Gerald Butts

They're a little bit younger than they were last year.

So when you think of that young Ivan Demidov, who's 20 years old, watching him get late in a tied playoff game minutes because Marty St.

Louis trusts him so much.

And Slavkovsky, obviously, you know, Nick Suzuki's kind of the veteran of the team and he's what, 26, 27.

And they've all been signed.

They've done their backroom homework.

So they've all been signed to seven, eight year contracts with the exception of Demidov.

So the hockey gods willing, if this team stays healthy and together, we're in for a really good decade of hockey in Montreal.

Got close and lost.

That sounds powerful.

Go Habs go if that's my last word.

Three of them.

Well, look, I think that in some ways, and there's very few positives to come out of this, Peter, but I try and be an optimist and look for them in every dark cloud.

I think that this is a clarifying moment for a lot of people within Alberta, especially and first and foremost, but also people in the rest of the country, that there is a small minority of people in Alberta, as there is in Quebec, who would prefer to see the country broken into

into pieces so they can go their own way and that group has through political organizing taken over the governing party of the government of Alberta and I think that for

the vast majority of fair-minded people who are looking at the legitimate beefs that Alberta or any other province has with the way they are being treated by the central government in Ottawa.

And God knows when I was working in the Ontario government, there were lots of beefs and we certainly made our voices known about that.

you have to draw the conclusion that there's a certain small group of people that are just strategically unpleasable, that there's absolutely nothing that Mark Carney or any other prime minister could do of any political stripe that would please the people who've now revealed themselves in public to be secessionists or seppies, as they've

started calling them in Alberta, which is kind of a funny term.

And I think that's clarifying for people because it's hard to do politics when people are pretending to be something they're not, when they're pretending to share your values when they really don't.