Western Standard - The Pipeline： Is Kenney stacking the deck？

00:00:00.000 Music

00:00:00.500 Good evening, I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard, and you're watching The Pipeline.

00:00:23.860 today is march 23rd 2022 i'm joined as usual by western standard news editor and the head of our

00:00:31.900 calgary bureau dave nailer how you doing dave i'm well dark thank you and uh i'm visiting i guess

00:00:38.000 his studio uh it's actually my first appearance in the new studio here at our new calgary headquarters

00:00:42.760 uh western standard opinion and broadcast editor and host of triggered cory morgan how you doing

00:00:48.760 Corey. Very good. Thank you for inviting me to your space. It's much nicer. We're not sitting

00:00:59.660 on top of each other here. It's much better. Okay, well, very important things going on today that

00:01:05.960 we've got on the show is Jason Kenney stacking the deck. New last minute rule changes for the

00:01:14.600 leadership review vote of UCP Premier Jason Kenney. We're going to get into it, but it

00:01:21.420 appears very much so that he was headed for a defeat in the leadership vote scheduled for April

00:01:25.180 9th. Radical overhaul in the rules that I think many are very fairly saying is going to stack the

00:01:33.080 deck to try and keep him in power here. Quite extraordinary. And we're going to get into it

00:01:38.140 some depth. And of course, the NDP liberal axis of weasels. Trademark Sun News Network. Credit

00:01:47.140 where credit's due. Sun used to have a lot of great headlines, really good stuff. And not so

00:01:53.320 much since you left the Sun, Dave, I got to say. Sorry, I do have to credit you. It wasn't Sun News

00:01:58.780 Network. That was the old TV station. Sorry. That's gone. Post media. Yeah, post media, but on the

00:02:06.060 the Sun Chain, the Sun Chain, which is a part of Postmedia now. The Axis of Weasels, the new

00:02:13.640 liberal NDP alliance. We're going to talk about some of the politics around it and what it means

00:02:19.400 for Westerners. Before we get going, of course, we need to pay our bills. And paying the bills

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00:04:11.980 media. Let's get into it. The reason you're all here. Is Kenny stacking the deck? I mean,

00:04:19.420 the question, the question almost answers itself. Of course, Kenny, if asked, will, I'm sure will

00:04:25.340 probably not say yes. But well, let's go through the history of this. We had 22 CAs demand a

00:04:33.960 special general meeting, essentially to recall Kenny on his leadership, they wanted to vote on

00:04:38.300 his leadership. And they wanted polling stations across Alberta. Kenny's people on the board said

00:04:43.380 no, they even fought, tried to push through change of the party's constitution at their AGM in the

00:04:48.360 fall in November. That failed. They go through and they say, fine, you can have your vote,

00:04:53.160 but it's going to be a vote just in Red Deer on a single day that they believed, I think,

00:04:59.660 would play to Kenny's strengths. He's known as a great organizer, a great fundraiser.

00:05:03.620 Turned out that was a terrible idea for Jason Kenney. He might be a good organizer and fundraiser,

00:05:08.460 but his opponents are much more motivated than his supporters. And they were, I've seen the

00:05:14.220 numbers. I've seen the internal numbers from inside the party and inside groups like Take

00:05:18.140 back Alberta that are working to oust Kenny, he was going to lose. On the other side of the door

00:05:22.840 over there, we've got an office pool, and I bet Kenny was going to get 42%. I'm not so sure anymore

00:05:29.900 because they've just radically changed the rules, I think, to keep them there. Dave, why don't you

00:05:34.060 tell us about the new rules that were announced by the party today on the Kenny Leadership Review?

00:05:38.960 Well, it's a shambles, Derek, an utter shambles. They've announced it's going to be a mail-in

00:05:43.320 ballot uh they've still cut off the membership as of march 19th i believe it was uh so those

00:05:50.680 people that didn't want to pay the registration fee to go to red deer and 99 bucks to get up there

00:05:55.800 they just didn't bother to to fill in the registration or to become a member so all

00:06:01.800 those people have been excluded uh mainly those would be the the rural people uh we thought it

00:06:06.840 was going to be too far too far of a drive yeah so the big red deer gathering is off they're still

00:06:11.560 going to hold a special general meeting and it's going to be done virtually uh they're going to

00:06:16.200 refund the money so i think cory said it's about 1.5 million bucks they gotta they've got a they've

00:06:21.480 got a refund to people or of course if you wanted to just make your 99 bucks a donation to the party

00:06:28.040 they are gladly offering you that option so um it's been met with uh indignation across uh

00:06:37.800 across on the shall we say the enemy benches uh brian gene is kenny's biggest foe has issued a

00:06:44.120 statement calling it a travesty and completely against ucp rules uh i'm sure a lot of the uh

00:06:52.200 you know those 22 constituency associations that you talked about earlier uh they've got to be

00:06:57.640 pulling their hair out uh their hair out too so all sorts of questions around mail-in balloting

00:07:03.880 uh that we'll get into and how accurate it is how you know how safe a process it is but it's uh

00:07:11.640 right now the the ucp is just a party in shambles uh they're also potentially going to face lawsuits

00:07:17.320 here we're going to have i think some stories coming up on that but i'm uh i'm aware in the

00:07:20.920 background right now some legal challenges that are being mounted remember uh the ucp is essentially

00:07:25.720 a private not-for-profit corporation or a society under the societies act in alberta and its members

00:07:31.240 or shareholders effectively can sue it

00:07:33.380 if they're not following their own bylaws.

00:07:35.500 I know there's people coming through those bylaws right now

00:07:37.640 because, you know, they're not just changing the rules of the game.

00:07:43.480 I think they're just changing what the game is.

00:07:45.560 You know, when you have a political contest,

00:07:46.940 you're going to play within what the rules are to maximize your outcome.

00:07:51.800 And if the rules are you have to get your people 0.96

00:07:54.700 to become a member by a certain date,

00:07:56.380 and then they have to pay $99 by a certain date,

00:07:59.160 then they have got to drive somewhere on that specific date, vote, and go back.

00:08:03.380 That's one set of rules.

00:08:04.900 But now it's just mail-in vote.

00:08:09.180 So, like, who's going to vote, how they're going to vote, when they can vote is all different.

00:08:13.480 It's not just changing the rules of a football game.

00:08:15.880 It's like they played football for three quarters, and the last quarter they're going to play basketball.

00:08:18.900 It's just a totally different game.

00:08:20.440 And they were considering moving it to three different cities.

00:08:24.240 Yeah.

00:08:24.880 Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary, which sort of made a sense.

00:08:28.820 I mean, that hotel in Red Deer, the Cambridge, that they were going to put it in,

00:08:32.220 only has a capacity of 2,000 people.

00:08:34.300 Yeah.

00:08:34.660 So that would seem to me to be a reasonable...

00:08:38.280 That would have been changing the rules in the game,

00:08:40.100 but I think it would have been reasonable under the circumstances.

00:08:42.100 It would have been more acceptable.

00:08:43.000 You couldn't have had 15,000 or 20,000 people piling into a Red Deer hotel

00:08:46.880 on a single afternoon, not even the morning.

00:08:49.360 You couldn't have done it.

00:08:50.540 They had to do something.

00:08:52.580 But as I say, you know, you give them an inch, they take a mile.

00:08:54.840 They had to be given an inch here.

00:08:56.480 I think something had to be done.

00:08:57.800 Everybody would reasonably agree something had to be done.

00:09:00.980 You know, it was a Western Standard exclusive story.

00:09:02.600 The party was planning on just adding a voting station in Calgary and in Edmonton.

00:09:07.000 They would have voting on three separate days so the party staff could move between the cities.

00:09:11.120 That seemed to me, I know some people were crying foul at that, but I said, look, you have to do something.

00:09:16.260 And that seems, yeah, it probably gives a bit of an advantage to Kenny, but it seemed reasonable.

00:09:21.260 This is totally different, though.

00:09:23.420 Corey, I want to come to you next.

00:09:25.620 do you think this is this completely it's not even changing the rules it's just a totally new

00:09:31.100 set of rules the the old set of rules they've even just removed from their website uh yeah

00:09:36.000 and i've had people copied already yeah bylaws say in person this isn't something that's ambiguous

00:09:40.620 for an sgm is supposed to be well if there are rules in advance i don't i'd have to look at the

00:09:45.940 rules but i know the um like the ucp was created was created by virtual or mail-in and online

00:09:51.960 voting, the referendum that created the UCP was done, at least in the Wildrose side, by a mail-in

00:09:57.640 and online SGM. There were ways of doing it. But I want to come to you now about, is this going to

00:10:05.560 significantly change the outcome? Like, is this going to give Kenny a significant advantage over

00:10:11.240 what appeared to be the likely outcome under the rules that they just got rid of?

00:10:17.160 I don't know if it is, but it's certainly what they wanted to do.

00:10:20.520 Now they can work on those $10 members that they feel there must be a pool that they're

00:10:25.340 going to be able to galvanize and get to vote in favor of Kenny.

00:10:27.680 They've got to know that a move like this, so I bet you there's a number of people who

00:10:31.680 spent the $99 and were planning on supporting Kenny, and this has put them off.

00:10:35.620 Enough of these political games.

00:10:37.360 This is unprincipled.

00:10:38.940 This is not what I've signed up for.

00:10:41.160 This is a huge gamble.

00:10:42.400 It's a sign of desperation.

00:10:44.180 My bigger concern, though, is the logistics.

00:10:46.200 And I'll be talking to Daniel Smith on the show tomorrow on my show.

00:10:49.560 And I talked to her briefly today about it.

00:10:51.300 She said it's given her PTSD, the memories, because I was at the Wildrose Party when she got elected as the leader.

00:10:56.760 My wife, Jane, is the executive director, and we did a mail-in balloting for that.

00:11:00.120 There was about 13,000 eligible members.

00:11:02.680 To get 13,000 uniquely marked envelopes out to people, filled out correctly, sent back, stored, counted, we had months to do it.

00:11:14.100 And it was still a logistical nightmare.

00:11:16.840 If 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.

00:11:25.140 This is a recipe for a disaster.

00:11:26.860 Well, it could be a lot more than 20,000 now because people no longer need to go to Red Deer.

00:11:30.600 The registration thing is over.

00:11:31.840 Just anyone who's a member can vote.

00:11:34.100 It could be well over 20.

00:11:35.540 This could easily hit 40.

00:11:36.700 They have to get a ballot to every person who's eligible out.

00:11:40.020 And then whatever amount gets back.

00:11:41.420 And then, I mean, that was part of the problems.

00:11:42.600 We had questions with the Wildrose afterwards because we had ballots showing up weeks after the leadership race because of Canada Post.

00:11:49.240 I mean, well, they would need to get those ballots out now.

00:11:51.680 Yeah.

00:11:52.020 Like by the time you need to print them, get them out.

00:11:54.100 People have to have them for some time, especially people in rural areas.

00:11:57.520 People in rural areas might not have time to get their stuff and return it in time.

00:12:01.340 And you need means of controls and ways to make sure there hasn't been rigging or things like that.

00:12:05.380 You need uniquely numbered ballots.

00:12:06.900 We salted membership lists.

00:12:08.840 We did things to make sure this thing was on the up and up.

00:12:10.880 And that took months of planning and work and on a smaller scale than what the UCP is talking about.

00:12:17.580 I don't see how they can pull this off.

00:12:19.000 It's going to be a catastrophe.

00:12:20.580 Nobody's going to trust the results of this.

00:12:22.060 Nobody.

00:12:22.520 Well, let's, okay.

00:12:23.300 So we're going to, we're going to get to that in a bit about trusting the results.

00:12:28.700 I still want to go with kind of the motivations around this.

00:12:31.480 Who's the winner, who wins and who loses out of this change?

00:12:35.100 We've seen in the last few weeks and really ramping up lately,

00:12:38.160 Kenny 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.

00:12:49.720 They often play a fairly large role in Alberta politics, particularly in inner party politics, you know, in nominations and leadership races.

00:12:57.480 You know, having the right connections in those communities can be very, very influential in these races.

00:13:03.340 Kenny has spent a huge part of his career

00:13:05.240 courting ethnic and religious minority groups.

00:13:07.160 He's very good at it.

00:13:09.320 But we've seen,

00:13:12.100 actually, I don't know if Nico can pull up the video in a second,

00:13:14.780 but that video of Kenny speaking to a gathering

00:13:18.020 of some minorities in Northeast Calgary,

00:13:20.260 where he was making the case

00:13:22.360 that the people opposing him are racists.

00:13:25.940 And he pointed to one or two guys,

00:13:28.020 Todd Beasley and Brian Jean,

00:13:30.040 says these guys are racists

00:13:31.240 and more or less tried to paint all of his opponents as, like, being these guys.

00:13:35.020 These are the guys against him.

00:13:36.560 And if you oppose Kenny, like, his opponents are racist.

00:13:40.040 So, therefore, if you want to stop racism, you have to support me.

00:13:42.880 You're saying I'm going to protect you guys from these racists, these extremists, these hate-filled people.

00:13:47.080 He's been making the case to these groups that are clustered in large measure, not entirely by any means,

00:13:54.220 but in large measure, northeast Calgary and southwest Edmonton.

00:13:56.780 And 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.

00:14:11.180 That's a tough, that's a tough ask.

00:14:13.560 But now I think it gets very easy for them to vote.

00:14:18.520 And there's still questions.

00:14:20.400 Actually, we'll get into the security of the vote in a bit.

00:14:22.100 But I want to talk about the role of the ethnic vote.

00:14:25.500 Nico, do we have that video?

00:14:26.780 available? Okay, let's roll that video.

00:14:29.120 The government is leading the country.

00:14:30.920 We are keeping our commitments.

00:14:32.980 There is a new boom happening

00:14:35.140 in this province. So much great stuff

00:14:37.300 happening, but on April the 9th

00:14:39.080 it could all go into the ditch.

00:14:41.740 It could all go

00:14:42.900 offside. If this government

00:14:45.200 is disrupted,

00:14:46.960 and let me be honest,

00:14:48.720 if voices of

00:14:51.080 extreme views end up

00:14:53.080 destabilizing the mainstream

00:14:54.860 politics of this province i'm going to do something tonight that will be controversial but is

00:15:00.300 necessary you need to know what the stakes are whose men refer to it now i committed when i

00:15:07.900 became leader of this party that we would not you know we believe in freedom of speech we believe

00:15:12.860 in that and in political diversity but we are committed to this being a party rooted in the

00:15:18.780 mainstream values of Alberta, a belief in human dignity and an opposition to racism.

00:15:25.740 And that is why I committed that we would have a rigorous screening process for people

00:15:29.420 who apply to be candidates for this party. In the last election cycle, we did that.

00:15:34.940 And there were a number of people that had views or statements that were not consistent with our

00:15:42.220 Alberta values, some of whom are actively organizing to disabilize my leadership, this

00:15:47.980 party and this government right now one of those individuals is a guy named todd beasley he was

00:15:55.900 excluded as a candidate in brooks medicine hat because he had posted the following on facebook

00:16:01.180 and my apologies to our muslim friends he said quotes islam is not a religion of peace it is 0.87

00:16:07.580 cruel revolting racist oppressive and has no legitimate basis the mongols would have done 1.00

00:16:14.060 mankind a favor if they snuffed this evil when they had the chance there's another individual 0.94

00:16:23.100 he's running around the province organizing meetings like this to ask people to come to

00:16:27.420 red here on april the 9th to destabilize this government this is not an opinion it's a matter

00:16:31.980 of fact there's another individual who was just just applied for a candidacy and was excluded

00:16:37.660 who had posted on social media that uh islam is them quoting quotes islam is a death cult

00:16:47.660 we excluded this person from being a candidate and there are many many more like this we have

00:16:54.780 an individual who was just elected in fort mcmurray who said he was running against a

00:16:59.980 a nomination against Dr. Gogo, a Canadian of Nigerian origin, and this individual said

00:17:06.900 that Kenny is pushing a Nigerian economist, not a Canadian, not an Albertan, but implying

00:17:16.100 that that person doesn't belong here. Folks, I'll tell you what does not belong. As long

00:17:21.860 as I am leader of this party and premier of Alberta, voices of racism, hatred, and intolerance

00:17:29.140 will find no home in this party, in this party.

00:17:47.200 And so I'm sorry if I've offended anybody,

00:17:50.140 but you need to know that the stakes are high.

00:17:53.440 I respect Alberta democracy,

00:17:56.280 but this party must be a party that is in the mainstream if there are people with views like

00:18:01.900 that they can go and run as independents and run on other party tickets but not in this party and

00:18:08.140 that is part of what is on the ballot on april the 9th i want to thank you for being here and

00:18:14.100 i'll just close with three things i've learned in the last two years first it is a lot harder

00:18:20.640 to unite than it is to divide secondly it's a lot harder to lead through multiple

00:18:30.540 once-in-a-century crises all right well let's sit on the sidelines and thirdly it is a lot

00:18:39.400 okay well uh so there was jason kenny speaking uh that was it's a long speech but we wanted to

00:18:45.340 make sure we give the full context of it uh we could have given a shorter clip i wanted to

00:18:49.000 give the full context here uh i don't like it when anyone takes me out of context we need to

00:18:53.880 be fair to others uh so you know he was speaking about comments he didn't name brian gene but you

00:18:58.780 know the newly elected guy in brian gene quite easy to figure that out so racist that he got

00:19:03.340 vetted out of being a candidate right oh no no he was allowed to run anyway uh yeah well what

00:19:08.500 brian gene said there about a nigerian economist i think it was a bit inappropriate but i i really

00:19:13.940 wouldn't call i i've got my own feelings and critiques of brian gene racism is not one of

00:19:19.740 them uh todd beasley i think some of his comments were probably definitely over beasley's not a

00:19:26.080 player no come on let's not pretend he has much to do at all with it not meaning to be insulting

00:19:31.480 to the guy but like he's a guy in medicine hat he is probably not in the top 10 top 100 major

00:19:38.380 organizers against kenny here he is just one guy who who is against kenny so what kenny is doing

00:19:43.000 here is saying these guys are racists and they oppose me therefore my opponents are racists

00:19:48.820 and he's making this case to uh some minority groups but he's the great defender of them

00:19:53.520 without him uh a bunch of clansmen are going to be running alberta and that's that's been his

00:19:59.120 his tactic um he needs these groups to vote um membership cutoff is already done unless there's

00:20:07.420 some funny way of getting memberships to them retroactively but let's remember there's still

00:20:11.880 an active case of voter fraud ongoing from the RCMP dating back to the 2017 UCP leadership

00:20:18.140 campaign of Jason Kenney. None of that's proven in court. These are still allegations at this

00:20:22.600 point, but it's still an active and ongoing RCMP investigation. Maybe nothing will come of that.

00:20:26.840 Maybe that was all just a fugazi. But it is a real, at the very least, it's a real fear of a lot

00:20:32.880 of UCP members and Kenney critics. And mail-in votes are fairly susceptible to fraud.

00:20:41.880 doesn't mean they are like they they are a legitimate tool but they are susceptible to fraud

00:20:46.040 and it's on such a short timeline here uh i'll put this to either of you how how concerned should we

00:20:50.440 be that um you know that these members might not be able to trust the results of a mail-in vote

00:20:56.920 done like this well the only thing they could have done worse was bring in the dominion voting

00:21:01.240 machines right i mean it's they're they've changed the rules so many times that they've just shown

00:21:09.560 and they can't be trusted. And say Kenny wins by 51% and he said he's going to stay on with that

00:21:16.780 number. It can't be trusted. It can't. And then how does he go on uniting the party that way with

00:21:25.000 such a low mandate? And we're going to come to that about what happens in some of the scenarios.

00:21:31.240 We're going to come back to that. Corey, how big a role do you think Kenny's play to kind of stir

00:21:38.380 of fear in some minority communities, many of which, you know, are coming from places where

00:21:42.680 they have faced persecution in the past, but... It's playing on real fears. They have legitimate

00:21:47.100 ones. They probably, you know, Northeast Calgary, New Canadians, they have faced some racism. They

00:21:51.820 face some jerks on the streets. And if they fear that this is a movement of those sorts of jerks, 1.00

00:21:57.360 then it could be effective in galvanizing them. But it's a low brow tactic. It's one that's been 0.99

00:22:02.880 used the case Kenny before uh and it's ridiculous it may be effective in galvanizing you know new

00:22:10.280 Canadians in certain uh regions where there's a large concentrations of with UCP memberships

00:22:15.500 but at the same time the rest of the membership is getting more and more furious with this this 0.90

00:22:20.120 kind of crap play this this stuff we expect of Notley the stuff we expect of Trudeau and then 0.97

00:22:24.620 to see well this sounds a heck of a lot like a certain Trudeau quote about the unvaccinated being 0.99

00:22:28.600 racist, misogynists, and extremists. I mean, it's, what was Kenny's quote, driven by racism,

00:22:36.660 hatred, and extremism. Like, it's the same, it's the same damn thing. It might, maybe this will 0.98

00:22:45.300 be successful in getting some of them out, but the membership's already sold. You can't sell

00:22:48.900 any memberships. You can just get the current ones to vote at this point. Not every existing

00:22:52.400 member is up there. No, and it kind of reminds me a bit of Nenshi in his last election when

00:22:57.960 things could have gone either way he played the race car too the exact same thing and i mean

00:23:02.100 there's the other thing that is worrisome and i don't anticipate to be crazy but

00:23:07.560 anybody who's dealt with northeast calgary nominations and races and membership based

00:23:12.460 things it's because of different past values i mean it's a delicate area to talk about but

00:23:18.900 every party knows about it it's a challenging area to work there's a lot of people who feel

00:23:23.620 rules are something to be stretched. We dealt with that in what used to be Calgary Cross with

00:23:27.900 the Wildrose. We had four nominees, three of them, it sold 5,000 memberships each. And they were all

00:23:35.020 the exact same 5,000 people. So we had 15,000 membership applications. We cross-checked

00:23:40.140 same addresses. We went to households that supposedly had 20 people in them to disqualify

00:23:45.020 because we want to be very careful. It's very delicate up there. We had Vidor and others door

00:23:49.900 knocking and going and physically checking to be absolutely sure and sure enough there was a gross

00:23:55.420 amount of abuse of membership lists of false peoples of uh you know names and living in houses

00:24:02.560 that didn't exist well and that's i think the big reason that uh the people who brought in this

00:24:07.620 recall against kenny demanding a leadership review vote here they wanted an in-person vote

00:24:12.960 personally i i thought that online ballot is pretty modern political parties and you can do

00:24:18.240 that. It is still subject to fraud. Like there is fraud, voter fraud investigations, as we were

00:24:23.040 just talking about going back to Kenny's 2017 leadership campaign. But they wanted in-person

00:24:27.760 voting, but voting stations across Alberta and the party said no at Kenny's behest because of

00:24:33.100 the reasons we talked about. They thought having a single event in Calgary would make it harder for

00:24:36.640 people from distant rural areas to travel to, big registration fee. So it would be an organizational

00:24:42.480 fee to be like the 2016 PC, or 2016 or 17 PC leadership convention that led up to the merger

00:24:50.240 of the Wild Rose, a delegated convention, very complicated, where, you know, organizing prowess

00:24:55.660 is more important than anything else. That's what they were hoping for. But the thing is,

00:24:59.420 they had this motive, there's a motivation or enthusiasm gap between Kenny's supporters and

00:25:03.420 opponents. If you talk to Kenny supporters, like there's a reason they pretty much don't have

00:25:08.200 volunteers. There's a reason they're going around to the staff and the premier's office and

00:25:11.680 minister's offices saying, you're expected to take Friday or Thursday off or something and

00:25:15.560 make phone calls. They're not getting real volunteers. If you talk to Kenny's supporters,

00:25:21.120 such as they are, it's, you know, their answers are normally, well, it was a tough time to govern,

00:25:27.880 and I think he did, and what has been a tough time to govern, but, you know, it's a tough time,

00:25:33.160 and I think, you know, he maybe made some mistakes, but I think he made the best of it.

00:25:36.640 That'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.

00:25:50.820 It'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.

00:26:04.700 So 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.

00:26:14.420 Maybe they just would have added more pulling stations in Red Deer and surrounding Red Deer.

00:26:21.560 Okay, so let's talk about what happens in some of the different circumstances here.

00:26:26.520 Kenny could still lose. He very much could still lose.

00:26:28.900 I think this is the first indirect sign we've seen from Kenny acknowledging he could lose.

00:26:36.580 The rules would not have changed otherwise, at least in this significant way.

00:26:40.460 um but let's say he manages to hold on he gets 51 he gets 55 i mean no no leader of any party

00:26:49.500 has ever stayed on with numbers anywhere close to that normally you need well into the 70s to

00:26:54.620 stay on as the leader of a party but let's say you know and and i take him at his word on this

00:26:58.640 he gets 51 he's going to stay i i believe that he'll try let's let's go i'll go through either

00:27:04.340 of you i'll start with uh with you cory about what are there what do you think the circumstances

00:27:08.220 What happens if Kenny gets 51, 55, 56, and he says, that's it, people have spoken, I'm staying.

00:27:15.880 What happens now?

00:27:16.600 The party tears in two.

00:27:17.980 There's going to be mass floor crossings.

00:27:19.700 There's going to be members supporting whatever new entity is presented to them.

00:27:24.420 I mean, as we know, you only need four sitting MLAs in order to form an official party in the legislature.

00:27:32.660 So, 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.

00:27:39.440 Members 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.

00:27:49.320 Dave, can you hang on?

00:27:50.540 What do you think happens?

00:27:51.540 Well, I think then it becomes real for MLA is that we're a year away from the next election.

00:27:56.960 We're going to get slaughtered.

00:27:58.540 We'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.

00:28:05.380 And by then, panic stations will set in. And I think Corey's right. I think you'll see mass floor crossings.

00:28:13.320 You know, maybe all this leads into Drew Barnes' big plan of a new rural conservative party.

00:28:20.320 If he gets enough, you know, support from rural MLAs.

00:28:24.120 um yeah it's uh ndp are just sitting there uh just just laughing they don't even have to do

00:28:31.840 anything these days and you know i've talked to tons of ucp mlas will tell me you know can't use

00:28:36.520 their name here but they'll tell me i'm never running under jason kenny it actually goes the

00:28:40.120 other way around too kenny will never sign their nomination papers he will you know kenny purged

00:28:44.400 a large number of the more adamant wild rosers uh not getting too much into this because i've got a

00:28:50.220 conflict of interest in that topic. But he purged a lot of the more hardcore Wild Rosers, Pat Stier,

00:28:57.060 Wayne Anderson, Rick Strankman, a number of Wild Rosers before the last election.

00:29:05.800 He just simply puts people in place with favorable rules for nominations to take them out or just

00:29:10.300 disqualifies them, period, from running. Kenny's got a clean house if he stays as leader, and he's

00:29:14.560 not going to allow a lot of these people to seek nominations. They're going to know this. Those

00:29:17.960 MLAs will either retire or have to run with a new conservative party, because independents don't

00:29:22.940 get elected numbered. I know some of you like independents, but you all say you like independents,

00:29:27.000 but you never vote for them. So they're going to have to get with another party on the right here.

00:29:30.960 It could be Wild Rose or Cold, something else. Who knows what it is? Okay, well, we're going to

00:29:36.020 keep it moving along here. The NDP liberal axis of weasels, again, front cover of the sun. Every

00:29:44.460 once in a while they get those good old-fashioned sun headlines back. Dave, tell us about the axis

00:29:51.080 of weasels. Well, two of Canada's top weasels, Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jack Mead Singh,

00:29:58.060 apparently had high-level talks and decided, okay, let's sort of, it's not really a coalition,

00:30:06.220 but a very strong alliance and that the NDP will support the Liberals in all confidence motions

00:30:13.680 And 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.

00:30:27.840 If this happens, I'm canceling benefits for all you guys.

00:30:29.980 Yeah, well.

00:30:30.920 If the Western Standard is paying for this in taxes, I ain't paying for it in benefits on top.

00:30:37.720 Enjoy your government dental plans.

00:30:39.380 There 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.

00:30:59.580 So 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.

00:31:10.240 And, you know, we've all sort of said that Jagmeet Singh has been deputy prime minister for a while.

00:31:16.860 It 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.

00:31:27.700 So let's talk about the politics of it.

00:31:31.220 This is not the first time we've seen an agreement like this in Canada.

00:31:34.320 We've seen it at the provincial level a number of times in different provinces in Canada.

00:31:38.400 Federally, we've seen things close-ish, but generally not this formalized.

00:31:43.940 Again, it's not a technical coalition.

00:31:45.620 A coalition would have the NDP with seats in cabinet.

00:31:49.280 The government, the capital G government is a form.

00:31:52.760 The government is not the House of Commons.

00:31:54.220 It's not even necessarily the governing party.

00:31:56.440 it's the cabinet. So it's not technically a coalition government, but it's pretty damn 0.95

00:32:01.240 close. We'll call it a governing alliance. Very often when this happens, the junior partner gets

00:32:09.880 screwed in the next election. This happened in Ontario when Bob Ray's NDP was back supporting

00:32:15.740 Bill Davison's, I think, Liberals in Ontario. This was back in the 80s. It happened in BC when

00:32:26.440 The Green Party there was backing John Horgan's minority NDP government, and then they broke the deal and screwed the Greens.

00:32:33.360 And 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.

00:32:44.080 The 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.

00:32:51.400 They can't say, that was us, because it was kind of everybody.

00:32:54.200 But then they get a lot of the bad.

00:32:56.400 And so it's very dangerous for smaller parties in these coalitions.

00:33:01.600 Corey, do you think there's any major political risk for the NDP in doing this kind of deal with Trudeau?

00:33:06.140 I think there's a lot.

00:33:07.280 I think maybe Jagmeet Singh is at the point where he knows it and doesn't care.

00:33:11.020 Like, this is the most power the NDP could ever hope for.

00:33:13.100 And look at the concessions.

00:33:14.180 I mean, that's an NDP wish list that's being imposed.

00:33:17.600 Dental, pharma care is in there as well.

00:33:19.520 I mean, there's some strong labor commitments, housing for low income housing and things like that.

00:33:26.700 If he could get a bunch of those in and gets wiped out the next time around, he's probably getting tired anyways.

00:33:31.320 And then he can retire, you know, on his expensive rocking chair and look at his Rolex and buy the time away.

00:33:36.920 Unfortunately, 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.

00:33:44.700 And as soon as Trudeau thinks there's a winning element for an election, he'll call a snapper.

00:33:48.860 Well, let's remember, both will.

00:33:52.600 Coalitions or alliances of this kind only last so long as both are happy on policy level

00:33:57.840 and both don't see any political advantage to dissolving the relationship.

00:34:03.400 In British Columbia, the Greens, I think, enjoyed the policy relationship with the minority NDP of John Horgan

00:34:09.280 until John Horgan saw, oh, I'm high in the polls, everybody likes lockdowns on the left in BC.

00:34:14.480 He 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.

00:34:33.220 we're giving you some, we're giving you social justice, we're giving you woke policy, we're

00:34:37.680 giving you green policy. We're a part of making the liberals doing these things. It might be able

00:34:45.000 to go the other way around and that they can say, hey, it's not a waste to vote for the NDP now.

00:34:51.180 My concern now is the government has to do something about inflation. They have to. It's

00:34:55.920 out of control. And all these NDP-led promises of spending, billions and billions of dollars,

00:35:01.820 pharma care and dental care and god knows what else they've got cooking that's not going to stop

00:35:06.620 inflation that's going to make it worse the printing presses are going to have to go into

00:35:12.700 double overtime as opposed to just over time there's already no money the government's already

00:35:16.940 running incredible deficits we just had the debt clock come through uh calvary today when i was

00:35:21.820 with the canadian taxpayers federation in a previous life i toured it around and i was

00:35:25.900 looking at some old pictures of that debt clock tour and it was sitting around 500 something

00:35:29.980 billion. And I remember how pissed off I was, Stephen Harper. Oh, you socialists, Stephen,

00:35:35.520 you spent so much money, you're borrowing so much, you're just driving up this debt clock.

00:35:40.040 The debt clock is twice that now. It's literally broken. They've broken the debt clock. They had

00:35:45.320 to retire the debt clock that I threw around the country with, because it ran out of digits. 0.98

00:35:49.740 They had to get a whole new debt clock to add digits to the damn thing. There is no money to 0.98

00:35:54.700 be spent. So, you know, I think three of us would agree, from a policy perspective,

00:35:59.180 this is terrible. But I want to talk about the odd man out in this marriage. Let's talk about

00:36:05.240 the conservatives. I've argued for some time that one of the problems the conservatives had

00:36:11.340 is that because they've been in minority governments, they have not really had the time

00:36:15.500 to do serious genuflection, to really reflect what the hell does this party stand for? What

00:36:21.300 does it mean to be a conservative in the 21st century, the 2020s? You know, who are we? What

00:36:27.780 do we want to achieve beyond power? And you can't really do that when you expect an election around

00:36:32.760 the corner at any time. I want your thoughts now on is this potentially a good thing for the

00:36:38.100 conservative party, both in that in the next election, they'll be able to maybe lump the NDP

00:36:42.460 and liberals together, swing vote, liberal Tory swing voters be afraid of this, but also just in 0.89

00:36:47.780 terms of they're getting their own crap together internally. Is this good for the conservative 0.87

00:36:51.780 party? Let's start with you, Dave. I think so. When they initially set September for their

00:36:58.460 leadership vote, I thought, holy cow, what's to stop Justin from calling an election in July?

00:37:04.640 And they'd be still without a leader, even though the campaign's been going on for months. So I

00:37:08.840 think it is good that it's going to make a robust leadership campaign. There's going to be lots of

00:37:16.540 debate, lots of issues. There's already everybody in the dog catcher running for it already.

00:37:22.800 We'll see what the final cut is. But yeah, I think it's good for the party to have more time

00:37:29.420 to talk about things. I'm with you. And it gives them some breathing space to, and a very clear

00:37:35.780 thing to build an opposition to. They could say we are the responsible right. We are looking for

00:37:40.340 some conservative fiscal responsible principles here. And they've got a lot of big targets they

00:37:44.680 can point at and, and, and appeal to Canadians saying, you know, we're sticking to the issues

00:37:48.620 that are important. And, uh, we're going to, you know, get the budget and ballots by 2100

00:37:53.940 or something as opposed to a liberal plan. But yeah, I think it's good for the liberals.

00:37:58.700 The liberals will be lucky to do that. That was about Aaron O'Toole's plan.

00:38:02.180 Who was that? 2070. Yeah, they got time to think about it now. So I think it will be good for them.

00:38:08.040 Okay. Uh, well, we're going to end with a sponsor, a note from our sponsor, Bitcoin.

00:38:13.960 BitcoinWell. BitcoinWell is actually the first major sponsor of the Western Standard. I'd call

00:38:19.960 them almost a founding sponsor, really, as we're taking off and getting serious as a media company

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00:38:36.640 You should check out BitcoinWell. They're going to run you through tutorials about how you can

00:38:39.840 get into buying Bitcoin. We're just talking about inflation now. You don't have to use the Canadian

00:38:44.300 peso anymore. You can use real hard currency in the form of Bitcoin. So everyone here at the

00:38:49.620 Western Standard is using it. We've got something called a Bitcoin savings plan for our employees.

00:38:54.280 At the end of every month, we allow our employees to get up to 2% of their salary paid in Bitcoin.

00:39:01.420 And the Western Standard matches 2% of that. Some companies do that with RSPs. Well, we do it with

00:39:06.680 Bitcoin, because we're trying to encourage savings of good, good digital currencies that are not

00:39:11.400 going to lose their value, they can't be seized by despotic governments. This is money that the

00:39:17.500 government cannot touch no matter how hard they try. So I'm, you know, I'm a big believer in

00:39:23.580 Bitcoin, but Bitcoin well is really what's made it accessible. I've been fascinated by Bitcoin for a

00:39:28.220 long time. But getting with Bitcoin while it's really been able, what's been able to make it

00:39:32.280 accessible, not just for me, but for everyone working here at the Western Standard. And I'd

00:39:36.540 really encourage all of our listeners, all of our readers, our members to seriously check it out.

00:39:42.040 This is, I think, a big part of your financial portfolio now as a hedge against inflation,

00:39:47.420 a great way to store value and keep your money out of the dirty hands of the government.

00:39:52.760 Well, gentlemen, I've enjoyed doing this in our new studio, much, much more spacious.

00:40:00.940 Yeah, your knee hasn't banged into mine 28 times.

00:40:03.920 Well, you like it.

00:40:04.380 It's like it used to.

00:40:04.780 You like it.

00:40:05.400 Not really.

00:40:06.020 Okay. Well, thank you very much, Dave Corey, and all of you for joining us today. God bless.

Western Standard - March 24, 2022

The Pipeline： Is Kenney stacking the deck？

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