Western Standard - November 11, 2021


The Cory Morgan Show： A Maverick future with Jay Hill

Topics
Quebec vs Saskatchewan nationalism line five Maverick Party leadership race Maverick Party and Western Canadian politics leadership race rules
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Corey O'Toole Maverick Party Jason Kenney Jay Hill Prairie Westerners Scott Moe Mulroney Kretchen Blanchet
MORGAN： Shut down Line 5 Calgary psychologist says lockdowns, mandates creating serious mental crisis

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

170.8

Word count

3,382

Sentence count

222

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On this episode of the Western Standard, we have a special guest on the show, Jay Hill, the interim leader of the Maverick Party in the upcoming election. We also have a look at the Canadian oil pipeline strike in Saskatchewan and the reaction of the media.

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 .
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.
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00:01:00.000 Let's get started.
00:01:30.000 Thank you.
00:02:00.000 Hey, welcome to The Cory Morgan Show, getting into mid-November 2021. I just want to go
00:02:07.880 on a quick, well, actually, first I've got to start by thanking our subscribers. I've
00:02:12.080 always got to thank them. I tend to forget sometimes. If you haven't subscribed already
00:02:15.440 to the Western Standard Online, go there, westernstandardonline.com. Take out a membership.
00:02:21.740 It's 10 bucks a month. You get a free trial for a couple of weeks. You'll find it worth
00:02:25.000 your while. You honestly will. That's where you can get the commentary, the columns without
00:02:29.040 out of paywall, videos, news reporting, breaking news, things like that. Take it out. And for those
00:02:35.060 who've already subscribed, thank you very much. That's what keeps us going. That's how you have
00:02:38.360 independent media who will speak on the truth, who will speak on these things. And I'll tell you,
00:02:43.320 I saw an example just today from the Toronto Globe. Some people call it the Globe and Mail.
00:02:48.500 We know where it's focused. It was talking about how Saskatchewan was bizarrely talking about
00:02:55.360 declaring itself a nation. You know, they say that, right? Oh, right. It's bizarre when
00:03:00.040 Saskatchewan does that. You know, you would think maybe it is, except Quebec just did that.
00:03:05.740 Why does that quote unquote national newspaper refer to an action of Saskatchewan that's exactly 1.00
00:03:12.840 the same as what Quebec did as bizarre, unthinkable, stupid, foolish, but doesn't utter a peep when 1.00
00:03:18.800 Quebec wants to do the same thing. It's a great reflection on how screwed up our media is in 1.00
00:03:23.160 Canada and how screwed up Canada is in general. You know, Quebec wags this dog and we know it. 0.99
00:03:28.840 And the tax-funded media, well, they do what their tax-funded funding masters tell them.
00:03:35.200 So with that subsidies to media, plus, you know, of course, constant threats of censorship coming
00:03:38.860 out of the federal government, media doesn't know if it's coming or going. They'll just comply
00:03:44.180 and do as they're told. The Western Standard won't. Nobody's subsidizing us. Nobody's offering
00:03:49.600 us tax dollars to keep operating. We aren't asking for them. We'll report on and comment
00:03:54.620 on what we think is important and what our listeners and viewers and readers think is
00:03:58.960 important. Getting onto that federal front, where is O'Toole? What a sad sack of a leader
00:04:07.060 that guy has been so far. But we've got Trudeau, again, gallivanting around virtue signaling,
00:04:13.640 talking about putting an emissions cap on Western resources and phasing out the oil field.
00:04:18.200 O'Toole's hiding from that. He's putting out fires within his own party. Line five,
00:04:23.560 and I've got a separate column on that. Be sure to read that. Check it out or catch it read out
00:04:28.940 by me and a different rant on video. But I mean, this is just another symbol. This is something
00:04:33.860 that's huge. It should be huge. It should be making waves across this nation. People should
00:04:38.420 be getting up because this critical oil infrastructure line is on the brink of being
00:04:44.320 shut down. And our leadership doesn't care. People in Sarnia are going to be outworked by the
00:04:51.300 thousands. Our leadership don't care. You know, I mean, they're going through the motions. They
00:04:55.160 talk about things and treaties, but they haven't made a push. When they really want to get something
00:04:58.620 done, you hear about it. They're just going through the motions. Quebec and Ontario are
00:05:03.260 really going to feel it. I propose shutting it down. Shut it down. Let's do it. Fine. Let's just
00:05:07.160 do it. Give them what they're asking for. Let them freeze for a little while. Let those airfares 0.97
00:05:11.840 double. Let the airports in Pearson and Montreal and even Detroit shut down. Get that taste of it.
00:05:17.760 Maybe some of our political leadership will start to wake up. Though I don't hold out much hope for
00:05:22.620 it, but at least some people will get a taste of reality because reality is missing a lot.
00:05:29.000 So for today's show, we're going to go in on the federal front. I've got Jay Hill. He's the
00:05:32.940 interim leader of the Maverick Party coming in. Now, the Maverick Party had a less than spectacular
00:05:38.680 showing in the last federal election, but they did establish themselves. They're new and they
00:05:43.440 are Western focused. That's all they're going to be. There's questions of whether they're
00:05:47.420 separatist or they're not separatist, but there has been now a full leadership race scheduled
00:05:53.220 and declared. So somebody new is going to be taking the helm of that party. They're going to
00:05:56.740 be going into the next election organizing in the West. Perhaps there'll be a few candidates to
00:06:01.380 offer a few senses of direction of where it's going to go. We do need some more voices because
00:06:05.280 again, as been pointed out with Trudeau's climate notions and things such as that, our Western
00:06:11.080 members of parliament haven't exactly been lighting the world on fire over all of that either.
00:06:15.940 So maybe it's time to go back to something like the old reform days. And Jay Hill was an old
00:06:19.920 reform member. It'll be an interesting chat. So stay tuned and let's see what his plans are going
00:06:25.220 forward. All right. Thanks for joining me, Jay. It's been a little while. I think we did have you
00:06:29.920 on election night briefly there and chatted. So the Maverick party is, I guess, hit its
00:06:36.880 next point in its evolution. You guys have run through an election. You're established. Some
00:06:41.340 people know who you are. I mean, there was no seats won or anything like that, but everything
00:06:46.340 comes in steps, I guess. I'd like to begin with those. So you've declared a timeline for a formal
00:06:52.660 leadership race now to bring in a permanent leader. Can you expand on that?
00:06:56.060 Certainly, Corey. First of all, I guess I'd just step back and say that, yes, we finally got registered so that we're on a level playing field with all the other parties. And of course, you're well aware that the registration process is such that you have to be eligible with Elections Canada rules, eligible for registration as a federal political party.
00:07:17.980 And then, of course, you have to go through an election campaign.
00:07:21.100 And once your first candidate is confirmed by Elections Canada, then you're officially registered.
00:07:26.240 And, of course, what is important about registration is that a political party can issue tax receipts, quite generous tax receipts to their donors, to their supporters.
00:07:34.500 So we've cleared that hurdle in this first election campaign.
00:07:38.800 Obviously, as you and I discussed before, we didn't do near as well as we'd hoped.
00:07:42.540 And there's a variety of factors that play into that.
00:07:44.860 One of the things that we did here was that people wanted to see a leader, the sort of traditional leader that was running for the party, running for a seat in Parliament.
00:07:55.800 And of course, I did not. I felt and still feel that I've served my time.
00:08:00.820 And so now we're officially into a leadership race. I'm quite excited about it.
00:08:05.680 It'll be obviously our first leader for the Maverick Party will be elected, and we've set the date for that.
00:08:12.060 And so there's a number of different steps along that path between now and May.
00:08:16.920 And we'll see what happens.
00:08:18.700 And I'm hopeful that a number of people will step forward to contest the leadership.
00:08:23.220 Great.
00:08:23.480 Well, let's assume some of the viewers still might not be quite familiar with the Maverick Party.
00:08:27.140 Now post-election and on to this next, I guess, level of the evolution.
00:08:30.240 What is the party in a nutshell and what are you trying to pursue with it right now?
00:08:33.880 Well, if I had to sum it up just in a few words, Corey,
00:08:37.220 Maverick Party is all about respect and autonomy for Western Canada.
00:08:41.260 And there's a variety of different reasons that you would be more familiar with than many Westerners of why Western Canada needs to assert that autonomy, that separatism, if you will, from Ottawa.
00:08:56.180 Ottawa and our federal governments keep infringing on provincial jurisdiction.
00:09:02.600 It's been happening more and more and certainly has become very prevalent under the current prime minister and his government.
00:09:09.060 And so Maverick Party is all about convincing Westerners that they need a different way of approaching federal politics.
00:09:21.560 It does no good to elect NDP, Conservative, or Liberal members of Parliament.
00:09:29.060 Nothing's going to change for the West with the status quo.
00:09:33.000 Recent events have really demonstrated that, I think, quite well with, I mean, as predicted,
00:09:38.240 Justin Trudeau went off to the COP26, made some bold declarations on emissions caps and
00:09:45.360 targeting, outright targeting Western Canada's oil and gas sector.
00:09:50.180 And the silent sort of O'Toole has been deafening.
00:09:52.540 We've got a federal leader who relies on Western support, takes the Western contributions.
00:09:57.900 But when the time comes to stand up to them, you won't say anything for fear of alienating Central Canadian voters.
00:10:03.060 So it leads to a standoff that's not serving the West right now.
00:10:06.980 Exactly.
00:10:07.420 And the great irony, of course, is even before and certainly since the September 20th election, when largely Prairie Westerners, I'll call them, re-elected their Conservative incumbents. 0.94
00:10:19.120 So we've got all these Conservative members of Parliament that were re-elected again with massive majorities in most cases.
00:10:25.520 And, you know, they're silent.
00:10:29.020 They're silent because the edict has come down from Mr. O'Toole and party headquarters that you stay quiet on hot button issues.
00:10:37.660 Well, what is a hot button issue?
00:10:39.500 I guess equalization, which Alberta just had a referendum on that.
00:10:44.400 62% of Albertans supported scrapping equalization, if that was ever possible.
00:10:49.780 and yet no words, not only from Mr. O'Toole, but from our very own conservative members of
00:10:55.420 parliament, just silence, as you say. Yeah, well, and it's not sellable in central
00:10:59.120 Canada. So, I mean, I think that's where Westerners have really got to reevaluate where you're going.
00:11:03.320 People say, oh, you can split the vote, get more liberal. We've already got them.
00:11:06.440 We don't have much to lose. Plus, we don't even have an effective opposition speaking up
00:11:10.420 for us with a liberal government. So, I mean, we're back to, I mean, to turn the clock back
00:11:16.340 in the sense whether you're self-representing it, but the reform party days, we'd hit that
00:11:19.940 stalemate. The Mulroney government certainly wasn't representing Western interests at that
00:11:23.800 time in the CF18 contract. I mean, it took him a couple of years to get rid of the national 1.00
00:11:27.640 energy program. He didn't hurry to get rid of that thing. So what would be different than the
00:11:32.880 reform this time? I mean, I thought reform was great. I thought some of our best federal government
00:11:36.040 we ever had actually was Kretchen with the reform and you guys breathing down his neck.
00:11:40.500 Is that kind of what you re-envisioned coming again in a sense, a conscience in the house,
00:11:44.240 perhaps pushing a government into a more capable role or? Well, certainly Maverick members of
00:11:50.140 Parliament would be similar to reformers in the sense that they would be speaking out
00:11:53.740 very volubly on issues of importance to their constituents in Western Canadians.
00:11:58.300 They wouldn't have to consider every position and every speech in the House of Commons
00:12:02.640 framed in the sense that, oh, well, will this offend anybody in Quebec or Toronto? Well,
00:12:09.540 Mavericks won't care. Mavericks will be there to, as reformers were, to speak out on issues of
00:12:15.280 importance to their constituents and Western Canadians. And so, yes, it's an incremental
00:12:19.500 step. There are people and a growing number of people in Western Canada, obviously, that
00:12:24.560 support outright sovereignty, that think that we need to move. And indeed, we may end up moving
00:12:30.100 towards a completely separate nation. But the majority of Westerners are not there yet.
00:12:35.940 And I've always maintained, Corey, that if Western Canada, whether it's Alberta or Saskatchewan or parts of the other provinces, if we ever get to the point where they want to move towards a completely separate sovereign nation, you have to win that referendum first.
00:12:53.880 You don't want to repeat the mistakes of Quebec once you get to that point and lose.
00:12:59.420 So incrementally, Maverick Party supports the Fair Deal panel recommendations.
00:13:05.860 I see that Premier Scott Moe in Saskatchewan now is moving.
00:13:10.300 He's actually talking about the very same thing that I sent him a letter on the 25th of May
00:13:15.740 suggesting he started talking about a nation within a nation.
00:13:19.460 He did that yesterday.
00:13:20.720 And good on him.
00:13:21.660 I applaud him.
00:13:23.280 I hope that Jason Kenney will follow through on that.
00:13:26.340 I don't know what the delay has been on the part of Mr. Kenney and his majority UCP government
00:13:31.160 and not bringing forward more of those fair deal panel recommendations
00:13:36.060 and really push it forward from Alberta's perspective
00:13:39.300 and basically draw the line in the sand with Prime Minister Trudeau.
00:13:43.940 Yeah, it's been frustrating.
00:13:45.320 I mean, committee after commission, after talk, after motion, after...
00:13:48.860 Come on, take one of these things and run with it, for crying out loud.
00:13:52.220 You've been in there with a majority for over two years now.
00:13:54.780 There's no more excuses to keep talking about it.
00:13:56.660 I think the strongest one, and I think you would agree, Corey,
00:13:59.240 is the the on the in the area of taxation i think that alberta needs to pursue and saskatchewan and
00:14:05.000 i think scott moe is going in this direction pursue uh all they can in the sense of taking 0.51
00:14:11.240 control of taxation as quebec has done and taking control of the fact that in in joint programs
00:14:18.120 provincial federal programs have the opt-out clause that quebec has where they say well
00:14:23.240 we don't like your program as it's structured we'll we'll develop our own program but we want
00:14:28.360 exactly the same amount of money that we would have got had we been in the in the uh provincial
00:14:33.400 federal program there are steps like that that i would say alberta and saskatchewan it's long
00:14:39.000 overdue that uh for them to emulate quebec and do the very same thing i'm thankful that scott mo
00:14:44.440 is now talking about doing that absolutely we're gonna stop getting mad at them and start learning
00:14:48.120 from them i mean blanchette doesn't think twice about what alberta thinks when he speaks because
00:14:51.960 he doesn't care he's there for quebec he was elected for quebec yeah it doesn't matter he's
00:14:56.200 going to speak in Quebec's interest. And I mean, whether people think it's a good idea or bad,
00:15:00.040 it works. I mean, nobody can deny that the bloc is influential in parliament. And I would dare
00:15:05.800 say much more influential than every one of those conservative members right now. When Blanchet
00:15:10.360 speaks, Trudeau listens. When the CPC speaks right now, Trudeau laughs.
00:15:13.720 Yeah. Well, and as you say, it's because they have to coach everything they say,
00:15:18.440 they have to compromise with everything they say. So that's why they're silent on things
00:15:22.680 about what's their their official position on equalization but they don't want to anger quebec
00:15:27.320 so they say nothing even though 62 percent of albertans voted to get rid of it yeah and i
00:15:32.680 suspect it would be even higher if it wasn't for some internal politics we have going on in alberta
00:15:36.680 right now exactly yeah sort of the anti-jason kenny vote yeah which unfortunately probably
00:15:41.800 reflected in some ways in those numbers well that's been frustrating because it feels almost
00:15:46.360 like everybody is suddenly for the time being in favor of big government intrusive government
00:15:50.600 We're seeing that in multiple elections, provincially, federally, even municipally.
00:15:54.680 Right.
00:15:55.280 But when you see that core that still realizes they're looking at equalization, they're saying, that's a bad program.
00:16:00.460 You know, that's a left, right, or center.
00:16:01.700 They look at it that is not a good program.
00:16:03.580 So even in these times, 62% said, we want out of this thing.
00:16:07.260 That's significant.
00:16:08.320 That's a strong thing.
00:16:09.900 So it's good that you're providing an outlet for the people who are frustrated, a place to go, a place to dedicate their energies, and hopefully, you know, achieve some change.
00:16:17.200 So kind of finish up with the timeline.
00:16:19.360 I'd say your race is going to open up in January, I believe, 1.00
00:16:22.240 and it's closing in May for the leadership.
00:16:24.160 Well, as per our constitution, which we passed at our first convention on the
00:16:28.120 seventh of August, the first step was to strike a committee.
00:16:31.840 Once I let it be known that I'm going to be stepping down and sort of a firm
00:16:35.760 date for that, we struck a committee of, of counselors,
00:16:40.420 members of our governing council, and they not right now are doing the research
00:16:44.320 and putting together the draft rules and regulations for contestants for
00:16:48.640 this leadership race. So we hope to report back in early December. Obviously, we'd be letting
00:16:54.160 yourself and other members of the media know what the rules are the council comes up with.
00:16:59.360 Then we're going to have it out there over Christmas so that would-be contestants will
00:17:04.720 have some time to consider the rules, see if they make sense to them, see if it's workable for them.
00:17:10.240 And then we'll start accepting applicants in early January. That will give them about four
00:17:16.080 and a half months to get out there, raise money, sell memberships, and hopefully have
00:17:21.540 a real robust leadership race with two, three, four, however many there are. Hopefully not
00:17:28.720 like the recent conservative leadership race where you had 12 people on a stage. I would
00:17:34.560 hope that it's a half a dozen at most of very serious contenders, and it'll culminate on
00:17:41.980 the 14th of May. So not a lot of time to put this together. And we hope to generate a lot of interest.
00:17:48.540 Yeah. And I mean, leadership races can really help build a party. I mean, it really shows
00:17:53.020 some people on the ground, get out there, sell those memberships, sell the party, sell themselves.
00:17:56.460 Yeah. I'm just guessing it still goes to community. Would this be probably a one member, one
00:18:01.660 vote type of leadership race, not the delegated sort or weighted by region or any of that complexity?
00:18:07.020 Exactly. And I'm glad I used the word complexity. I would have said, you know,
00:18:10.620 that's a sort of nonsense that do we see the conservatives go through with the quality of
00:18:15.020 all the ridings regardless of whether you have 50 members in that riding or 5 000 and that's
00:18:20.140 always as a reformer that always stuck in my craw uh in our constitution and bylaw that we passed
00:18:25.900 at our convention again on the 7th of august uh it calls for one member one vote so that's already
00:18:32.060 been decided we don't need the government council to make that decision uh the delegates at our
00:18:37.340 convention uh supported that overwhelmingly so it will be one member one vote doesn't matter
00:18:42.620 whether the person holding a maverick party membership is in tuktuk or vancouver or or
00:18:48.700 downtown calgary every vote counts the same excellent well uh where can we find more
00:18:54.380 information i guess then your site and such for the race if people are interested in joining
00:18:57.900 or supporting or just want to find out more about you guys yeah exactly we've just launched a new
00:19:02.860 refurbished website uh we have all of the members of our governing council and the board of directors
00:19:09.100 for maverick party fund our not-for-profit corporation that does is the financial arm of
00:19:14.380 the party uh similar to the conservatives and liberals uh in how we operate so all of that
00:19:19.740 information is on our new website and uh we would ask people to check us out and and hopefully buy
00:19:24.940 a membership get involved in the party everyone's welcome yeah and that url is maverick party dot
00:19:29.500 maverickparty.ca. Very simple. Yep. Great. Well, I'm sure we'll be talking again before the race 0.98
00:19:35.240 is up and thanks for the work you've done so far. And well, hope the rest of your holding the helm
00:19:41.480 for this term goes smoothly for you. Thanks very much, Corey. Appreciate it. Appreciate
00:19:45.600 being asked on your show again. Okay. Thanks, Jay.