Western Standard - June 01, 2022


CORY'S RANT： The insane climate plan proposed in Calgary.

Topics
climate plan in Calgary
Mentioned
Jody Gondek
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

177.7

Word count

916

Sentence count

53

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Jody Gondek is the new mayor of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and she's already proving to be one of the worst elected mayor s in the city s history. She's a climate crusading environmentalist, and has a climate change plan that sets the city on the path to becoming a net zero city by 2050.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The city of Calgary, and this applies to anybody with a municipal government, it really does.
00:00:04.320 So I mean, despite never having campaigned on it, the first thing Jody Gondek did as the
00:00:08.720 newly elected mayor of Calgary was to declare a climate emergency.
00:00:12.800 Her declaration was received with all the approval of a fart at a funeral.
00:00:17.260 Undeterred, Gondek continued with her climate crusade and managed to get the Calgary Event
00:00:22.460 Centre project cancelled within her first month as mayor due to rising costs, not the least of
00:00:28.080 which were new climate change measures being applied to the project unexpectedly by the city.
00:00:32.860 With all these efforts, Gondek managed to win the dubious honour of being the least popular
00:00:36.560 newly elected Calgarian mayor in living memory, as her approval numbers plummeted to 38% within
00:00:41.860 months of being elected.
00:00:43.500 There is an emergency in Calgary, and citizens want it addressed.
00:00:46.680 That emergency has nothing to do with the climate, however.
00:00:49.340 I mean, over the course of the pandemic, Calgary's downtown has deteriorated into something akin
00:00:53.540 to a dystopian scene from a movie.
00:00:55.580 Ground-level businesses are all graced with for-lease signs, while 30% of the office spaces
00:01:00.340 remain vacant.
00:01:01.660 Addicts and homeless people are everywhere, while discarded needles and human waste have
00:01:05.380 become common sites on the streets in downtown Calgary.
00:01:08.740 People don't feel safe downtown in response.
00:01:12.240 Calgary constantly attacks their police force, though, with threats of defunding and demoralizing
00:01:16.740 them with the ordered removal of a patch that commemorated fallen officers.
00:01:20.700 It's not going to make us any safer, guys.
00:01:22.080 Calgary's transit service is still at only 60% of the use it was prior to the pandemic.
00:01:27.840 The reason, again, for this is clear.
00:01:29.700 Addicts are passed out in bus shelters.
00:01:31.820 The only thing that drowns out the smell of piss on trains is the wafts of meth smoke
00:01:35.840 as it's openly consumed on the cars.
00:01:38.320 People have been randomly attacked on train platforms, and the city closed a number of
00:01:43.020 expensive train stations rather than deal with the addicts who had set up camp within them.
00:01:46.760 The city's latest effort to get people to use transit is an initiative to cut fares
00:01:51.020 in half for a couple of months.
00:01:52.820 They have also implemented a policy calling for heavy fines for a person if they can't
00:01:57.820 call a woman on a sidewalk.
00:01:59.340 But they have no plans on dealing with aggressive addicts.
00:02:02.460 Even if transit was free, people aren't going to ride it if they don't feel safe.
00:02:06.560 But these cloistered, naive city councillors will never understand this as they drive and
00:02:10.500 park in their secure indoor parkade.
00:02:12.200 Whether Calgarians like it or not, Gondek's climate crusade is the city's top priority,
00:02:17.620 and the climate plan the Calgary's administration released is shocking.
00:02:22.400 Calgary's climate change plan is set to come in at a cost of $87 billion over the next few
00:02:28.780 decades.
00:02:29.520 It's not a typo.
00:02:30.520 It's not misreading.
00:02:31.760 $87 billion in one city, with fewer than a million people of taxpaying status in the
00:02:37.700 city, that amounts to over $87,000 per taxpayer, or about $3,100 a year.
00:02:44.900 So, I mean, think of that in a household with a number of people.
00:02:48.200 What are we looking at?
00:02:48.780 $7,000 tax increase to do this?
00:02:50.920 The plan sets an impossible bar of becoming a net zero city in emissions by 2050, along with
00:02:56.780 forcing 60% of Calgarians to travel without personal vehicles.
00:03:00.360 They will have somehow eliminated all non-electrical vehicles by then, or as well, by the way.
00:03:07.100 New building codes and retrofitting is going to cost a fortune.
00:03:10.160 Calgary is already in an economic crisis, and these ludicrous regulations are going to
00:03:13.340 make the city an investment pariah.
00:03:15.440 Neighboring municipalities have been reaping the benefits of Calgary's woke administration,
00:03:19.380 as citizens and businesses alike have been fleeing the city to escape the taxes and regulation.
00:03:24.200 The city's latest plan is going to cause nothing short of an outright evacuation.
00:03:27.180 The bill for the city's climate action dreams are only going to be filled with massive tax
00:03:32.680 increases upon businesses and homes.
00:03:35.460 The actions of the city are only going to exacerbate the existing problems downtown.
00:03:39.320 Calgary's downtown is going to be increasingly morbid, and budgets are going to fall short
00:03:42.820 as producers flee the city.
00:03:44.980 Calgary's myopic.
00:03:47.020 Mayor and city council will likely only respond with further tax hikes to fill the budget void.
00:03:50.940 They can't seem to think any farther than that.
00:03:52.720 This city, the once and great thriving city of Calgary, is on the path of becoming another
00:03:58.580 Detroit, or maybe San Francisco, where one has to avoid stepping in human excrement while
00:04:02.560 trying to navigate through the endless tent cities.
00:04:05.140 Calgary's far from alone in this.
00:04:06.600 Many municipalities have allowed their governance to be taken over by delusional, woke politicians,
00:04:11.380 and we're all paying a hard price for it.
00:04:13.300 And in the end, the responsibility still falls on the voters.
00:04:15.440 If we keep refusing to pay attention to who's running for office, it's inevitable that a 0.94
00:04:20.600 gang of clowns is going to rise to the top, as they have in Calgary. 0.74
00:04:23.760 We keep our eyes too focused on federal and provincial politics at times and forget who's 0.94
00:04:27.860 controlling our lives locally.
00:04:29.720 For that electoral error, Calgary and many other cities are on the road to economic ruin,
00:04:34.140 and it won't do a damn thing to help the environment.
00:04:36.960 Pay attention, folks.
00:04:38.140 It's only going to get worse.
00:04:39.300 We'll see you next time.