Jason Kenney is facing defeat in the UnitedCP leadership vote. Is he stacking the deck to keep his party in power? The question has been asked many times over the years, and the answer is always the same: yes.
00:10:44.180My bigger concern, though, is the logistics.
00:10:46.200And I'll be talking to Daniel Smith on the show tomorrow on my show.
00:10:49.560And I talked to her briefly today about it.
00:10:51.300She said it's given her PTSD, the memories, because I was at the Wildrose Party when she got elected as the leader.
00:10:56.760My wife, Jane, is the executive director, and we did a mail-in balloting for that.
00:11:00.120There was about 13,000 eligible members.
00:11:02.680To get 13,000 uniquely marked envelopes out to people, filled out correctly, sent back, stored, counted, we had months to do it.
00:11:14.100And it was still a logistical nightmare.
00:11:16.840If these guys think they're going to do 20,000 of them in two and some weeks when they just made that decision today, I don't see how it's even physically possible.
00:12:23.300So we're going to, we're going to get to that in a bit about trusting the results.
00:12:28.700I still want to go with kind of the motivations around this.
00:12:31.480Who's the winner, who wins and who loses out of this change?
00:12:35.100We've seen in the last few weeks and really ramping up lately,
00:12:38.160Kenny seems not to be focusing as much on the general UCP membership, but he's targeting religious and ethnic minority groups, really making the case for them to come out.
00:12:49.720They often play a fairly large role in Alberta politics, particularly in inner party politics, you know, in nominations and leadership races.
00:12:57.480You know, having the right connections in those communities can be very, very influential in these races.
00:13:03.340Kenny has spent a huge part of his career
00:13:05.240courting ethnic and religious minority groups.
00:13:36.560And if you oppose Kenny, like, his opponents are racist.
00:13:40.040So, therefore, if you want to stop racism, you have to support me.
00:13:42.880You're saying I'm going to protect you guys from these racists, these extremists, these hate-filled people.
00:13:47.080He's been making the case to these groups that are clustered in large measure, not entirely by any means,
00:13:54.220but in large measure, northeast Calgary and southwest Edmonton.
00:13:56.780And I thought setting up new polling locations in those two cities was probably trying to make it easier for them because, you know, if they're not dedicated hardcore members and they're just kind of coming out for this particular event, get them the Red Deer and pay them a hundred bucks.
00:17:56.280but this party must be a party that is in the mainstream if there are people with views like
00:18:01.900that they can go and run as independents and run on other party tickets but not in this party and
00:18:08.140that is part of what is on the ballot on april the 9th i want to thank you for being here and
00:18:14.100i'll just close with three things i've learned in the last two years first it is a lot harder
00:18:20.640to unite than it is to divide secondly it's a lot harder to lead through multiple
00:18:30.540once-in-a-century crises all right well let's sit on the sidelines and thirdly it is a lot
00:18:39.400okay well uh so there was jason kenny speaking uh that was it's a long speech but we wanted to
00:18:45.340make sure we give the full context of it uh we could have given a shorter clip i wanted to
00:18:49.000give the full context here uh i don't like it when anyone takes me out of context we need to
00:18:53.880be fair to others uh so you know he was speaking about comments he didn't name brian gene but you
00:18:58.780know the newly elected guy in brian gene quite easy to figure that out so racist that he got
00:19:03.340vetted out of being a candidate right oh no no he was allowed to run anyway uh yeah well what
00:19:08.500brian gene said there about a nigerian economist i think it was a bit inappropriate but i i really
00:19:13.940wouldn't call i i've got my own feelings and critiques of brian gene racism is not one of
00:19:19.740them uh todd beasley i think some of his comments were probably definitely over beasley's not a
00:19:26.080player no come on let's not pretend he has much to do at all with it not meaning to be insulting
00:19:31.480to the guy but like he's a guy in medicine hat he is probably not in the top 10 top 100 major
00:19:38.380organizers against kenny here he is just one guy who who is against kenny so what kenny is doing
00:19:43.000here is saying these guys are racists and they oppose me therefore my opponents are racists
00:19:48.820and he's making this case to uh some minority groups but he's the great defender of them
00:19:53.520without him uh a bunch of clansmen are going to be running alberta and that's that's been his
00:19:59.120his tactic um he needs these groups to vote um membership cutoff is already done unless there's
00:20:07.420some funny way of getting memberships to them retroactively but let's remember there's still
00:20:11.880an active case of voter fraud ongoing from the RCMP dating back to the 2017 UCP leadership
00:20:18.140campaign of Jason Kenney. None of that's proven in court. These are still allegations at this
00:20:22.600point, but it's still an active and ongoing RCMP investigation. Maybe nothing will come of that.
00:20:26.840Maybe that was all just a fugazi. But it is a real, at the very least, it's a real fear of a lot
00:20:32.880of UCP members and Kenney critics. And mail-in votes are fairly susceptible to fraud.
00:20:41.880doesn't mean they are like they they are a legitimate tool but they are susceptible to fraud
00:20:46.040and it's on such a short timeline here uh i'll put this to either of you how how concerned should we
00:20:50.440be that um you know that these members might not be able to trust the results of a mail-in vote
00:20:56.920done like this well the only thing they could have done worse was bring in the dominion voting
00:21:01.240machines right i mean it's they're they've changed the rules so many times that they've just shown
00:21:09.560and they can't be trusted. And say Kenny wins by 51% and he said he's going to stay on with that
00:21:16.780number. It can't be trusted. It can't. And then how does he go on uniting the party that way with
00:21:25.000such a low mandate? And we're going to come to that about what happens in some of the scenarios.
00:21:31.240We're going to come back to that. Corey, how big a role do you think Kenny's play to kind of stir
00:21:38.380of fear in some minority communities, many of which, you know, are coming from places where
00:21:42.680they have faced persecution in the past, but... It's playing on real fears. They have legitimate
00:21:47.100ones. They probably, you know, Northeast Calgary, New Canadians, they have faced some racism. They
00:21:51.820face some jerks on the streets. And if they fear that this is a movement of those sorts of jerks,
00:21:57.360then it could be effective in galvanizing them. But it's a low brow tactic. It's one that's been
00:22:02.880used the case Kenny before uh and it's ridiculous it may be effective in galvanizing you know new
00:22:10.280Canadians in certain uh regions where there's a large concentrations of with UCP memberships
00:22:15.500but at the same time the rest of the membership is getting more and more furious with this this
00:22:20.120kind of crap play this this stuff we expect of Notley the stuff we expect of Trudeau and then
00:22:24.620to see well this sounds a heck of a lot like a certain Trudeau quote about the unvaccinated being
00:22:28.600racist, misogynists, and extremists. I mean, it's, what was Kenny's quote, driven by racism,
00:22:36.660hatred, and extremism. Like, it's the same, it's the same damn thing. It might, maybe this will
00:22:45.300be successful in getting some of them out, but the membership's already sold. You can't sell
00:22:48.900any memberships. You can just get the current ones to vote at this point. Not every existing
00:22:52.400member is up there. No, and it kind of reminds me a bit of Nenshi in his last election when
00:22:57.960things could have gone either way he played the race car too the exact same thing and i mean
00:23:02.100there's the other thing that is worrisome and i don't anticipate to be crazy but
00:23:07.560anybody who's dealt with northeast calgary nominations and races and membership based
00:23:12.460things it's because of different past values i mean it's a delicate area to talk about but
00:23:18.900every party knows about it it's a challenging area to work there's a lot of people who feel
00:23:23.620rules are something to be stretched. We dealt with that in what used to be Calgary Cross with
00:23:27.900the Wildrose. We had four nominees, three of them, it sold 5,000 memberships each. And they were all
00:23:35.020the exact same 5,000 people. So we had 15,000 membership applications. We cross-checked
00:23:40.140same addresses. We went to households that supposedly had 20 people in them to disqualify
00:23:45.020because we want to be very careful. It's very delicate up there. We had Vidor and others door
00:23:49.900knocking and going and physically checking to be absolutely sure and sure enough there was a gross
00:23:55.420amount of abuse of membership lists of false peoples of uh you know names and living in houses
00:24:02.560that didn't exist well and that's i think the big reason that uh the people who brought in this
00:24:07.620recall against kenny demanding a leadership review vote here they wanted an in-person vote
00:24:12.960personally i i thought that online ballot is pretty modern political parties and you can do
00:24:18.240that. It is still subject to fraud. Like there is fraud, voter fraud investigations, as we were
00:24:23.040just talking about going back to Kenny's 2017 leadership campaign. But they wanted in-person
00:24:27.760voting, but voting stations across Alberta and the party said no at Kenny's behest because of
00:24:33.100the reasons we talked about. They thought having a single event in Calgary would make it harder for
00:24:36.640people from distant rural areas to travel to, big registration fee. So it would be an organizational
00:24:42.480fee to be like the 2016 PC, or 2016 or 17 PC leadership convention that led up to the merger
00:24:50.240of the Wild Rose, a delegated convention, very complicated, where, you know, organizing prowess
00:24:55.660is more important than anything else. That's what they were hoping for. But the thing is,
00:24:59.420they had this motive, there's a motivation or enthusiasm gap between Kenny's supporters and
00:25:03.420opponents. If you talk to Kenny supporters, like there's a reason they pretty much don't have
00:25:08.200volunteers. There's a reason they're going around to the staff and the premier's office and
00:25:11.680minister's offices saying, you're expected to take Friday or Thursday off or something and
00:25:15.560make phone calls. They're not getting real volunteers. If you talk to Kenny's supporters,
00:25:21.120such as they are, it's, you know, their answers are normally, well, it was a tough time to govern,
00:25:27.880and I think he did, and what has been a tough time to govern, but, you know, it's a tough time,
00:25:33.160and I think, you know, he maybe made some mistakes, but I think he made the best of it.
00:25:36.640That's the defense of Kenny. His opponents are, he took my rights away. He locked me in my house. He closed down my church. He arrested my pastor. He had kids beat up for playing hockey. He destroyed businesses.
00:25:50.820It's much more, his opponents are much, much more motivated to pay a hundred bucks, drive potentially hours and hours, stand in line for more hours and then drive home as opposed to his supporters.
00:26:04.700So that plan backfired. And that's why the rules are changing. If that original plan was still working for Kenny, I guarantee you, no matter how many people registered, they'd still be voting in Red Deer.
00:26:14.420Maybe they just would have added more pulling stations in Red Deer and surrounding Red Deer.
00:26:21.560Okay, so let's talk about what happens in some of the different circumstances here.
00:26:26.520Kenny could still lose. He very much could still lose.
00:26:28.900I think this is the first indirect sign we've seen from Kenny acknowledging he could lose.
00:26:36.580The rules would not have changed otherwise, at least in this significant way.
00:26:40.460um but let's say he manages to hold on he gets 51 he gets 55 i mean no no leader of any party
00:26:49.500has ever stayed on with numbers anywhere close to that normally you need well into the 70s to
00:26:54.620stay on as the leader of a party but let's say you know and and i take him at his word on this
00:26:58.640he gets 51 he's going to stay i i believe that he'll try let's let's go i'll go through either
00:27:04.340of you i'll start with uh with you cory about what are there what do you think the circumstances
00:27:08.220What happens if Kenny gets 51, 55, 56, and he says, that's it, people have spoken, I'm staying.
00:27:17.980There's going to be mass floor crossings.
00:27:19.700There's going to be members supporting whatever new entity is presented to them.
00:27:24.420I mean, as we know, you only need four sitting MLAs in order to form an official party in the legislature.
00:27:32.660So, I mean, if you get 10 or 15 or 20 of them, and I could very conceivably see that and say, you know what, we're out.
00:27:39.440Members are going to move towards M-support, and we're very well close back to that old Wildrose PC sort of scenario we were looking at, and Rachel Notley is going to grin ear to ear.
00:27:58.540We're going to lose our jobs and we're going to be, you know, we're not going to be on the on the public teat anymore.
00:28:05.380And by then, panic stations will set in. And I think Corey's right. I think you'll see mass floor crossings.
00:28:13.320You know, maybe all this leads into Drew Barnes' big plan of a new rural conservative party.
00:28:20.320If he gets enough, you know, support from rural MLAs.
00:28:24.120um yeah it's uh ndp are just sitting there uh just just laughing they don't even have to do
00:28:31.840anything these days and you know i've talked to tons of ucp mlas will tell me you know can't use
00:28:36.520their name here but they'll tell me i'm never running under jason kenny it actually goes the
00:28:40.120other way around too kenny will never sign their nomination papers he will you know kenny purged
00:28:44.400a large number of the more adamant wild rosers uh not getting too much into this because i've got a
00:28:50.220conflict of interest in that topic. But he purged a lot of the more hardcore Wild Rosers, Pat Stier,
00:28:57.060Wayne Anderson, Rick Strankman, a number of Wild Rosers before the last election.
00:29:05.800He just simply puts people in place with favorable rules for nominations to take them out or just
00:29:10.300disqualifies them, period, from running. Kenny's got a clean house if he stays as leader, and he's
00:29:14.560not going to allow a lot of these people to seek nominations. They're going to know this. Those
00:29:17.960MLAs will either retire or have to run with a new conservative party, because independents don't
00:29:22.940get elected numbered. I know some of you like independents, but you all say you like independents,
00:29:27.000but you never vote for them. So they're going to have to get with another party on the right here.
00:29:30.960It could be Wild Rose or Cold, something else. Who knows what it is? Okay, well, we're going to
00:29:36.020keep it moving along here. The NDP liberal axis of weasels, again, front cover of the sun. Every
00:29:44.460once in a while they get those good old-fashioned sun headlines back. Dave, tell us about the axis
00:29:51.080of weasels. Well, two of Canada's top weasels, Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jack Mead Singh,
00:29:58.060apparently had high-level talks and decided, okay, let's sort of, it's not really a coalition,
00:30:06.220but a very strong alliance and that the NDP will support the Liberals in all confidence motions
00:30:13.680And in return, they get some of the stuff that the NDP have been after for years, including possibly a $5 billion dental care program, free dentistry for kids, families.
00:30:27.840If this happens, I'm canceling benefits for all you guys.
00:30:39.380There you go. We can all go to Mexico when Dr. Corey's dentist. And the other sort of important news today is that they're going to introduce a law banning replacement workers, you know, the so-called scabs who are critical to keeping companies operating during these labor movements.
00:30:59.580So it's a deal that, you know, if everybody sticks to their word, is going to keep the Trudeau administration in place for their entire reign.
00:31:10.240And, you know, we've all sort of said that Jagmeet Singh has been deputy prime minister for a while.
00:31:16.860It puts him in the position of power that he was probably as close to as he was ever going to get and, you know, probably infuriates a lot of his base.
00:31:27.700So let's talk about the politics of it.
00:31:31.220This is not the first time we've seen an agreement like this in Canada.
00:31:34.320We've seen it at the provincial level a number of times in different provinces in Canada.
00:31:38.400Federally, we've seen things close-ish, but generally not this formalized.
00:31:43.940Again, it's not a technical coalition.
00:31:45.620A coalition would have the NDP with seats in cabinet.
00:31:49.280The government, the capital G government is a form.
00:31:52.760The government is not the House of Commons.
00:31:54.220It's not even necessarily the governing party.
00:31:56.440it's the cabinet. So it's not technically a coalition government, but it's pretty damn
00:32:01.240close. We'll call it a governing alliance. Very often when this happens, the junior partner gets
00:32:09.880screwed in the next election. This happened in Ontario when Bob Ray's NDP was back supporting
00:32:15.740Bill Davison's, I think, Liberals in Ontario. This was back in the 80s. It happened in BC when
00:32:26.440The Green Party there was backing John Horgan's minority NDP government, and then they broke the deal and screwed the Greens.
00:32:33.360And very famously, it happened in the United Kingdom, where you had the Liberal Democrats in a formal coalition government with David Cameron's Conservative Party.
00:32:44.080The smaller party often does very poorly in the election that comes after, because they can't take a ton of the credit for everything that happened, but they get all the blame.
00:32:51.400They can't say, that was us, because it was kind of everybody.
00:33:14.180I mean, that's an NDP wish list that's being imposed.
00:33:17.600Dental, pharma care is in there as well.
00:33:19.520I mean, there's some strong labor commitments, housing for low income housing and things like that.
00:33:26.700If he could get a bunch of those in and gets wiped out the next time around, he's probably getting tired anyways.
00:33:31.320And then he can retire, you know, on his expensive rocking chair and look at his Rolex and buy the time away.
00:33:36.920Unfortunately, for the ones who get screwed, they're the ideological NDP members who had to sit through this coalition until it becomes inconvenient for Justin.
00:33:44.700And as soon as Trudeau thinks there's a winning element for an election, he'll call a snapper.
00:33:52.600Coalitions or alliances of this kind only last so long as both are happy on policy level
00:33:57.840and both don't see any political advantage to dissolving the relationship.
00:34:03.400In British Columbia, the Greens, I think, enjoyed the policy relationship with the minority NDP of John Horgan
00:34:09.280until John Horgan saw, oh, I'm high in the polls, everybody likes lockdowns on the left in BC.
00:34:14.480He broke the agreement unilaterally, called the election. Greens got trounced. But maybe it's a potential win for the NDP here, because the NDP might now be able to go back to its supporters and say, we're not just a party of yelling about socialism.
00:34:33.220we're giving you some, we're giving you social justice, we're giving you woke policy, we're
00:34:37.680giving you green policy. We're a part of making the liberals doing these things. It might be able
00:34:45.000to go the other way around and that they can say, hey, it's not a waste to vote for the NDP now.
00:34:51.180My concern now is the government has to do something about inflation. They have to. It's
00:34:55.920out of control. And all these NDP-led promises of spending, billions and billions of dollars,
00:35:01.820pharma care and dental care and god knows what else they've got cooking that's not going to stop
00:35:06.620inflation that's going to make it worse the printing presses are going to have to go into
00:35:12.700double overtime as opposed to just over time there's already no money the government's already
00:35:16.940running incredible deficits we just had the debt clock come through uh calvary today when i was
00:35:21.820with the canadian taxpayers federation in a previous life i toured it around and i was
00:35:25.900looking at some old pictures of that debt clock tour and it was sitting around 500 something
00:35:29.980billion. And I remember how pissed off I was, Stephen Harper. Oh, you socialists, Stephen,
00:35:35.520you spent so much money, you're borrowing so much, you're just driving up this debt clock.
00:35:40.040The debt clock is twice that now. It's literally broken. They've broken the debt clock. They had
00:35:45.320to retire the debt clock that I threw around the country with, because it ran out of digits.
00:35:49.740They had to get a whole new debt clock to add digits to the damn thing. There is no money to
00:35:54.700be spent. So, you know, I think three of us would agree, from a policy perspective,
00:35:59.180this is terrible. But I want to talk about the odd man out in this marriage. Let's talk about
00:36:05.240the conservatives. I've argued for some time that one of the problems the conservatives had
00:36:11.340is that because they've been in minority governments, they have not really had the time
00:36:15.500to do serious genuflection, to really reflect what the hell does this party stand for? What
00:36:21.300does it mean to be a conservative in the 21st century, the 2020s? You know, who are we? What
00:36:27.780do we want to achieve beyond power? And you can't really do that when you expect an election around
00:36:32.760the corner at any time. I want your thoughts now on is this potentially a good thing for the
00:36:38.100conservative party, both in that in the next election, they'll be able to maybe lump the NDP
00:36:42.460and liberals together, swing vote, liberal Tory swing voters be afraid of this, but also just in
00:36:47.780terms of they're getting their own crap together internally. Is this good for the conservative
00:36:51.780party? Let's start with you, Dave. I think so. When they initially set September for their
00:36:58.460leadership vote, I thought, holy cow, what's to stop Justin from calling an election in July?
00:37:04.640And they'd be still without a leader, even though the campaign's been going on for months. So I
00:37:08.840think it is good that it's going to make a robust leadership campaign. There's going to be lots of
00:37:16.540debate, lots of issues. There's already everybody in the dog catcher running for it already.
00:37:22.800We'll see what the final cut is. But yeah, I think it's good for the party to have more time
00:37:29.420to talk about things. I'm with you. And it gives them some breathing space to, and a very clear
00:37:35.780thing to build an opposition to. They could say we are the responsible right. We are looking for
00:37:40.340some conservative fiscal responsible principles here. And they've got a lot of big targets they
00:37:44.680can point at and, and, and appeal to Canadians saying, you know, we're sticking to the issues
00:37:48.620that are important. And, uh, we're going to, you know, get the budget and ballots by 2100
00:37:53.940or something as opposed to a liberal plan. But yeah, I think it's good for the liberals.
00:37:58.700The liberals will be lucky to do that. That was about Aaron O'Toole's plan.
00:38:02.180Who was that? 2070. Yeah, they got time to think about it now. So I think it will be good for them.
00:38:08.040Okay. Uh, well, we're going to end with a sponsor, a note from our sponsor, Bitcoin.
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00:39:52.760Well, gentlemen, I've enjoyed doing this in our new studio, much, much more spacious.
00:40:00.940Yeah, your knee hasn't banged into mine 28 times.