Showdown with Ottawa: Alberta's New Premier | Danielle Smith | EP 306

And we always forget that our biggest supporters of all of our institutions, funders of hospitals and wings at universities, and all of our charitable organizations, are the people who really did well through free enterprise. They feel like they need to give back to their community. That is the full cycle of what conservatism is about, and I don't know why we don't talk about all of that because that, to me, is a full vision.

I know part of what's tearing our culture apart at the moment, our battle, is about identity. I'm whatever I say I am. What I say I am is whatever I feel I am, moment to moment. It's intrinsic to me, and that's a really pathological, narcissistic, and egocentric viewpoint. It's doomed to failure. The young people that I've been communicating with around the world are dying to hear a proper story about identity.

If you say to them, "Take on some responsibility, have some entrepreneurial daring, establish a long-term relationship, get married, have children, engage civically, right? Grow up and become part of your family, your community, your state, your province, your country, and dedicate yourself to a high-level religious view of the world," then you have an identity. You're embedded in multiple layers, and that actually constitutes psychological stability and purpose.

The conservatives have done a very bad job of delineating that vision for young people, but if you do, they're extraordinarily receptive.

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Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and on the associated podcast. I'm very, um, honored today to have the new premier of Alberta speaking with me, Danielle Smith, who's quite a firebrand from the West—Alberta, that's Canada's version of Texas, I suppose. It's the province in Canada that's blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with, I think, the fourth largest fossil fuel reserves in the world.

That province struggles continually to get to market for reasons of idiocy that we're going to discuss in some detail in this podcast. Premier Smith has newly occupied the Premiership role in Alberta and is starting to put her government in order and to use battle, I would say, with the liberals in Ottawa.

That's partly what we're going to start talking about today: the relationship between Alberta and the federal government, historically and currently. Welcome to the conversation, Premier Smith. It's very good to have you here.

“Well, Professor Peterson, it's a delight to talk to you. Thanks for having me on today.”

So, let's talk about Trudeau and the Liberals and what you have to offer Albertans, and as an alternative, Canadians for that matter. I know the conservatives in Quebec are pretty interested in Alberta's push for increased provincial sovereignty, so it's not as if you'd only be speaking for Albertans when you talk about a more distributed balance of powers in this country, this united country of ours.

I wonder if people know how our country has been established compared to others. Because as a confederation, there's a great deal of powers that have been given to the provincial order or sub-national level of government. Not all governments are structured that way, and I think it creates a little bit of confusion about why we have these battles in Canada.

I think, because we have an international audience, walking through that would be very useful for people as a beginning of the conversation.

“Well, I might go back to an academic journal because as soon as I started talking about the Alberta Sovereignty Act, of course, there was a mass freak-out in the Eastern media. So I went back to an academic paper that had been written just after the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement had been written in 1993. At that time, they said you have to be very mindful of how you implement international trade agreements in the Canadian context because there is a sovereign exclusive level of jurisdiction at the federal level and a sovereign exclusive level of jurisdiction at the provincial level. And they use the term s...”