Western Standard - July 22, 2022


All talk, no action plan of establishment candidates for the UCP leadership

Mentioned
Danielle Smith Sovereignty Act Trudeau Kenny
Two Calgary residents facing bylaw charges in dog mauling death Triggered： All talk, no action plan won’t cut it with Albertans

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

207.08

Word count

920

Sentence count

66

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Staying the course just won t cut it. Six out of seven of the candidates vying for the leadership of the United Conservative Party are sitting MLAs, and it shows. Aside from Danielle Smith, the rest just seem to keep uttering the same old talking points when it comes to dealing with Ottawa.

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 Now we're going to talk about the UCP race.
00:00:01.560 Staying the course just won't cut it.
00:00:03.860 Six out of seven of the candidates, you know, now that are registered vying for the leadership of the UCP,
00:00:08.240 are currently sitting MLAs, and it shows.
00:00:11.140 I mean, aside from Danielle Smith, the rest just seem to keep uttering the same old talking points
00:00:15.280 when it comes to dealing with Ottawa.
00:00:17.000 The federal government's been attacking Alberta for years,
00:00:19.380 and the provincial government hasn't reacted with much more than threats and musings.
00:00:23.300 Court challenges are nice, but they invariably fail once they reach the federally appointed level of the courts.
00:00:30.040 Referendums express our feelings, but they need to follow through with something with teeth. 1.00
00:00:34.380 The silence from Kenny after the last fall's equalization referendum was deafening.
00:00:38.160 The Fair Deal panel traveled Alberta ostensibly to get feedback from citizens
00:00:42.040 and proposed ways to head off federal incursions into provincial jurisdiction.
00:00:46.480 The panel issued a number of solid conclusions.
00:00:48.720 Citizens said what they wanted.
00:00:50.240 The government spent, though, years talking about the conclusions
00:00:52.760 and not really beginning the process of implementing any of them.
00:00:56.540 Where's the provincial police force?
00:00:57.720 Oh, we're talking about it.
00:00:59.040 What about the provincial pension plan?
00:01:00.620 We're talking about it.
00:01:02.020 How about an Alberta parole board?
00:01:03.280 We aren't even talking about that one.
00:01:05.380 Okay, how about the demands to reform unemployment insurance?
00:01:07.520 You see, the list gets longer and longer.
00:01:09.240 It was bait and switch.
00:01:10.520 Aside from appointing a chief firearms officer, and hey, good on him, that was a good call,
00:01:14.080 the government really hasn't done anything more with the Fair Deal panel recommendations
00:01:17.460 than to talk about it.
00:01:19.260 Talk is cheap, and Albertans are sick of it.
00:01:22.360 Trudeau is making plans for emission controls targeting Western energy producers that are
00:01:25.900 going to castrate the industry if they're imposed.
00:01:28.480 Fertilizer is also the next target the ideological liberals have in their sights.
00:01:32.940 Their proposed attack on that will crush agricultural producers and consumers alike.
00:01:36.860 It's hardly coincidence that Western industries are the focus of federal government attacks.
00:01:41.200 It allows them to virtue signal to the world about what they're doing, and they know the
00:01:45.040 provincial government will do nothing more than stomp their feet in a rage and talk and 0.57
00:01:48.700 talk and talk and talk.
00:01:51.500 Daniel Smith came out of the race, out of the gates, into the race hard and fast.
00:01:56.040 Her proposed Sovereignty Act takes the battle to Ottawa.
00:01:58.400 She wants to play an offensive game with the federal government rather than the defensive
00:02:01.680 one we've been doing.
00:02:03.060 Her tactic appears to be working as she's already sprung from being what was once considered
00:02:07.100 not too long ago a spent force in politics to the presumed frontrunner in a race to become
00:02:11.540 the next premier.
00:02:12.820 Smith's identified where the UCP lost the faith of their membership, and she's making
00:02:17.340 proposals to fill that hole.
00:02:19.480 The establishment candidates first appeared to be in shock.
00:02:22.460 At first, they let Smith lead every headline and own the discourse while they continued to
00:02:27.520 issue mushy middle talking points on issues.
00:02:30.420 I've interviewed nearly every candidate for the leadership now, and aside from Smith, they
00:02:34.700 sound nearly indistinguishable from each other.
00:02:37.100 Now, the establishment candidates are finally starting to realize they may have let the
00:02:41.100 race get away from themselves.
00:02:42.620 Instead of looking at their own shortcomings in platforms, they're shooting outward at
00:02:46.360 Smith.
00:02:47.320 They're trying to tear down the frontrunner rather than raise up their own support.
00:02:51.340 And this tactic is bad for the party, it's bad for the province, and it's not good for
00:02:55.340 their campaigns.
00:02:56.640 The establishment's saying the Sovereignty Act is not realistic and couldn't work.
00:03:00.920 Okay, fair enough.
00:03:02.260 What will work, though?
00:03:03.420 We know from experience that just talking about the issues doesn't solve them.
00:03:07.500 That's why Kenny is heading for retirement rather than preparing for the next election.
00:03:11.720 The candidates need to come up with some concrete policies and actions to counter Ottawa, and
00:03:16.360 they need to be convincing in their will to do it.
00:03:19.340 The UCP members already heard it all before from Kenny, and it's made them cynical when
00:03:24.080 they hear establishment candidates making the same promises.
00:03:26.580 Sorry, guys, you had three years to work on this.
00:03:28.380 The campaigns trailing Smith and the UCP leadership need to look within.
00:03:32.300 Start creating some unique ideas and approaches.
00:03:34.540 Deliver pitches for those ideas.
00:03:36.560 Tired old talking points are just going to fall on deaf ears now.
00:03:39.900 A person tweeted me this morning, I would rather take the wrong action than none.
00:03:44.000 That may not be the most advisable path, but it illustrates how a lot of members are feeling
00:03:48.040 on this issue right now.
00:03:49.120 They don't want to see the provincial government sitting on their hands with Ottawa anymore.
00:03:52.480 They will support whoever presents them with a concrete plan, whether it's viable or not.
00:03:58.140 Doing nothing isn't an acceptable course anymore.
00:04:01.740 Will the contenders for the UCP throw and figure this out before Smith runs away with it?
00:04:05.960 I guess time will tell.
00:04:07.900 But right now, they've got to figure out what they're doing.
00:04:11.440 Okay, that's what's got me wound up this morning as I watch the politics unfolding.
00:04:15.680 Like I said, it's not an endorsement for Smith. 0.99
00:04:17.660 It's a kick in the butt for the ones running against her. 0.98
00:04:20.100 Guys, you got to do better. 0.99
00:04:22.100 Just shooting at her isn't enough or she's going to win this hands down. 1.00
00:04:25.400 So think a little harder, guys. 0.84