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00:00:01
The News Boys
69 Plays4 years ago
We talk with Scott Schmidt and Jeremy Appel of the Medicine Hat News. We learn how they carved out a space for themselves in the Alberta political discourse as two of the only members of the mainstream media willing to say that THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS! when it comes to Jason Kenney’s regime. For the full show notes, head to www.theprogressreport.ca/the_news_boys
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Transcript
Interrogation Scene
00:00:01
Speaker
Tell me how many lights you see. How many? How many lights? This is your last chance. The guards are coming. Don't be a stubborn fool.
00:00:37
Speaker
There! Oh! Four times!
Introduction and Guests
00:01:01
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskichiwa Skygan, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treatisex territory, and today we have two people on the line. And I don't use the word hero often, because what's a hero?
00:01:19
Speaker
But today we have two true blue Albertan heroes in Jeremy Appel and Scott Schmitt with the Medicine Hat News. And that's them cackling in the background there. Jeremy is a reporter covering the education and justice beat with Medicine Hat News. And Scott Schmitt is the layout editor and also an extremely popular columnist, also with the Medicine Hat News.
00:01:41
Speaker
Scott and Jeremy have carved out an incredible space for themselves in the Alberta political and media discourse as two of the only members of the mainstream media willing to say that there are four lights when it comes to Jason Kenney and Alberta politics.
00:01:57
Speaker
And I hope you got that, uh, Picard reference. I haven't had a chance to watch the new show, but I'm just, as Jim tells me, it's really good. Also joining us today on the line, uh, just actually in studio with me is ketchup man himself, Jim story, our producer. Hey folks, it's a real dude's rock episode, uh, an all bro episode of the progress report, but Jeremy and Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Yeah. It's, uh, great to be here, uh, don't get me.
Medicine Hat Community and Industry
00:02:25
Speaker
And by here, I mean in Scott's basement. Yeah, the magic of the internet and recording technology is bringing us together. But it is a modern miracle, not the ones that the, like, petro-nationalists talk about, but we won't, we'll get into those folks later. So, okay.
00:02:44
Speaker
like magnets. So so y'all are in medicine hat and medicine hat is, you know, a relatively small city in southeastern Alberta. I mean, kind of like for the people who listen to this pod who have never been to medicine hat or have only ever been kind of very briefly, like what what the hell is it like describe medicine hat to the folks who listen to progress, Alberta. Okay, so I'll go do this because I've been here longer. It's like the
00:03:12
Speaker
Metrics Club that I guess serves like 63,000 people and we're right obviously in the little southeast corner here. The thing about Medicine Hat is it's both the epicenter of conservatism, but also this really sort of tight knit community group where people take care of each other really well down here. We have easily the best weather in the province, which is a huge selling point.
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's a nice little town actually. We're supposedly the sunshine capital of the country.
00:03:48
Speaker
I mean, here's what I know about Medicine Hat. I know that it's tucked away in that southeast corner. I know you guys own a shit ton of natural gas wells. The city itself is actually a player or was a player in natural gas production and that their utility and all the heating and everything runs off natural gas and that's a very explicit strategic choice because the city owned natural gas assets and they decided to run the city off natural gas.
00:04:16
Speaker
It's like quasi post industrial, you know, like medicine hat used to have a ceramics manufacturing plant called medalta, which I think is like, kind of cool. You don't really think of like, sorry, it's actually a really cool museum. Now that they spend a lot of money restoring and it's like a heritage site now. And they sort of unearth some of the old camp kilns and stuff that were there and
00:04:41
Speaker
They brought an archeologist actually and to do the dig to go through and you can walk over this like glass floor that kind of goes over top of some of this stuff that they've done and a lot of the old history is in there. It's really quite a nice facility now. And you know, the fact that it was once this booming ceramics factory and now it's a museum, I think speaks somewhat to the economic decline of medicine hat in particular.
00:05:10
Speaker
Hubbard in general. Yeah. And I mean, and the reason why there was a ceramics factory was because there was cheap natural gas, right? They could fire the kilns off the natural gas. And if you, and if you go, and if, and if you go antiquing in Western Canada, you can still find like medalta, the casserole dishes and like medalta, sour, sauerkraut crocs. And, uh, and it's just a, like a little like, uh, forgotten bit of Alberta history that there was this, this thing. You can actually still get that stuff.
00:05:39
Speaker
and uh it's still really good stuff um it's a neat little yeah it's a nice spot it's when you mention the natural gas it's funny because like i just remember like back in the day they used to just dig their own wells here like you wanted natural gas for your building or whatever you just dug a well and they had these these open pits of natural gas coming up all over the city and we just had to knock down a building and like that's been up this well in the back that was like
Medicine Hat News and Media Independence
00:06:09
Speaker
it's been like a shiny restaurant and then it was a saloon and it's just like this absolute environmental disaster and it was it was only maybe six months ago now that they finally knocked it down or a year ago that they knocked it down and then they tried to find the well and they couldn't find it and oh it was absolutely hilarious if you like that sort of
00:06:30
Speaker
I mean, every other backyard has a natural gas well in it and it's just like, oh shit. So the other thing I think is important to set the stage for our chat as well is like the Medicine Hat News. I mean, you've kind of come onto the radar of Albertans as folks who are willing to say, willing to tell the truth about how this United Conservative Party is running this province and the brutal austerity that they're
00:06:54
Speaker
committing on us as well as the just like outright like lies and spin and obfuscation and bullshit that they're like happy to peddle in. But like, you guys both work at the Medicine Hat News. Can you like describe the newsroom to us and like who owns it and how long you've worked there? Well, it's, you know, it's a daily paper in a city of 63,000 people, which is, you know, I think somewhat unique.
00:07:25
Speaker
It's, we're owned by, you know, a lot of people on social media, you know, I've seen, assume that we're this, you know, independent, truly local paper. But we're actually owned by Glacier Media, which is a, you know, it's not post media or tourist art, but it's a big multinational
00:07:51
Speaker
news conglomerate, and it's owned by a fellow named David Radler, who, if you want to learn more about him, I would recommend googling him. He's been around the business a while.
00:08:05
Speaker
He was a confederate of Lord Conrad Black, if I remember correctly, and was deeply involved in his fraud case. I mean, I don't want to get you guys in trouble with your ultimate boss here, but he is a bit of a figure. And yeah, his Wikipedia entry is highly interesting if you do want to learn more about Conrad Black. I think what I would say is that he, you know,
00:08:32
Speaker
He's obviously been in charge of the companies, or own the company, since I've been there, and that's about 10 years. And I've probably only been in the same room with them four or five times and never actually met him personally. But it's probably true to say that he wouldn't love what we're writing, the two of us necessarily. But at the same time, I've been sitting at the news desk for eight and a half of those 10 years, and I've not one time ever had content fed to me from another
00:09:03
Speaker
like a suspect source or the top or anything like that. So he definitely allows, certainly our publisher, the autonomy to make the choices that she makes for content, which is all I can really ask for. It's kind of surreal how low the bar has been set for conservative media barons. They let you print these columns and they seem heroic.
00:09:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough that we're at this place right now where it's considered either heroism or absolutely deplorable, depending on who you talk to, that we're a media source that is willing to criticize the government. That's literally what the media is there for. If the media isn't holding the government to account, that's a huge
00:09:58
Speaker
get to democracy. Right. And I think it says more about the particular media landscape in this country, and also to an even greater extent, Alberta, that what we're doing is seen as, you know, this anomaly in this, you know, truth speaking exercise, when it's really I mean, it's the role of journalists and media to hold
00:10:28
Speaker
public figure to a camp.
00:10:31
Speaker
Well, there aren't many of you left doing it at this point, right? Like, who can you rattle off, Duncan, as voices in Alberta media who are willing to criticize the government at this point? Like Charles Ruznell, maybe Catherine Krakowski. Graham Thompson has a column like every other week, maybe. Keith Garine did it a little bit very tepidly and got pushed off that file pretty fast. But I would criticize, I would characterize any criticism of this government from the media as like,
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah, incredibly tepid, right? It's great that there are people out there and I don't know what kind of pressure anyone else feels from anyone, but I think that there's this general either fear or pressure or something when you do go against the conservative grain with your commentary that you lighten the load so as to not ruffle too many feathers because the echo chamber is strong here and people just tend to
00:11:30
Speaker
sort of come down harder on when you're more, you know, if, if you actually acted like a, you know, wrote like a Rick Bell, if anybody wrote like he would curiosize the left, they would be, you know, they feel like they would be random. Yeah.
00:11:50
Speaker
Well, however, however it worked out, whatever confluence of circumstances occurred so that you two are there in Medicine Hat, occasionally able to write true things about this government. I'm very grateful for it. Jeremy, I know there was one thing that really kind of happened in the past few months that got the attention of not just people across Alberta, but really folks across Canada. And this was,
00:12:15
Speaker
you know the war room launched and you know the war room kind of continually kept shooting itself in the dick and one of the times that they did this was um was when you wrote an op-ed for the medicine hat news about the war room and then they reached out to you can you uh just like just tell that story and and walk us through what happened so i i mean i guess it starts i mean i've been writing uh op-eds
00:12:42
Speaker
Um, since I've been at this paper and, and before, um, you know, I, I worked at the white court star for like half a year and I would also write op-eds there, but you know, no, it's the white court paper. It was owned by Postmedia, but I've been writing op-eds, you know, some of them were, uh, you know, got, got a bit of traction, you know, some likes and retweets on Twitter, but, um, it's sort of, uh, an outlet.
00:13:12
Speaker
um, I think as a reporter, I find quite valuable to be able to report the news. And then, you know, because when you're reporting, you're talking to people, you're getting a variety of perspectives, but there's no room for there to, for you to come out and say, you know, who you think is right and who you think is wrong.
Op-Eds and Government Criticism
00:13:30
Speaker
And so, um, I found that for reporters, um, and that's sort of a benefit of being at a relatively small newspaper. Um, you can,
00:13:41
Speaker
also provide your opinions on things and analyze them like the social animals we are. So Scott started writing his column, I believe it is in late September 2019. And he definitely pushed me, I would say not necessarily intentionally, but his column
00:14:08
Speaker
you know, pushed me to take a more blunt approach. And, you know, I think it may have been a bit of a snowballing effect where each of us would, you know, rip off each other. But, so the war room, this was in December, if I recall correctly,
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, the headline here is, the headline that I've got in front of me is, opinion, colon, energy war room, an expensive joke at best. Yes. And so what I was amazed by by that announcement was the contrast between, you know, on the campaign trail, they're saying they're going to set up a war room to
00:14:59
Speaker
fight the provinces enemies that are foreign funded and lying. And then you have this announcement and it's like, we're the Canadian energy center and we're just going to respectfully, you know, promote the image of Canada's energy industry. So, you know, you have on the one hand, a war room that is respectful. And I just thought that that was, you know, it was absurd.
00:15:28
Speaker
And I, you know, I started off that column with a reference to, you know, Dr. Strangelove. Because I think it highlights that I'm sorry to be that they're saying, this is a war room, but we're gonna be nice. There's no fighting war. And pop culture is just like something for me that I think I use to understand the world.
00:15:57
Speaker
um without maybe despairing um and i think um a lot of people are like that too um to a lesser extent but um so i read this editorial and you know it does fairly well on social media when i tweeted it out like maybe probably a bit better than usual and then um monday comes around i
00:16:23
Speaker
go into my office and, well, the office and check my email as, you know, in early June morning. And there was an email from Grady Simmons of the Canadian Energy Centre sent to me and our publisher. And I can read it for you here. I have it in front of me. Good morning. I just wanted to reach out to let you know that we will provide a response to clarify many of the comments in inaccuracies in Mr. Bell's column.
00:16:53
Speaker
to write a link to it. I will have you something on Monday afternoon and would appreciate it if you could run it as an op-ed as quickly as possible. Thanks. Now, when I got this email, my first instinct was to just screenshot it and tweet it out. And I told the world to bring it on.
00:17:23
Speaker
You know, and there was sort of a debate, I think, on Alberta Twitter about whether we should run their op-ed or not. And I'm not privy to those decisions, and I understand both sides. But I would say that I think anyone can read my op-ed and read theirs, which was obviously written in advance. They just shoehorned in a paragraph
00:17:51
Speaker
medicine hats, gas wells being shut down, which is a bit of a cell phone. But yeah, I mean, it was like a mad lib, and it, you know, I don't think it detracted from anything I would say at all, which is, in the events of the next week, sort of bore that out, that word was an expensive joke.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I have my opinion around what you folks should have done about running that op-ed. But I'm curious if any of the actual lies or inaccuracies were mentioned in the op-ed, because I find this is an extremely common thread. We have this whole inquire, we have this war room that's based around countering the lies and misinformation inaccuracies. Did they actually find any lies, inaccuracies, misinformation, anything you had to correct or apologize for in your original op-ed? Not in the slightest. Again, it was all very general.
00:18:45
Speaker
Um, just saying, Hey, this is the war room and this is what we're here to do. I'm sorry, the Canadian iron design. He mentioned medicine hat long enough to suggest that we, we really have benefited off this industry as a whole. So that's neat. And then that was sort of the paragraph that he thrown in to this clearly stock. Yeah. I think the Canadian energy center has like a mat lib.
00:19:12
Speaker
for like their responses to, you know, subversive content, you know, shoehorning the city and local connections in the oil and gas industry. And then the rest is just how they put themselves into a pretty awkward position. And this is a
00:19:31
Speaker
really a problem of their own making, right? They make up this enemy, this like phantom threat of foreign interference, trying to sabotage our industry, create a whole war room around it, and then they go to war with an entity that doesn't really exist. So what's left to do except pay Tom Olsen and his chums $30 million a year to do like blog posts about, did you know greenhouse is run off of natural gas sometimes?
00:19:58
Speaker
Did you know that plastic is made out of oil and gas? I mean, most of the fighting the war room has been doing is just defending itself. I think that they're actually like more, I think it's more calculated than simply like what like this is all we can do.
Political Distractions and Systemic Issues
00:20:14
Speaker
Like I think every aspect of this is just part of the theatrics and the distraction that they went for.
00:20:22
Speaker
when they started picking all these fights. Cause it isn't, it isn't just foreign radicals. It's Trudeau and it's BC and it's, uh, unions and it's anyway, like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna pass law preemptive laws now about protesters on, on private property because of, and we'll say it's about Turkey farms, but it's obviously preemptive stuff for future oil stuff. Like it's all about one thing, right? And it's not to,
00:20:52
Speaker
They already know that Albertans are sold on oil and gas. I mean, like we walk around and I love oil and gas t-shirts for crying out loud. Like people are sold. It's not so that like it's clearly just to continue to keep people focused on. Look over there because what we're going to do here is give all the revenue to the CEOs and we're going to basically
00:21:21
Speaker
got this place in favor of this industry. I mean, that's honestly what these moves are doing right now. A lot of it is about just the appearance of being busy, like looking like you're doing some work. Look how hard working they are. We recorded this on a Saturday. We're the kings of overtime. Okay.
00:21:44
Speaker
Okay, so I know, Jeremy, you're this fly-by-nighter Toronto, you're the Central Canadian Laurentian elite. Scott is a real, you know, salt-of-the-earth prairie boy, you know, grew up in Saskatchewan, has been in Medicine Hatford. How long have you been in Medicine Hatford now, Scott? I moved here originally in 97. I left a little bit, but I've only not lived in Alberta for one year. It's a very short year in Winnipeg.
00:22:11
Speaker
So, so true blue Albertan on the line here, genuine hero. Um, you know, you started writing your pull, no punches column in September. I mean, I'm curious about like the Genesis ever, right? Like you've got a job, you got a comfortable position as the layout editor. I mean, relatively comfortable position as a layout editor. Why did you decide to like add to your workload and, uh, decide to get conservatives mad at you for, um, you know, writing this column that was so focused on telling the truth. Yeah. Um, I actually, uh, it just came to a breaking point to be honest with you, like,
00:22:41
Speaker
I think anyone that's paying any attention is aware of real systemic issues in our society. And we never talk about them. And I would go back and forth between, I could focus on my wife and family and ignore politics as best as I could. And I could try to find happiness that way. And then eventually I would feel awful that I'm ignoring this worldwide problem. And then I would put
00:23:11
Speaker
all my focus into that, you know, and I would start feeling like, oh man, I'm neglecting my, my home life and it would go back and forth. And I just finally, you know, a few months after the election, when everything started to happen exactly as most of us knew would happen, the moves toward privatization and, and spending like gutting spending in public sector attacks and things like this.
00:23:40
Speaker
I just sort of hit this breaking point where I needed to find a balance between like paying attention and having family that still loves me, you know? And so when I was having one of my moments in my publisher's office one day where I just was going off about, you know, the state of not only society, but just journalism and not even from a journalist standpoint, sometimes just how we're sort of, we're, we're,
00:24:09
Speaker
were tunneled down certain directions. Like you get statements and you get a little scrum where you get to talk to people. You never really get to ask follow-ups and do your job. And I was just like, somebody needs to start doing something. And my boss was like, you should just start writing. And I said, okay. So I did a, I started with a four part series that just ran four days in a row. And it was about the McKinnon report that had just come out. And it was essentially me warning
00:24:35
Speaker
exactly what we've already started doing like to the team like this is what's going to happen and it's all started happening and so I really wanted to write about systemic problems and I'm just I guess like most of my pieces if not maybe all of them have mentioned or been about UCP policy or maneuvers but I think that like I'm trying to take what they're doing
00:25:00
Speaker
as like a real-time, hey, look everyone, this is what I'm talking about when I say we have systemic problems that go beyond the UCP's existence. The UCP is simply a byproduct of a system that had no other choice but to go to this place if you look at 50 years of policy and deregulation and the things that have happened in order to
00:25:27
Speaker
sort of separate society in the audience of this these categories right so I just wanted to start doing that and I started doing into both the UCP and I think I was really tame at first to be honest if you compare it to what I'm doing now and then I wrote about one piece about the fights these distractions that we're doing just fights with these guys fights with Texas, Quebec, Trudeau you name it
00:25:52
Speaker
And it's all meant to distract you while they do these things that are about to happen. So trust me, the fight is in Alberta, not in, you know, Tamiska Mean Quebec or something like that. You know, like we have a real situation on our hands.
Conservative Politics in Alberta
00:26:10
Speaker
And that kind of was the first time anything I had done sort of blew up a little bit on Twitter, like Charles Adler was tweeting it out. And I mean, if we're at a point in society where
00:26:20
Speaker
Charles Adler and I are agreeing on policy, then we really ought to look at like where conservatism has gone, right? There's a bit of a mixed bag. I'm not insulting Charles Adler at all. I mean, everyone's entitled to be, you know, wherever they want to be. I mean, I'm just saying that this is where we're at. Conservatism has gone so far off the rail.
00:26:49
Speaker
that Charles Adler and I agree on all of these issues. Like that's crazy. We've been friends with Michael Coran last year, and that was a pretty similar experience. Yeah, right. Michael Coran though is like full on left wing now. Like he's woke. He's left of where he was. Yeah, he's turned into a much, much better person. I mean, I think you're right though, in that we are on the front lines of like radical, radical conservative politics.
00:27:19
Speaker
The program that Jason Kenney is bringing in and the UCP are bringing in is, you know, unprecedented in kind of like modern history. I mean, maybe, maybe Michael Harris did something similar. I mean, maybe Ralph Klein in the nineties for that like two years. But like the thing is, is that I think Jason Kenney is a true believer, you know, like I think Ralph Klein kind of did it for, um, cause like people told him and it was the fashion at the time to kind of do this, that brutal austerity.
00:27:44
Speaker
But I think there's really no good reason to do what Jason Kenney's doing. It is actually going to harm us and our economy. And what's coming down the pipe is gonna fucking suck. And we really are the pilot program for this stuff too. If it gets established here, you're gonna see it slowly spread across the prairies. You're gonna see it spread across Ontario. It'll be the new norm. And that's why it's so important for the voices we do have like you to call it out, right? Because I think quite honestly,
00:28:12
Speaker
Like the politics of most journalists and reporters, to the extent that they have politics, is fucking dogshit, right? Like I have a journalism degree. I know a lot of journalists, people who I went to school with and who are Confederates who are still in the industry.
00:28:27
Speaker
And like, it gives you the job itself, and the way the like mainstream institutions are set up, like encourage you to not think about politics, like you essentially have this baby brain approach to politics, you cover politics all the time, you're around politicians all the time, but you're not encouraged. In fact, you're discouraged from developing any real understanding of how power works of how politics actually works. And you're just focusing on the surface level bullshit.
00:28:52
Speaker
And the type of analysis and reporting and commentary that you two are providing are just like,
00:29:00
Speaker
It's not radical. It's very straight ahead journalism in a context of quite radical stuff happening in this province. I just get frustrated with journalists all the time. A third of my Twitter content is just me making fun of journalists, probably. Well, I think that part of this is that we're at a place where commentary is looked at and weighed. The publications are weighed and judged by what their commentary is.
00:29:30
Speaker
Columnists have gotten to a place just, I don't want to name names just yet today, but like a lot of columnists just sort of barf out some stuff on paper and they don't actually do, like they don't take responsibility with that. Cause like, if people are going to read what I'm writing in a column, okay. And it needs to have like a basis, a foundation of truth and fact and information.
00:29:58
Speaker
where you then form an opinion from that and say like, this is what's happening. And that's what I think is just, there's just so much like, you know, I feel like in Alberta, we cheer for the logo on our chest, right? Like we, it's like a sport, right? Like, as long as you have the conservative logo, you're fine. And I think that comes out in a lot of the people that become journalists in this province.
00:30:24
Speaker
I don't know how else to explain it, other than to suggest that people are being told what they can and can't write, but I don't know that that's happening because my career is two years as a freelance journalist and 10 years at the Medicine at News. I've never worked for one of those other places.
00:30:42
Speaker
You and Jeremy brought up an interesting point on Twitter last week, uh, which is that in a way, a lot of these columnists are being kind of parasitic on the frontline workers, the reporters who are trying to do, I mean, okay, we make fun of the reporters for having a bit of West wing brain, but they're not, they're not awful in comparison to some of these columnists. You got good reporters doing relatively reasonable work at like the Calgary Herald, but.
00:31:07
Speaker
We were telling people last week, cancel your Herald subscriptions because of, you know, all of the Rick Bell columns and, and so on. Like they're, uh, they're just like consuming the dignity and respectability of the actual reporters and using that to promote these columns. It's, it must be deeply, deeply frustrating to be in like a Herald or a Sun or Edmonton Journal newsroom trying to do just news work. And then you've got the columnists just destroying your reputation every week.
00:31:38
Speaker
I don't think I'd make it. I know I wouldn't personally. I think that I'm real, real lucky where I am because if I was allowed to have editorial space like I have here, but I was told to curve or change or be something that I'm not or write in a way that I'm different than how I do, I honestly couldn't do it. I just don't have the
00:32:05
Speaker
like, ability to choose dishonesty over, you know, what's right. And I think that there's this, you know, mistaken notion, you know, permeating the field of journalism, you know, not just in Canada, of course, in the States, in Britain, etc., etc., that journalists aren't allowed to have opinions that they have to observe the news,
00:32:35
Speaker
and then just duly report what they told. And obviously, I mean, there is value, and that's, you know, a lot of what I do, although I try and do more than that and actually take a look at the facts. Because it's easy to just say, you know, here's what one guy says, here's what another guy says, make up your own mind.
00:32:56
Speaker
Well, no, no, I mean, it's the observe and report ethos, right? A bit of a tangent. I mean, observe and report is actually, I don't know if I would call that movie funny, but I think observe and report is, I don't know if anyone in this room has seen it, but extremely accurate and prescient foretelling of fascism and the police state and the surveillance state and the way our society works now.
00:33:21
Speaker
observer report is a really like Movie that doesn't make you feel good and that's like deliberately done on purpose because our society doesn't make you feel good I would put observer report actually next to like 300 as these like proto-fascist texts that really did Like predict where our society was gonna go like 10 15 years later But but you did mention something that I did want to
00:33:46
Speaker
Well, I have it. I have issues with idiocracy, but this is not a movies podcast. You go on Kino left her for that. But the, the, the, you did bring up something that I wanted to raise and that is the question of whether someone, if someone was going to like, um, if a manager or a, or a boss or a publisher or whatever, like you say you guys have freedom and that's incredible. You have the freedom to write what you want. Have the UCP tried to call the manager on you? Like, are they like harassing your boss to like, get you to shut up or calling you about corrections or like, what's the, have there been any run-ins there?
00:34:16
Speaker
No and I wanted to make that real clear earlier when like a few columns ago I made it real clear that like if you think I'm saying something that's incorrect you go ahead and tell me and if I'm wrong I'll correct it and we're still like corrections numbering zero and we're at requests for corrections numbering zero because that's supposed to be what you do when you actually do this job is you're supposed to make sure by the time it gets to print
00:34:46
Speaker
that there's no chance of anybody asking to correct your information. So the UCP has not, other than their two times that they decided to respond to Jeremy and one time that they decided to respond to me, they haven't made direct contact with the news. In fact, and I'm not making any claims here for one way or the other, but
00:35:14
Speaker
uh there's a couple of conference calls that have gone by where um our reporter has introduced phoned early said who they are said they had a question and then weren't didn't get to ask so i don't know if we're causing that kind if they're gonna they're actually going the other way and not talking to us i don't know if we should even that's interesting because i i always get to ask questions at conference calls
00:35:44
Speaker
And in fact, Adriana Lagrange was quite angry this past week where she felt the need to respond to a column of fun that I didn't ask questions at her press conference that I phoned into. Now, I didn't know I was obligated to do that. But also, I've met Adriana Lagrange when she was here
00:36:13
Speaker
touring the schools. She had a media availability at our local charter school. Although she did visit all the boards, I think it's kind of symbolic that the big event was at the charter school. And I asked the most basic questions about the McKinnon report that really any cabinet minister, particularly when the recommendations
00:36:43
Speaker
pertain specifically to your office, right, like education. And she just couldn't answer them. Fortunately for her, Travis Taves was in town that day, and he's much more well versed in his talking points. And so he stepped in to assist her.
00:37:08
Speaker
She couldn't answer even the most basic questions, and that was borne out in the very press conference where she unveiled the K-12 panel, which has no active teachers on its recommendations, and she couldn't provide any details of what they were specifically doing.
00:37:30
Speaker
If I was Adriana Lagrange, I don't think I would be getting angry at lack of questions. I've seen quite a few Adriana Lagrange pressers by this point, and I would be very pleased in her position to not be taking any questions. Yeah, she's corpsed multiple times at press conferences. That's not a part of her job she's very good at.
00:37:49
Speaker
Okay, I mean, we got two folks from Medicine Hat on the line. There's just no way to do this podcast without talking about an absolute fucking legend. That's right, I'm talking about MLA Drew Barnes, the king, the king of southeastern Alberta. I like to call him Alberta's dumbest uncle. You have to deal with him all the time. He's your local dude. I see you interact with him on Twitter all the time. Give me your best Drew Barnes story.
00:38:17
Speaker
Hell yes. I just wanted to start out by saying, I think Scott and I have a disagreement over Ian Barnes, whereas, from my experience, he's a lovable oat. I mean, the guy gives out his cell phone number. You can call him anytime and ask him like whatever you want. And he has this revolving door of talking points. He uses like, you know, we need more local decision making.
00:38:44
Speaker
Um, stronger families, but he, you could ask him anything, you know, challenge him and he'll just respond with one's talking points. But if you push him enough, um, you know, sometimes he'll say things off the cuff that, um, go again, what the government is trying to do. And usually it's minor things. Like I was talking to him about H and so with regards to the cuts to H,
00:39:13
Speaker
He was like, oh, well, you know, we need to reduce the debt, and we're all in this together. Taxes also got D in debts from inflation. But then when it came to delaying the age payments, and he was like, well, I brought up the concern with the government. He always refers to the UCP government as the government, because he's not in cabinet. So even though he's part of their caucus,
00:39:41
Speaker
He refers to the government as like an outside entity. And he said, they said it was for certainty purposes. So people would all get their age checks at the same time. And I was like, Drew, they were getting their age checks at the same time before. How is that?
00:40:09
Speaker
How does that provide more certainty? And he was like, look, I don't know why the government's doing this. And I don't know if this, if he's playing like 3D chess, and this is all part of his plan for
00:40:26
Speaker
He just had like, you know, a human moment, you know? Drew Barnes is not playing 3D chess. Absolutely not. Like Drew Barnes is, he's shut out because he's bad at politics. Like he doesn't wield power or influence in any way.
00:40:41
Speaker
It was very easy for them to marginalize him and he's a dumbass. So they did. I mean, I think he's really good at door knocking and like being a nice genial guy. Like I think you've got the lovable o thing down. He's just, it's just incredibly stupid. He's very charismatic. I will say that you call him stupid, but he, he generally has a pretty complex understanding of most matters. You bring something up and he'll cite over a million reasons for it.
00:41:09
Speaker
What reason is he on there, Scott? Well, this is the one I've got in the script. So this recent Twitter exchange between Drew Barnes and NDPMLA Mary Renaud is just absolutely legendary. So he's quote tweeting some goon from the CFIB. And he's like, reason number 1,152, why we deserve less government, more free enterprise, more room for families, communities, and choice.
00:41:37
Speaker
period for some reason, double space, more credit card competition, and choices. Hashtag UCP, hashtag medhat. The response from Mary Renaud, where can a person find the other 1,151, the response from Drew Barnes, Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, hashtag medhat, hashtag abledge.
00:42:00
Speaker
just just an absolute king it's just a huge i'm legend i have nothing bad to say about that tweet no and i actually i i quote tweeted that um taking requests for the drew barnes book club and uh
00:42:18
Speaker
Do you think Drew Barnes has actually read All of Atlas Shrugged? I mean, it's not that long, but do you think he would make it through that? Oh, it's long. It's pretty long and shitty. I mean, I think he probably has. It's incredibly popular book. I mean, I read it when I was like 19 or something. Like, I assume at some point in his life, what is he, in his 50s, 60s? Duncan, I'm willing to bet you a large King Noodle that he hasn't read All of Atlas Shrugged, but he has read All of the Left Behind books.
00:42:45
Speaker
It's like, Atlas Shrugged is literally like, I'm not even exaggerating when I say it's the worst book I've ever read. And it was a complete waste of time. And it says nothing at all about, you know, human interactions and the way people actually are. So it's fitting that, you know, it would be held up as this like Bible by certain, you know, ideologues. Ideologues who own a lot of property.
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's another low-key thing about Drew Barnes that, I mean, just never really comes up. It kind of came up in the context of him talking about his wife's development company. But Drew Barnes, yeah, low-key thing about Drew Barnes, he is low-key super rich and owns more than 100 rental properties. On his ethics disclosures papers, you can go through all of these and look at all of his numbered companies and look at all of the businesses and houses that he owns, has controlling interests in,
00:43:42
Speaker
And he is not an, he's not an everyman. He's not a man of the people. Yeah, you talk about him as a lovable oaf, but this guy is rich. He is rich. I would estimate like at least $20 million. He's really, really, really good at coming across as an everyman. Like I played golf with three barns once before he was an MLA. And he had just been named the MLA, like the candidate for the wild rose, which was this
00:44:11
Speaker
new party that you knew was more conservative but you didn't really know what they had if this was long before the lake of fire stuff and all that right so I played golf with this guy and he was with my boss and him and I kidding not like he looked like he was worth like $50,000 like he had golf clubs that were like the old wooden ones from like the 1970s
00:44:39
Speaker
and like he just had this like super cheap coat on with like sneakers and like he just looked like the most and he's like not a big guy so he's so unassuming and you just he's soft spoken and you're kind of like okay you know you didn't really he had no idea that he was actually extremely extremely rich
00:45:07
Speaker
And these properties are spread out, these properties are spread out over Medicine Hat, Brooks, Bow Island, Blairmore, Barhead, St. Paul, and a handful in Edmonton as well. And if Drew Barnes is your landlord, and especially if he sucks as your landlord, by all means please reach out to us at Progress Alberta, we do want to know about that.
Drew Barnes and Wexit Movement
00:45:28
Speaker
The other thing about Drew Barnes that I think is worth bringing up is that he has been on the leading edge, the forefront, of the Wexit discourse as a UCP MLA. And I think that is, again, emblematic of Drew Barnes' politics and approach to politics. Have you been to any of these Wexit events? Have you seen Drew Barnes at any of these things? Have you seen him talking about it?
00:45:51
Speaker
No, but here's the thing. And see, this is where like Jeremy says we differ and he's a lovable. This is why I have less time for the lovable part. Jeremy rolled into town when the NDP was going and it was just him opposing everything. You know what I mean? And that's all he had to do was campaign anything that the NDP does is bad. But he'd already had a full term where he did that for the PCs.
00:46:21
Speaker
And he had basically, it was just opposite of everything. And so you could already see this pattern of like contradiction among the things that he does or whatever. And then we get to like nowadays, he doesn't, it's different. Now he's the guy. Like now he actually has to answer to what's happening and he's sort of running out of campaign points
00:46:50
Speaker
to go at, and I think he's starting to leave himself pretty exposed to what he, the contradictions that he's laid out in the past, I guess. Well, on that note, another favorite interaction on the truth, you know, I have several, is when I was talking to him about the teacher's pensions. And you know, here's the case, I mean, he's always talking about local decision making, free enterprise,
00:47:20
Speaker
So, but then when it comes to teachers wanting to invest their pensions as they see fit, they can't do that. And I asked him, like, how do you reconcile that with what you say about the free market? And he was, he was stumped, but it was just,
00:47:38
Speaker
just said, well, they're going to get the same return. Drew's dalliances with the Wegset stuff, uh, I think speak again to how he is not just a lovable oath because this Wegset stuff is becoming particularly pernicious. It's a really, really reactionary force that the UCP are, are playing footsies with. Uh, and you can see them getting mixed up in some, some kind of dire shit lately. Like they had the United We Roll people.
00:48:05
Speaker
uh, roll in and try and disrupt the, the strike over in, um, over in Carsland recently. Uh, like these people are kind of being called up as foot soldiers at this point and being in the position of, well, you're the, you're the goofy oaf that we send to entreat with the Wegset people. That is not really that innocent of a duty. Well, no, but if you ask him about it, see, this is what his problem is, is like it
00:48:34
Speaker
You know, he funded the climate science denial documentary, helped to fund it, and he retweets all this stuff. But if you ask him about climate change, he'll change the subject or spin it something. If you do the same thing with Wexit, he acts like he is ready to separate. The action, I mean, this most recent story where it was like, you know, if this tech frontier mind is approved, Albertans are going to want to separate. And he attends all of these meetings.
00:49:04
Speaker
and you ask him about it, he won't tell you that he's a separatist, but he would, honest to God, I can tell you right now, he would just go into something about, oh no, we're just, people are just looking for a fair deal, and he would go on to a talking point, but you would never get him to tell you that he is like a Wegset supporter. But you know, and people are saying that, you know,
00:49:32
Speaker
on social media and stuff like Drew Barnes is going to like rebrand as a Wexit guy. But I think, and this goes back to my view of Drew, as opposed to Scott's, I think Peter Downing and those guys would eat him alive. So, you know, I think that Drew is going to rebrand as a Maoist. He's gonna like take his like pickup truck
00:50:02
Speaker
across the countryside and, you know, get farm workers riled up and collectivize farms. So if you thought the NDP farm bill was bad, just wait till Drew becomes a third world. I'll believe it when I see it, Jeremy. I mean, Jim is right in that we do have to be very mindful of this Wegza shit and the kind of
00:50:27
Speaker
the fascist and the racist and the petro-nationalist undertones under all that but i mean i think he i think drew fits in perfectly with wags it because wags it and drew barnes both have this very matchy matchy kind of like big dumb guy energy and it's and it it works out really perfectly um i wish i had better insults about drew barnes but he is just he is just a sack of hair he is like
00:50:51
Speaker
he's there's just nothing there okay okay one million reasons in seven he's now what in almost on his eighth year as a MLA i'm telling you if you look back you can't find a single time that he left the range of one million and eleven and one million one hundred and fifty eight like there is literally 147 reasons that he just repeats but
00:51:16
Speaker
He has to throw a million in front of it. You got to commit to the bed. We'll accidentally repeat the same number in the same week. It's like you have all the numbers to choose from Drew. Like how is 2 million and 58. Just go to go into six digits. Um, I mean, the nice thing about Drew Barnes is that ultimately he is like pretty irrelevant. He's outside of cabinet.
00:51:41
Speaker
He is, again, I don't think widely respected by his peers within the UCP. He's a safe seat, but at least he's not in cabinet. Enough about Drew Barnes, I think that was fun, but I don't think he's ultimately super relevant in a ton of the evil shit that's happening in this province right now. We're just going to expropriate all of his properties eventually.
00:52:05
Speaker
And you saw how Quincy came to winning the Wild Roos leadership originally over Brian Jean, right? Like he finished second to Brian Jean.
00:52:14
Speaker
Where would Drew Barnes' political career be if he had been the wild rose leader when Jason Kenney wanted to take over? That's a good question. It's fun to play sliding doors in that scenario. But I do want to refocus on to the real enemy here.
Post Media's Influence on Politics
00:52:31
Speaker
And ultimately, you know, a group that I think is doing far more to harm Alberta than Drew Barnes. And that is post-media.
00:52:38
Speaker
you know, the organization that runs, you know, the major daily newspapers in Edmonton and Calgary, as well as newspapers, community daily and several times a week newspapers all over this province. And that is post media. And, and it is worth talking about post media, because they are, they are literally becoming, you know, a communications arm of this government. I mean, I know that they lobbied to be a part of the war room.
00:53:03
Speaker
But I mean, why would the government pay them when they're just doing it for free? And yeah, and I would argue they're far more effective in using their platforms, like those platforms that they have are far more respected, have far more reach than the war room has, right?
00:53:21
Speaker
The content is a lot more punchy and aggressive too. Over on Tom Olsen's blog, the Canadian Energy blog, there's nothing there that hits anywhere near as hard as a Danielle Smith column or a Rick Bell column.
00:53:34
Speaker
And I think it's worth just saying out loud that like post media must be destroyed and that like one of Progress Alberta's projects is to build a media platform that can compete and ultimately crush, you know, our competition, which is post media because they have set themselves. It's worth noting, I think that Tom Olson
00:53:55
Speaker
um is a former post-media journalist that there's a very clear revolving door between the conservative party across canada and post-media papers was also one of the scabs was also one of the harold scabs boulsen was a calgary harold scab yeah and yeah you're right jeremy i mean there is a very clear and operating revolving door between the conservative movement and the post-media newspaper space um mark tui was you know rob ford's chief of staff now he's the like
00:54:23
Speaker
publisher of the Toronto Sun, like Leisha Corbella was a literal fucking member of the UCB and voted for Jason Kenney in the leadership race. And then had when that was revealed by reporting from Sean Craig, I think, in Canada land, it they like, they disappeared a bunch of her columns, ones who I believe that she was talking about Jason Kenney or conservative politics.
00:54:47
Speaker
frequent guest columnist danielle smith was somewhat attached to conservative politics i hear yeah just maybe a touch attached to it i mean you've got i mean we'll link to the to the canada land piece in the show notes because it is worth refreshing um what was dug up in that piece right like the fact that kevin liban was kind of appointed as the political czar of of post-media political coverage is
00:55:10
Speaker
extremely concerning. You know, Mark Ipe, the former editor in chief of the Edmonton Journal, was mysteriously disappeared after they published a pro-carbon tax editorial. Yeah, they did not like his coverage of the provincial election, which was, again, just
00:55:26
Speaker
balls and strikes bullshit post media coverage of like of a provincial election. They wanted it to be far more torqued. You know, Mark Ipe is now no longer with post media. He got shuffled off to some special projects gig that was clearly a way to put him in a rubber room.
00:55:42
Speaker
and to not have him actually be near any political or news coverage. And now Mark Ipe is no longer with post media. I mean, this is a very deliberate project and campaign of post media to be the communications arm of the conservative movement.
Rick Bell's Narrative on Drug Use
00:56:00
Speaker
And when I say post media must be destroyed, I am being serious. And I think we have a really good example of why post media must be destroyed. And that is this Rick Bell column.
00:56:11
Speaker
I guess I want to say like, um, content warning coming up ahead for just like extremely gross and gory descriptions of people struggling with addiction. Uh, really, really hateful stuff. The headline is bell colon Kenny blasts a drug site disorder, uh, published on January 21st of this year, 2020. That's a pretty anodyne headline, honestly, for the like straight up, like, uh, like hatred and marginalization of, of drug users in this piece. Okay.
00:56:40
Speaker
Uh, I mean, he kind of has a blustery like voice. I mean, he's from Ontario. I'm not going to try and impersonate him. All right. It's, it's really like, he just kind of like talks like this. The latest cold snap brought a bit of good news for at least one neighborhood. Now I'm not going to do it. He's one of those post media guys who look exactly
00:57:00
Speaker
like you would expect them to when you read them. Yes. Rick Bell is a doughy middle-aged man with not a lot of hair on his head. It's true. Okay. For a week or so, the deep freeze toned down the out-of-their-bloody mind screaming of the legions of meth addicts wandering around Calgary's Beltline near the Sheldon Schumer drug site looking for money and looking to score and not giving a damn how they make that happen. You have to form an agent if you're going to get the good meth.
00:57:28
Speaker
Yeah, and again, I mean, the conflation here of like meth addicts with, you know, people who are addicted to opioids happens throughout this piece. And, you know, it's worth pointing out that drug users, I mean, using meth is not using opioids and the two are very different drugs with their very different effects. But he's just trying to kind of set this like maximum carnage tone.
00:57:51
Speaker
For my knowledge, you go to a supervised consumption site, it's opioid use that's supposed to be happening there. Is there meth use? There is a lot more meth going around in Calgary these days. So there's some people. I think the only place where you're allowed to use inhalants is in Lethbridge. Sorry, I don't think you can use inhalants in Sheldon Shimmer. You can actually use meth at the supervised consumption site in Calgary.
00:58:15
Speaker
I don't believe so. I mean, I have to check that, but I'm pretty sure you can. But again, I mean, he calls it a drug site. I mean, at the very least you have to give Bell a tiny bit of credit for not just going NDP drug site, which is what Kenny is calling supervised consumption. He gets there. He gets there. He gets NDP drug sites. Okay. Okay.
00:58:33
Speaker
Continuing on, Premier Kenny doesn't hold back when looking into the face of this rude reality. He has never held back when it comes to the horror show around drug consumption sites. He has never minced his words when it comes to the invasions of meth heads turning neighborhoods into some Alberta communities into crap. Scary places, threatening places, ugly places. You know, what really galls me about that ugly descriptor
00:59:02
Speaker
is that this is just a spectacle to them. You know, Rick Bell and other people who talk about harm reductions don't care if people live or die. In fact, if anything, they want them to die because they're just a nuisance to them.
00:59:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's inconveniencing homeowners. I mean, homeowners and developers, outline developers. Exactly. And it is a total disregarding of these people's humanity and the fact that these people are individuals with lives and families and friends and lives they want to live. And it's just like, oh, no, they're just doing drugs and they're bad. I got to get back into this, though, because he uses this construction, this never construction again.
00:59:48
Speaker
Going back into the piece, he has never pulled his punches when it comes to the taxpayer-funded zombie movie cooked up by the previous Notley NDP government, the so-called working class party showing no respect for the working class.
01:00:11
Speaker
dehumanizing drug users. And it's just really, really ugly. It's not inaccurate though, right? Like Kenny was a member of the Harper cabinet that in federal government opposed the first big safe consumption site project in Vancouver, Insight.
01:00:28
Speaker
Uh, like a decade ago, they got slapped down by the Supreme court. The Supreme court told them to fuck off and stop, but it's trying to get people killed. But they fought, but because they, they, um, rag the puck on it so long and it, it took a charter challenge. It was like literally five, six years of like no progress on the federal level when it came to supervise consumption sites because, uh, because they obstructed it. The NDP invented, uh, harm reduction, right? By the NDP and it,
01:00:57
Speaker
And then he makes that reference, that snide reference to the working class that the NDP, which has seen, you know, as part of the working class, isn't standing up for the working class, but addicts aren't these zombies. And what do we do with zombies in the movies, right? What is this metaphor? We kill them before they kill up. We shoot them in the head. Yeah. And so he's calling them zombies in contrasting them with the working class.
01:01:27
Speaker
But addicts are people just like you and me and Scott and... Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is not like us, but no, you're right to point this out. The opioid crisis is essentially a working class crisis. I mean, how do most people end up hooked on this stuff? You get hurt on the job site. You get prescribed opioid painkillers.
01:01:52
Speaker
you know you're you're making a ton of money and you don't get a lot of sick days in the trades so you you keep going to work while you're hurt and you power through it with the help of these drugs and then your prescription runs out or your job runs out and where does that leave you there aren't a lot of like professional managerial class people
01:02:12
Speaker
are overdosing in the same way, right? Like it's kind of, it's safe. It's safe to have an addiction if you have enough money. I mean, when you look at the stats of who dies from opioids, right? Like it is single working class men. And I mean, that is because of, I mean, the way we've structured our society and the like the terminal loneliness that we've kind of built into our society because capitalism has kind of atomized everyone and made everyone into these individuals.
01:02:41
Speaker
But like, it is, when Bell invokes the working class thing, it does make my blood boil because... Well, it's the working class that he's turning this stuff against. It's the working class that he's attacking with this stuff. Let's get back to the piece. So it's like, Bell starts back into it.
01:03:03
Speaker
Meth users going to the drug site to shoot up. Police calls for service in the surrounding area going through the roof and expected to go up some more. Additional cops brought in to help. They know it's a theater of the absurd up close and personal. Citizens and businesses seen as collateral damage for the latest cause. Casualties who should suck it up when they wake up and see their vehicle ransacked or their streets taken over by those acting out their meth-addled mischief.
01:03:31
Speaker
and mayhem. I think we're on the third or fourth reference to meth at this point in the piece. Yes.
01:03:40
Speaker
Oh, Command F. Here, let's see. He has not yet. He has not yet. And you know, that section we just got through, too, about calls in the belt line going up is patently false. The stats, say the opposite, that calls to that area have gone down, not up. I mean, he's just coming out and fabricating this horror story. He's not providing. At least he didn't link to the information that just defunct him this time.
01:04:10
Speaker
He does not. He does not. I mean, there's hilarious statements of fact in this that are not backed up by anything. Here's a, here's an example. A stat in one apartment block parkade in the past year, the number of break-ins are double the number in the previous 14 years combined. Well, I mean, what apartment blockade where who's keeping track? Like, like literally that's on that unless you like he.
01:04:35
Speaker
Pretends that he talks with some guy that works at the like ticket booth or whatever Yeah, like well, it's an apartment block parkade Like there's just no one keeping stats going back 14 years on apartment block parkade break-ins like get the fuck out of here He goes back to okay, this is the content warning where he gets into the like real like gross gory details and
01:04:57
Speaker
An image. I've mentioned it before. A guy losing his mind and smashing his fist against a tree until his hand is hamburger and the blood flows down his arm. A guy literally peeling the skin off his leg with a knife. Let's get to the premiere. He's ready for lights, cameras, and action.
01:05:14
Speaker
Kenny says the government's first responsibility is to protect the public. He figures those in authority who allowed the trashing of a neighborhood consider themselves compassionate and progressive and oh so full of virtue while seeing the law abiding locals living in fear as just a bunch of whiners. This is a really good movie. Like honestly, if you're like my not like if it was just a zombie movie he was describing, it's
01:05:41
Speaker
It's not bad. Like, you know, there's, you got the invasion part, you got people in the neighborhood are fearing for their lives. You got the hero fucking Jason Penny wrote, riding in on like his lights, camera action, baby. Like this is what I mean. Like the way, like now that I've read it so many times that I'm just like done with being angry at him.
01:06:05
Speaker
over it, because the guy to be angry at over this is Kenny anyways, for even like endorsing the ship. But, but he like, if you just like once like, it's a goddamn movie he's describing. That's it. He's honestly watched, like Dawn of the Dead or something and then just written some shit like, there is no way he has seen anyone punching a tree until their hand was hamburger.
01:06:35
Speaker
or like peeling your skin off with it. Like, what is he talking about? Yeah, Pixar, it didn't happen, Rick. Fuck you. But this is also, this is like a case study in manufacturing consent. This is like uncut.
01:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, this is straight, straight to the fucking veins. Like here's how you get a government to just roll over drug users or a marginalized minority, right? You just, you set them up as the other. You say they're invading your neighborhoods, that they're assaulting kids, that they're like, uh, doing all sorts of, that they're, that they're, yeah, it's, it's really fucked up. Um, I mean, you know, some readers who, from my understanding, um, are, you know, working class, I mean, they'll, they read that on transit or whatever. And.
01:07:21
Speaker
They say, you know what, I'm scared too. And then Kenny comes forward and says, you know, we need to close these NDP drug sites. And then people read Rick Nell and don't know any better. Say, yeah, do it. Save us. Plus you have your 43rd panel, and it is a panel on supervised substance sites. And you're not allowed to use harm reduction stats
Government Panels and Media Critique
01:07:49
Speaker
weighed against any of this. So it's like, you have to go, you're going to go and collect as much negative information about this, these sites, and you're we're not even going to weigh that against the lives that it saves. Like, why don't like this is what it's like, I don't know, he's hiding it, but not fighting it. Like, it's not like they're
01:08:15
Speaker
not blatantly doing these things, but yet they seem to launder them through these panels or these stacks that they make up or these columnists that post media that they get to just write, you know, how great they are about everything. Like, it's mind boggling to me because like, if you're gonna try to hide what you're doing, then try to hide it. But he's so boldly not fighting any of his plans to do what he's doing.
01:08:44
Speaker
Well, they just don't need to in the media landscape here, right? They started this anti-harm reduction rhetoric before the election, right? Right after Kenny assumes the leadership and we get into the UCP AGM and you start seeing the language coming out in their platform. This is back when you started hearing Kenny
01:09:12
Speaker
talking about shooting galleries and people putting poison in their veins, et cetera, et cetera. And harm reduction advocates immediately reacted to that and said, like, look, this is some really scary stuff. The direction that they intend to go in is very dangerous and is going to result in them obstructing, defunding, shutting down harm reduction sites.
01:09:34
Speaker
And where was the media coverage at that point? Can he backpedals a little bit over a couple of weeks and moderates his language and suddenly nobody is criticizing him?
01:09:48
Speaker
Like it was so obvious, you should have been able to see right through it. And I don't, it's deeply, deeply frustrating that most of the media platforms in this province just ate it up. You know, when he walked back a little bit, they were just like, oh, I guess he's a changed man. I guess Jason Kenney, who for the past like 10 years has been consistently trying to get all of these sites shut down across the whole goddamn country. Oh, I guess maybe he had second thoughts.
01:10:16
Speaker
But here we are, you know, months later, he's going in the same direction. Well, our like the Mayor of Medicine hat, and I'll paraphrase a little bit, because I don't have the quote in front of me, but before, you know, a year or so before the election kind of thing. He basically told he said in our newspaper that, you know, if you want, like, I'm not really into these sites. So like, you should vote for basically vote for a party.
01:10:44
Speaker
vote for a government that won't fund them. Like essentially saying, you know, if you want to get rid of supervised consumption, you should vote for the UCP because they'll, they'll take the money away. And that was well before the election. And there's another guy, um, you should Google deer listener, Ted Klugster.
01:11:07
Speaker
Yes, he solved homelessness in medicine hat. No, we're getting off on a tango. I'm going to get back to the piece. We're getting now into the quote. This is the meat of the piece where Jason Kenney gets his platform to just give his like raw, raw quotes. And this is quoting Kenney here. Quote, what is compassionate or progressive about making seniors afraid of going out in their neighborhood in the evening, about children stumbling on syringes filled with poison in their local park? Asks Kenney.
01:11:32
Speaker
What is compassionate about taking somebody who has put their life savings in a small business and losing that because of an arbitrary decision by some politicians who want to congratulate themselves for how virtuous there are? Kenny says it's not just about Calgary's Beltline site. In Edmonton, three out of four sites are in one ethnic neighborhood, Chinatown, where some people don't speak English. They don't have a lot of political power, and there are a lot of small businesses. I mean, that's debatable. I mean, Chinatown, little Italy.
01:12:01
Speaker
If you support supervised consumption, you're a racist. I think that's what he's trying to get at. Yeah, this is the Edmonton opposition to safe consumption sites is particularly weird, largely driven by the Chinatown Business Association. Very, it's a complex matter. We got into this with Garth Mullen a few episodes back. I would definitely encourage listeners to hop into our back catalog and check that episode out.
01:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, and then someone's gotta stand up for the small business owner.
01:12:34
Speaker
Well, I mean you look at the the edmonton, um situation with the the clustering of the sites It's like the sites went there because that's where the people who were using the drugs are already The people who are using the drugs are already in those neighborhoods Because edmonton's poverty has been shoved into those neighborhoods And yeah that that is ultimately because the the people in that area have less political power but uh, I think it's
01:13:01
Speaker
You're kind of missing the the middle of that subject if you jump in and just be like, yeah, the safe consumption sites went there uh Like they went there because of racism but putting the sites there was not racist. Yeah, poverty is racist, right? Like like Who do you think has more political power like small business owners in chinatown or drug users? Let's be fucking real for a second Um, this this the article goes on
01:13:28
Speaker
that's there you go the article goes on funny where these drug sites go why didn't they put one in Rachel not least neighborhood near the university why didn't they put one in Mount Royal I think the question answers itself yeah because the people aren't there the people using the drugs aren't in those areas well you can make an argument for Strathcona but yeah I mean yes there should be one in Strathcona probably but like in Mount Royal in Calgary that's the like richest neighborhood like who gives a shit this is the this is one of my like favorite parts of the column
01:13:53
Speaker
It's a two word sentence immediately after a Jason Kenney quote, the one we just read. The sentence is, you betcha. Seriously? Like the guy is like the least clever writer I've ever read. Honestly, this is like beyond stenography. Like this is like, yeah, this is a Lenny Riefenstahl, but like, by like some idiot.
01:14:24
Speaker
Yeah, the the kind of gets into like the fact that there's this review this panel is coming out soon This was this was before they announced I think a bunch of treatment sites Going to abstinence only sites. I think I should probably point out too. But the final quote here Uh, it's from Jeremy Farkas, um alberta's um Jeremy Jerome
01:14:50
Speaker
Jeremy Farkas. He apparently represents the people right across the street from the Calgary drug site. Except the drug users. He does not represent those people. The quote from Farkas is, this situation can't go on. People have been patient. It's abundantly clear what's going on is contributing to the problem, not solving the problem. Something has got to give. Often people come to me and ask me what the province is doing to fix the problem created by politicians. For the first time, I can say help is on the way.
01:15:16
Speaker
Well, the hero is here, man. Are you kidding? You betcha. Jason Kenny to the fucking rescue. He will save homeowners and small business owners from the perils and dangers of people who use drugs. Like, what's the point of anyone showing compassion to the things that we are looking for and do so with?
01:15:43
Speaker
when the premier tweets out that column the next day. Like that's, like Rick Bell is Rick Bell, you know? And like, he's literally just, if he took the adjectives out of any column he wrote, it would be half as long. He's just Mr. Districter of catastrophic language. And he's just sort of a guy barking at the moon, you know? But like, when Kenny endorses that, like the premier endorsed that column.
01:16:12
Speaker
Well, there's even more so, right? It wasn't just Kenny tweeted this column out the next day. Kenny held a presser the afternoon that this column went out, in which he teased a bunch of policy changes around harm reduction. It is very obvious why this column was published on this day.
01:16:32
Speaker
i don't know who called rick or he just like sensed it through the ether his his his bootlicker sense was tingling kenny's office reached out to rick they arranged the interview they they knew when the column was coming out and the quotes that were going to be in it and then they scheduled their shit for the same day it was yeah like it was i mean you i mean any any
01:16:50
Speaker
Um, premier politician will kind of schedule this, these friendly interviews, but Rick is just like, especially, especially supine before Kenny.
Harm Reduction vs. Abstinence-Only Programs
01:16:59
Speaker
Jeremy, you taught, you brought up, um, you know, manufacturing consent. And I think it's interesting to look at what the, the two pronged comms approach from the UCP is around all this harm reduction stuff. The one prong is, is this really gory, fear-based, uh, zombies are going to destroy your neighborhood shit, which is very obvious.
01:17:21
Speaker
But the second half of it, and you see a lot of it in this bell column here as well, they fed him the message box, they sent him some notes, obviously, is this suggestion that the NDP were like half-assing it or virtue signaling with harm reduction programs.
01:17:41
Speaker
And you look at what the UCP are offering up as an alternative. These like very, very modest funding announcements for abstinence focused programs. Like that week they announced it was 4.3 million over four years for some more treatment beds.
01:18:03
Speaker
4.3 million over four years, by the way, is like barely over one-tenth of a war room. You're obviously not that concerned with it in the context of a healthcare budget. But then to send it to these private abstinence-focused clinics, I was reading a paper
01:18:21
Speaker
This morning, I'll throw this in the show notes, it was a mass study where they followed 40,000 people in the United States who interfaced with different kinds of addiction treatments program. And they found the efficacy of these abstinence only programs, like the efficacy basically of programs where you are not given methadone or suboxone to replace the opioids that you're trying to get off.
01:18:50
Speaker
was 0%, flat 0%. It was no better than not getting treated at all. They're diverting all of this public funding at the same time that they're trying to quash a program that actually works. That saves lives. That actually saves lives. And they're trying to give it to this weird complex of these sort of spiritual, semi-faith-based, Austin and Sonlia, like, pray the addiction away centers.
01:19:19
Speaker
It's kind of sleazy stuff when you look behind the curtain, how much the conservative movement is culturally tied up with these kind of treatment programs. Kenny's brother himself, David Kenny, ran one in BC, he's not allowed to run one anymore is my understanding. The Nixons family was really tied up in this kind of stuff.
01:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they're the mustard seed. I don't I would imagine they're they do something on addiction. I don't know exactly. But yeah, it is. It really fucking sucks. And I think I just have to conclude by saying, Rick Bell is awful and should retire
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
01:19:54
Speaker
immediately. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, guys. It's that part of the show where people can follow you on social media, you can plug the things that you're working on. So what's the best way that people can follow your work and keep track of what you're up to? Okay, well,
01:20:08
Speaker
As we've said before, I have my column, which is called Laying It Out. It comes out in the medicine news every Saturday, online and in print. You can follow me on Twitter at Schmitzy says, which is S-H-M-I-T-Z-Y S-A-Y-S. And aside from that, I have my email with all my columns every time. So if you want to offer feedback, good or bad, I welcome it.
01:20:36
Speaker
And yeah, just thanks to everybody that's been reading and sharing and doing all the work for us to get this voice out. And I can be reached on twitter.com at mhren, Jeremy Appel, if you care to read my pop culture hot takes, all that. Also, if you have a lot of money and you want to purchase an ad with the Medicine Hat News,
01:21:06
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, me. I will hook you up with the finest sales people in the business. And I just wanted to say that, you know, reporters in calmness get all the public recognition at newspapers. But if it weren't for people in the press room or in creative and yes, even advertising, we wouldn't be able to do what we do. So I would just like to conclude with a shout out to the brothers and sisters.
01:21:36
Speaker
at Media and Communication Workers of Alberta 30400. All right. Hell yeah. You'll have to see it. Okay, thanks so much guys. And dear listener, if you like this podcast and if you want to keep hearing it, there's a really simple thing you can do. And that's one of the things that Jeremy just talked about. That's sharing it with your friends, your family. If you think more people need to know about the fact that we have these two absolute boys,
01:22:06
Speaker
in media, in medicine hat, consistently producing good content, share this podcast. Post about it on your social media wall. Put it onto a cassette tape and share it with your friend. I don't really care how you do it. There's lots of different ways to do it, but please, the word of mouth is the best way to actually get the word out on this podcast.
01:22:23
Speaker
And there's other ways you can help as well. By all means, please hit like, rate, review, and subscribe. Those Apple reviews, for whatever reason, the algorithm with Apple Podcasts really thinks that those are important. Those five-star reviews really help as well. And the one other kind of final thing that you can do to help us out.
01:22:41
Speaker
is give us cash. There are 250 other folks who give Progress Alberta a donation from anywhere from $5 to $50 a month. And that ongoing cash, that really does keep us going. And it does help keep and build this independent media project, which I think it does a lot of good work and I want to keep doing it. So if you can go to the progressreport.ca slash patrons, you can put in your credit card and contribute, we would really, really appreciate it.
01:23:06
Speaker
Also, if you want to get a hold of me, if you have any thoughts, notes, comments, things you think I need to hear about, you can reach me on Twitter. I'm at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at Duncan K. You can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress Alberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Fami Communist for the amazing theme. Thanks so much to my colleague, Jim, for appearing on the pod as well as Jeremy and Scott. Thank you for listening and goodbye. Goodbye.
01:23:33
Speaker
Did you know that Progress Alberta is part of a national community of leftist podcasts on the Ricochet Podcast Network? You can find the Alberta Advantage, 49th Parahel, Kino Lefter, Well Reds, The Progress Report, Lefi Sales, Out of Left Field, and Unpacking the News, as well as a bunch of other awesome podcasts at Ricochet Media or wherever you download your podcasts.