Western Standard - April 04, 2024


Protests have been growing as citizens feel hopeless

Topics
civil unrest grows
Mentioned
Trudeau Jagmeet Singh
CMS： Canada's growing protest culture is a sign of a broken system Residential School GPR Anomalies

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

209.22

Word count

1,038

Sentence count

63

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Protesters are out in droves across Canada, and there's a good reason why they're out of options: Canada's political system is broken, and once a politician's elected to office, there's no mechanism for citizens to hold them accountable.

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 Why are the protests happening so much?
00:00:02.160 Not just this one, but it's constantly left, right, center, doesn't matter.
00:00:05.080 Well, I mean, most people would rather do darn near anything than stand on a street corner or a highway waving a protest sign.
00:00:11.540 I mean, time's a precious commodity, and using it to stand jumbled within a crowd while police and many folks passing by are often less than supportive of your efforts.
00:00:19.920 Well, it's a sign of desperation.
00:00:22.080 On Monday of this Easter weekend, thousands of Canadians in dozens of locations went out to protest the latest increase of Trudeau's carbon tax.
00:00:30.500 So why are more and more people subjecting themselves, though, to the elements and possibly the long arm of the law with protests across Canada?
00:00:36.980 Well, it's pretty simple. It's because they feel helpless.
00:00:39.140 They're frustrated, and they're out of options.
00:00:41.700 You see, in Canada's system, once a person's elected to office, there's no mechanisms for citizens to hold them accountable.
00:00:47.480 No matter how poorly a politician might govern, the people are stuck with them until the next election.
00:00:52.720 Now, some people will say, well, that's just how democracy works, and they kind of have a point.
00:00:56.060 People got the chance to select their elected officials, and they should have to live with their decisions, or at least within reason.
00:01:02.600 There were cases, though, where the politicians grossly misrepresented themselves when applying for the job during an election.
00:01:08.720 And yes, we have a local example in Calgary.
00:01:11.040 Jodi Gondek has become, and she's managed to become, Calgary's most unpopular mayor in Calgary history, 1.00
00:01:17.200 and she's barely served more than half of her first term. 0.99
00:01:20.940 Gondek campaigned as a moderate, won the election based on that.
00:01:25.180 As soon as she became mayor, she pivoted into a crazed, woke agenda. 1.00
00:01:29.920 She ushered in an insane $87 billion climate change plan. 1.00
00:01:34.080 She torpedoed an agreement for construction of a new arena. 0.87
00:01:37.240 She committed hundreds of millions of dollars to an electric bus program,
00:01:41.340 and brought in a single-use plastic ban, which enraged the city when it was implemented.
00:01:45.100 Not to mention how far she went out of her way to piss off our local Jews. 1.00
00:01:49.060 Taxes to fund those plans have spiraled as well, of course.
00:01:52.240 Now, had Gondek campaigned on doing all those things in the first place,
00:01:55.780 sure, some citizens would still be upset, I mean, when those initiatives came about,
00:01:59.440 but I think they'd be more inclined to accept it until the next election,
00:02:02.620 because, well, that's what she said she was going to do.
00:02:04.860 But since Gondek deceptively campaigned as something else,
00:02:07.800 people feel they've been misled, and that she should be held accountable for that.
00:02:11.080 I mean, a recall petition in Calgary was initiated, and it's garnered a lot of interest.
00:02:15.660 Alas, the legislation for recall in Alberta is terribly flawed,
00:02:19.000 and the bar for successful petitioning is set impossibly high.
00:02:22.480 After months of hard effort, it appears the recall Gondek campaign
00:02:25.420 will have only reached a little more than 10% of the signatures required to force a recall.
00:02:30.120 That's not to say the petition's been a total failure.
00:02:32.280 It's put an embarrassing spotlight on just how terrible Gondek has been as a mayor,
00:02:36.060 and it's shown how ridiculous the current recall legislation is in Alberta.
00:02:39.080 All the same, though, if recall was the goal, it was an exercise in futility,
00:02:43.920 and many people now are going to feel even more frustrated with the process.
00:02:48.640 Last weekend at the Calgary Flames game, thousands of attendees,
00:02:51.760 and it made national news, booed Jodi Gondek as she walked onto the ice for a ceremony.
00:02:56.180 And there's been many pearl clutchers, 0.89
00:02:58.100 and they've been aghast with the disrespect shown to the mayor.
00:03:01.020 Well, they'd be better served to try and understand why people are so upset in the first place
00:03:04.880 rather than complaining about the people being upset.
00:03:06.760 Citizens are exasperated, and they want to show their discontent however they can,
00:03:11.080 even at a hockey game.
00:03:13.100 Federally and provincially, citizens face the same dilemma.
00:03:15.360 There's no way for citizens to remove an elected official no matter how terrible that official is.
00:03:20.520 Canada's Senate.
00:03:21.740 It's ostensibly the house of sober second thought.
00:03:24.280 It's supposed to hold Parliament accountable. 0.53
00:03:25.920 Come on.
00:03:26.280 In reality, the Senate's an insult to democracy,
00:03:28.620 as appointed members act as rubber stamps for the Prime Minister's policies.
00:03:32.300 It's just a patronage pit for old folks to get a really big pension before they fully retire. 0.96
00:03:38.280 And while the Trudeau government is an incredibly low level of public support,
00:03:41.880 citizens remain stuck with it as they're propped up by the NDP.
00:03:45.340 And Jagmeet Singh isn't widely popular in Canada either.
00:03:48.680 But through his ugly alliance with Trudeau,
00:03:51.000 Canadians get to enjoy being governed by not one but two parties that don't really represent them.
00:03:54.920 But it shouldn't be easy to remove an elected official from power.
00:03:58.300 That's fair.
00:03:58.860 Recall initiatives should have a high bar to be invoked.
00:04:01.800 We don't want to live in a world of endless recalls and by-elections.
00:04:04.400 Premiers and Prime Ministers shouldn't be removed from power on a whim.
00:04:07.800 While it shouldn't be easy to remove an elected person from power,
00:04:10.140 it should be possible.
00:04:12.080 A report from Canada's RCMP warned that civil unrest is growing
00:04:15.300 and is going to continue to grow in Canada due to bad governance and upset citizens.
00:04:19.340 The government's likely going to ignore that warning.
00:04:20.880 In Canada's system, the lack of accountability among politicians is making people desperate.
00:04:26.140 And as the desperation grows, anger grows.
00:04:28.600 And people are going to feel more inclined to take on dangerous or even illegal ways to express themselves to pursue change.
00:04:34.100 When a person's back is against the wall, they will lash out.
00:04:37.720 We're only seeing the warning signs now and it's going to get worse.
00:04:41.100 If we could avoid much of this civil disorder,
00:04:43.380 if only there was a reasonable way for citizens to have their voices heard and respected by politicians between elections.
00:04:48.480 Unfortunately, there's little indication that politicians want to change the system in any way that might disempower themselves.
00:04:53.940 So I'm afraid that means things are going to get much worse before they get better.