Skate Canada and the Canadian Figure Skating Association are teaming up to shame Alberta's premier, Danielle Smith, for her anti-Transgender policies and her opposition to a bill that would have allowed trans women to compete in girls' sports.
00:07:23.780She has not actually backed down at all, and in fact, she's going on the offensive.
00:07:28.720I've seen sometimes where conservatives will just hold their ground, and you know, that's good.
00:07:32.340What's better is to actually fight back, because these people are the fools.
00:07:38.180They're the ones who look terrible in front of the public.
00:07:41.080Danielle Smith, upon passing the law and defending it, said,
00:07:44.540Women and girls have the right to play competitive sports in a safe and fair environment against other biological females.
00:07:51.440This view is held by a vast majority of Albertans and Canadians.
00:07:54.780It is also common sense and common decency.
00:07:57.300Skate Canada's refusal to hold events in Alberta because we choose to protect women and girls in sports is disgraceful.
00:08:03.020We expect they will apologize and adjust their policies once they realize they are not only compromising the fairness and safety of their athletes,
00:08:09.880but are also offside with the international community, including the International Olympic Committee,
00:08:15.440which is moving in the same direction as Alberta.
00:09:24.780I know trans people that absolutely back this policy, because even though I may disagree with them on other things, they can actually say, like, yeah, obviously, this is just normal.
00:09:35.760This is just how female sports should be.
00:09:38.480And we have morons like our newly minted Alberta sender, Dr. Christopher Wells, coming out and saying, fully agree.
00:09:45.360I hope more sporting organizations and businesses follow Skate Canada's leadership.
00:09:50.240We must all stand up and speak out against discrimination.
00:09:54.240And then we see this disgusting post by Adam Van Koverden, who used to be an Olympic athlete, by the way, a male Olympic athlete, basically saying that female sports don't matter to him at all, which is actually one of the most chauvinistic things you could possibly say.
00:10:08.680He, in this statement, says, our government believes in a sports system that provides opportunities for all Canadians to participate and excel without discrimination, including the transgender community, which is disproportionately vulnerable, excluded, and marginalized.
00:10:24.640National sports organizations like Skate Canada operate independently from the government and make decisions with respect to individual rights of athletes based on science and evidence specific to their sport.
00:10:34.500There must be a path forward for sport in Canada, where the integrity and fairness of sport categories are preserved, while at the same time, opportunities promoted and human rights are respected.
00:10:44.680But obviously, this statement is designed to basically back Skate Canada.
00:10:49.080And sorry, they cannot claim, you cannot claim they are independent when you give them $5 million a year.
00:10:54.500If they want to be truly independent, they want to resist the Alberta government's common sense policy, they can have their taxpayer money taken away.
00:11:02.300They can go about it alone if they don't actually want the taxpayer money that, in part, comes from Albertans, disproportionately comes from Albertans, in terms of how much Albertans pay in taxes.
00:11:14.500But let's just move on to, actually, I want to actually highlight Pierre Polyev, who did a good thing in fully backing Premier Smith.
00:11:55.860Nicole Gearing, Alberta's new Democratic Shadow Minister of Tourism and Sports, responded to the news today that Skate Canada has decided it will no longer hold national and international events in Alberta.
00:12:06.500Skate Canada's decision to not hold national and international events in Alberta is sadly an expected outcome of a bad policy by this UCP government.
00:12:14.720This is what happens when the UCP chooses to move ahead with no consultation and ignore advice, forcing organizations like Skate Canada to take action in order to maintain their standards of safety and inclusivity for athletes.
00:12:28.080The UCP's unconstitutional and intolerable policies are putting young Albertans' lives at risk.
00:12:38.920If you do what you do, Danielle, people will die.
00:12:41.860People are going to suffer because girls' sports are for girls.
00:12:46.460But it's putting young Albertans' lives at risk.
00:12:48.800Today's announcement by Skate Canada also shows these policies will not only harm sports and athletes, but also tourism, hospitality, and local economies.
00:12:56.400It will unfortunately not be surprising if other organizations take similar actions in the future.
00:13:01.380Alberta's New Democrats believe in government.
00:13:03.400Governments have a responsibility to maintain and ensure human rights, not take them away.
00:13:07.540We believe in fairness for all athletes.
00:13:09.520Albertans should compete against the very best in the world right here in Alberta.
00:13:13.500Yeah, but they won't actually back girls up here.
00:13:15.220They do not care if the integrity of girls' sports is going to be damaged by, or would be damaged by, like, trans women athletes competing, like, with normal girls.
00:13:31.920Daniel Smith has been doing a great job firing back organizations like LifeSite News and other conservative outlets have been covering the kind of back and forth here.
00:13:39.840But the stupidity of the Alberta NDP to take on this fight is beyond reason.
00:13:47.680They realize that Alberta families, you know, have a 50% chance of having a boy or a girl, and many of them have girls.
00:13:56.820You know, if you have two kids, three kids in your family, you know, one or two of them are all three could-be girls.
00:14:02.620And do you think you're going to tick off those parents because your party won't even stand up for female sports?
00:14:08.740The Alberta NDP is just an activist party.
00:14:11.300If they have LGBTQIA plus something, something, something activists telling them to do something, they'll do it.
00:14:17.980Anti-coal mining activists tell them to do something, they'll do it.
00:14:21.300They do things without any actual sort of recognition of what the average Albertan thinks.
00:14:26.720They backed the disastrous Alberta Teachers Association strikes that the Alberta government had to pass their first bill in the session, Bill 1, in order to send them back to work for.
00:14:38.140They were striking because they weren't given a more generous offer than what Daniel Smith's government already gave, which was perfectly generous.
00:14:45.64012% wage increases or salary increases, including 17% for some people.
00:14:52.380At the minimum, people were getting 12% more, 3,000 more teachers, 1,500 more teacher assistants, $11 billion going into school infrastructure.
00:15:01.740And then the ATA stood up and said, $2 billion more, a little more than $2 billion more for us, please.
00:15:09.140And so the Smith government used the notwithstanding clause for the first time to send them back to work.
00:15:14.580And the Alberta NDP decided that this was their moment to launch a series of recall petitions against 17-plus different UCP MLAs.
00:15:25.740Now, yes, they are not directly involved in the petitions going forward.
00:15:30.660The petitioning must be done by grassroots individuals inside the riding, and you can't even have outside individuals collect signatures, which makes sense.
00:15:38.620But obviously, the ATA and the NDP effectively wanted these things.
00:15:43.460If you trace back whoever's participating in it, riding by riding, I would bet you that they significantly overlap with NDP memberships and ATA memberships.
00:15:56.000All these people are clearly involved in those organizations, which is why the first person they took on was Education Minister Dimitrios Nicolaitis.
00:16:04.060And I've heard the entire thing is going up like a lead balloon.
00:16:06.840They are well over one-third of the way through their petitioning initiative against Dimitrios Nicolaitis, and they only have over 3,000 signatures.
00:16:16.260And they need, like, more than four times that many.
00:16:18.740It's not an impossible feat to pull off if somebody was a genuine bad MLA, like they committed crimes or they were stealing money or they had done some other disastrous thing.
00:17:08.280They were asking me about the recalls.
00:17:10.160Well, are the recalls going to go anywhere?
00:17:11.920I have no clue what this person thinks about politics.
00:17:15.020If I was to bet who they vote for on a federal level, I would say they probably don't vote or they switch between liberal and conservative depending on the election.
00:17:26.280Like, they'll follow it a bit, but it's just not their thing.
00:17:28.460After I kind of explained that, like, yeah, the recalls are silly and the ATA was triggering this just because they didn't get even more money than any reasonable person would actually expect to get, then the person just leaned in and they're like, you know what?
00:17:42.860I think Danielle Smith's doing a good job.
00:17:44.320I have no clue why people keep attacking her.
00:17:46.920And it's because that's really the average person's thought.
00:17:49.960I always find that when you bump into somebody who is apolitical, you don't, like, tell them what their perspective should be.
00:17:56.920You just kind of talk more mildly around the subject, not being too hyper-partisan about it.
00:18:02.600And they basically just be like, I think they're doing a good job.
00:18:05.540That's when you know that the silent majority of people are behind Danielle Smith.
00:18:09.480Does anyone actually think that Danielle Smith is a bigot or intolerant?
00:18:14.360Does anyone think that she's somehow screwing the teachers over?
00:18:58.040At the same time, we're actually pretty good at using coal while being very efficient with it.
00:19:02.280Like, natural gas is, like, 95% plus efficient.
00:19:05.240Coal these days, with, like, their clean coal standards and being able to actually be able to keep recycling coal rather than putting black smoke in the air.
00:19:12.820You'll never see black smoke coming out of a plant that uses coal with all that, like, and we're going to, but we're going to ban it from being used because it's not absolutely hyper-efficient compared to other forms of fuel.
00:19:52.760The government should defund them, and they should basically be replaced by a different skating organization, one that actually doesn't give a crap about politics.