The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 25, 2024


The most pathetic political party in Canada - BC United

Topics
BC United merger controversy BC United response to John Rustad
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Kevin Falcon John Rustad Erin O'Toole Jeremy Nixon Lila Ayer Maxime Bernier Derek Sloan Doug Ford Vancouver Langara Michael Scott Jason Kenney David Eby Pure Poly
Justin Trudeau knows he's going to lose in 2025 Jagmeet Singh looks sad next to Pierre Poilievre

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

193.98

Word count

3,401

Sentence count

191

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

21

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The BC United Party is a party run by consultants and focus group-run policy and marketing. They have no clue what they re doing, and they re not even trying to do anything about it. They re just triangulating themselves to the point where they take every position that makes every single person upset or disappointed in what they're saying and doing. And that's why nobody is voting for them.

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 .
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 Hey guys, I'm here today to talk to you about Canada's most pathetic political party, that being the BC United Party out in British Columbia, of course.
00:00:10.460 This party embodies every single aspect of what not to do in politics.
00:00:15.760 This party had every advantage in the world to be able to reclaim the provincial government after the NDP won the 2020 election,
00:00:23.020 and it has thrown that all away in favour of consultants and focus group-run policy and marketing.
00:00:30.440 This party has made sure that it appeals to absolutely no one by triangulating itself to the exact point where it takes every position
00:00:38.480 that makes every single person upset or disappointed in what they're saying and doing.
00:00:43.500 And I just want to scroll through a little bit of their social media to make it perfectly obvious why nobody is voting for Kevin Falcon's United Party.
00:00:52.360 Everyone in British Columbia has pretty much either shifted NDP or BC Conservatives,
00:00:57.760 and the BC Conservatives, in fact, actually probably have the momentum going into the 2024 provincial election in British Columbia.
00:01:04.000 But even just the marketing here, we have Kevin Falcon standing over a pier, contemplating his life.
00:01:11.640 He looks like Michael Scott in The Office during the episode where he's depressed and trying to feed pigeons in the park in the fall.
00:01:17.740 It's horrible.
00:01:18.640 And the entire, all the marketing that the BC United has been putting out gives you a feeling of crushing apathy,
00:01:25.500 that these people are somewhat competent and they want to run your province.
00:01:30.100 That's not something that's going to make people run out the door to go and vote for you guys.
00:01:34.660 You need something that really gives people a kind of that energetic feeling of change and momentum,
00:01:39.400 and we're getting stuff done and we're fighting the corrupt NDP.
00:01:42.500 They feel like they are somewhat wagging their finger at the NDP from afar at the same time they're giving them a thumbs up,
00:01:49.500 because they don't know what position to take on all these issues.
00:01:52.440 Kevin Falcon, leader of BC United.
00:01:54.880 I believe a leader's job is simple.
00:01:56.720 See a problem, solve a problem.
00:01:58.720 I want you to know that when I become premier, I'm going to work hard to actually lower costs for people,
00:02:02.820 not keep increasing taxes, reduce taxes.
00:02:04.860 And I've been in government before, so when I...
00:02:07.220 Oh my goodness, even that little half smile that the seat guy gives right here is just so sad.
00:02:11.880 And I've been in government before.
00:02:13.680 Just kind of like the tight lip, like I'd get a little bit bigger on screen here,
00:02:17.720 but he just gives that little tight lip, like he knows that he's supposed to seem like somewhat interested
00:02:22.860 in what Kevin Falcon is saying, but he can't bring himself to it.
00:02:25.720 But why I want to talk about this today is that the BC United have been absolutely scuffing this controversy therein
00:02:31.940 regarding a potential merger between themselves as well as John Rustad's BC Conservative Party.
00:02:37.960 It was obviously never going to happen.
00:02:40.220 We know it wasn't going to happen because the BC Conservatives have nothing to gain
00:02:43.980 by tying themselves to the BC United.
00:02:46.300 And I'm not just saying this because I support the BC Conservatives, I 100% do,
00:02:50.360 but the BC United are clearly driven by consultants, by lobbyists.
00:02:54.960 It is a party that very nervous lobbyists and consultants are running.
00:02:59.020 If you ever go into the, if you were ever around the Conservative Party when Aaron O'Toole is leader,
00:03:04.920 this is the same sort of feeling that you get from United,
00:03:07.360 that they're utterly petrified to take a solid position on any issue.
00:03:10.960 And so they take usually two contradictory issues,
00:03:13.780 or they just sit on the fence firmly refusing to leave, like to get off of it.
00:03:18.900 It's a party where they have three or four focus groups
00:03:21.560 trying to find the exact balance that makes every single person in the room say,
00:03:26.700 well, I guess I don't mind him. And then that's what they go for.
00:03:30.320 But all of what they've been doing right now is they've been making themselves whiny to boot.
00:03:34.600 They don't even look professional.
00:03:36.200 Like they've also stopped pretending that they can even beat him.
00:03:38.860 But now they're like going after David Eby for grocery prices and whatnot.
00:03:42.240 It's all very boring stuff.
00:03:44.560 But this is the funniest thing ever.
00:03:46.480 So the BC Conservative Party put out this statement,
00:03:50.180 basically saying that we tried to actually work with the BC United Party back in November of 2023.
00:03:55.680 This is back when, depending on the poll,
00:03:58.360 either United were a little bit up on the Conservatives or Conservatives were a little bit up on United.
00:04:03.200 It was a moment where they both maybe had mutual reasons to merge.
00:04:06.540 I still would have disagreed with a merger at the time.
00:04:09.160 You don't sell out all of your best assets as the Conservatives to United,
00:04:13.980 who was just a burning wreck at that point.
00:04:16.700 Just because they had vote in the polls didn't mean that they were going to have more vote in six months.
00:04:21.720 And I think they should have just waited.
00:04:23.000 And effectively, that's what happened because of how BCU reacted.
00:04:27.140 But John Rustad put out a statement where he said that back in November,
00:04:31.140 when the two parties were tied around 15%, 18%,
00:04:34.340 neither of them really had the edge quite yet,
00:04:37.160 that he had made a proposal that we should maybe talk about a merger coming together,
00:04:41.120 maybe strategically running only in certain places.
00:04:44.020 And then the response, according to John Rustad, was, you know, blank off, not exactly super classy.
00:04:52.800 And I love that in response to this.
00:04:55.200 And I want to get to the deal that BC United just proposed recently
00:04:59.100 that got, like, viciously rejected by the Conservatives because of how silly it was.
00:05:03.260 But Kevin Falcon does not know how to do media
00:05:06.000 because in response to the statement from the Conservatives,
00:05:08.780 and you can go on to their social media to go read it,
00:05:11.740 he said, no one with any authority to negotiate on behalf of BC United
00:05:15.840 has ever told the BC Conservatives to blank off,
00:05:19.040 and no one with any authority to negotiate was ever approached in February of 2024.
00:05:23.460 John Rustad is trying to trick you, and he's not entitled to make things up.
00:05:27.040 Well, he said the original offer was in November of 2024,
00:05:31.040 and he said that there really wasn't any substantial negotiations in February of 2024.
00:05:36.660 Sorry, the negotiations previously were 2023 in November.
00:05:39.820 And Kevin Falcon, I like how what he's doing here is he's effectively admitting a bunch of this stuff is true.
00:05:45.900 No one with any authority to negotiate on behalf of BC United has ever told the BC Conservatives to blank off.
00:05:52.240 Like, so somebody from your party executive or somewhere in your office did in fact say that.
00:05:58.340 They just weren't authorized to sign any deals.
00:06:01.340 Okay, so you sent a flunky out to meet John Rustad at a time where his party was obviously going to surpass you in the polls
00:06:08.460 because you wanted to hide in your office and pretend that you're still the toughest man in BC politics,
00:06:15.580 and I'm hard-nosed, and I don't have to talk to John Rustad, that turncoat, 0.92
00:06:20.200 even though I kicked him out of my own party and he naturally went to the Conservatives,
00:06:24.220 who weren't even a real party before John Rustad took over the leadership.
00:06:27.320 But yeah, now Kevin Falcon's all outraged that I can't believe that they're not entitled to make up their own facts.
00:06:36.840 Dude, say this a week ago.
00:06:39.080 It's so obvious that even this had been talked about in three or four meetings with BC United's consultant executive
00:06:46.320 where they're slowly putting together over the past two weeks,
00:06:49.700 what's our exact response to what Mr. Rustad has said?
00:06:53.940 And they're two weeks late to say anything.
00:06:56.480 John Rustad already made his point very clear.
00:06:59.120 We're not merging. You guys were rude to us back in November.
00:07:02.380 And BC United, two weeks later, puts out their response because they had to probably subject it to three focus groups
00:07:08.760 and figure out what was the exact right wording to use that would appeal to every single person in no particularly strong manner.
00:07:17.580 This is why people like Aaron O'Toole were terrible Conservative leaders.
00:07:21.240 It's not just that Aaron O'Toole was basically a Liberal, but it's also that they're flat-footed.
00:07:26.860 They don't know what to say on the spot.
00:07:28.780 And that's what people hate these days.
00:07:30.500 That's the way of doing politics in 2006.
00:07:33.160 Just say very little.
00:07:34.720 Just come off like a strong, confident man, and people will vote for you.
00:07:39.200 That's the one area in Canadian politics I'd actually agree that there's sexism, 1.00
00:07:43.140 is that in my riding, this is a very deep cut of a reference,
00:07:48.140 but in my riding, I'm running for the Calgary-Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:07:52.700 And two of my opponents are former MLAs from the provincial government under Jason Kenney, Lila Ayer, and Jeremy Nixon.
00:07:59.060 Jeremy Nixon and Lila Ayer.
00:08:00.440 Lila has a very strong reputation as being a very Liberal Conservative.
00:08:05.400 Jeremy Nixon is basically the exact same.
00:08:07.800 He is basically the exact same on all the issues, but frankly, he is a tall man with broad shoulders and a square jaw.
00:08:15.180 So people are like, well, he must be more Conservative.
00:08:17.040 No, he actually voted against conscience rights for doctors in 2019 saying,
00:08:21.440 well, I believe in conscience rights.
00:08:22.960 I just don't like that conscience rights are getting in the way of non-discriminatory healthcare decisions.
00:08:28.860 It's like, what?
00:08:29.760 Then you don't believe in conscience rights.
00:08:31.440 You get all this sorts of stuff going on.
00:08:33.140 But that's what people hate, the idea that you also will say something like, I believe in conscience rights, but not when it does, blah, blah, blah.
00:08:40.640 It's like, you don't believe in it then.
00:08:42.140 Stop saying stuff.
00:08:43.080 That was what was going wrong with Aaron O'Toole the entire time.
00:08:46.500 He was the federal Conservative Party leader.
00:08:48.380 And that is the defining thing about Kevin Falcon.
00:08:51.620 He can't make his mind up on any of the issues at all.
00:08:54.960 He has to wait to be told what to say on these issues.
00:08:57.800 And I heard he used to be a pretty decisive guy when it came to policy.
00:09:01.860 Kevin Falcon endorsed Maxime Bernier for the 2017 Conservative Party leadership.
00:09:07.360 And that's not to say like, oh, that means he's amazing because he endorsed Maxime Bernier.
00:09:11.760 I didn't vote for Maxime Bernier in the 2017 leadership.
00:09:17.200 But that demonstrated that he's willing to take a hard stance and vote for somebody like Max who has very strong stances on the issues.
00:09:24.480 But this is the deal that BC United had given to the Conservatives and that we were all supposed to think, according to the media, was a very serious document that this was – I can't believe the BC Conservatives and United couldn't make this work.
00:09:39.160 So these are the six stipulations to the deal.
00:09:43.180 The parties will not merge.
00:09:44.700 They are each responsible for their own leaders, fundraising, and election campaigns.
00:09:48.340 Okay.
00:09:48.960 I've seen this before. 1.00
00:09:50.420 This is a stupid plan. 1.00
00:09:52.360 You don't do this. 1.00
00:09:53.500 This is what happened in Ontario in 2022.
00:09:56.640 The Ontario party under former MP Derek Sloan proposed to the new blue party of Ontario.
00:10:01.980 How about we run candidates in half the ridings and you run candidates in half the ridings? 1.00
00:10:07.380 No, that is stupid. 1.00
00:10:08.900 That doesn't work. 0.99
00:10:09.900 And it was very clear that the Ontario party and Derek Sloan were basically just working for Doug Ford and the PCs because they wanted the whole alternative conservative movement in Ontario to seem like a clown show by having multiple random parties popping up all over the place to oppose him so that the vote wouldn't consolidate anywhere.
00:10:26.800 But obviously, you need the opposition to the NDP in BC to consolidate behind one party.
00:10:32.620 If you split yourself up, you're just going to seem both like limp parties that nobody wants.
00:10:38.300 You need to actually coherently run one message, not two messages depending on where you live in the country. 0.97
00:10:44.880 That's foolish.
00:10:46.300 Anyways, the second point here reads, the parties agree not to attack one another over the course of the campaign. 0.86
00:10:51.680 Oh, goodness.
00:10:53.440 Just admit that we're vulnerable.
00:10:55.840 The BCU knows it's vulnerable. 0.82
00:10:58.880 And if you're putting a stipulation saying, let us win, don't see anything negative, that just sounds really pathetic and demonstrates that you're not ready to win a provincial election in British Columbia.
00:11:09.860 Point three, their parties will not run candidates against each other's MLAs who are running for re-election.
00:11:14.740 This is two BC Conservatives and 15 BC United seats.
00:11:17.920 So it advantages the BC United massively, even though they do not have the polling that could even win 15 seats naturally.
00:11:24.800 Four, the BC Conservatives will run 47 seats and the BC United will run 46 because BC United has more incumbents to protect.
00:11:32.740 Okay.
00:11:33.460 The seats will be divided up between the parties in a draft format whereby the BC Conservatives can each make three choices for each one that the BC United makes until each party has picked the same number of ridings, including incumbents.
00:11:44.820 From that point, the parties will alternate choices until the agreed upon total number of seats. 0.99
00:11:49.380 You're not going to win an election with this stupid seat-picking scheme. 0.99
00:11:52.840 As soon as there is a scheme that is going to be arbitrarily determining which party is going to target each seat, we're done. 1.00
00:11:59.160 This is a clown show immediately.
00:12:00.760 If we're saying, I'm going to run someone here, like we're picking players in a hockey draft, oh, well, you took Vancouver Langara, oh, then we're taking Port Moody Burkwitlam. 0.93
00:12:14.000 What?
00:12:14.620 Why?
00:12:15.220 Is there any point to it?
00:12:16.280 It's just arbitrary order picking that, well, this person picked that seat, so we get to pick this seat.
00:12:21.820 Do you have a better chance of winning that seat than they do?
00:12:23.880 Well, no, then it would just become a game where BC United would pick a bunch of rural ridings to run in because the BC Conservatives would automatically win those, and United want to take away those easy wins from the Conservatives so that United can inherit them? 0.98
00:12:36.800 That's dumb. 0.99
00:12:38.000 That's just dumb. 1.00
00:12:39.640 Point six. 0.93
00:12:40.960 If the combined seat total in the election exceeds the NDP, the party agreed to a form of a coalition government.
00:12:46.060 The premier will be the party leader that won more seats, while the party leader that wins the smaller number of seats will be the deputy premier and hold a senior ministerial portfolio.
00:12:55.280 Cabinet seats would be allocated in proportion to the number of seats held by each party.
00:13:00.060 So basically, it wasn't a merger.
00:13:02.120 Sorry, I didn't even bring that up on screen when I was reading point six there.
00:13:05.140 But so it's not even a merger.
00:13:06.320 We're not even really merging here.
00:13:08.240 We're just running, and we're just not going to criticize each other, and we're going to leave each other alone in certain ridings.
00:13:14.520 It's not a merger.
00:13:15.120 It's not a deal.
00:13:16.160 It's not coherent, and it's specifically based to advantage the United.
00:13:20.200 And you could say, well, they drafted it.
00:13:21.900 Of course, it's going to advantage them.
00:13:23.480 Like, no, this is just sucking away all of the momentum and leverage the Conservatives had.
00:13:28.480 And Kevin Falcon entering this negotiation saying, can you just let us win?
00:13:32.960 Can you keep our party on life support even though nobody likes us?
00:13:36.720 Because really what he's asking for is, can you tell the Conservative supporters in a lot of these ridings to vote for us instead?
00:13:42.760 That's what they want.
00:13:43.560 And again, the incumbent seats would be advantaging the United in a very silly way because obviously in the last election when the BC United were still called the Liberals, they won a lot of rural seats because it was either NDP or Liberal.
00:13:56.980 So they've won all the rural seats.
00:13:59.080 So even though BC Conservatives have like 40%, 42% in the rural areas, according to the polling, BC United then wants them to not run in all the incumbent rural seats. 0.99
00:14:09.640 That's stupid. 1.00
00:14:11.140 Don't say stupid things, Kevin. 1.00
00:14:13.020 You need something better than just simply saying, let us win. 0.99
00:14:16.960 You need to, if you're making a real deal, what you would probably do at this point is enter the Conservative Party, agree to dissolve yours, bring over some of your incumbent MLAs to join you,
00:14:26.860 and let John Rustad run the party with some vague concessions towards the BC United incumbent MLAs.
00:14:35.620 You keep it vague because people don't like the United Party.
00:14:38.260 But even then, I wouldn't want them to merge anyways because the problem with bringing incompetent people into a competent party is you're just watering down the competency.
00:14:46.240 This is actually why in 2017, I was actually against the merger between the PC party and the Wilder Rose in Alberta because there was no way that the NDP was going to be able to win regardless of how the vote ended up splitting.
00:14:59.220 It was just that the NDP was just not popular in Calgary at all anymore.
00:15:03.080 So even with all the splitting, it would either go PC or Wilder Rose with a couple downtown Edmund, sorry, downtown Calgary NDP ridings.
00:15:10.040 And so what they ended up doing in a lot of ways was just bringing all the incompetent people from the PC party that managed that party into the floor into the Wilder Rose.
00:15:18.680 And then it started like open civil warfare inside the party over who was going to control it.
00:15:23.300 And so then I found that it just buried a bunch of the problems without actually resolving them.
00:15:28.180 But yeah, this is pretty much it for me, guys.
00:15:31.400 I hate the way that political parties are often run.
00:15:34.980 Pure Poly is actually doing a great job as the leader of the Conservative Party because it's just focused on taking hard stances, going after your opposition and being very clear in the differences between yourself and the incumbent government.
00:15:50.700 BC United, the Conservative Party under Aaron O'Toole, frankly, Ontario with Doug Ford.
00:15:56.380 It's about like this weird scientific way of doing politics that if we agree to this subsidy, but then we have this small tax cut measure, but then we pass this regulation and we reach out to this community and we do an event in this area and then we'll be able to cobble together a coalition.
00:16:11.700 No, just do good things and hope that voters will vote for you if you market to them why these things are good.
00:16:16.480 I hate the way people do politics where they think about politics as like this very bland coalition building game.
00:16:24.980 There is coalition building in politics, but at the end of the day, people join your coalition, they join your winning coalition because you promise good things and you argue in favor of them.
00:16:34.700 You don't do it by kind of giving people each like 10% of what they want and hoping that they show up to you on voting day because technically the current government isn't doing anything for them.
00:16:44.420 That's such a losing strategy in the long run.
00:16:46.440 You have to market why your ideas are good, your oppositions are bad and why people need to vote for you, not the idea that we're enlightened centrists here at the BC United Party.
00:16:58.300 So you should vote for us because we're not as crazy as the NDP, but we're not as common sense as the Conservatives.
00:17:04.380 I know they wouldn't frame it that way, but if the NDP is horrible, what's the point of just being 50% of what the NDP is and 50% of the Conservatives?
00:17:12.280 People don't like the NDP, so be like the Conservatives, be the opposite of the NDP.
00:17:17.980 That should be it for me today, guys.
00:17:20.840 In the description below, there's the Give, Send, Go legal fundraiser for the National Telegraph and then also my campaign website for Calgary Signal Hill.
00:17:28.860 Check those two out if you want, and I'll see you guys next time.