Western Standard - Calgary council falls for Trudeau's gold

00:00:00.000 good evening and welcome to the pipeline this is the western

00:00:27.440 standards weekly panel show where we break down some of the top issues making news for the week

00:00:33.200 my name is corey morgan i'm one of the opinion writers at the western standard and for our

00:00:38.960 panel lineup today i'll start in my immediate right here with western standards opinion editor

00:00:44.480 nigel henneford hello again corey yes on a different angle this week covering

00:00:50.640 production okay what do you do with them yeah well we've got it for a treat we've got our news

00:00:54.880 editor dave naylor on the end there to looking forward to bloviating with you guys yes

00:01:00.880 lots of win the prize you said it first yes bloviation within us to to share with you so uh

00:01:07.520 yeah and lots of stories to to cover this week so uh i think i'll get right into it here quickly so

00:01:13.680 i mean to start with uh calgary i think some of this has kind of made national news in the sense

00:01:19.120 of being such a big, well-attended council marathon session going on.

00:01:24.780 And the outcome, Dave, was kind of what everybody expected,

00:01:27.640 but a letdown for a lot of people.

00:01:29.100 Can you kind of expand on what's going on over there?

00:01:31.300 Well, as our opinion writers have said today, you know, the fix appeared to be in.

00:01:35.820 There was a vote last night by council to basically a blanket rezoning of the entire city

00:01:41.760 where multi-unit apartments can be built, fourplexes and whatnot.

00:01:47.560 And it's all tied in with federal housing money of a quarter billion dollars that the Liberals have promised.

00:01:56.460 So it was the largest public meeting in Calgary history.

00:01:59.080 It went a couple of weeks.

00:02:00.680 I think 700 people addressed the council, 75% of them against it.

00:02:06.720 And quite emotional scenes down there, some people crying.

00:02:11.140 But in the end, I guess democracy didn't win.

00:02:14.580 The council voted 9-6 to move ahead with it.

00:02:17.560 And, you know, cue the predictable outrage.

00:02:22.780 As per that, though, I mean, was the string that tight with the transfer from the Trudeau government?

00:02:29.480 Or if the council had voted otherwise, would they have just given the money to Quebec?

00:02:34.640 Or would that money still be coming to Calgary?

00:02:36.380 Hard to know.

00:02:37.400 Let's hope it was airtight.

00:02:38.800 Because if not, then they have just sold their soul for nothing.

00:02:42.960 But it is, and I think you may have made this point yourself.

00:02:47.560 in one of your writings that nobody voted for this like when the when the last municipal election

00:02:56.200 came up nobody said and if elected i will do everything i can to rezone single family

00:03:04.600 residential so that people can have fourplexes next door to their back gardens nobody campaigned

00:03:12.600 for that, and yet they felt they had the authority, the mandate, to do this. So was it the money?

00:03:20.020 Well, yeah, I would say so. It makes sense. But the fact that so many people came out and said,

00:03:28.360 no, we don't want this. 75% of the submissions to council were rejecting it. Take that with the

00:03:37.300 fact that nobody had campaigned for this, and I actually think the city council has just

00:03:42.380 acted outside its authority. This is going to be a national trend, you may depend.

00:03:50.140 And I think political suicide is the word I used for it in a tweet last night. So many

00:03:56.220 Calgarians are against it, yet the council decided to go against it. Just rather like,

00:04:02.280 you know, you talked about them not campaigning on it. It was like Mayor Gondek. She gets elected,

00:04:07.300 day one and she's in office, she declares an $80 billion climate emergency.

00:04:13.240 Oh, wait, hang on a second, where did that come from?

00:04:15.900 So if Calgarians finally get off their butts, which they don't like to do for civic elections,

00:04:21.840 and, you know, get out there, this could be a sweeping change to council in a couple of years.

00:04:29.040 Well, to your point about where does this come from, she has a very good example at the national level

00:04:35.560 of somebody who gets elected and then starts doing a whole bunch of things

00:04:40.060 that he never talked about before he was elected.

00:04:43.860 It seems like if you can just get in, the current generation of politicians

00:04:47.620 thinks that once you have office, you can do what you want.

00:04:51.320 In actual fact, what's the point of campaigning on a platform

00:04:55.660 if the platform does not describe roughly the direction in which you want to go

00:05:00.140 and be a reasonably comprehensive list of the things that can be predicted.

00:05:06.440 I mean, obviously, governments have to respond to unforeseen events,

00:05:12.100 but there's nothing unforeseen about this.

00:05:13.620 They've been working on rezoning for many, many years.

00:05:16.880 But here it is.

00:05:18.360 They feel they can make this decision.

00:05:20.180 Well, you know, the citizens will make a decision in 18 months' time.

00:05:25.040 Let's hope it's not gone too far that they can't pull this back.

00:05:29.380 Sorry, Corey. I mean, of the three of us sitting here, the only guys whose property values is going to go up is Corey, because he lives outside of town.

00:05:37.500 Oh, yeah. I mean, it makes it more attractive to get the heck out of the city and away from the zoning to acreages and areas like where I live.

00:05:43.900 I'd rather not my fellow Calgary had suffered for the sake of my property values.

00:05:50.220 This council, I mean, it seems incapable of learning.

00:05:53.540 I mean, we saw something different this time around with Mayor Gondek.

00:05:56.400 Like, as you said, Calgary has an apathetic voter base, pretty permissive with their mayors.

00:06:01.100 I mean, we've been around long enough with Bronconnier or Klein or Dewar.

00:06:06.360 I mean, their first two terms, usually, even then she's a shoo-in. 1.00

00:06:10.520 I mean, once you're in, as long as you don't rock the boat too hard, you get a really nice, comfortable honeymoon period.

00:06:16.140 Gondek just pooped in the swimming pool the second she got in there, and her support numbers have shown.

00:06:20.640 She's a record low support, and for those reasons you mentioned, she went completely against what she had campaigned on to get in to begin with, but they don't seem to have learned from this yet.

00:06:32.080 No, the polls show the entire council is historically low ratings. And you think as a smart politician, you want to maybe stay in your job, but they keep doing things to upset Calgarians. The plastic bag ban and things like that, it's like they're deliberately, it's almost like they're like Prime Minister Trudeau. They know they're going to get defeated, so they're trying to cause as much damage as they possibly can in the time that they have left in office.

00:06:59.680 That's right. They're certainly doing a job of that. I mean, it was almost inspiring that we don't see congregants get off their butts like that. There were thousands of submissions that came in, too, that weren't in person. And of those, apparently, 90% of them were opposed to this. What's the point of public engagement when you can see that they spent two weeks sitting there listening to hundreds of people with thousands of submissions, nodding their heads, pretending they care, and then saying, okay, well, to hell with all of you. We're just kidding.

00:07:21.820 Yeah, a lot of pictures of Councillor Giancarlo sitting there on his phone while, you know,

00:07:27.420 people are weeping as they're talking. You know, the fix was in. The fix was in from the beginning.

00:07:33.580 So let's look on the bright side here. We know that City Hall moves at a snail's pace. If you

00:07:39.340 were wanting to develop a piece of property within the city limits and you bought it today,

00:07:43.900 I don't think you'd have your permits in place in 18 months' time. So there is a possibility

00:07:50.220 of pulling this thing back now how they deal with the money they've received from ottawa

00:07:54.860 or will receive from ottawa that's another matter but come and get it you know you're not going to

00:07:59.180 see apartment towers rising up in pump hill between the mansions quite yet i don't think so

00:08:04.700 there is i mean there is a chance to put another city council in place to direct the city

00:08:11.820 administration which i think generates and drives a lot of these ideas and put them in their place

00:08:18.940 Well, I mean, that kind of leads well into, you know, we get the opportunity every four years in

00:08:23.820 a general election, but we're supposed to kind of have the opportunity through the means of recall,

00:08:29.260 if we really found that politicians were gone too far, and we feel that we need to pull them

00:08:35.980 out of there before their term is finished. Premier Kenny had given us a recall legislation,

00:08:41.420 an effort was put together by a land in Johnston to do so and and uh the official

00:08:47.660 counting and sorting and whatnot came out on that yesterday was it Dave it was uh Monday before yeah

00:08:53.260 on Monday and the official count was uh like 69 000 something people signed the signatures well

00:09:00.380 well below the uh 507 000 that was needed I mean it was such a high figure it was never going to

00:09:06.380 succeed uh from the beginning uh but you know this one guy took on decided he'd had enough and

00:09:12.780 you know got noticed took on city hall and got noticed but to add insult to injury corey the uh

00:09:19.500 the city administration ruled that every single signature all 69 000 signatures were invalid

00:09:27.100 because they hadn't been included with a petition sheet on every seat sheet of signatures a

00:09:33.580 technicality really uh but they were all called invalid so you can imagine those people who spent

00:09:39.580 their weekends collecting signatures at the side of the roads and in parking lots saying that their

00:09:45.100 their voice was invalid how arrogant how arrogant uh fortunately you know premier smith has agreed

00:09:54.140 that uh the uh the jason kenny rules are are too onerous and has promised to look at them well

00:10:02.700 It did expose some things. I'll give credit where it's due to the organizers and Mr. Johnston,

00:10:07.040 even if that wasn't their intent, but they really exposed how bad the legislation is. I mean, not

00:10:12.780 just the bar of numbers. I mean, if Premier Smith had just said, okay, we're going to reevaluate

00:10:17.280 and we'll knock that down to 40% of those who turned out in the election or something like that,

00:10:21.440 like other provinces or states do. But there's a lot of bureaucratic junk in that bill too,

00:10:28.300 which allowed city administration to come up with, oh, we found this questionable, you know,

00:10:36.600 oh, you didn't attach this sheet with a notice of recall to every petition sheet, thus it's invalid.

00:10:43.780 That stuff needs to be cleared out of there, too.

00:10:45.860 I mean, they put in so many poison pills in this legislation.

00:10:48.220 It was just absurd.

00:10:49.400 You know, if I were Mayor Gondek, I would not be taking any comfort from any of this.

00:10:55.580 Sure.

00:10:56.240 You pull an administrative click and declare the vote's invalid.

00:11:00.820 Well done.

00:11:03.560 69,000 people, madam, gave you the middle finger.

00:11:08.860 That is nothing to be proud of, nothing that should give you any comfort.

00:11:14.520 And for every person who did it, there was probably more,

00:11:18.240 three more, you know, rhetoric here, three more, four more, five more.

00:11:22.520 There were more people who would have signed it if they could have got to a sheet.

00:11:27.520 She is not popular.

00:11:29.140 She must know in her heart that she is not popular.

00:11:33.640 And I come back to what Dave said just now.

00:11:36.460 She knows she's going to be a one-term wonder.

00:11:39.380 So whatever I think is the right, beautiful, woke thing to do, I will do.

00:11:44.980 And it'll be up to somebody else to take it apart and, you know, put things back the way they were.

00:11:49.860 Two days after the recall vote was announced, she's voting to rezone the city. 0.99

00:11:55.880 So obviously she didn't work. 0.95

00:11:57.860 And as you say, she's just trying to create her own utopia now. 1.00

00:12:01.200 To a little credit, and I don't give Eric Gondek a lot of credit on many things very often at all,

00:12:05.520 she hasn't been crowing about it that much, actually.

00:12:08.220 She's kind of said, well, that came, it's behind us, it's back there.

00:12:11.200 I'm hearing some of the others crowing on it, you know, some political scientists and other pundits.

00:12:14.600 Oh, look at that.

00:12:15.100 They were poorly organized and not a single one

00:12:17.360 of their signatures counted rubbing it in,

00:12:19.780 twisting that knife.

00:12:21.980 Mayor Gondek hasn't done that at least.

00:12:23.440 She hasn't gone out of her way to inflame it further,

00:12:26.040 but people have to understand too.

00:12:27.440 I hope they realize, because I've seen others as well.

00:12:30.660 With my Twitter account, I could probably get

00:12:33.020 a couple thousand signatures on a petition

00:12:34.920 to change the color of city hall

00:12:36.660 if I just threw it out there within a few hours.

00:12:39.160 This is an official petition, this is different.

00:12:41.620 The 69,000 people who did it put their physical

00:12:45.080 mark and name and address on a piece of paper witnessed like that is a a significant number

00:12:51.640 of people to put together and anybody dismissing it it's all is doing their apparel well yeah that

00:12:57.480 same kind of you know i was just thinking about the bloke um standing up there outside costco up

00:13:02.680 in the northeast up in the northwest there you know cold weather he's got his big coat on and

00:13:08.440 he's got his little little platform there for you to write on and everything and uh standing out

00:13:14.440 there on his own people just filing up it was awkward it was inconvenient but there were lots

00:13:21.800 of people like that hundreds probably all over the city going door to door standing in parking

00:13:29.400 lots whatever that's a very serious mass movement like 69 000 people there's a lot of people

00:13:37.960 and if if those people who did the work on this are as well organized and as dedicated and as

00:13:43.000 determined to get out and help other candidates in the next municipal election you are going to see

00:13:48.920 a turnover like that's that's an impressive engagement uh you you know you had a column

00:13:54.280 oh it must be a must be seven or eight months ago now talking about the need for calgarians to

00:14:00.760 recognize that the rules are made by the people who show up well we don't like what's going on

00:14:07.720 time to show up they did there as i i said too and it'll be in a future column i mean

00:14:12.840 I think there's a rule for recall. It's obviously not going to apply in this term,

00:14:17.800 but we need to have that legislation fixed to maybe put a little bit of fear into these guys

00:14:22.920 between their terms or just realizing that we expect you to stay reasonably within your platform.

00:14:29.240 They work for us and they don't seem to realize that. I'm already looking forward to October

00:14:34.200 2025 for the next election because we'll have slate politics then, won't we? That the UCP is

00:14:40.880 going to allow formal ones, slates running. So you'll know whether a certain politician is an

00:14:48.340 NDP supporter or UCP supporter. Thing is, in October 2025, we're also going to have the

00:14:54.820 federal election, which is going to, I mean, that's going to be a bumper issue. So we shouldn't

00:15:00.200 book holidays for that month. Shouldn't book holidays. And, you know, there's a financing

00:15:04.360 issue there too. People are trying to get elected to city council. They're going to need money to

00:15:08.820 campaign as well at the same time as other candidates are who gets to the who gets to the

00:15:14.840 pocketbook first I guess that's going to be an important consideration of anybody doing practical

00:15:20.100 politics in 2025. True enough I mean these things your average person doesn't think about but those

00:15:24.260 of us worked around around campaigns before I mean there's only so many times you can touch those

00:15:28.620 donors before they get fatigued and say hey you know I need to save for my vacation too so they're

00:15:34.440 to be worked over pretty hard in that period. I guess something in Calgary though, the conservative

00:15:39.640 federal politics in Calgary aren't terribly contested. I mean, this is one of the areas

00:15:44.920 where we're quite predictable. Aside from perhaps a couple of writings in the northeast, they're

00:15:49.800 going to go conservative. So I mean, I think perhaps some of the nipple ones looking for 1.00

00:15:54.760 change might do better with fundraising than the conservative ones are considered an issue,

00:15:58.280 but we'll see. Especially if Trudeau continues to trail by 20% in the polls.

00:16:03.720 and then Edmonton might see a turnover too though we're not you know speaking of that as much but

00:16:07.160 so he's not exactly terribly popular up there we haven't seen quite the pushback like we're seeing

00:16:12.840 in Calgary but I think we might see a a bit of a reckoning with our municipal politicians that

00:16:17.880 Premier Smith certainly loves picking the fights with them so bless her heart yes all right well

00:16:24.440 let's turn on to something nice and light COVID facts and statistics we've got more coming to

00:16:31.400 light yeah every day something's coming to light uh you know we used to uh call them conspiracy

00:16:38.440 theories back in the day that oh that can't be true that can't be true now some of them are

00:16:42.840 coming true just in the last 10 days astrazeneca has recalled their vaccines because it was it was

00:16:50.120 causing injuries uh labor uh boards are saying like canada post for firing all their remote

00:16:57.160 workers for not being vaccinated uh was wrong uh you know lots of uh just lots of stuff is slowly

00:17:05.240 starting to creep out uh that you know there's maybe a bit of a huge overreaction and it's going

00:17:11.080 to be a drip drip drip of stories constant stories over the next couple of weeks that we can look

00:17:17.880 forward yeah it's uh it is a major point of point viewers by the way to the coverage that we've had

00:17:25.400 of these things i tried to get a bunch of these together like linked in under one column um

00:17:33.000 you know we were always told that the vaccines were safe and effective we very quickly found

00:17:42.120 that there were thousands of people who had taken the vaccine who developed covered so

00:17:49.880 how effective were they? I mean, the line was, well, sure, you got COVID, we didn't expect that,

00:17:56.720 but, you know, it'll be easier for you if you had the vaccine. And there's really no way of knowing

00:18:02.520 whether that was true or not. But one thing we did find out was when they said it was effective,

00:18:07.820 it was not effective at preventing infection. So then a matter of safety comes up. Now,

00:18:16.460 I realize there's a lot of people out there who are deeply concerned about the number of people

00:18:23.180 who seem to die suddenly. I also know that there is no authoritative medical science published

00:18:33.480 that I am aware of, and if anybody watching is aware of it, please get in touch. But I have

00:18:40.160 know of no medical science that links the vaccine to these sudden deaths.

00:18:49.980 However, I thought it was highly significant that AstraZeneca, as they pulled their vaccine

00:19:01.820 off the world market, admitted that in rare occasions there was a dangerous side effect.

00:19:09.620 We didn't know that when we were taking it.

00:19:13.120 Would it have made a difference to the people who took it?

00:19:15.440 I think some people would have said, oh, I don't know.

00:19:17.540 Maybe I'll go for a different one, maybe not that one.

00:19:21.260 And then Pfizer, apparently, and this is according to a Health Canada official,

00:19:29.320 didn't reveal to Health Canada that there was a component in their vaccine

00:19:36.360 which has been linked to cancer-causing agents.

00:19:40.720 Now, if it was that serious, I guess it would be a lot of dead people.

00:19:44.700 So maybe it wasn't that serious.

00:19:46.780 But can you imagine, Dave, at the height of the season,

00:19:49.940 if we had got hold of that information and published it,

00:19:55.520 what would have happened?

00:19:57.260 You were on the desk.

00:19:58.540 What would have happened?

00:20:00.200 We would have been censored to high heaven.

00:20:02.400 Yeah.

00:20:03.280 You couldn't say it.

00:20:04.780 No.

00:20:04.960 Even if you'd have known it and known it was the truth, you couldn't say that.

00:20:09.960 And you couldn't say a lot of other things that you suspected.

00:20:11.820 And you couldn't say it on this program.

00:20:13.980 We would get kicked off every channel out there.

00:20:17.240 That's right.

00:20:18.040 Well, now, years later, starting, well, okay, maybe, yeah, actually there was this, you know.

00:20:23.740 So I have personally lost a good deal of confidence in the good word of some of these companies.

00:20:32.440 and of the governments, too.

00:20:36.300 You mentioned just now the finding in B.C.

00:20:40.520 This was a court decision which said that Bonnie Henry went too far

00:20:46.120 in requiring vaccination for people who weren't dealing face-to-face

00:20:52.280 with clients of the medical system there.

00:20:57.100 Well, you know, we could have told you that.

00:20:58.860 If the guy's working from home and never sees anybody,

00:21:01.520 he probably doesn't need to be vaccinated let him do him whatever same thing with canada post

00:21:07.040 canada post mandated vaccines you know they were trying to get the shot then i know lots of people

00:21:14.460 who worked for federally regulated agencies wouldn't take it got fired doing something else

00:21:22.060 now but the truth of the matter was that it was not necessary for those people who were not

00:21:28.660 dealing with the public so so what I'm saying here is there's a whole lot of

00:21:34.120 stuff that is coming out we're gonna see more of it because you may depend but

00:21:40.000 there's a lot of other groups working people groups who said well you know if

00:21:44.860 if it was not good for the post office because they weren't meeting people

00:21:48.940 face-to-face maybe maybe it wasn't good for me either I should have been left

00:21:53.560 alone so they'll be suing it's gonna be on and on and I think we're gonna see

00:21:57.220 some reckoning stuff. Yeah, I can tell you, gentlemen, I've been vaccinated four times. I

00:22:02.140 think the first one was AstraZeneca, and the rest were Pfizer. I'm not getting vaccinated anymore.

00:22:09.140 You know, I've just read too much stuff about it. I will continue to get the yearly flu shots,

00:22:15.680 but that's all COVID is, I think, you know, is just, it's a bad case of the flu. Yeah. And it

00:22:21.420 comes around every year and it takes a horrific toll on the elderly and uh it doesn't affect the

00:22:29.020 young people just like very lucky you know so uh you know if you're in a you're in a high risk

00:22:36.140 group then maybe you would consider getting more vaccinated but it's just a regular flow you know

00:22:41.660 there's another thing that we couldn't have published this this would have been like two

00:22:45.020 years ago i think that i was digging around in the in the piles and i came up with health canada's

00:22:51.020 definition of the flu and on another page i found out their definition of covid they were identical

00:23:00.300 except for one thing that with covert i think there was a tendency to nausea other than that

00:23:06.540 there were about 10 things 10 things they're all the same and if you had then said well if health

00:23:13.260 canada says they're the same thing you would have still got bumped off the facebook or censored or

00:23:21.740 something like that this was the insidious thing about that period of time was that there was a mood

00:23:28.380 in the country in government that you couldn't talk about it you couldn't say even things you

00:23:33.980 knew to be true meanwhile the science i've said this several times i apologize to people who are

00:23:41.820 bored with it. But in same COVID disease, same science, in BC they interpreted it as a necessity

00:23:50.060 to close the churches and keep the restaurants open. Completely different approach in Alberta,

00:23:55.740 keep the churches open, close the restaurants. How could this be following the science?

00:24:00.140 The absurdity of the lockdowns and inconsistency and the lack of impact it had now that we have

00:24:06.540 the hindsight and seeing infections in areas that were higher or lower. It looks like most of the

00:24:11.580 the measures didn't do a bloody thing anyways aside from terribly impact a lot of people's lives

00:24:16.220 and livelihoods and businesses but at least hopefully with hindsight we can start seeing

00:24:20.940 and learning from this this is what i want meanwhile we'd have somebody who was classified

00:24:27.020 as having died of covid well wait a minute they were decapitated in a car accident well yes but

00:24:31.180 they had covid thus it goes into the stats like okay let's now rather than trying to pad the

00:24:37.100 numbers one way or another actually look at them yeah for two years we had every young athlete

00:24:43.740 around the world who died it was immediately thought oh it must be COVID must be COVID

00:24:48.780 it wasn't this is the biggest I mean COVID was the biggest overreaction to my world governments that

00:24:54.860 I've ever seen and I ever hope to see well that's it and hey there's gonna be more bugs in the

00:24:59.740 future there's gonna be other pandemics some maybe hopefully not but maybe more dangerous than COVID

00:25:07.020 And we'd better get our stuff together and learn from this,

00:25:11.400 or we're going to react poorly again

00:25:13.160 to whatever the next big health challenge might be,

00:25:16.080 whether it's underreacting or overreacting, 1.00

00:25:18.580 because we were so stupid with this one. 1.00

00:25:22.760 Do you ever get tired of being mad? 1.00

00:25:25.400 I do.

00:25:26.460 No.

00:25:26.980 I know that's...

00:25:27.880 It's my nature.

00:25:28.640 That's your nature.

00:25:30.040 I get out of bed and scowl at the world, you know,

00:25:32.920 the bluebird outside my window, and I shoo it off.

00:25:36.080 Go away. Don't brighten my day. I've got to keep my rage up. I'm writing.

00:25:40.920 No, this is a bad one. We've got to stay on top of it, but boy, boy, I wish I could develop a sense of humor about it.

00:25:46.740 Nothing funny about it.

00:25:47.860 No, it was tough to laugh about, and a lot of things are, but I throw my tasteless humor in now.

00:25:55.500 All right, well, let's go on to, you know, another light issue, the Israel-Hamas conflict still ongoing,

00:26:02.040 into Canadian and American university reactions as a lot of coddled white bread students have 0.87

00:26:07.560 decided to set up encampments on their local campuses and non-students it turns out as well.

00:26:13.280 It looks like Alberta, of all the jurisdictions in North America, I think had none of it right

00:26:17.900 off the bat. Boy, U of C, U of A, Dave. U of C, U of A, you remember we had a, when the

00:26:23.940 started happening in the United States, the weather was quite bad here in Calgary and

00:26:29.280 burn. It was cold and rainy, but as soon as the sun came out, the tents went up at U of C and at

00:26:36.960 the U of A. The U of C said, hey, you're good to protest here, but you can't camp.

00:26:43.520 So when the tents went up, Calgary police issued them with trespass notices,

00:26:48.000 said you can protest here, but you can't camp. Around 10 o'clock that night, they'd had enough.

00:26:56.320 some bottles started to be thrown at police, so they moved in. They, you know, say they looked

00:27:02.800 intimidating with their shields and whatnot as they moved forward and continued to be hit with

00:27:08.160 objects, including glass bottles, according to Police Chief Neufeld. They used flashbangs,

00:27:17.200 they used pepper ball guns, which, you know, would irritate the eyes, and they moved the students out

00:27:25.760 Were they all students? Well, nobody knows. Nobody knows. The same thing happened in Edmonton a

00:27:32.480 couple days later on Saturday. They were warned in the middle of the night, 4 a.m., they were

00:27:39.040 moved in and dispersed. Cue the outrage from the left-wing students union, the horror, the horror,

00:27:48.000 NDP, the horror, the horror, civil libertarian lawyers, the horror, the horror.

00:27:57.680 She probably had to, but, you know, Premier Smith says, okay, well, let's let ACERT take a look at it.

00:28:03.940 Nobody's filed a complaint yet.

00:28:05.880 There were no injuries.

00:28:08.760 I think, Corey, you said in your show today, your mother spanked you more or harder than, you know, what these students got.

00:28:15.420 And like the students, I typically deserved it.

00:28:17.300 Yeah, exactly. And then over the weekend, even funnier, four universities in Halifax have got together and banded in and set up a camp. And they've issued a list of demands, Corey. They want free housing. They want free tuition. And they've got a list of about a dozen outrageous things that they demand before they move their encampments. So we'll see how long that lasts.

00:28:46.040 You know, Dave, I've got a plan for the next time this comes up.

00:28:51.160 Instead of the students or whoever it is, I actually, I'm told that it was by no means all students.

00:28:57.820 And there's a lot of people just looking for trouble.

00:29:00.120 Before you let them go in and put a perimeter around a piece of property,

00:29:05.140 you put the perimeter up first and you control the gate.

00:29:09.240 And anybody who wants to go in there and protest has to answer a simple skill testing question.

00:29:14.100 We show you a map of the world, find Gaza, right? 1.00

00:29:19.880 That would be a good litmus test.

00:29:22.260 Because that's the thing, there is an awful lot of lack of knowledge,

00:29:27.200 lack of complete ignorance.

00:29:30.040 These people don't even know about what happened to the Jews in the Second World War. 0.97

00:29:34.840 A lot of them.

00:29:36.140 If they did, that would temper their feelings about what Gaza did, 0.92

00:29:41.240 It was what Hamas did on October the 7th. 0.79

00:29:45.740 You know, nobody likes to see buildings destroyed,

00:29:51.160 people crushed in the rubble, women and children getting killed.

00:29:54.760 But, you know, nobody likes to see whole people led off to destruction either.

00:30:00.780 And nobody likes to see people coming in on ultralights

00:30:04.380 and shooting up people at a rock concert either.

00:30:08.220 And then, I mean, I don't even talk about some of the things they did to individuals.

00:30:13.140 It's, they don't know what they're doing.

00:30:18.320 Well, and that aside, I mean, I think the issue isn't even, I mean, they've got the right to protest.

00:30:22.920 You've got the right to protest and support the odious side of Hamas. 0.79

00:30:26.640 That's your right.

00:30:27.960 It's the encampments where the problem comes in.

00:30:29.880 And that's where I'm getting tired of it with protesters.

00:30:31.740 And you know what?

00:30:32.100 The right's guilty of it, too.

00:30:33.760 That's where, and I know I'll get some bad feedback from it, but that's where the truckers convoy,

00:30:38.220 overplayed. They overstayed. They had no exit plan. They had no rational set of demands.

00:30:44.280 There's A, B, and C could be accomplished. We'll all disperse the border blockades. Same thing.

00:30:49.840 Once you entrench, you force the state. You can get out. You can express. You can make noise. You

00:30:55.900 can disrupt the roads. You can block some spots for a little while. But when you entrench, like

00:31:02.020 you're sitting in the Halifax now or the East Coast, you're going to have to act. I mean,

00:31:06.680 the demands are unreasonable. They're not going to happen. It's easier to get rid of them earlier

00:31:11.720 rather than later. I think the UCLA lesson, I'm sure, inspired what happened in Alberta. I mean,

00:31:15.800 they let it go too long, and then it turned into a real mess when they had to get these guys out

00:31:20.880 of there. Yeah, and the University of Toronto, they've had, what, two, three weeks to end camp

00:31:26.060 and get their defenses going. That's going to be a tough one to clear out. And, you know,

00:31:31.880 you saw the right squad of the NYPD go in and haul all the Columbia students out. And you're

00:31:38.320 right, you cannot let them get entrenched, you have to do it quickly. And just to correct too,

00:31:43.240 I mean, I know in Calgary it wasn't confirmed, but I'm pretty sure at least Premier Smith said as

00:31:46.260 much that the police reports in Edmonton, at least with those arrested when they moved there,

00:31:50.820 only 25% were students. So three out of four were, they didn't even belong on campus, much less

00:31:57.360 uh camping on these things but uh the screaming of the the usual suspects on the left you know you're

00:32:05.040 infringing on the right to demonstrate no they can demonstrate if they feel that strongly about

00:32:10.880 it next time there's a provincial election they can campaign on that count they certainly can

00:32:15.200 there we go they're the right to camp on campus and support hummus right and certainly i think

00:32:19.120 there's been a couple of uh online polls the vast majority of calgarians support the calgary police

00:32:24.720 on what they did again it's just the vocal minority trying to cause trouble well that's

00:32:30.240 it and i just get tired i'm saying they're using too much force what do you expect them to do

00:32:33.680 you know walk in they did politely ask a number of times after that eventually you have to walk in

00:32:38.560 this is like the people again i'll throw my own bias on it but you know talking as if israel's

00:32:43.760 been uh overreacting in gaza and committing genocide guys israel could have killed every 0.88

00:32:49.760 person in Gaza 10 times over within the first week if they had the will to do such. I mean,

00:32:55.820 I'm certain they've probably been doing some things wrong. And, you know, everybody has the

00:33:00.180 right to question their actions. But guys, they're not committing genocide, rest assured, if they

00:33:06.020 wanted to. No, it's absolutely ridiculous to use that word. Yes. All right. Well, another area where 0.85

00:33:12.920 Genocide is misapplied quite often again, and we're talking the Kamloops alleged graves at the residential school site.

00:33:25.100 It's been almost three years now.

00:33:26.780 I think it'll be three years in a week or so since the big revelation of radar has found anomalies in Kamloops.

00:33:34.880 They got a whole lot of money, and we haven't seen a whole lot of bodies.

00:33:37.720 No, in fact, it was reported this week, or last week actually, $8 million has gone to the local band. What they've done with that $8 million, they're not saying. As far as I know, they haven't done any excavations. They haven't really gone far forward with it at all.

00:33:58.360 as far as I know

00:34:01.980 and there were not just Kamloops

00:34:03.580 there were bans all over western Canada

00:34:05.860 that claimed we've got

00:34:07.660 possible graves, we've got anomalies in the ground

00:34:10.120 as far as I know not a single body

00:34:12.120 has been unearthed

00:34:14.580 to me it's kind of like COVID

00:34:18.620 this could be the biggest non-story

00:34:20.560 foisted upon Canadians 0.90

00:34:22.780 again that these bodies didn't exist

00:34:24.980 never did exist

00:34:26.360 and the things as a country that we've done because of this false claim

00:34:31.140 have been absolutely, you know, it's changed Canadian life for no reason.

00:34:41.320 Three years is long enough.

00:34:43.880 It isn't, by the way, just the $7.8 million that was delivered to the Kamloops Band.

00:34:50.760 That $7.8 million is part of a $320 million fund.

00:34:56.360 that's available to indigenous groups all over the country if they want to do an excavation and

00:35:02.920 do some kind of investigation at any rate into these stories now the one place there is one

00:35:09.960 place dave that did do an excavation it's a it's a it's in manitoba and it was strongly believed

00:35:16.920 like word of mouth was unanimous that there were bodies of children underneath the roman catholic

00:35:25.160 church on this reserve they excavated underneath the church they found old campsites and animal

00:35:36.600 bones but no human remains you would think that that would settle the matter but the response was

00:35:44.440 well then it must have been somewhere else you know so there is unfortunately some

00:35:55.160 What is it? What's the word I'm looking for? Some people want to believe it, therefore

00:36:02.140 they do believe it, and it's going to be very hard to shake them. But really, until somebody

00:36:08.700 produces the proof, the rest of Canada needs to say, no more.

00:36:14.520 We've got to start questioning, and the cowardice when it comes to some of this.

00:36:21.040 was another one actually a capsule hospital site in Edmonton it was an old

00:36:24.580 hospital that had treated a number of indigenous people and again there'd been

00:36:27.940 mythology that there was a bunch of they died in the hospital and they were

00:36:30.700 buried on the grounds this happened a couple years ago they did ground

00:36:33.760 penetrating radar found 32 sites they were confident were graves and this was

00:36:39.260 a private company one development that's why they were doing this so this wasn't

00:36:42.820 on a reserve or at residential school but it was sim issue so the private

00:36:46.360 company spent the money they had indigenous elders they were doing the 0.97

00:36:49.160 chanting and the smoke ceremonies and the whole works as they excavated each and

00:36:53.120 every one of these anomalies and all 32 of them nothing was found. Ground

00:36:58.820 penetrating radar is notoriously unreliable. Even the person who

00:37:03.080 conducted the initial survey in Kamloops and she's a you know questionable as

00:37:08.020 almost an activist said this needs to be verified by excavation. It doesn't take

00:37:14.060 three years to get some people with some shovels to dig a hole. I mean, seriously, that's really

00:37:20.940 what it comes down to. I understand you don't want to just rip in there in case there's certainly

00:37:24.480 there are some remains and you want to be respectful and careful. And but this is ridiculous. 0.98

00:37:29.880 I mean, when the allegations are of murdered children, of missing children, that's part of 0.89

00:37:33.980 the problem too, is they can't find any reported missing children. This was actually quite well

00:37:38.200 documented at these schools. So where's the families? Where's the people saying, hey, young

00:37:43.020 And Sally disappeared in 64 at the Kamloops school, and we never found what happened to her.

00:37:48.640 They don't have that.

00:37:50.000 But nobody's got the courage to say it, and they've got to start calling it out.

00:37:53.480 We're talking, yes, $300 million, $7.9 million.

00:37:56.160 And aside from the money aspect, this is keeping a lot of wounds open, creating new ones, maybe, with things that didn't happen.

00:38:03.140 Yeah, the stories at the time, three years ago, were horrendous.

00:38:07.700 All nuns throwing babies into fire pits and stuff like that. 1.00

00:38:11.700 And as you say, Corey, nothing's been proven, no evidence of anything.

00:38:16.180 And Nigel, you're right, let's move on.

00:38:19.140 Sir, we aren't moving on.

00:38:21.260 No, that's the problem.

00:38:22.420 The churches are still being burned.

00:38:25.080 What's the latest?

00:38:25.960 Was it 85?

00:38:27.060 I think that have been damaged.

00:38:29.000 At least dozens have been actually raised right to the ground.

00:38:33.320 I mean, this is the anger that's built.

00:38:34.640 There's people that believe these things really happened.

00:38:37.800 And if you really believe it, I can understand why you'd be very outraged,

00:38:40.900 why you can be pushed to violence, why you, you know, hold that against other people.

00:38:46.400 I, you know, yeah, we shouldn't just be letting this go.

00:38:48.640 We've got to be following up.

00:38:49.700 I mean, we should be demanding now an excavation on this site.

00:38:55.040 And it's, or at least start calling them out, maybe embarrassing them.

00:38:59.480 I'm serious.

00:39:00.160 Start saying, like, you guys are committing fraud now.

00:39:02.720 Like, why are you hiding this?

00:39:03.900 Why do you not want to dig this hole?

00:39:05.700 And what the heck did you do with the $8 million?

00:39:07.860 I mean, this is our money too.

00:39:08.860 Do you think there's any politician that will stand up for that?

00:39:12.420 Not a chance, but we'll keep going on about it, you know, because, I mean, this is, this gets farther back, too, to something that the Trudeau government did when they undid some of the stuff that Harper did with lack of accountability with the money going to these First Nations bands.

00:39:27.340 Like, they just toss them the check and say, you know, we trust you to not misappropriate it.

00:39:32.620 And there's still lots of reserves with boil water advisories.

00:39:38.620 You've gotten lots of money for that.

00:39:40.620 You know, there's still lots of reserves that abject poverty, even though they're banned, maybe getting, you know, millions and millions of dollars a year.

00:39:48.620 You know, I wouldn't have said this 10 years ago, but I think there's an appetite in the voting public today for straight talk and authenticity that exists.

00:40:01.620 exists today because people are fed up with being knowing they're being lied to and yet people

00:40:09.700 looking them straight in the eye and telling them everything's fine i'm not so sure that

00:40:15.700 there isn't a politician who could take that up if they wanted to

00:40:20.100 surveys suggest that two-thirds of the people are not woke one-third are and they're the one-third

00:40:27.220 in the universities the institutions and in politics and journalism which is unfortunate

00:40:33.220 but two to one against if our readership on this is anything to go by you know just the sheer amount

00:40:41.540 of interest that these this story is called has generated which by the way i i have yet to see

00:40:48.900 any note of this in the mainstream press no no touch it as you know nigel it blew up our site 1.00

00:40:55.620 this week by far it was the most popular uh uh story we've had all week and all year in fact and

00:41:02.580 it's there is a lot of interest out there for sure i think there's a i think there's a constituency

00:41:07.700 for dealing with this let's hope so nobody likes misappropriation of funds it's not and there's

00:41:12.820 there's some of the we know the reality it's the fear of the big r word you just don't want to be

00:41:16.340 called racist but it's not racist to ask for accountability we i hate every race has been 0.94

00:41:21.780 found occasionally to have people who are unprincipled who misuse funds there's been white

00:41:27.140 politicians and business people and indian ones from india and first nations ones it's not

00:41:33.700 unreasonable to say hey what the heck did you do with that money that really needs to be asked i

00:41:39.300 mean sounds like you should run for office oh god the world deserves better than that

00:41:45.220 i deserve better i wouldn't want that job oh i thought i did once but no not a chance you

00:41:50.340 You ran for the NDP once.

00:41:52.080 Well, I did, but they rejected me, and it hurt.

00:41:54.020 I don't know if I could take such rejection again.

00:41:58.460 That's a different story altogether.

00:42:00.380 Well, finishing, I mean, I guess, just talking about some contemporary news.

00:42:03.060 Hopefully, maybe by next week, this won't even be in our news scroll.

00:42:06.320 But the fire season's happened again, and Fort McMurray is threatened again.

00:42:11.480 We're looking at evacuations.

00:42:13.260 Boy, it must go eight years since the last bad one.

00:42:15.200 Eight years, yeah.

00:42:15.700 And the fire season started early in Alberta, out of control one now,

00:42:19.520 bearing down on Fort McMurray, which has sort of left the roads out of town, jam-packed with

00:42:25.840 people leaving. Premier Smith and all the officials held a press conference today and

00:42:31.600 basically said they're throwing everything they've got at it. They got helicopters with

00:42:36.380 night vision flying at night and, you know, hopefully they can bring this under control,

00:42:42.260 but they've already prepared help for people who are being evacuated in terms of

00:42:48.840 grants and money to to pay for hotels and stuff like that city of edmonton has set up a reception

00:42:55.320 center and uh you know story changes hour by hour and that's uh let's hope that it works out for the

00:43:01.240 best that was a great uh very little scoop by our friend and colleague jonathan bradley getting the

00:43:07.640 guy on the phone talking about it as he was driving out of yeah great pictures and he expressed

00:43:13.880 frustration that the roads were jammed because a lot of people left town without filling up their

00:43:18.120 gas tanks and they ran out of gas on the road and blocked the highway for forever until you can push

00:43:23.880 them out yeah you gotta you gotta be prepared you gotta have your car filled you gotta have your

00:43:28.520 overnight bag packed and uh yeah jonathan had a uh ripping account of a guy as the as the fire

00:43:34.840 closed in and gave us some great pictures and um yeah it was it was a good story so when you go to

00:43:40.120 our website and you click on news that's still fairly near the top had a lot of news today but

00:43:46.200 you know you'll find it yeah great story and we'll close off with that uh you know i can remind

00:43:52.220 everybody yes we've got reporters out there on the ground jonathan out there working jen lots of

00:43:56.920 others coming up with lots of stories as they break we really have a newsroom on the go here

00:44:01.620 those aren't a common thing anymore and the reason we can do it is because of you guys we are

00:44:06.100 subscription-based, not tax subsidy-based. So for $9.99 a month, $100 a year, guys,

00:44:11.080 westernstandard.news slash subscription. This is how we can keep doing it. This is how we can keep

00:44:15.580 those stories going and be sure to keep checking back because the new ones are coming up all the

00:44:20.300 time. So if you haven't subscribed yet, please get on there and do it and nag your friends and family 0.98

00:44:24.360 to do it too. It's cheaper than newspaper subscription used to be. And if you've already

00:44:27.940 subscribed, thank you. We really, really do appreciate it. We appreciate your readership

00:44:32.040 and your subscription so that kind of covers us for this week maybe hopefully

00:44:35.960 good bloviating guys the bloviating guys hopefully next week we're talking about how the fire suddenly

00:44:40.920 was contained and everybody caught home safely heroic firefighters and we certainly hope for

00:44:46.520 the best for everybody up in fort mack that's going to be more all being evacuated like that

00:44:50.200 so thank you dave and nigel and chatting with you thank you all out there and uh yes be sure

00:44:56.680 to tune in again next week and we will cover whatever's on top of the story scroll at that time

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Western Standard - May 16, 2024

Calgary council falls for Trudeau's gold

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