The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 12, 2024


Recall Mayor Jyoti Gondek! (Calgary's Union Mayor)

Topics
recall Gondek recall Gondek
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Dan McLean Jody Gondek Jeff Davison Rob Ford Richard Poopmans Alberta Proud Jeff Davidson Jeremy Farkas Erin O'Toole Pierre Poilievre Will Smith Zane Novak Ken Paxton Kenny
The ticking time bomb in Justin Trudeau's government Nightmarish polling result for the Liberals (Trudeau losing the middle class)

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

190.29

Word count

2,228

Sentence count

117

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Jody Gondek is the mayor of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She's a radical, progressive, and deeply incompetent mayor who has been in office since she was first elected in the early 2000s. In this episode, I discuss how she got into office, why she got there, and why she should be recalled from office.

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 If you're a Calgarian and you're watching this video, I assume you're already very well aware
00:00:04.520 of the petition floating around attempting to gather signatures to recall Calgary's radical
00:00:09.760 progressive and deeply incompetent mayor, Mayor Jody Gondek. I fully encourage all of you to
00:00:15.680 find a way of signing this petition or even getting involved to gather signatures yourselves.
00:00:20.140 It's a very healthy practice in trying to hold corrupt politicians accountable,
00:00:24.860 incompetent politicians accountable. At the same time, though, I will say that it's very
00:00:29.420 unlikely that this recall movement will actually succeed. At the very least, it will gather a lot
00:00:34.080 of data to be able to use to try and elect a real conservative mayoral candidate in the next
00:00:38.840 election. But at the same time, the Recall Act in Alberta passed in 2021 under Kenny's UCP government
00:00:45.300 effectively makes it so that you can't recall any politicians, at least not a politician in a large
00:00:51.120 jurisdiction. The Recall Act in Alberta makes it so you need 40% of all registered voters to sign a
00:00:58.220 petition within 60 days, a paper petition only, in order to get rid of an incompetent elected
00:01:03.940 official. And even then, they still have a chance of being reelected in the recall election that is
00:01:09.840 then triggered if you get the 40% of signatures. And they do, you know, signature verification,
00:01:15.180 all the details of people who signed it verified. And if you even mess up on one name, and that puts you
00:01:20.640 below 40%, the petition does not go through. It's incredibly unfair. And obviously, Kenny and the UCP,
00:01:26.640 in the middle of COVID, only passed this in order to pretend that they take holding democratically
00:01:31.540 elected officials accountable seriously. At the same time, they made it so it's effectively
00:01:36.800 impossible to hold anyone accountable. You would need in Calgary 8,800 signatures per day,
00:01:42.660 every day of the 60 day period in order to recall Gondek. There's just too many people who are checked
00:01:48.260 out, even if they dislike her, they're too checked out to actually pay attention enough to sign the
00:01:52.760 petition. At the same time, again, we might be able to get hundreds of thousands of Calgarians
00:01:57.280 to show support for anyone but Gondek, who we can move towards a more conservative candidate later.
00:02:03.340 But now I just want to turn my attention to just who Jody Gondek is. I don't care about who she is 0.93
00:02:08.660 personally, doesn't matter to me. What I care about is who is she as a politician? What is her movement?
00:02:15.100 And how did she get elected into office? Because if anything, she's a fairly who cares counselor
00:02:20.280 before she was mayor. She's a high spending anti-police kind of mayor that usually would not 1.00
00:02:25.700 appeal to a typical Calgary voter. Yes, you might say, well, Calgary voters voted in
00:02:30.640 Bronconnier and Nenshi back in the day. But at the very least, they both acted like softer liberals.
00:02:36.800 They didn't go too hard and end up sort of getting a bunch of conservatives out there to rally against
00:02:42.600 them. Nenshi almost had conservatives rally against him in like 20, I think it was like 17 with Bill
00:02:48.200 Smith. But at the same time, there just wasn't a strong enough conservative candidate in order to
00:02:53.300 get conservatives to turn out. That was also the problem in 21. Farkas and Jeff Davison, at least in
00:02:58.460 my opinion, ended up taking each other out because neither of them were the obvious conservative. So
00:03:02.640 they ended up splitting each other's votes. And even if you combine them together, I think they would
00:03:06.460 have still been beaten by Gondek. But regardless, I want to get into specifically who Gondek is.
00:03:11.620 Who Gondek is, is effectively a union backed Manchurian candidate. I don't mean that in the
00:03:17.700 conspiratorial way where she's just, you know, been activated to act as a hyper progressive when
00:03:21.740 she really wasn't before. Everyone knew she was a hyper progressive candidate, but she ran as a 1.00
00:03:27.020 candidate who cares about the taxpayer, not going to raise taxes, not going to do anything crazy,
00:03:31.500 just going to rely on highly effective social services. But then she gets in and starts doing 1.00
00:03:36.760 all this climate emergency stuff, bans plastic bags, starts trying to force people to pay for
00:03:41.180 their bags at fast food restaurants, raises property taxes every single year she's been 0.98
00:03:45.340 mayor despite running on a tax freeze, all this other stuff. And the reason that she flipped so
00:03:50.900 quickly is because all of her money for her campaign, not directly for her campaign, but all the money 0.97
00:03:56.280 that ended up trying to boost her campaign was mostly union money. And so she freaked out today on
00:04:02.540 Twitter at the very good Ward 13 counselor, Dan McLean, because he simply shared a CBC article
00:04:08.980 about all the money that went to third party advertisers, because the most amount of money
00:04:14.020 went towards an organization that was effectively just a union front group in order to get Gondek and
00:04:20.240 a slate of other union backed counselors onto council. So look at this. This is her response to Dan
00:04:25.960 McLean, who didn't even exactly swipe at her directly. He just quoted the article and now she's mad. 0.99
00:04:31.220 She said, my dude, maybe attending meetings in person instead of phoning in from a golf cart should
00:04:37.240 be your top priority. And now while that's true, Dan McLean did skip a couple meetings and was golfing
00:04:42.800 while like on Zoom. Yeah, that did happen. It's bad. At the same time, Dan McLean's a far better
00:04:49.520 counselor than Jody Gondek ever was and would be a far better mayor if he was a mayor. I actually don't
00:04:55.460 blame him for going golfing. Council's pretty incompetent and it's full of progressives who he cannot
00:05:00.000 convinced on any policy. So if anything, I would say golf away, Dan, and even apologize for that.
00:05:05.460 So her bringing it up just is very petty. But that's a response to Dan just bringing up the fact
00:05:10.260 that Calgary's future, again, a union front group, was able to raise $1.7 million for the 2021 election.
00:05:17.620 It had a bigger budget than I believe than any other mayoral campaign. And I think it was probably
00:05:24.140 many of the mayoral campaigns combined. It had a bigger budget then. And a lot of its money came
00:05:29.900 from unions. As a union or a corporation, you're actually allowed to donate up to $30,000 to a
00:05:36.180 third-party advertiser. And every union associated with Calgary ended up maxing out donations to
00:05:42.800 Calgary's future. And then many union members who are very loyal to the political causes the union backs
00:05:48.480 also gave large donations, probably not $30,000 donations. But it was obvious that the vast
00:05:54.540 majority of people who were basically funding Calgary's future were union activists or progressive
00:06:01.440 activists. Jodi Gondek ran as a very bland, slightly liberal politician. And then when she gets into 1.00
00:06:07.360 office, she starts attacking parents for not liking drag queen story hours and raising taxes. And it's 0.81
00:06:11.940 purely because the people funding her, who she has to please in order for them to do the same
00:06:17.380 third-party advertising racket for her again, wants her to raise taxes and do all this hyper-progressive 1.00
00:06:22.800 stuff because she funnels a lot of money into more union jobs, raises the wages of union members just 1.00
00:06:28.600 like Nenshi did. In 2020, when there was less work for any union member to do than ever before because
00:06:33.960 it was during the pandemic, they were given like 16% wage raises. It was nuts. And Jodi Gondek has been
00:06:41.060 doing the same thing. Union wages in Calgary, the civil workers' wages have been skyrocketing.
00:06:47.380 There's a reason that although she fearmongers against developers and many developers funded
00:06:51.880 third-party advertisers associated with Jeff Davison, they also funded her campaign because
00:06:58.220 at the very least, she will potentially give individual developers favors to build housing 1.00
00:07:03.600 on land that was previously blocked from actually being developed. It's not because that land shouldn't
00:07:09.400 be developed, but it's because if you want anything done, you have to sidle up to certain politicians
00:07:15.340 who might give you waivers to be able to speed up the approval process for those actual developments
00:07:20.980 to start. But here is a chart that a friend of mine posted to Facebook showing just how much money
00:07:26.860 was given to like Calgary's feature and spent. They had about $1.7 million given to them and they
00:07:33.320 were advertising before and after the mayoral election, before in order to get progressives to unite
00:07:38.340 behind them. And then after in order to push progressive policy during council sessions,
00:07:43.320 but they spent $506,000 during the election. That's more, I believe, than the vast majority
00:07:50.060 of the mayoral campaigns. As much as people go after Alberta Proud, oh, it's a conservative front
00:07:55.000 group funded by conservatives to elect conservatives. They only spent $24,000. It's an obvious grassroots
00:08:00.260 organization. If it wasn't grassroots, I think they would have raised more than a single maxed out
00:08:05.020 donation. They did not. Calgary's future, when you look at the people elected council,
00:08:10.160 it's almost all Calgary's future candidates outside of a few ridings where they backed a
00:08:14.600 progressive in a riding that was just so conservative that they were obviously going to
00:08:18.740 elect a man like Richard Poopmans. And even Dan McLean barely won. When I say barely won,
00:08:23.900 he actually won with a pretty sizable margin, but he ran against an incumbent council candidate who was
00:08:29.600 deeply incompetent and progressive. And then there was a Calgary future candidate that was also
00:08:34.660 probably going to be incompetent, but also super progressive. So they took each other out. And
00:08:38.560 then Dan McLean came up the middle on that ride and getting like 40% of the vote. That's great
00:08:43.040 that happened. But in the future, in order to get rid of Gondek, either we need laws cracking down on 1.00
00:08:48.580 how third party advertisers can get money. I don't think that corporations and unions should be giving
00:08:53.340 money. Individuals should be giving money or at the very least open it up. So at least there can be
00:08:58.540 municipal parties because the problem is in Calgary is that nobody seems like the union candidate
00:09:04.300 on paper. They all run as a mild-mannered liberal, a mild-mannered, slightly progressive person who
00:09:10.760 cares about the taxpayer. And then they get in and they immediately flip and just start doing everything
00:09:15.060 they can for the unions. So at the very least, we should at least have a party brand that goes with
00:09:20.000 each council candidate so that people can identify over time which ones are the lefties and which ones
00:09:26.620 are the conservatives. Because conservatives will start winning in Calgary if the conservatives realize who
00:09:31.480 the obvious conservatives in the area are. That's why for mayor, even if we don't have municipal parties,
00:09:37.340 we need a conservative mayoral candidate who is the obvious conservative mayoral candidate.
00:09:42.480 Rob Ford is deeply out of step with the typical liberal progressive culture of Toronto, but every
00:09:48.660 single conservative got behind him when he won the mayoral race back in, I think, like 2013 or so,
00:09:54.380 because he was the obvious conservative. The problem in Calgary is you had Jeff Davidson,
00:09:59.260 you had Jeremy Farkas, you had Zane Novak, and you had a few other people who were decently
00:10:03.500 conservative all splitting the vote. It's not the voters' fault for not getting behind one of them,
00:10:08.480 it's frankly their fault for not being the obvious enough conservative that everyone can consolidate.
00:10:13.700 They were each a little bit more conservative on a different issue, and then they were each kind
00:10:17.060 of progressive on other issues. So the conservative vote ended up getting confused and not showing up.
00:10:22.300 It's the problem with Aaron O'Toole federally, and it's the problem with our municipal candidates
00:10:26.900 locally. Anyways, that's a bit of a rant for me, but this is really who Gondek is. She is a union
00:10:33.400 front, and in future, Calgarians need a mayoral candidate for the conservatives who is an obvious
00:10:39.380 conservative who can get by. We need a Peter Polyev or a Rob Ford to run for mayor so that we understand
00:10:45.500 who the man is we need to back in order to defeat the progressive union activists. Anyways,
00:10:51.200 that's it for me today. I don't believe the Recall Gondek people have an actual site up yet. I will
00:10:57.820 endorse Kian Bexty's recallgondek.ca website. I believe he's just doing an online petition,
00:11:04.360 but I believe he will be connecting you with the places you can go in order to sign the anti-Gondek 0.93
00:11:09.540 official paper petition. It's key that at least we get 100,000 people to sign this to demonstrate
00:11:15.380 that Calgarians do not like Gondek. Anyways, that should be it for me today. I'll see you guys in
00:11:21.180 my next video. Again, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination. My name
00:11:25.480 is Wyatt Claypool. Check out my website in the description below. Also, if you live in that area
00:11:29.880 of Calgary, it'd be great if you'd all back me because we need real conservatives representing strong
00:11:34.560 conservative ridings. If you like my videos, you'll definitely like me in Parliament, so try and do that
00:11:39.320 for me. Buy a membership. Vote for me if you live in Calgary Signal Hill.