Western Standard - March 23, 2022


BREAKING： Jean calls UCP move to mail-in ballots for Kenney’s review ‘a travesty’

Mentioned
Jason Kenney Elections Alberta
LIVE - Triggered： Exclusive with Jean Charest. Is the UCP rigging the review？

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

141.18

Word count

384

Sentence count

21


Summary

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

My friends, this is a very important message. The UCP Board's decision to hold a leadership review vote completely outside of the party's rules is a travesty. A rushed mail-in ballot is a formula for fraud and cheating, and the UCP cannot survive another tainted vote.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.560 My friends, this is a very important message. The UCP board's decision to do this leadership
00:00:06.320 review vote completely outside of the party's rules is a travesty. The UCP rules require that
00:00:13.840 leadership review votes must happen at either the annual general meeting or a special general
00:00:18.640 meeting. This is not a rule that the party board can change. This rule exists to make sure that
00:00:25.280 no one votes who is not actually present at the meeting. It is an anti-cheating mechanism that
00:00:31.760 prevents fraudulent votes from being cast. The party board has now decided that the party rules
00:00:38.720 don't matter. The Societies Act which governs our party doesn't matter and the rights of UCP members
00:00:45.520 to have a process that is fair and honest does not matter. Make no mistake, a rushed mail-in ballot is
00:00:54.000 a formula for fraud and for cheating. The UCP cannot survive another tainted vote.
00:01:01.360 Throughout the past weekend we heard from organizers in certain communities that Jason
00:01:05.600 Kenny was signing up thousands of members in Edmonton and Calgary who never paid for their
00:01:10.080 memberships. That's unethical. But it is also a violation of Alberta law. In late 2017 the law was
00:01:18.880 changed and it was made explicitly illegal for any third party to incur expenses to engage in selling
00:01:26.000 of memberships for a party. My campaign team were told this weekend by MLAs and organizers that thousands
00:01:32.400 of memberships were bought by the Kenny camp for people most of whom don't even know that they are now
00:01:39.200 members. We will be calling on Elections Alberta to investigate this flagrant violation of section 41.41 of the EFCDA.
00:01:49.840 We will be calling on the vote auditor to review every membership added to the list in the last month
00:01:54.960 to confirm that those memberships were bought consistently with the party rules and the law.
00:02:00.720 We will ask that the auditor disqualify any illegal memberships. We will also be providing the auditor
00:02:09.440 with a detailed list of concerns and items to investigate. In the meantime, we will be in
00:02:17.440 discussions with our lawyers over what legal options party members may have to use either the party's
00:02:24.000 dispute process or the courts to make the UCP follow the law and its own rules. I will have more to say about
00:02:33.600 this tomorrow.