The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - December 19, 2023


Canadian unions have become corrupt political parties

Topics
unions and AHS restructuring United Nurses Association structure
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Verna Yu Adriana LaGrange Heather Smith Janice Irwin QP Ontario
The Canadian Left wants crime to increase Liberal MPs destroy themselves at their own press event

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

195.08

Word count

2,814

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The United Nurses of Alberta is trying to get rid of the Alberta Health Service (AHS) in order to serve their own interests, and the interests of the unions they represent. In order to do so, they need to get their hands dirty with the money their members give them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 I think it's incredibly revealing into how I make videos based on the fact that this video only exists because I saw an incredibly annoying post from the United Nurses of Alberta and this got me curious into what they're up to these days.
00:00:12.200 But for some reason on X, they posted this weird video where they changed the lyrics to the Christmas song, All I Want for Christmas is You, and replaced them with union demands or whatever. I don't know. It really goes to show that the UNA values the dollars that their members give them to make these really hokey videos.
00:00:30.000 But whatever. I got curious into what they're doing, and it really was revealing on just how Canadian unions really disrespect and undermine their own members.
00:00:39.800 Unions in Canada really could care less about the general well-being of their members. They mostly, they kind of break down almost into sort of hierarchical structures, not just based on seniority, the way that you typically think of unions, but based on sort of political elitism.
00:00:56.400 The more you serve the political goals of the union, the higher up in the union that you travel and the easier you have access to cushy jobs that take you away from having to do frontline work and into sort of office spaces where you do reports all day on nothing that nobody's ever going to read.
00:01:13.420 And you get paid significantly more than other union members who work in the same area, even if you get a job where you have to leave the union, the whole idea is that there's a lot of union advocacy that takes place into getting well-connected union members better jobs in management or administrative services.
00:01:29.420 And those people, in turn, in exchange for that nicer, easier job, then also help serve the interests from the unions from those management positions.
00:01:38.580 And that's exactly what's going on here. When I saw that the United Nurses Association is opposing the restructuring of the Alberta Health Service.
00:01:46.740 Now, the Alberta Health Service restructuring is something I think is 100% needed.
00:01:53.000 It's not the only issue with the health care system in Alberta, but it's the reason why we spend the most per capita on health care in Alberta compared to any other province.
00:02:01.780 Yet we have the slowest waiting times for just basic for just basic surgeries, basic checkups and whatnot.
00:02:07.840 But it's because we have so much money in the system that does not actually go towards health care delivery.
00:02:14.280 And this is basically a roadmap on how you should just fix health care in Canada.
00:02:17.500 They need to have mandated that administrative costs can only make up maybe 25, 30% of the budget.
00:02:24.020 In Alberta, it's like every other dollar is put towards something that has nothing to do with actual health care delivery for patients.
00:02:30.300 We have people who work in HR positions, in management positions, coordinating positions, who effectively only make the jobs of other people harder by creating more paperwork, by basically meddling around with structures and systems of how AHS works.
00:02:45.080 So this is why trying to make AHS more regional like it used to be before like 2006, 2007 or whenever, by making it more regional that the health care services might be able to focus on more regional needs and that by reducing the amount of money that's in this giant centralized health care system and then moving it to smaller pots of money around the province, the health care systems, the regional ones, will have to become more realistic on what they actually need and what they do not need.
00:03:12.160 The AHS restructuring is coming along with a lot of mandates to cut a lot of administration and managerial positions.
00:03:21.800 I've heard it, and it's 100% true, that in AHS, there's tons of people, dozens, maybe even like hundreds of people who are managers of nobody.
00:03:30.120 They have management positions and they manage nobody underneath them, but they still get the salary that goes along with it.
00:03:35.980 They might just be someone who just does some diversity training and they get $130,000 a year and they literally, if they were fired, you would never notice.
00:03:44.740 They do nothing but slow down the workflow in AHS.
00:03:49.640 Anyways, I also just want to say that Adriana Lagrange is the current minister of health in Alberta and I fully endorse everything she's doing.
00:03:57.380 I think she's probably one of the best ministers, not only in Alberta, but probably in Canada, maybe even North America in general.
00:04:02.920 I know Adriana. She is not scared of anybody. If the media or unions or any activist group tries to smear her for what she's going to do, she will fully ignore them.
00:04:12.180 And she will just focus on trying to get the goal that she wants done, done as well as possible.
00:04:17.340 And in this case, it is going to be making our health care system more efficient and cost effective.
00:04:22.480 Anyways, though, getting back to the United Nurses Association, you think that if you were advocating for nurses, and again, this could apply to any union in Canada, pretty much outside of private sector unions, which tend to be better, any public sector union, all my criticisms probably apply to them 100%.
00:04:39.480 But you think if you were the United Nurses Association, what you your goal every single day is to get more benefits, higher pay for nurses, you want more nursing staff around to be able to ease the load of everyone's jobs.
00:04:52.160 Now, I've talked to multiple members of the United Nurses Association, that is not how they work. 0.77
00:04:56.800 And you can tell from this thing that they now have on their website, opposing the AHS restructuring.
00:05:01.800 So the Alberta, the United Nurses of Alberta say massive AHS restructure won't fix nurse shortage may make it worse.
00:05:09.800 I don't know how they get to that conclusion, considering that the province is going to shift more money towards hiring nurses and employing nurses rather than management.
00:05:17.800 But the UNA website reads, United Nurses of Alberta sees nothing in the bank, the breakup of Alberta health services, and the restructuring of the administration of public health care announced this morning by the provincial government that will address the principal crisis that concerns most nurses, chronic understaffing and overwork caused by shortages of nurses.
00:05:37.880 While UNA has long acknowledged genuine deficiencies in the management of health care services by AHS, no, they have not.
00:05:45.060 They basically just say there's not enough money, even though the health care system is oozing money.
00:05:49.700 Anyways, getting back to it, they say there is nothing in today's announcement that will address that problem, said Heather Smith, president of UNA, which represents more than 30,000 registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses, the majority of them employed by AHS.
00:06:03.860 The wrong diagnosis always creates the wrong treatment, Smith said.
00:06:08.220 The government has diagnosed the problem in Alberta's health care system as being the structure of AHS.
00:06:12.360 A far more serious problem is the shortage of nurses and other medical professionals, as well as beds incapacity.
00:06:17.540 Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
00:06:19.560 Now, let's be very clear.
00:06:21.480 The United, the structure is the problem.
00:06:23.840 The structure is why there is not money for nurses. 0.97
00:06:26.820 And I will get into why it is primarily the union's fault for that.
00:06:30.700 I literally wrote an article series that helped get the former AHS CEO, Dr. Verna Yu, fired.
00:06:37.240 She's making $750,000 a year.
00:06:39.980 This is a bit of an anecdote.
00:06:41.240 But the UNA was a strong ally of her.
00:06:45.000 And she was horrible at managing ICU bed materials and other sort of health care resources during the pandemic. 1.00
00:06:52.060 Yet they never went after her because Verna Yu is an ally.
00:06:54.920 They will never go after allies because people like Verna Yu, even as high up in the administration, even if they're the literal CEO like Verna Yu was, there's a lot of people in the management and administration of AHS who are allies of the nurses' unions who will try and get them what they want and will always basically try and set up the government for failure if they try and oppose the nurses' unions.
00:07:15.200 Now, here's where the nurses' unions heavily screws over their members. 1.00
00:07:19.740 What they do is in order to reward those who are very well-connected and political union members, because effectively these unions have become political bodies, they're a political party that is pushing for usually ideological goals first and then some financial resource goals for the members.
00:07:36.520 But even then, not all of their members, not only do you get a lot of unions these days, like QP Ontario, especially, that push for things like Hamas apologia and all this other kind of nonsense, but when they're even trying to get benefits for their members, they kind of get some benefits.
00:07:55.080 But really what they want is that they want to be able to have high administration jobs or cushy HR jobs that they can promote their very sort of loyal members into.
00:08:04.720 Again, I've talked to many UNA members, and they say that the way this works and why it's actually hard to hire more nurses is that there's no budget left for nurses because there's so much administrative nonsense in the system that they don't have a budget left over to hire more nurses.
00:08:22.040 So what they'll do if a nurse part of the membership is loyal, they go to all the protests, they advocate for the right things, they're really well connected to the structure of the nurses union, they will go from being an actual nurse doing actual healthcare work to someone who fills out diversity reports or someone who works in HR or someone who's in management or someone who is some sort of resource in charge of resource procurement.
00:08:44.820 Or they, again, like I said before, they will become a manager in charge of nobody, and they are accountable to nobody, and they effectively just sit there, eat up resources, and potentially even make the jobs of regular nurses more difficult.
00:08:56.720 Not only by taking themselves out of the front lines, making the workload bigger for each individual, but, you know, being someone who creates more reports that nurses have to fill out that nobody actually ever reads or follows up on, but they got a fake job that they get paid more for because the union happened to like them.
00:09:13.540 This is why the UNA completely opposes restructuring of AHS, if we restructure AHS and we cut administration management and HR jobs, well, the UNA has basically, it's almost like, now I'm not trying to be too rude here, it's almost like if you've ever heard of the way that the North Korean political system works, it's like they call it the North Korean court economy, that they basically have little gifts they hand out to people who are loyal to basically keep them oppressing other people who are not loyal to the government.
00:09:43.540 Or it basically creates like an in-group, that's what the UNA effectively does, is that they have all these fake jobs around to give to loyal UNA members, so that they will stay loyal to the UNA, so even if they have to lose their jobs or lose their membership as a nurse because they're in a different higher-up position, they are going to still serve the interests of the nurses' union.
00:10:03.540 Now, this also happens in the education system in Alberta. I've talked to many teachers, and also this is just true on paper. In about 20 years ago, maybe a school which has like 23 kids per classroom, because we used to have more teachers per capita, a school that has 23 kids per classroom, you know, maybe it's a school of 400 kids, who knows, it doesn't really matter.
00:10:24.260 They would say that a typical school would have maybe a principal and a vice principal and like a superintendent who oversaw multiple schools in like a district area.
00:10:33.040 Now, what you have is you have like a school that has 33 kids per classroom because there's far fewer teachers per capita, but you have 17 administrators, you have two vice principals, you have a principal, you have a superintendent just for that school, you have a resource coordinator, you have someone in charge of, you have a couple people in HR.
00:10:54.400 And it's like all this random bloat, and most of these people in these positions were teachers, but if it's someone like Janice Irwin, they taught very briefly, and then they somehow became a vice principal because they were loyal to the union and were able to get that much nicer and cushier job.
00:11:10.440 And from that vantage point that they now have, they actually are more useful in putting pressure on the government to get the teachers union or the nurses union more benefits.
00:11:19.640 So as much as the nurses unions and all the other unions try and pretend that they're fighting for their individual members to get them more pay, the thing is that we could immediately give a massive bonus or a massive pay rise to every single nurse and teacher.
00:11:33.020 If we cut administrative bloat, we fired managers, administrators, and people in nonsensical HR positions, and we gave, you know, 50%, 75% of the savings directly to the salaries of nurses or our teachers, and then we incentivized where we kept a pool of money also to hire more nurses and teachers.
00:11:50.920 That is, if we're going to have public services, the public services have to be oriented towards the actual delivery of the services.
00:11:57.660 The great thing about the private sector is that if you are terrible at delivering services, you're going to go bankrupt.
00:12:04.000 In the public, because you cannot go bankrupt because the taxpayer is your piggy bank, it at least needs to be that there needs to be this sense of accountability that if the vast majority of the budget, if 70%, 85% of the budget isn't going towards the direct delivery of the services, then we need to heavily, we need to basically fire anyone in charge of that area,
00:12:24.800 and maybe punish the government for not staying, or for not actually enforcing standards hard enough.
00:12:32.120 Anyway, so hopefully this doesn't seem like a bit of a, too much of a rant, but that's kind of the way I think about unions and the way more people should talk about them.
00:12:39.700 It's not that, and I see some conservatives doing this, they inherently find anyone who's part of a union like suspicious, they don't like unions, they think that they're undermining taxpayers, because a lot of the time the unions are advocating against taxpayers.
00:12:51.480 But if we actually solved the issue of unions, that being union bosses and corrupt left wing administration of them, then we could actually probably get more union members what they want, while also actually reducing the burden on taxpayers.
00:13:06.000 It is the administrative union that is actually hurting the country and each individual province and our services.
00:13:12.580 It's not the union members themselves. Most of them do not have the time of day to work inside their own unions.
00:13:20.260 They probably don't even like their own bosses, I can guarantee you.
00:13:23.620 Anyways, that's it for me today. I'm still in my current lawsuit.
00:13:27.580 If you want to donate to the defamation case defense I have against this billionaire, I'm winning it, but he's just trying to bleed me dry of money.
00:13:34.780 I'm like $25,000 deep in this lawsuit right now.
00:13:38.040 But if you want to throw $5, $50, whatever you want to give me into the Give, Send, Go link in the description, that really helps me out, reduces the burden on myself.
00:13:46.320 And then also, I'm running for the Conservative Party nomination for Calgary Signal Hill.
00:13:51.120 So if you live in the Calgary Signal Hill area, you know, think about voting for me, it's in the west side of Calgary, based on the views I get on all my videos, guaranteed one to five, even, you know, 25 of you live in that riding.
00:14:04.260 So make sure to check which riding you live in, even if you don't live in Calgary, make sure you know the riding you live in.
00:14:09.620 It's very important. And if you live in that riding or you know someone who lives in it, not only buy a membership for yourself, make sure your entire household has a membership come election day.
00:14:17.260 We want a real Conservative in this area, and I'm intending to be that.
00:14:20.860 So other than that, I hope everyone has a fantastic night, and I'll see you in my next video.