Western Standard - May 11, 2022


CORY'S RANT： Wishful progressive thinking is putting citizens at risk

Topics
city transit crisis fare enforcement crisis
Mentioned
Councillor Dan McLean Edmonton
EXCLUSIVE： Éric Duhaime Conservative Party of Quebec chats with Matthew Horwood CORY'S RANT： Wondering if the courts will succeed in maintaining regional sovereignty

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

197.82

Word count

1,235

Sentence count

80

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In Alberta, light rail transit or LRT stations and trains in Edmonton and Calgary have been overrun with addicts to the point where hardly a day goes by without reading about another violent incident in the transit system. Drug use is open and rampant, while stabbings and random assaults on the system are actually becoming commonplace. We ve got multi-billion dollar transit systems becoming unusable by the general public, and city officials are afraid to do anything about it.

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 This is an issue that's affecting cities across North America, but particularly in
00:00:03.920 Edmonton and Calgary. We're reaching a state of this peak Pollyanna-style denial among the woke
00:00:09.640 when it's actually considered controversial to ask people to pay for products and services.
00:00:15.040 Now, the opioid crisis has been sweeping across North America for years. Addictions are skyrocketing,
00:00:20.220 overdoses are killing thousands, and homelessness and crime is spiking in every major city.
00:00:25.560 There's no straightforward solutions to this problem. There's no magic bullet. It's going
00:00:29.700 to take a combination of addictions treatment, mental health supports, housing initiatives,
00:00:33.460 and law enforcement to get this crisis under control. Most of all, though, we need a solid
00:00:39.140 dose of reality, and many municipal politicians refuse to apply that to this issue. So let's
00:00:45.320 get to the history of what I'm going on about. In Alberta, light rail transit or LRT stations and
00:00:50.080 trains in Edmonton and Calgary have been overrun with addicts to the point where hardly a day can
00:00:54.420 go by without reading about another violent incident in the transit system. Drug use is
00:00:59.180 open and rampant, while stabbings and random assaults on the system are actually kind of
00:01:03.020 becoming commonplace. Heated transit stations and bus shelters have become de facto homeless shelters,
00:01:08.740 while trains themselves have become pipelines for crime into suburban neighborhoods. We've got
00:01:13.820 multi-billion dollar transit systems becoming unusable by the general public, and city officials
00:01:18.600 are afraid to do anything about it. Traffic going into city sensors has been rising for months
00:01:23.860 as we recover from the pandemic, and people are returning to work. Arcades that languished empty
00:01:28.420 a year ago are filling up again. Streets are bustling with commuters during rush hour.
00:01:33.220 Not so with city transit, however. Transit passenger levels in Calgary remain at 54% of what they had two
00:01:39.900 years ago prior to the pandemic. Edmonton is better at 70%, but there's still a 30% drop in ridership.
00:01:46.620 People are returning to work, but they're choosing not to use city transit. And can you blame them?
00:01:51.440 To ride a train, one has to start the cycle of it. You know, you have to entrust your vehicle to a suburban
00:01:56.240 parking lot at a station where there's clusters of addicts hanging around every corner. Vehicle break-ins are a
00:02:02.640 constant problem. If you're one of the stations that still has indoor space, and I'll explain in a moment where that's
00:02:09.000 going, you have to navigate around and over addicts camped out in various states of inebriation while being
00:02:14.380 aggressively panhandled. Discarded syringes are often seen amidst the piles of garbage strewn about as
00:02:20.220 addicts tear through bags harvested from alleys in hopes of finding empty bottles to return.
00:02:24.880 Now, when you get on the train during the ride, open consumption of meth and other substances is
00:02:29.520 often seen, while the ills of secondhand smoke are documented and smokers are chased from all public
00:02:34.060 places. Protecting transit riders from crack and meth smoke apparently is not a high priority.
00:02:38.820 Now, once you get downtown, you'll exit into a dystopian scene as wasted addicts shuffle and wander
00:02:45.120 around if they aren't unconscious or even worse, wired and aggressive. It's typical to see first
00:02:50.680 responders trying to revive overdoses throughout the stations and parks downtown as well. This is how bad
00:02:55.760 it's getting. A lot of people aren't going into downtown these days. A lot of people aren't using
00:02:59.700 city transit, and that's why I got to keep laying this out. You're not seeing it, but this is how it's
00:03:03.720 happening. The only thing that's surprising is 54% of riders actually returned. These, I assume,
00:03:09.400 are people who don't have vehicles or other means to get to work. Anybody who can find a way to avoid
00:03:13.480 these hell rides on public transit is chosen to. So how is City Hall responding to this problem in
00:03:18.360 Calgary? Well, first, they closed four LRT stations in South Calgary altogether. Rather than try to clean
00:03:24.520 out the stations and make them safe, they just shut them down. Transit users have to shiver on an exposed
00:03:29.460 platform while looking at a heated, shuttered, multi-million dollar station right next to them.
00:03:34.660 And they're working hard as well to sugarcoat and change the language used to address the
00:03:39.360 situation. No longer does any city official refer to crime or addicts. They refer to social disorder
00:03:44.800 and vulnerable people. Now, this head-in-the-stand approach serves nobody. Call it what it is.
00:03:51.100 The next area of denial and refusal is to reconsider the honor system for transit fare collection.
00:03:56.780 While every major transit system in North America has some form of turnstile or fare collection for
00:04:02.860 riders and their trains, Alberta's kind of unique in that we allow for an honor system. People buy
00:04:07.060 tickets and board trains with no supervision. Occasionally, transit officers board the trains
00:04:11.440 to check for tickets, but it's rare. I rode for months for a while and I never got checked once.
00:04:16.340 While many people are law-abiding citizens who will pay their fare on their own, let's quit pretending
00:04:19.820 that everybody will, particularly the addicts. The troublesome people riding the trains are spending
00:04:24.400 every time they can get to buy drugs. None of them will spend that money to buy a train ticket.
00:04:29.100 Enforcing fare collection on LRT systems will have an immediate benefit in removing the vast
00:04:33.820 majority of the troublesome and dangerous riders. Whether this is done through turnstiles, as most
00:04:38.460 cities do, or with a larger presence of enforcement on the ground, it has to be done. In Calgary,
00:04:44.680 City Councilor Dan McLean, he did a ride-along with city transit officers and posted pictures of it.
00:04:49.980 And he's proposed a turnstile payment on trades. Well, what's happened? He's been pilloried by many
00:04:54.720 of his current council counterparts, along with other pundits. He's being accused of being
00:04:58.620 insensitive and shaming the vulnerable. The Walker going wild and flooding social media with claims
00:05:03.480 that McLean is attacking the homelessness. All McLean is asking for people to do is pay their
00:05:08.440 fares. This shouldn't be controversial. Now, will fare enforcement solve the addiction, crime,
00:05:13.440 and homelessness crisis? Of course not. It will, though, at least take much of that crisis
00:05:17.480 off of public transit so commuters can safely return to using it. If the mess on the LRT stations
00:05:24.040 continues to be ignored, ridership's going to continue to plummet. I mean, shall City Hall just
00:05:28.440 keep their heads buried in the sand on this, close even more stations while the currently closed ones
00:05:32.480 remain closed permanently? The addictions crisis is real, and it's growing. It won't be solved quickly
00:05:37.700 or easily. Now, until public officials are starting, you know, are willing to face reality with some of
00:05:42.280 the simplest common sense approaches to at least mitigate some of the harms from the crisis,
00:05:46.740 though. It's not going to be getting better anytime soon. We're in a world of denial.
00:05:52.440 It's causing real damage, and we've got to stand up and clean these things out. They're building
00:05:57.180 a green line in Calgary. They're going to spend billions of dollars more to extend a train line
00:06:02.340 where we can't even get 50% of people, more than 50% of people, to come back and ride on the old
00:06:06.360 ones. It's ridiculous. And anybody who questions it is shouted down as they're trying with Dan 0.89
00:06:11.800 McLean. It's ridiculous, and it has to change. 0.82