The Paul Wells Show - Jason Kenney's mea culpa

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Jason Kenney is back on the show. The former Alberta Premier and Conservative MP offers a mea culpa for his time as Defence Minister, takes issue with a former guest’s views on the war in Ukraine, and tells the story of a young Pierre Poilievre. 

How often do you hear a politician say something was their mistake? Well, I found an ex-politician. You know what? Mea culpa. One area where modern Conservative governments didn't live up to their own aspirations was in maintaining a sufficiently robust Canadian defence. Today, Jason Kenney, Canada's former defense minister, because he did that on top of all

the other stuff, on the state of the world. I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. You know how people are always saying political leaders need to get some experience in the real world? Well, these days that's what Jason Kenney is doing. Until two years ago, he was the Premier of Alberta. Before that, he was the Minister of Immigration in Stephen Harper's federal government, and then the Minister of Social Development, and then the Minister of National Defence. He was elected to Parliament when he was in his 20s.

Anyway, all that stuff is over. For good, he says, and I have no reason to doubt him. These days he's on a bunch of boards, and he works at Bennett Jones, one of the country's biggest law firms, handing out strategic advice to clients. I decided to catch up with him because a conversation with Jason Kenney has always been a great pleasure, and also because immigration and defense policy are big issues once again in our federal politics. He had some things he wanted to say in response to William Thorsell, who was on this podcast a few weeks ago, warning against more war in Ukraine.

And when I suggested to Jason that he hadn't followed his own advice on defense spending when he had a chance to make a difference, he agreed with me. The guy's full of surprises, even now. Jason Kenney, thanks for joining me. Great to be here, Paul. Thank you. I thought that we should catch up when I ran into you at the Mulrooney funeral, which was many things, but the most astonishing schmooze that I have attended in a long time. And kind of the international festival of strange bedfellows, like people who used to be just

absolutely a daggers drawn for decades were all together to sing the praises of Brian Mulroney. Was it strange for you? Well, yes, but I think he would not have had it any other way. And it also had the feeling of a kind of, well, to use a cliche, an end of an era. When I looked around at that funeral and the reception and the apres wakes that went till about two in the morning, I realized how many of his generation weren't there. But I mean, it was sort of the last gathering of that tribe of the Conservative Party. And of that tribe of the Conservative Party. And it made me recall, Jean Charest gave the political eulogy, and he was the youngest minister. He was appointed when I think he was 28 years of age,

and Mr. Mulroney was in his 40s. So they were on the young side of that team. And many, many of their colleagues were no longer here. But it was an amazing ecumenical broad church gathering of Canadian politics. And I think a beautiful and fitting sendoff. You were in politics very young as a liberal in Saskatchewan. But you sort of spent the shank of your political career, say the late 80s and most of the 90s, trying to put a stake through the heart of Mulroneyism. Let's just say I was a confused young man. You must have been listening to my appearance on your competitor, David Hurley's podcast.

He, I accused of being my gateway drug into politics when I was a young guy interested in politics in Saskatchewan and David was kind of running the liberal party there for Ralph Goodale. And I ended up working in Ralph's office in the legislature. But to be honest, I hope no 16-year-old has fully developed political ideas. And I had a bit of a family history in the Liberal Party. We were close to John Turner. So it wasn't a deep, zealous ideological commitment.

Also, I will say this, and David Hurley and I kind of chatted about this. In Saskatchewan, there was a different liberal tradition, very much a sort of continuation of the Laurier, what we would now call classical liberal tradition, which had a modern expression in Premier Ross Thatcher in the 1960s, who despised, frankly, Pierre Trudeau as a kind of European-style social democrat. So the Saskatchewan liberal tradition was what we would now say was pretty right of center, actually. Well, I mean, I'm not sure you'll agree with this, but even until the end of his elected political career, Ralph Goodale represented a bit of that.

Yeah, exactly. And he was very conscious of it. I remember having the temerity to give him political advice in his election campaign. I guess it would have been 88, that he should run to the right of the Tories who were running these huge deficits. And in fact, he did. His whole campaign was elect somebody who's going to be responsible with the public purse. And he had this ad with a cash register and talked about the Tories and the NDP just trying to bribe you with your public purse. And he had this ad with a cash register and talked about the Tories and the NDP just trying to bribe you with your own money. We're going to bring back fiscal responsibility. So different times for sure. That would not be welcome in any corner of today's Liberal Party,

I suspect. Although I was doing some archival work for a short book that I've got coming out about Justin Trudeau. And I noticed that in the famous, famous McLean's debate of 2015, he went after Stephen Harper by saying that Harper had run eight consecutive deficits. And in fact, I think it's fair to say that Trudeau ran in 2015 as much more of a fiscal moderate than what we've seen since then. So to some extent, I guess the conclusion we can draw is that politics is to some extent a choose-your-own-adventure. Like you decide which of the various genes in your party's phenotype you're going to express.

Right. The only problem is you don't get to choose the events with which you're confronted. I was flattered when we chatted at the Basilica because you had been listening to my podcast and you had heard the then latest episode, which was where Bill Thursell lectures the rest of us on how to think about Ukraine. The war to me is an outcome of American policy on NATO.

It's very hard to see military progress from the point of view of Ukraine going forward. So if you don't have a reasonable prospect of reversing the front where it is today, and I don't think there is one, then you've got to start figuring out what your interests really are. He's not at all convinced that pursuing this war makes a lot of sense. He's got company, some prominent intellectuals who think that the better part of valor is just to sue for peace now, negotiate with Putin, lay down arms, get this war done with.

You're not convinced. No, I'm not. First of all, you're triggering my Catholic guilt by reminding me that I was schmoozing and kibitzing before the funeral as opposed to being in prayerful reflection. But it seemed that everybody else was, so it was inevitable. And yes, I'm sorry for lighting up on you about that interview. I understand why you did it, and I'm glad you did. I think it's important that different views be expressed.

And I share your esteem for one of the great Canadian journalists, Mr. Thorsell, originally in Albertan, right? Yeah, from Edmonton. Canadian journalist, Mr. Thorsell, originally in Albertan, right? Yeah, from Edmonton. But I found his take on this slightly bizarre. I don't mean this as an ad hominem, but a fact. I think there's very little difference between his basic analysis and that of Tucker Carlson, say. And I think he got a lot of facts essentially wrong. I mean, the biggest one is, one of my general rules in politics and events, Paul, has always been generally to take things at face value.

I think there's a tendency in politics and political analysis too often to imagine that everything is three-dimensional chess and there are all sorts of obscure and coded messages and motives. I think Vladimir Putin has been pretty clear about what his motive is. and motives. I think Vladimir Putin has been pretty clear about what his motive is. If you go and listen to his two-hour rant that he broadcast the night of the invasion and his two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago, the core message is that Russia must redeem itself from the humiliation of a separate Ukraine, because there is no such thing as Ukraine. There's Kiev Rus', and this goes back a thousand years to Prince Vladimir of Kiev, and it's a wound on the spiritual unity of the great Russian peoples that Ukraine has gone off on its own.

Stuff that most of us in the West don't even begin to comprehend. And then he jumps into all of this zaniness about denazification and so forth, the moral corruption of the West. He's trying to save Ukraine from the seduction of the morally degenerate West. I mean, look, Tucker went there essentially to bait Putin into blaming America, essentially, to bait Putin into blaming America, into blaming NATO, into the storyline that Bill gave you about Putin's motives. And he didn't take that bait. He said a few things, a few things in both the announcement of the special military action and the Carlson interview about NATO.

But that was not the core of the message at all. and the Carlson interview about NATO, but that was not the core of the message at all. You know, another thing I found troublesome is I thought Bill sort of was dismissive about Ukraine as a project, as a nation. He referred to it as the second most corrupt country in Europe after Russia and the poorest country in Europe, which is true, but he also accused them of having a coup d'etat.

This was not a coup. It was a popular democratic uprising of mainly young people in the square in Kiev, trying to address the legacy of 20 years of corruption, much of it driven by Putin-aligned oligarchs, and trying to modernize their country. So I just, I'm sorry to start on my own rant. their country. So I just, I'm sorry to start on my own rant. I just, I was the defense minister who launched Operation Unifier in 2015 to train the Ukrainian military. President Poroshenko told me that that played a critical role in the modernization of the Ukrainian military. I provided real time, high resolution satellite imagery of the front in the Donbass at the time,

even against the wishes of the Americans for some reason, which played a critical role in Ukraine's defense at the time. I've been there several times. I know many of the key actors. And what I see is just a proud, incredibly courageous people trying to stand up to a murderous thug who's under indictment at the Hague, who has kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, whose war aims are absolutely clear, the total elimination of the Ukrainian state. And at best, we fought him to a standoff. Let me appoint you defense minister again. What would you advocate that the course for NATO be over the next year or so?

Well, look, he's also making the case that because it's a standoff, because Ukraine has no evident prospects of pushing Russia back at this point, we should abandon Ukraine. I don't follow the logic. If Ukraine hasn't been able to make more progress in this war, it is at least in part because its Western supporters, including primarily the United States, have been temporizing the practical support. There's been this, you know, on almost virtually every weapons system, this months-long internal debate in the administration. And now, of course, things being derailed by Trump-esque people in Congress. But to look at this from an American interest point of view, the Ukrainians, using largely

limited and used equipment, have managed to eliminate half of the Russian army in two years, the largest prospective adversary of the United States. I know that's not why the United States is doing it. The point is, it's the single most efficient investment they've made in advancing American security interests in the post-Cold War era. But still, they've held back enormous, particularly longer range weapons out of fear of uh that this is going to lead to a provocation it was putin who did the provocation so i hope that the renewed interest of people like president mccall in trying to get the europeans to up their game and a resolution in congress will give ukraine a new lease on life in this fight. Unfortunately, this has put a spotlight on our own Canadian diminishing military capacity, how very little equipment we've

been able to share with them because we have so little of our own. For example, two years ago, we could have seen this coming. We could have and should have made long-term orders for procurement of things like 155 millimeter caliber shells, which are the mainstay of the Ukrainian artillery. That requires manufacturers knowing that they've got long-term reliable contracts in order to make the capital investment in new plants, hire and train people, order the supplies. Two years in, we haven't done any of that. It's probably about a $400 million project. And I think DND has allocated that like $4 million. So this is one granular example of how I don't think, you know, despite

all of the stirring rhetoric from Prime Minister Trudeau, we've taken this seriously enough. I believe he would say at this point that you were the defense minister when Stephen Harper cut Canada's defense spending to below where it is now. Stephen Harper cut Canada's defense spending to below where it is now. Yeah, we also ramped it up to the highest level, I believe, since the 1950s during Afghanistan, because when we came to office inheriting the count of our mission, we saw that our folks didn't have the equipment that they needed. So there was a considerable ramp up. I think we went up to 1.7% of GDP by around 2011 and then your you know post global financial crisis in the 2011 election we had a commitment to balance the

the budget over time and and that meant frankly stripping out some of the war footing costs but i'm not you know what mea culpa um i think uh one area where modern conservative governments including that of mr maroney didn't live up to their own aspirations was in maintaining a sufficiently robust Canadian defense. It is hard to keep the Canadian population focused on these concerns because we live in some of the safest real estate on earth. We complain about the neighbors, but they're probably out of the habit of invading us. And I have a hard time imagining even a poly of government moving rapidly to 2% of GDP on defense. There's always going to be other claims on that kind of money. It seems to me. Yeah, of course. Especially now in the context of the aging of our population is no longer an abstraction. It's in real time. There are going to be massive growing demands on the healthcare system that's already in crisis and provincially, is going to be, well, it's set for a long-term deterioration. So finding, and Pierre's commitment is, if there's an increase in spending in one area, it's going to require an offset somewhere else.

He says that's going to happen for defense through reductions in aspects of the international development budget. And I think there are things to legitimately cut there for certain multinational organizations and regimes whose values we don't share, but it's not $15 billion to be sure. So I think it's viable to imagine some increase in the baseline defense budget under a Polyev government, but it's not going to be the $15 billion that gets us to 2%. I should reassure you and warn our listeners that I haven't brought you in this week to be the poly of whisperer. I'm not going to ask you to parse everything that he's doing. I just don't think it's fair to you or him. And there's so much else to talk about.

Although I should mention, I think I played for Pierre something, another role that David Hurley did for me. I first met Pierre when he was 16 and he worked in my first nomination campaign for parliament back in 1996. He was in high school and I think that was the first campaign he volunteered on. And I. Are you, are you going to do the call center

story? I love the call center story. Let's do that. I walk into a, we're doing, we've got volunteers doing a membership sales calls. I walk in and they're in these do that. I walk into a, we're doing, I've got volunteers doing membership sales calls. I walk in and they're in these cubicles. I can't see people, but I can hear these voices. And I hear a very mature baritone voice.

I'm picturing sort of a, I don't know, a businessman or a lawyer in his forties. And he's crushing it. This disembodied voice is closing like 80% of the membership sales calls. disembodied voices is closing like 80% of the membership sales calls. And during the break, this young, somewhat scrawny high school kid comes out and that's him. This is the guy, Pierre. And I just realized right then, I remember the moment like it was yesterday, that this young man was a savant. He had a natural skills for what he has honed and refined through a lot of discipline practice sometimes error but i'm not surprised to see how he has emerged and um i frank i'm proud of him he's a young guy who didn't grow up with any natural advantages he he grew up um as we know

adopted and he's made everything he's a self-made man in the truest sense of the word. Do you remember the pitch that he made back in the day? Yeah, he'd say something like, you know, hello, Mrs. Smith, this is Pierre Poliver calling on behalf of Jason Kenney, the tax fighter. Mrs. Smith, do you support Jean Chrétien's soft on crime, high tax, anti-Alberta policies? No, I didn't think you would, Mr. Smith. So can I put you down for a three or a five-year membership? Can I take your MasterCard or we'll have a volunteer drop by to pick up a check right now? And he just made it so easy.

I can't imagine why anybody didn't sign up. Well, I'll just ask it. He doesn't always seem as interested in governing as he does in marketing. Well, look, he's not in government. He's in opposition. That's primarily a communications role. And the roles he had during the Harper government were primarily communications roles, parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, minister of democratic reform is not an operational department. He did have nine months at my former ministry, employment and social development, which is the largest department in the government of Canada. And I'll tell you

an interesting story. I became very close to my deputy minister at that department, the great late Ian Shugart, who went on to become a clerk at the Privy Council and sadly passed away after a long fight with cancer last year. He and I got along like a house on fire. I frankly got along with all of my deputies very well. And we had tremendous mutual respect and I dug into the policy details. And when Pierre was appointed, Ian was not happy with the prime minister, about why am I getting this young hyper partisan communicator, but Ian told me, he and I had lunch about eight months ago in Ottawa, as kind of a farewell, and he told me that he saw Pierre grow enormously during that time at ESDC. And he saw something really impressive at a federal provincial territorial minister's meeting where Pierre actually sat there for the whole day and actively listened to and took on board legitimate points being made by his provincial counterparts. And changed course on a couple of policy issues to try to find a consensus. And he said, suddenly the light went on for me, this is Deputy Minister Shugart,

that this guy is a lot more depth and ability than I ever imagined. And he said, I only grew in respect. He said, my view on him changed quite dramatically during the nine months that he was in my ministry. So I think there is that aspect of Pierre that perhaps some of his critics don't see or don't want to see. Perhaps he hasn't spent a lot of time showing us lately. I mean, I caught glimpses. I've been having a copy with Pierre Paulier for 20 years. I used to see that guy too. I've seen less of him lately. Again, being a leader of the opposition is just about the toughest gig in politics, right? Because you don't get to create facts.

You basically only get to respond to them. Although he's done a pretty good job of shaping the battleground. You don't really have levers of power over your people. The only thing you can do to keep your team disciplined and focused is, it's like herding cats, but it works if you're up in the polls, perhaps, and he certainly is. And also, the dynamic is, or at least it traditionally was, back in the day of the TV clips, that you only succeeded as a leader of the opposition if you showed up on tea every other night with histrionics in question period. You know, Rod Love,

Ralph Klein's conciliare, used to say that political journalists are just fight promoters. And the opposition leader who doesn't bring the fight isn't doing his job. And that's the challenge. You know, I think the best advice Brian Mulroney gave to Pierre was be a happy warrior. And I actually see that if you're looking for it. But when Pierre is being a charming guy, watch the 30-minute video of his speech to the, I think it's the Beth Seddick Synagogue in Montreal two weeks ago. It's remarkable. Not a note, not a single note, and all through it, he's weaving in charming personal anecdotes and humor. That's the happy warrior that Brian Mulroney called for. And it's

there. It just doesn't show up, I think, on the Twitter clips and on YouTube videos. One of the biggest events in the year ahead is going to be the US presidential election. And the big question is, will it be Trump or Biden? Assuming both of them survive until the fall. Your last federal campaign was in 2015. And if things had worked out very differently and Stephen Harper had won another solid government, you folks would still have been in government when Donald Trump became president. It has always seemed to me that that would have been a tough nut to crack for a Canadian conservative prime minister. Have you given that any thought? Yeah. And I think it's potentially dangerous for Canada in many ways.

I think right now, as it sits, pretty high likelihood of a second Trump term. And if he's elected on a commitment to impose a 10% global tariff on everything entering the United States, that's an existential threat to the Canadian economy, to NAFTA slash KUSMA. And at the same time, if Prime Minister Trudeau sticks with the October 2025 election timeline, you're going to have, what, nine months of a Trump-Trudeau dynamic, where I suspect Prime Minister Trudeau's advisors will tell him, I think what I suspect he will do is to spend those nine months to campaign against Donald Trump. And I can already see the AI generated liberal ads that morph Polyev's face into Donald Trump's.

And so, as we know, Donald Trump does not take kindly to that kind of provocation, political provocation. to that kind of provocation, political provocation. Saw how he responded after the G7 meeting when Trudeau was heard making some critical comments. So I think it's a dangerous situation where we're going to need to get back into negotiation mode to protect the Canadian economy in the context of Trump, again, trying to tear up our free trade agreement

with a prime minister who I think will probably, all of his incentives will be to be politically reckless with the Trump administration. So that concerns me a lot. I hope that the prime minister puts our economic interests ahead of some all too clever partisan tactic like that. Well, okay, I think that's probably all true. Incidentally, I don't think that the specter of a second Trump presidency is any particular help to the liberals at all. It's clear from polls that Canadians don't see Trudeau as a shield against Trump, and conservative prime minister governing while Trump was or is president, particularly because about half conservative voters would take Trump's word over any Canadian prime minister's word in any conflict. That would have been tricky last time. Yes, it would have been. You know, I think Prime Minister Polyev would be professional in his dealings with any American administration. I mean, we've had prime ministers and presidents from different political philosophies, and they've

always found a way to work together. I mean, certainly the most harmonious relationship, the most productive that we've ever seen was the one that was just celebrated at Brian Mulroney's funeral, the relationship between him and Ronald Reagan. We're not going to have that kind of dynamic anytime in the foreseeable future. There's no way that Prime Minister Polyev would be any kind of a pushover for Donald Trump. I think, if anything, as much as I have deep fundamental concerns about the direction of American politics and conservatism in particular, under the influence of Trumpian populism, the truth is that a conservative government here would at least have a better job getting access and being heard out in a Republican

Congress and administration. So I don't think that's a bad thing. I was certainly, when I went down there as premier, to try to get, you know, I had just made an Alberta government investment in restarting and hopefully finishing the Keystone XL pipeline. This is in 2020. And I went down there to sort of lobby them, not only to sign the presidential permit for the border crossing of the pipeline, but to try to hardwire it so it'd be difficult for a future president to reverse it. And I got a very welcome hearing from the administration, obviously. So, you know, but the Biden transition team wouldn't even talk to Canada about Keystone. It was the very first executive order, I believe, that he signed within hours of being sworn in, which was, I think, a huge insult to Canada. So I probably share the views of most Canadians about Mr. Trump, but we shouldn't imagine that

Mr. Biden has been a unqualified friend of this country. There's a NATO summit, heads of government in Washington in July, 10 days before the Republican presidential nominating convention. Given that there's some chance that the next president, if it's Trump, will pull out of NATO. What do you think the order of business should be for that NATO summit in Washington? Well, to get to at least 2%. And I think there is newfound momentum on that. I mean, most of the European countries are, I think 16 of the NATO countries are going to be there or achieve that target this year. As you know, Poland is leading the way to basically 4% of GDP. And now you have certain Eastern and Central European countries calling to move the target to 3%.

The Americans are there, of course. So I think there will be growing momentum. And you know what? I'm deeply concerned about the noises coming from Donald Trump on Ukraine and his congressional allies. But the fundamental point that he has made about Europe under-investing in its defense is, I think, a legitimate point. If you strip away all of the kind of spear-shaking about this, what Trump is basically articulating is that American taxpayers have had fundamentally to subsidize Europe's and Canada's defense now for decades.

So fair point. So I think that's what it has to be, but I would also hope a renewed commitment to finally give Ukraine the equipment that it needs properly to defend itself. A lot of people have said that one role that Canada could play in this is to substitute Canadian natural gas for Russian natural gas and Canadian resources in general for the resources of a cruel world. It's a lovely idea. Is it feasible? Is there a market for specific Canadian exports on this front? First of all, it's a fungible global market. But more than that, the world looks at us in amazement because people who are literate on global energy markets know that we have the third largest proven and probable oil reserves in the world,

like the fifth largest proven and probable natural gas reserves, and that we are a rights-respecting liberal democracy with some of the highest environmental standards that is a natural ally. I'll tell you, I first met Narendra Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat in 2008. And after he thanked me for coming, the very first thing he said was, we are opening a large LNG import terminal here in Gujarat. When can we get Canadian natural gas? Because he said, I don't like buying Qatari gas. The Qataris fund the Diobandi terrorists in Pakistan who are attacking us in India. I don't like funding our adversaries. We want a commercial energy relationship with our close friends in Canada. That was 2008. We haven't moved a molecule onto the Pacific market since then.

And that's essentially the message that Chancellor Schultz gave us in Halifax last year. It's the message that the Prime Minister of Greece gave recently in Canada. So, you know, the Europeans would be there in a jiffy, but regardless, it would be on the global market. And this is not that complicated. I mean, we have the Repsol LNG terminal off the East Coast that could be converted into an export facility, but we can't build an East Coast LNG terminal because the prime minister tells us there's no demand for our natural gas. This is ridiculous. Talk about not reading the room. About a week after the invasion of Ukraine, I was speaking at an event at CIRA Week, which is the

biggest global energy security. And the minister responsible for the third largest oil stocks in the world stands up and says, basically, we'll give you green hydrogen windmills and lectures on climate policy. The entire room, this is people from the global energy markets, were astounded by the inability to see the bigger picture here. So yeah, that's something that, look, we're not going to be at 2% of GDP on defense. We're not going to have carrier groups as Canadians. But there is something fundamentally that we can do to improve international security,

and that is not to allow places like Qatar and Venezuela and Russia and Iran to have a monopoly on global energy markets. It is true that while Joe Biden wins plaudits in Canada for his environmental policy, under him, the United States has also become the world's largest exporter of oil and of natural gas. It's a hell of a trick, and it's one that the Canadian government doesn't seem interested in imitating. Yeah. Under President Obama, US oil production, he actually went. The Barack Obama who on Super Tuesday when he won the primary said that this is the night that the oceans stop rising. After he left the presidency, one of his first speeches was to the American Petroleum Institute where he received an award and he gave a speech bragging about the fact that under his administration, U.S. oil production had doubled.

Right. I think they're up to like 12 million barrels a day, which is two and a half times what Canada produces. But, Paul, at the same time, in the last decade, the United States has led the largest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of any country in the world. And I think not just in absolute, but also perhaps in relative terms. So under Obama, you have a doubling of oil production. And under Trump, you have the largest reduction in American GHG emissions ever because of gasification moving from thermal coal to natural gas. So the point is that the Americans are not shy about this. They need continental energy security. We can help to provide that, which is why I really do not

understand why Prime Minister Trudeau did not lay down the law to President Biden on the abrogation of the presidential permit on Keystone XL, which if that had not happened, residential permit on Keystone XL, which if that had not happened, we would now be shipping about 800,000 barrels a day of Canadian heavy crude to Gulf Coast refineries. Instead, they're lifting sanctions on Venezuela to import that from a failed socialist thugocracy in South America. It makes no sense to me. Hey, I put you on the cover of McLean's magazine in like 2018, 2019 with a bunch of your conservative counterparts in other jurisdictions. In a photoshopped cover, which most people thought we actually somehow got us all in

the same room for that. Yeah. And a lot of people since then think that the guy who wrote the article wrote the cover line, which called you all Trudeau's worst nightmare. That story has been my worst nightmare ever since then, because every time one of you guys lost power, 80 people on Twitter would say, well, this is more proof that Paul Wells is an idiot. Kenny's gone. Pallister's gone. Scheer's gone. Trudeau's still there. Was there just a kind of a lag time,

a hang time built into the devastating power of carbon taxes to beat liberals? Or we're talking in the week that the carbon tax has gone up at the pump. Do you think you guys are definitively beat on this file? Or do you think- No, to the contrary. I think you were just ahead of your time in that story. Perhaps we were as premiers, but the same alliance is there. You've now got seven of the 10 provinces opposing at least any future increases to the carbon tax. And this is becoming, I think, a problem for Premier Eby in British Columbia. And I don't think there will be a federal retail carbon tax by Christmas of 2025.

by Christmas of 2025. And I think the provinces led by Alberta that have been critiquing this from the get-go have been right. By the way, Alberta is the first province, the first subnational jurisdiction in North America to have imposed a quote-unquote price on carbon, a carbon levy or tax on the industrial emissions way back under Ralph Klein. And we used the money in part to invest in green tech, like carbon sequestration projects, which have now, which has now been, by the way, a technology that was criticized by people on the green side of things, but which has now been validated and is a key part of the Pathways Group plan to decarbonize the oil sands. So I think Alberta has been taking the right approach on this. You know, there's something fundamentally dishonest about the fancy and the clever people

who've supported this carbon price. And they say it's a moral imperative that we don't do this, we're letting the world burn. But the same people know that the only way this tax will have any meaningful impact on Canadian emissions, and will never have any meaningful impact on global emissions, by the way, is at a price approaching $200 a ton. We're now at what, 65. So that's why they're only going up in teensy increments year by year. It's the frog in the pot approach to this carbon tax, which is why even Environment Canada admits that by 2030, the carbon tax will have had no meaningful impact on Canadian emissions. It takes until 2060 or something, and like a price of $240 a ton. So here's my point to the fans of the carbon tax as a moral imperative. If it's really a moral

imperative, then put your money where your mouth is, be honest with people and say, you're going to have to pay a $240. We're going to have to increase this sucker by fivefold or more overnight and see how that goes with the voters next October. What would putting your money where your mouth is look like on your side of the debate? With the lamented exception of Aaron O'Toole, it seems to me that the conservative policy on this has been to pretend to have a carbon policy. Well, I think Stephen Harper had this right. And I suspect it will likely be the Polyev approach, which is on carbon pricing. We're prepared to talk to the Americans, but it makes absolutely no sense. Look, for a country that's responsible

for 1.5% of emissions, at a carbon tax of $170 a ton, maybe one third of our emissions reductions would be accountable to the carbon tax. But a tax that hits trade exposed industries in the context where they're trading with the United States that does not have a tax or China. If you really want to get serious about carbon pricing as a tool, it has to replace all the regulations. So it's a pure Pagovian tax that satisfies the 300 or whatever economists who've signed their annual letter in favor of carbon taxes. This is the alternative to, but not in addition to, regulations approach. And secondly, it has to be international. And there's one way of doing that without every country signing on, which is to impose a carbon tariff adjustment, basically a

tariff on imports from countries that don't have it, like China. So we're not encouraging Canadian manufacturers to offshore. And finally, to integrate with whatever the Americans do. I think that's the intelligent approach, but in lieu of that, significant investments in green tech, in emissions reducing technology. And again, I think Alberta has been helping to lead the way on that. I think we're getting pretty close to wrapping it up. It's been fun catching up with you. Do you miss this politics stuff? I know. I hardly follow it. And every time I go, people say, are you going to run again? I feel sometimes like I realize people can only think about me in a political context,

which is probably not a good thing. I'm enjoying having a more balanced and regular life without all of the pressure. I'm grateful for the time I was able to serve and learn a hell of a lot of things, met amazing people, great experiences, but it is a very, very demanding kind of life. And I think I did my part. Jason Kenney, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright. And our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.