264. Naheed Nenshi: Is Premier Danielle Smith Failing Alberta?

Alberta’s Official Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi joins to discuss Danielle Smith’s government, the separatism debate, immigration and Indigenous rights, as well as the pressures facing Alberta’s healthcare system and economy with host Aaron Pete. 

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

I am the leader of the opposition in Alberta, the leader of Alberta's New Democrats.

Aaron Pete 0:04

What happened in Alberta that made you decide criticism wasn't enough? That you actually needed to try and replace Daniel Smith as premier?

SPEAKER_01 0:13

We had what's called a grid alert. Grid alerts are very serious. So I went onto the premier's social media and she was busy attacking the federal government and Stephen Gubo and the clean energy regulation for the grid alert. And she was saying, you know, things like, It's so cold, global warming doesn't exist. And I was like, What are you doing? We need to tell people right now to turn off their lights or people are gonna die. And then I said those fateful words that, Chief Pete, I'm sure you have said to yourself. And those fateful words were, somebody's gotta do something about this.

Aaron Pete 0:43

If Daniel Smith is so bad, why aren't you winning?

SPEAKER_01 0:47

I think we are winning. You know, we've had three public polls in a row showing that if an election were held today, we would win a small majority.

Aaron Pete 0:54

What do you think Premier Daniel Smith gets right? If anything. Thank you so much for being willing to join us today. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself for folks who might not be acquainted?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Sure, Chief Pete, thanks so much for having me on, and thank you for doing this. Uh, in the world we live in these days, the place for nuanced conversation sometimes seems to be missing. And I love that you do this work. So I'm Nahid Nenshi. I am the leader of the opposition in Alberta, the leader of Alberta's New Democrats. Uh, before that, I was mayor of Calgary for 11 years, three terms. Uh, and my background is that I grew up uh here in Calgary on Treaty 7 Territory, um, went to the University of Calgary, worked in the private sector for a long time as a management consultant, starting with McKinsey and Company, the big international firm, traveling all over the world, uh, moved back here in the year 2001, just before 9-11, uh, because I wanted to be more engaged again in community. So I became a professor in a business school, a consultant on my own, but also just really, really deeply engaged in both municipal government because I love cities and how cities work, but also in the area of civic engagement. My I was a terrible, terrible researcher when I was a professor, but my research such that it was is in the area of civic engagement, how and why people get more involved in their communities. Uh, and one of the things I learned in doing that is that it's actually very easy to get people to volunteer in the community. Over literature, over time, over geography, people always give them the same reason for why they don't volunteer. Uh uh, let's let's play this with you, Chief Pete. What do you think the number one reason people don't volunteer in their community is?

Aaron Pete 2:51

I don't know. I would guess being busy.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, that's what people always say. I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, I don't really care, I don't have a passion for anything. It turns out none of those are right. Uh, the correct answer is nobody asked me. So our job as people who aspire to leadership in the community is to help people understand the role of community service. I like to use the Sanskrit word seva, selfless service, in being human. Marion Wright Edelman once said, service is the rent we pay for being human. So that's what I've really been engaged in and trying to get people more involved in their community. And one of the things I learned was that it's relatively easy to get people to volunteer in the community. You just have to ask them. But it's really hard to get people engaged these days in politics. Fewer people are volunteering on election campaigns, fewer people are even talking about politics. And so I made it, I'm now talking 16, 17 years ago. I decided to try an experiment to try and get more people engaged in politics. And basically, all I did was ask people to run for office. And every single person said no, particularly women said no. I struck out every time. And I always joke that I'm used to striking out with women, but this was different. Uh, no one thought that there was a place in government for them. And so many people said to me, Well, if you're so passionate about this, why don't you do it yourself? And I came up with every reason not to get into politics. I don't look like a politician, I don't talk like a politician. I don't particularly love kissing babies, shaking hands, hanging out with puppies, rainbows, and decision making, um, which are, you know, things you probably need to be a politician. Um, and people would say to me, Look, if you really believe that the world can be better if government is better, you got to put your money where your mouth is. So 16 years ago, I threw my hat in, started at 0% in the polls, five months later was elected mayor. Um, and here we are. So that was a really long introduction.

Aaron Pete 5:00

I'm curious, just on that note, it is often said that serving in government is a public service, but I think it's feeling less and less that way for people because there are people who choose to be career politicians. There is, it's hit a point now where you can make a very, very comfortable living being a politician in a way that historically, from my understanding, it didn't used to be. You used to have the elders in your community take up these high-ranking roles within your community, and they did it as an act of civic duty to help guide the community and look outwards. They had already had children, they'd already kind of gone through chapters in their life and they looked outwards. Now, being a politician feels like then that's the door to private opportunities. That's the opportunity to kind of make a name for yourself. It's become something different. Do you still think that being a politician is a civic service to the community?

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Well, you know, I probably agree and disagree with what you're saying, which is I believe it has to be. Because frankly, as you know, in your own leadership role in your own community, it's hard. Um, and you know, we don't ask people to live on starvation wages anyway anymore, but there are easier ways to make money. And particularly when you are a provincial or federal politician, the travel is difficult, it's hard on your family life. I'm not trying to make it sound like anyone's a martyr here, but you have to have a passion for trying to make change in the community. You know, just yesterday I got a text from a friend of mine who does an enormous, she's not a politician, but she does an enormous amount of volunteer work in the community. And she texted me and said, I'm on my way to the annual general meeting for this nonprofit whose board I sit on. And I don't even want to go because the people are so small-minded and so angry, and you have to deal with that every day. So how do you deal with it? And the answer I gave her was you got to remember why you're there. And you have to remember why the other people are there. You're there because you want to help. You're trying to do something good. You don't need this in your life, right? Plenty of other things you could be doing, but you're trying to do some good. And the people who are there, you know, perhaps this is the biggest thing they'll ever do in their life. And that can lead them to some bad thinking and bad decisions. Now, so it sounds like I'm agreeing with you, but the area that I might disagree with you on is I believe politics works better when we have people in politics from every part of life. So we do need young people. We don't just need elders there. We do need people with very different professional opinions and professional backgrounds to be able to bring what they're bringing to the table, people with different life experience coming to the table. So I don't want it to sound like I'm blowing smoke, but I've spent a lot of my time over the last 16 years with indigenous communities, particularly the First Nations and Metis communities. And I thought I kind of really knew the score, right? I knew what people needed, how to talk to people and so on. But I got to tell you, having two Indigenous MLAs working with me, Brooks Arcan Paul, and Jody Calder's Stonehouse, not only are they everybody's cousin and everybody's auntie, and they know everybody, um, but it's a nuance that I don't have because I don't have that lived experience. So for me, I think it's really important that we have politicians who come from everywhere. You know, when I ran for mayor, I was very strangely qualified for the job. You know, my master's degree is in nonprofit administration and management. I had spent 10 years, I wrote a book about the future of Canadian cities, and I had spent 10 years talking about cities and municipal government. I had a column in the paper critiquing the municipal government. I'd probably been to more council meetings than anyone who wasn't a council member. So I was really well qualified. Meanwhile, one of the guys who was elected at the same time as me had never been to a council meeting before. He didn't have a post-secondary education. He was an entrepreneur, he and his wife had a flower shop. He had worked as a forklift operator before. And that guy turned out to be one of the best city counselors that I have ever seen. Because he brought a, and and not even ideologically all that aligned with me, but he brought a real sense of this is what matters to real people, to the community that a lot of the rest of us had forgotten about. So to me, I really believe that you need to keep that in mind. But I'll tell you, Aaron, it is frustrating right now. The government that I deal with every day is like nothing I've ever seen before in my life. If you had asked me any time up until two years ago and you said something mean about politicians, I know I would have said, listen, there's a lot of people that I disagree with. We may have different paths that we're on about what we think is the right thing to do, but the vast majority of people in politics are honest and they're there because they desire a better community. And this is their way that they think they can do it. And when people say, oh, all politicians lie, it actually really bothers me because up until I started in this job, I could count on two hands, maybe one hand, in all my years in public life, the number of times a politician had straight up lied to my face. Now it's different. I am sitting across from a government that I don't understand. Because everything I see about them is I feel like this is a government that has no actual interest in governing. I always joke that it's like the college republican club somehow became the government and they're using the opportunity to settle scores and uh score political points and stay in power for whatever reason. And what I always say to supporters, to volunteers in my party is look, we exist to win the next election. But the difference between us and the other guys is for us, winning the election is the starting point to be able to do good things in the community. For them, winning the election is the whole point. And for me, it has been difficult over the last two years because I'm forever going, well, why would you ever do that? Like, why are you wasting time with a motion? This is a this is in today's news. Why are you wasting time with a motion that says you can only fly the provincial and federal flags in a school and you must play the national anthem once a week? Is this really going to change anybody's life for the better? Why are we spending hours on this when healthcare is in crisis, when public education itself is in crisis? Why are we distracting people with these conversations? And by the way, on that front, it's because they want to ban the pride flag, but they're not brave enough to say we want to brand the pride flag. And it was pointed out to them that if you put in this flag policy, then indigenous schools can't fly indigenous flags, that any school can't fly the flag of a nation that they're on. And they went, oh, oops, that wasn't our intent. But because they didn't want to say that they were doing this to ban the pride flag for political reasons, they tried to come up with this whole policy and have wasted unbelievable amounts of time and money at a point where people are really worried about the cost of living. They're really worried about jobs now and in the future, they're worried about healthcare and education and separatism and all of those things. And we're wasting our time on what day of the week should schools play the national anthem? It's ridiculous. And that's been a big change for me to be able to see that in fact, in this day and age, there are politicians out there who, for whatever reason, are distracting themselves from actually trying to make people's lives better with all this culture war stuff and other things that they're trying to score political points on.

Aaron Pete 12:42

So can I ask? You had mentioned that you were mayor of Kelgary and then did a lot of things outside of partisan politics. What happened in Alberta that made you decide criticism wasn't enough, that you actually needed to try and replace Daniel Smith as premier?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

So I had been mayor, as you said, for 11 years. And I decided at that point that it really was time for me to move on. You know, I'm a Gen Xer, I'm 54 years old, and I've spent most of my life waiting for boomers to retire to create opportunity. And I didn't want to be that guy. And I thought, here's an opportunity to bring in new voices. So I stepped away. Ironically, the new mayor was older than me, so my plan didn't quite work out, but uh but I stepped away and I had two years of, you know, great retirement, to be frank. Um, to your point about how it's not impossible to live comfortably as a politician. I was making so much money and working so much less, um, and doing stuff that I really loved and enjoyed. I was consulting organizations around the world on economic development, on how they could be more effective in delivering services. And I learned that there was a job that I did not know existed before I was in it, which was professional public speaker. Um so I was having a good life. But this is what happened. It got really cold one day. And uh, I'm gonna tell this story. I'll let people in behind the curtain for a moment, Aaron, because I'm about to tell a story about the electrical grid. And I was telling it earlier when you had a power outage where you were, so I just find that very ironic. But um, but in any case, it got very, very cold. People might remember in January of 2023 there was a historic cold snap, and it was a cold snap that went across Western Canada from British Columbia to Manitoba and through the Pacific Northwest. We normally don't get cold snaps that are that geographically wide, but that meant that the entire electrical grid was under enormous strain. So on a Friday evening in what we call the electricity rush hour, which starts at about 5 p.m., people get home, everyone turns on the lights and turns on the stove all at the same time. We had what's called a grid alert. Grid alerts are very serious. They mean that you have to reduce the use of electricity right now, or else the grid will collapse and then it'll take hours or days to bring it back up. And at a point where it's minus 45 air temperature in Peace River, Alberta, that means people are gonna die. And so when I got the grid alert, I was like, whoa, we haven't had one of these in a long time. We've got to take this very seriously. I still have a huge following on social media, so I thought I'll better get online and tell people what to do. But it's not my place, so I'll just repeat whatever the premier is saying. So I went onto the premier's social media and she was busy attacking the federal government and Stephen Gibaud and the clean energy regulation for the grid alert. And she was saying, you know, things like, it's so cold, global warming doesn't exist. And I was like, What are you doing? We need to tell people right now to turn off their lights or people are gonna die. So I did what I could on my own social media, which I still had a bigger following than her, I think I still do, uh, to try and get people to do that. And I got a call from the Premier's chief of staff say afterwards saying thank you. But I was like, Well, why weren't you doing it? Why were you trying to play political games at a point where people's lives are at stake? And when the grid alert passed on the Friday night, I sent a note out on social media saying, folks, you did a great job. The odds of there being another problem tomorrow were very low. We don't get grid alerts on the weekend because there's no rush hour where everyone turns the stove on at the same time, but it's still very cold. So, you know, please do your best to conserve energy. And the next day, there was, in fact, a grid alert on a Saturday. And I know how to read that. I know that's crisis. So this time I got on, realized the premier was finally telling people turn off your lights, turn off your stove, whatever. So I amplified her. I did all of that work. And as I was doing that, I got another call from her chief of staff, and I said, How bad is it? And he said, We're within inches of a total grid collapse. And I said, Send out a cell phone message, send out one of those emergency alerts immediately. And he's like, We're on it. And sure enough, a couple minutes later, we got the cell phone alert. And I have a friend who lives on the west side of Calgary, overlooking the city. And she told me that the second they got that text message, she could see everyone's lights go down across the city. And that reminded me that even when politicians try to divide us, when we give people a path to do something to help the community, they're gonna do that thing to help the community. So I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about how sad it was that we don't have politicians who try to do that with people. They're too busy scoring political points uh in Alberta. And then I said those fateful words that, Chief Pete, I'm sure you have said to yourself. And those fateful words were somebody's gotta do something about this. And as soon as you say somebody's gotta do something, you have to ask yourself, wait a minute, am I somebody? Am I the somebody who has to do something? And what is that something? And so I said, All right, I've been non-partisan this entire time. It was a really big deal when I wrote a column that I actually endorsed someone in an election. I've never done that before. I had done a few months earlier. I've always been non-partisan, and I said, All right, how can I help? Do I want to get more involved? Do I want to do this? I talked to a bunch of people. All my friends said, stay the hell out. Actually, what they all said was, as your friend, I want you to stay out. As an Albertan, I can't imagine anyone else who can beat Danielle Smith. And so in the end, I looked around and I said, Listen, I'm at a point in my life where I've still got more to give. I'm not that old. I don't have to be retired. I don't have kids that I'm raising. Um, here's my chance to say, do some more Seva, do some more service. And that's fundamentally how I got into it. And a bunch of people said to me, Nahid, you're gonna hate partisan politics. It's so mean, right? And that's not what you are. You're a consensus builder, you bring people together even when they're irritating. Um and I said, you know, I'm not worried that I'm gonna hate partisan politics. I'm worried that I'm gonna love partisan politics. I'm worried that that piece of it, the debating and the fighting and the being at loggerheads with one another is actually something I would enjoy. I was a champion debater in my youth, after all. And so one of the things that I always have to remind myself in this world is it is partisan. And when you're the leader of the opposition, you're not running anything. So people will call you and say this horrible thing has happened, you know, my disabled son is in this terrible situation, and all you can say is, Well, I will raise it with the minister and I'll raise it in question period. You know, when you're the mayor, you actually say, Let me fix that for you, right? When you're leader of the opposition, your only job is to get elected as the premier and to do what we call the constituency casework, which is helping people on an individual basis, but with very little power behind it. And so I always have to remind myself and my caucus and our candidates that while it's easy to get caught up into the day-to-day cut and thrust of the battle and the question period and all of that stuff, we're doing this because we have the ability to make life better for people. And that's why we're here. And that's what I keep reminding myself every day.

Aaron Pete 20:41

Could I ask? You once wrote that one of your favorite university courses was Executive Federalism, taught in part by Peter Loheed and Daniel Smith.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Lohid, we're in Alberta. I know it's Loheed's in British Columbia, but yeah.

Aaron Pete 20:56

And Daniel Smith was one of your classmates.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

She sure was.

Aaron Pete 21:01

Can you just tell me your reflections? Because you've gone from sitting in those classes with her to now uh being her opposition, and that's an extraordinary bit of history. Yeah, you two are where you are today. Can you just connect those two dots for us?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

I sure can. So I went to university, the University of Calgary, in the early 1990s, which I know is probably before you were born, but um it was uh a really heady time to be um at the University of Calgary. It was the birth of the Reform Party. So Preston Manning was on campus all the time. Um, and he had this like very quiet grad student with him all the time. And that guy just was shy and withdrawn, and we could never get a real sense of him. We could never get a real sense of what was going on behind his eyes. Um, he turned out to make something of himself. His name was Stephen Harper. Um but In addition to that, you know, it was full of people. The the TA for that class, the teaching assistant for that class was a guy called Ian Brody, who was later the chief of staff to the prime minister. And um in that class was myself, Danielle Smith, a guy called Kevin Bosch, who was worked in Trudeau's PMO for a long time. Um, Danielle's first husband, who was a big reform party organizer, I believe, was in that class as well. Not in that class, but in school with us, my was my debate partner, a guy you may have heard of called Ezra Levant. Um, so it really, uh Rob Anders, who was an MP in Calgary, was in that class, I think. So it really was quite a thing. And the class was, as you say, called Executive Federalism. And it was about how provinces and the federal government work together. So it was what it was was a mock first ministers' conference. You spent the semester developing a mock first ministers conference. Um, and it was at the time of the Charlottown Accords, which of course was the referendum post uh pre the 1995 referendum in Quebec. The failure of the Charlottetown Accords led to that referendum. So think of all the parallels. We're talking about separatism, we're talking about breaking the country apart at a very difficult time. I played the role of the Premier of Quebec, uh, Danielle Smith. I thought she was the media team, but she has corrected me. She was actually, here's the deep irony, the federal government. I feel like I shouldn't tell this story. Maybe I will. Let me just say this. I have known Danielle for many, many, many years. Uh, we went to school together. We weren't best friends, but we were certainly in the same social circle. And uh, in the years in between, I've spoken with her many, many times. I probably have an email saved on my phone somewhere, which was when she was leader of the opposition. Um, and she was running for government. You may remember there was a big scandal. She was supposed to win that election in 2012, and she lost it, partially because one of her uh candidates made some really derogatory anti-LGBTQ comments, basically saying gay people should burn in a lake of fire. And she didn't know how to deal with that, and I still have an email probably saved on my phone somewhere. I should look for it one day. Gmail never forgets. Um, of her saying, what do I do about this? How should I manage this situation? So that's the kind of relationship we had. Since I've gotten into this job, I have said maybe 100 words to her in two years.

unknown 24:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

That's sad about partisan politics. But on my very first day in the house, she came over to say congratulations, welcome on your first day, which is great. That was, by the way, the day that the government, for the first time in Alberta history, preemptively used the notwithstanding clause to strike away people's rights. And we were there until 2:30 in the morning on my first day at work. Um, but you know, she reminded me of that story, but then she also told me kind of a shocking story about let's not go too much detail about it, but how she handled that course in a way that frankly was shockingly unethical to me. And I was like, This is the story you're telling me on my very first day in the house that you got a better grade by doing something that I would call unethical or maybe cheating. And it just I don't know why, but I still remember that going, That is not what I would have pegged you as when we were in university together, and all those years later. So that said, I choose not to think of it that way. I choose to think more about the fact that you know we had a great time at university and we learned a lot about the community. I was president of the students union at the university at some point after that, right after that. But how we growing up were able to be in a place where we could differ from one another politically, but still be deeply engaged in the community and understand the importance of that. I think the students union at the University of Calgary a million years ago did a very smart thing, and I wonder if it's still the same, which is all the party clubs on campus, the conservative club, the liberal club, the new democrat club, et cetera, they all had to share an office. So they all sat in the same office together every day and had to actually deal with one another. And I think that's actually pretty cool. And when I got into the legislature, I was frankly quite surprised that the opposition members and the government members don't really talk to one another very much. And I thought that was a shame.

Aaron Pete 27:07

I want to go through more of your perspectives on the premier and where the government is falling short. But I also just want to see, what do you think Premier Daniel Smith gets right, if anything?

SPEAKER_01 27:20

There are a few things. You know, I was asked this question recently. Um, I was sitting in front of the Chamber of Commerce in Calgary, and they were like, is there anything they get right? And I tell me three things she gets right. And I was like, oh, am I gonna come up with three? And in the end, I had five or six. Um, but I'll tell you, there are some specific policies that make a ton of sense. So, for example, I've worked really hard. This is a small one, but it is really important and really impactful. I worked hard for a long time on helping build a film and television industry, a digital industry in southern Alberta. And one of the things we were really missing was the provincial government participating in that through a competitive tax credit. Uh and Jason Kenny, when he became premier, put in that tax credit. Danielle Smith has kept it in place, and that's really created a bunch of jobs in a very good industry that will continue even in economic hard times. One of the things I disagree with the premier on is the overall application of what she calls the Alberta model for addiction and mental health. I think it is not holistic enough, and I always say people can't recover if they're dead. So we've got to keep people alive and in a position where they're ready for recovery or recovery will fail. But that said, the recovery part of the Alberta model is great. Building more recovery centers, partnering with First Nations to build those centers, and most important, making them publicly funded so that rehab is not only for the wealthy, has really made a difference in the lives of many, many people. Um, staying on healthcare, I'll just give you one more. Uh, there are there are others. You know, there we don't vote against everything in the house, but I'll give you one more, which is uh starting right now, the first set of students in two new medical school programs uh are being uh are just starting school now. And if you live in Grand Prairie, Alberta, or up in northwestern Alberta, uh you have the opportunity to start at the University of Alberta Medical School in Grand Prairie and take your courses in Grand Prairie. Similarly, you can start at the University of Calgary Medical School in Lethbridge. And the idea behind these programs is to keep people in smaller communities so that they stay in those communities and so that they do family medicine in those communities. Um, that's a terrific program. It's cheaper and smarter than starting a brand new medical school, but hopefully we'll address a lot of those concerns in smaller communities.

Aaron Pete 29:50

I'd like to talk about separatism and your perspective on it, but I'll just lay out from British Columbia. So I'm not in your province. I don't know all the nuances of how it got to where it is. But I do think I deal with something it that's similar in concept, which is the unmarked graves controversy. Yes, that there were there were uh accusations that 215 unmarked graves uh were found in Kamloops uh shortly after, about a month after they came out and said there are anomalies, we still need to excavate in order to confirm. And a lot of my First Nation communities don't want to touch that topic with a 10-foot pole. They go just let the community figure out, let's not talk about it. I think there is a group of people, you can say they're 10%, 20%, who say, if you don't dig, we don't believe you. And so I'm trying to navigate the complexity of this topic and understand where my community's coming from and many First Nations are coming from, while also understanding that there's a challenge with how the story was written by the CBC at the time that was not accurate and that people rightfully have concerns. How I see the Alberta separatism tying into that idea is that there is maybe 10%, maybe 20% of Albertans who feel like they have been maligned and mistreated by the Stephen Gaboes, by the federal government under Justin Trudeau, and feel that that needs to be addressed. Looking with uh a bird's eye view, seeing how Premier Daniel Smith has chosen to allow the referendum on a referendum in response to uh some of the petitions that were going around is a way of potentially diffusing that that group of people who are angry and who will not be satisfied until changes are made. And then it gives her potentially a bargaining chip with Mark Carney that goes if we don't see progress, that voice, that group of people are gonna get louder. And so um I'm just interested. I could be completely mistaken. You likely have different perspectives on what's resulted. But as a bird's eye view, that's kind of what I see the game playing out. Where am I mistaken? Where am I missing something?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Well, look, this is your podcast. Uh, so far be it for me to ask you a question, but I'm gonna ask you a question. Feel free to tell me uh to bugger off and answer your question. Go ahead. But I'm really interested in the issue of unmarked graves in residential schools and how you are navigating that. Because the challenge that I see is that over the last 10 to 15 years, we have had political movements everywhere, um, particularly on the right, but the progressive side is not immune from this either, who have learned that it is politically saleable to get people really angry and to just keep people angry all the time and mistrustful all the time. And the challenge with that is if you go about telling people you can't trust experts, you can't trust traditional knowledge, you can't trust scientists, you can't trust the media, you can't trust the CBC, you can't trust my political opponents, the only people you can trust is me. Well, guess what? Eventually they're not going to trust you anymore. And certainly ask a guy called Jason Kenny what happened when he did that, right? As I often say to Premier Kenny, who I was also, he didn't go to the University of Calgary, but he's part of that same generation of people that I've known forever. Um, you know, as I often say to him, Jason, the arsonist waves the right to call the fire department because now he complains about it all the time. But I'm like, well, look. So, you know, part of the issue here is that nobody trusts anybody. And so I would argue to you, it's probably more than 10 or 20 percent who say, I don't know in indigenous communities, but I would say more broadly, it's probably more than 20 or 10 or 20 percent who say, well, dig it up. And, you know, we'll not hear answers about, well, is that respectful to the remains of these children to do that? And I'm just curious and feel free not to answer, but I'd love to hear from you. How do you navigate that? How do you navigate that anger and that mistrust and how people just will not listen to, for example, the elders' wisdom on these stories because they need proof of their own eyes?

Aaron Pete 34:01

Uh, that's an interesting question. So I've interviewed Francis Widowson, who you may be aware of, who uh will She was my colleague at Mount Row. Yeah, and so I've spoken with her about her concerns with the story and how it was written. Uh, she was very respectful to me. I've spoken to Tim Thielman, who doesn't believe we should be participating in reconciliation. And my broad view is there are arguments they're making that get so lost because they're the ones delivering it that good faith indigenous people actually do agree with. Like, I do believe there's a reconciliation industry. I do believe that lawyers um and consultants make a lot of money. And that's one of Francis's arguments. Uh, she is correct that we don't have evidence of the claim. It went national, and a lot of money was poured into this without verifying the facts of the case. And so she's right on certain pieces. I've said I don't agree with her approach of taking sandwich boards. That's not how I would do it, but she has every right to express herself that way. But I think my goal is always to bring the temperature down in the room and validate where possible, like you're correct that there aren't uh these bodies being confirmed. Um, but at the same time, a First Nations elder who did have their child child pulled away from them has every right not to want to participate in a debate about whether or not the history of that is true. There's kind of like the pursuit of truth doesn't include everyone, right? Just because you're a citizen doesn't mean your goal is to pursue the facts of a case. And that's kind of what Francis is doing. But when you're a community member who is abused in residential school, your experience isn't really up for debate in the same way that Francis wants to debate this 215 story. And so I just think there's different groups of people who want to have different conversations. And I think it is an academic conversation. What do we know about the site? How far do we want to go? Uh, what is fair to put a community through? And what are their responsibilities? Because they did accept $12 million to excavate and they have not done so. And so I think just accepting kind of the truths where you can and drawing the lines where you can't move forward is how I've tried to approach it. I've received a lot of feedback from people that are described as denialists saying just thank you for hearing the argument. Thank you for not calling them names and insulting them and running away and saying they have nothing to say. And that's just how I try and approach these things. That's why I'm not trying to get dramatic about the separatist pieces. I don't want those Albertans to feel like they don't have rightful concerns. And I'm sure that's a line you're trying to walk as well, is how do you acknowledge their frustration while also not saying that the next move is potentially to separate from the rest of Canada?

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Yeah, thanks for that. And I promise I'm not dodging your question on separatism. I can talk about that forever. Um, but you know, this is an important thing. And if I can put on my professor hat for a second, right? I would ask on the other issue that we're talking about. I would wonder why we're not asking ourselves one other question. Does it matter? Why are we so focused on the existence or non of unmarked graves when we understand that there are, and we learn this from the TRC and from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and from so many other sources, that we know that there was abuse at residential schools, we know that attendance at the residential schools was often involuntary, and we know from the TRC that there were thousands of kids that never came home. And certainly we can hear that, well, they might have died on reserve. People got TB in those days, sure. But there aren't other schools where they had to have a protocol in the school for what happens when kids die and where do they get buried. And so the question I ask is yeah, we can focus on the truth or the non-truth of Cam loops, right? But does that actually distract us from the real questions of where are we now? You know, First Nations men in Alberta have a life expectancy. Oh gosh, the number is escaping me, but I want to say 20 to 25 years less than non-First Nations men in Alberta. That's not right. And do these debates distract us from the fact that we have some serious work to do? You know, my friend uh Elder Casey Eagle speaker, I think he gave me that little piece behind me here, um, doesn't like the word reconciliation. He prefers to use reconciliation. Where's the action? Right. And what are we doing in order to really make a fundamental difference with people? And are these debates, and I'm an academic, I'm a professor. Uh, I love academic debates, but are these academic debates distracting us from the work? And can we all agree on the work?

Aaron Pete 38:54

I would just respond with it was First Nations that demanded truth before reconciliation. Yes. And then I would say that it's a it's a weak spot to go, I want the truth from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I want the truth about the missing and murdered indigenous women. But here, why are you so focused on it? And I have interviewed Alia Warbus and other elders who kind of go, like, why bother? And it's like, okay, but if you want the truth that results in more funding, but you don't want the truth that that leaves you vulnerable, and you go, let's just not focus on that, then citizens across the country go, it it there's no dispute that we've spent billions on reconciliation federally, and many provinces have spent a lot of money. So it's not, there hasn't been no action. Uh, we can debate about whether or not I think it's equitable, like every nation has experienced the same amount of impact from those dollars spent. But there has been large investments. And in response to that, we formed a national uh Truth and Reconciliation Day. We invested billions into trying to excavate to answer these questions. And so I just I look at my own side and go, like, are we weak on this? And if that's my defense, like who cares? Canadians care, and it's their taxpayer dollars, and so they have a right to go. What happened here? And why don't you want the truth on this? But you want the truth about other things.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

That's a very fair point. It's a very good argument, but I'm it's interesting. Sorry, I shouldn't be interviewing you, it's your podcast. And I do want to get back to separatism, but I I love this conversation with you. It is called nuanced after all.

Aaron Pete 40:24

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

You know, I what I'm hearing you say is that you're deeply concerned that the money's being spent well. And I don't think anybody would disagree um with you on that argument. Um, and you know, when we live in a world where I'll give you one small example, you know, it's been it's been my great privilege um in the last 16 years to form what I hope are very deep relationships with particularly First Nations and Metis communities uh here in southern Alberta and now across the province. And and we can talk more about well, I'll just tell you this. If you had asked me a year and a half ago, do you think that the one thing that will finally unite all the chiefs and councils in Alberta will be a defense of the colonial government? I probably wouldn't have taken that bet.

unknown 41:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

But the level, and I'm sure you've been talking about it on the podcast, and I hope you talk about it more.

Aaron Pete 41:20

I'm trying to get the chiefs on to talk about their perspective in the case that they're talking about. Have you had them? Have you had them? No, I'm we're getting closer. I'm hoping they said maybe in September, but I'm working on it.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

You know what? We can we can might be able to help you with who to talk to there. But um, but um it's it's remarkable because the level of political activism that we've seen among not just chiefs and councils, but within indigenous communities on the issue of separatism is like nothing I've ever seen before. Because, you know, there's always been a vein in some indigenous communities, especially in First Nations communities, that our treaties are with the crown, we are sovereign, we don't get involved in politics, and we certainly don't get involved in provincial politics because our relationship is with the crown. And oh my goodness, the young people and the communities getting it from north to south in Alberta, getting engaged against separatism is like nothing I've ever seen before. The fact that for the first time in Canadian history, we had a unanimous vote of all the chiefs of no confidence in their provincial government was a shocking thing to me. And um, and you know, a few days later, the chief that happened by the way on budget day in uh in Alberta. So I was in the budget lockup. And when you're in the lockup, now I'm really gonna tell a tale out of school, when you're in the lockup, you can't be connected to the internet, right? Because you're in the lockup. And so, you know, my phone was on airplane mode, my uh computer was on airplane mode as we're analyzing all of this. I forgot to put my watch on airplane mode. And at one point, we're typing away, and I I got a text, right, on my watch, which said the Chiefs just unanimously voted non-confidence. And I might have gone, what? And everyone in the room was like, What? And I'm like, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. I'm not I'm not connected to the outside world in any way. And of course, then I couldn't do anything. I had to put my watch on airplane mode immediately. And um, and nonetheless, that was a huge day. Uh, and then our first sitting day when we were back after the budget was a day I'll never forget in my life, which is all the chiefs sat in the gallery in full regalia with full headdress and just looked at the government. Uh, and every one of our questions was on indigenous rights and the failure to move to action on reconciliation uh in the government. And it was a very uncomfortable day uh for the government, but it's a day I'm never gonna forget. I've never seen anything like that in Canadian politics before. And it really was something unbelievable for me. You know, I have my own headdress. You know, I'm I'm honored to have names with the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Sutana community and to have been granted a war bonnet. Well, when I was granted that war bonnet, you know, it was when I was just finished being mayor. And I remember saying to the elder, one of the elders that was there, who I know very well, I call him my Uncle Reg, Reg Crochet. And I just said, you know, thanks for giving me this war bonnet. Um, I will find a place of honor to display it in my home. Spoiler alert, I saw and found out, figured out where to put it. But what he said to me was, Oh, you're completely misunderstanding the purpose of this. You keep calling it a headdress. This is not a headdress, it's a war bonnet. That's what we call it in our tradition. And I said, I know, but I don't really understand what that means. And he said, It's not a thank you gift for the work that you've done, it's a recognition that you are a warrior and that you must continue to be a warrior. And I looked at him and I went, I think you made a terrible mistake, right? I'm no warrior. And he said, Nah, you've been a warrior for human rights for our people and for other people. And now that you have this thing, your job is to wear it physically and symbolically. I still haven't figured out where to wear it physically. Every time I wear it, it's inappropriate and I get in trouble, but to wear it symbolically and continue to act as a warrior. So when I give speeches to people in the community, I always tell that story. And I say, look, every one of us is called upon to be a warrior for the causes that we believe in. So we need to continue to do that. And that's fundamentally what I'm so proud of the communities for right now on the issue of separatism. So let me answer your question on separatism after that little segue. So I think you've got it a bit off. So far more than 10 to 20% of Albertans are frustrated with Alberta. It's like the inverse of that. 80 or 90% of Albertans are frustrated with Alberta. And we've always been frustrated with Alberta. Uh, with Ottawa, sorry. Um, that's just a nature of living in Alberta. The difference is that over the last several years, that frustration has been weaponized by politicians into real that's the wrong way to put it. It's always been weaponized. Peter Laheed weaponized it, right? That's how you got deals for Alberta. And frankly, that's how Alberta became the wealthiest province in the country. It's different now, though. And the difference is that because the government has not a record they can stand on on things like healthcare, education, fiscal responsibility, all of those things, economic development, the cost of living. They've only got one track to play, and that track is Ottawa is Unfair to Us. And this is the song that the premier continuously plays. It's not that different from previous premiers. What is different is her pandering to the separatists on this. So there's always been a portion of Albertans who want to separate. There's always been a portion of British Columbians who want to separate. And in fact, I saw a recent poll that said 30% of Texans want to separate from the United States. It's sort of always there. And it hasn't grown, it hasn't gotten more powerful, it hasn't taken roots in the community in any particular way. If anything, it's less popular now than it was when Trudeau was re-elected the second time. And we had the Wexit conversations, if you remember that. But the difference is that this premier, instead of doing what every other premier in Alberta history has done, which is to tell the separatists bugger off, you know, run in an election the way the Parti Québecois does. And if you win the election, you can do what you want. And by the way, they did run in three by-elections last June. One of them I won, right? They ran there with unbelievable amounts of money. There's a story in the Toronto Star this week about some pretty shady political donations that supported the Alberta Republican Party in that by-election. They raised $200,000. I feel like they spent more than that watching it on the street. And then in the fourth quarter of last year, they raised $1,000. So where was that money coming from? Right? But they did all this. They ran a great campaign, one of the most professional campaigns I've ever seen as an opponent, right? And they fell flat on their face. Even in the most separatist rural riding in Alberta, where there happened to be a by-election, old Disbury Three Hills, the New Democrats beat the separatists in probably our weakest riding in the entire province. And so rather than take a signal from that and tell the separatists bugger off, stop distracting us, the premier has been pandering to them continuously. And we've always known that there was some kind of a deal there. There was some kind of a quid pro quo, because a bunch of the leaders of the separatist movement are also the people who got Danielle Smith in power to replace Jason Kenny. And so she's done something that no other premier, she's done many things no other premier of Alberta has ever done, including using the notwithstanding clause. She used to call herself a libertarian. Her maiden speech in the House when she was first elected was about how human rights are unassailable and no legislature can take them away. And she's now used the notwithstanding clause four times to take away people's human rights. Pretty shocking stuff. But in addition to that, she has been pandering to these separatists in ways you would not believe. I spoke to someone at the Calgary Stampede, a very prominent person who had no reason to mislead me, who said 18 months ago she told him that they would have a referendum this fall on separatism, whether or not the separatists got their signatures. She changed the law to allow the separatists more time and fewer signatures after the pro-Canada group got far more signatures than anyone was anticipating. She blames the referendum on the pro-Canada petition. But listen, I've talked to many people who signed that petition, every one of whom said, I signed that petition to avoid a referendum. Don't use me as the excuse to have a referendum. The question that the separatists are asking has been ruled unconstitutional by two different judges, particularly on the basis of indigenous issues. She went ahead with it anyway. She changed the law to allow for an unconstitutional question. And the separatists barely got the lower threshold of votes. They never would have gotten the higher one. This would have gone away if she had just not messed with the law. But she did all of this to allow for a referendum that she always wanted. And in fact, the referendum is a government referendum. It's not a citizen-initiated one. So the petition that everyone sign, the poor separate. I actually feel bad for the Separatist volunteers standing in the cold, you know, under a highway overpass, having people yell at them and give them the fingers so they could get a few signatures when the fix was always in, that the separatists were always going to get this referendum. So this sounds just like politics, but it has real implications, real life implications. First of all, the referendum itself is going to cost probably all in close to $200 million. I would much rather have that money go to healthcare and education and economic development than to a political stunt of a referendum. The referendum has 10 questions in it. One of them is, should we separate from Alberta? Five of them are what I would call broadly anti-immigrant questions. You know, when I was a political commentator, as I was for a long time, people would say, what's the difference in the right wing in Alberta versus in other places and in Canada versus in other places? And I would say, you know, in Canada, we haven't succumbed to the temptation that right wing movements everywhere else in the world have succumbed to, which is to be anti-immigrant. We have a bit of a consensus on immigration. Well, no longer. So five of the questions are things like should children of refugees be allowed to have public education? Should immigrants have to wait before they can access public health care? These are blatantly illegal and likely unconstitutional questions. The remaining four questions are in fact unconstitutional. They are questions about constitutional change that will never happen. Should we abolish the Senate? Should Alberta appoint its own justices to the Supreme Court instead of the federal government doing it? These things will never happen. And so what I call them is separation in slow motion. Because the strategy here is extremely clear. If these referenda pass, and they likely will, they're very populously written questions. I don't mean the separation one, I mean the other nine. That's the government's calculus. They think these will pass. And then when they don't get it, then God forbid this government is still in power three or four years from now. They will say, Well, look, we didn't get what we wanted. We didn't get what Albertans voted for. It's time to have a separatist referendum. And the cycle will continue on forever. It's the Parti Québecoise playbook dot by dot. And what has that done for Quebec? 60 years of economic decline. 350 head offices leaving Montreal. That's not the future I want for Alberta. And so I don't want a future of perpetual grievance, of perpetual anger, of pitting neighbor against neighbor. So those are the head arguments. We already know Alberta now has the highest unemployment rate outside of the Maritimes. We know that even the talk of separatism is scaring away investment. We know that it could kill a pipeline before the pipeline ever gets built. But those are not the arguments that are resonating with Albertans right now. The real arguments that are resonating with Albertan are the heart's arguments. People are proud of Canada. They're proud of what we built here. And yeah, in a family, you're always going to have squabbles back and forth. We built the greatest place on earth. And people are angry that this premier, for the sake of her own political survival, for no benefit to any actual Albertan, is willing to gamble away the future of the country in order to satisfy who she thinks is her base or to be able to play this game. So she now calls herself a fiercely proud Canadian. Has she come on your podcast? I know she was going to. I don't know if it's happened.

Aaron Pete 54:56

This Monday, yes.

SPEAKER_01 54:57

So this will be very interesting because I guarantee you, I'll tell you what she's going to say. She's going to say, I can't believe anyone thought I wasn't a proud Canadian. I've been saying forever that I believe in a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada. It's garbage. She calls herself a fiercely proud Canadian. Now, a fiercely proud Canadian wouldn't have let it come to this. A fiercely proud Canadian would have told the Separatists to go pound sand. But in fact, she's pandered to them and she's played it. And her strategy was very clear from the beginning. The day after the referendum, she was thinking of calling a snap election. And if the remain side won, she'd say, see, I saved Canada. Give me a mandate to reward me for making a deal with Mark Carney, which is the same deal that Rachel Notley made with Justin Trudeau 10 years ago, by the way. We've had all this wasted time, seven years of wasted time with UCP and power picking fights to get us exactly back to where Rachel Knotley was with a couple dollars difference a ton on the carbon tax. That's it, right? But she was gonna say, look, I save Canada, reward me with a mandate, give me four more years. And if God forbid, the leave side one, she was gonna say, I need a mandate to negotiate the terms of separation. I'm the only one who can do it. It's all a political game. But the country is too important for these kinds of political games. Meanwhile, the cost of living is through the roof, unemployment is through the roof, people are fighting it harder and harder to get to the end of the month. Our healthcare system has completely collapsed in many communities. Our classrooms have never been larger, and all she can do is blame immigrants and blame Ottawa. I say we need a premier that takes the responsibility and actually does her job.

Aaron Pete 56:37

On the immigration piece, I've spoken, I don't know if you follow Tony Keller, who's uh a writer for the Club and Mail. Yeah, he wrote a book about immigration uh and what happened under the Justin Trudeau years. Uh, I also had Mikhail on, who's an economist uh out of the University of Waterloo, who talked about how Justin Trudeau and his government pivoted away from the historic highly skilled immigration system in favor of business lobbyists in order to bring down the costs of goods at the front end, at the Tim Hortons level, at those entry-level jobs for a very long time, and that that had real repercussions for low-income people, and that that did create a space where immigration was divisive in a country that had never had immigration as a divisive issue. And so, like, as much as I agree with you that like how we talk about these individuals, I just saw somebody who said, I won't go to that store because they're um they're like an immigrant family, and I was disgusted by that because you should be mad at how your government is. Yeah, that should be that should be abhorrent and we should we should call that out because it you have to hold your government accountable. Because when I asked Mikel and Tony Keller, was this done for Canadians? Like what was what was the rationale in the government's mind from their documents, from their emails, from their discussions? And it was all about improving bit the business sense because there was a fear of a labor shortage coming and had nothing to do with the benefit of everyday Canadians. And the people who lost out the most were those on low income, those were on fixed incomes, and like Tony Keller did a good job of walking through. Like your your your house cleaner is the one who's getting hurt, not your uh lawyer, not your judge. Those people are all fine.

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Except for the fact that your house cleaner is herself an immigrant and a newcomer or himself, right? Sure.

Aaron Pete 58:24

I think he just meant like if you have like somebody from Canada historically, uh, and then you have somebody come in, those would be a lot of those impacts.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

How many of us lucky enough to have house cleaners have been lucky enough to have a house cleaner who was born in Canada? That number is very, very small. So I'm so let's be clear. I mean, I'm not here to defend the federal government. I think they made a horrible mistake on immigration policy, particularly in the immediate post-COVID years. But let's put this all into context, right? When Jason Kenney was the immigration minister, you know, I remember having a conversation with him and saying, let's talk about two things that we think might be logical, right? Number one is if you're giving people points for whether they're gonna integrate in Canada and be good Canadians, if they graduated from a Canadian college or university, shouldn't that mean that they get a little uplift? If they went to college in Canada or university in Canada, probably means they're gonna be able to integrate in Canada better. And I think most people could agree on that. So we said, all right, you know, not we, because I was just, I was just a guy talking, right? But he was actually the minister. But, you know, so they created a pathway to citizenship for international students. When I was in university, you could only work for a year after you got your degree, and then you were kicked out. And they thought, well, in a time when we have a labor shortage of skilled workers, we should have a pathway to citizenship for international students who studied here. Sounds logical to me. The second question was any newcomer to Canada um actually uh will excuse me, any newcomer to Canada who's applying for a job is always asked what I call the dirtiest question, which is what's your Canadian experience? So if people have experience working in Canada, shouldn't they also get some points in the system that decides when you come? And most people go, well, that makes sense, right? All right, so let's create a pathway towards citizenship for temporary foreign workers. So if you work here temporarily, you fall in love, you get married, or you just fall in love with Canada and you want to stay here. Let's have a pathway for you so you're not forced to be on working visas that require tie you to your employment for the rest of your life. These things sound pretty logical. And for a long time they worked fine. And you'll recall that in the immediate, I won't even say the aftermath, I'll say in the later stages of the pandemic, we really did have a very significant labor shortage because we essentially hadn't invited any immigrants into Canada for a year or 18 months. And even that small frame really changed the labor markets. So you'll remember Tim Hortons were closing at 6 p.m. or 8 p.m. because they just didn't have staff. And that's when the federal government made a terrible mistake, which is they kind of turned, I don't know if they did it on purpose or they just weren't paying attention, but they didn't realize the incredible huge, or I shouldn't say they didn't realize, they didn't do anything about the incredible huge influx of international students and temporary workers, in addition to an increase in the number of permanent immigrants that we were bringing in. And that fundamentally is because our population is aging. And so there's only two solutions to that. One is you bring in a lot of younger immigrants. Number two is you have a lot more babies, and the first is easier than the second to have happen because otherwise we'll never be able to afford pensions and so on in healthcare for our population. It's called the productivity ratio, how many people are working, how many people are retired, and it's really changing very fast. So the challenge there was that they brought in way too many people. And that led to a bunch of labor market disruption. Thing is, that's been fixed for two years. The overall population of Canada has been stable or shrinking. And yes, they absolutely made a huge mistake. We've got a bubble of people that we have to deal with coming through the system. Um, but it used to be a good thing that people wanted to live in Calgary and Edmonton and other cities and they were attracted to come here, right? So the problem we have right now is all right, the federal government's screwed up. But the anti-immigrant rhetoric that the people on the right have chosen to use is unbelievably dangerous. So you're seeing it probably in your life every day, Chief, but the anti-indigenous backlash is huge. I'm hearing people say things about indigenous people that I haven't heard since like schoolyards in the 1970s. Right now, similarly, though, the other kind of Indian, my kind of Indian, I didn't even hear that kind of racism in the 1970s. You know, like like schoolyard stuff, like, oh, you smell funny, you heat eat weird food. Anytime there's a car accident in Calgary that's on the news, the social media is all oh, those damn Indian pejorative who don't know how to drive, even if it wasn't someone from that community who was there. So the monsters that have been unleashed, hate crimes, the level of hate crimes in this country has never been higher. That should not be happening. And that is not a natural response of people to the policy failures of the federal government. That is because politicians on the right have been stoking that because they they benefit when people are angry. And these referendum questions have led to the anti-immigrant and racist sentiment like I have never seen before. And the closer we get to the actual referendum, the more we get. You know, I'll give you an example. The the province is in an ultimate act of virtue signaling, is now requiring when you get your driver's license renewed, you are required to bring your proof of citizenship so that now the driver's license will show whether you're a citizen or not. There's no reason to do this. There was no issue of health fraud. But the result of it is if you were born in Canada and you know where your birth certificate is, it's super easy for you to renew your driver's license. If you were not born in Canada, I was born in Canada, but my sister was not, and you don't have a passport, you got to go find your citizenship certificate from 1954 to renew your driver's license, a document that you have never needed before, or you have to order it and get a new one. So the results of this policy, and you know, and it's hitting people that no one thought it was gonna hit. You know, it's hitting like uh two ladies I know recently, elderly women trying to get their driver's license renewed, immigrated here from England in the 1950s after the Second World War, can't get their driver's license renewed. They have to apply for their citizenship papers, and they're worried that they won't get them in time for the able to vote in the referendum, because you need a valid ID, obviously, to vote in the referendum. So that is bad enough. That is policy that is directly impacting people in different ways based on their how how long they've been in Canada. However, the real issue is whenever you see stories about this online, the comments you see are good. I don't want those people to be able to get a driver's license. Maybe they'll leave now. Come on. That didn't happen five years ago. That didn't happen ten years ago. And certainly not this openly. And that's the result of politicians who don't think about the impact of their political games on the real lives of real people. And, you know, the fact that if you just try to go to work at Tim Hortons and you happen to be an Indian guy, you are now subjected to abuse that you were not subjected to before. Just trying to go to work in a minimum wage job. And to me, that is so wrong. And yes, we have absolutely massive problems with youth unemployment. And we put forward a bunch of policies to address youth unemployment, but to blame the entire thing on immigrants in a way that exposes those people to ridicule for doing jobs that other people maybe don't want to do. So I'd love to see from Tony Keller who's that house cleaner he's talking about, who was badly hurt by immigrants, who wanted to job as a house cleaner and was pushed out of the market by immigrants. This is what we call, I call it Schrdinger's immigrant. The immigrant who at the same time is stealing your job, but also sucking up social benefits because they're not working. I'm not sure how you do both of those things at once. Uh, and it's just a matter of really understanding that this is the impact of these policies on real people. And to say the solution to that is to not allow them to have health care or not allow kids into public education, that's not going to solve anything. It's going to make matters much worse. You have kids who are traumatized, who are refugees, who've come from a war zone, and you say you can't go to school for a year or two. What is that going to do in the long term? Uh, so these this is the area where you can see I'm getting a little hot under the collar about it because the response to a very real policy failure on the part of the federal government, and I don't deny that that was the case. That is absolutely the case, is having really bad implications on people and isn't going to solve the problem that frankly is already mostly solved.

Aaron Pete 1:08:01

I'm mindful of time. Uh your team is letting me know.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:05

I'm sure people will watch.

Aaron Pete 1:08:07

Absolutely. Um, I'm hoping we can do maybe a rapid fire where you just give me your takes. I just want to make sure I'm fair to you and Daniel Smith on the ideas that are being put forward. Uh, do you support, broadly speaking, a pipeline coming through Alberta, uh through British Columbia to one of our ports?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:24

Yeah, in fact, uh as mayor of Calgary, I played an important uh assisting role on getting the Transmountain expansion done. And while Danielle Smith was going on and on about a North Coast pipeline that was never going to get built, we were quietly pushing for a South Coast pipeline uh to go to uh to follow the TMX um uh what do you call it right of way? And that is in fact what we're getting. So I'm happy about that. I will remind everyone that the deal that Rachel Knottley made with enable assist from the then mayor of Calgary to get TMX built also had a bunch of stuff in it about modernizing our electrical grid, about renewables, and about fighting emissions. That is missing now, which is going to make it harder for that to be completed, but it has to get done.

Aaron Pete 1:09:11

Wouldn't Ninchi government approve the meta project?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:15

That's a great question. I'm in the middle of a uh listening tour to consult public about this. Um, there is a lot of anger about AI right now. When the Premier announced the meta project, she did so on purpose in the middle of Stampede, thinking that she could take a big victory lap. And in fact, what she's gotten is people really angry because the government hasn't consulted or talked to people. So fundamentally, very, very quickly, because that is a hard question, we're developing our policy now after listening to people, but it really does say that you need a set of regulations and guidelines for these things that look at land use uh emissions, the impact on utility bills and electricity, especially on water, and on whether they really create a lot of jobs in the long term and whether there is community benefit. This is not rocket science. This is how you're supposed to do economic development. This government has been pushing for data centers for three years, but never bothered writing any regulations. This is governmental misconduct, malpractice, and we should have had all of this done so that we could have evaluated Meta on a series of objective rules and determined whether to go forward on it. But it's not just Meta. There are many other hyperscalers in place, and many of them, unlike Meta, are going on agricultural land, they're going close to residential, uh, and they don't have a closed loop system to prevent the use of water, to the overuse of water. And remember, every one of these uses as much electricity as the city of Calgary. It uses as much water as the city of Edmonton. So to say that there should be no impact assessment and no environmental assessment is madness.

Aaron Pete 1:10:51

Does Alberta have a spending problem or a revenue problem?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:55

Mostly a spending problem under this government. Um, you know, they're not fiscally conservative in any way. They have seven times the royalty revenue that Rachel Notley had, but still forecast a deficit as large as Rachel Notley's deficit in the absence of a global recession that she was dealing with. This government is bad with money.

Aaron Pete 1:11:17

When you call this one of Alberta's biggest government scandals around health care and procurement, are you getting ahead of evidence that hasn't actually been established yet?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:26

No, even the evidence that's out, we know that it's a giant scandal. This government, in its move to privatize and its move to line the pockets of its donors and friends, um, has done a bunch of ridiculous things. And in particular, the CEO of Alberta Health Services was fired simply for trying to investigate if there were shady contracts. That in and of itself, the fact that she was fired for trying to investigate it, should be the biggest scandal we've ever seen.

Aaron Pete 1:11:54

How can the same political movement contain Avi Lewis and Naheed Ninchi?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:59

How can the same political movement contain Brian Mulroney and Pierre Polyev? Very different people, um, very different views on the world. And by the way, it doesn't. And I don't want to be technical about it, but the Alberta NDP is independent of the federal NDP. We are financially independent, we're policy independent, and a year ago, um, our members voted to make membership optional in the federal party. I don't belong to the federal party myself. That said, Mr. Lewis has a very different job than I do. His job is to reinvigorate the federal party and the progressive movement federally. My job is to be the premier of Alberta.

Aaron Pete 1:12:36

If Daniel Smith is so bad, why aren't you winning?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:41

I think we are winning. Um, you know, we've had three public polls in a row showing that if an election were held today, we would win a small majority. Um it's not good enough. And one of the things we know is that polls are very inaccurate now because people legitimately we've made politics so ugly and awful that people don't pay attention to politics before an election. But I'll tell you that we're raising more money than we ever have. We have more volunteers than we've ever had. We've knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors uh here in Alberta uh with very positive response. Uh the premier refuses to call a by-election in a strong conservative riding in Calgary because she knows that we're going to win that one. So uh, and the government is trying really hard to gerrymander the boundaries to ensure that they win the next election. If they were winning, they wouldn't be doing any of these things.

Aaron Pete 1:13:33

Nahed, thank you for joining us today. Uh, I'm very excited to have your two perspectives contrasted in interviews. But I also think you adapt more to this space than many other politicians do who keep their thoughts very short. You're willing to kind of go along form and break down uh how you arrive at your positions and share stories where you're not self-censoring yourself about where those stories might lead. So I'm just very grateful to have spent this time with you and appreciate you sharing your insights today.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:00

That is an incredibly polite way of saying I talk too much. Uh no, not at all.

Aaron Pete 1:14:04

No, I like when we get into these things.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:07

After all these years in politics, I still can't speak in sound bites. Thank you so much, and thank you for bringing a little bit of nuance to these important conversations.

Aaron Pete 1:14:15

Thank you so much for doing this. I look forward to speaking to you again in the future as we near an election. Um, can you just share where people can follow your work?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:25

Oh, sure. Just uh you can follow me on any social media. It's at Nanshi uh on Twitter slash X, uh, on Instagram, on TikTok, and reach out. Uh we would we would love to hear from you uh and love to have your ideas.