. Who believe in entrepreneurial spirit and the handshake deal are absolutely convinced that the natural resources of this province are a legitimate cornerstone of the economy. And they hear that Ottawa is interested in a just transition and they wonder whether you can protect Alberta against those global trends. Again, you know, I talked about, you know, sort of easy solutions versus rolling up your

sleeves to get to work dealing with the fact that, okay, this is going to be a bit harder work than we thought. And when you talk about pressures on a rolling gas industry, I think that that falls into the latter category. And there are no simple solutions. It's not as simple like, you know, let's just say, you know, let's take it to its nth extreme. And Daniel Smith successfully protected, quote unquote, Alberta from Ottawa. And we left Canada and we put up our little fence and we said, ha, enough of you and your transition and your this and your that we're gonna do what we want now assuming for a moment that you could actually find a way to get your product to market which of course you know gee too bad that pipeline the federal government

built is no longer a thing that we have access to by right but beyond that point the international market is going to demand that Alberta sell to them a product that is more sustainably produced, more responsibly produced with less carbon in the barrel. So there is a market for oil and gas for some time to come. But the market is looking for the cleanest barrel of oil, the most responsibly produced natural gas that it can get. So there is an opportunity for Alberta and Alberta's leadership to get as much support as they can out of the national government to help with that work. I don't think the word transition, as many people have said, you know, it's not a helpful word, but more to the point, if you're talking about transitioning the nature of the product, sure, that's fine. I think if we do this right, we're going to create

more jobs, not lose jobs. I think there's a shortage of jobs in the oil and gas, or shortage of people to work in the oil and gas industry now. And I think that there are even more job opportunities in the work of pulling that carbon out of a barrel. So if that is the point from which you start, then the key is to forcefully with a determined, well-informed, a determined, well-informed, uncompromising approach to get everything we can from Ottawa to help support that model of continuing our export and continuing to support the rest of Canada the way we can in Alberta. So where we've fallen short over the last three and a half years is that we literally have a government.

Well, I'd say under Jason Kenney, I would argue it was much more cynical. I think that he knew a lot of what I was just saying, but he was more interested in playing politics. And he was very cynically playing politics. Danielle Smith, I'm not even sure 100% that she knows that. And she literally hasn't thought past putting her hands over her ears covering her eyes and holding her breath and assuming that if she stomps her foot enough everybody's gonna do what she wants both of those approaches have resulted in the conversation in Alberta and the work that needs to be done in Alberta being delayed on a lot of different fronts.

And that has been at the expense of Alberta jobs and Alberta's economic growth and Albertans' opportunities. So we need a government that is actually going to go to work just the same way as all Albertans do, roll up our sleeves and work hard to get the best deal we can for our province in the face of realistic understanding of what our opportunities are and what our obligations are. After the break, Rachel Notley will talk about working with Justin Trudeau, the recent federal health care deal, and how to handle the opioid crisis. I want to take a moment to thank all of our partners,

the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, our title sponsor, Compass Rose, and our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. What's it like working with Justin Trudeau for a Premier of Alberta?

You know, whether you're talking about Justin Trudeau, Pierre Pallièbe, Jagmeet Singh, a Premier of Alberta who is focused on serving the people of Alberta, will always have both, you know, an opportunity for good relationships, but also some strong needs to sort of throw their elbows out every now and then, and get things done for the people of her province. You know, I think we might have talked about this before. You know, I mean, I'm a Westerner. I'm an Albertan born and raised here. I went to school out in Toronto for law and a lot of good friends out in Toronto and Ottawa.

But to this day, I am very conscious of the, not malicious necessarily, but inadvertent ambivalence towards the West that sometimes can live in central Canada, if people aren't reminded regularly about how much they count on and need the West. So does that make me a separatist? No, that just makes me someone who understands that it's important to make our case in a convincing, compelling way that will make other folks actually listen and ensure other people listen.

And I think that if you present your message in the sort of, you know, extremely antagonistic and sometimes cartoonish way that the UCP has been for the last four years, people stop listening. Because I watched this government in Ottawa, and their ability to sort of classify and sort and forget a file is astonishing. And I think they've got their idea of Alberta in their heads, and there's just nothing going to get them to revisit it.

Jason Kenney tried with referenda. Daniel Smith has a sovereignty act. You would be sort of been there, done that. And Katie Telford knows what she thinks about Alberta. Well, let me back it up a bit for you because here's the thing. There's a brief window in Alberta's history over the last 50 years where the Conservatives were not in power and the NDP was. And in that period of time over the last 50 years, there was one window of time within which a pipeline to Tidewater, a new one, was approved and construction commenced. And that was under

our leadership. How did we get that to happen? How did we get Ottawa to that place? How did we get them even to the point where they, you know, got into the position of buying it and funding it to the tune that is much larger than I think they'd originally planned to? A whole range of things. You know, it's not like I'm trying to sort of sell myself for my another career 10 years down the road or anything. But when it comes to getting these things across, what do you do? Well, as New Democrat, I go into rooms of environmentalists and people concerned about the climate in Quebec, in Ontario, in BC, and I explain to them why we need this pipeline and how we can have this pipeline and still make progress, serious,

important progress on reducing emissions and attacking climate change. What else do I do? reducing emissions and attacking climate change. What else do I do? I sit down and make a list of all our allies all across the country. And I go and I speak to municipalities all across the country. And I get Alberta municipal leaders to speak to their colleagues all across the countries. I do that with rotary clubs. I go to Bay Street and I talk to business leaders and investors who know how much money from the West they see every day and they need to see every day in order to continue doing the work they're doing and we get them on side. I look at who is it that the Liberal government or any government is listening to right now and I start going and I meet with those folks and by me I don't mean me, I mean my whole government. This was a cross-government effort. It was a cross-Alberta

effort. We brought in labor-Alberta effort. We brought in labor unions. We brought in municipal leaders. We brought in environmentalists. We brought in community leaders to make the case to people all across the country about why this was important. And we bought advertising. And it was pretty effective advertising in certain places. We went into BC and we started advertising in the parts of BC that we knew actually wanted the pipeline. And we started moving political opinion in BC, understanding that that was also another place where we had to do some convincing. It was like when I say multi-pronged, I don't mean that as a sort of,

you know, rhetorical kind of cute language to make it sound like I'm doing work. It truly was multi-pronged. It was a real war room, one that was effective, as opposed to one that was putting out cartoon characters and becoming the laughingstock of a whole bunch of different places. We leveraged other public policy. We did a whole range of things. And the result is that Alberta is going to have the first pipeline to Tidewater

that we've had in 50 years. So I feel, I believe, I hate using the word feel, I believe we actually did some very, very good advocacy for the province of Alberta in our time, notwithstanding all the things that you rightly describe about the current federal government. So that's why I think if you're smart about these things, you can sometimes get what you want. You know, like I started negotiating with my dad when I was five, you know, my family used to make jokes about how I would do that. So I think we're well equipped to make sure Alberta gets what it needs from the rest of the country. We just had a two or three month round of federal provincial negotiations on kind of negotiations on health care, which ended with the prime minister summoning the premiers to Ottawa so that he could read the deal to them. What did you make of that whole process as a very interested observer? That is an interesting one because, you know, first of all, the demands that premiers have been making of Ottawa for health care funding were very alive and well when I was premier and they were alive and well a decade earlier.

So I don't know that the deal that the premiers got was good enough. And I don't know that the issue is over, like just because the prime minister read them the deal, quote unquote, and they all agreed to take the deal, I would be surprised if all premiers have agreed that it's done. But I think that there's going to have to be a more common front from premiers if more work is going to come from Ottawa

when it comes to restoring and rebuilding and improving our system of public health care. You know, one of the things that's often been the case with premiers is that partisanship has allowed them to be divided. I think that that's worse now than it was, say, you know, in the early 80s, when the Constitution was being negotiated. was, say, you know, in the early 80s, when the Constitution was being negotiated, I think there's a much bigger divide between conservatives and liberals and New Democrats than there was back in the day. So that's what I think of it. I think it wasn't good enough. But it doesn't surprise me, because I've been at that table before. And you need to have everybody on the same page around that table of premiers. And I don't think everyone was on the same page when I was there.

And they're certainly not on the same page right now. Is politics just more polarized now? I mean, most people I know who are in politics have serious personal security concerns. COVID and Donald Trump and seven years, I'm told eight years of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump and seven years, I'm told eight years of Justin Trudeau, have made it so that different factions in our politics can barely stand to look at each other or hear each other, let alone have conversations about what the future is supposed to look like. Is that fair? I think that's pretty fair comment. I mean, in Alberta, there is a subsect, and I would say it's a fairly small group, of conservatives who really are quite irritated that there's another party challenging for government. Because they literally believe that this was never supposed to be a problem ever in Alberta.

What the heck, NDP? What are you doing here? Now, I would argue that that's a small group. I think the rest of them have come to terms with this and, like me, believe they need to earn voter support. But I think there's a small group that are maybe not quite so circumspect about the idea. But, yeah, no, I think, you know, I was talking about how Alberta has been over the last few years with the, you know, COVID superimposed upon

what was a deeply difficult time for Albertans as far as what happened to the oil and gas industry. So that certainly made it more challenging. But then again, I mean, there's all these other factors too. I mean, you watch what's going on south of the border, and it is very concerning. And Donald Trump is a deeply, deeply toxic force in our political world and politics has become more difficult to talk about and it's too bad because I you know I think social media

allows people to be a lot harder on each other and when you're talking to somebody face to face, you immediately become more reasonable when someone's across from you. Like that's just how humans are. Humans are meant to engage with each other face to face. You know, I grew up in a very rural northern part of Alberta. My dad was an NDP MLA who never won a seat by more than 200 or 300 votes. It was divided the whole time I was there. And he was often down in Edmonton, and so his family was left to be the spokespeople for the MLA. And so I had more than my share of political debates with people who didn't agree with the NDP.

But the fact of having those conversations in person makes it a lot easier. And so we've had a lot of things converging all at once that have made it more difficult to have thoughtful conversations. And I'm not sure which beget which, but certainly there's a meeting of several trends that have made it harder, for sure. So you mentioned on the list of things that are not going to win you a lot of votes at the door, you mentioned the difference in resource revenue now versus then, $3 billion then, $20 billion now. First thing that came to my head is,

boy, it's a much better time to be an incumbent now than it was then. And we saw that to some extent. You've got a conservative government led by somebody who ran to the right of Jason Kenney, who's spraying money around like it's Christmas. Is that hard to run against? I mean, I guess we'll see. We'll see what Albertans choose, you know, on election day. What I will say that I can say with great conviction is that the budget that the UCP introduced yesterday is an ineffective attempt to paper over the deep damage that they have imposed upon both our health care and our education system. And I think for a moment, let's talk about healthcare. It is unbelievable what these folks have done to healthcare. And I know, and you'll know, because you're a national commentator broadcaster, that the healthcare across the country has been through, you know, heck and back as a result of COVID. But in Alberta, we actually started out in a better place than a lot of other provinces. And then this government, before COVID hit, threatened to fire 1,000 nurses, told support workers in our health care system that about 10,000 of them should get ready to look for other jobs,

and told everybody else that they were earning too much money, and then ripped up a doctor's agreement. And then when COVID hit, they didn't back up. They didn't rethink this plan. They kept going for another 24 months. And so the number of folks that I have talked to have literally stopped their practice, you know, retired early, picked up, moved to another jurisdiction. It's overwhelming. They've created so much damage in our system, one that was otherwise better placed to weather the storm that all Canadians faced during COVID. And Albertans know that, and they are really frustrated by it. And I don't think they trust Danielle Smith one iota to be the agent of improvement in our health care system. Let us be clear.

This is a woman who just 18 months ago was clearly on tape saying she doesn't think the government should pay 100% of every doctor's visit. I'm not making this up. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not twerking that. That's what she said. And don't even get me started on the things that she wrote, which make it even very clear why she's saying that. And her desire to train Albertans to see their health care as some kind of auto insurance plan where you have a big deductible and you better not call on it very much because sooner or later you're going to have to start paying more. An element of health care, I suppose, is opioid policy. you're going to have to start paying more. An element of health care, I suppose, is opioid policy. The federal conservative leader, Pierre Poiliev,

is saying Vancouver's hell on earth because an NDP government there is giving hard drugs to whoever needs it. And the situation has improved in Alberta because it's more treatment-based and because... He's making it up. There is not a single solitary shred of evidence to suggest for a moment that the situation has improved in Alberta. That is pure fiction.

Okay. I've actually, I mean, I've seen charts that suggest that the numbers of overdose deaths are down in the last few months. Well, maybe in the last few months months because you're comparing it to COVID, but certainly not overall. Compared to 2019 when we left office, the number of people dying from drug-related overdoses has, I don't know, doubled, tripled, and they are not.

They are not in any way, shape, or form having any success in that regard. Now, don't get me wrong. I am happy for the fact that they're opening recovery units and that they're putting more resources into recovery. I think that is important. It is worthwhile to go back to, you know, in 2015 to 19, we were down to $3 billion a year of oil money. And before that, we'd been at about 10. So we were dealing with quite a budgetary challenge when we were in government. So unfortunately, we didn't invest fast enough in recovery. But we also know that recovery is only part of the problem, that recidivism is very high, even amongst people who do recover.

For that recovery to take, there needs to be a whole bunch of other wraparound services. This government has cut income support, thrown thousands of people off of rent supplements, and slashed our affordable housing and other supportive housing programs. So the number of people who are without homes in Alberta has tripled or quadrupled in the last four years. So I think that safe consumption is an important part of the model. It's not all there is by any means. It's a holistic thing. But the UCP and someone like Pierre Polyab have irresponsibly politicized and reframed this issue in a way that has resulted in people dying, and they need to be held accountable for it. So you'd hang on to those treatment facilities that have been newly opened, but you would reintroduce opioid agonist therapy and safe supply.

Well, opioid agonist therapy is a form of safe supply. Safe supply is a step that we had not gotten to when we were in government. And I want to see the evidence and consider the evidence on that very fully with a whole range of people who are actually capable of giving evidence, not people who are telling anecdotes because they happen to drive through downtown Vancouver once. So I want to see the evidence on that. But safe consumption, for sure. That is a way to help folks and a way to get them attached

and connected with the kinds of supports that will help them stabilize their lives enough that they can then take that step towards recovery. Completely different topic. Are there people in Alberta who should be paying more taxes or companies that should be paying more taxes? Well, we've said back in December, I was really pleased to be able to roll out our competitive jobs investment strategy for the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

I had a speech there. There were a number of elements to that strategy that I talked about. One of them is both ensuring and making a commitment that corporate taxes should remain the lowest in the country here in Alberta, and we would commit to that. remain the lowest in the country here in Alberta, and we would commit to that. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the daylight or the delta between, you know, 11 or 11.25% and 8% has created any extra jobs. Meanwhile, we're hearing even today that the failure of this government to move forward on a digital tax credit, on an Alberta investment tax credit, on the kinds of incentives that actually support emerging businesses that are trying to diversify and create new economic activity, as opposed to the ones who've been here already and who are making record profits,

that those folks are not being supported by this government. So when it comes to a tax regime for businesses, I want one that's smart. I want one that's going to create jobs and incent investment growth in new areas, not one that's just going to randomly throw money out to companies that are already doing really well and also appear to be in the process of actually shrinking their workforce. So that's what the UCP plan did. The evidence has not backed up its success in any way, shape, or form. And meanwhile, we're hearing over and over about sort of emerging companies, entrepreneurs in emerging sectors picking up and going to other provinces

that actually provide much more strategic support to them. Rachel Notley, you've been really generous with your time and I appreciate it. Thanks for joining me today. All right, it was a pleasure. Take care. Cheers. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show.

The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, Thank you. If you're enjoying this show, spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. you