Western Standard - June 13, 2022


CORY'S RANT： The catastrophe on Calgary’s transit system

Mentioned
Councillor Dan McLean
EXCLUSIVE： George Porter veteran Alberta paramedic on challenges to ambulance service EXCLUSIVE： Aurora Townsend of Planet Theta

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

222.36

Word count

1,117

Sentence count

73

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Calgary's public transit system has become a drug and crime-ridden dystopian nightmare, and it's getting worse by the day. In this episode, I talk about how the mainstream media has finally caught up to the problem, and why the city needs to do something about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I guess in a sense I should celebrate.
00:00:02.260 The mainstream media has finally stood up and taken notice of the fact that Calgary's city transit's become a drug and crime-ridden dystopian nightmare.
00:00:10.880 Our state broadcaster, the CBC, sent a reporter out to ride Calgary's trains for a few hours.
00:00:16.480 And she reported on it honestly.
00:00:17.940 She saw chronic open drug use, aggressive addicts, and no less than three overdose incidents.
00:00:22.900 Yeah, that's just one ride, guys.
00:00:24.580 Well, one day anyways.
00:00:25.520 In interviewing other riders, she was greeted with a plethora of stories of violence and drug use.
00:00:31.680 People told her they avoid using transit whenever possible.
00:00:34.360 And statistically, it matches up.
00:00:36.340 Reported crime is up 47% on transit just this year.
00:00:40.120 Unreported crimes are surely much harder.
00:00:42.420 But many people have chosen not to ride transit any longer.
00:00:45.560 Or if they do, they just put their earbuds in and turn a blind eye into what they see going on around them.
00:00:50.080 Getting on the phone could draw attention to yourself in a dangerous environment.
00:00:53.220 Basically, people riding public transit have adopted a jailhouse mentality of introverted self-preservation.
00:00:59.480 Just keep to yourself.
00:01:00.720 I see nothing.
00:01:02.240 The question I have to ask, though, is what the hell took them so long to notice?
00:01:05.580 This issue didn't just spring up overnight.
00:01:07.600 The horror story of Calgary's transit system is the consequence of willful ignorance on the part of civic officials and the mainstream media for a long time.
00:01:15.140 They just hoped if they buried their heads in the sand long enough, this problem would fix itself.
00:01:19.520 And unsurprisingly, it got worse.
00:01:21.000 And it continues to do so.
00:01:22.680 We've been reporting on this problem with the Western Standard for well over a year now.
00:01:26.440 In February 2021, I wrote a piece on the issues with the train and accompanied it with a footage of a man smoking meth on there.
00:01:32.760 For that, the Western Standard got kicked off YouTube for a week.
00:01:35.500 Turns out we're not allowed to show any footage of drug consumption, even when it's directly related to a news story.
00:01:40.880 A policy of forced ignorance on the issue, basically.
00:01:43.320 We've reported on the transit mayhem issue over a dozen times all the same.
00:01:47.520 We just take care to avoid the videos that will get us banned.
00:01:50.260 People need to see, though, just how bad it's gotten.
00:01:52.860 Most people don't need to go downtown, and most of those who do understandably choose not to use transit, so they don't know how bad it is.
00:02:00.780 Sharing videos and images of the mess, we can give people an idea of what it looks like on the trains and in the bus shelters these days.
00:02:06.980 Unfortunately, we're not really allowed.
00:02:08.740 Now, one Calgary city councillor did what none of the other coddled councillors would.
00:02:13.520 He went out and rode the train for a few hours last month.
00:02:16.320 As with every commuter, he was greeted with a scene of violence, drug use, disorder, trash, and witness what appeared to be an overdose.
00:02:22.120 He posted a picture of a person sprawled unconscious on the floor of the train.
00:02:26.000 For that, Councillor Dan McLean was shouted down and accused of shaming vulnerable people.
00:02:30.200 City council members and progressive media folks were enraged that he dares share his experience and that picture.
00:02:36.020 What the progressive set in Calgary was most pissed about, though, was that McLean exposed the horror story on transit that they wanted to pretend wasn't happening.
00:02:43.380 McLean was shattering the illusion of everything being fine.
00:02:46.520 City council was acting like a bunch of children with their fingers screwed into their ears, shouting to avoid hearing what they don't want to hear.
00:02:51.960 Well, it's too bloody bad, kids.
00:02:53.980 You guys are being paid the big bucks to take on the tough issues, and this one's right in your lap whether you like it or not.
00:02:58.500 Calgary's city administration, much of the council, doesn't even want to admit there's a problem, much less deal with it.
00:03:04.160 The consequences of their inaction on this file are dire, as multi-billion dollar transit systems have been abandoned by citizens and taken over by addicts.
00:03:12.200 Last January, the city of Calgary closed a number of large LRT stations because of the encampments of addicts they weren't willing to handle.
00:03:20.460 They remain closed today.
00:03:21.860 Taxpaying transit riders have to shiver in the rain, wind, and snow while looking at a shuttered, heated station right next to them that they paid for.
00:03:28.820 They still have to deal with the crime-ridden transit system as a whole, too, since closing the stations did nothing to address the problem.
00:03:34.340 The cowardice on the part of city officials on this issue has to come to an end.
00:03:37.800 The city of Calgary either needs to crack down and take back its transit system, or they may as well shut it down altogether, because doing nothing is no longer an option.
00:03:45.660 Homelessness and addiction are complicated issues, and they need to be addressed.
00:03:48.840 Letting an entire transit system turn into a de facto homeless camp and a rolling drug consumption system, though, isn't helping.
00:03:55.900 Cleaning up the transit system is not—it's going to be a tough and ugly job.
00:03:59.800 Police need resources, not the belittlement and using of defunding that they've gotten from any city council members.
00:04:05.800 We need enforcement to remove the problematic people from the transit facilities and keep them off.
00:04:10.400 And that's going to be a rough and probably dangerous job.
00:04:13.260 There's likely going to be videos of law enforcement personnel physically dragging people out of the facilities or arresting them, and the usual anti-police suspects will indignantly howl about it.
00:04:21.260 Those anti-police advocates don't have to ride the train, of course.
00:04:24.000 So what are we to do with the troubled people once they've been removed from the transit facilities?
00:04:27.140 Now, that's a good and a tough question, and we need to have some serious discussion about it.
00:04:31.020 In the meantime, though, we have to accept that addicts don't belong on the transit system.
00:04:35.160 Alternative media outlets such as ours were ignored by city officials.
00:04:38.380 Now that the CBC has taken notice of the issue, perhaps something's finally going to be done.
00:04:41.940 And I don't care what the catalyst for action on this is.
00:04:44.140 I just want to see it acted upon.
00:04:46.760 So that's what's got me wound up today.
00:04:48.880 Like I said, a bit of a hats off to the CBC.
00:04:52.020 I mean, again, better late than never. 0.91
00:04:54.580 And maybe those clowns at city council will pop their fingers out of their ears long enough to realize what everybody else has been screaming at them for the last year and a half. 0.96