00:00:41.240Beautiful. No one's supposed to ask me that back.
00:00:43.860Okay. We're going to be talking about the complete non-fallout from revelations that the NDP have open communists running for them in this election.
00:00:54.860Total media silence on the fact that the NDP have incontrovertible evidence that the NDP have open communists running for them right now.
00:01:06.680We're going to talk about the latest seat projections from 338.com that are projecting a wild nail-biter of a race right now.
00:01:16.540Really just a few seats that could come down to a few hundred votes in just a few constituencies to determine who wins the May 29th election.
00:01:24.860And the latest promises from the campaign trail, the UCP promising a 25% discount if you're old.
00:03:02.680There was no comment from the NDP, probably wisely so,
00:03:06.060because the rest of the media, have you, I asked you to look into it this morning,
00:03:10.860has there been a single news report from the Herald, the Journal, the Suns, television, radio?
00:03:17.540Have you seen a single report in legacy media pointing out that there is an open communist running for the NDP right now?
00:03:24.360Nothing. I went on Google News prior to getting on here to see if there was anything posted in the last 24 hours about Rod Loyola, and nothing.
00:03:32.900The only other thing that was available was a Rebel News story that was unrelated.
00:03:43.740But nothing. I didn't see anything from the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, CBC News Calgary, CTV News Calgary.
00:03:49.000Dave, what the hell? You've worked in the legacy media. You worked at the Calgary Sun
00:03:58.760for most of your career before the Western Standard here.
00:04:04.600I feel like at least the old Sun would find it newsworthy that a sitting two-term MLA and
00:04:09.480candidate for a party that has a good chance of forming government in Alberta
00:04:13.800is a member of a political party that killed about 100 million people in the last century.
00:04:19.000I think the old sun would have. But don't forget, it's not the sun anymore. It's post media. It's run by the Herald. They're both the same. But, you know, the big thing, we're not surprised, are we, Derek, that the legacy media is a good one?
00:04:34.140Yes, feigning surprise. We're shocked because the media, for the most part, the legacy media is left wing and they're not going to go out of their way to write stories that could lead, you know, some votes swinging towards the UCP.
00:04:49.080They don't like the UCP and their columnists clearly favored the NDP and they're not going to do anything to to harm them.
00:04:57.600Okay, but I mean, they're not 100% in the I don't leave. I know some of our viewers are disagree, but I generally don't think of them as sitting around the taking orders from the NDP war room.
00:05:10.460No, you know, most of them are more professional than that. And there are some good people in the legacy media.
00:05:16.300Like they're not all bad. There's some good guys there.
00:05:36.720There's no, you know, talking amongst the reporters, you know, coming up with ideas, generating ideas, saying, hey, let's go after this.
00:05:45.140there's none of that that goes on which you know for for a newsroom that is exactly what you need
00:05:53.360and I feel sorry for young journalists unlike Jonathan who don't get to grow up in a newsroom
00:05:59.960they get to just work at home and don't get to experience what what Jonathan does you know as
00:06:06.240we abuse him here in our newsroom yeah to build on that point I mean we actually literally do
00:06:12.320abuse him here. Yes, we did. Yeah, to build on that point, when Rebel News broke a story in the last
00:06:21.200election about Anne McGrath running for the Communist Party back in Calgary Varsity, I believe
00:06:25.100there weren't any news outlets in the mainstream media that covered, if I'm not mistaken. There
00:06:29.480might have been maybe one or two, but... I think there was passing mention of things, but there
00:06:33.300was no like dedicated stories that woman who ran for Communist Party in the 80s when the Russians
00:06:39.080wanted to nuke us is running for the NDP. But there was some passing mention of it. But I mean,
00:06:46.720that could be dismissed at least a little bit as I was the 80s. Yeah, you know, crazy kids,
00:06:52.400you know, and I think, you know, you're not that far out of university here. You know that
00:06:58.020communism is not a weird thing on modern campuses. It's, it's certainly not considered at least
00:07:04.160beyond the pale. Everyone's not a communist, but everyone knows there's plenty of communists and
00:07:08.840I think a lot of people in the post-secondary education system who come out of it think, well, everyone's been a communist. Who hasn't been a communist going through university?
00:07:17.820And the atrocities of Mao and Stalin are long history now and forgotten by the younger communists of the day.
00:07:26.300I don't think they ever remembered it. The atrocities of Hitler are still very well remembered, but, you know, the communists had more time to run up their death score.0.56
00:07:38.000But I don't know, Jonathan, do you think it's just that this isn't seen as, you know, you came out of university not that long ago.
00:07:59.480Well, I think it might just be that we're not educated enough on that.
00:08:02.220I mean, Jordan Peterson talks about that, about the atrocities of communism all the time and how the younger generations aren't aware of that.
00:08:09.280I mean, I went to a trauma metropolitan university, formerly Ryerson University, and it was a woke school where many of my fellow classmates were communists or just completely unaware of how great capitalism it is and what it's allowed people to achieve.
00:10:46.540They kind of take an aggregation of generally all the credible polls that are published and kind of come up with an average of those polls generally.
00:10:57.020And then use a formula that is not exact, but pretty good generally determining how that overall vote is going to translate into actual seats on the ground.
00:11:08.100What were the main findings in the latest projection?
00:11:10.460So the main findings were that the Alberta United Conservative Party would win a majority government with 45 seats, and the Alberta NDP would form the official opposition with 42 seats, and no other parties would win a seat in the Alberta legislature.
00:11:26.200I've got, I'm looking here, they're actually, I've got the 338 has went 45 and 42, but yeah, still very close.
00:11:33.740Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, oh, you're right. Yeah. So that's a division of just three seats and you need one for the speaker. So that would give you just a two seat effective majority. The speaker only votes if there's a tie vote. So if someone's sick one day, extremely rare to see something like that. I think two elections ago in BC, there turned out to be something like that. It was so close and you had speakers breaking ties. It's very unusual.
00:11:59.780Anything else stand out for you from the projections there?
00:12:22.500Lesser Slave Lake was considered a battleground, but it's starting to trend more UCP now.
00:12:25.520So I suspect that seat will probably go to UCP.
00:12:27.280Actually, yeah, so my mix up there was the popular vote of the average of these polls was 48 UCP, 44 NDP.
00:12:36.580So the UCP has a slight overall edge in the popular vote.
00:12:41.100And then I think the smart wisdom, Dave, is that even if the parties were tied in popular vote,
00:12:48.000the UCP still probably comes out ever so slightly ahead because the math is just better.
00:12:54.660The NDP are so concentrated in Edmonton, and with the exception of a very small number of seats, the two in Lethbridge, Banff, Canaanaskis, the NDP is totally uncompetitive outside of the two big cities.
00:13:07.900Right. They're basically going to have to sweep Calgary if they're going to, if they want to become the government. Getting back to the polls, saw one earlier this week by Main Street, 50 to 43 for the UCP. So they're the sort of first poll to show that the UCP may be gaining a little bit of, getting a little bit of traction. But yeah, currently right now, as it stands, the numbers are not there for the NDP to form a majority, but it's close.
00:13:37.480it's close a little with uh some of the toss-ups there's maybe like a percentage of a difference
00:13:41.960like uh calgary acadia so we're gonna dive into some of these seats right now um so they got a
00:13:49.080list here of the toss-ups there's a lot of we're not going to go through every toss-up because
00:13:51.640there's there's a lot of them but some of the highlights here so calgary acadia yes um so
00:13:56.600there we've got tyler shandro running uh and who's the ndp candidate diana madden um that is a
00:14:02.760a wildly tight race. I know the UCP is pouring resources into it. The NDP is pouring resources
00:14:08.560into it. There, it could come down. I would not be shocked to see that as the single closest0.97
00:14:14.520race in Alberta, or easily, I'm going to say it's in the top five closest races in Alberta. It could
00:14:21.000be easily within a couple of hundred votes. I would not be shocked at all. And there, you know,
00:14:25.820it's a particularly interesting race, Dave, because Tyler Shandro was the health minister
00:14:31.320under Jason Kenney. And the left hates him because it was fights with doctors and whatnot. And a lot
00:14:37.640of the more populous right hates him because he was the minister who oversaw lockdowns and mandates
00:14:43.000and all of these things that played a massive role in having Kenney thrown out. Yeah, he's got the
00:14:49.480ghost of COVID hanging over him. Yeah. So he's in a he's in a tough battle. He's in a battle for
00:14:55.160for his political life without a doubt. And then on top of that, there's the Law Society of Alberta
00:14:58.920investigation that he's facing right now over his i'm not that one's getting some media traction
00:15:04.600i'm not sure that one though is getting as much at the doors but no i mean anger at him over covid
00:15:09.960you know a few hundred people who are still upset with maybe they've forgiven the ucp and come back
00:15:14.280in the general ucp fold but who are angry at him over his actions as health minister
00:15:19.320conservatives who stay home or vote for one of the smaller parties on the right that could cost
00:15:24.520them the seat i guess the the question there i think is luckily for him in this case i don't
00:15:30.040most people don't vote for their mla they vote party they vote leader and platform they they're
00:15:34.280not really voting for mla but i and then he's in trouble and daniel smith was sort of elected on a
00:15:41.560on a platform where she vowed never to bring in lockdowns again and uh and wasn't happy with what
00:15:47.240what kenny did so so you're right though that's uh chandra's only hope uh calgary bow is another
00:15:53.720very close one there. We've got the UCP's Minister of Post-Secondary Education,
00:16:00.120Dimitrios Nikolaitis, running. He's being challenged by Drew Farrell. She is a former
00:16:05.960member of the Calgary City Council. Dave, you have covered her in the city.
00:16:13.560I don't think she's well known in the riding because her municipal ward was in a different,
00:16:17.960more central part of the city. Calgary Bow is on the western extremity of the city.
00:16:23.720Got name recognition though. She does have name recognition, but she's got a bit of a record and it's not necessarily a particular, the centrist Wahidian image that the NDP is trying to put forward.
00:16:37.220No, no. She was very left-wing on Calgary City Council, ignited a firestorm when she accused police officers of being wife beaters, you know, and has a, you know, currently going before the courts right now with a lawsuit brought on by a Calgary businessman that she basically forced the closure of his stampede tent because she didn't like the noise and the parking around her Kensington home.
00:17:05.880So yeah, that's what his lawsuit is alleging. So yeah, she's well known. She's very well known
00:17:14.440as quite the left wing. So she would be on the further left of the NDP spectrum.0.99
00:17:19.960Although we don't know if she's an actual communist, so probably not the most left wing.
00:17:23.720Oh yeah, good point. She could be pretty far left.0.98
00:17:31.160She's right of a communist, but probably left of Janice Irwin.
00:17:35.880Okay. You know, so the Calgary ones are close. We know that. Let's just kind of talk about some of the other kind of bellwethers that are outside. We'll start maybe Sherwood Park. So the donut around Edmonton, very important because remember the NDP has got to round the score so far in Calgary to get to a bare majority that these few ones really do count.
00:18:01.420So I know there's Strathcona Sherwood Park, which is a big, more sprawling one that's projected slimly to probably remain UCP, but Sherwood Park proper, Jonathan, that one is projected now to narrowly flip to the NDP.
00:18:16.120Yes. And it's Justin Walker who's running in that area. Someone who's not a high profile name. He wasn't a cabinet minister or anything like that. But it just goes to show that the suburbs do matter with these elections. Like I know that Airdrie, for example, is set to say UCP. But some of the other suburbs in like say Edmonton are leaning more towards the NDP.
00:18:36.840Yeah. I guess the only one in, there's only two seats at all of Central and Southern Alberta outside of Calgary that the NDP have any shot at right now. That'd be Banff-Cananaskas and Lethbridge East. Banff-Cananaskas is a weird riding. On a map, it looks like it's a big rural one, but it's different, Dave, right?
00:19:01.200Yeah, it's, you know, you've got the population centers of Banff and Canmore, which are, you know, sort of young hippie-ish people, you know, maybe seasonal workers at the restaurants, at the ski hills and whatnot.
00:19:20.400So you would think they may tend to be left-wing leaning.
00:19:24.240And then also in the riding, you've got, you know, the ranches and cowboys.
00:19:29.940Well, that's the reason it's not solidly in the list.
00:19:55.500Of course, I think the big issue in Lethbridge is health care.
00:19:59.940and lack of doctors. Yeah, so Lethbridge, the NDP currently holds Lethbridge West with Shannon
00:20:06.820Phillips. But Lethbridge East, Deputy Premier Nathan Newdorf facing very serious challenge.
00:20:12.500338 is projecting him that this by thin margin flip to the NDP right now. But I think, you know,
00:20:20.340that one's still definitely in play. Okay, not a lot of news from the campaign trail itself.
00:20:26.900You know, and I really hate campaign promises now because it's mostly involving spending money. Some of our seniors are going to hate me for this one because I don't like this campaign promise. 25% off of fees for seniors. Okay. If the government is charging a fee for something, it should be because it costs money to do something like a park fee. And that fee is supposed to cover that, not generate income for government. So Dave, tell us about this promise, the 25% discount on seniors.
00:20:56.900Yeah, this is the one Premier Smith has just announced while we've been talking.
00:21:01.600Yeah, they're going to offer 25% senior discount on all government services from park passes, camping spaces, driver's licenses, driver's exams, driver's renewal.