https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IJlORaohWr4
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, subnational 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 I think 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, and so I went back to an academic paper that had been written just after the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement had been written in 1993 and 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 sovereignty interchangeably with autonomy. It wasn’t a provocative term back then and that is really the appropriate way of talking about how we are supposed to operate as a country that I have no more right to legislate in the federal areas of government. I can’t set up military bases. I can’t go out and negotiate international trade agreements on my own. I can’t sadly even manage passport offices much as my residents here would probably wish I could because they’ve been managed so poorly, but it’s supposed to be a two-way street. That means that the federal government should not be legislating or interfering in our areas of jurisdiction either and they do it all the time. They pass legislation that is unconstitutional, force us to go to court to strike it down. They are constantly reaching in to whether it’s our municipal level of government or our universities or our middle level management in every single department trying to get funding deals so that we end up compromising what we want to do here in service of Ottawa interests and at the same time they show massive disrespect to us as a province in being able to develop our own resources. So I can tell you that Albertans have had just about enough of this and it’s we’ve had times in the past where we’ve had conservative governments at the federal level who’ve been far more respectful of our jurisdiction and our rights. Even we’ve had liberal governments in the past that were far more respectful of our jurisdiction and rights. The past seven years have been a catastrophe in our relationship with the federal government and as a result we have to take some pretty dramatic steps in order to save confederation, to get the country working like it was originally intended to work and that’s what the Sovereignty Act is about. It’s telling Ottawa stay in your own lane otherwise we’re going to put up a shield and we’re just not going to enforce any of the laws you’re trying to impose on us that fall in our areas of jurisdiction or that violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and I’ve been delighted to see that having this conversation it was initially sort of shocking I think for the country for Alberta to be talking this way but if you notice Saskatchewan recently has put forward the Saskatchewan First Act which is very much along the lines of what we’re proposing here so I think that we’ve started a bit of a trend and I think it is going to lead to a better country, a better confederation. Right so for everyone listening Canada has 10 provinces and three territories and the provinces as Premier Smith just pointed out have a fair degree of autonomy and power ceded to them so it’s a distributed confederation and Alberta is one of the most economically has been one of the most economically successful provinces in Canada for the last 30 or 40 years primarily because of the energy industry when it’s not being cut off at the knees by the federal government and as Premier Smith pointed out there’s a constant battle for power depending on how centralized the federal government is between the federal government in Canada and the provinces and that’s really reached ahead again over the energy issue in Alberta. So what’s happened to the energy sector in Alberta since the Trudeau Liberals took power? It’s been devastated since 2014 and some of that is technological change there was a new type of development called horizontal multi-stage fracking which allowed for us to open up massive oil and gas fields and as a result the prices ended up collapsing so that happened just before the federal government got elected so we were already struggling in this province but then as we’ve been trying to find our feet find new markets we have been stymied at every single step there are multiple multi-billion dollar transmission projects whether it’s an energy east pipeline that was supposed to go to the Atlantic coast or the northern gateway project that was supposed to go to the western coast or whether it’s even Keystone XL that was supposed to go to the US Gulf coast every single time that we have tried to to find a way to get more of our products to market we have either had a federal government that has actively cancelled it in the case of the northern gateway actively stood in the way on the regulatory environment energy east they’d spent a billion dollars in the regulatory environment before pulling the plug because they couldn’t see a way to get to the finish line or even Keystone XL. Billion dollars. The US president billion dollars just in the regulatory process and then you had the Keystone XL project as well which US president Joe Biden cancelled within five seconds of becoming president we didn’t have a single word of support that came from our national government and so that has been when you don’t have takeaway capacity now what’s the point is the international investors are looking at what’s the point in developing new fields if there is no place for us to to be able to get our product to market and so we have seen multi-billion dollar projects that have been cancelled there have been those I was just talking about with oil there was a major oil sands project in called the the tech frontier mine same story it would have been a 20 billion dollar project a billion dollars into the regulatory approval process they couldn’t see a way to the finish line they pulled the plug there have been 18 I believe different LNG projects that have been proposed starting around the same time that’s liquefied natural gas yeah well that’s the that’s the liquefied natural gas that the new leader of Germany came looking for cap in hand talking to Trudeau who said that he couldn’t make a business case for that kind of transaction and then decided to make an agreement with shots to ship non-existent hydrogen from non-existent green plants on the east coast to a country that’s desperate for energy now you’re following it very closely and and we started talking about developing these plants at the same time Australia did in the same time the US did they are well along on that and we haven’t even really gotten to square one and all of that is because of federal interference we have the ability to develop our resources at the provincial level so when we’re talking about the subnational level of government we have the exclusive right to develop our resources to develop conservation policy around them but the federal government has the right to to develop the pipelines that go cross border and they have stymied us at every single step and that is part of the reason we find ourselves at the impasse that we’re at today I just feel like there is a an absolute hostility on the part of Justin Trudeau and his environment minister Stephen Gibbo towards our industry industry I mean to talk about the ultimate slap in the face you when we had a a referendum to try to talk about a better way to share the wealth in the in the country they take a lot of wealth out of Alberta and don’t have it go come back our way when we had a referendum on that the answer from the federal government was to give us Stephen Gibbo who earned his stripes by climbing the CN tower to protest oil and gas development and so if that’s the answer that the federal government gave us in when we were trying to in good faith seek a new arrangement with the rest of the country we know where we stand and that’s part of the reason why we were taking such a strong stance in pushing back so I’m curious so for those of you listening who aren’t Canadian and for many of those who are it’s the case that there are transfer payments in Canada from richer provinces to poorer provinces to try to balance out the economic status of the different regions of the country and Alberta sends a tremendous amount of money out of the province and this referendum that you were referring to I believe was one that put put the question to Albertans about whether or not they wanted essentially they wanted the transfer payments to continue given the hostility of many of the recipient provinces to the mode by which Alberta generates its revenue and I believe Albertans voted to to cease offering the transfer payments what is it have I got the story right and what became of that all things considered I believe the transfer payments are still occurring as they it was essentially ignored by the federal government and we got a 62 mandate from Albertans and I think the thing to understand is that Albertans are very generous because we’ve put up with this a disproportionate way of distributing resources for for decades if you look at the amount of money that has come out of our little province to fuel the rest of the country it’s 600 billion dollars since the 1960s and and the fact that we haven’t put it put up a fuss before now is because we realized that there was a partnership with the rest of the country that we would develop our resources we would ship them to eastern Canada eastern Canada would use our energy to develop products that we would need we would purchase them back and they broke they’ve now broken that compact they they not only do they want the dollars to keep on flowing to eastern Canada but they want to stand in the way of us being able to to develop more of our resources and that’s and that’s part of the reason why I think it loud and clear I’m hearing from Albert and saying you know if that’s the if that’s the way you want to operate maybe we should start thinking regionally maybe we should start developing partnerships with just the coalition of the willing the two adjacent provinces who share our values maybe the American states maybe going up to the north to northern Canada maybe there isn’t much point in us continuing this relationship where we have such a trade in balance with Quebec and Ontario if they’re not going to assist us in getting our product to market that’s the conversation that we’re beginning now it seems a bit much to both have to deliver the money that’s produced by the oil and gas industry and also to have the oil and gas industry demonized and shut down like you can’t have both of those right you could maybe get away with one but to get to to ask for both is just you know it’s funny I used to live in Alberta it’s a long time ago now and I was I would I would say fairly federally inclined when I lived in Alberta I like the idea of Canada but as I’ve been out in the east and watching what’s been happening to Alberta over the last especially the last 10 years and Saskatchewan for that matter I keep thinking it makes less and less sense you