In this episode of The Pipeline, we have a bit of insider baseball, and some real interesting political news in Alberta. The editor of a far-left publication has been charged for vandalizing a monument to a Ukrainian commander who fought against the Soviet Union and Nazis in World War II. And a group of disgruntled members of the United Party of Canada are trying to take over the board of the party.
00:01:18.560A far left, the editor of a far left Alberta publication, Progress Alberta, or Progress Report, has been criminally charged for vandalizing a monument to a Ukrainian commander who fought against the Soviet Union and Nazis in the Second World War.
00:01:40.480I think I have a feeling he's more angry about the fighting the Soviet Union part of that equation.
00:01:44.800The best part is this guy, he wrote about it the next day. Shocked that this happened. Largely glorifying this act of proletarian insurrection. But he wrote about it the next day on his lefty publication. It's a bit of a head scratcher if the allegations prove true in court.
00:02:09.260um and then the ucp convention was last weekend friday to uh sunday uh the western standard was
00:02:17.160there we had a number of reporters i was up there myself as well a lot of really interesting
00:02:21.740things going on danielle smith uh introducing her cabinet her first big speech to the party
00:02:28.520membership at the convention uh and a bit of an insurrection uh by a large group of the membership
00:02:35.100taking over the board of that party. And there's a lot of implications to that. That sounds super
00:02:41.900inside baseball, but I'm asking you to please bear with me. Stay with me. Some of this stuff
00:02:45.020is going to have real effects on Alberta politics. Before we get into it, though,
00:02:49.580we got to thank my favorite sponsor, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. Yeah, I know you've
00:02:54.220heard me say it a million times. I've been a member of the CSSA for over a decade
00:02:58.200because I trust them to stand up for my rights as a law-abiding firearms owner in Canada.
00:03:05.100The Canadian Shooting Sports Association is standing up for the right of firearms owners to own, to purchase, and to safely use their firearms in Canada.
00:03:15.200Without the work the CSSA has done, I'm sure the Trudeau gun bans would have been implemented long, long ago.
00:03:25.220We'd have no firearms left, legally at least, in this country.
00:03:30.140So if you're not yet a member of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association,
00:08:57.000Have you ever seen a journalist, or somebody calls himself a journalist at least, do something in secret and then report on it the next day?
00:09:14.160But what I have seen is a long list of journalists who have invented fake stories.
00:09:21.080And as we are talking about the situation between Russia and Ukraine, then we can take ourselves into the whole business of the New York Times and its reporting on, you mentioned a whole lot more just now.
00:09:38.320Yes, they had a journalist there by the name of Walter Durante. He occupied the Moscow Bureau for the New York Times for 14 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting.
00:09:50.080He completely ignored the ethnic destruction of approximately four million.
00:10:34.100The closest thing I can see to it is if it is true as charged as the case just a couple of years ago of Jesse Smollett, the film star.
00:10:44.300J-U-S-S-I-E, I'm better on the Ukrainians, but at any rate, fate, a hate crime against himself.
00:10:58.300Yeah. And he actually went down for 150 days for that.
00:11:01.580Yeah. That caught my mind too. I know we were talking about the Juicy Smoulier thing.
00:11:07.180If you haven't seen the Dave Chappelle skit, or not skit, his bit on Justice for Juicy, Juicy Smollier, it's one of the best pieces out there.
00:11:20.120But yeah, he had committed a fake hate crime against himself to illicit sympathy.
00:11:25.980This is, well, it's both worse than that and not as bad as that.
00:11:32.480It's worse than that in that he didn't commit the fake hate crime against himself here.
00:12:32.340Will it be the end of Kinney? I guess that's the question.
00:12:34.720Well, I don't know. We've had reporters on it. I don't think we've heard any confirmation yet if he's even still got his job. I mean, he's not convicted of anything yet. But you'd think at the end, like, this is the height.
00:12:47.540You probably love him, Derek. I mean, it's a slow news day and he goes out and makes some news.
00:12:51.160But you're not supposed to get caught doing it.
00:15:48.600Charged with what some would argue would be kind of a hateful crime against Ukrainians.
00:15:53.980Well, either way, I mean, I just, you know, can't help but like it.
00:15:56.840After such a long history of basically social media thuggery out of this guy,
00:16:00.160he's just not a good character, and it looks good on him.
00:16:04.140Okay, well, that closes our section on Alberta Pravda.
00:16:08.520So, this just past weekend, the United Conservative Party held its first ever convention without Jason Kenney as leader, or in attendance.
00:16:20.380A very interesting weekend. It opened immediately before the convention.
00:16:25.700The government put out a news release announcing the new cabinet at around a quarter to noon on Friday.
00:16:30.780And 15 minutes after that, I sat down with Alberta's new premier, Danielle Smith, and we chatted for an hour.
00:16:38.520questions of my own, some from the comment section, which by the way, we can confirm is
00:16:44.760going to be a regular bit. Not sure if we're going to, not sure. Yeah, we're probably not
00:16:48.680doing it this Friday, but we're going to have a Danielle Smith on every Friday for question1.00
00:16:52.500period with the premier here. But we spent an hour going through it, spent a lot of the time
00:16:59.320on the cabinet. So let's, let's talk about her cabinet picks here. It's a big cabinet, isn't it,
00:17:04.540Nigel? 27 members. I think that's a few more. I'm not a big fan of big cabinets. Plus a ton of
00:17:09.660parliamentary secretaries. I can see why people do it. I mean, it's not just Premier Smith. It's
00:17:15.060generally speaking, you have a large cabinet. She set a record for Alberta, though. This is the
00:17:19.060biggest. Well, this is a fan. I'm not a fan, but this is a, it's easy to see what the temptation
00:17:26.040is. You've got a party that has just come through a six-month fight. There's still some hard
00:17:32.760feelings even though the i'd say it's a two-year fight because it was a big fight to get rid of
00:17:36.120kenny and then six months to replace him that's actually true yeah so obviously despite a quite
00:17:43.240convincing show of unity on saturday with brian gene and travis daves coming out and standing
00:17:50.840there and saying all the right things through gritted teeth it was nevertheless a convincing
00:17:58.040performance but they're still out there there are still hard feelings give everybody a job something
00:18:02.720to do a reason to stay in law i can see what the argument for a larger cabinet would be don't have
00:18:08.720to like it yeah so that's uh but as for the actual composition of it um it was very well put together
00:18:16.240a mix of the old and the people who had experience which by the way is important
00:18:21.360it was mostly though she left most of the cabinet intact uh some people that she left in their
00:18:27.520positions, like Travis Taves, returned to their positions, kept Shandro in justice. Those are two
00:18:34.000of the big ones. Some people got moved around, like Sonya Savage. Some people booted, some people0.55
00:18:38.880in. But it was, for the most part, fairly status. I thought it was a very status quo cabinet,
00:18:43.600considering Danielle was coming in as very much an insurgent, shaking it up, and then0.99
00:18:49.520she shook up the cabinet. But it was a cabinet shuffle, it wasn't a new cabinet.
00:18:52.880No, you'd have to be a diehard rebel to look at that and say, well, that just isn't my cabinet. You should be able to live with that, even if you didn't vote for Danielle Smith in the leadership campaign, didn't support her as a member of caucus. You should be able to live with it.
00:19:10.760um uh what were your big takeaways uh from the the new cabinet oh similar to what nigel's saying0.97
00:19:17.300i mean she's buying caucus peace and uh i guess perhaps the the phase has moved because she's
00:19:22.840still speaking some pretty uh militant you know language about shaking up the government going
00:19:28.100after ahs uh fixing that uh still stuck you know very focused on the sovereignty uh act things like
00:19:34.640that but i think perhaps she's done rattling the party tree for a while let it settle down for a
00:19:40.420And yes, politically, the easiest way to do it is to toss as many bones as possible as you can to the caucus.
00:29:10.720Take Back Alberta, some of you guys might know, you guys do, is kind of a grassroots-y organization,
00:29:18.900kind of within the UCP orbit, and it goes out and just mobilizes people,
00:29:24.000gets them signed up to do stuff in political parties, or the UCP, I should say. It played a
00:29:30.580very significant role in the takedown of Jason Kenney. It was out there signing people up.
00:29:37.240Actually, let's back up a little bit. The last UCP convention, November 2021, the Great Eagle
00:29:43.420Casino on Susina Reserve, just next to Calgary here. Jason Kenney was bragging, my slate of
00:29:50.480candidates sweat the table. No one even came close. This talk of challenging my leadership
00:29:55.520is all a paper tiger made up mostly by the Western standard. Well, we knew better than that.
00:30:01.820But some of the media bought that. Like, they sweat the board. The UCP board, half of it comes
00:30:06.780up for election every time, plus vacancies. Kind of like the U.S. Senate, you know, kind of never
00:30:10.980turns over all at once. And his people sweat the table. But the people against them weren't even
00:30:16.200really trying. It kind of made them overconfident, which is why they didn't see the big
00:30:21.420leadership challenge coming. So then Take Back Alberta comes, and it signed up a ton of people
00:30:25.940and played a pretty big role in what was supposed to be the in-person vote on Kenny's leadership
00:30:31.100in Red Deer. They had beaten Kenny about four to one, three or four to one. Then they canceled that
00:30:36.620and changed the voting stuff. Anyway, Kenny still goes down. Take Back Alberta seems back again,
00:30:42.960And it showed up in force at this convention. It seems to both influence the policy votes, but more particularly to elect a new board of directors for the party. That board was rightfully or wrongly perceived as Kenny's board. And they swept it. There was nine positions up, and they took every single last one.
00:31:04.940So that was half the board up for re-election plus some vacancies.
00:31:07.300So these guys now hold a majority on the board of directors.
00:31:12.200And they seem to have been a little less forgiving than Smith.
00:31:14.740They came in looking to now shake up the party's establishment and governing body itself, their board.
00:31:21.520Corey, you've been around internal politics a long time, less so with the UCP.
00:31:26.700But you kind of understand how these things work.
00:31:29.060um have you ever seen like an outside group come like this to to a major party not like uh you know
00:31:35.840take we can take over the alberta green party in the afternoon yeah you me and nigel can go when
00:31:39.500we take you know vote them at the ag and i've seen them try with blocks there have been advocacy
00:31:43.900groups that have tried or slates and things like that but not something on such a large order with
00:31:48.040that many voting members to manage to do it uh but there's a whole lot i mean a party board a lot
00:31:52.940of people don't necessarily understand what the board does i mean uh you get policy discussions
00:36:39.880They will get their phone calls returned.
00:36:41.620So let's talk about what's probably most on the mind of these people coming in.
00:36:46.840So in the interview I had with Premier Smith on the Friday, I asked about, well, you know, there's these some very controversial nominations that have already been kind of snapped in ridings with Kenny loyalists, where their opposite opponents were all disqualified on what seems some pretty flimsy grounds.
00:37:07.180probably those, you know, we had Jody Gateman in Carts and Siksika, and probably most
00:37:11.440prominently Tim Hoven in Remy Rocky Mountain House Sundry with Jason Nixon. And I asked Smith about,
00:37:20.300you know, okay, what's happening with reopening these nominations? This was talked about during
00:37:23.120the leadership. She said, it's not really up to me. It's up to the party's board. The leader does
00:37:27.080not have the power to just snap the thing. A leader can get what they want if they really
00:37:32.020want to push hard enough. But I got the impression she wasn't going to spend too much political
00:37:36.400capital on it but she said uh it's up to the board and you know if the members want to want
00:37:41.120these nominations open they're going to have to elect a board that wants to do that
00:37:44.640but appears to be exactly what's happened um so nominations reopening uh
00:37:52.400let's start with you uh let's start with cory uh because i think you got a bit more background on
00:37:57.280this one um what are the chances that jason nixon has to face a contested nomination now
00:38:03.680with an opponent that doesn't get disqualified. I think quite good. That could be part of why he
00:38:08.800was jettisoned from caucus too. I mean, she has, that's the large, not caucus. Cabinet, I should
00:38:14.180say. Yes. Thank you. And that was part of what Smith campaigned on as well was saying she would
00:38:19.600reevaluate those. And that was one of the most odious. I mean, Tim Hoeven was not a radical
00:38:24.940racist or any of that kind of garbage. He was kicked out on shaky grounds. It was insulting.
00:38:31.660And there were 1,000, I think estimates was maybe 1,400 local memberships sold there.
00:45:54.120I mean, management of your constituency, for example, that's something you've got to watch your flank as a politician, no matter what party you're in.
00:46:00.200And she let that fester and get behind her and couldn't get it under her own control.
00:46:05.640I don't know necessarily if the NDP wants here.
00:46:09.600We can't presume that they would necessarily want her amidst them as well.
00:46:15.320Well, they didn't want Sandra Janssen.
00:46:37.180The reason she was upset with Kenny was she didn't get a senior cabinet portfolio because she had been used to more prominent position for one reason or another that didn't apply anymore.
00:46:48.300But it would probably be at least viewed as a win for the NDP.
00:46:52.620She might be a bit of a handle, but.1.00