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Kinney 4 Senate
107 Plays3 years ago
Nobody's actually going to get elected to the Senate this year. So why are the UCP holding a Senate 'election'? And why's Duncan Kinney in it? Featuring guest host Producer Jim
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:25
Speaker
Haters and Donators, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your temporary host, Jim Story, and we're recording here in Amiskwichiwa, Skuygen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory. The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. Joining us today is someone you'll be familiar with, here to talk about his campaign, it's the regular host of the report, and the only real candidate in Alberta's fake Senate elections, Duncan Kinney.
00:00:50
Speaker
Hello. Hello. It's so nice to be a guest and not the host, Jim. Fantastic intro. And I look forward to doing not all the work on this podcast today. I'm really happy about it.
Are Senate Elections Effective?
00:01:02
Speaker
Now the subject today is the Senate. A lot of folks have had a lot of things to say about the Senate. And here's one of them. Today in the legislature was my pleasure to introduce Bill 13, the Alberta Senate Election Act.
00:01:15
Speaker
This bill is based on election law that expired in 2016 and reflects our government's belief that elected senators who have a mandate from Alberta voters are more effective voices for Alberta's interests in federal parliament. Our government believes that Albertans, not the federal government, are the ones who should choose who best can represent their interests in Ottawa. When Albertans have had a say in who best represents them in the Senate, they have always chosen individuals of the highest caliber.
00:01:45
Speaker
This law would allow a Senate election to be held as part of a provincial or municipal election as a standalone process or with a referendum. The government of Alberta would then provide the names of our Senate nominees to the Prime Minister for consideration when filling future vacancies, with the hope that he would uphold the democratic mandate of the Alberta people. And when our government passes this bill, I am proud that we will once again have Senate elections in Alberta.
00:02:13
Speaker
and set an example for other provinces on the benefits of having an effective elected voice in Ottawa. Duncan,
Alberta's Political Landscape
00:02:20
Speaker
the project of an elected Senate has obviously been on Conservatives' minds for quite a long time. You are the man in the room who is running for Senate. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of this project?
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, this is OG reform party stuff, real Preston Manning being made fun of on the Royal Canadian Air Force stuff. Yeah, they saw the Senate as bad, which is not necessarily bad political analysis, but they wanted to turn the Senate into something that was equal, effective, and elected, and essentially turn the Canadian Senate into a shitty carbon copy of the American Senate.
00:03:01
Speaker
which would make sense given how dysfunctional and shitty that body is. And yeah, it's really been a political project of theirs since the 80s and 90s. It's Reform Party, it's Western Canada kind of grievance stuff. We're not getting treated fairly by Ottawa, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:03:21
Speaker
The funny thing about these Senate elections is that they don't actually get people into the Senate. We've had quite a few of them. We've only had less than half a dozen of these folks actually get appointed, only by conservatives. So the question is,
00:03:37
Speaker
Why are they doing it? Well, here's the thing. The Senate election isn't the only thing people are going to be voting on on October 18th this year. This fall, Alberta is going to be voting on new mayors and new councils for all of our towns and cities. And while the Tories may have most of the small towns locked down already, they're just drooling over the prospect of taking over Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, and especially Edmonton and Calgary. They're so thirsty to control these city councils that they've already been changing the rules to give their teams an advantage.
00:04:07
Speaker
And don't forget school boards as well. They definitely don't want to leave any kind of elected body free of shitty conservative elected officials. They want to get them everywhere.
Kinney's Satirical Senate Run
00:04:19
Speaker
Absolutely. Especially given all of the curriculum nonsense, right? The school boards are definitely a locus of resistance there too. I mean, I'm not
00:04:32
Speaker
holding anything back when I say that they've been changing the rules to give themselves an advantage either. We've seen changes to campaign finance laws that allow the conservatives and their donors to pump more money into these Senate campaigns. They've even changed the laws such that sitting cabinet ministers can go out and campaign for their Senate candidates and the things that they want in these equalization referendums and so on.
00:04:58
Speaker
It's when you consider that context that everything suddenly starts to make sense. Why have a Senate election that doesn't actually send people to the Senate? Why have an equalization referendum for a province that can't actually change the equalization formula? Well, it's easy. The only people howling about equalization and about the Senate are dyed in the oil conservatives. Jason Kenny wants to make sure that as many of those folks get out to these municipal elections as possible.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah, it really is an opportunity to raise the bloody shirt and be mad at Ottawa and distract people from how shitty of a job they've done of governing this province. Well, if this was just a series of national post articles and rebel media tweets, I don't think I would be quite so bothered by it. Frankly, I think it's outrageous that public resources, millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars of them,
00:05:52
Speaker
are being funneled into a scheme that is essentially a get out the vote operation for the Tories. That's the public's money. It's not to be spent electing Kenny's friends and campaigning on Kenny's issues. Well, okay, Duncan, I've done my rent. Why don't you tell us a bit about where your campaign fits into all of this? What's your campaign about? Yeah, so I am running for Senate as loyal listeners to the podcast know.
00:06:18
Speaker
You know it's It's a bit of a taking opportunity to take the piss right like this this election is a sham. It is a fake
00:06:28
Speaker
whoever wins this election is not going to become a senator because that's not how senators are appointed. We just saw a woman named Karen Sorensen appointed to the Senate through the process that the liberals have set up, right? That's how it works. And waving your fist and being mad that Justin Trudeau isn't going to respect your sham Senate elections isn't going to change
00:06:52
Speaker
You know, House senators are appointed. I mean, the hilarious thing about this is that Jason Kennedy was in Stephen Harper's cabinet when Stephen Harper went to the Supreme Court and said, hey, how do I get rid of senators? How do I reform the Senate? And the Senate said, essentially, you got to open up the Constitution, which is a big fucking deal. It's a lot of effort. I can't remember what the amendment formula is, but it's a high bar to change the Canadian Constitution.
00:07:18
Speaker
You know, what our campaign is all about is essentially saying this campaign is bullshit and a vote for me is essentially a vote against Jason Kenney. Imagine Jason Kenney having to write a letter to the prime minister saying, pretty, pretty pleased. Will you, will you appoint this shitposting socialist, independent journalist to the Senate? That's, that's it. The stakes are low, admittedly, and we're not putting a ton of like money and resources into this, but it is an opportunity to fuck with Jason Kenney.
00:07:47
Speaker
It is and you know what I think excites me about this campaign too is that it's an opportunity to try and flip the game on him a bit because if he's using this sham election to try and push Tories out to the vote
00:07:59
Speaker
Why don't we use this sham election to get lefties out and vote? Not only will it be much more embarrassing for Kenny to see his candidates actually lose this thing instead of, you know, if people just go out and spoil their ballots, then Kenny's cronies will still, quote unquote, win, and he'll get to do a victory lap about it. You won't really care that there's low voter participation.
00:08:20
Speaker
But what if all of the lefties show up and not only make a mockery out of his election, but elect all the people to city council and school board and mayors that Kenny does not want to get elected? Don't discount the fact that if I win this ridiculous sham Senate election, the chances of us having another one go way, way down.
Can Kinney Challenge the System?
00:08:38
Speaker
It would be very embarrassing if I won.
00:08:41
Speaker
Well, that I mean, that leads me to my next question, a question that I do have to ask, like, are are you actually going to take the appointment if someone hands you an appointment? What if you win? Well, there's one more Senate vacancy. So this Karen Sorensen woman was appointed to the Senate. There's one more Senate vacancy for the province of Alberta. I fully expect another appointment announcement in the next few weeks before the federal election gets called. I have not actually applied. I've not gone through Justin Trudeau's
00:09:11
Speaker
special, um, like, you know, application process though, though I, at some point I probably should, like I could put my mom down as a reference or something. Um, and, and so the chances of me both winning the election and then the Senate election in quotes, and then a conservative prime minister winning this next federal election. So Aaron O'Toole has to win.
00:09:34
Speaker
I mean, those are the steps that have to happen in order for me to even get to the point where it would be even quasi-realistic for me to be appointed to the Senate. And again, there has to be a Senate vacancy. So if Justin Trudeau appoints someone in the next couple of weeks, it doesn't matter. I just get to put Senator in waiting in my email signature for the next five years.
00:09:54
Speaker
And to answer your question, what would I do if I was a senator? Like say all the heavens align and I win this ridiculous Senate election and I'm appointed to the Senate. I mean, I promise to like, you know, shin feign it, you know, like it.
00:10:10
Speaker
I don't think the Senate is a very effective body. I think it's an incredibly anti-democratic institution and I don't like it. I would like to abolish the Senate. But I mean, if I'm going to get paid $150,000 a year to, I don't know, do whatever senators do, I promise to use it in a way that would, you know, fuck with the system.
00:10:30
Speaker
So you would not be voting for like back to work legislation, et cetera. Yes. I promised to show up and vote against any back to back to work legislation that any government brings forward. If I was a Senator. Okay. Well, this is, this is kind of pie in the sky stuff. I don't, I don't want to lend too much legitimacy to the election by talking about platforms and that kind of thing. There's, there's like a 0.01 chance of me ever be kind of mean ever becoming a Senator. Yeah.
00:10:58
Speaker
Okay, well, let's talk about actually just winning the scam itself and embarrassing Kenny and getting the letter and so on. I mean, it sounds like a great idea. I'm certainly on board. But it really does seem like the deck is kind of stacked against you, considering all of these changes to legislation, considering you're going to have actual cabinet ministers campaigning against you, considering that there's going to be
00:11:24
Speaker
tens of thousands, if not more pumped into these things into like packs and so on. I don't know how many people are paying attention to the Senate elections, to be honest. I think the media treats them as the joke in the sideshow that they are. But the one thing that my opponents have over me, which is a party affiliation, when people go to vote in their municipal elections,
00:11:45
Speaker
They get to vote for a candidate that says Conservative Party of Canada next to it. There's just a lot of people in Alberta who are just going to vote for someone who has their name next to the party that says Conservative Party of Canada.
00:12:01
Speaker
And so that is, you know, it's an uphill battle, right? And none of the other parties, like the NDP aren't taking it seriously. Like the liberals, the federal liberals, obviously believe in their kind of Justin Trudeau process and the Alberta liberals don't even really exist. They're getting out fundraised by the like pro-life party of Alberta. So it's like, they're not really, not that they would take part in it anyways, but it's, that's, that's, you know, where we're at.
00:12:27
Speaker
It sounds kind of like that ballot is going to have two or three people with conservative next to their name and one guy with independent next to his name. So is that really a detriment? Yeah. There's like, there's two folks who have put their names, like two elections, Alberta, both of them, I believe, are going to be conservative party of Canada, Erica Baruti's. She's establishment, establishment conservative. She was like the president of the United Conservative Party, like the first president and like Jason Kenney literally like officiated her wedding with, with a riding
Exclusion in Senate Elections
00:12:55
Speaker
map of Alberta behind them.
00:12:57
Speaker
Uh, which is a fun Erica broody's fact. And then the other person that has put their name forward for the Senate is like a, like some perennial loser, like fringe, um, a wacko conservative. Yeah. Like a, like a pro lifer. And then there's some like doctor, high level Ahs person. I can't remember this person's name who has put themselves forward as an independent as well, I believe, but I have, I've not talked to or met this person. I have no details on them. So we're at four.
00:13:22
Speaker
Well, the board seems to be set up in a pretty fun way. I think this is going to be an enjoyable game to play through October, but I guess listeners are going to have to stay tuned for more updates since we are really at the start of this race. If you are a regular progress report listener, I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot about this campaign.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, there are, you know, a handful of things you can do, you know, we'll have the link in the show notes, you know, Kinney for Senate, you know, take the, uh, take the vote pledge, which is essentially just give us your contact info and we'll remind you to vote and we'll do it. We'll communicate with you a few other times about the campaign.
00:13:58
Speaker
There's a I have to get 500 nomination signatures. So if you ever see me in person, I very likely have a clipboard on me. I will need you to sign that clipboard for me and I need to get 500 nomination signatures. You can donate to the election. I get.
00:14:15
Speaker
for some reason, Senate candidates are able to give the exact same tax receipts that provincial political parties are able to give. And so I don't know if you've ever donated to a provincial political party, but they're very generous tax receipts. And so if you'd say if you donate $200 to the Kinney for Senate campaign, you get a tax receipt for $150 back.
00:14:38
Speaker
Quarter of all donations are going to go to Treaty 6 Outreach and we're going to include campaign materials and some of the buttons and what have you in the street outwards work they do. And if you don't know about Treaty 6 Outreach, they're an amazing group doing absolutely necessary work, especially in the kind of face of the opioid poisoning crisis that we are seeing right now in this province. It is really bad right now. People are dying all the time.
00:15:02
Speaker
There are bad drugs everywhere and the policies of our provincial government and Jason Kenney and the UCP are killing people. People are dying every day from bad drugs and it is policy decisions that are going to ensure that those people keep dying.
00:15:19
Speaker
So if you do make a small donation to the Senate campaign, when you factor in your tax receipt, it's essentially like you're donating to Treaty 6 outreach, but then you're given a little bonus to the campaign. So I think that works out nicely. There's one other little aspect of this that I think I want to hit on before we move on to a little news roundup of this week, which is that the Senate election is kind of racist.
00:15:43
Speaker
Absolutely correct. Yes. The Senate election is a little problematic. The way that the Senate election is working, it's piggybacking on the infrastructure that happens with municipal elections. As a result of that,
00:16:02
Speaker
Um, elections are not happening on reserves across Alberta. The hundreds of reserves that are in Alberta are not having municipal elections. And so that's like a hundred to 200,000 people that live on reserve in Alberta, uh, indigenous folks. And they are, unless they specifically requested, like it's not really clear what the process is for them to actually be able to vote in not only the Senate elections, but the, uh, the referendum on equalization, the daylight savings time, uh, referendum, like.
00:16:33
Speaker
You know, I know the NDP put forward a motion to properly fund, you know, having the ability for their on reserve folks to vote in this in those elections. And like it was voted down by the UCP. So I want to continue to look into this. But as far as I know, the on reserve indigenous folks are not able to vote. It's not very good. It's not going to be very easy for them to vote in this election. It's not going to be accessible. And so, yeah, no, this election is also racist on top of being fake.
Alberta's COVID-19 Policy Critique
00:16:59
Speaker
All right. Well, we don't have a whole lot more to say about the Senate campaign just yet.
00:17:03
Speaker
So what we'd like to do today is just to round up a little bit of the news this week as there were a lot of really weird things Yeah, let me let me take over the hosting bit here Jim because yes a lot of shit has gone down Recently and I think it's worth talking about
00:17:20
Speaker
So yeah, our government is continuing to try and kill us. Dina Hinshaw, our Chief Medical Officer of Health, held a press conference recently that essentially was, fuck them kids, you're on your own. You are no longer required to isolate if you test positive for COVID. You can now get COVID, confirm that you have COVID with a test, and then go to an Oilers game with 18,000 of your closest friends.
00:17:48
Speaker
You are allowed to do that now. There's no longer any rules. You can't do that. And this will help the economy somehow. I don't understand the reasoning behind this relaxation of this rule. The political calculus here is weird. It's really, really weird. I don't know who this is supposed to appeal to.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, I do not understand who they are appealing to with this. I don't understand how they think the economy will do well if all of a sudden you're not obligated to quarantine after you get sick with COVID. They're also shutting down testing outside of clinics.
00:18:27
Speaker
uh, sorry, testing outside of clinics and hospitals, like the special testing centers that they had set up, those are getting shut down. Uh, there's just like far less testing is happening. There's going to be far less contact tracing that's happening. Like they're winding down those things. Hinchaw is out at a microphone saying that apparently the only information that we need to keep track of is, is hospitalizations and I see people in ICU and
00:18:50
Speaker
And again, this is like they're trying to kill us. We know by now that COVID fucks you up, even if you don't end up in the hospital. There's a lot of evidence out there that it causes lasting brain damage. You have people walking around in a zombie state these days, not just because they're stressed out from the whole pandemic thing, but because they got COVID and it messed their organs up.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, long COVID is nasty. I mean, even getting a mild case of COVID could knock you out for like five to 10 days. And there's still like one and a half million Albertans or roughly like a third of the population that have still not gotten a vaccine either because they're not going to get a vaccine, they haven't gotten to it yet, or because they're like under 12 years old. Yeah, the demographics of who doesn't have it is...
00:19:35
Speaker
It's pretty stark too. I mean, I think with good reason, we focused on vaccinating and protecting older people right off the top. But we can't just skip all the young people at the end, especially since they're the people who are going to school. They're the people largely who are like frontline workers working in retail, food service, restaurants, that sort of thing. There's a lot of people to have walking around unprotected when we have right now more
00:20:02
Speaker
active COVID cases than any other province in the country. Yeah, I mean, the best part is that, yeah, all of these things are being announced as cases are going up from Stampede, essentially, I mean, and from other things, but it's, yeah, it's not great. It's not great. And this brings us to, you know, the former bell of the ball, really, when it came to Alberta's pandemic response, and that is Dr. Hinshaw.
00:20:28
Speaker
What's your take on Dr. Hinshaw doing this press conference all by herself? No Tyler Sandro, no Jason Kenney. Tyler Sandro going to the media the day after the announcement and saying, oh yeah, it's all Dr. Hinshaw's idea. What's your take on dear old Dr. Hinshaw? And apparently it was something that was her idea from the very beginning.
00:20:50
Speaker
I think her credibility took a big, big hit with that kerfuffle with the numbers on Friday. Because last Friday, we were, I think, two, three days into when you would first start seeing the results of Stampede and of the restrictions being eased up. They released numbers and they kind of fudged them. I don't know if everyone's familiar with this story, but they had found some cases from earlier in the year, like way back, like
00:21:18
Speaker
January? December or something? Last December. That they feel were entered in the database in error, like they were double entries or something. And so when they released last week's numbers, they subtracted these cases from like months and months ago,
00:21:35
Speaker
from the numbers and they released that net number at first, which made the spike look a lot smaller than it actually was. And that was very quickly picked up on by the Twitterati who go through Hinshaw's announcements with a fine comb every time. And they were like, hold on, what the fuck? You can't just subtract a bunch of numbers from last December.
00:21:57
Speaker
And so they finally released the actual numbers. But there is a perception out there that Dr. Hinshaw is complicit with the UCP administration in trying to downplay the pandemic or hide numbers or hide damages. And her going up to this press conference now this week and being like, hey, we're not even going to track it anymore. What other idea are you supposed to get?
00:22:22
Speaker
I mean, we've been critical of Dr. Hinshaw for a long time, and for very good reason. You know, she was responsible for how fucked up it got at the meat processing plants in Alberta. She was working hand in glove with Devan Drishan, the agriculture minister, to try and downplay those fears and to tell the workers that then nothing was wrong, and then when clearly something was wrong. And she has continued to work hand in glove with the UCP government
00:22:51
Speaker
on their catastrophically bad handling of COVID. And there's been reporting on this, you know, by Dr. I'm sorry, by Charles for Snell with the CBC that show just how much the UCP is driving this. But I mean, Dr. Hinshaw has to wear this too. I mean, you can resign.
00:23:10
Speaker
You can, you, you are a highly trained, you know, PhD public health expert. You could have had dignity and you could have stepped back at some point and been like, I am not going to be a part of this. But now she gets to where, according to Tyler Shandro,
00:23:27
Speaker
this whole like fuck them kids, you're on your own, we're not gonna test, we're not gonna do anything anymore. It was all her idea. She could have had more than dignity, right? She could have had an impact. Like if the CMOH at any point in this had stepped out to the media and been like, you know, listen, like I disagree with what the administration is pushing for, it's not correct. That would have had just a seismic impact on how things had played out here in the province.
00:23:56
Speaker
Outside of Cabinet, I can't think of any one person who had more ability to intervene or more ability to change the approach to the pandemic than Dr. Hinshaw did. So even if you're not completely on board with seeing her as a member of the team of villains, I don't think it's correct to look at this as
00:24:20
Speaker
I've seen a lot of people talk about this as kind of like a harm reduction sort of situation that Dr. Hinshaw is holding back the administration's worst impulses. How much worse could their impulses get? Yeah. I think we put this out on the Progress Alberta Twitter account, but it was like, you can't use the excuse anymore that like, oh, if she resigned, someone worse would replace her. No, you cannot get any worse than what Dr. Hinshaw is doing right now.
00:24:46
Speaker
that you have the Canadian Pediatric Association writing letters saying, what the fuck are you doing? I think it's a real live question of whether we're going to see travel restrictions placed on Albertans because of this policy decision. And you have the Globe and Mail, well, in the Globe and Mail, not the Globe and Mail, but someone writing the Globe and Mail, a person named Blake Murdock,
00:25:08
Speaker
saying, quote, the UCP government and their irredeemable yes woman, Dr. Hinshaw, have committed to a path forward that will result in the reckless waste of human life. Even more will experience long term disability. This policy is repugnant and shows a true disregard for Albertans.
00:25:25
Speaker
I think I used to play Magic the Gathering with Blake Murdock. I think I knew him in college. But he's absolutely right. This is not the time when you are seeing in the metrics these warnings of a potential fourth wave hitting to give up, to give up on trying to control things. We were so close to the finish line and we could be just fucked over for another three, four months or more.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah, so what's your prediction? When does the fourth wave hit? How bad does it get?
00:25:58
Speaker
I mean, the fourth wave, I think, has already hit if you look at the numbers. It's not going to be as bad as the last one for most people, but I think for the young unvaccinated people, it's not going to be a heck of a lot better. The last wave that we had, if you looked at the data around ICU capacity, we were maxed out. We were pretty much at the point where you could not fit more people in hospitals, and that was a desperate, disastrous situation.
00:26:27
Speaker
And I don't think that it's going to get that bad because people are vaccinated and so the hospitalization rate is lower. But you are still going to have young people who could have been safe get a preventable disease, get long-term organ damage from it. Like, I don't see how you can see that as acceptable at all. The numbers are still growing exponentially.
00:26:52
Speaker
Delta variant. A lot has changed since March 2020. The fact that so many people are vaccinated is an unequivocal positive thing. It's going to stop a lot of the bad, serious outcomes. Deaths are going to go down. Presumably ICU visits are going to go down on this fourth wave.
00:27:11
Speaker
But the thing is that this is all fucking preventable. If you had a government that took it seriously, say like Nova Scotia or PEI or New Brunswick or Newfoundland, they provide a model here just across a short plane ride away of how to actually deal with this public health emergency as opposed to
00:27:33
Speaker
sacrificing people so that the economy line can go up, you know what I mean? What's really galling is that even if Alberta was not to adopt all of the proper infection control practices that other jurisdictions had been using, we would still be a hell of a lot better off if we hadn't done the relaxing restrictions and stampede.
00:27:55
Speaker
a couple of weeks ago, right? That was a very deliberate decision. The numbers of infections traced to Stampede keep going up. I heard it was 71. Now it's over 80. I'm sure they will find more unless they stop tracing those contacts. I'm like, unless they fire the contact tracers who are on the Stampede files.
00:28:15
Speaker
I mean, who thought it was a good idea to have a big super spreader party in the city, in the province that is having the most trouble with COVID. It's fucking insanity. It is. It is. And I think, I think we've come to the end of our COVID slash Hinshaw section, and I don't really have a good segue into the next section, but it is very funny that Steve Allen, the commissioner of the public inquiry is
00:28:42
Speaker
juiced up on Red Bull right now, hasn't slept for the past two days, and is furiously typing and editing and finalizing his long-awaited, long-delayed $3.5 million report into anti-Alberta energy campaigns. We were chatting about this one, you and I, the other day, and you feel that he's putting in a lot more work, that he's probably changing a lot in that draft that we saw a couple weeks ago?
00:29:09
Speaker
It's a quasi-judicial proceeding. There's legitimate concerns that have been raised in submissions that have been made public. I assume stuff that hasn't been made public. Anyways, I'm not an expert. I think he's sweating it because I don't think he's put a ton of work into this thing and I think it's like you're
Steve Allen's Inquiry Analysis
00:29:27
Speaker
an undergrad. It's a term papers do. It's like he's got a cram.
00:29:31
Speaker
I mean, I would get a little flagrant with term papers here and there, but I think the worst I ever got was showing up at like five in the morning to slip it under the professor's door before he got to work. So it looked like I submitted it the last night before. I've never asked for four extensions and got a million dollars.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, a million dollars extra, as well as making like $291,000 a year. So yeah, the Allen inquiry has been a special subject for myself, ourselves, because back in 2019, when the provincial election was happening,
00:30:08
Speaker
You know, Vivian Krauss wrote a piece that was referenced by Jason Kenney and Jason Kenney put out a press release saying, hey, yeah, we're going to use every legal tool at our disposal to fuck with Progress Alberta. And that included the inquiry. The inquiry was part of that list. This was the this was the vaunted fight back strategy.
00:30:26
Speaker
And when the, uh, you know, the inquiry was announced, we were, we were, we fully expected that, you know, the, this commissioner, this forensic accountant dude was going to grab us by our ankles and hold us upside down and shake us loose and go through our emails and go through our.
00:30:41
Speaker
our records and go through our funding and nothing. That was a particularly weird one, like the inclusion of us in the lines of attack. And I think it's worthwhile for people to know the context of that too, because back in 2018, 2019, this was before we had started the progress report. And before we were more focused on journalistic media content.
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah, we were hybrid. We were doing campaign and advocacy and journalism. And we were doing a lot of a lot of more campaign style activities. And during the election campaign, one of the things that involved was getting out these stories about these UCP candidates. Right. And so a lot of
00:31:29
Speaker
a lot of really unflattering material about people the UCP were trying to get elected was being sent to us, often from conservatives who were just like stabbing each other in the back and so on. And there was a great desire from Kenny to get conservatives to not listen to us, to block us, to ignore us, to make sure that anything that came out of Progress Alberta was just suspect and they would not believe it.
00:31:55
Speaker
And that way, you know, a conservative voter, if they heard from Progress Alberta, that Kamikaze candidate Jeff Callaway is involved in a bunch of stinky shit and there's a bunch of weird money changing hands and et cetera, et cetera. They wouldn't believe it, right? Or like here are all the rich assholes behind, you know, shaping Alberta's future, which is like, you know, buying up, you know, billboards and the front page of that. Yeah, exactly. That's the kind of information that we were getting out during the electoral campaign.
00:32:22
Speaker
I think it's really telling in the report right now that Alan spends a lot of time trying to change the emphasis of words in the phrase anti-Alberta energy campaign because it is absolutely clear to me that during the electoral campaign that label was applied to us
00:32:43
Speaker
so that people who might otherwise hear things from us and then think about them and vote on the basis of that consideration, they would mentally designate us as anti-Alberta. They would be like, oh, well, those guys are anti-Albertan. They're traitors. Why would I listen to them? They're against Alberta. They're bad guys. They're the bad. They're the enemy.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yes. And that writ large has been the overall project of the inquiry itself to deem not just little groups like us or press progress, but the entire environmental movement
00:33:20
Speaker
in some, maybe with the exception of Ducks Unlimited, as anti-Alberta so that Albertans think of us as like villains and terrorists and don't listen to us. Steve Allen's definition of the word anti-Alberta inquiry
00:33:37
Speaker
contorts the English language to such an extent that it is unrecognizable. I'll just read it to you. So we got a leaked version of the draft report. This has been ruled on in other, like Steve Allen has publicly talked about how he defines anti Alberta energy campaign. This is not a secret. This is how he defines it. Quote, I find that the term anti Alberta refers to Alberta as a geographic modifier and should not import any connotation that opposition to oil and gas and
00:34:07
Speaker
oil and gas development in Alberta is against Alberta or its interests in any sense. So did you get that? Because it's pretty fucking tortured. And it's like he's essentially saying, I mean, it's my interpretation of it, was that anti doesn't really mean against. And so like, sure, these people might have might have taken a part in anti Alberta energy campaigns, but that it's not a bad thing. Anti Alberta energy campaigns are not in fact anti anything. Just just look over here.
00:34:36
Speaker
I mean, if that was true, if that was his aim, then he would not use the language anti-Alberta in his report, right? He would talk about anti-bitumen extraction campaigns or anti-fracking pipelines or anti-pipeline campaigns.
00:34:55
Speaker
And I think he is very deliberately trying to obfuscate what the actual political project was there, which was to carve out a whole bunch of people who dissent, a whole bunch of people who disagree with the UCP administration and tar them as traitors to the province so that, you know, average Albertans would not pay attention to us or would dismiss what we have to say.
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, and so, you know, we did get a copy of the draft report. You know, we did report on some of that. And I mean, the thing that jumps out at you immediately is
00:35:32
Speaker
again, he's trying to have it both ways. He's trying to say, yeah, these people were a part of anti, anti Alberta energy campaigns, all of these groups, but they didn't do anything wrong. And like he over and over again, throughout the document, he makes a very specific point to say that nothing bad happened. He does not make any findings of misconduct. He's not make any adverse findings. He, this is, this is no misconduct over and over and over again.
00:35:57
Speaker
I have a feeling that this sort of cover your ass language is not going to protect him or the inquiry from legal action. Yeah. I mean, I suspect that there's going to be many reasons why environmental organizations and individuals that are named in the report will have
00:36:16
Speaker
Legitimate legal beef with this with this final report We will see when the final report why it kind of comes out what's in it But the stuff that's in the draft is still so wild like there's a whole sections on motives and he spends pages Saying well, maybe these are the motives of the people who are involved
00:36:34
Speaker
Steve Allen didn't talk to anyone. Why didn't you just call them and ask them what their motives were? He has no on the record or off the record interviews with any of the named groups in the inquiry, like Ego Justice, Pembina, Dogwood, WWF, et cetera, et cetera. They all refused to speak them and he didn't press the issue.
00:36:52
Speaker
The speculation that he does about their motives to fill that gap too is fucking wild. No, no, I got to read from it. I got to read directly from the draft report here because it is wild. So here it is. Quote, throughout the course of the inquiry, I heard many theories advanced as to what is driving the anti Alberta energy movement, including those detailed in the inquiry commissioned reports
00:37:12
Speaker
that are posted on the inquiry website. Side note, those things are fucking incredible and hilarious. And circulated for comment during the participants for comment phase of the engagement process. Some suggest it was primarily concerned with the challenges of climate change. Some suggested the movement has its roots in the one world government philosophy.
00:37:31
Speaker
Others suggested that it was a progressive socialist movement. Other theories suggest that the movement is driven by those who will benefit from trading in carbon credits, subsidies for renewable energy, the ownership of rail cars, or some other scheme that will be economically beneficial for the participants. Yeah, and then there's a few other more, but those are the kind of like most egregious ones. And I just want to reiterate,
00:37:51
Speaker
Later on in the document, he does not dismiss those theories. He says, quote, of course, given the campaign of campaigns, nature of the movement, overall, it may very well be a combination of more than one of these theories. It is a question that this inquiry did not have the resources to ultimately determine. Other than to observe, the movement involves great amounts of funding and outstanding collaboration amongst many like-minded organizations. Sorry, he didn't have the resources to figure this out. What did he get? Four and a half, five million dollars? Three and a half.
00:38:21
Speaker
Three and a half to start, but then he got topped up. Well, we'll find out what the real cost is. I think nearly two years to write this thing. But he didn't have the resources to fact check whether it was a one world government plot, sadly.
00:38:36
Speaker
I think that one's pretty easy to check. The document, the draft document mentions agenda 21 four times. There is not a single reference to the international panel on climate change or really like
00:38:51
Speaker
really any discussion of like climate change or how bad shit is gonna get at all. It is an incredible document. The First Nations section, oh my God, when this comes out, when the final report is out and everyone gets to see it, like the First Nations section will blow your hair back with like, there's like pages and pages and pages of quotes from a guy named Brian Lee Crowley, who is like some muckity muck with the McDonald-Lore Institute.
00:39:17
Speaker
Google a picture of Brian Lee Crowley. He is the whitest man in Canada. This is something that has been lacking from our analysis so far because I just felt that we didn't really have the standing to dive specifically into this one or to speak for into the First Nations folks here in Alberta.
00:39:39
Speaker
But first of all, it's way outside the scope of the inquiry to have a giant appendix that's like, well, my indigenous friend says that this is not violating the treaties. Yeah. So he's got a ton of stuff from Brian Lee Crowley that says, oh yeah, by the way, indigenous people, all those activists, they don't speak for indigenous people. These people speak for indigenous people. And then they quote at length from pro-resource development indigenous folks.
00:40:07
Speaker
who exist and are fine, but that's like, come on. A lot of the content of that chapter was very familiar to me because I saw all of those names and heard all of those voices before a few years ago at the screening of Vivian Krause's pro-extraction propaganda piece, Oil Over a Barrel.
00:40:31
Speaker
If you recall, we had a screening here in Edmonton. It was hosted and emceed by Ryan Jesperson, who loves conversations, very progressive, open-minded guy. He's a big fan. Yeah, he loves us. We love him. Yes. I mean, you're right to bring that up in that
00:40:51
Speaker
Vivian Krauss's involvement in this inquiry is an open question. And I feel like there are more shoes to drop because for some reason on Twitter, she revealed that she was paid $30,000. No, no, that they hadn't paid her $30,000. She had an invoice. She was contracted and they stiffed her. She was net 60 or something. I don't know what the exact amount of days it was, but she had sent them an invoice and hadn't heard back. And then $30
00:41:17
Speaker
Like straight payment for services rendered whatever it was thirty thousand and then another nearly ten thousand dollars in expenses that she was waiting to get paid for and like No one the inquiry hasn't explained why so that's fun I think it's fair to describe her as the inspiration for this report or the thought leader of
00:41:34
Speaker
for this. I mean, okay, the cap would have hired somebody else to do Vivian's work if Vivian hadn't been there. I'm not calling her like a visionary or anything. But she was the one who was originally driving this stuff hard during the election campaign. That's how it got in the UCP platform.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, she definitely talked a lot about us in that story that I mentioned earlier on. I mean, I'm reluctant to talk too much about her. She's a private citizen. What is more troubling is when Jason Kenney and the government of Alberta uses their power to go after organizations that they don't like.
00:42:07
Speaker
And we published a piece by Martin Olshinsky, who's a University of Calgary law professor, that talks about like, hey, this is bad. The authoritarian precedent that is being set here is bad. And just because this particular inquiry has been a clown show doesn't mean that the next one
00:42:25
Speaker
I think what people really need to keep in mind here is that there are serious consequences for being targeted by an inquiry like this. First of all, it's very difficult already to do organizing around the climate in Canada, in a country where a lot of workers are literally over a barrel, where their livelihood rests on the resource extraction industries, because we haven't built something else up instead.
00:42:55
Speaker
And so if you go out there and you're demonizing these groups that are already struggling to find purchase and convince people, you're already setting them back, but then you're scaring away their donors. You're forcing them into these protracted legal battles that eat up their resources and their costs.
00:43:10
Speaker
Like for Alan to present this report as though it is a neutral, harmless fact-finding mission is a complete lie. Like this is extremely stressful and damaging for the organizations that are being actually targeted. And thank God that they didn't actually target us, that they were just threatening us.
00:43:34
Speaker
Like, can you imagine what some of these other groups are going through right now? It's tearing up their donor base. It's fucking with their fundraising. This stuff is harsh. And it could be turned against some other campaign very easily, right? Like, you could see Cor Blund get hauled before an inquiry because he was talking too much about coal within a couple of years.
00:43:54
Speaker
I mean, yeah, that's the scenario that Martin Olshinsky raises in his piece, right? And so yeah, it's bad. And even though this inquiry has been so poorly run that it's just kind of like turned into a joke, the next one could not be a joke. It could be run competently and effectively, and it could really fuck with the way that our society works.
Political Fundraising Trends
00:44:15
Speaker
Like there's a Sandy Garrison article that talks about kind of the human cost and the relationship cost that these folks have faced. It's not pleasant.
00:44:24
Speaker
And it's been, I'm glad that this fucking inquiry is finally coming to an end, but it's going to get, I mean, they got to release the final report. There's going to be legal shit. Like this story is not over. When you talk about these groups getting harassed, I immediately think of that time that Robbie Picard handcuffed himself to our door
00:44:46
Speaker
Yes. Oh God. Yeah. Yeah. They did a, the government of Alberta, Kenny did a presser with Robbie Picard when they launched the war room. And then, yeah, it's like, Oh yeah. Robbie Picard fucking zip tied himself to our door and like live streamed it. Uh, these guys, yeah, they suck. I mean, I, I want to move on to the next thing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we talked a bit about the impact to these groups and their fundraising and on the subject of fundraising, there was some big news this week about the, uh, the NDP versus UCP fundraising.
00:45:14
Speaker
Electoral politics news, zing, ring, ring, ring, ring. The latest fundraising numbers are out from Alberta provincial political parties. And the NDP is out fundraising the UCP by a wide margin. So they've outraised them for the past three quarters. And in 2021, so far, the NDP have raised 2.7 million and the NDP have raised 1.35 million. That's like, that's, that's, that's substantial.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not like a lockstep, notly booster or anything, but I do think it is quite good that some of the gap is being closed there. Like there is a lot of money that you don't see in those reports because it's going through the PACs and so on and the third party groups. But it is good to see that the conservative advantage in money that they usually have is being ground down a little.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yes, fundraising is a very good proxy for volunteer and supporter enthusiasm and the fact that so many UCP supporters are not responding positively and giving the UCP money when they ask for it, I think is a very good sign that they've pissed off a lot of people, including their own supporters. And then conversely, when so many people are throwing money at the NDP,
00:46:35
Speaker
Again, the UCP is doing an excellent job of pissing off a lot of people. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I do want to highlight one little thing, which is a little less consequential than the UCP or NDP numbers, but is just great balm to my soul, which is to see the Alberta party getting just absolutely rinsed. They got out fundraised by the Pro-Life Association of Alberta this year.
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah, they're third place. I mean, they're way back in third place, but Alberta is a two party province now, right? Like the UCP and the NDP are really the only political parties in the near, like now that really have any kind of ability to raise money, any kind of infrastructure.
00:47:20
Speaker
You really hope that the Wild Rose Independence Party of Alberta is able to get its shit together, but Paul Hinman seems like a pretty marginal political character, an actor at this point of his career.
00:47:37
Speaker
whether Alberta being a two-party state is good or bad. I mean, I will do that analysis at another time, but it certainly seems to be the reality. Better than the previous one-party setup, I imagine. Yeah, fair enough. One thing too that I like when I see these UCP fundraising numbers in the absolute tank
00:47:56
Speaker
You got to know it's causing a lot of chaos at the board level, the constituency association level.
Role of Independent Media
00:48:05
Speaker
There are people in the party structure who are doublessly pissed off right now. These are the type of people who are in the position to knife Kenny in the back and cause a ruckus. I would like to see it.
00:48:18
Speaker
Yes. I mean, you really would like to see it. And when you see the NDP raising $2.7 million in two quarters here in Alberta, I also think that that shows that there's some capacity out there to support perhaps some extra parliamentary left-wing groups. What I'm saying is we need donors. So if you have a few extra bucks and you like the work we do, donate to us. If you've got all the way to the end of this podcast and you like what you're hearing, the link
00:48:46
Speaker
to the patrons page is right there. But also, I mean, it's going to take independent media, it's going to take, you know, mutual aid, it's going to take labor groups kind of coming together and figuring out you need, you need and social movements as well, like you need everything pulling together, you cannot simply elect the NDP in 2023.
00:49:07
Speaker
and think that that will solve all our problems. I will remind people that we elected them in 2015 and then nurses and other public sector workers ate zeros, they ate wage freezes year after year after year after year. For two years with the wage re-opener, yeah. They didn't do great. I mean, they got language they didn't get fired or fucked with like they're getting with the UCP. But essentially, we all know that a freeze is a cut when you can factor in inflation, right? So it's not great.
00:49:32
Speaker
It is good to replace the UCP with the NDP. That is a good thing, but you also have to be at the NDP's back with a stick pushing them forward, or they will not do everything you want. It doesn't stop with an election. That's why you need a strong civil society to exist independent of the electoral politics system.
00:49:51
Speaker
Well, I think we've covered everything for today. And folks, if you like this podcast and you want to join the 450 other folks who help keep this little independent media project going, just go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, drop in your credit card and throw a few bucks in the hat. We would really appreciate it. I mean, we need it.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:50:12
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, or comments you think we need to hear, I'm on Twitter at Jim Story and by email at jimatprogressalberta.ca.
00:50:21
Speaker
Thanks to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme, thanks for listening, and goodbye.