Western Standard - May 04, 2023


AB REPORT： Smith announces $1,200 bonus plan to attract workers

Topics
Premier Smith's bonus plan
Hosted by
Derek Fildebrandt
Mentioned
Rachel Notley Danielle Smith Nigel Hannaford Justin Trudeau Dave Naylor Arthur Wild Rose-type Stephen Harper Ralph Klein Jay Gannam Gondek Reagan Dacia
MPC Daily Market Update May 3, 2023 Alberta Election weekly wrap-up

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

162.77

Word count

2,681

Sentence count

197

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this special edition of The Alberta Report, host Derek Fildebrand is joined by Western Standard Opinion Editor Nigel Hannaford and News Editor Dave Naylor to discuss the UCP's economic diversification plan, including a new tax credit, tuition tax incentives, and a $1,200 bonus for first-time home buyers.

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 Good day, I'm Derek Fildebrand, publisher of the Western Standard.
00:00:13.660 Today is May 4th, 2023.
00:00:17.140 You're watching the Alberta Report coverage, special coverage of the Alberta election campaign.
00:00:25.480 We're going to dive straight into it.
00:00:27.160 Of course, I'm joined, as usual, by Western Standard opinion editor, Nigel Hannaford.
00:00:31.480 Good to be here.
00:00:32.140 And Western Standard news editor, Dave Naylor.
00:00:34.780 And we will have breaking news on Premier Smith's press conference happening basically right now.
00:00:40.740 Do we want to start with that?
00:00:42.280 We can. I can tell you.
00:00:44.000 Have at it.
00:00:44.560 Well, this is the UCP's economic diversification plan.
00:00:48.760 And to me, the most interesting thing is they're offering a come to Alberta bonus.
00:00:53.420 So if you move to Alberta from anywhere in the country and stay here at least a year, you get $1,200.
00:00:59.740 $1,200 cash payment.
00:01:02.260 They're also creating tuition tax incentives, anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 for graduating students who stay in the province and apply their trade there.
00:01:14.520 So just a way to get more workers into the province and broaden that tax base.
00:01:20.420 So the UCP will literally pay NDP voters to move to Alberta.
00:01:24.440 Exactly.
00:01:25.520 So do you have to have a job before you get the $1,000?
00:01:29.000 That's a good question.
00:01:30.080 I would think you have to make some sort of contribution.
00:01:32.220 They should probably attach some strings to it. 1.00
00:01:33.700 Some people can't come here to show up and collect welfare.
00:01:36.180 We don't want that.
00:01:37.100 You do have to live here and contribute.
00:01:38.980 Right.
00:01:39.140 I'm sure there'll be something like that.
00:01:41.160 Good.
00:01:41.620 The NDP's job creation plan for that.
00:01:44.960 We're going to bring in Arthur Green, the Western Standards Alberta legislative reporter based in Edmonton.
00:01:50.320 Arthur, you were there yesterday.
00:01:53.500 I recall reading in the article, Rachel Notley declined to take all reporters' questions.
00:02:00.600 But nonetheless, you were there.
00:02:01.900 Tell us about the NDP's jobs plan.
00:02:04.820 Yeah, so yesterday, Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley laid out her plan for good-paying jobs for Albertans.
00:02:15.740 And it's a new proposed tax credit.
00:02:18.800 It's called Alberta's Future Tax Credit.
00:02:20.880 And it's the NDP's plan to grow jobs here in the province, which will cost roughly $400 million.
00:02:30.640 If we look back to December of 2022, Notley said this Alberta's future tax credit is estimated to cost $250 million annually.
00:02:43.080 You know, she quoted back in December that it would create roughly 20,000 jobs.
00:02:49.920 Now, that number on Wednesday, she promised to attract $20 billion in private sector investment to the province while creating 47,000 jobs in Alberta's energy sector.
00:03:04.200 And what's the reaction of the UCP to their announcement so far?
00:03:09.400 Again, I just sent off a question to Smith.
00:03:15.680 I know she's having a news conference this morning.
00:03:18.960 And my question was simply, you know, Rachel Notley came out with this jobs plan yesterday, but she's also open to increasing the corporate tax. 0.99
00:03:28.260 So, you know, it kind of seems a little hypocritical.
00:03:32.000 And I asked, of course, the UCP leader, Daniel Smith, what her thoughts are on this.
00:03:37.300 And I'm just waiting to hear back.
00:03:39.920 Yeah, I think, you know, we were also listening to Rachel Notley on the Chorus Radio Network today with Shea Gannam.
00:03:47.280 She was asked about taxes, and she committed to not raising personal income taxes.
00:03:53.440 And personal income taxes are actually technically higher than they were when she was premier because Jason Kenney de-indexed them for inflation.
00:04:00.520 So they've actually gone up slightly.
00:04:02.040 But they are more or less, other than four years of inflation, they are more or less where Rachel Notley was.
00:04:09.040 But she was careful on using careful little words that, yeah, she would raise taxes on businesses. 0.99
00:04:20.480 But it's not, this strikes me, Nigel, as, yeah, it's a center-left policy announcement, but it's not radically different from what you're seeing from the UCP.
00:04:30.920 Other than their stances on business taxes, that aside, this jobs platform, I think, it's trying to strike kind of towards the middle.
00:04:39.020 Similar to Smith's announcement today, it's more money for businesses and people if you create jobs rather than just cutting taxes to allow businesses to create jobs.
00:04:51.120 Well, there's actually a lot in here, as you would expect, with a $400 million tax bill.
00:04:57.400 And, of course, she was asked yesterday, how do you pay for this?
00:05:01.200 And she said, oh, it'll pay for itself.
00:05:02.660 I couldn't help thinking of Mr. Trudeau.
00:05:03.920 She did actually use those words today.
00:05:05.920 Yeah.
00:05:07.360 Well, it's obviously a theme, because she said it yesterday as well.
00:05:10.640 Don't worry, it'll pay for itself.
00:05:12.060 It's a little bit like Mr. Trudeau looking at the, you know, don't forget, these budgets pay for themselves.
00:05:21.360 She does have a case to make that you can, I mean, a similar case is made for lowering taxes on people and on businesses, that if you lower, now, I think there's probably less evidence to suggest that it would be the case here.
00:05:32.480 But, you know, if you lower taxes on businesses, businesses create more economic activity and therefore actually pay more in taxes overall, even though there's a lower rate.
00:05:40.320 I think she's trying to argue that if we subsidize businesses to create jobs, well, that'll create more tax revenue overall. 0.97
00:05:47.900 I think there's less evidence to support that.
00:05:49.520 But, I mean, it's not probably as far out as Justin Trudeau's budget.
00:05:53.840 What else is she going to say?
00:05:55.020 I mean, you've got to say something, because there is that, it's a fair question.
00:06:00.040 How are you going to pay for it?
00:06:01.160 And what she's actually doing is saying, okay, don't worry, let's move on, that's taken care of, it'll pay for itself.
00:06:09.360 Next question.
00:06:10.540 So, no, no, no, there are some serious questions about this.
00:06:14.260 I mean, look, just for one thing, $1,200 to, say you're a tradesman and you're in BC or anywhere, you can get $1,200 from moving to Alberta.
00:06:24.680 That might appeal to you, and suddenly you've got a tradesman without all these training programs that Rachel Notley is proposing, which, by the way, are a payoff to her union allies.
00:06:37.120 You'll notice that in that $18 million training program, it's part of this $400 million package that we're talking about.
00:06:43.160 I believe it was actually announced, correct me if I'm wrong, Arthur, I believe this was actually announced in front of a union headquarters.
00:06:48.780 It was, yes.
00:06:49.820 It was announced at local 488, UA local 488 here in Edmonton, and in the $400 million, like Nigel mentioned, the NDP plans to invest $18 million into union-led training facilities and consult on expanding the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation to include other sectors.
00:07:16.380 There you go.
00:07:17.400 As Nigel was kind of hinting, you know, if you're a business in downtown Toronto and you're looking at Alberta and you see the UCP cutting business taxes, you see the NDP raising business taxes, it's an easy decision.
00:07:30.220 And the other thing is, I think both parties have to worry about throwing up big-figure promises with the plunging price of oil, right?
00:07:40.520 Because all of a sudden, a $500 million promise when oil's at $80 doesn't seem a big problem.
00:07:48.900 Now oil's hovering around $70.
00:07:50.900 That's a big loss to the Treasury.
00:07:52.460 You know, there's a dark side.
00:07:55.220 Of course, I want oil to remain high.
00:07:57.040 It's all good for us.
00:07:58.040 But there's a dark side of me that would like oil to plunge during the campaign so that both parties could answer for why they don't plan for the future.
00:08:06.800 But, you know, they just, they always budget in their promises up to the maximum of what oil they hope will be, and they just don't plan.
00:08:17.020 So there's a part of me that would just like to see the parties have to readjust their promises because they do this, every party does this every time.
00:08:25.760 If they'd only got it right a couple generations ago, we'd be like Norway. 0.95
00:08:29.300 Anyway, we would have so much money, we wouldn't know what to do with it. 0.99
00:08:32.520 What fools we mortals be. 0.99
00:08:34.280 We do are. 0.98
00:08:35.140 You know, actually, okay, so thank you for joining us, Arthur.
00:08:38.280 There's one point I want to touch on from Rachel Notley's appearance on the Shay Gannam show with Chorus today.
00:08:44.220 She was asked about, you know, she was going after Smith, saying, well, you know, Smith might not have a mandate to privatize health care, but she might do it anyway.
00:08:55.360 And Jay Gannam had a pretty good question for her then, and I said, well, you did have a mandate for a carbon tax, but you did it anyway.
00:09:02.820 And Rachel Notley danced around it a bit, but effectively came to the position, to paraphrase her as fairly as I can here, I think, that, well, I had a mandate to do it because I didn't say I wouldn't do it.
00:09:16.000 So I guess there's positive campaign promises and negative campaign promises.
00:09:20.980 So does this mean if you don't promise to do anything, if you make no promises whatsoever during the campaign and you just don't say anything and you get elected, you could do anything you want?
00:09:31.820 I think that's what she's saying.
00:09:34.360 And when it boils down to it, we're happy when the party we support does things that we like without a mandate, and we don't like it when another party does things that we don't support without a mandate.
00:09:45.980 That's really what it boils down to, but that was her justification for how she brought in the carbon taxes. 0.94
00:09:53.100 Well, I didn't say I wouldn't do it.
00:09:55.520 Well, it sounds a bit feeble, doesn't it?
00:09:57.120 But, you know, we elect people to govern to make what they believe are good decisions on behalf of all of us.
00:10:05.620 Sometimes when you're proposing a major change to society, you should run it, specifically by the voters.
00:10:14.980 I think carbon tax is one of those things.
00:10:17.160 It's a major change because of the philosophy that underlies it, where they even call carbon dioxide pollution, which it manifestly isn't.
00:10:25.200 You know, that perhaps there should have been a mandate for, but I will give any party this much.
00:10:31.160 We elect you, do a good job with what's in front of you, make smart decisions.
00:10:36.860 You shouldn't have to come back to the voters for every single little thing.
00:10:41.300 And just look at, in Calgary, Mayor Gondek campaigns away, mentions nothing.
00:10:46.900 Dacia gets into office, $87 billion climate plan.
00:10:50.440 Now, there's a big one.
00:10:52.080 Okay, should you not have talked about this on the hustings?
00:10:55.200 $87 billion.
00:10:56.560 That number rings a bell, $87 billion.
00:10:58.080 But in that case, it was their own number they said it was going to cost.
00:11:02.000 Oh, man.
00:11:03.080 So when it comes to the modeling out on the seat projections, I think we're going to save that for tomorrow.
00:11:08.220 But let's just quickly touch on, I don't think it's happened yet today, but it actually may be taking place right now.
00:11:15.840 But maybe, Dave, tell us, what can we expect?
00:11:18.240 Notley says she's going to make a pitch to...
00:11:22.220 The undecided.
00:11:23.400 She's making a pitch to the undecided.
00:11:24.960 Well, she's explicitly said she's making a pitch to people who have voted conservative in the past.
00:11:30.420 Right.
00:11:31.240 So it's people that don't like Daniel Smith, probably, voted for Jason Kenney, voted for Ralph Klein, you know, the traditional UCP conservative leaders.
00:11:42.640 Now they don't like Daniel Smith, so they're wavering.
00:11:45.040 What should I do?
00:11:45.780 What should I do?
00:11:46.620 Do I plug my nose and vote for Notley, or do I just stay home?
00:11:51.100 So those are the people she's going to be addressing directly today.
00:11:54.840 And I don't think we've actually seen what her pitch is yet, honestly.
00:11:57.380 No, not yet.
00:11:58.140 I don't know.
00:12:00.260 Okay, Nigel, if you're...
00:12:02.100 Rachel Notley has hired you as her speechwriter for today, and you're going to write this speech, and you get to lay out...
00:12:09.100 What is the pitch you're making to people who have voted conservative in the past?
00:12:14.480 Let's call them, like, a bit more mushy, centrist, progressive conservatives.
00:12:19.720 I doubt she's really making a pitch for Wild Rose-type conservatives here, but let's say she's making a pitch to more progressive conservatives here. 0.62
00:12:26.820 What are the actual, I guess, two things.
00:12:33.980 What are you putting forward in the shop window policy-wise to say, okay, we could be a place that moderate, progressive conservatives can vote for?
00:12:44.460 And then second, what are you putting forward in the messaging, the language used to make those kinds of red Tory conservatives comfortable enough to vote for Rachel Notley and the NDP?
00:12:55.000 So here's the thing that comes back to me through the Gossip Channel, that people who you would expect to be voting for the UCP, as a matter of course, are saying something, well, I don't like the NDP, and I kind of can't imagine ever voting for them, but I don't like Daniel Smith.
00:13:12.380 So there's nothing about the UCP policies that they're rejecting.
00:13:16.120 It is the personality of, or shall I say, the portrayal of the personality of Daniel Smith that the NDP has been very effectively making.
00:13:26.140 So I know what I would say to them if I were writing for Daniel Smith, but if I were actually composing something for Rachel Notley, I probably wouldn't go much into policy side of it.
00:13:40.040 I would go on the feelings end of it and say something like, my friends, we all want the same thing, don't we?
00:13:47.880 We want a better Alberta. 1.00
00:13:49.780 We want a better future.
00:13:51.660 Our policies are not so destructive that we're going to take anything away from you, but you need a leader who is going to lead in the same direction and not get her facts wrong.
00:14:05.820 So, you know, Reagan did this when he did his famous speech asking the blue dog Democrats to come over to the Republican side in the 1984 U.S. presidential election. 0.72
00:14:18.600 She would model herself on that speech.
00:14:21.300 Well, it's no wonder Stephen Harper paid you those big bucks.
00:14:23.900 That's gold, man.
00:14:24.920 That's gold.
00:14:25.660 It's gold.
00:14:27.920 Unfortunately, I'm the guy who lost the 2015 election.
00:14:30.420 Remember that?
00:14:31.060 Yes, yes.
00:14:31.520 It was all your fault.
00:14:33.160 Okay, Nigel, Dave, thank you very much for joining us.
00:14:35.420 And thank all of you for joining us on today's Alberta Report.
00:14:38.260 Remember, if you're not yet a member of the Western Standard, go to westernstandard.news, click on membership.
00:14:42.520 It's only $10 a month or $100 a year for unlimited access to the Western Standard, supporting and getting access to really the only ballot-free media left in Western Canada.
00:14:53.480 Thank you very much for joining us today.
00:14:55.200 We'll see you tomorrow.
00:14:56.220 God bless.
00:14:57.420 The current Lothbridge feed grain prices are as follows.
00:14:59.900 Cash barley is holding at $4.10.
00:15:01.480 Feed wheat slipped $2 to $4.04, while corn is lower $2 at $3.96.
00:15:07.520 In the milling wheat markets, July Minneapolis futures added $4.5 at $8.08 per bushel, with local hard red spring bid for May movement at $10.30 per bushel delivered.
00:15:17.000 Over to the canola market, nearby canola futures decreased $3.60 at $712.30 per tonne, with delivered values for May movement at $15.92 per bushel.
00:15:29.620 In the pulse markets, nearby red lentils are unchanged at $0.35 a pound, and yellow peas are at $11.50 per bushel.
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