Western Standard - August 15, 2022


KRAYDEN Phony polls, left wing media continue to dismiss Poilievre

Topics
new immigrants tariff on fertilizer
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Pierre Polly Ebb Jean Charest Jerry Ritz Ronald Reagan Erin O'Toole Brexit Corey David Chrystia Freeland Stephen Harper Danielle Smith Donald Trump Ralph Klein Paliyev
Triggered： Bringing Triggered To A Close Independent MLA for Cypress Medicine Hat, Drew Barnes on provincial politics

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

181.48

Word count

2,660

Sentence count

185

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the Western Standard's new political podcast, the team discusses the latest polls on the federal Conservative Party of Canada leadership race, the growing number of polls showing support for Jean Charest, and whether or not the Liberals are backing the wrong horse.

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 .
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 Lots to talk about as usual out on the federal front.
00:00:04.860 I guess your most recent one, I mean, we'll kind of start with that,
00:00:07.560 and that's the polling and such with regards to the Federal Conservative Party of Canada race.
00:00:14.520 Yeah, I noticed this this morning, and I think the Western Standard picked up on this as well
00:00:19.660 from this Canadian press story.
00:00:22.340 I really found this poll to be, this Leger poll, to be completely haywire
00:00:28.000 because it's basically no more accurate than some online poll where you ask a question
00:00:35.800 and you take the first 100 responses, and that's your poll.
00:00:40.080 So it's completely inaccurate, and there wasn't even a positive or negative in terms of accuracy
00:00:47.500 because it wasn't accurate.
00:00:49.940 And I took two things from it.
00:00:51.620 First of all, 44% of Conservative voters apparently favor Pierpaglia.
00:00:57.240 I have 17% favor Jean Charest.
00:01:01.320 So I said, hey, if you add that up, that means where's the other 39%? 0.93
00:01:06.000 And it certainly wasn't going equally to the other three contenders.
00:01:10.360 So I don't know the number crunching some problems.
00:01:14.100 But what really got me is the suggestion that Canadians writ large,
00:01:21.020 Canadians as viewed, defined by the Liberal Party of Canada, don't like Pierpaglia and they like Jean Charest.
00:01:28.180 He's a nice red Tory in the comfy sweater.
00:01:31.940 And why are Conservatives backing the wrong horse?
00:01:34.900 So I found this poll to be very suspect.
00:01:39.920 But at the same time, expect more of this in the next couple of months
00:01:45.340 because Pierre is going to win this Conservative leadership race.
00:01:50.160 I mean, if you have any money on it, good for you.
00:01:53.660 If you're just interested in political science, I don't think there's any way he can lose
00:01:58.180 because he's put the most work into it.
00:02:01.040 He's certainly got the biggest crowds when he's out on the hustings.
00:02:06.420 And I think, as I said in a previous column,
00:02:09.960 the endorsement by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was the icing on the cake
00:02:13.560 in terms of getting people into his camp.
00:02:16.540 But he's not liked by the mainstream media, by the state media.
00:02:21.540 He's considered to be too dangerous, whatever the heck that means.
00:02:26.880 And can mean anything they want it to mean, of course.
00:02:29.540 But I really do think we're going to see a lot of smearing going on against Pierpaglia
00:02:35.780 because I think he's going to beat Pierpaglia.
00:02:38.760 Sorry, I just said Pierpaglia.
00:02:40.720 Justin Trudeau.
00:02:42.000 If Justin's still around for this next election.
00:02:44.420 And if, as a lot of people have been theorizing, we might have a fall election,
00:02:49.940 I think Pierre is going to have the momentum from winning the leadership race
00:02:54.200 and he's going to walk into this election fully prepared and warmed up and ready to go.
00:03:00.040 And I think he's got this election beaten if it happens soon.
00:03:04.220 Well, and, you know, those discussions, they come up basically anytime there's a candidate coming up
00:03:08.260 who's unapologetically conservative.
00:03:09.700 We're seeing that here in Alberta as well, where it appears anyways that Daniel Smith
00:03:13.140 has got a pretty good lead going on in the leadership race.
00:03:16.200 So they start saying, well, sure, the conservative policies are good.
00:03:20.020 And yes, they make sense in their comments, but they'll never win with the public.
00:03:23.240 So we can't go with that candidate because we can't sell conservative policies to the public.
00:03:28.640 And, you know, I think it might scare some people away.
00:03:31.880 But typically, despite what people say, if they could be believed, we never would have had a Ralph Klein.
00:03:36.860 We never would have had a Ronald Reagan.
00:03:39.340 You know, I mean, you can sell conservative policies to an electorate.
00:03:43.240 You just have to sell it right.
00:03:45.640 Well, that's very true.
00:03:47.820 And I'm furious to some degree.
00:03:51.940 I mean, I never get that furious with people.
00:03:54.440 I get furious with ideas, but the idea that Polly Ebb is somehow wrong to talk about freedom.
00:04:02.200 I saw this the other day on Natasha Carradine's LinkedIn site, and she was doing an interview
00:04:09.440 with a Calgary radio station, which will remain nameless with a host that I know very well
00:04:13.600 and have never gotten along with.
00:04:15.860 But she said the subject of the conversation was going to be how talking about freedom
00:04:20.980 offends some Canadians.
00:04:23.300 And I said, you call yourself a conservative?
00:04:25.860 This is what Polly Ebb's campaign has been all about. 1.00
00:04:29.680 And as far as I'm concerned, this is what conservatism is all about.
00:04:32.700 It's about freedom.
00:04:33.500 It's about liberty.
00:04:34.040 And if we don't talk about positive conservatism, as Ronald Reagan did, better than anybody else,
00:04:40.740 I think, in the late 20th century, we're not going to win this because we're going
00:04:45.360 to be phony Tories.
00:04:46.920 We're going to be phony liberals.
00:04:48.020 We're going to be the same thing we were in the last election, which was not sure where
00:04:53.480 we were politically, maybe somewhere to the right of Justin Trudeau, but not really in
00:04:59.020 terms of real policy.
00:05:00.600 So I get very frustrated when I hear conservatives say, we need Jean Charest because he's a nice
00:05:06.120 guy and Canadians all like him, except he's got the same policies as the current government,
00:05:11.980 as far as I'm concerned.
00:05:12.980 He's no different from Aaron O'Toole, who we had in there recently.
00:05:16.420 And we do not need another liberal leading the Conservative Party.
00:05:19.980 We need a decision in this next election.
00:05:22.620 We need a choice.
00:05:24.620 And Pierre Polly Ebb is certainly going to provide that choice.
00:05:27.820 Is he the only candidate that's providing that choice?
00:05:31.320 No, I like most of the candidates in this race, but I think he's the only one that can
00:05:35.480 win.
00:05:36.540 It's going to be a very nasty race in the next election because they're going to throw everything
00:05:41.260 at Pierre that they can possibly come up with in terms of him being too extreme, too
00:05:47.140 right wing, too dangerous, too populist, blah, blah, blah.
00:05:50.920 Too much like Donald Trump.
00:05:52.100 You wait for it.
00:05:53.000 It's all going to come out.
00:05:54.520 But I think Pierre is astute enough, articulate enough, and good on his feet enough to come
00:06:01.240 back at this stuff.
00:06:02.320 And I don't think another candidate out there is going to be tough enough to go against the
00:06:07.060 liberal machine, whether it's Justin Trudeau or whether it's, God forbid, the finance minister,
00:06:12.780 Christian Freeland.
00:06:14.520 I don't care who they put up, but the liberal party is a vicious political machine when it's
00:06:20.800 in full mode election action.
00:06:22.220 And I think it's going to be a very tough election.
00:06:25.240 I think Pierre is up to it, though.
00:06:26.380 And I think we need someone with his stamina and his guts to fight this election, to duke
00:06:31.160 it out with the liberals and the NDP in this next election.
00:06:34.020 Well, that's it.
00:06:34.680 I mean, when we try to out-liberal the liberals, people will just vote liberal.
00:06:37.660 I mean, if I were a liberal voter, I've got, well, this is a conservative pretending to be
00:06:41.340 liberal.
00:06:41.620 And here's a liberal who's unapologetically liberal.
00:06:43.380 I'm going to vote for the liberal.
00:06:44.660 And meanwhile, the conservative voters see a conservative saying he's liberal.
00:06:47.180 What do they do?
00:06:47.700 They stay home.
00:06:48.800 And we saw that with O'Toole.
00:06:49.940 And yeah, we'll see it again if we try to stick another pretend liberal up there.
00:06:54.080 I mean, just to be true.
00:06:55.080 You know, you reminded me of something here, Corey.
00:06:57.240 I really have to do a column about this, because what the Brexit results showed a couple of
00:07:04.040 years back in Britain was that there were about 20 percent of the electorate was sitting out
00:07:10.040 elections because they just weren't motivated to vote.
00:07:13.520 They didn't think there was enough of a difference, enough of a choice.
00:07:17.340 And they came out for Brexit to overwhelmingly say, no, we don't want to be part of the European
00:07:21.840 Union.
00:07:22.740 And that was the secret of that campaign's success.
00:07:25.980 It wasn't saying, we're going to attract the liberal voters on our side.
00:07:30.860 It was, we're going to get those people who haven't been voting.
00:07:33.820 And that's what Pierre has really been going after.
00:07:36.360 I don't know, consciously or not.
00:07:37.880 I hope so.
00:07:38.400 But his populist message, his message, which is very like what the Republican Party is trying
00:07:45.080 to get out in the States, is that it's not a party that's open to every idea out there,
00:07:51.000 but it's open to everybody out there who wants to be part of this political movement.
00:07:56.440 And it's a conservative populist movement that is attracting blue-collar workers, working-class
00:08:03.540 people, new immigrants, people who have traditionally not voted conservative are going to be voting
00:08:10.100 conservative in this next election because, quite frankly, the liberals are bankrupt of
00:08:14.680 ideas and policies.
00:08:15.960 And they're getting excited about this idea of freedom.
00:08:18.520 They're not turned off about freedom.
00:08:19.760 That's why they came to Canada.
00:08:21.020 That's why new immigrants come to Canada. 1.00
00:08:22.520 They want to be free.
00:08:23.260 And my goodness, working-class people are tired of paying taxes the same way middle-class 0.98
00:08:28.920 and upper-class people are.
00:08:30.200 They're tired of working for the government.
00:08:32.300 So I think we've got a great opportunity here to sell positive conservatism.
00:08:37.020 Yeah, I believe so, too, if it can be done right.
00:08:39.360 And getting on that speculative road, I mean, there's two big speculations, whether or not
00:08:42.120 there'd be a fall election.
00:08:43.880 The other thing you wrote about wondering, you know, well, Trudeau is out languishing in Costa
00:08:47.880 Rica at great expense to all of us.
00:08:50.460 Not that he's cheap for all of us when he's home either.
00:08:53.260 But you think he might be just, you know, making his mind up?
00:08:57.880 Is it time to give it one more kick at the can to try and get a majority or that he might
00:09:01.680 throw his hands up and say, oh, maybe it's time to walk off into the sunset?
00:09:05.780 I definitely think he's weighing his career.
00:09:08.120 He's weighing his chances.
00:09:11.320 He's weighing his legacy.
00:09:12.820 Because people like Trudeau, who are very narcissistic, it's all about legacy for them.
00:09:20.980 They want to leave a legacy behind.
00:09:23.280 And right now, he really doesn't have much of a legacy except legalizing marijuana and
00:09:27.660 being one of the worst prime ministers in the history of this country.
00:09:30.360 So I think he's wondering what he can do to stay in power.
00:09:35.780 I don't think he's really contemplating resignation.
00:09:38.520 But I think he is plotting his return, as it will.
00:09:43.640 And he wants to come back with something.
00:09:45.500 Right now, I think he is in very, very dangerous ground.
00:09:48.640 He's incredibly unpopular.
00:09:49.920 I don't think it's going to work.
00:09:51.720 I think it's delusion.
00:09:53.640 But Justin Trudeau, don't ever think he sells himself short because he really thinks he
00:10:00.480 has a lot to offer this country.
00:10:02.560 Yeah.
00:10:03.480 Well, he lives in a special bubble world of his own, I'm sure.
00:10:07.020 I mean, as you said, you can't underestimate that liberal machine, though.
00:10:10.000 Even if the guy at the head of it isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, they've got
00:10:14.380 some very powerful strategists and connections that there will be a well-funded campaign.
00:10:20.360 And they just can't be taken lightly.
00:10:22.320 So, I mean, the conservatives are definitely going to have to go straight into at least
00:10:24.920 election preparation mode the moment they're finished with their leadership race.
00:10:28.940 Yes, yes, yes, yes, they will.
00:10:30.720 Because there's no time to waste with this.
00:10:33.720 And this is going to be a very tough election, as I said.
00:10:36.900 And I think the conservatives have to be prepared for that.
00:10:39.020 And I think they will be.
00:10:39.860 I mean, they're not naive.
00:10:41.920 And as I said, I think Paliyev, he's a tough political character.
00:10:46.660 There's no question about it.
00:10:47.660 But he's been there long enough to understand politics is a tough sport.
00:10:53.960 Yeah, that it most certainly is.
00:10:55.940 Well, I appreciate you coming in to talk to us today, David.
00:10:58.960 And always those prolific Ottawa-based columns coming out from out there.
00:11:03.580 Have you got stuff coming down the pipe you can give us a heads up on?
00:11:06.180 Or are you still seeing what you're going to write on next?
00:11:08.220 I know you just put one up there.
00:11:09.480 Yeah, I just put one up next.
00:11:11.580 I'd like to revisit this fertilizer mess, which I had a great time last week talking to former Agriculture Minister Jerry Ritz, which is just going up the turnstile there.
00:11:26.580 Jerry is really motivated to get out about this message that Trudeau is deliberately tampering with our food supply by essentially banning fertilizer because it contains nitrogen, which he thinks is causing greenhouse gases.
00:11:44.880 And this is even rather Canadians go without food and starve rather than emit a few more greenhouse gases.
00:11:54.140 And it's really quite negligible in terms of is this having any effect on climate change at all?
00:11:59.660 Probably not, because even if we stopped emitting any greenhouse gases in Canada, and if Justin Trudeau stopped flying in his Challenger jet and creating this huge carbon footprint, even if he stopped it, China and India would still be producing much more of these things than we are. 0.56
00:12:16.760 So really, I don't think we want to fall on our sword over this.
00:12:20.740 I think we want to keep food production up.
00:12:22.960 And as Jerry points out, there's no more responsible environmental stewards out there than farmers.
00:12:27.880 Farmers are some of the best, but they're being punished by Justin Trudeau because he doesn't think they're important.
00:12:33.420 He doesn't think people who work the land, he doesn't think people who produce the food that he eats, breakfast, lunch and dinner, he thinks it comes from the grocery store and nothing before that.
00:12:43.260 He doesn't think that's important.
00:12:44.620 And I think that this is an issue, I think it's the most important issue facing Canada right now.
00:12:48.300 And this might destroy Justin Trudeau's political career, because I think there's enough sane people in the Liberal Caucus who are saying, this is insanity.
00:12:58.820 This is madness.
00:13:00.840 We cannot go down this route because this sounds like a Maoist great leap forward, which ended in catastrophic results.
00:13:08.720 Well, Canada's agriculture minister just this morning was up saying, no, no, no, no, you guys are misinterpreting.
00:13:13.600 We want a voluntary reduction of 30%.
00:13:16.600 I don't think anybody believes her.
00:13:19.520 No, it's not only, it's not voluntary, won't be voluntary, but the tariff on fertilizer is not voluntary right now.
00:13:26.640 They're not talking about that.
00:13:28.040 We're the only G7 country that's taxing fertilizer out of the market for farmers.
00:13:33.120 They literally will not be able to afford to buy fertilizer.
00:13:36.360 And that's not voluntary.
00:13:38.520 A tariff is a tariff.
00:13:40.140 So don't trust or believe with the Liberal government on this because they are driven by a radical climate change agenda.
00:13:47.280 And that's really all they care about is satisfying their masters in the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and the people who are pushing for radical green energy plans.
00:13:57.320 Yeah, I mean, well, you know, the elitists who are pushing this don't care if the price of caviar goes up a little for them, but it's going to hurt everybody else in a terrible way if they get these sorts of things pushed through.
00:14:08.900 But, all right, well, thank you very much again for coming on and keeping on with these.
00:14:13.720 It's definitely one to follow up on.
00:14:14.960 As you said, this is an issue that could grow big.
00:14:17.160 I mean, it took down a government in Sri Lanka.
00:14:19.000 It's got the Dutch government paralyzed.
00:14:20.720 I mean, I think they've overplayed their hand on this thing, and that might be the catalyst for change in Canada finally.
00:14:28.060 I hope so.
00:14:29.180 We can only hope and pray, yes.
00:14:32.000 All right.
00:14:32.640 Well, good to talk to you, David.
00:14:33.720 It always is.
00:14:34.540 And I look forward to seeing more columns in the coming days.
00:14:37.500 A pleasure meeting with you again, Corey, and all the best.