Alberta celebrated its 121st birthday as a province on September 1, after it was created by splitting a proposed mega-province, which would have been known as Buffalo, into what we now know as Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Sheila Gunn Reid joined Ezra Levant on Tuesday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show for an in-depth conversation on all things Alberta to mark the occasion.

The conversation started with the good news first.

Alberta was projected to run a $9 billion deficit this year, but instead, the province pulled an $11 billion turnaround and posted a $2 billion surplus — its sixth consecutive budget surplus.

The provice allso created 91,000 jobs last year, more than half of the roughly 180,000 jobs created across the entire country. "Things are good here in Alberta," Sheila said. "But they're good here in spite of the federal government and not in any way because of Confederation."

Ezra then shifted to a New York Times report, saying he had to learn from an American news outlet, rather than a Canadian one, about Mark Carney's apparent offer to revive the Keystone XL pipeline as part of trade negotiations with the U.S. — only to then walk away from a deal at the last moment.

Premier Danielle Smith, speaking at a press conference that Rebel News reporter Angelica Toy attended, said she had explicitly told the prime minister he had her full support to pledge additional barrels — another million or two million barrels a day — as a way of bridging the divide and closing the deal.

Carney, it would seem, did not take her up on the offer.

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"Just walked away from $30 billion a year," Ezra said, "and I think it's because Brookfield doesn't have a share in it and the Liberal government doesn't have a cut of it. So they can't really praise themselves like they do when they give away every dollar in public investments."

Sheila said the pipeline is a shared interest, "something that Alberta wants, but it's also something the Americans want." 

"It was an easy win in these negotiations and Carney took it off the table. Danielle Smith has explicitly said, 'You will not use Canadian energy as a bargaining chip. We don't want it. We're not going to hurt people on both sides of the border by doing this.' And yet Mark Carney, as an affront to the Western premiers, decided to use it as a bargaining chip anyway. It's such disrespect to us," she said.

The failure to complete Keystone XL is one of many, as Ezra detailed, pointing to projects like the Trans Mountain, Northern Gateway and Energy East proposals. Each was privately funded, but each was killed before being completed, with the Liberals ultimately nationalizing the Trans Mountain pipeline for a cost of $35 billion.

"The Liberals destroyed a hundred billion dollars of oil pipeline wealth and a quarter of a trillion dollars of oil wealth," Ezra said. "And Venezuela's going to fill up those U.S. refineries," he added, following a major announcement from the two countries this week.

Carney, Sheila said, "used the oil patch as a weapon." In the end, "the only people who were punished were Albertans. So maybe Carney doesn't think of it as a failure."

Alberta "could be like Dubai" if the province wanted to be, Sheila said, "but we're shackled to this anchor called Confederation."