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Journalist Markham Hislop interviews leading energy experts from around the world about the energy transition and climate change.
Welcome to episode 293 of the Energy Talks podcast. I'm energy and climate journalist Markham Hislop. Before she was premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith was a Calgary talk radio radio show host. She's interviewed me a couple of times, including in April of 2019, about my book. Sitting in the waiting room, I listened to Smith interview a well known climate denier and field comments from her audience.
Markham:It was a gong show of epic proportions, complete with wild accusations and shouting. Now watching her performance as premier over the past 18 months, I'm often struck by how much it resembles her talk show. When it comes to energy issues and policies, one word comes to mind, chaos. On many occasions, I've asked myself, how in the world can anyone run a government like this? To answer that question, I'm joined by Mount Royal University political science professor, Duane Braut.
Markham:So welcome to the interview, Duane.
Duane:Hey, Markham. Happy to be here. And I was on Danielle's show a number of times as well, but I, of course, knew her before her radio career, because she was involved in politics prior to that. And she's been a public commentator of one sort or another for decades.
Markham:So what do you think about my comment about, gong show, chaos, any of those words come to mind when you
Duane:Yeah. That that was at its strongest, I think, just after she became premier and and during the leadership race for the UCP, where she just seemed to be stepping into it one time after another. And we saw this in press conferences. We saw it with the the controversy over, talking to Art Pawlowski, the, the preacher, over his court case, where she seemed to treat the job just as a a talk show host. I actually think she's had, in some respects, a bit more discipline since she won the May election.
Duane:Not entirely, and and we can talk about that, but but most of the drama seems to have died down compared to where it was, you know, this time last year, for example.
Markham:I'll give you my take on that. And for listeners, particularly those who are not based in Alberta, she became leader when, the former premier, Jason Kenney, was forced out in a leadership review, and she immediately stepped in a number of cow patties as we say in Western Canada. And the thing that's important here is that she went on, TV or she gave interviews where she apologized and she tried to explain her position, and then she just stopped. And I think the reason she stopped is because nobody cares. She says the most outrageous things and tweets about the most outrageous things, and nobody cares.
Markham:I and I think she just stopped. She she realized she didn't have to.
Duane:Well, there are things that I think I have taken issue with and I think others have taken issue with since she won the May election. It hasn't hurt her. I I would argue she's she's more popular now than she was at that time. She's still in a honeymoon, phase. And that's because despite the issues around transgender issues or the pension plan or municipal parties, She has got a major foil, and that's Justin Trudeau.
Duane:And so whatever she says about another topic, people just seem to ignore that because they focus on the attacks on Trudeau. And quite frankly, Trudeau gives her enough ammunition on almost a daily matter. So her mantra for months for for over a year has been stay in your lane. Stop interfering in the provincial jurisdiction. And yet almost every day, Trudeau is trying to interfere into provincial jurisdiction pharmacare.
Duane:The day before that was dental care. So Trudeau, I think, has helped, Smith. It's given her a target, a very rich target, and that I think has allowed Albertans to ignore a lot of the other stuff where she has promised things. She has said stuff. She has violated some campaign promises, but she actually hasn't enacted policy on the pension.
Duane:She hasn't, in fact, created a provincial police force. She just created the ground conditions for that. She has given a speech about transgender, but she actually hasn't brought in regulations. So let's see what happens when she actually implements this stuff, and as is looking very likely, Trudeau was not there. Then what does she do?
Duane:So let's, let's let's stay tuned. I'll also say it's not unusual for people, for politicians to use their background as a lens of which they view their job. I mean, how many lawyers do we see that that still analyze things through a legal framework? Think about Stephen Giebeau. He often still sees climate issues through his environmental activism lens.
Duane:So to say that, Smith is viewing her job through a talk show lens, yeah. Yeah. She is.
Markham:Well, okay. If we wanna compare lawyers as premiers versus talk show hosts as premiers, that's that's a lens of its own. But I've I've had you on a couple times and interviewed you about energy issues. And one of them was r star, where she had a credit program that was was supposedly $20,000,000,000, but really the cost to the government would have been $6,000,000,000 to clean up old wells that, are abandoned wells. And you called her corrupt.
Duane:Well, I called it corrupt because she had been a lobbyist advocating for this policy.
Markham:Exactly.
Duane:She became a premier advocating the same policy. We often see politicians become lobbyists, but this was a case of a lobbyist becoming a politician, which is a bit more unusual. But that's a good illustration. She talked about it. She floated the idea, but she actually hasn't done anything about it.
Duane:Right? And and so was this just a trial balloon? Was this just the Tuesday show where we're gonna talk about our star? And then the Wednesday show, we're gonna talk about police. And then on the Friday, we're gonna bring in Markham Hislop and and bash him.
Duane:Right? So the addition
Markham:to that She could. She would if she could. Though I will say, we formally asked her to appear on this podcast, and she, likely declined. For I don't know why I don't know why, Dwayne.
Duane:She does appear on podcasts of all sorts. You know? So
Markham:you know, asking. But usually friendly ones as a rule.
Duane:Yeah.
Markham:Yes. Well, look, but there are many other okay. Yeah. On my beat, which is energy with, with some climate, it doesn't look like it doesn't look like what you're describing. It's looks like one cow patty after another.
Markham:And the the the renewables moratorium that was declared in August and then was rescinded in February on February 29th with some, rule changes that were pretty outrageous. And then they got softened in the actual regulations, but nobody talked about those. And that was pretty chaotic, and I've had I had Dan Balaban from Greengate, Power on here, who's a developer, talking about what it meant for the industry, and he was just shaking his head. And he's like, oh, you can't run it. You can't do this as a government and run regulations and policy like that when we're talking about investing 1,000,000,000 of dollars.
Markham:It just makes no sense.
Duane:Well, okay. So there are so many issues at play. I didn't talk about renewables, but on that file, I would agree with you. I think it was totally chaotic. She lied multiple times about where the origins come from this, and I think probably the best illustration of this is the Norwell Drew Anderson did a FOIP request, and he got all he got was a date, a title, and some boilerplate at the top, and everything else was redacted.
Duane:That was all I needed. That itself was a smoking gun because it was the date was early June, so just after Nathan Neudorf, the, utilities minister was appointed. K? The, boilerplate was this is what the Alberta Utilities Commission does. When you look at that, and I, you know, teach how to write policy memos and and all of this, that's a memo that you write for the first meeting.
Duane:So brand new minister, he's about to meet the AUC, so they give him this boilerplate about what the AUC actually does and all of that. And then the 3rd piece of evidence was the title, which was renewable suspension. K? So this was June, early June, just after the May election. When does the moratorium come in?
Duane:Late August. How does Smith describe the moratorium initially in August? We got a request from AUC. AUC asked us to do this. That memo, despite all the redactions, told me that, no, Neudorf was telling AUC in June, months before, that they were gonna bring in a a moratorium.
Duane:They did bring in the moratorium. It caused chaos for the renewable sector, and then the regulations came or, the the the announcement came in in late February that only the AUC later released its report on land use, and there was no connection. The the report that AUC did and the way that Smith described at the end of February, those are 2 very different stories. So you might say she lied about that too.
Markham:Might say?
Duane:Yeah. Might say. So the the point is, yeah, the renewables has been a fiasco. I wrote an op ed in the Globe and Mail saying that this was gonna drive out investment. This was gonna create uncertainty, and this was a deliberate ideological choice made by Smith.
Duane:And then you go further back before the election, before she became premier, before the leadership race, and she's having discussions on podcast with Rob Anderson, just ripping into renewables. Not the, you know, renewables have some flaws like other energy sources. No. It was just hammer and tong against renewables. So I think that is been a consistent policy that she has brought through, whether she is telling the truth about where the origins come from or what the rationale was.
Duane:You know, she was talking about wind turbines the other day to a parliamentary committee saying they're bigger than the Calgary tower, and couldn't really explain, you know, what a pristine viewscape was and and all those other things. Quite frankly, she hates renewable energy. And the reason she does so is because she sees Alberta as a natural gas province, and renewables aren't our competitor. She sees it as competitor. And so, yeah, I think on that case, on the renewables file, yeah, she has done stuff besides just talk about it, and it has caused, you know, market uncertainty.
Markham:Well, let me add a little a little context here because I interviewed, Ata Ramon, who is the grid planner for ASO, the Alberta electric system operator. Yeah. So he's on the pointy end of the stick on on this topic. And he started out the interview by saying, we expect a a significant re retirement of thermal operations. Now some of that will be coal a little bit, but but also natural gas, and we expect a significant adoption of renewables in the electric, the Alberta power grid.
Markham:And I went, what? That's not what the premier said. This is exactly the opposite. Now here's the here's an irony I want to note for you. One of the I've had a number of guests on about power grids and renewables in the last couple of months because, I mean, this is a complex issue, and we need to understand it.
Markham:Right? Not just for Alberta. And I have been told, categorically, that when you get over a couple percentage points in renewables, you must reengineer the grid. You have to bring in more storage and more software and all a whole bunch of stuff. And Alberta hasn't done that.
Markham:It has 14% renewables in its grid and has done nothing, very little, to prepare the grid to accept those renewables. So the thing that she's complaining about, the problems she create her government government in part created by not providing the policy framework to direct ASO and the Alberta Utilities Commission and whoever else needed to be to to change the grid to to work with those renewals.
Duane:So on that point then is one of the reasons to have the and then create rules so that these aren't built is to prevent that grid transformation, that that grid upgrading that would be required. That if you limit the renewables, then you don't need to do these other things.
Markham:That's some very serious that's some bad thinking, and I'll tell you why. Because Ata himself, he said, look. We are, for the last 4 or 5 years, the there's been a a tsunami of new technologies coming in that are transforming grids around the world. And Yep. You know, we're we're monitoring these on the transmission side, the distribution side, and and we'll be adopting many of them ourselves over you know, as we've got discussion papers and we're we're preparing for it.
Markham:So that you can't keep the the grid cannot be kept in a status quo situation. It is going to change under the weight of technological change whether whether Danielle Smith likes it or not. Right. And it's the chaotic nature of there's no plan. There's no strategy.
Markham:The government is not providing the policy direction to the system operator and the regulator and is often contradicting. That's not the way government should plan these kinds of things.
Duane:Yes. Unless you just really, really, really dislike renewables, and then that is the goal, and you'll figure out the rest later on. Now also think about this. What she keeps saying that they will hit these targets by 2050. Right?
Duane:They will have a net zero electricity grid. She doesn't, just say, no. It's it's a hoax. We're not doing this. Instead, she sets a timeline.
Duane:She's also set a timeline that she hopes that the Alberta population doubles by 25th. So you you're gonna need greater electricity demand and a net zero simultaneously. How is that going to happen? The basic argument she's making is through carbon capture and small modular reactors. Those are the two things that will save this grid.
Duane:So we'll we'll have to see. She's not gonna be around in 2050. I don't know if I'll be around in 2050, but I think that's why she chose 2050 is that so far in the, in the in the future.
Markham:Well, I I'll go back to, my introduction where I said, how in the world can anyone run a government like this? Because anyway, here's another one, carbon tax.
Duane:Yeah.
Markham:So the, leader of the Canadian conservative party, Pierre Polioff, has been on this, bandwagon for a long time now, and he came out with ax the tax campaign. And in a in in anticipation of the April 1st increase from $65 a ton to $80 a ton. Yep. And in fairness to Smith, she's not the only premier conservative premier who's jumped on this bandwidth. But she's done so pretty enthusiastically, and I know it's it's the criticize Guillebeau and criticize, Trudeau, but she's quite happy repeating and regurgitating nonsense.
Markham:Stuff that isn't true.
Duane:But this is not unique to Alberta and Alberta Conservatives. Bear in mind, before the federal backstop kicked in, the conservatives were fighting the NDP's consumer based carbon tax. And and I maintain that I'm not convinced that Justin Trudeau would have brought in the pan Canadian framework if Alberta hadn't moved first. And, I've I've had this debate with others, but I thought it was much easier for Trudeau to come in when Ontario had a cap and trade, Quebec had a cap and trade, BC had a carbon tax, and Alberta had a carbon tax. So the conservatives in Alberta have been fighting a consumer based carbon tax for years.
Duane:You know, the the April 1st one, there were similar protests, you know, April 1st last year, and every time the the price goes up. Now outside of Alberta, we've had multiple elections on the carbon tax. It hasn't risen to the same vitriol that it is now. In fact, Aaron O'Toole adopted a similar type of carbon pricing that looked and sounded an awful lot like a carbon tax. He just couldn't call it that.
Duane:But it was a realization that he wasn't gonna win that fight because he saw what happened to Andrew Scheer in 2019. What is different now is, a, the cost of living is much higher than it was then, and the carbon tax continues to to rise up. So what you see is a coalition of governments. You've got some governments primarily in Atlantic Canada who were focused on the increase, and they felt that they could fight the increase because they fought them over the home heating fuel in Atlantic Canada. Then they they merged, with people like Scott Moe and Daniel Smith, who just wanna scrap the tax from day 1.
Duane:You know, and so that's what you saw was was a coalition of of like minded, people, and it's a simple slogan. You know? Ask the tax. You saw the same thing in BC over the HST, which was better policy, but, it's you you can't go wrong attacking a tax policy.
Markham:Okay. Dwayne, we spent 20 minutes or thereabouts, talking about various issues on which, you know, she's lied. She's done this. She's it's not handled herself. It's been kinda chaotic.
Markham:And I don't wanna do the entire I don't wanna spend the entire interview talking about that, about various issues and whether she handled it well or didn't handle it well. But I'd I remember a conversation that you and I had, and I'm pretty sure it was you and I, but you'll remind me if it if you weren't the the interviewee, where you talked about how Jason Kenney was an incompetent premier. The UCP were incompetent in the running of government. They they would leave public health orders too late, and then their bureaucrats would be up all night rewriting them. Those sorts of things.
Markham:They weren't very good managers. And I'm sorry, but Danielle Smith looks as bad or worse than Jason Kenny when it comes to the actual running of government.
Duane:And you would have thought and and I did say that. And you would have thought that Kenny would have been a better manager because that had been his trademark prior to becoming premier. It was his trademark before COVID hit, but I think he was such an organized man with with spreadsheets and timelines that when the crisis hit, he was going back and forth between what he should do, what he wanted to do, how did this divert from the plan, and that's where I think the the chaos came from, is you had a very organized person not being able to handle a curveball, a significant curveball, and then this created and he had to be front and center. So he had to lead, the the press conferences, and then they would scramble, to to determine how to how to deal with that after the fact because there would be a lot of details that were missing by the stakeholders of those groups, and those could be, you know, hockey organizations or small business owners who would hear these announcements and go, well, what does that mean? It's Friday afternoon.
Duane:We've got a game on Friday, or my business is open on Sunday, and and that's where the problems came in. Smith is a bit more unusual, as I said, because she's floated a lot of stuff, the renewables being the exception, but she hasn't done a lot of that stuff. So she floated pulling out of the pension plan. She took so much backlash on that. She simply stops talking about it and hopes it it kinda goes away.
Duane:She promised her signature policy idea during the election campaign was a tax cut. Budget comes out, there's no tax cut. What's the response of Albertans? Crickets. And that's because, as I said off the beginning, she has a great foil, and she has got her thumb on public opinion, which is so anti Trudeau, that it it doesn't seem to matter what she says on these other things as long as she can keep going after after Trudeau.
Duane:And so I wonder what happens when Trudeau is not there. And she can even say stuff that's legitimate, but she can also say stuff, and she commented on a, a graph that Trevor too had put together. You're looking at the carbon price in the country and then singling out Quebec because they use a different cap and trade system. So she says that this is actually about redistributing wealth from Alberta to Quebec. And, I know where she got that idea.
Duane:It's the equalization formula. But she's completely off base here, and she's been asked to correct it, and she hasn't because I think there's enough Albertans who are convinced that we're paying the carbon tax to give that money to Quebec, and and logic and facts mean mean nothing. So is that a cynical politician? Is that cynical politician? Is that one with with her hand on the pulse of a public opinion?
Duane:You know, that will be up to, to you to figure out.
Markham:Yeah. I I I saw that, tweet from Trevor where he said, that's the incorrect interpretation of my graph.
Duane:Which is is I could hear Trevor's voice when he when he wrote that, but it's made no difference. It's made no difference. And I'll give you another reason why Smith is being able to slide by, and that's because the NDP are in the middle of a leadership race. And as part of that leadership race, you know what the NDP is doing? They are reflecting on why they lost the May election.
Duane:Right? And and so when you've got the opposition internalizing things, it's tough for them to mobilize against Smith. Let's see what happens as I suspect when Nehaet Nenshi becomes leader of the NDP, and then they start to go head to head.
Markham:Yes. I think that will be. I I will have to say that I don't think Rachel Notley was a particularly effective opposition leader, especially on the energy and climate files, given her success and arguably very substantial success as premier bringing in the climate leadership plan and and some of the energy policies that she did. And and then she wouldn't even talk about them as as, when she became opposition leader and when she ran campaigns in 1923.
Duane:Absolutely. She refused to talk about that, and, she obviously felt that that was not a winnable argument. It it appears now the NDP is abandoning the idea of a consumer based carbon tax. All of the candidates, to my knowledge, have have disavowed it in some fashion or another, and they based it on, you know, its its, popularity. But where the question, I think, is gonna come, and Trudeau is trying to make this argument.
Duane:Unfortunately, I don't think he's got the the credibility or people are even listening, is what is your alternative measurement? You know, Smith could go back and say, well, we have the tier program, and we have a an industry based carbon tax. And she has actually handled this better than Scott Moe, where Moe accidentally told the truth by saying, yeah. We looked at all other alternatives, and everything was worse than the carbon tax. Well, what does that tell you?
Duane:So it will be very I have no doubt, you know, if if Poliyev is elected, and, again, it it's looking more and more like that, he will scrap the consumer based carbon tax. But he has given no indication of where he goes next. Does that mean getting rid of regulations? Does that mean getting rid of the industry based tax? You'll he hasn't answered those questions, and the premiers aren't answering those questions either because there's an obvious follow-up that if you're not gonna do anything, what do you think about climate change?
Duane:And I don't think they can hide in the hole like the oil bros do and say, but but but China.
Markham:That's my line. But but but China. The okay. So, essentially, my takeaway from these conversations is that while she may have and no one denies her political skills and her communication skills. But I would say that she is now a far more accomplished politician than when she led the Wild Rose party and lost in
Duane:the 20 And I would say she is better now than she was a year ago.
Markham:Yeah. Yeah. Fair. I I would agree with that. I watched her at the World Petroleum Congress in, in September in Calgary and went to you know, I was at the press conference, asked her a couple questions.
Markham:And the way she handles herself and answers, you know, it's very politically skilled. But
Duane:And she's no now she has learned to stop talking as well. Right? In the early days, she was still in talk show host mode, which is keep talking. You know? And the longer she talked, the more trouble she got into.
Duane:And and to hear, I will say, going back to the pensions issue, because that is deeply unpopular. And I think that she she blew some capital on that, and she realized that stock. But in her discussion about the pension, she literally focused only on the dollar amount and the overpayment. She didn't mention that this was leverage against Trudeau or this was about oil and gas. She let her people do that.
Duane:She showed some discipline on that file. Even though prior to August of 2023, she did mention that all the time. I think she she has learned and and gotten better, and that's just, you know, what what we call the the discipline of power.
Markham:In the course of this conversation, you've certainly explained why she did what she did in some at least promote some of this stuff, And I'm no more convinced that she I'm not convinced that she's not chaotic, that she's runs a good government, that this is the right way to do energy and climate policy. It still seems as chaotic as it does when we when I did the introduction. Yeah. And that's I was looking through the the the data, the emissions data the other day. And so Alberta is 38% of Canadian emissions.
Markham:Saskatchewan is another 10%. Yep. That's half of all of Canadian emissions come from 2 provinces. And the And
Duane:that's been the case for a very long time. Right? None of that is new.
Markham:None of that is new, actually, because Alberta says growing and other provinces have dropped. So it is the proportions are different.
Duane:You know, the proportions may be different, but the fact that Alberta and Saskatchewan are at the top of the list, that's been there for a long
Markham:time. Right. And then the other thing that's new, of course, is the pressure for the oil and gas emissions cap and and to actually have emissions and on and on and on. I on in on the energy file, I have a hard time finding an issue where I would say, good job, Daniel. You did good on this one.
Markham:This is you might be able to think of 1 or 2, but goodness gracious. In the epicenter of the Canadian energy, industry, surely, we should be able to come up with more than 1 or 2.
Duane:Well, and you're you're focused on the energy climate file. And so the point that I'm making with the exception of the renewables and even that policy as chaotic and, I think, bad for the economy was popular, to do, at least in the the segment that she listens to, which is her rural rural caucus. Where I think she's in more danger is not on the energy file. It's on the pensions, the trans issues, the school curriculum, the policing, the municipal parties. And what unites all of those is the ideological lens that she is going through.
Duane:And, so I think that's that's an important, recognition.
Markham:Yeah. I had a recently did some town halls in rural Alberta, places like Nanten and, you know, and I'd have to say, we ran into the typical rural, voter, and they're not plugged into the global, energy transition there. You know, they're listening to the the the narratives, the Alberta narratives, oil and gas narratives. And okay. So I get it.
Markham:I mean, she's reflecting that. Yeah. But I don't know where to go with this because this industry and electricity for that matter scream out for rational policy to adapt to rapidly changing trends at the global level or at even at the regional, like North American level. And I I wouldn't say I despair, but I worry a lot about Alberta because the window to adapt is closing a little bit every month. And I see somebody in the premier's chair who is doesn't seem to be capable of leading the charge, the leading this the process to adapt to make those adaptations.
Markham:And so when the the the shoe begins to pinch, which it probably will around 2030 is my guess, Alberta will be unprepared. So
Duane:When when the crisis really hits, and and I agree with you on that point, You know, historians are gonna look back at a at a period in time and said this was this was the moment where change could occur. And the only way to explain that is why they're operating this way, and motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Okay. And, you can convince yourself of a lot of things. You can say as we have.
Duane:If you watch some of the carbon tax protests, not the nationwide ones, but the ones in Alberta, the one that was outside between Cochrane and Calgary, and you scratch the surface, it wasn't about the increase in the carbon tax. It was climate's a hoax. Trudeau's treasonous and needs to be hung. I have no freedom, even though I've got a fuck Trudeau bumper sticker and a $150,000 truck. Try having a fuck Putin bumper sticker and drive to Moscow, and you'll learn what freedom is and is not.
Duane:But there's enough people who have convinced themselves of of that, and she is she is not leading. She's reflecting that. And so we often wonder what the role of a leader is, of what a premier is. Are they to lead us to where we should go, we wanna go to make the tough decisions, or are they to represent the views of the people who voted for you?
Markham:So is this a case where as as Ralph said and I love this quote. I really do. He said, I don't lead. I get in front of a parade. Well, I get in front of a parade.
Markham:And so is this given that her base is in the in rural Alberta, is this a case of where take back Alberta and and David Parker and people like that, Arthur Pawlowski, you know, they were they made the parade, and now she stepped out in front of it.
Duane:So the difference with Klein is he was looking, I think, broader. He had a much broader base, a better understanding of of public of widespread public opinion. Smith, I think, has already discounted the 2nd largest city in the in the province. I don't think she gives a damn about the city of Edmonton, and I think that is apparent. There are rumors that she is gonna try to step in and possibly fire the the, the city council as occurred in Chestermere or taken some other sort of financial aspects.
Duane:We we saw the cancellation of the Edmonton Hospital, the new Edmonton Hospital. I think her initiative around municipal parties, well, it's about Calgary. It's also about Edmonton. So she's writing off that. I think she's writing off parts of Calgary, and she is much more focused on the the base of support that she has and maintaining that base of support, which as you mentioned is is in rural Alberta.
Duane:That is different than the than the Ralph Klein approach.
Markham:Well, folks, we've come to the end of the interview, and I have to say, Dwayne, this is highly entertaining. I'm not sure I'd wanna live in Alberta at the moment. It's and and I'll I'll just share this with you. I am appalled by the number of Albertans that I know. You know?
Markham:I lived in Calgary for many years and go back regularly. That's where my network is, my family is. And I get asked all the time, when should I sell? When should I sell my house and move to BC or somewhere else? That's not a good sign.
Duane:And yet, you look at migration patterns and where are people moving to? They're moving to Alberta.
Markham:Yeah. That no. That's
Duane:land of the land the land of milk and honey at least in the short run.
Markham:All I have is anecdote, and you have data. What can I tell you?
Duane:Yeah.
Markham:Yeah. Data Trump's anecdote. What, Dwayne, thank you very much for this. I'm gonna have you back because we need to understand everything about energy and climate in Canada goes through Alberta.
Duane:Absolutely, it does. This is the energy capital.
Markham:And not only do we it's one thing to criticize Smith. It's another thing to understand where all of this comes from and why they do. And and, you know, I I obviously have my own biases, my which I kind of caught to in the in the introduction. So I appreciate these because you give me more insight into into what her operational views are, why she does what she does, what motivates her. I appreciate that.
Markham:I think, the my audience benefits from that.
Duane:Okay. Thanks, Mark. I mean, I I will leave with this, and I probably said this before. The best predictor of the Smith government is to have a better understanding of the Wild Rose party, because those the same people are in charge right now. They may have lost in 2012.
Duane:They may have crossed the floor in 2014, but they're in charge now. And it's not just Smith.
Markham:That sounds like grist for another podcast.
Duane:Yes.
Markham:Okay. Thanks, Dwayne.
Duane:Okay. Thanks, Marco.