The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - December 13, 2023


Liberals exposed for faking support for Liberal Speaker


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

197.67992

Word count

1,812

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A clip of a Liberal MP trying to build up Greg Fergus for wearing his Speaker's robes at a Liberal fundraising event is exposed to be fake, and the whole thing ends up being a political stunt that cost the Liberal Party of Canada a whole bunch of money.

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 .
00:00:00.320 Hey guys, it's Wyatt here again, here to talk about yet another self-inflicted and embarrassing
00:00:05.640 moment by the Liberal Party of Canada that truly feels like a gift to all of us this
00:00:10.220 Christmas season because of how funny it is to watch.
00:00:13.000 This, of course, is the Greg Fergus situation.
00:00:15.980 It's a few days old, but I've been walking and driving around ruminating on it because
00:00:20.820 it's so horrifying to imagine the fact that a real-life person inside the Liberal Party
00:00:26.120 thought this was a great idea.
00:00:27.940 It was going to be great press for Greg Fergus, and in the same meeting that this clip took
00:00:33.620 place in, it was exposed that the entire thing was basically a political op.
00:00:38.080 It was fake.
00:00:39.380 Of course, I'm referring to this clip of a Liberal MP trying to build up Greg Fergus in this
00:00:46.300 committee meeting, investigating him for wearing his Speaker's robes at different events that
00:00:51.900 were supposed to be, like, that were partisan Liberal events when the Speaker is supposed
00:00:55.620 to remain completely neutral in his official capacity.
00:00:59.160 He can go to Liberal events, but he's not supposed to be wearing his Speaker robes.
00:01:02.260 He's not supposed to be presenting himself as the Speaker of the House at Liberal Party
00:01:06.260 fundraisers.
00:01:07.180 It's just one of those things that if you are Speaker, you stay the Speaker while you're
00:01:12.520 at work.
00:01:12.940 But as soon as you're at a partisan event or outside of Parliament, you do not represent
00:01:16.640 yourself anymore as the Speaker unless it's a completely nonpartisan event.
00:01:22.220 So because Greg Fergus got caught doing this, he's a new Speaker, the Liberals do not want
00:01:26.920 another scandal of having to get rid of a Speaker and replace it with someone else so
00:01:31.180 soon after Anthony Roda was removed for inviting a literal SS officer or soldier into the House
00:01:38.680 of Commons to get a standing ovation by the sitting MPs.
00:01:42.500 So this situation, the Liberals are assuming that if they build up his reputation, they
00:01:48.020 say that people actually like Greg Fergus and they're supporting him despite the mistakes
00:01:52.040 he made, that somehow they maybe might have like a bit of a rallying moment for Greg Fergus
00:01:57.360 that look at all these great things that people are saying about Greg, maybe we should give
00:02:01.440 him a second chance.
00:02:02.640 It completely backfired because they just made up the letters he was supposedly receiving.
00:02:07.220 They were from Liberal Party representatives themselves.
00:02:11.100 One of them was a former MP and then someone else was like some insider in the Liberal Party.
00:02:15.860 I'll play the clip for you here because, again, regardless if you like the Liberals or not,
00:02:21.100 you should take a lesson away from this.
00:02:23.200 Fake politics, fake support, astroturfing almost never works.
00:02:29.220 And it always ends up hurting you more when it's revealed than any benefit we might have given
00:02:34.120 you in the short run.
00:02:35.200 But anyways, here's the clip.
00:02:36.220 And Mr. Speaker, you're probably not aware of that, but late last night, many members
00:02:41.820 of PROC received letters supporting you in your role as Speaker.
00:02:46.140 Point of order, Madam Chair.
00:02:47.980 Point of order, Mr. Duncan.
00:02:49.520 Wondering, just in reference to Ms. Romanotto's comments about, she referenced some emails that
00:02:54.140 we received last night, including the members of PROC's personal parliamentary emails.
00:02:58.900 I'm looking for unanimous consent if I could table those two letters that were provided
00:03:03.140 to us by email last night.
00:03:05.620 And also including in that, a copy of the metadata from both of those.
00:03:09.900 When you open up the Microsoft Word document, you can actually go and see who the original
00:03:14.060 authors of those two were.
00:03:15.540 I'd like to table not only the letters, but along with each, that the author of the one
00:03:19.880 letter dated yesterday came from a Liberal-appointed senator, Senator Andrew Cardozo.
00:03:26.660 And I'd also, in the second letter, like to table not only the letter, but the mega data
00:03:30.620 that shows that the author of that original letter was a former Liberal member of Parliament,
00:03:36.700 Frank Hillis.
00:03:39.000 Yeah, like the one, I love the way that that clip starts off.
00:03:42.600 I forget what the lady's name is, some Liberal MP, I'm not sure if she's a cabinet minister 1.00
00:03:47.260 or just a backbencher on this committee.
00:03:49.240 But like, the way that she's kind of like giving him this warm smile, like this is a
00:03:53.260 heartwarming moment, as if like a bunch of, like, I honestly, in this moment, this entire
00:03:57.920 situation, I'm embarrassed on behalf of Greg Fergus.
00:04:00.920 I guarantee they did not run this plan by Greg Fergus, that they were going to fake letters,
00:04:05.600 because I even, I don't think Greg Fergus is exactly the most competent politician.
00:04:10.260 But if you were to tell him, we're going to fake a bunch of letters from Liberal senators
00:04:14.820 and former MPs, he would have probably said, that's a stupid idea.
00:04:17.540 And you're going to make me look like a putz once it comes out that these are fake letters.
00:04:21.480 But I love the way that that Liberal MP is looking at him with like this warm smile on
00:04:25.000 her face, like a bunch of children around Christmas might have written letters in favor
00:04:28.920 of Greg Fergus.
00:04:31.120 Just one thing, the reason why this was never going to work was who really writes letters of
00:04:37.120 support to Parliament, pretty much nobody already writes any of their MPs, maybe 1% of Canadians
00:04:43.020 have ever sent an email or a letter to their MP or to Parliament about anything, let alone
00:04:50.220 people sending, like, you know, letters of affirmation to the Speaker of the House.
00:04:55.020 It's never happened.
00:04:56.520 So there was, this was obviously going to be something that the Conservatives were going
00:04:59.820 to look into.
00:05:00.960 And the Conservatives have access to the data, they were going to see what these letters
00:05:04.880 were, and it wasn't going to work.
00:05:07.220 Like, again, on its face of it, it's just embarrassing.
00:05:10.640 Why would you, why would you do this, pretending like anyone was writing in for him?
00:05:14.700 And even then, who cares?
00:05:16.640 Even, let's just say that these are regular citizens.
00:05:18.640 For some reason, just a bunch of Canadians got a bug that they had to go and write about
00:05:25.120 how great, how much they love Greg Fergus.
00:05:28.320 And they sent letters in.
00:05:29.920 Who cares?
00:05:30.840 Does this make anything he's done not scandalous?
00:05:33.080 Like, I don't think it's the biggest scandal in the world that he went to these Liberal 0.69
00:05:36.880 Party functions or recorded videos for them in his Speaker robes.
00:05:40.980 It's a dumb thing.
00:05:41.960 It's a scandal.
00:05:42.820 The Liberals are extremely sloppy.
00:05:44.620 They know better.
00:05:45.440 They should still be held accountable for this.
00:05:47.500 But who thought that they were going to somehow recover from this by the news coming out that
00:05:51.780 some people had written some letters?
00:05:53.460 Like, do the Liberals really think that people were watching the committee minutes or the committee
00:05:59.060 on, like, CPAC, and they were going to see the clip of her saying, we got some great letters
00:06:04.580 in favor of you, Greg.
00:06:06.300 And Canadians are like, hearts were going to melt and say, you know, maybe we should give
00:06:09.740 Greg a second chance.
00:06:10.980 It wasn't going to happen.
00:06:11.800 What was there going to be an article written about how there's some letters that came in
00:06:15.400 in support of Greg?
00:06:16.800 I don't understand what the benefit here was for the Liberals to fake letters, but I
00:06:22.900 think it just demonstrates that whoever's in the back, like the background of the Liberal
00:06:26.480 Party running the sort of, like, infrastructure, the internal PR of the Liberal government is
00:06:32.100 not doing a good job.
00:06:33.520 They should fire these people because they're obviously not getting their money's worth.
00:06:37.080 Never fake anything in politics.
00:06:39.860 Do not run bots on your social media pages.
00:06:42.520 Do not fake support on your social media pages.
00:06:45.500 Do not pretend that people are writing you letters.
00:06:48.300 Do not pay people to show up to your rallies to pretend that you can have bigger rallies
00:06:52.260 than you really do.
00:06:53.120 It never works.
00:06:54.500 One, because fake support, all it does is just fake support.
00:06:58.640 It just appears that you have a bunch of fake support because people aren't going, there's
00:07:03.040 very few people in this world who just see that someone supports you and that they're
00:07:06.900 going to support you too.
00:07:07.880 If you're not doing good things, people are just going to be confused by the fact that people
00:07:11.660 support you.
00:07:12.280 So you end up wasting all this time and money just creating this facade that you might have
00:07:18.320 a couple more people that like you than previously assumed, but it is not actually going to get
00:07:24.120 people to vote in favor of you.
00:07:25.960 You have to have a very, very, like, I don't know, very sheep-like electoral base in order
00:07:32.500 to think that because someone wrote a nice letter about you, that people are going to somehow,
00:07:37.260 like, start jumping up and onto the bandwagon of like, oh, I guess I like Greg Fergus because
00:07:41.540 someone wrote him a letter.
00:07:43.260 I'm like, I'm kind of talking in circles here a little bit, so I do apologize.
00:07:47.500 But I don't, I am, it's like for the life of me, this is why I walk around thinking about it.
00:07:51.900 I cannot understand the motivation or the end goal of this political op, but it blew up in their
00:08:00.060 face, so I'm at least happy that I got to see that because you don't usually see a political,
00:08:05.200 like, operation that sloppy get exposed that easily.
00:08:09.780 But anyways, I guess that should be it for me today.
00:08:12.120 I have my legal fundraiser still linked in the description of this video, still being sued
00:08:16.480 by a billionaire.
00:08:17.260 I'm winning that case.
00:08:18.100 It's a really dumb defamation case.
00:08:20.400 It's just someone trying to harass me because the National Telegraph, when he wrote an article
00:08:24.660 mentioning them, we had accurate information.
00:08:27.180 He did not like what the accurate information implies about him, so he basically tried to
00:08:32.700 sue us, and it's been going badly for him ever since.
00:08:35.880 Other than that, I'm also running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination,
00:08:39.500 so if you live in the Calgary Signal Hill riding, I have my website for that linked in the
00:08:43.920 description below, so if you live in the riding, sign up onto the email list and make sure
00:08:47.180 you have Conservative Party membership.
00:08:48.580 But other than that, that should be it for me today.
00:08:51.540 Hopefully everyone has a great Christmas season because the Liberals seem to be, or if you're
00:08:56.700 not having a great Christmas season, the Liberals will make sure that you do because these embarrassing
00:09:00.860 clips keep getting more and more frequent with them as the Christmas break drags closer.
00:09:08.420 But other than that, have a great day, everyone.