Western Standard - June 02, 2023


'Danielle Smith led the party to a solid election victor'

Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Rebecca Schultz Rachel Notley Jason Kenney Ralph Klein Jezebel Trudeau
Past COVID policies & public expectations MPC Daily Market Update June 5, 2023

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

128.79

Word count

746

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

There is something rotten in the United Conservative Party, a mean streak of envy, resentment, and bad faith. And it s not the people who took a pass on vaccination. It s the evil behind the party board, and they are killing the party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There's something rotten in the United Conservative Party,
00:00:03.780 a mean streak of envy, resentment, and bad faith.
00:00:07.060 And it's not the people who took a pass on vaccination.
00:00:11.040 Hardly a day had passed since Danielle Smith led the party to a solid election victory
00:00:15.920 before malicious texts and emails started circulating.
00:00:20.440 Some came my way.
00:00:21.900 This, for example.
00:00:23.800 DS opened her mouth in 2012 and lost an unlosable election.
00:00:27.580 Now she opened her mouth again and almost lost another unlosable election, 1.00
00:00:32.220 writes my correspondent.
00:00:33.960 And my opinion of Take Back Alberta is not fit to print.
00:00:38.140 For the UCP to survive, DS must be removed at once.
00:00:43.360 Take Back Alberta are the evil behind DS, and they control the party board.
00:00:48.940 They and DS are killing the party.
00:00:53.340 Again, huh?
00:00:54.760 Well, Smith has been Premier for eight months
00:00:59.280 and just won 49 seats out of 87 in a perfectly losable election.
00:01:06.120 Rachel Nutley was measuring the Premier's office for drapes.
00:01:10.320 How many might Jason Kenney have won?
00:01:12.620 We'll never know.
00:01:14.280 How many Travis Taves or Rebecca Schultz might have won?
00:01:18.320 And had they won the leadership?
00:01:20.440 What we do know is that 53% of the vote
00:01:24.960 to 43%, which was what the NDP received,
00:01:30.140 and a majority of 11 in a legislature with 87 seats
00:01:34.880 and complete independence of quirky minorities
00:01:38.060 informing a government, is not killing the party.
00:01:42.900 If it had been someone's achievement other than Smith's,
00:01:45.960 you could be heating up your dinner on the glow of self-satisfaction
00:01:49.980 coming from all the people and their media interlocutors
00:01:53.100 who are presently writing that a future under Jezebel's guidance
00:01:56.800 is too hideous to contemplate.
00:02:00.200 What's happening here is nothing more than tribalism,
00:02:04.000 and for everybody's sake.
00:02:06.060 That is all Albertans, not just people who voted UCP
00:02:09.920 because they like Smith,
00:02:11.800 but on behalf of NDP voters as well,
00:02:14.760 it has got to stop.
00:02:17.180 There is too much at stake in Alberta today
00:02:19.740 to waste energy on promoting the tribe.
00:02:23.560 Yes, the Wild Roses are in control,
00:02:27.000 and the old progressive conservative crowd are not.
00:02:30.900 So what?
00:02:32.680 Should any faction have a lock on government?
00:02:35.860 An unchallenged right to rule defined by belonging
00:02:40.540 to a self-selecting clique?
00:02:42.920 A cabal, as my quoted correspondent called the Smith team?
00:02:49.320 The truth of the matter is that Alberta's world has changed,
00:02:54.980 and the PC tribe hasn't had a new idea
00:02:58.100 since Ralph Klein went on the wagon.
00:03:00.500 Sure, Smith's policies could have been more conservative.
00:03:08.220 For example, what Calgary taxpayers need
00:03:11.000 is less arena and more street hockey.
00:03:14.400 But with its governing levers of ask and bid
00:03:18.800 applied in the legislative corridors
00:03:20.980 with surreptitious nods and winks,
00:03:24.520 the PC club wouldn't have done any different.
00:03:27.380 What matters is that the issue of the moment
00:03:31.880 is keeping a predatory, anti-Alberta federal government
00:03:35.780 from taking control of Alberta's energy industry
00:03:39.660 and from telling its farmers to cut production
00:03:42.840 by using less fertilizer.
00:03:45.660 These concerns are not theoretical.
00:03:49.500 Planning natural gas and reliance upon renewables
00:03:53.000 mean the lights go out and the heat shuts down,
00:03:56.680 when you need both most.
00:04:00.400 And food gets more expensive.
00:04:03.860 No thanks.
00:04:05.500 Those UCP hopefuls most likely to keep Ottawa
00:04:09.320 out of Alberta's business,
00:04:11.960 Smith stood out and continues to stand out.
00:04:16.560 She's been talking about it for years.
00:04:19.000 Frankly, she'll be disappointed
00:04:20.340 if Prime Minister Trudeau walks away from the fight.
00:04:22.940 Those who can't stand the thought of Smith being successful
00:04:28.340 need to consider the mathematics of Monday's election.
00:04:33.740 A mere 2,600 votes saved six seats for the UCP.
00:04:39.660 That is, if 2,606 UC voters had said,
00:04:44.900 I can't vote for the NDP and I can't vote for Smith either
00:04:48.080 and stayed home, we'd have an NDP government today. 0.51
00:04:54.120 The NDP knows that too.
00:04:56.660 And there's nothing they'd like more
00:04:59.200 than to see the UCP split apart,
00:05:02.620 not on policy,
00:05:05.060 but on who gets to sit in the chair upstairs
00:05:08.800 at the legislature.
00:05:10.900 It won't do.
00:05:13.680 For the Western Standard,
00:05:15.640 I'm Nigel Hannaford.
00:05:17.400 Canadian Shooting Sports Association.
00:05:19.480 Without the CSSA,
00:05:20.760 our gun rights would have been taken long, long ago.
00:05:24.020 These guys are on the front lines
00:05:25.400 helping to draft smart and intelligent firearms,
00:05:29.220 regulations and legislation in Canada.
00:05:31.700 And more importantly,
00:05:32.800 educating the public
00:05:33.700 about how we keep guns out of the hands
00:05:35.840 of the wrong people.
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