The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 29, 2025


Elections BC failing to investigate Surrey Guilford vote issues!


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

176.96245

Word count

2,201

Sentence count

121

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Elections BC is just going to stop looking into the Surrey Guilford case while Hanvir Randhawa files a Supreme Court application to overturn the election results in that riding. I talk to Hanvir about why this is happening and why Elections BC won't even look into it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I saw this pop up last night and it is absolutely insane.
00:00:04.780 So Elections BC is just going to stop looking into Surrey Guilford while there is the court application from the BC Conservative candidate from that riding to overturn the election results because of all the irregularities they found in a race where Gary Begg, the BC NDP candidate, only won by 22 votes.
00:00:26.760 So Hanvir Randhawa, the Conservative candidate, is bringing forward a petition to the court, a lawsuit in order to overturn the results because with a 22 vote margin, they have found more than 45 voter irregularities, 21 of which are all from one lodge, Argyle Lodge, in which there's a lot of evidence, affidavits and whatnot to prove that there was voter intimidation, votes being sent in for people who are incapable of voting and all that sort of thing.
00:00:55.580 And BC Elections is just like, well, we're going to stop looking into this while this very serious lawsuit is going on.
00:01:03.880 I'm going to break this down for you guys today.
00:01:05.780 I actually just got off the phone with Hanvir Randhawa who gave me some more details on what's going on with this.
00:01:11.840 We're going to be reading the article and doing all that.
00:01:14.740 But before we get into it, guys, if you want continuous updates on this story, we're probably going to be doing an interview tomorrow with Hanvir.
00:01:21.800 Make sure to subscribe to the channel, like this video, leave a comment, do all that great stuff.
00:01:27.400 It really helps us in the algorithm and helps spread news about this extremely important issue.
00:01:32.580 Let's get into this news article because as I read this, it's going to make less and less sense why they are just suddenly not looking into this issue.
00:01:41.840 You would assume that when there is evidence, affidavits, all that sort of thing for a potential election integrity issue, BC Elections would be all over it.
00:01:52.040 But instead, while it is most serious to collect evidence, BC Elections doesn't want to do that anymore.
00:01:59.060 So here is the article from Fraser Valley Today.
00:02:02.120 I'll be linking this in the description below if you want to read it for yourself.
00:02:05.460 But they say, Fraser Valley, Elections BC says it has suspended a review from a BC Conservative candidate who submitted a complaint after losing his Fraser Valley riding by 22 votes.
00:02:18.780 This is, of course, Surrey Guilford.
00:02:20.760 Maybe it's in the Fraser Valley.
00:02:22.100 It felt weird that they were referring to it as Fraser Valley.
00:02:25.100 They say, according to Statement Tuesday, Elections BC said it received a complaint from Surrey Guilford candidate Hanvir Singh Randhawa on January 3rd, 2025.
00:02:34.360 The complaint argued there were potential violations of the Election Act in his election district during the 2024 provincial election.
00:02:42.760 Roughly a week later, on January 9th, Elections BC confirmed that Randhawa's complaint was being reviewed.
00:02:49.320 Four days later, on January 13th, Randhawa submitted a petition to the Supreme Court of British Columbia seeking judicial declaration that the election of BC Surrey Guilford candidate Gary Begg was invalid.
00:03:01.720 The election, the Chief Electoral Officer and Gary Begg were named as respondents to the judicial petition.
00:03:09.040 Elections BC says the allegations of Randhawa's complaint to BC elections are essentially the same as the allegations contained in the court petition.
00:03:17.260 Elections BC says it is suspending a review of Randhawa's complaint while the outcome of the petition is decided.
00:03:23.120 Why? I can stop reading it right there. Why? Why are you suspending investigations into this same matter because it's in front of the court?
00:03:33.880 The problem is, and Hanvir has confirmed this to me in other media, he doesn't have the tools and capacity to investigate this the same way Elections BC does.
00:03:43.640 In fact, he keeps writing them requests for information, and they keep ghosting him or just saying they're not going to give him anything.
00:03:51.700 So he, as some random guy and his team, are supposed to just run around investigating information without any voter data,
00:03:59.360 without being able to match up if somebody said they didn't vote but a mail-in ballot was sent in for them, that they can't even confirm that.
00:04:05.580 They're, effectively, in my mind, they're waiting for Hanvir's petition to potentially get rejected so that then they'll look into it,
00:04:13.800 and even if they find hundreds of ballots that are invalid, well, the court's not going to look at the same issue twice.
00:04:21.140 They've already ruled on this. This is insane. This is not how anyone would expect this to go.
00:04:28.560 It's also a bit sketchy, because BC Elections is, of course, a corporation within the BC government.
00:04:37.540 At this point, it feels like they're just protecting a government's MLA.
00:04:42.020 Gary Bagg only won by 22 votes. That is the thinnest of thin margins that I've seen in an election.
00:04:47.560 I guess in Alberta, we've had some UCP MLAs lose by, like, six votes, but at least in BC.
00:04:52.780 That is the closest margin.
00:04:54.180 Hanvir has already found 45 irregularities, including people who are nonverbal and unable to write their name,
00:05:00.880 somehow sending in mail-in ballots to a ballot station only 80 meters away,
00:05:06.040 and people signing affidavits saying they were intimidated.
00:05:08.860 I was told by Hanvir that even BC Elections, Elections BC, went to Argyle Lodge,
00:05:14.760 the place where these 21 ballots were sent in on behalf of people who are recovering from addictions and whatnot,
00:05:20.220 and they have usually some capacity limits in terms of physical capacity and mental capacity,
00:05:25.920 that they interviewed a couple people.
00:05:28.300 They found out that this isn't just conjecture from his camp.
00:05:31.640 It's real.
00:05:32.740 And that's when they decided they wanted to stop looking into it.
00:05:35.920 As soon as they went to Argyle Lodge, realized it's all very true,
00:05:39.500 and this is all clearly messed up,
00:05:42.140 that these people are just signing people's names to ballots that they didn't want to fill out,
00:05:45.760 or forcing them to fill out the ballot that they want, or they'll be kicked out,
00:05:49.400 that suddenly they don't want to look into who's voting for what anymore.
00:05:54.320 Absolutely insane.
00:05:55.700 By the way, the lady who is the manager of Argyle Lodge is a maxed-out BC NDP donor in 2023.
00:06:02.120 We don't have the records for 2024 yet.
00:06:04.560 I wonder if she donated to them, my goodness.
00:06:08.060 It's like actually insane that this is just considered something where BC Elections can just suspend it,
00:06:12.980 and there's not going to be major media outcry.
00:06:14.860 There should be massive media outcry right now that they just don't want to look at this while it's pending.
00:06:21.980 Imagine if the province of BC was suing a corporation for some amount of fraud.
00:06:29.360 Maybe they poisoned a lake.
00:06:30.580 Who knows?
00:06:31.320 And it's also a federal issue, too.
00:06:33.460 And the federal government is investigating,
00:06:36.500 but because they have a relationship with the corporation,
00:06:39.220 and it's kind of like an S&C-Lavalin situation, they don't want to punish them.
00:06:42.820 While the province is suing them, suddenly the feds stop investigating because they don't want to provide any evidence to the issue.
00:06:51.380 They don't want to give any evidence to the province when they're suing.
00:06:54.740 That's effectively what's going on here.
00:06:56.720 Hanveer told me, Elections BC says that they don't want to affect the case.
00:07:01.900 You don't want to affect the case.
00:07:03.460 Why?
00:07:04.880 The whole point is evidence is not, like, negatively affecting a case.
00:07:08.100 It's not ruining a case.
00:07:10.020 Imagine if somebody was being tried for, like, a major crime,
00:07:13.320 and the police said, well, he's already being criminally tried.
00:07:16.080 We just don't want to look for any more evidence because that would be unfair.
00:07:19.240 Unfair how?
00:07:20.600 You are providing more evidence to a controversial situation.
00:07:25.260 More evidence helps.
00:07:27.140 It's actually ridiculous.
00:07:28.300 They're just going to wait for the petition to be basically timed out.
00:07:32.700 Then they're going to investigate.
00:07:34.440 The BC conservatives, because they're not actually part of this petition,
00:07:37.780 they need to get involved, help pay court expenses if they can,
00:07:41.520 help investigate themselves, because if BC elections isn't going to do it,
00:07:45.460 somebody has to, and obviously Hanveer Randhawa and his team are not going to have the resources
00:07:50.360 that a party or any other institution is going to have.
00:07:53.700 So the guy needs assistance.
00:07:55.320 He absolutely deserves it.
00:07:56.540 That guy was a workhorse in the Surrey-Guilford riding.
00:08:00.160 That was a riding that was not on the table for anyone to win.
00:08:03.320 Nobody assumed it was winnable.
00:08:04.820 And that was now within 22 votes, and Gary Begg barely snuck in.
00:08:10.180 It is worthwhile to do this because the BCNDP are currently ruining the province.
00:08:14.140 They've broken basically every election promise right after the election.
00:08:17.440 They're not even giving people the $1,000 grocery rebates because it turns out
00:08:21.280 socialists suck with money, and now they have a massive cost overrun,
00:08:24.840 and they don't have the government tax revenues they assumed they were going to have.
00:08:28.720 And now they're running a $10 billion deficit rounding up.
00:08:33.000 That's insane considering the federal government is in trouble for running a $62 billion deficit,
00:08:37.860 and $9 billion is coming from BC alone, from their own coffers,
00:08:41.900 even though they don't have to pay for the military or anything like that.
00:08:44.480 They've somehow found a way to waste even more money.
00:08:47.780 By the way, the cost overruns are so bad, there's a water treatment plant on the North Shore
00:08:52.340 that was budgeted at being $700 million to get online.
00:08:56.020 They are currently running past $4.7 billion to get this thing online, and it's not done yet.
00:09:01.100 It's probably going to be more like $6 billion by the time it's built.
00:09:04.440 These people are just thieves at this point,
00:09:06.480 and now that we actually have some real smoke to investigate with the election,
00:09:11.020 we've got to go on vacation, guys.
00:09:13.280 We don't have any time for any of this stuff.
00:09:16.420 Before I end this off, I actually just want to talk about this one thing
00:09:19.040 because I don't really have anywhere else to stick this in at the moment.
00:09:22.740 It is nuts how little the BC government works.
00:09:27.400 They spend oodles of money.
00:09:29.960 They spend more money than the taxpayers are giving them per year.
00:09:34.120 They have massive deficits, and they're not working.
00:09:37.100 This is a great video that the BC Conservative Caucus uploaded just going over
00:09:41.540 how little these people actually do on a day-to-day basis since they've gotten into government.
00:09:46.920 They've been in government for three months now, a little bit over three months,
00:09:50.100 and they haven't done anything.
00:09:51.320 It's been three months since the election, and we've hardly heard anything from EB's NDP.
00:09:57.160 So where have they been?
00:09:58.480 What have they been doing?
00:09:59.620 And have they actually done any work at all?
00:10:02.360 Well, the NDP's bloated cabinet is legally required to disclose their schedule,
00:10:07.460 and what they filed is absolutely disgraceful.
00:10:10.960 With our province facing an immediate generational threat, 0.99
00:10:14.300 Minister of Energy Adrian Dix has clocked in a grand total of six days of work.
00:10:21.540 Minister for Mining and Critical Minerals J. Group Brar has worked a total of two days.
00:10:27.020 Parliamentary Secretary for Anti-Racism Jesse Sunner has also worked only two days.
00:10:33.620 By the way, a self-professed, basically a fascist, somebody who literally puts trade unionist in
00:10:41.920 their bio, trade unionist does not mean I heart unions. Trade unionist means that I believe that
00:10:48.300 unions and the government should own the economy, should run the economy, which is what the fascist
00:10:53.660 government in Italy was based around, was the idea that trade unions and the government should own
00:10:58.720 all means of production.
00:11:00.720 Minister Terry Young has attended one event, went to a luncheon, and has had two phone calls.
00:11:07.500 Minister Mike Farnworth has gone to one event and one lunch. That's it.
00:11:13.000 But somehow it gets even more ridiculous.
00:11:15.600 These BCNDP MLAs have done literally nothing since their calendars began. And with these MLAs completely
00:11:23.780 refusing to file their schedule, we can only assume they've been vacationing in the Bahamas.
00:11:29.920 It must be nice for EB's MLAs to get a $2 million pay increase, cancel the fall sitting, and then take
00:11:36.480 a vacation for an entire month.
00:11:38.660 Well, I'm not going to play the rest of this, but this is just like the, this is parody levels.
00:11:45.340 This is if we are writing a sitcom about British Columbia, and we're really jacking up the incompetence
00:11:50.760 of lefty granola politicians. This is what we would put in. Oh, they don't work, they give themselves 0.99
00:11:57.080 pay raises, budget overruns, and they're on a beach in Hawaii. This is what we would write if we were
00:12:02.780 trying to make jokes about how incompetent BC government is. Anyways, that's it for me today,
00:12:09.420 guys. There's going to be a lot of media coming out about the Surrey Guilford thing in the next few
00:12:13.000 days. I heard that Randhawa might be doing an interview with Trey Humphrey at Rebel News. That
00:12:17.820 would be good to check out once it comes out if you're not subscribed to them. But remember to
00:12:21.680 subscribe to this channel, like the video, leave a comment, all that great stuff, and I'll see you guys later.