The Message of the Left Is So Bleak | Premier Danielle Smith

There's no improvement that can be made. There's too many humans on the planet. Young people who are choosing not to have kids because they're worried about what the future might hold. This a very bleak vision. So it's interesting to me that somehow that because it has that spiritual component is so attractive to young people. I just find it self-defeating.

Well, they're afraid, but the thing is, it's not just that they're afraid. You know, because it also appeals to their irresponsibility. So what happens to people is if you truncate their time horizon. So let's say you put people in a situation where they know that they're going to die in battle in two weeks. Well, they're going to party like there’s no tomorrow because there's no tomorrow.

And so if you tell people that there's no tomorrow, well that does terrify them, but it also offers them an excuse for irresponsible hedonism. And so that's a very toxic combination, and the left has definitely capitalized on that. Now, the problem with that is that it leads to despair. Not very long, assuming you're not dead, it leads to despair, right? Assuming that the apocalypse doesn't come. So it's not a good long-term solution.

I was writing this morning about the end of the Exodus story, and so it's detailed out in numbers, actually. What happens is that the Israelites are now on the edge of the promised land. So now they're looking to actually occupy the future. Moses sends scouts out to check out the land. The scouts come back and make two reports.

One report is unbelievably pessimistic. It's like there's nothing but giants in the land of Canaan. They're going to crush us militarily. We don't have a hope. The future is dismal. Everything is terrible. You're a corrupt leader. You led us through the desert only for your own power, and we should go back to the tyranny of Egypt.

That's one group of reporters. The other group is Caleb and Joshua, and they say, well, there's some troubles ahead but we can manage them, and we're going to be delivered. Right? What happens is that God brings a plague in and strikes down the faithless scouts. Joshua, who's the scout with courage and faith, leads the Israelites into the promised land.

There's an archetypical significance to that story, you know, truly. Leaders who envision the future are called upon to presume that we can manage to offer that vision to young people. You need faith and courage because that's what you have to confront the future with, because you don't have the facts at hand and you never will.

You say something like you do when you get married, and the idea is we can do this. That's what you say when you have kids: we can do this. It's the business of leaders to say that, especially to young people. That we've got this. If we put our heads together, if we abide by the proper moral principles, if we make the right sacrifices, if we're responsible, we can make the future the promised land.

So conservatives have that at their grasp if they want to take it, that vision. As you said, the vision of the left is unbelievably toxic. It's very bleak. I believe you've just called Alberta the promised land because that's exactly how I look at what it is we're trying to do in Alberta, and it's working.

I mean, I couldn't have been more astonished at what happened post-COVID when we said we're getting back to normal, and we're going to invest in our economy, and we want people to come here to help us build this place. It has been more successful than I ever could have imagined. We had over 200,000 people come to Alberta in 2023, and they're continuing to come. It's young families.

In my view, and I just said this, I was on a radio program today. You can look at the problems; you can say, oh yes, we've seen now a surge in housing prices, and we've got issues of crowded classrooms. We've more people who need healthcare. Of course, whenever you end up with people who find themselves displaced and don't get a job, you do have a problem with homelessness and addiction.

But my view is I would rather take the challenges of a growing economy, where people are wanting to solve the problems, than the reverse, which is managing the decline. That’s where Alberta was at for the last 10 years. I'm just seeing aspirationally because people want to come here and want to be part of what it is that we're providing.

It's very simple; the ones that I've met at various festivals over the summer say, you know what? I can afford a home here. My dollars go further because the taxes are lower. I'm able to raise my family and have the conversation about whether or not one of us wants to stay at home.

Those are the very basics that people are looking for in life, and so I think we're trying to provide that here. I think that people are responding to it well. If the question is, is Alberta the promised land? The answer is do people who are in the desert want to go there? The answer to that is yes, because you have this net influx, and so people are making that decision all by themselves.

Whatever you're offering is obviously worth pursuing in comparison to what they have, and that is the eternal definition of the promised land. You do see that by the proclivity of people to vote with their feet. It is the case that Alberta is one of those places that I think beckons property to young people for exactly the reasons that you just described, not least because of the still intact preponderance of an essentially small-C or classic liberal ethos that characterizes not only the population from the bottom up.

It's interesting to me because we actually now think we have more conservative Premiers in the country than we have other parties. There's myself, Scott Moe in Saskatchewan, Doug Ford in Ontario, and we’ve got conservative leaders in Atlantic Canada as well. There is something that has happened at the subnational level, and those are all the services. We are the ones who have the primary responsibility for creating the economic environment and the social support environment that's going to be able to support people.

I think it's telling that notwithstanding the fact that we've had a dysfunctional federal government that is operating on an entirely different set of values that I think is destructive for the country in some ways. At the subnational level, we have conservative leaders who I think have been able to counteract it to a large measure. Maybe that'll ultimately spill over federally. Maybe people will have finally had enough.

I think I’m surprised to see the folks of Toronto have finally had enough. That I think came as a surprise to everybody. That's definitely a kind of miracle if even the folks in downtown Toronto, who have not voted anything other than liberals since 1993, have said this vision is not one I want to buy into.

That's a very important turning point, I think, for our country. We need it.