Western Standard - June 27, 2023


They just don't get Poilievre, do they？

Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Brian Mulroney Justin Trudeau Joe Clark Stephen Harper Martin Wolf Belinda Stronick Preston Manning Chantal Hubert David Musgrove Andrew Coyne Jean Charest Polièvre
Who do you trust on oil predictions, the Liberal government or OPEC？ Cory Morgan Show. The age of ESG has finally ended

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

138.01

Word count

730

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Nigel Hannaford: Is Pierre Polyaev a liability to his party and is wasting his chance to become Prime Minister? The Western Standard's own editor-in-chief, Nigel Hanaford, argues that the real problem is that Canadians are not angry enough.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert tells it, Pierre Polyaev is a liability to his party and is wasting his chance to become Prime Minister.
00:00:10.900 Women don't like him, writes the Globe and Mail's Marie Wolfe.
00:00:15.320 I've known Pierre for 20 years and I can't say I've ever noticed that, but Marie Wolfe says he shouldn't be so quick to press the anger button. 0.56
00:00:23.840 David Musgropp, a Canadian writing in the Washington Post, says he's a phony and a loudmouth. 0.91
00:00:32.000 And Andrew Coyne, who I always thought was a Conservative, says, God, Polyaev is a thug. 0.95
00:00:39.940 One could go on. He's a busted flush, you see, and to the delight of the Eastern writers who truly understand Canadian politics,
00:00:47.820 former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney recently heaped praise upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's leadership
00:00:54.600 while conspicuously neglecting to make any mention of Polyaev.
00:01:00.660 There really is no accounting for tastes.
00:01:04.140 But the fact there's a Conservative Party of Canada for Polyaev to lead is very much related
00:01:09.320 to decisions Mulroney made that blew up the old progressive Conservatives.
00:01:14.400 Remember that Winnipeg CF-18 fiasco?
00:01:17.820 But those who wish Pierre Polyaev well should not be alarmed at the media pile-on as Parliament wraps up for the summer.
00:01:27.060 If he could choose his critics, these would be the ones he would pick.
00:01:31.820 All those folks who circulate their ideas through the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the CBC
00:01:37.740 and having reviewed each other's work, figure they have taken the pulse of the nation.
00:01:41.940 Now, to concede the smoke that is assumed to indicate the presence of a raging fire,
00:01:49.740 a recent Leger poll did suggest that if an election had been held in May,
00:01:55.220 Trudeau would have had a sporting chance of forming another minority government and a fourth consecutive term.
00:02:01.760 Not a certainty, but it was not impossible.
00:02:04.580 Okay, pundits have also decided that the failure of the Polyaev team to break through in any of the recent by-elections
00:02:13.320 represents a stalled party.
00:02:17.220 Again, fair enough.
00:02:19.420 However, if a week is a long time in politics,
00:02:22.200 the more than two years before the next scheduled election is a really long time,
00:02:28.380 and by-elections in safe seats with a 40% turnout seldom produce surprising results.
00:02:35.440 Remember, 20 years ago, the same kind of people were saying the same kind of thing about Stephen Harper.
00:02:42.160 He then went on to be Prime Minister for nearly 10 years.
00:02:45.160 Let us just remember that 20 years ago, it was Preston Manning's efforts to draw the PCs
00:02:51.960 into his United Alternative that were rebuffed, first by PC leader Jean Charest,
00:02:58.360 who was completely blown out in last year's CPC leadership race,
00:03:03.500 then by former Prime Minister Joe Clark, when he took over leadership of the failing PC party.
00:03:10.120 Clark himself was utterly dismissive of the United Conservative movement under Harper.
00:03:16.080 Oh, it would have wonderful debates, he said, but could never form a government.
00:03:20.480 It's hard to remember that we ever listened to these people.
00:03:24.760 But with the well-known attraction of reporters to conflict and personalities,
00:03:29.360 a discouraging word from Clark was a story, and Belinda Stronick's defection,
00:03:34.860 a wound from which the party recovered by bedtime,
00:03:37.920 was a sensational development.
00:03:40.120 And when Stockwell Day famously conducted a lakeside presser,
00:03:44.920 his wetsuit arrival on a jet ski was the story, not what he said.
00:03:49.680 So here's the thing.
00:03:51.640 Perhaps the issue is less that Polièvre is too angry,
00:03:57.380 than that Canadians are not angry enough.
00:04:01.760 Notwithstanding the soothing praise Mr. Mulroney lavished on Mr. Trudeau,
00:04:05.860 what should you feel other than anger when the Prime Minister apparently failed to heed security warnings about Chinese electoral interference,
00:04:16.880 doubled the national debt to look like a COVID hero,
00:04:20.920 insults hard-working Canadians who pay their taxes and play by the rules, 0.95
00:04:25.720 sets out to destroy Alberta's energy industry that funds equalization,
00:04:29.840 and represents 10% of Canada's GDP.
00:04:34.720 Again, one could go on.
00:04:36.140 The F-35 debacle,
00:04:38.120 the ethical violations,
00:04:39.940 the strong-arming of a Solicitor General,
00:04:42.440 prancing about in blackface, 0.90
00:04:44.480 paying off a terrorist,
00:04:46.220 but telling Canadian veterans
00:04:47.820 there was no money for them.
00:04:49.980 And then weaving and dodging in question period
00:04:53.160 under Polièvre's skilful interrogation.
00:04:58.360 A thug?
00:04:59.440 A phony? 0.99
00:05:01.140 A loudmouth?
00:05:02.340 Not at all.
00:05:04.600 It's just time somebody like him
00:05:07.540 asked some of the questions that need to be answered.
00:05:12.860 For the Western Standard,
00:05:14.960 I'm Nigel Hannaford.
00:05:16.040 Thank you.