In this episode, Wyatt talks about Alberta getting two new parties in the upcoming election, and why he doesn't think either of them are going to be good for Alberta. Also, he gives his thoughts on the new UCP party, the Wild Rose Loyalty Coalition.
00:00:03.020Well, it looks like Alberta's not just getting one new provincial party, it's getting two this year.
00:00:09.380The first, of course, is the Republican Party of Alberta, which actually ran in the three by-elections that happened late in June.
00:00:16.860They didn't do so well, I don't think they're really going to have much impact on the next election.
00:00:21.240But the next one is freaking a lot of UCP supporters out, which is actually an old party that's becoming new again.
00:00:28.800Two of the current independent MLAs, Peter Guthrie and Scott Sinclair, are going to be reviving the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta.
00:00:38.600I assume they didn't try and revive the Wild Rose Party because technically the Wild Rose Party is currently existing in the form of the Wild Rose Loyalty Coalition.
00:00:48.480And so they're taking over the old PC brand because, well, we'll get into that.
00:00:54.840Now, I want to say right off the bat here, and I want to do an analysis of who I think the new Progressive Conservative Party is going to hurt more,
00:01:02.520either Daniel Smith's UCP or Naheed Nenshi's NDP, but I will just say, off the bat, I am not against small parties.
00:01:10.600Heck, I work for a small party in British Columbia.
00:02:53.420It doesn't matter in a certain sense because if you had a personal grievance,
00:02:57.280it doesn't then justify starting a party that doesn't have a reason to exist.
00:03:02.200Again, not only am I someone who's not against small parties, I also help the New Blue Party in Ontario.
00:03:07.620I'm also somebody who's not exactly a Danielle Smith fanboy.
00:03:11.980I voted against her in the UCP leadership review in late 2024.
00:03:17.100It's not because I hate Danielle Smith.
00:03:18.500It's because at the time the government was sluggish or not moving on certain priorities.
00:03:23.080I was thinking that they should have been able to at least make some progress on since they had been in government for two years by that point.
00:03:30.400They have made progress since November of 2024.
00:03:33.820So if there was another leadership review, I would vote yes on Smith.
00:03:37.420So I'm somebody who's very much willing to call balls and strikes.
00:03:40.820Now, the progressive conservatives, they're not yet a party yet.
00:03:44.980They've reserved the name and they have to go around collecting signatures and whatnot,
00:03:48.380jump through a few other hoops in order to become a real registered party.
00:03:51.360And so they can sit in the legislature under that brand.
00:03:54.420But the criticisms I see from them on the UCP feel really inside baseball and really, really just vague.
00:04:04.240It's like the party is not fiscally responsible enough or they're not fiscally conservative enough.
00:04:09.260Could they be cutting more spending or could they be cutting spending in general?
00:04:14.140I'm not sure if they've been cutting spending at all.
00:04:16.040I think they should be cutting spending.
00:06:27.780If you're trying to make a big change, you should be able to have, you should have to gather 170,000 signatures.
00:06:33.560The problem with the 600,000 is that that's literally impossible.
00:06:37.420Think about going door to door collecting signatures.
00:06:39.440How many people are just not even home at certain times of day?
00:06:43.820And then you have to be hitting at like a more than 50%, probably, probably more like 70% hit rate in terms of who will sign your petition in order to actually get it over the finish line in time.
00:06:55.940And that's with probably like 100 people door knocking full time.
00:07:00.540Most, it would be hard to get 100 signatures as a really, really good door knocker in one day.
00:07:05.600Maybe a week and you can pull off 150.
00:07:07.940And so what Smith did was make a very reasonable change.
00:07:11.260Now, on the angle where the Peter Guthrie's been going on about, about potential corruption in AHS, could there be, did it seem like a guy was getting a basically sweetheart contract from the UCP for AHS, like for medical supplies?
00:07:38.160There's going to be more investigating about it.
00:07:40.000And even the UCP is not like trying to shut down the investigation.
00:07:43.260When they kicked out Peter Guthrie, and again, I'm not trying to rumor monger about, I hear it's because Peter Guthrie was legitimately hoping that Daniel Smith would be taken down by the scandal and was hoping to become leader himself.
00:07:55.200I don't put that much credence into whenever someone's accused of wanting someone else's job.
00:07:59.140It's the most, I would say, routine accusation in politics.
00:08:05.060The John Rustad is trying to claim that anyone who's against him and joins 1BC is doing so because secretly they wanted him ousted as leader so they could become leader or they could become president of the party or whatever.
00:08:19.160In Peter Guthrie's case, I don't care whether it's true or not.
00:08:22.360But the party basically said that he started going after them on this scandal when they hadn't even had an official report come out yet, like demanding people resign and, you know, demanding massive changes or whatever.
00:08:34.820Here is their press release they put out on April 16th, the day they expelled them.
00:08:38.800They said, today the UCP caucus made the difficult decision to expel MLA Pete Guthrie from the government caucus.
00:08:45.920MLA Guthrie has made it clear that he does not support the government's decision to wait for the investigations of both the Auditor General and Judge Raymond Wyant to conclude prior to taking further action on the issue of AHS procurement practices and the allegations made by the former AHS CEO.
00:09:02.980It is also clear that he wishes to continue to publicly voice his opposition to the government on that issue.
00:09:09.840We wish him well as he continues his role as MLA for his constituency.
00:09:14.960Now, again, I don't really like even when people are kicked out of caucus.
00:09:18.740If you have a problem with someone in caucus, have a nomination.
00:09:22.960The UCP actually has automatic nominations.
00:09:25.320If you do not like somebody, you can vote them out in an automatic nomination that happens before every single election.
00:09:32.160If you notice, there's a little cuts in this video.
00:09:36.180It's because I have to keep pausing because the sun keeps trying to take over this room that I'm in.
00:09:40.200I have way better lighting than yesterday, though.
00:09:42.080But now I do want to move over into the topic of who would a progressive conservative party revival hurt the most?
00:09:50.760Because I think off the bat, people assume I think I've said off the bat like three times.
00:09:54.720I think at the jump, people assume that conservatives in the name, this is going to hurt UCP.
00:10:00.740And I don't actually think that's what's going to happen here.
00:10:03.920I actually think it's more likely that the progressive conservative party is going to take votes away from the NDP.
00:10:10.940This is like why I was advocating during the BC election or the BC conservative party before they revealed themselves to be extremely woke.
00:10:19.200I was advocating during the campaign, guys, stop trying to make deals with the BC United party.
00:10:25.040Stop trying to put them into the grave.
00:10:27.360I want BC United to be around on election day because guess where nervous, upper middle class, progressive people are going to vote who don't like a lot of the policies of the NDP, but they've been propagandized into hating conservatives.
00:10:42.500But if the United party goes away, they'll start voting NDP again because, again, the media propaganda about conservatives being evil and scary is going to overcome the fact that the drug crisis and other things are really bad because these people live in the gated communities where they don't even see it.
00:10:57.820They know it exists, but they can kind of ignore it.
00:11:01.300I think the same thing is going to happen in Alberta.
00:11:03.660Progressive conservatives may be the landing place for people who don't really like the NDP, but they hate Danielle Smith.
00:11:09.420And so they'll go vote for Peter Guthrie's party.
00:11:11.840So in Calgary, where I want to pull this up, in Calgary, where it was very close in 2023, although the UCP won the provincial election popular vote by like 8%, when it actually came down to the city of Calgary, I think if you added up the margins and the closest ridings in Calgary, you would only be for like what the NDP would have needed to win.
00:11:33.580And it's only like 1,200 votes or something like that.
00:11:37.180And so what you'll see is, you know, 52.63% for the UCP to 44.05% overall.
00:11:46.400But then you look at specifically Calgary right here, and the NDP actually won about 50%, a little bit more than 50% of the ridings in Calgary.
00:11:57.620And so right now, where is the progressive conservative party vote going to be coming from?
00:12:04.000Probably a lot of people more in the downtown areas of Alberta, the more downtown leaning suburbs, people who usually vote, who may be back in 2012 when the NDP wasn't a thing.
00:12:16.400They voted PC, they didn't like the Wild Rose Party, and now that the UCP captures most of the people who voted Wild Rose and progressive conservative, they're only going to be, the PC Party is going to be getting all like the anti-separatist red Tories, basically.
00:12:32.900Red Tories who were naturally probably going to be voting for the NDP instead.
00:12:36.560So I actually think that right now, Nenshi, who is really far down the polls and very unpopular compared to Smith, Smith is actually quite popular right now.
00:12:46.180She's riding very high in the polls, leading the NDP by like 10 to 14 points.
00:12:52.260I think that she is going to benefit from this because none of these people, probably a lot of the people who are going to go vote PC are the people who are bleeding off of the NDP over the last three or four months.
00:13:03.320They don't like Naheed Nenshi, and they are maybe going to suck it up and vote UCP.
00:13:08.440Maybe they're probably just going to stay home, but now they're just going to vote progressive conservative instead.
00:13:13.500The progressive conservatives are going to get their 5%, maybe even 7% provincially.
00:13:17.700They'll get a lot of it concentrated in Scott Sinclair's riding and Peter Guthrie's riding because they're the incumbents, and then nothing else is going to come of it.
00:13:24.880Because there's no narrative for them to run on.
00:13:26.860What narrative are they going to run on?
00:13:30.800Well, it's kind of already taken out of their hands.
00:13:32.860The UCP is cutting taxes, so good stuff all around.
00:13:36.360Here's something else good that the UCP did.
00:13:39.220I'm always happy to give praise to Danielle Smith, even though I've been in the past willing to criticize her.
00:13:47.820So I hope that makes people trust me more when I say she's doing something good, because I'm not somebody who's only trying to pretend that she's getting wins that don't exist.
00:13:56.340She just announced the new Alberta police force.
00:14:00.540And so this is also why the separatists are doing so bad in provincial elections.
00:14:04.780Cam Davies running as the leader of the Republican Party of Alberta in Olds, Didsbury, Three Hills got absolutely squashed because, yeah, maybe somebody is in favor of independence.
00:14:16.240But that doesn't mean they think that Danielle Smith's doing a bad job.
00:14:19.980People who want an independent Alberta, like Corey Morgan, are – and I'm not an independence guy, but he's being very rational.
00:14:26.500He's saying, guys, if we vote for independence, wouldn't you want Danielle Smith leading the independent in Alberta?
00:14:33.580And so this is also what's killing off the separatists.
00:14:36.500And then it also – the fact the Republican Party exists kills off the argument the progressive conservatives are making that she's too pro-separatist.
00:14:43.460So having a provincial police force, is that one step towards making it more conducive for Alberta independence?
00:14:51.280And how does that impact national collaborative projects?
00:14:55.600Like I know that your government has discussed working with Ottawa on things like human trafficking.
00:15:03.380I would say that what this is about is getting good policing for those areas that are currently being policed by the RCMP.
00:15:10.260As we mentioned, there's 80 percent of people who already have a local police service, a municipal force.
00:15:15.860But we have vacancies that have resulted in a delay in response time, sometimes for days, sometimes issues not getting followed up on at all.
00:15:26.640And that's not delivering good policing.
00:15:27.940That's what this is about, is to fill some of those gaps, which we've already done.
00:15:32.180We have a scan force under the sheriffs, which shuts down drug houses.
00:15:41.600And many of those entities work hand in glove with alerts, with municipal forces, and even with the RCMP.
00:15:49.540I think that I'm just mindful that the federal government issued a white paper saying that they think that the role of the RCMP should change.
00:15:56.840And so like she's doing a really good job on this.
00:15:59.680And also, that was just a really silly question.
00:16:02.500Like, are you trying to make it easier for Alberta to separate?
00:16:13.840I think, in fact, that it's just probably good for the provinces to run their own police.
00:16:18.100In fact, provinces should be able to enforce their own laws, too.
00:16:21.020It's insane that the federal government gets to have all say when it comes to criminal justice policy, because that's what sticks us in this insane bail reform situation.
00:16:30.140Where because people in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal want these insane bail reform policies, then Alberta has to live with it, too, even though our population wants us to enforce the law.
00:16:40.440And in fact, a lot of people in Toronto also want the law enforced.
00:16:43.180But it's the sliver of woke activists that keeps the liberals in favor of these insane bail reform laws and just soft on crime policies in general.
00:16:53.260But anyways, so, yeah, Smith doing a good job.
00:16:58.600Adrienne Lagrange, the health minister, was doing really good on health reform.
00:17:02.360She actually had, I think, since COVID, because the NDP will harp on, you know, that wait times are actually up still since 2019.
00:17:10.380It's like, well, yeah, wait times are up everywhere because COVID was terrible in terms of the lockdowns giving massive backlogs to the hospitals.
00:17:18.080But I think the UCP have reduced like things like staple surgeries, the ones that they use to track efficiency.
00:17:27.040Things like knee replacements and hip replacements and other sorts of surgeries are down like 30, 40 percent in terms of their wait times.
00:17:32.860It's been quite efficient and they're deep like bureaucratizing, bureaucracy, bureaucratizing.
00:17:42.280Basically, they're getting rid of all the administration in AHS that's making it faster.
00:17:47.140And they're going to re-regionalize the system, which is exactly what is needed so that we stop having ambulances from Edmonton going up to pick up people in small towns two hours away.
00:17:57.440That is how inefficient the current system is because they wanted to consolidate the entire system in Edmonton or dispatch.
00:18:05.280But anyway, so, yeah, Progressive Conservative Party, I don't see why they exist.
00:18:15.380And I'm not seeing the reason other than, frankly, NDP narratives.
00:18:19.140If your new Conservative Party is being run off of narratives being generated by the left-wing opposition against the government, you're not running a proper Conservative Party.
00:18:29.000I guess it's just called the Progressive Party.
00:18:33.300When you're calling the government radical, because Peter Guthrie is also somebody who was like the first MLA to endorse Danielle Smith during her run for leadership.
00:18:40.400The man should have conservative instincts.
00:18:42.940But this is where, again, I'm not trying to basically say, oh, he has no legitimate reason for doing this at all.
00:18:49.540But it does make it seem like a grievance when I feel like he's pitch shifted hard left.
00:18:56.100Not like he's on the hard left, but he's moved from being a very right MLA to being like a center to maybe slightly center right, maybe even center left MLA in terms of his views on the government.
00:19:06.720That makes me think it's a grievance when it feels like you've shifted your own views so that you can find more criticisms of the current government.
00:19:14.860Illegitimate criticisms, in my mind, as somebody who's been willing to criticize them in the past.
00:19:20.360I was criticizing them for a few years, saying, you guys keep running surpluses, but where's the tax cut?
00:19:25.780Why are you bringing back the gas tax?
00:20:07.800I know people are trying to get people behind Jeremy Farkas, who's gone super progressive, or Jeff Davison, who literally has a land acknowledgement on his website and won't even commit to cutting any spending or taxes.
00:20:20.680Sonia Sharp has actually explicitly said she will cut taxes and spending, which is the only thing I'm pretty much looking for from a Calgary mayoral candidate.
00:20:29.900If you can't do those things, I will not support you or endorse you.