The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - March 04, 2024


Liberals hate democracy unless they win (Gondek recall)

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Jody Gondek Rachel Notley Danielle Smith Nancy
Justin Trudeau's ESG agenda must be scrapped! Trudeau Liberals got crushed in the Durham byelection

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

172.15

Word count

1,351

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the ongoing recall campaign against Calgary's Mayor Jody Gondek, and why it's not undemocratic to try and force her to step down. I also talk about why I think it's time for Calgarians to vote on whether or not to keep their mayor in office.

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 .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Truly, the Canadian progressive left doesn't believe it's democracy unless they win.
00:00:04.880 And if that sounds a tad hyperbolic to you, here is an article written by Canadian progressive leftists
00:00:10.120 arguing it's not democracy unless they win.
00:00:12.920 It's an article from the Calgary Herald titled,
00:00:15.440 Opinion, Democracy Under Attack with Recall Petition.
00:00:18.980 This about the ongoing recall petition drive being done against Calgary's very unpopular mayor, Jody Gondek.
00:00:25.880 It is an established democratic process to hold democratically elected officials accountable
00:00:31.380 so that the activists trying to get rid of her are allowed to go around with petitions 0.55
00:00:36.160 to get Calgarians to sign up to basically say they want a recall petition
00:00:39.920 and if they get past the threshold needed, a recall election is triggered.
00:00:44.100 They're probably not going to succeed. The threshold is way too high in my opinion.
00:00:48.120 But to progressive leftists, the act of people even collecting these signatures
00:00:52.960 is like the height of fascism.
00:00:54.840 They don't know what democracy even means.
00:00:57.840 Democracy simply just means that the public gets to control the government in some way.
00:01:02.380 Obviously, we don't have a pure democracy where we vote as a public on every single issue.
00:01:07.580 We elect representatives.
00:01:09.080 But if the democratic process allows us to try and recall those people,
00:01:12.720 it's not undemocratic to do so.
00:01:15.060 But the left truly does just think that if they are not winning,
00:01:19.840 then it means that there's something wrong with the system
00:01:22.260 and the whole thing is rigged and it's not democracy.
00:01:25.720 So I want to get into this article here because I did find it truly funny.
00:01:29.820 And I did say at the start that this was written by progressive leftists, plural.
00:01:35.120 It's just labeled as columnists, says the writers,
00:01:38.200 because three effectively, in my opinion, hacks who either run nonprofit groups or strategy firms
00:01:44.060 wrote this turkey.
00:01:44.940 It's only a two-minute read, yet it still needed a committee to put it together.
00:01:49.360 I'll just read a little bit of it.
00:01:50.800 It's quite funny.
00:01:52.260 It says,
00:01:52.820 The attempt to recall Calgary's mayor defies democratic principles
00:01:56.100 and subverts the power of the people.
00:01:58.480 No, it does not.
00:01:59.260 This is the people exerting their power over the elected officials
00:02:03.000 because they are not, you know, dictators.
00:02:05.440 And it says,
00:02:06.520 The majority of voters elected Jody Gondek in every single ward in Calgary.
00:02:11.120 Well, no, they didn't.
00:02:11.880 She only got like 42% of the vote.
00:02:13.800 And now a small group of people want to upheave democracy
00:02:18.080 because they can't comprehend that the majority of people don't share their perspective.
00:02:22.660 The role of Calgary's democratically elected mayor is a leadership role.
00:02:26.360 The mayor, like each councillor, holds just one vote,
00:02:29.520 meaning governing power is shared with the councillors.
00:02:32.100 This vocal minority is intentionally trying to make an example of Gondek 0.98
00:02:36.720 and signaling to others that they have more power
00:02:40.620 than the citizens who voted for her in a democratic election.
00:02:44.480 Well, there's a lot of people who voted for her in 21 0.84
00:02:47.620 who are signing this petition.
00:02:49.640 Her approval rating is only 30%.
00:02:51.960 If anything, the public does not support her,
00:02:55.120 so she is not a democratically popular official.
00:02:58.580 But the idea that she was voted in once,
00:03:00.600 that means that we're not allowed to have any say
00:03:02.900 over whether she stays in office now.
00:03:05.640 That's anti-democracy to not let Gondek do whatever she wants.
00:03:09.600 And no, her role is not simply leadership.
00:03:12.540 City Hall and the mayor's office has a lot of control over policy.
00:03:16.360 Yes, she only has one vote over council, 1.00
00:03:18.560 but she has a lot of executive type powers 1.00
00:03:21.020 in how policies are carried out,
00:03:23.380 you know, what gets funding and whatnot.
00:03:25.380 And the councillors are not as able to put forward bills
00:03:28.140 as she is or motions or bylaws.
00:03:31.100 And I just want to read this sentence
00:03:32.460 because it's quite funny.
00:03:33.980 36 of Calgary's 37 mayors have been men,
00:03:37.220 of them, 35 of them white.
00:03:39.840 Calgarians lack experience with female leadership 0.99
00:03:43.840 and non-white leaders, 0.93
00:03:45.680 especially those leaders not only deviant
00:03:50.100 from the prescribed norms
00:03:51.300 by consistently challenging the status quo. 0.99
00:03:53.840 Well, that's a great way of saying Mayor Gondek sucks at her job 1.00
00:03:57.320 and nobody likes her. 0.98
00:03:59.120 Nancy is not white and he was elected three times.
00:04:02.840 I'm pretty sure Calgarians aren't secretly racist
00:04:05.360 and don't want like a brown mayor. 0.94
00:04:08.040 If anything, it is complete bigotry 1.00
00:04:09.900 from these, frankly, morons 1.00
00:04:12.080 who wrote this article trying to claim 1.00
00:04:14.220 that, well, people just don't get Gondek.
00:04:16.960 And if you try and run a petition drive against her,
00:04:19.400 well, you're just not democratic like we are.
00:04:21.960 We actually are.
00:04:23.820 We're actually engaging in the democratic process.
00:04:26.220 We're not just going to let an elected official get elected,
00:04:29.200 break all their promises,
00:04:30.340 start raising taxes,
00:04:31.420 calling climate emergencies on all this
00:04:33.080 and let them get away with it.
00:04:34.720 But to not let them get away with it
00:04:36.700 because you're opposing the progressive agenda,
00:04:39.060 that is fascism.
00:04:40.640 These people are so tiresome
00:04:42.360 and you can tell this is written by non-profit
00:04:45.400 and strategy firm leftists
00:04:47.320 because the fact that they even had to bring up,
00:04:49.400 well, you know, she's a woman 0.93
00:04:50.820 and people aren't used to female leadership. 1.00
00:04:54.680 Of course.
00:04:55.780 Oh, yeah.
00:04:56.120 It's just because we don't.
00:04:57.080 We're just not used to female leadership. 1.00
00:04:58.900 That's why all these people voted for Daniel Smith
00:05:01.680 as the premier.
00:05:03.000 This is why Albertans have voted for Rachel Notley
00:05:05.480 as the premier. 1.00
00:05:07.060 You're a complete fool 1.00
00:05:08.360 if you argue that people don't like Gondek 1.00
00:05:10.360 because she's a woman. 0.93
00:05:11.200 If anything, you're a sexist
00:05:12.760 for pretending that Gondek represents all women
00:05:16.100 and that if we don't like her,
00:05:17.740 it's because we just don't like female leadership. 1.00
00:05:20.200 That's insane. 0.99
00:05:21.480 You're insane for having written this. 1.00
00:05:23.720 You know, feel shamed for having written such garbage. 1.00
00:05:26.800 This was a very short article 0.99
00:05:28.640 and they couldn't make a coherent point.
00:05:30.900 But it's just, it's undemocratic.
00:05:32.580 We oppose them.
00:05:33.360 It's undemocratic.
00:05:34.660 It's not undemocratic.
00:05:35.760 And this is also why I oppose
00:05:37.460 like a proportional representation
00:05:39.180 and all these other like systems.
00:05:41.040 It's usually being pushed by people
00:05:42.600 who just want different outcomes in elections
00:05:44.500 and not people who actually want,
00:05:47.320 you know, the public to get what it wants.
00:05:49.000 They just want what they want.
00:05:50.680 Their niche ideology to get into parliament
00:05:53.540 or into the legislature or council.
00:05:55.440 They're not actually looking for,
00:05:57.920 you know, the government to be more representative.
00:06:00.760 If anything, the proportional representation
00:06:02.840 just means that niche parties
00:06:04.680 tend to get to cram down a lot of very niche interests
00:06:07.340 on the general public
00:06:08.380 who didn't want them in the first place.
00:06:10.500 Ugh, sorry for the little mini rant there
00:06:12.180 on proportional representation.
00:06:13.700 I am a staunch supporter of First Past the Post
00:06:16.960 and I'm basically just a staunch supporter
00:06:18.960 for the status quo of our democracy.
00:06:21.200 I don't like when we start sort of gerrymandering the rules
00:06:23.840 on how people are elected.
00:06:25.180 It's annoying.
00:06:26.480 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:06:28.860 And to bring up democracy again,
00:06:31.320 right before the video ends,
00:06:32.460 I, Wyatt Claypool,
00:06:33.620 I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill
00:06:35.360 Conservative Party nomination.
00:06:37.220 If you live in this riding,
00:06:38.820 please vote for me by a Conservative Party membership.
00:06:41.660 And the nomination hasn't been called yet,
00:06:44.100 but just make sure you're all locked and loaded
00:06:45.960 and ready to support me.
00:06:47.640 I'm an actual conservative
00:06:48.940 who actually lives in the riding.
00:06:50.860 There are 14 other candidates or so,
00:06:53.020 and I cannot say the same about them.
00:06:55.120 So hopefully you'll support me.
00:06:56.440 Check out my website in the description below,
00:06:58.180 WyattClaypool.com.
00:06:59.220 And also you can try and give to our legal defense fund
00:07:02.360 for the National Telegraph,
00:07:03.780 linked in the description below in the Send Go link.
00:07:06.540 It's some billionaire developer suing us
00:07:08.500 because we wrote accurate things about him.
00:07:10.600 That was all based on previous reporting,
00:07:12.440 but he wants to pretend that he's all offended
00:07:14.100 and he's been defamed,
00:07:15.480 even though we said nothing wrong
00:07:16.780 and we said nothing new about him.
00:07:18.460 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:07:20.200 See you guys around.
00:07:20.880 See you guys around.