The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 05, 2024


David Eby’s is making a doomed Carbon Tax gamble


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

175.2458

Word count

1,717

Sentence count

80

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

British Columbia Premier David Eby is making the same horrifyingly stupid gamble that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is making with the axe-the-tax movement across Canada, and that BC voters are not going to punish them in the next provincial election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Much like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Columbia Premier David Eby is making the same horrifyingly stupid gamble that his NDP government is going to be able to maintain the provincial carbon tax in the face of the axe-the-tax movement across Canada, and that BC voters are not going to punish them in the next provincial election.
00:00:20.640 They're high on their own supply of hubris, believing that because they're far ahead in the polls, and that David Eby is the second most popular Premier in Canada, that they couldn't possibly lose the next election.
00:00:33.600 So they are doing the dumbest thing you can do when you're far ahead. It's stop calculating any decisions you make to whether they're going to tick people off or not.
00:00:42.260 And so David Eby has picked a fight with Pyropolyev, asking him to simply sign on with other premiers in getting rid of the carbon tax in his province and then fighting the carbon tax federally.
00:00:54.000 He thought he could maybe shore up his populist progressive base by fighting with Pyropolyev, and he misjudged that there's really not that many hyper-progressives within the NDP base right now.
00:01:06.380 The NDP relies on a lot of middle-class voters who just didn't like the previous BC Liberals, and they didn't see another opposition party that was worthwhile voting for until recently.
00:01:18.280 Right now, the BC Conservatives are actually surging in the polls from what they used to be at about a year ago, and they are both consolidating BC United votes at the same time that they are clawing away BC NDP votes.
00:01:31.740 The BC NDP was only far ahead in the polls because there was effectively nobody else to vote for, and people do like a bandwagon.
00:01:40.160 And now that the Conservatives are actually offering good policies and they are a viable vehicle to win the next election, you're going to see a lot of votes shifting over this spring and summer.
00:01:51.100 And another thing that David Eby miscalculated is that for him to win the next BC provincial election, he's going to need a lot of crossover voters from the federal Conservatives.
00:02:03.100 You see, Pyropolyev is actually quite popular in British Columbia right now.
00:02:07.640 The Conservatives federally are in the first place in terms of polling in British Columbia.
00:02:12.760 So for David Eby to win in this next provincial election, he is relying on a lot of people who plan to vote for Pyropolyev's Conservative Party federally, and then who will cross over and vote for his NDP party provincially.
00:02:27.780 That is a very tenuous position to be in.
00:02:30.880 Wab Kanu out in Manitoba understood that he was in this position.
00:02:34.500 That's why he signed on with Pyropolyev in opposing carbon tax, even though he's probably more left-wing than even David Eby is.
00:02:42.760 Same thing with Andrew Fury out in Newfoundland and Labrador.
00:02:47.040 He might be the liberal premier of that province, but he is striking at Justin Trudeau on the carbon tax issue, because he knows in order to win the next provincial election, he has to be against the carbon tax in his pro-oil and gas province.
00:03:01.380 And so David Eby decided to attack the guy he, in a certain sense, is sharing voters with, and that is going to fuel the rise of the BC Conservatives.
00:03:11.260 And another thing is that a lot of people don't even think that David Eby is really doing that good of a job.
00:03:16.880 Ledger just released some new polls today, and here's the first one.
00:03:20.600 The second one's more shocking, but this one really gives you sort of a flavor for what's going on.
00:03:26.000 This poll reads, are things in the province going in the right or wrong direction?
00:03:30.100 And this is just for British Columbians.
00:03:32.140 Wrong direction is 48%, right direction is 42%.
00:03:35.260 And I would say, mind you, a lot of people are just going to say right direction simply because, at the moment, they're supporting the NDP government.
00:03:44.000 Once the BC Conservatives are a more viable vehicle, I think you're going to see the wrong direction result actually start to increase in its likelihood for voters to pick.
00:03:53.600 But the even worse part of this thing for David Eby is polling has finally come in, demonstrating that British Columbians don't like the carbon tax at all.
00:04:03.820 It's not, well, if you squint, you could see that he has enough of a base of support to be able to drive himself into the next provincial election, declaring he will maintain the provincial carbon tax.
00:04:13.340 Not at all.
00:04:14.760 Look at this poll right here.
00:04:16.020 Again, this is only British Columbians.
00:04:19.060 It reads, federal opposition leader Pierre Polyev's Axe the Tax campaign aims to eliminate the carbon tax at the federal level.
00:04:26.400 However, the carbon tax in British Columbia is provincial, not federal.
00:04:30.380 So in order to eliminate the tax in the province, the province would need to support the removal.
00:04:35.080 Do you support or oppose the recently proposed removal of the carbon tax in British Columbia?
00:04:39.800 And people supporting the removal of the tax in British Columbia provincially is 56% of people polled, and this is 1,002 respondents.
00:04:50.300 Only 29% opposed removing the carbon tax, and 15% were unsure.
00:04:56.220 And generally with unsure people in polls, they tend to break the way that the other people who actually had a positive or negative response gave their results.
00:05:06.600 And so even if I'm to be generous and only to assume that out of the 15% who were unsure, only 8% would then support for the removal, still, Premier Eby is only working with about 36% of people who would maintain the carbon tax, who would vote to maintain the carbon tax.
00:05:23.600 And remember, he does not own that category of voters entirely.
00:05:28.000 Do you think the Green Party of British Columbia is running against the carbon tax?
00:05:31.520 If anything, they would want the carbon tax strengthened.
00:05:34.200 So I don't even think the BC NDP is benefiting fully from the 29% who oppose removing the carbon tax.
00:05:42.400 So this is the problem with David Eby.
00:05:44.680 He wants to please his progressive radical base.
00:05:48.400 At the same time, his middle class base probably makes up two-thirds of his voting share.
00:05:54.400 So right now, David Eby is in the position where every statement he's making and all his policies are only pleasing about one-third of his actual voting base.
00:06:06.000 And the other two-thirds of the NDP's support right now have no reason to stick around.
00:06:12.040 Yes, they might support the NDP over the BC United because the BC United is just the old and competent Liberal Party rebranded and who wants to go vote for them again.
00:06:20.460 But with the BC Conservatives around consolidating both United votes and NDP votes, it's a great kind of unity party to vote for.
00:06:31.040 Plus, it's going to be an ally of Pure Polyev's future federal government.
00:06:35.600 Do you really want David Eby, another four years after 2024, scrapping with Pure Polyev after he becomes Prime Minister? 0.85
00:06:43.640 No, that would be horrible for the province.
00:06:46.700 And also, let's just not pretend that David Eby is actually popular in terms of policy.
00:06:52.540 He's popular because he wasn't the BC Liberals.
00:06:55.500 And the BC Liberals were unpopular for all the exact same policy reasons that the BC NDP are slowly becoming unpopular.
00:07:04.100 The BC NDP did not reverse pretty much any unpopular BC Liberal policies.
00:07:08.540 If anything, they deepened them.
00:07:09.720 Do you think that people in the province of British Columbia are really in favor of the mass drug decriminalization, the defunding of the police, the high taxes provincially, the crazy environmental regulations and restrictions blocking pipelines from being built to tidewater?
00:07:27.680 No.
00:07:28.500 At the end of the day, middle class voters like economic security.
00:07:31.680 And the NDP has not offered any of that.
00:07:33.980 They have offered fashionable policies that people only vote for when they're economically comfortable.
00:07:39.100 They are not comfortable right now, so they're not willing to let the British Columbia NDP keep taxing them to death for horrifyingly dumb experimental policies like decriminalization and handing out safe supply drugs.
00:07:52.600 Anyways, I do want to quickly make the call to action, though, that anyone watching this video right now in British Columbia should go to the description of this video because I've included links to the Facebook and X account for the British Columbia Conservatives.
00:08:08.260 You should go follow them.
00:08:09.800 You should sign up and buy a membership.
00:08:11.380 I don't live in British Columbia, but you guys need to reverse this because for Canada to get better, we need to get better provincially all over the country.
00:08:20.920 We can't have pockmarked areas of liberal and NDP governance when we're trying to fix the whole country at a federal level, or the provincial governments will block all the reforms we need to make.
00:08:32.200 So if you live in British Columbia, click on those links in the description for the BC Conservatives Facebook and X page, follow them, figure out a way of volunteering, donate to them, do whatever you want.
00:08:43.620 And if you don't live in British Columbia and you're still watching this video, please consider donating to my and the National Telegraph's legal fund.
00:08:50.620 It's the Give, Send, Go link in the description below.
00:08:53.240 We have a billionaire developer suing us for no reason at whatsoever.
00:08:58.140 It's been two years or more than two years that this lawsuit's been going on.
00:09:02.440 It started in December of 21, and they still have not actually submitted any evidence to show that we defamed them.
00:09:09.300 And all of our reporting on this guy was based off of a Globe and Mail article that came out a year and a half before we published our article.
00:09:17.980 He's effectively just trying to legally bully us in court by driving up our costs.
00:09:23.000 So I, as a 24 and to the time a 22-year-old, have been paying more than $26,000 in legal fees.
00:09:31.540 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:09:34.440 Make sure to vote conservative no matter where you are.
00:09:37.140 And I guess a shameless plug, I'm running for the Calgary-Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:09:42.640 So buy a membership if you live in that area and visit my website in the description below, wyattclaypool.com.