The news just keeps coming, hard and heavy. Rarely good news, but there's lots of it, anyway. So since we're the ones who report on and analyze it for you, we have an embarrassment of riches to share with you today as well. As a guest, I have Landon Johnston, the young fellow who started that initiative to recall Mayor Naheed Nenshi in Calgary. We're going to bring him in for an update on that initiative, what the plans are, and just check in on that in general.
00:01:54.180And this has all changed, ironically, due to two men who haven't even formally entered the race yet.
00:02:00.180Both former Calgary Mayor and the head, Nenshi, and Alberta Federation of Labor, Gil McGowan,
00:02:05.660have expressed their interest now in pursuing the NDP leadership, and the fireworks are sure to follow.
00:02:11.000I mean, Nenshi and McGowan, they have much in common in that they both have thin skins and inflated egos.
00:02:17.220They also have some very serious differences.
00:02:19.060as McGowan's an in-your-face type of old-school union-pushing socialist.
00:02:24.640While Nenshi's more of a pragmatic type of leftist,
00:02:27.460he's going to pander to an assortment of groups to try and gain and maintain power.
00:02:32.220Now, Nenshi is clearly giving the leadership serious consideration
00:02:34.800as he suddenly appeared giving fire-and-brimstone-type speeches at leftist rallies.
00:02:39.180He hasn't denied his interest in the job
00:02:41.020and has been painting himself as something of a savior for the NDP,
00:02:44.680and he can bring their party back into prominence, he says.
00:02:47.500Legacy media outlets, of course, are dutifully giving Ninchy more coverage suddenly with interviews and polls.
00:02:52.320And there's even a story in the state broadcaster showing his favorite list of books last week.
00:02:57.640Yes, they certainly come around for Mr. Ninchy fast, don't they?
00:03:00.920Gil McCowan now. He's been entrenched in the NDP for decades.
00:03:04.620And he's less than pleased with the prospect of an outsider suddenly appearing on the scene, telling his party it needs to be saved from itself.
00:03:11.360So he's decided to throw his hat in the ring.
00:03:13.380And McGowan has kicked off his campaign by taking shots at Stephen Carter, who's long been a compatriot of Nahed Nenshi.
00:03:19.580And in saying his campaign will not be run by party insiders, these are Gil's words, or self-styled strategy gurus with podcasts who too often look down their noses at ordinary working people and who've never actually run for office themselves.
00:03:34.680Yes, the shots have already been fired. Gil's going after Carter. I'm sure they'll start shooting back soon.
00:03:40.340Now McGowan, he's an abrasive sort of brute who's known for verbally assailing media members with
00:03:45.600profanity-laden rants as he tries to block cameras with his middle finger. He's styling himself as
00:03:51.760being a worker who could lead a worker's party. He'd love to bring union, thuggery, and intimidation
00:03:57.660to the prominence it used to enjoy decades ago. He wants to be a modern-day Joe Hill who'll
00:04:02.380inspire people to bring oppressive capitalists to heel. Nanchy? He's more an opportunist,0.99
00:04:07.920willing to wear whatever cloak it takes to win. The Alberta party was his first political choice
00:04:12.020of vehicle, but his unexpected mayoral win in Calgary put a halt to his provincial ambition.
00:04:18.920So since leaving the top job in Calgary, Ninchy's been biding his political time to see where to go
00:04:22.900next. Since there's little indication Trudeau's leaving the federal job anytime soon, the head's
00:04:27.000turned his eye to the opening at the helm of the NDP. Now, McCowan, he has enough union support to
00:04:32.480potentially win the NDP leadership, but a loose cannon like him isn't going to win the premiership
00:04:37.400in a general election. Nenshi, on the other hand, he could bring in new members, and he might win
00:04:41.300over pragmatic existing members, and might win the NDP leadership, and could conceivably garner
00:04:47.380more Calgary support for the party, which would be interesting, but it would cause a lot of division
00:04:51.860among the party loyal, wouldn't it? Both Nenshi and McCowan have already fostered some division
00:04:56.460with the NDP, as of course, they burst upon the scene and pushed aside four women who've put in
00:05:01.060their time as party MLAs, and basically what they're saying is, step aside, girls, it's time1.00
00:05:04.920for the men to take charge and get things back in order. The feminist wing of the NDP can't be1.00
00:05:10.140amused. I'm sure Nancy will close his eyes, look at the ceiling, and explain more clearly to them
00:05:15.160why they need to embrace his guidance. Maybe he'll tell them to calm down. That always works.
00:05:19.360The NDP members were going to have a tough choice to make. Should they go with the unelectable
00:05:23.880McCowan, who would keep the party true to its roots, or should they accept some personal
00:05:27.960compromise and choose a party outsider like Nancy to try and win the next election? The race has0.81
00:05:32.720become interesting in the future. The NDP is on the line. The Nenshi-McGowan battle won't do the
00:05:37.200party or Albertans really any favors, but it will offer us some fantastic political drama to observe.
00:05:42.280I'm looking forward to watching it, kind of like that morbid fascination akin to a kid who just
00:05:46.580put a couple of bugs into a jar and wants to see them fight. I'll try and give it a little shake
00:05:50.720now and then when I can. I don't really care who wins. I just want to see how low they're going to
00:05:54.280go in trying. So the NDP race, which I was indifferent to, has finally become exciting,
00:06:00.100and I'm looking forward to covering it with all of the zeal I just showed now.
00:06:04.780All right, let's see what else is going out there in the big bad world of news
00:06:07.420and check in with our news editor, Dave Naylor.
00:17:06.480These guys are not doing anybody any favors.
00:17:10.600Landon appears to be running a little behind, it seems, so we'll just carry on talking about things.
00:17:14.620I'll talk about another issue sort of related to what he's been working on with holding the city council to account.
00:17:24.120And there's been more and more talk about political parties possibly getting in on the municipal scene.
00:17:29.220And of course, people are getting very, very upset with that, particularly, and unsurprisingly, existing municipal politicians.
00:17:36.320If they won already and got their role and got their seat in the old system, they don't want it to change.
00:17:42.060The issue we have is that we've got a lot of these municipal politicians, we see the same thing all the time.
00:17:48.920When they come up as an independent, they don't need to go through a nomination.
00:17:54.540They don't need, they don't have that first vetting that's going on.
00:17:57.820People in general don't know who they are. So they know, because if you look provincially and federally, Alberta in general, anyways, tends to vote fairly conservatively. So they campaign conservatively. Ninchy did it. Gondek did it. Others did it. And then they get in and they swing hard left because they can rely on our apathy. And it's our own fault there. There's truth to that. It's our own fault in that front. But they rely on our apathy to just stay in there. And voters don't get off their butts and fire these guys.
00:18:31.020In Vancouver, they actually knocked off Vancouver, the land of the left,
00:18:33.780knocked off an incumbent mayor, which is a tough job in any city,
00:18:38.040but it's because Vancouver has a political party.
00:18:40.620You see, with a party, as I said, the first thing is it would give some vetting.
00:18:44.880So somebody, the party presumably would have a set of broad principles.
00:18:50.300They're going to have things that they all agree on.
00:18:51.780The candidates agree on, the volunteers agree on, things such as that.
00:18:54.420So there's going to be people running for nominations to get in on these, and they're going to compete against other people for those nominations.
00:19:01.560If it turns out it's a closet lefty, it's going to be exposed at the nomination stage, not once they're in office.
00:19:09.540So you've already got that first level of accountability.
00:19:12.580The other problem we have is we lose a lot of what could have been potentially very good civic politicians because they didn't know how to campaign.
00:20:46.860let's get you checked off so we can stop nagging you. It works. It works. It can bring out many,
00:20:52.520many more voters than would have normally done it. If there's a good item on television,
00:20:56.560they might choose not to vote rather than come out that day. And that's where the apathy wins
00:21:00.220the day. Parties have mechanisms, databases, training, volunteers to get out that vote.
00:21:08.260So party candidates will be able to do that. Now in the last Calgary, well, Alberta municipal
00:21:15.300elections. There was a union-backed group. It always comes down to those public service unions,
00:21:20.180a union-backed group, and they had a $1.7 million fund. Huge. When you're talking municipal politics
00:21:28.760to start spreading that around and doing more promotion and things, that's a lot of money.
00:21:33.280And you can only gather that sort of money as a large organized group. So what did they do?
00:21:39.920They endorsed loads and loads of candidates, and loads and loads of those candidates won.
00:21:45.300What did we get to follow? Well, now we got candidates that are beholden to the public service unions. That means the unions are getting more sweet deals. We're getting larger sunshine lists. We're getting more highly paid civil servants and bureaucrats that we don't need. And suddenly Edmonton and Calgary are issuing huge tax hikes as usual, because you got to pay those bills. Why did the unions win? Because they're organized. It's funny. People say, I don't want to see partisan come into our municipal system. Guys, it's already there. It's just informal.
00:22:26.260Parties you can scrutinize and choose between because the parties are already there.
00:22:31.140The only thing, and I say it over and over again, worse than a partisan system in municipal politics is an informal partisan system in municipal politics.
00:22:43.460have people talked about that? You know, I think I talk a little more about parties in general.
00:22:47.720I've taken part in a lot of them. And yeah, it gets frustrating. You know, one of the things I
00:22:51.180hate seeing more than anything else is whipped votes. And every party does it. Conservative0.68
00:22:55.680parties do it. Liberal parties do it. The rest of them do it. When you see what should be a
00:22:59.500contentious vote in a legislature, parliament, or any of those spots, yet each member votes exactly
00:23:06.180on party lines, none deviate. I despise that. Because you know that a few of them do not agree
00:23:11.420with how they voted, but they voted that way because the party told them to. That's the ugly
00:23:15.000side of partisanship. That's a problem with partisanship. But let's just imagine for a moment,
00:23:21.100let's say we took parliament and just wiped out parties somehow. Nobody in there was any longer
00:23:26.740a member of a party. Okay, well, unfortunately, under our system, actually, let's say we even
00:23:32.080had a Republican system. We elected a head of the parliament, a head of state separately. So we do
00:23:36.500have a president, prime minister, whatever that might be, but we've also got 308 or whatever it
00:23:40.860is members of parliament now that have no party affiliation. They're all in there and they got no
00:23:44.960parties. How are they going to get anything done? What are they going to get done? Nothing. Absolutely
00:23:50.480nothing. Within hours of this imaginary scenario, know what they're going to do? They're going to
00:23:54.740start talking with each other and forming groups, forming alliances. They're going to start doing
00:23:59.440nose counts and see whose group is larger than which group. Which group can get which done? Which
00:24:03.560group agrees more on these principles versus those principles? Maybe we can get this bill done if
00:24:08.060this group works on that bill and then we all vote together and get that bill through. Guess
00:24:10.900what you got now? You got a political party. It'll be back within hours. It'll just be informal
00:24:14.740because we can't operate without that. And I saw, you know, people talk about proportional
00:24:21.740representation. There's where you get too many parties into the mix and you can really get into
00:24:25.820dysfunction. I think it was Tristan Hopper, maybe it was somebody else who pointed out,
00:24:29.540I saw a great tweet online where they said, you know, if you want to see what proportional
00:24:35.200representation would look like. Just look at the deal Justin Trudeau just cut for the Pharmacare
00:24:41.100with the NDP to remain in power, which is exactly right. Unfortunately, if you get into that,
00:24:46.160you get into all these endless minority governments and a bunch of horse trading1.00
00:24:49.360going on with a whole bunch of different parties, you can really start getting some terrible policy
00:24:53.400in. Now, getting back to municipal politics again and what a party can offer is policy formulation.
00:25:00.440You see, for people who don't watch, and I don't blame you, but if you don't watch municipal politics closely enough, unfortunately, what happens a lot is, again, let's look at the city of Calgary.
00:25:09.820You know, they're managing over 1.2 million people in this city, and their budget is massive.
00:25:15.460And rather than formulate policy, what they keep doing is asking administration to formulate the policy.
00:25:22.380Then administration brings it back to the council and mayor, and the mayor is usually just to accept it as it is.
00:25:28.320In a party system, the party resources, the staffers, the rest are going to formulate policy.
00:25:34.320They're going to write the bills and then they will work and debate and amend and fix up those bills.
00:25:39.480Does it always make a good bill? No, not necessarily. Of course not.
00:25:42.960But what do you expect to come from city administration when you're getting them to write the legislation all the time?
00:25:48.620Well, the legislation isn't going to serve Calgarians. It's going to serve the bureaucrats.
00:25:51.600It's going to serve the unions. Guess what? Why do you think the budgets are exploding?
00:25:55.220and they've made it backwards. They've made it backwards. We used to see that all the time
00:26:00.700in, uh, in the city council and head and then she used to scream at Sean Chu, for example,
00:26:06.860when Sean Chu dared, I remember one scene where Sean Chu dared to question the numbers put out by a
00:26:11.940bureaucrat who was hired to build bike lanes, who gave out a bunch of baloney stats about how many
00:26:16.860people want to ride bikes and Chu dared to call her out. And then she went totally off on Sean1.00
00:26:22.180you about that? How dare you question her? You don't question our city staff like that in here.1.00
00:26:27.300Well, wait a minute. If city council can't question the major city staff, who does? That's exactly what
00:26:32.700they're supposed to be doing in there. But the administration bureaucracy is wagging, is the tail
00:26:38.020wagging the dog. The elected people actually are riding it and not doing the work, but they also
00:26:43.280don't necessarily have the resources. How much time can one city councillor have to write up a policy,
00:26:49.080a large policy, or a motion. But if they got a party behind them, they could. They could
00:26:54.500dedicate some people to looking at that, dedicate the party to actually going on the ground and
00:26:59.300seeing what people want, if they want that policy or if they don't want that policy.
00:27:03.340The other people think some opponents have been saying, folks online, say,
00:27:06.920add partisanship, it'll just ruin everything. Everybody will come in and they'll just, you
00:27:11.060know, walk the party line. Well, maybe, I don't know. It's up to us as voters again. We have to
00:27:15.240be engaged. I mean, we can screw up a party system just as well as an independent system.
00:27:20.060But who's to say it's not screwed up already? You know, it's already a mess. So I don't know
00:27:26.520if we can make it much worse. Plus, the party system coming in, if one comes in, doesn't mean
00:27:31.220a person can't run as an independent, you can still go out there and run as an independent.
00:27:35.840So why not? Jordan saying for the city of Calgary, the bureaucracy is basically the Senate,
00:27:41.520Yeah, kind of in a sense where they're appointed and they have a whole lot of power, yet they have no accountability.
00:27:47.960So, yeah, that's sort of a way to put it, though it's even more so it'd be as if the Senate was writing the bills for Parliament.
00:27:54.200I mean, there are Senate bills, but they rarely pass.
00:27:57.000Jordan saying, could Calgary legally enshrine a constitution?
00:28:00.560Well, it's getting into a different sort of road.
00:28:02.240I mean, there's also discussions about having a municipal charter and things like that that would enshrine more rights for municipalities and back and forth.
00:28:09.180But I don't know about a constitution.
00:28:10.680uh the municipalities are a creature of the provincial government they're they're an
00:28:16.220extension of that they're actually somewhat beholden to the provincial government i like
00:28:19.580to see more local government i don't want to see the province stepping in any more than it has to
00:28:23.620when it comes to municipal politics we saw that in chestermere and alberto where they had to fire a
00:28:27.440mayor and a few counselors because they were just that that crap crazy and screwed up and corrupted
00:28:32.520by the looks of things they had to actually fire them they had to intervene at least there was a
00:28:36.640way to do it. It looks like I'm guessing Jordan's not going to make it in. That's unfortunate.
00:28:41.680Either way. So what Jordan, Jordan Landon, I'm getting mixed up. Sorry, Jordan. Landon Johnson
00:28:50.660was working on, he started the initiative to recall Mayor Jody Gondek. Now I'll give a little
00:28:57.140more history on that. Jason Kenney, when he was premier, before he was premier, he promised us
00:29:02.400direct democracy legislation. He said, when we get in, you know, this was back when the NDP were
00:29:07.760still in, we were saying, when the UCP gets in, we're going to empower Albertans by giving them
00:29:12.700the ability to recall politicians, and we'll give them the ability to force referendums on issues
00:29:19.980as well. And after a couple of years in power, he finally gave us that legislation. And it was crap.
00:29:27.180I wrote about it multiple times at the time.
00:29:29.320I was furious because the legislation was crap.
00:29:33.840What he did was gave us theoretical legislation where you could recall somebody,
00:29:39.340but set the bar so high that it's impossible to actually do it.
00:29:45.360And it just, it bugged me just from the deceptiveness of it.
00:29:48.120I would rather his honesty and saying, I just rather, I don't think it's good legislation
00:36:39.360So, yeah, I mean, it says Parliament in 2019 approved a $595 million bailout.
00:36:44.420yeah, including, you know, payroll rebates and all sorts of things. And viewership is going down.
00:36:49.200You see, I still wouldn't, I wouldn't support these media bailouts if they did work. But boy,
00:36:55.420at least, you know, if they could work, but they don't work, they're failing, they're not helping.
00:37:00.220And yeah, you know, here's an interesting one. And that's part of also was pointed out by Gormley.
00:37:04.940This is a quote from he says, I don't necessarily accept the supposition that Canadian media is in
00:37:07.960trouble because it's underfunded by government. You know, he said, the government has nothing to
00:37:13.140do with this. He said the media is in trouble because it did two things. It bet on a modernized
00:37:16.920definition of journalism that backfired and they lost audiences. Secondly, it whistled past the
00:37:22.780graveyard as the internet and social media developed technology to mitigate content revenue
00:37:27.560away from the media, which was always entirely predictable. Anybody looking at things should
00:37:32.060have seen it coming, but they seem to live in a world of denial. They didn't want to change their
00:37:36.320ways. They took on bad models and now they're going broke. And no, it's not due to lack of
00:37:41.820government funding. That's for sure. Absolutely. Let's see. Let's talk about other things that are
00:37:47.960interesting out there. The House of Commons voted 318 to zero. That's unanimous, guys.
00:37:56.580Unanimous to give second reading to a bill banning replacement workers in the federally
00:38:01.800regulated private sector. This is disturbing, guys. This is getting intervention into private
00:38:08.000businesses now. This is saying if your private business has workers going on strike, you are
00:38:14.900not allowed to hire anybody to replace them. In other words, you are now immediately over the
00:38:19.260barrel. You're done. They have a gun to your head. It's wrong. It's wrong. And yet 318 cowards in the
00:38:27.540House of Commons voted to get that because they're terrified of the unions. I keep talking about
00:38:31.720unions on here a lot. Well, that's part of the reason is because the unions are at the root of
00:38:35.240so much of the ugliness we're seeing in politics. And we get the cowardice that comes from our
00:38:40.020parties and our governments on all levels because every one of them is terrified of having some sort
00:38:45.060of strike happen just before an election. They never want that. This is different now. This is
00:38:51.040getting into private sector, federally regulated. Yes, but private sector. The Teamsters, for example,
00:38:56.900I mean, truckers are federally regulated. Remember when they were forced through vaccinations? How
00:39:01.180of that all work out anyways. And where were the unions to help those truckers? Where were the
00:39:06.340Teamsters? I don't know, they're padding their wallets somewhere. The Teamsters aren't exactly
00:39:10.040known as a honest union, typically, are they? But they're federally regulated. So it would be
00:39:17.020illegal to hire replacement truckers if there was a strike. I mean, a strike, a strike is a right.
00:39:23.260And it is something that I don't believe, you know, should be banned. I don't believe unionization
00:39:27.180should be banned. But if there's going to be a battle between workers and the ownership of a
00:39:32.380business, you've got to allow them tools both ways. The skilled, experienced help walk out and hold
00:39:37.260their picket signs, fine. But then the business should have the right to see if they can replace0.94
00:39:40.520them. You know what? If the business can replace them that easily, the strikers screwed up. They
00:39:44.980obviously weren't worth as much as they thought they were. And that's how these things get resolved.
00:39:49.380And if the business screwed up and found out that they can't replace these workers as easily as they
00:39:53.540hoped, well, then they better start negotiating with the workers. But when you take away the
00:39:57.720ability for the business to hire replacement workers, it basically means the business will
00:40:01.540be shut down the moment these guys go on strike. You've just handed them a loaded gun, the unions
00:40:06.380and taken away all recourse for the business. This will not do well. Yet, as I said, 318 to zero
00:40:13.940voted in favor of this. And yeah, it's gonna really screw things up further when things were
00:40:22.540screwed up enough already. Let's see. Conservative MP Kelly McCauley in Edmonton. Yeah, he got a
00:40:28.320house order compelling. Those two arrive can arrive scam app witnesses to testify or be taken
00:40:34.340into custody. So it's going to be interesting to watch this. They got three weeks now to surrender
00:40:38.340themselves. Surrender. Like I said, there's a warrant out for them. They have to show up.
00:40:44.800If you know, they've been summoned twice and they've ignored it both times. It's funny, again,
00:40:49.100And with a little guy like us, if I get summoned or something and don't show up, don't worry, they will come get me.
00:40:54.300Well, in this case, finally, it took a lot of work, but there is essentially the parliamentary form of a warrant.
00:41:00.160These guys have to show up and start speaking.
00:41:01.900Now, the problem is they might come before Parliament and just fire out a bunch of lies or just not answer questions, even though they're standing there.
00:41:07.640But having them dragged physically in there is showing at least we're following up a bit on these guys who clearly, by all appearances, have been robbing us of our tax dollars.
00:41:17.480The latest update, you'll see that on the Western Standard.
00:43:33.180And that's why they chose that one, where they want a bunch of, you know, unplanned pregnancies happening and flooding the hospitals and, you know, abortuaries and everything else.0.83
00:43:48.240It's not saving money on health care.0.82
00:43:50.060So to go back to that point, the latest news on the Trans Mountain Pipeline, the pipeline that Trudeau regulated out of existence and then had to buy with our own money because he finally backed himself into a corner because he'd shut down every other possible pipeline in the country already, has turned into a disaster.
00:44:06.900Of course, it started at $4.5 billion.