Western Standard - August 08, 2024


‘Nothing got done under Nenshi’s management’

Mentioned
Ninchy Jason Kenney Uber Matthew Michael Cal Wenzel Olympic
CMS： Nenshi's legacy of lies. Attempts to cancel Paul Coffey

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

223.45

Word count

911

Sentence count

58

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Calgary s mayor, Naheed Nenshue, is a known quantity to Canadian voters. He s known for massive tax hikes, a failed Olympic bid, a massive commercial vacancy, and a Green Line that may prove to be the biggest municipal boondoggle in Canadian history. Instead of trying to explain his legacy, he s trying to lie about himself.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Ninchy has a history in Alberta, and much of it actually isn't very good.
00:00:04.460 He's trying to hide from his own political baggage as he chases the premiership,
00:00:08.540 and he's resorting to lies to do so.
00:00:11.320 Being disingenuous is not new for Ninchy.
00:00:14.400 He initially got elected as the mayor of Calgary on a platform of being business-friendly,
00:00:18.520 and he was anything but.
00:00:19.740 Ninchy's relentless tax increases on city businesses actually drove owners to an unprecedented protest
00:00:25.200 outside of Calgary's city hall where they had to beg for tax relief.
00:00:28.560 The city was driving them right out of business.
00:00:31.840 Ninchy's frequent departures from the truth have landed him in legal hot water as well.
00:00:36.400 I mean, when Ninchy implied that Calgary businessman and philanthropist Cal Wenzel was an organized crime figure,
00:00:42.240 the resulting lawsuit left Calgarian taxpayers with a legal bill of nearly $300,000
00:00:46.920 until Ninchy could convince enough friends to pitch in and cover it for him.
00:00:51.620 One of those friends got a good contract, actually.
00:00:53.740 He apologized and retracted the statement, of course,
00:00:56.280 but it was clear, you know, he waited until he was sure he was going to lose that lawsuit,
00:00:59.880 and he was obviously going to lose it.
00:01:01.660 Ninchy also shared a bunch of bizarre fabrications about Uber while he was riding in a Lyft car in Boston.
00:01:06.840 He lied and claimed the city of Calgary had tested the security screening of Uber
00:01:10.620 by getting sex offenders through the process.
00:01:12.900 I'm not even sure where he's going to say they came from,
00:01:14.720 what, sex offenders are us or something,
00:01:16.200 or maybe he just happens to know a few of them.
00:01:18.020 I don't know.
00:01:18.480 But it was utter BS, and when the video surfaced, 0.98
00:01:20.960 it looked like Ninchy was about to get his arse sued again. 0.96
00:01:23.440 Uber had been trying for years to get into the city of Calgary, 0.97
00:01:25.580 but they'd been getting strong resistance from Ninchy,
00:01:27.700 who appeared to be pretty beholden to the Calgary's taxi cartels.
00:01:31.740 But then when Uber was about to sue the mayor,
00:01:34.360 Uber was suddenly approved as a service in the city,
00:01:36.740 and the talk of the lawsuit dropped.
00:01:38.080 Money on negotiations change when you're about to be sued into oblivion.
00:01:41.960 Now, though, Ninchy's taken to lying about himself.
00:01:44.640 It's one of his favorite subjects, I guess.
00:01:46.580 Ninchy's biggest personal legacy and vanity project
00:01:49.320 during his time as mayor is the LRT expansion called the Green Line.
00:01:53.560 The problem is the Green Line has turned into another debacle.
00:01:56.260 The size of the project has shrunken to a small fraction
00:01:59.320 of what the original scope was,
00:02:00.700 but the price tag has risen from $4.5 billion to $6 billion,
00:02:04.040 and meanwhile, they've pissed away $1.5 billion into it.
00:02:06.520 Not an inch of track has been laid yet.
00:02:08.920 At this rate, it's going to be another decade
00:02:10.360 before the Green Line ever gets out of the city's downtown,
00:02:12.680 and the cost will probably double or triple by then.
00:02:14.320 It's an unmitigated disaster.
00:02:17.100 Ninchy's trying to distance himself from this mess
00:02:20.240 by making his own historical revisionism going on.
00:02:24.460 In 2015, Jason Kenney was a member of parliament,
00:02:26.980 and he announced $1.5 billion federal dollars for the Green Line.
00:02:30.160 Ninchy at that time said the construction would begin in 2017
00:02:32.640 and be completed by 2024.
00:02:34.600 Yeah, that's Ninchy's words.
00:02:36.700 Now Ninchy's claiming, you know, he didn't say anything like that,
00:02:38.760 and that the funding was unexpected in 2015,
00:02:41.260 and that's what led to the delays in the construction.
00:02:43.420 He was actually blaming the feds for the delays in the construction
00:02:45.920 because the feds gave him money.
00:02:47.500 There's some sweet logic for you, isn't it?
00:02:49.180 The province kicked in another $1.5 billion as well, by the way.
00:02:52.240 Despite having all that money to play with,
00:02:54.100 nothing got done under Ninchy's management.
00:02:56.540 While he's trying to blame other levels of government for the mess,
00:02:59.060 it's simply BS.
00:03:00.480 Jason Kenney didn't beat around the bush on Ninchy's claims.
00:03:02.880 He said this is a broader problem Ninchy has.
00:03:05.620 He just makes stuff up.
00:03:07.340 I think people call it gaslighting.
00:03:09.400 Ninchy'll say whatever he thinks he needs to say
00:03:10.980 and pretend to be whatever he thinks he needs to be
00:03:12.920 if he thinks it'll bring him closer to power.
00:03:14.660 He lies without hesitation
00:03:16.060 and refuses to take responsibility for anything that happened
00:03:19.020 or didn't happen during his decade as a Calgary's mayor.
00:03:22.480 Ninchy is a known quantity to Calgarian voters.
00:03:25.260 Unfortunately for him, he's known for massive tax hikes,
00:03:28.280 a dysfunctional city council,
00:03:29.640 millions spent on a failed vanity Olympic bid,
00:03:32.360 a downtown with massive commercial vacancy
00:03:34.340 that's overrun with addicts,
00:03:35.620 and a green line project
00:03:36.940 that may prove to be the biggest municipal boondoggle 0.79
00:03:39.260 in Canadian's history.
00:03:40.840 Instead of trying to explain or wear his legacy,
00:03:43.320 Ninchy's trying to lie his way out of it.
00:03:45.060 He's counting on the short memory of voters
00:03:46.960 to try and win his way into the premiership of Alberta.
00:03:49.900 Let's make sure we don't let Albertans forget
00:03:51.560 what Ninchy's tenure as mayor was like.
00:03:55.160 It reflects how well he would government
00:03:56.960 if he were to become the premier.
00:03:58.500 Thanks a lot.
00:03:59.500 See you next time to hear.
00:03:59.640 See you next time to hear.
00:03:59.680 See you later.
00:03:59.980 See you next time to hear.
00:04:00.300 See you next time for a useful concern to us,
00:04:01.460 and before it comes back to the Trans Hmmm,
00:04:01.540 see you next time for now.
00:04:02.520 See you next time for Matthew Michael