Western Standard - May 16, 2024


＂Ignoring the People： Calgary Mayor Gondek and the Politics of Apathy＂


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

204.48833

Word count

1,139

Sentence count

68

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Calgary's mayor and council voted to blanket rezone the city, despite overwhelming opposition from citizens. What can citizens do about it? Is there any hope for a recall of the mayor? Or will Premier Danielle Smith continue to ignore it?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 We've had weeks, a record breaker, public hearings.
00:00:02.880 Nearly 1,000 people came out to Calgary City Hall in person
00:00:06.600 to express their feelings on the blanket rezoning plan.
00:00:10.120 Didn't matter.
00:00:11.280 Calgary's mayor and city council voted yesterday 9 to 6
00:00:13.760 to impose the blanket rezoning on the city.
00:00:16.660 Even though 70% of those who presented in person opposed the rezoning,
00:00:21.140 90% of the thousands of submissions that were put in from citizens
00:00:25.080 opposed the rezoning.
00:00:26.400 And the council, they never campaigned on rezoning.
00:00:30.000 It didn't matter.
00:00:31.300 They don't care what citizens think.
00:00:33.700 And the snide attitude to some of those council members
00:00:35.740 made it pretty clear.
00:00:36.580 Karah, if you're a Calgary, you know who I'm talking about.
00:00:39.400 He's a special piece of work.
00:00:40.440 But they got a few other clowns on there worthy of your derision as well.
00:00:43.880 In a sense, what Mayor Gondek and her supporters on city council
00:00:46.720 said to Calgarians as well, what are you going to do about it?
00:00:50.160 It's a valid question.
00:00:51.360 What can citizens do about it?
00:00:54.080 I mean, clearly, the mayor and council don't care
00:00:56.580 what people think between elections.
00:00:58.420 And they have no fear, you know, of being able to pursue
00:01:00.900 their own personal agendas, even if they don't match the wishes
00:01:03.500 of the citizens who put them there in the first place.
00:01:05.940 That's why I support having citizens initiated recall 0.97
00:01:08.880 and referendum legislation.
00:01:10.960 Citizens should have their means to at least hold elected officials
00:01:15.600 accountable between elections.
00:01:17.260 I mean, there's a case to be made against having such election legislation.
00:01:20.660 You know, they say we can remove elected officials every few years
00:01:24.020 in a general election, and we should just live with our choice
00:01:26.100 for the duration of their term come hell or hide water.
00:01:28.320 It's fair enough and debatable, I guess.
00:01:30.520 What isn't debatable, though, is that Alberta's current legislation
00:01:32.780 for recall and citizens initiated referendum is utterly worthless.
00:01:37.120 It was purposely craft by the Kenney government to be unworkable.
00:01:40.300 Kenney needed to fulfill a campaign promise,
00:01:42.540 but he didn't really want to arm citizens with the power to remove elected officials.
00:01:45.880 So when they passed the Recall Act of 2022,
00:01:49.500 his government ensured that the bars set to invoke a recall
00:01:52.420 were set impossibly high.
00:01:54.840 So there was a recent effort to recall Calgary Mayor Jody Gondek,
00:01:58.360 and it demonstrated how useless the legislation is.
00:02:00.620 I mean, polls have indicated Gondek is the least popular mayor
00:02:04.000 in Calgary's history.
00:02:06.140 Despite that, though, a recall effort initiated by Calgary and Land
00:02:09.640 in Johnston barely managed to get over 10% of the required citizens
00:02:12.920 to start the recall process going.
00:02:16.220 And there was hundreds of volunteers working around the city to do it.
00:02:19.280 On top of that, even if Johnston's petition
00:02:22.360 had somehow reached the ridiculously high 514,000 signatures required,
00:02:27.000 which is more than people voted in the entire election, by the way,
00:02:30.080 a technicality found by City of Calgary bureaucrats
00:02:32.880 rendered the signatures of the petition to be apparently 100% invalid.
00:02:37.020 The language of the act is confusing and offers all sorts of hurdles
00:02:40.340 on top of simply getting the signature.
00:02:42.560 So apparently there wasn't a little notice that was attached
00:02:45.180 to the sheets of the petition.
00:02:46.860 So those 69,000 signatures were 100% invalid,
00:02:50.580 according to city bureaucrats. 0.76
00:02:51.740 What a joke.
00:02:53.380 So, you know, even if you'd lowered it,
00:02:56.440 I don't think they'd gotten enough to effectively recall somebody.
00:02:59.820 It should be a last resort, but we've got to have that resort
00:03:02.400 in our tool belt to hold these politicians accountable.
00:03:06.420 Many other democratic jurisdictions have effective recall legislation.
00:03:10.040 We don't need to reinvent the wheel to find a bar that's acceptable.
00:03:13.720 Alberta's referendum legislation is just as useless as the recall rules, by the way.
00:03:17.220 The bar has been set ridiculously high.
00:03:19.600 Nobody's going to manage to invoke one,
00:03:21.040 and it's not binding on the government even if a referendum was, you know,
00:03:24.540 brought about by a citizen.
00:03:26.160 So this mess now lands on Premier Daniel Smith's lap to either fix it or ignore it.
00:03:30.840 Now, Smith appears to be on a mission to make municipal councils accountable,
00:03:34.280 and that's great.
00:03:34.960 The problem is, though, Premier Smith wants them to be accountable to her government
00:03:38.060 rather than directly to citizens.
00:03:40.840 I mean, do we really need to make it easier for the provincial government
00:03:42.940 to fire municipal officials or shoot down municipal bylaws?
00:03:46.140 I mean, they can already do those things if they have to.
00:03:47.780 It's just not easy.
00:03:49.100 Wouldn't it make more sense just to empower citizens to fire these guys
00:03:52.040 and initiate plebiscites to deal with bad bylaws?
00:03:54.960 I mean, you know, again, with a reasonable bar set.
00:03:57.600 But no government wants to empower citizens to fire elected officials
00:04:00.640 because they don't want to see that power potentially turned against themselves.
00:04:03.100 So they'll pay lip service to policies like recall and referendum,
00:04:06.500 but they have no interest in actually giving citizens the real ability to do that.
00:04:11.520 But I hold some optimism.
00:04:12.720 Daniel Smith has been different than most of the political leaders we've seen
00:04:15.400 in the last couple of decades.
00:04:16.440 She's not afraid to swim upstream or rock the boat.
00:04:19.120 And if any Premier might show the courage to fix Alberta's rotten recall
00:04:22.220 and referendum legislation, it would be her. 0.94
00:04:24.820 She's going to have to be encouraged, though.
00:04:26.960 I mean, the UCP government already has a lot of irons in the fire.
00:04:29.380 So citizens need to quit wasting time trying to pressure Calgary's mayor and city council.
00:04:34.180 Gondek and her gang clearly don't care what you think.
00:04:37.500 Energy needs to be directed at having the provincial government amend
00:04:41.020 Alberta's terrible recall and referendum legislation.
00:04:44.180 If 1,000 people can come out to City Hall in Calgary to talk about something,
00:04:47.820 if 70,000 can sign a petition to recall a mayor,
00:04:50.980 surely a few thousand of you can contact your MLAs and say,
00:04:53.440 hey, fix that legislation. 0.99
00:04:55.460 I mean, citizens need to show they're serious and want to have that.
00:05:00.620 You know, they've got to get out and fire these guys when the real election comes along.
00:05:03.700 But along the way, we can fix this legislation.
00:05:06.420 Alberta's going to be holding municipal elections next year.
00:05:08.680 And we're notoriously apathetic at voting time.
00:05:10.880 Why should election officials care what citizens think between elections
00:05:13.320 if citizens don't even bother themselves to vote at election time?
00:05:16.880 We do have the democratic tools at our disposal, guys.
00:05:19.480 We can affect the change, but we haven't been using them effectively.
00:05:22.000 If Calgary and Edmonton City Councils both got wiped out in next year's election,
00:05:25.500 you can rest assured the provincial government's going to suddenly feel inspired
00:05:28.880 to keep the rest of us happy.
00:05:30.220 It's up to us, guys.
00:05:31.120 It always was, and it always will be, and it is right now.