The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 20, 2024


Calgary spends $4.8 Million creating a 3-word slogan

Topics
spending on slogan and cuts Calgary's political mismanagement
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Jody Gondek
Justin Trudeau mocked after lying about cutting cellphone plan costs in half This is why Justin Trudeau is losing

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

189.31

Word count

1,161

Sentence count

53

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The City of Calgary spent $4.8 million to replace their old slogan with a new one, and it's not even close to being as bad as it is. I don't care what the city slogan is, but if it's bad enough to spend that much money on a slogan, it's a bad idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is such a stupid situation, I had to comment on it, but the city of Calgary, my city, has spent $4.8 million on three words, replacing our old city slogan of be part of the energy with Blue Sky City. 0.99
00:00:15.580 That has cost Calgary taxpayers $4.8 million. $1.8 million of that budget went to Calgary Economic Development, and $3 million went to Tourism Calgary, although this is majorly a project of Calgary Economic Development. 0.98
00:00:30.720 This was just absolutely insane to hear, considering I have had experiences interacting with Calgary Economic Development, because I was helping some nonprofits before, and we couldn't get $500 out of them, even though on paper we were pursuing a project that was going to bring a lot of tourism money to Calgary, that was going to help brand the city as a tech city.
00:00:50.960 We had a plan of how we were going to roll out the events that we were putting on over multiple years, and how we could get lots of people to show up to the city, we could fill hotels during months where there was not a lot of people around Calgary, and still they just said, well, where's your 10-year plan, where's your 50-year long-term strategy about managing your events over time?
00:01:11.780 And it's like, guys, we can literally show you on paper how we're about to make the city a lot of money, and you are sort of quibbling about whether or not we have a 10-year plan for the organization that I'm helping out.
00:01:23.720 It was insane. These people basically showed up to a meeting with us just to say no and pretend that they were actually hearing us out.
00:01:30.540 And at the same time, they weren't willing to give us more than $500 for an event that brought thousands of people to the BMO Center, yet they had $4.8 million to have people survey Calgarians on which slogans they like the best, hiring consultants, just sit around boardroom tables musing about, well, is Blue Sky City really going to capture the character of Calgary?
00:01:54.520 I frankly don't care what the city's slogan is. Yeah, it probably does matter a little bit. People are going to make fridge magnets and bumper stickers out of it, so you should take it somewhat seriously.
00:02:05.120 But if you're spending more than $100,000 on devising a new slogan, you've done it wrong.
00:02:11.100 And whenever these people in government say, like, justify raising property taxes because there are necessary things that the city of Calgary needs to pay for, and we need more money, don't you know that the formula of how much property taxes goes to the city and the province has changed?
00:02:27.340 So we need more money than ever. Guys, you spend money in the dumbest places possible, and then you expect us as taxpayers to actually care about raising you guys more revenue to pay for this stuff.
00:02:39.880 You spend a million dollars on each e-bus, the electric buses that you're buying, when diesel buses cost $750,000, and they actually work during the winter. 0.98
00:02:51.180 They find every excuse to spend hundreds of thousands of more dollars, and they tend to end up hiring a bunch of their own friends through different consulting firms in order to do this useless work nobody asked them to do.
00:03:02.680 This is why, on a municipal level, provincial level, federal level, you should never be terrified of the idea of spending cuts.
00:03:11.200 Yes, the liberals on the federal level, you know, Gondek's administration on the city level will pretend that everyone who wants to make cuts wants to do it to, like, you know, city repair, like, road repairs.
00:03:22.100 They want to do it to, like, old-age pensions and stuff like that.
00:03:24.920 Nobody actually is proposing cutting, like, necessities. 0.94
00:03:29.180 People are proposing cutting crap like this. 0.87
00:03:32.480 $4.8 million for a city slogan. 0.98
00:03:35.100 That is, like, money laundering at that point.
00:03:37.760 Someone actually needs to be charged for mismanaging a project that badly.
00:03:42.560 You somehow spent $4.8 million on a slogan?
00:03:46.200 Was there any physical materials that came out of this?
00:03:49.260 Because they were proud just naming the slogan.
00:03:51.560 They didn't come up with a strategy of all the billboards that they purchased in order to advertise our new slogan.
00:03:57.040 No, no, no.
00:03:57.340 That's all going to come after.
00:03:58.760 So we actually also need to pay more money now in order to rebrand everything that says be part of the energy and that was associated with the old slogan.
00:04:06.520 So we're at the tip of the spear right now in terms of spending on this boondoggle of a project.
00:04:13.080 We need way more people who will actually call this out in city politics, who are councillors, who are actually in city administration, if they're elected, unelected officials, people who will blow the whistle on stuff like this.
00:04:25.120 Because it is effectively theft to take taxpayers' money, pretending you're spending on a necessities, and then hiring a bunch of your friends in order to come up with, frankly, a slogan that was worse than the last one.
00:04:37.180 And I didn't even like the previous slogan, be part of the energy, sounds like you're about to get a degree at a college somewhere.
00:04:42.820 But anyways, goodness.
00:04:45.900 Calgary's a joke under Gondek right now.
00:04:48.060 And for anyone thinking, well, I miss Nenshi, at least he was better.
00:04:51.700 Guys, Nenshi was not a good mayor of Calgary.
00:04:54.800 Everything Yodi Gondek is doing is just the logical conclusion of what Nenshi was doing before.
00:04:59.980 She just intensified the same policies that he was pursuing in the long run. 0.79
00:05:04.980 She's basically just the true believer form of Nenshi, who has no ability to hold herself back and do things in incremental fashion.
00:05:13.020 Every change Nenshi made was terrible, but yet it's slow enough that not that many people are going to complain.
00:05:18.560 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:05:21.020 If you live in the city of Calgary here and you live on the west side of the city, I, Wyatt Claypool, am running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party Federal Nomination.
00:05:30.100 This is what the riding boundaries will look like in a few days when they get officialized since Alberta's getting three new ridings, so the boundaries are changing a bit.
00:05:37.480 If you live in this area of Calgary, buy a Conservative Party membership, vote for me in the nomination, and go check out my website in the description below, WyattClaypool.com.
00:05:47.320 And you can also donate to the National Telegraph's legal fund because if you're an independent media long enough, you get a lot of frivolous lawsuits, and we've definitely had a bunch of those.
00:05:56.540 So it helps us reduce the burden of legal costs on us so we can reinvest more in growing the National Telegraph and getting our content out there to people.
00:06:04.780 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:06:07.320 Have a good one.