The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 27, 2023


How Can Conservatives Beat Municipal Progressives Like Olivia Chow

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Olivia Chow Aaron Gunn Anthony Fury Jody Gondek Annamie Paul Doug Ford John Tory
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Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

198.08

Word count

2,245

Sentence count

82

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Olivia Chow has been elected mayor of Toronto, Canada's largest city, and she's running for re-election on a platform of anti-progressive policies like rent control, loosening drug and crime enforcement, and de-funding the police. In this episode, we discuss why these policies don't work, and why we need to take municipal politics seriously.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I think in the aftermath of this Toronto mayoral by-election where Olivia Chow won, beating out her closest opponent, Anna Balio, by a fairly decent margin, I think four or five points, in a race that really shouldn't have been this close considering the policies that Olivia Chow is running on.
00:00:16.280 I think a lot of, you know, people who are more fiscally responsible, especially all-around conservatives, need to contend a little bit more with the idea that we've kind of let municipal politics sort of out of our grasp, that we aren't really focused enough on it.
00:00:31.100 And because of that, there has kind of just been a progressive takeover.
00:00:34.560 And this is not just Toronto where you're assuming it's a progressive city, you're going to get more progressive mayoral candidates.
00:00:40.360 The problem is, is that this stuff is also happening in places like Calgary.
00:00:44.180 Toronto is just a microcosm, and even frankly, Olivia Chow is a little bit too NDP, even for Toronto. 1.00
00:00:51.060 Toronto tends to be a very upper middle class kind of liberal city in terms of its federal and provincial politics.
00:00:57.140 But then they've just elected someone who thinks that rent control, loosening drug and crime enforcement is going to somehow make the city better.
00:01:05.880 And what I think conservatives have to come to terms with in terms of actually getting us to take municipal politics seriously and getting us to the point where we can win is understanding that there are people out there who legitimately woke up on this by-election voting day excited to cast a ballot for Olivia Chow.
00:01:23.280 We think that's ridiculous. Who would ever want to vote for Olivia Chow? She's out of her mind. 1.00
00:01:28.780 She legitimately just thinks that these progressive policies that have failed everywhere they've been tried, New York, San Francisco, L.A., Vancouver, it's totally going to work this time in Toronto.
00:01:38.380 A place that has already been using these policies, been loosening drug laws, been giving out safe supply, and, you know, not really holding people in prison when they commit violent acts over and over again, that somehow if she just does those policies more, it's going to work.
00:01:53.440 And, again, there's people out there who actually believe that she's correct, that if we just, I guess, embrace a pure version of progressivism, all the negative aspects of these progressive policies are going to go away and we're only going to get the benefits.
00:02:06.920 The benefits that aren't even really all of that significant.
00:02:10.440 Like, but anyway, so, but getting to the point is I think that conservatives actually need to get to the root issues that Olivia Chow is running on. 1.00
00:02:18.040 Not just say she's a dumb progressive or who could vote for her, she's radical, explain why her policies don't work. 1.00
00:02:24.560 I think that too many people in this country, despite the fact that Canada has built, is completely built off of a free market economy, that, that, that's why Canada has its wealth. 0.57
00:02:34.400 It's not because of the social programs of the country, it's because of the free market initiatives of individuals that we have to explain why policies like rent control do not work.
00:02:42.840 We have to explain how, when you do not enforce the law, you are going to have an increase in poverty in many neighborhoods in Toronto, that it's a complete myth that crime is sort of driven by poverty.
00:02:55.740 It's actually the complete opposite.
00:02:58.500 Poverty, poverty does not drive crime.
00:03:01.540 Crime drives poverty.
00:03:03.180 When you are in a part of the city that is wracked by crime, it shuts down small businesses.
00:03:08.040 People move out and they divest from that area.
00:03:10.280 Toronto or any other city around Calgary can be experiencing a massive economic boom, but certain neighborhoods will remain poverty stricken because nobody wants to start a business in that area.
00:03:21.100 People do not trust people in that area to show up for work.
00:03:24.000 People do not trust that area to be safe to put in some sort of manufacturing plant, any sort of like, you know, IT office.
00:03:32.820 Nobody wants to set up anything there because of the crime.
00:03:35.480 Yet we just allow people like Olivia Chow to make the argument that somehow there is discrimination in policing based on sort of disproportionate levels of arrests, when really what you're doing is you're basically oppressing minority neighborhoods by basically saying that the criminals in those areas are allowed to keep committing crimes because we don't want to seem discriminatory by having arrested too many people from a specific group.
00:04:01.160 When you're basically just saying those criminals are allowed to oppress people in that area, they're allowed to steal from them, they're allowed to break their property, and we're not going to do anything because it would somehow be intolerant to remove the criminals out of this area who are destroying the community.
00:04:14.520 But anyways, but overall, that's just that's just crime rent control, we need to explain why rent control does not work it is in it is an anti housing policy it is even though people say it's all about affordability.
00:04:28.380 It's not this we literally have this happening in Calgary, the Calgary City Hall just released this affordable housing, you know, task force recommendation report, that is supposedly going to reduce the cost of housing in Calgary, and you read the thing.
00:04:43.380 And it's literally just rent control, it's just rent control and rent and housing subsidies, they're trying to force 15% of all available properties in any area of the city to be to be under delivered at under market values to be like put on the market for less than other rent for what the average rent is in that area.
00:05:02.380 All you're going to all that does is drives developers out of the city of Calgary, because why would you want to build houses in city of Calgary, and rent houses, if you have to offer a significant chunk of them, a below market value, it just means that more houses are going to sit vacant or fewer landlords have the ability or the money available to actually fix up their properties that they're just going to let them deteriorate and then they're probably going to sell them to big developer to knock it down and replace it with luxury units because after a while luxury units are the only thing that make any money you keep
00:05:32.380 your 15% subsidized units and then you just offer the rest at much more exorbitant luxury fees to make up for the fact that a bunch of people are getting rent for $700 a month.
00:05:42.380 Anyways, and I'm just going to keep circling back to different issues. Olivia Chow is talking about how we need to have like a housing first approach to drug policy. That was actually a very good moment that Anthony Fury confronted her on because she had no plan. Effectively, she's thinking, well, let's just let drug addicts harass people on the streets basically constantly needing to be revived by police officers with
00:06:02.380 naloxone kits. And we'll just you know, 20 years when we have the right enough housing will then deal with the drug problem. She she's actively delusional to think that that's actually going to work. And frankly, I don't think she actually thinks that policy is going to work. I think she just thinks it's an easy thing to say, say, Oh, rather than arresting people, we can just go we can just do a housing first up like policy. Conservatives need to take this on and say that no, you're actually being incredibly unsympathetic to the people Toronto, to the people who are addicts on the streets, and to the people who have to live
00:06:32.360 around these addicts and who are have their lives affected by this, you're not being compassionate in any way. All you're doing is basically saying, I'm not going to deal with this issue for 20 years. And even in 20 years, you're probably still not going to be dealing with the issue because public housing projects never worked out. If anything, they usually become vectors for drug trafficking. So anyways, I think that this all comes around to the idea that conservatives need to actually market why these liberal progressive issues do not work, not just saying that progressives have bad
00:07:02.340 records don't vote for them, that the progressives know their policies do not work, we can explain to you how their policies do not work, we can show you their track records. More people need to see Aaron Gunn's fantastic documentary Canada's dying, because that one does a brilliant job of showing how liberal crime or progressive crime and drug policies have gutted cities like Vancouver and Anaimo. And it's doing the same thing now to Toronto. And it was doing the same thing in Calgary until finally the UCP government ended up cracking down on
00:07:32.340 drug crime and actually getting very tough on addiction services where if you're going to you cannot be on the streets just allowing yourself to deteriorate, eventually, the government does actually have to step in and force you to detox, it doesn't need to force you to kick your habit, because it's not the government and the public's responsibility to effectively subsidize your addiction on the streets. But that Aaron Gunn documentary is fantastic, because when you if even if a liberal saw it, they would understand that yes, when we keep
00:08:02.340 example after example of a liberal policy being used, demonstrating the failures that that policy, like, I guess, brings, it's not even really the failure of the policy, it's the symptoms of the policy, that the policy isn't even meant to work. And more so is like, what's what's the chaos that the policy causes? So like safe supply, that's one of those things where I guarantee you, if you showed some sort of Green Party voter in downtown Toronto, they would probably say, yeah, this is a little bit much that we're giving hydromorphone,
00:08:30.340 like super strong opioids to people who are like fentanyl or heroin addicts. And assuming that just by giving them, you know, tons and tons of pills every single day that is going to somehow, you know, get them off drugs, eventually, you've just increased the supply of drugs. And then you're wondering why the supply of drug addicts is increasing. Whatever. Sorry about this being a bit of a rant. But after that Toronto mayoral disaster, I think that what we need to do is stop sort of just having
00:09:00.340 candidates do these headlong pushes right when the mayoral election is declared, we have a bunch of conservative candidates say they're going to run, they play very well to the conservative base. Anthony Frey had a fantastic platform. But the problem is, we haven't done the work of demonstrating why progressive policies fail. So when these candidates are allowed to run without a party band or under them, that voters can easily identify as a failing brand, like because because Olivia Chow does not have to run with the NDP brand, I guarantee
00:09:30.000 that's why she did better. Back in 2014, she was up against Doug Ford and John Tory, who had their own sort of personal brands that were very effective when they were running for mayor. But at the same time, people very much associated Olivia Chow with the NDP back then. And as time goes on, she more so just becomes Olivia Chow herself. That's why she was able to get across the finish line. And because we do not have things like the NDP brand weighing people like Olivia Chow down and us being able to say, hey, that's a failing brand, don't vote for that candidate. We actually have to express why what
00:09:59.980 specific policies attached to those liberal and NDP brands are the failing ones. So that even when someone in municipal politics like Olivia Chow is not running under an NDP or a liberal banner, people still identify as like, oh, she's talking about rent control. She's talking about safe supply drugs. She's talking about, you know, loosening enforcement of like, of crimes in different parts of Toronto. People need to hear that and immediately it triggers them to have this is a crazy person we can't vote for.
00:10:28.040 But we've given her an air of legitimacy and people like Jody Gondek in Calgary, an air of legitimacy by arguing with them as if their policies are just sort of other options out there. It's they're failing options. They're anti free market options. And they are basically pro criminal and pro drug addict options. We need to brand these options as being things that just are just no goes, rather than just sort of, you know, saying that their progresses and their ideas fail, that it's no rent
00:10:56.040 rent control fails, and you're trying to push rent control, you're trying to push safe supply, we shouldn't vote for you, you're trying to push, you know, you're trying to push an anti cop agenda, we're not going to vote for you where I think that never actually occurred with Olivia Chow. It just became Olivia Chow. She's just another NDP person. She's a hyper progressive don't vote for there wasn't saying don't vote for her because she's the safe supply candidate.
00:11:18.040 That's it.