Western Standard - June 08, 2023


Needed, a war cabinet

Mentioned
Jason Kenney Alison Redford Danielle Smith Jim Prentice Spruce Grove Jason Nixon Rick McIver Stony Plain Todd Lowen Corey Nigel Kenny
Gloves off between Trudeau & Poilievre Premier Danielle Smith’s new cabinet

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

177.76

Word count

804

Sentence count

58

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we look ahead to the new Alberta premier, Daniel Smith, swearing in her second cabinet. We talk about what to expect from the new cabinet, who to expect to be in it, and what to look out for.

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 So election's over. Daniel Smith is still the premier. And she gets to swear in her second cabinet. Her first cabinet, she inherited largely from Jason Kenney. She made some changes, removed a few, most notably Jason Nixon, who was kind of Kenney's right-hand man and who had inserted himself into the leadership race in a, I think, a way that most people found was grossly inappropriate.
00:00:27.040 So he was out. And he was very unpopular with people who opposed mandates and things like that because we've just seen it's too close to Kenney. Rick McIver, a longtime PC minister under Alison Redford and Jim Prentice, and then again under Jason Kenney, he was removed, although that was a bit more surprising.
00:00:47.020 And he was the interim leader of the PCs after they lost the 2015 election. There were a number of changes. She brought in some, but it was overall more or less still kind of Jason Kenney's cabinet. Didn't want to rock the boat too, too much.
00:01:00.080 Oh, and brought in Todd Lowen, who not only just came into the cabinet, but came into the caucus itself after being exiled by Jason Kenney.
00:01:07.460 I don't want to get into the specifics yet. We're going to talk about individual ministers you expect to be in or not to be in.
00:01:16.120 We'll start with you, Corey, on what you generally are expecting from Smith's first new cabinet now.
00:01:22.740 Are you expecting more or less a continuation of the previous cabinet or something entirely new?
00:01:28.840 Well, I, it's a tough question. I mean, whether she's going to want to make her mark now and break away now that she has a mandate or, or carry on.
00:01:38.220 You know, because she's got a limited caucus now compared to what she'd had before, she doesn't quite have the leeway to really shuffle too, too much from before. 1.00
00:01:46.560 I mean, we've got some inexperienced caucus members. I think there's going to be some eye raisers in there, though.
00:01:51.500 I mean, her relationships with different MLAs that are in there that we're only just seeing development is, I do believe she's going to want to make this hers.
00:01:58.380 As you said, she's been kind of carrying the remnants of Jason Kenney's cabinet for a while.
00:02:02.480 She's going to want some distinctions in there that are definitely her own that she didn't have, I think, going into this election. 0.72
00:02:09.100 Nigel, how big a change? Of course, some changes necessitated.
00:02:12.920 There are MLAs there who weren't there before, and there are some ministers who were in cabinet before but aren't there now.
00:02:21.500 Kenny's cabinet was particularly urban and, in particular, Calgary urban heavy, and that's where nearly all of the losses for the UCP and the Electric came from was in Calgary.
00:02:33.960 So, by necessity, some of these people are just not going to be in cabinet.
00:02:37.680 But how big a change are you expecting this cabinet to be over her previous cabinet, which was, you know, in large measure but not entirely, still had a significant number of holdovers from Kenny?
00:02:49.340 Well, I'll tell you what I'm expecting, and I'll tell you what I'm hoping.
00:02:53.540 My expectation is, as you said, so many of the last group, the last cadre, have lost the election or retired from the game of politics.
00:03:05.160 But out of the 24 cabinet positions that she announced in October, eight of those are gone.
00:03:10.340 So, she has a choice to make a smaller cabinet, but it's not going to be an order of magnitude smaller, that you would only have, you know, 20.
00:03:20.280 Some of those, some of those ministries just don't mesh well together.
00:03:24.360 So, she's going to have to come up with 20, 21, 22 names, I'm sure.
00:03:28.500 And my expectation is that she will look favorably on the people who supported her during the run-up.
00:03:39.700 Why wouldn't she?
00:03:41.340 And then, secondly, there are some interests that she has to satisfy.
00:03:45.640 There's got to be somebody from Edmonton.
00:03:47.940 The closest one would be a chap from Sherwood Park.
00:03:51.360 And the Moorinville, St. Albert.
00:03:52.720 There's two really close ones.
00:03:54.380 But there's also Spruce Grove, Stony Plain.
00:03:56.100 They've got the whole donut around.
00:03:57.400 Somebody has to speak for Edmonton.
00:03:59.340 So, those two individuals have a very high chance.
00:04:03.240 Two or three, actually.
00:04:03.940 There's three kind of really close donut ones.
00:04:06.160 All three could end up in cabinet, I'd say.
00:04:07.740 They could.
00:04:08.420 So, I'm expecting that.
00:04:09.980 What I'm hoping for is a cabinet that recognizes that the fight is going to be on with Ottawa.
00:04:18.220 Because Ottawa wants the fight.
00:04:20.680 And therefore, we need people with guts to go in there and stand up for Alberta.
00:04:25.880 And I hope that that's a big part of how she makes her decision on who she puts in there.