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Housing crisis + UCP power-grab intersect in weeks-long Calgary zoning hearings
872 Plays7 months ago
Joel Laforest, policy advisor to Calgary councillor Courtney Walcott, joins us on the pod to go over the politicking around the city's efforts to fix its zoning laws, the housing crisis, and how it all relates to the UCP's Bill 18 and Bill 20.
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Transcript
Introduction and Location Context
00:00:12
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiswachee, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kasiska, South Mississippi, or the North Saskatchewan River.
Guest Introduction: Joel LaForest
00:00:26
Speaker
Today we're talking with Joel LaForest. Joel has been closely following the past two weeks of Calgary municipal political madness. Always fun to go dip our toe down into the fountain of just political sanity that is Calgary.
00:00:44
Speaker
And while Joel works for city councilor Courtney Walcott, he is not speaking for him today, but that is probably why he's covering or why he's, why he's following these hearings so closely.
Public Hearings in Calgary
00:00:55
Speaker
So Joel, welcome to the progress board. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me, Duncan. How was your brain after listening to, uh, days and days and days of public hearings in Calgary city council chambers? It's really cooked. Uh, a lot of the days have been like.
00:01:13
Speaker
hour days of public hearings. And we're into week two now, so a lot of the arguments are sounding a bit repetitive. Yeah, how many speakers are we at now? Are we into the triple digits yet or no? Oh yeah, it's in triple digits for sure. The speakers go up in panels of usually four or five, and we're on panel at this point like 170 something. So yeah, a lot of people.
00:01:39
Speaker
So this is taking up a lot of Calgary City Council time.
Rezoning Initiative Explained
00:01:45
Speaker
What is going on? Can you explain to the good people out there what these hearings are, what these week, now two weeks of hearings are and why City Council is having them and why they're important? Sure. So what is happening at Calgary City Hall in terms of these public hearings is
00:02:04
Speaker
the, uh, they are hearings for the rezoning for housing initiative that, uh, the city of Calgary is proposing. Um, you may recall last year, uh, in June, there was a bit of a fuss over the housing affordability task force and the, uh, city council kind of like did a, an overnight flip flop over like saying, no, we're not going to do it. And then everybody got mad and then they said, okay, nevermind. We'll do it. Um, and then they kicked things over to September of 2023, where they approved the
00:02:34
Speaker
housing strategy, which involved like 97 or 98 measures to improve housing affordability in Calgary. One of those measures was rezoning or upzoning a big chunk of the city. And so that rezoning part is what we're involved in now. Any rezoning or land use change requires
00:02:57
Speaker
a public hearing, and so since we're rezoning thousands of properties on the city's initiative, here's the public hearing for that.
Public Investment in Rezoning
00:03:09
Speaker
And so rezoning. Honestly, if I was to tell a person that there'd be weeks of speakers that hundreds of people would be lining up to speak about, something that's kind of benign as rezoning,
00:03:22
Speaker
I wouldn't get it. And so why are we at hundreds of speakers? Why are these hearings taking nearly two weeks? What has animated the public to become so invested in whether or not this rezoning by-law passes or not? One thing that is animating all these people is the fact that they received a letter from the city saying, hi, we're going to rezone your piece of property. So that is likely.
00:03:52
Speaker
uh, animated a significant chunk of the population. Um, other things include the fact that we're in a tremendous housing crisis and people care about how that crisis is affecting them. And obviously many, many people are feeling a squeeze in terms of housing affordability. So that's animating a lot of people. Um, and honestly, like a lot of people like a stage, I think they're perhaps using, uh, these public hearings as an opportunity to
00:04:22
Speaker
their voice known about a wide range of topics which may or may not include housing. Yeah and I assume that you know you have a good amount of cranks right and not just cranks but also reactionary kind of like homeowner types like we're into hundreds of people talking now like are there any big broad buckets of like people who are coming up to speak that you would categorize them into? Well due to my
00:04:52
Speaker
Employment I love and respect all Calgarians, of course Yeah, you're right there there are different types there are some folks that see zoning as a kind of intrinsic property to the actual private property that they purchased and see like any anybody changing that zoning is like editing their actual property which they strongly object to you have folks that
00:05:21
Speaker
Oh, the federal links have developed into a whole political sideshow in some ways. You may recall in September of 2023, when the housing strategy was being debated at Council, Sean Frazier, the Minister of Housing, among other things, sent a letter to Council saying, hi, I know you have this Housing Accelerator Fund application, just so you know.
00:05:46
Speaker
A lot of it depends on
Impact of Rezoning on Housing Affordability
00:05:48
Speaker
ending inclusionary zoning. And so people are pointing at that now and saying, oh, there's federal money attached to rezoning. Therefore, it's part of Trudeau's big plot to change the country somehow. Have us all live in 50-minute cities where? The 50-minute cities thing has come up a few times. Although, thank goodness, not as much as I suspected it might.
00:06:13
Speaker
some people shouting about globalists or the World Economic Forum. Some kind of ugly sentiments coming out about immigration, which is unfortunate to see. And that's the negative side of things. But I think there's also a really positive side where a lot of people, to their immense credit, have gotten interested in zoning and housing policy and are showing up and saying,
00:06:42
Speaker
yes, please like upsell in the city because it affects housing affordability and will allow me to live in a neighborhood next close to amenities that I might like, or will, you know, my head, you know, generally have the effect of like making housing more affordable or at the very least decrease how unaffordable it is quickly becoming. Yeah. Like as a, as a relatively distant observer up here in Edmonton, like it seems like these, this kind of,
00:07:09
Speaker
weeks of hearings have become essentially just like an opportunity for people to vent about the housing crisis and really just to kind of like do the politics of housing in this kind of quasi-public space. Like the particulars of zoning and you know this better than I do like even if the best zoning things happened and I think I'm pretty sure that we already did all what we're talking about what's happening in Calgary has already happened in Edmonton and there were a couple of cranks that got better but it appeared but it has
00:07:37
Speaker
pretty simply. But even if you do all of this upzoning stuff, we're talking about an improvement to housing that's still relatively on the margins. If this goes through and the zoning happens, what is the actual real world effect going to be? The real world effect. Okay, great question.
Rezoning and Property Rights Debate
00:08:00
Speaker
Currently in Calgary, 67% of all residential land is zoned
00:08:05
Speaker
Uh, or roughly the equivalent, which means you can only build a single detached home on it. Um, the median assessed value of a single detached home, like for a new build in Calgary is 1.6Million dollars. So that means that, uh. The median value of any like redevelopment on these.
00:08:25
Speaker
lots of land, 67% of them in the city without doing any zoning changes, you're likely to come up with a very expensive single attached home that not very many people can afford. And so when you have the majority of the city set up to redevelop in a way in which nobody's going to be afford to get nobody's going to, or very few people are going to be able to afford what is going to get built. Um, you are setting yourself up for a range of problems in terms of, uh,
00:08:54
Speaker
kind of a spatial segregation of people, of neighborhoods. A lot of these, a lot of neighborhoods in Calgary have particularly like the Donate of Decline as it's called around the center of the city. A lot of them have seen population decline. So they currently house significantly less people than they did at their their post-war peak in the late 60s or 80s or whenever it was.
00:09:23
Speaker
So all of this sets up a situation where you have less people living in some of the best real estate in terms of proximity to the inner city and downtown. And not only do you have less people living in it, but you're setting up a situation where only people who are going to afford $1.6 million homes are going to be the ones that are going to be moving in on redeveloping the properties. So to avoid that situation,
00:09:52
Speaker
the solution that is being proposed is rezoning for housing. And that would allow up to
Wealthy Areas' Concerns
00:10:00
Speaker
a four-plex or row homes to be built on a standard lot. And really that has the effect of splitting the land cost amongst four units rather than concentrating it all in one house. The median SS value of a new
00:10:19
Speaker
I believe is around in the neighborhood of like 600,000, which is not cheap, but is significantly less than $1.6 million. So it would have a range of beneficial effects in terms of urban density, your ability to run services, your ability to have transit operate, your ability to have a catchment area that can support businesses that are local and walkable, all that kind of stuff.
00:10:49
Speaker
Okay. And like, I don't want to dismiss this. It's just like, we're not talking about SimCity publicly owned, publicly operated arcologies here, right? Like this is, this is a solution to the housing crisis that is like still very firmly in the like, you know, private enterprise, small businesses, you know, developers are going to with the right
00:11:14
Speaker
policy structure are going to build more affordable homes where people should be living. Is that fair to say? Yeah. This is a private property rights enhancement, if anything. You're giving private property owners more leeway or rights to redevelop their properties as they so choose. It doesn't force anybody to do anything. Anybody with the property suddenly
00:11:44
Speaker
now has the ability to do more with that property rather than have to go through a whole rezoning initiative on their own accord. It is kind of strange in that it's an issue that doesn't split left-right in the classical way that you might think it does. On the one hand, it's a private property rights thing, but also there's a social utility or a social good part of just having
00:12:13
Speaker
more diverse and slightly more affordable types of housing, added like density that enables a functional city. So there are arguments from kind of both sides that are in favor that way. And like, while you say it doesn't break down exactly left, right, like there have been like, I know Steve Allen, the guy who did the the famous bled the charge on foreign funded radicals for Jason Kenney, he he has somehow been involved in this as an E with
00:12:41
Speaker
for whatever random, rich-ass Calgary community he lives in, right? Yes. If I recall the article correctly, he was referring to the neighborhood of Rideau Rocksboro, which is like a riverside community alongside the Elbow River, very close to the inner city. And I think quite proximate to the Glencoe Club, which is a private club. And if ever you want to look into the membership fees there,
00:13:09
Speaker
interesting to say the least. Yeah, like it's considered perhaps as somewhat like exclusive or ritzy area and he opposed the rezoning. But the kind of frustrating thing that comes up a lot is that some of the most well off neighborhoods with large estates and very high property values are very alarmed by all this and showing up and voicing their opposition.
00:13:39
Speaker
But from an economics point of view if you want to build a four plaques somewhere in the city and assuming that the city gets rezoned or whatever You're not going to go to like some of the most expensive land in the city to put up a four plaques you're also not going to go to like the most wealthy and litigious people in the city and
00:13:58
Speaker
necessarily get on their nerves.
Housing Affordability and Policy Critique
00:14:01
Speaker
So I don't really think it's an issue that Mr. Allen necessarily has to even worry about. But that just goes to show how much the idea of zoning and the idea that it excludes not just certain types of uses like a slaughterhouse or an industrial factory, but it also really historically has been used to exclude
00:14:25
Speaker
people and certain kinds of people. I think that still really persists and isn't undercurrent to some of the arguments that we're hearing. Yeah. I mean, you were talking about immigrants earlier, right? And how there's been some people kind of conspiracy mongering about how this is just going to mean presumably poor brown people can now, will not be allowed to show up in their neighborhood, which is, would be terrible news for them and their property values, right? Yeah. There's even a less explicit version of that, that comes out, that sounds more like
00:14:55
Speaker
There's not actually housing crisis, what there is is an immigration crisis. And therefore, the crisis is not that we don't have enough homes, the crisis is that Justin Trudeau is like too many people into the country, blah, blah, blah, this kind of xenophobic, somewhat like Malthusian kind of argument, which I personally don't really care for.
00:15:16
Speaker
Yeah, which leads back into that these hearings have just become a referendum on whatever anyone thinks about the fucking mess that is housing in this country. And it's fair. You should be concerned about housing. A huge proportion of the Canadian and Albertan economy is built on this shit. And it's like Canada never had a correction. And we never had a 2008. We were relatively insulated.
00:15:43
Speaker
from the housing bubble bursting in the United States. And like federally we stopped building or funding social housing or public housing, however you want to call it. And with the 93 austerity budget kind of like put full stop to it. Within the past handful of years, it started coming back. But that's like multiple decades of just like not doing anything federally when it comes to housing.
00:16:14
Speaker
And all the social housing that did exist and did get built is also getting older and getting closer to either needing huge investments to keep standing up or way more money to redevelop or whatever. So there's that. And then you're entirely correct. There's the classic chart of US home values versus Canadian home values. And the US saw that substantial correction in 2008. Canada did not. Canada just kept going up and up and up.
00:16:44
Speaker
There's almost a bit of a perverse incentive for a lot of homeowners. And I'm not saying people are necessarily doing this, but it's just an economic dynamic to be aware of. If you own a home, it's quite a scarce thing. And how do I put this diplomatically? You kind of benefit from a housing crisis, because the value of your home will just keep inflating if nobody does anything.
00:17:12
Speaker
I don't know that people necessarily have the long view of like, yeah, I've got to mobilize to keep housing crisis going on. I don't know that anybody individually has that view, but it is a bit of a reality where you could buy property, sit on it, not do anything with
Council Decisions and Amendments
00:17:30
Speaker
it, and it could multiply in value through no act of your own. And so we're multiple days of hearings, week two of hearings,
00:17:41
Speaker
Council hasn't even had a chance to debate this. They haven't even had a chance to ask administration any questions. But broadly speaking, where is council on this? And I don't imagine it would have been brought forward if whoever was the mover of it didn't think it would get passed. What's the chance of this passing? And where is, broadly speaking, Calgary City Council on this issue? That's a great question.
00:18:07
Speaker
It's a bit of a strange one too because council to get to this point, basically had to vote in this direction twice already. They voted to save the housing and affordability task force recommendations, which included this measure in June of last year, so almost a full year ago. They then voted in September of last year as part of the housing strategy to direct administration to go ahead and do everything to get us up to this point, which is have a big public hearing about rezoning.
00:18:37
Speaker
So in a way, council has voted twice already to get us to this point, roughly in favor. However, I think the thing to watch as the public input eventually concludes, hopefully, and council starts to debate is what kind of amendments come out? Because various councilors will have obviously heard a lot from their constituents and will feel a variety of pressures in terms of, okay, what do we need to change
00:19:05
Speaker
in this thing to make it palatable to, for people to be able to live with it. Um, for, you know, I'm sure some counselors are also thinking, what do I need to change in this to make it so that I might get reelected? Um, so there are a range of concerns there that are likely to come out as amendments. Um, and whether or not, which ones like succeed or fail will really depend on, uh, how individual counselors feel about those, whatever issues that get raised in the amendments.
00:19:32
Speaker
So it's still a mess. No one knows what's going to happen. This council is, you know, a bunch of people running around their chicken, like chickens with their heads cut off and like, it could all still fail or it could all be butchered to shit. You know, a week from now, who knows, right? I doubt that council would sit through like multiple weeks of like 10 hour days of public hearings just to say, nah, nevermind. Let's not do this. Like I really hope that that is not the result.
00:20:02
Speaker
I guess it is like a possible outcome, though it's probably the most disappointing and hilarious one. I think what's likely to happen is that you end up with a housing strategy that or a rezoning that has certain amendments to it to tailored to the specific concerns of particular counselors, depending on the kind of support they have with the rest of council.
Public Hearing Highlights
00:20:28
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:30
Speaker
You know, you've been watching these hearings closely. I saw a video of some lady in like a witch's hat kind of having a very awkward exchange and the claim like, what are some of the more interesting things that have surfaced in the past week and a half of 10 hour days of you melting your brain watching this feed? That's a great question. The woman with the
00:20:59
Speaker
fancy hat, it was obviously cool to see. I guess one dynamic that's happened that is worth folks being aware of is that you may recall there was a recall campaign against Mayor Gondek that wrapped up a few weeks ago. Many of the folks that were mobilized through that effort are coming out to oppose rezoning because of course,
00:21:26
Speaker
Zoning is part of Mayor Gondek's nefarious agenda against the city of Calgary, blah, blah, blah. So there's a bit of that. I think it's also worth saying that there's some carryover between folks that were recall Gondek campaigners. There's overlap between them and folks that were
00:21:51
Speaker
involved in the convoy or involved with the anti-vax protests in Calgary. So there's still a stream undercurrent of folks that just like to protest whatever it is the city's doing. And it can be a little bit ugly. And that kind of concerns me just because they haven't gotten a new hobby yet.
00:22:17
Speaker
And so those, you're saying those people are kind of showing up
Provincial Government's Authoritarian Measures
00:22:20
Speaker
on mass to this, to this hearing. Yeah. Sorry, Duncan. I'm trying to think of how to say this diplomatically without getting it. Yeah. You don't have to say it. I mean, they're, they're cranks. They're going after Gondek. They're going after the city. They're mad about pick your, you know, right wing grievance of the day.
00:22:43
Speaker
And, you know, I don't want to put you on the spot and having to like call these people idiots because I'll call them idiots. But I think you bring up an interesting point to this, this Gondex stuff, because, you know, this, this recall, this kind of a joke of a recall campaign happened.
00:22:58
Speaker
And then immediately, you know, Daniel Smith and or Rick McIver can't remember who was like, Oh yeah, we're going to look into changing the rules around this. And then a few weeks later, they roll out, you know, Bill 18, which is this bill that allows them to essentially just remove city councilors or mayors for like vibes reasons, I guess, like they don't really have to provide a reason. It's just a decision made in cabinet. They can just remove people now.
00:23:26
Speaker
which, okay, this is Daniel Smith. So there are two things that have happened, provincially, that are interesting. I think it's bills 18 and 20. And I might be getting them mixed up in terms of their titles. But one involves being very mad at the federal government for daring to fund municipalities and kind of intervening there, which had the added scope of
00:23:52
Speaker
of jeopardizing all of like tri-counsel funding for post-secondary institutions like and putting short grants on the kind of radar and all this kind of stuff. So there's that. And then there was the municipal recall bill which also involves bringing back big money into municipal elections which is rather unfortunate.
00:24:16
Speaker
the ability for cabinet just to like decide they don't like someone one day and say like, okay, you're off that council today, you know, like reserving all these powers for themselves that are rather threatening, I would argue. Yeah, so the provincial government seems as for all their love of capital F freedom, they seem quite authoritarian when it comes to their own municipalities.
00:24:40
Speaker
Yeah, they just kind of like are mad that city councils exist and that they don't do exactly what they want and that they have different priorities. And it's like, well, we can do whatever we want to you. You existed our pleasure, so fuck you.
00:24:54
Speaker
And that's how the UCP governed. And yeah,
Political Strategy and Local Elections
00:25:00
Speaker
introducing kind of corporate money back into municipal elections, IAC is very bad, very deleterious to the sliver of local democracy that we do have.
00:25:13
Speaker
And yeah, it is truly unfortunate. And it truly has melted the brains of a bunch of academics, right? You see the academics being very mad about the tri-council stuff and the shirk funding and the fact that perhaps these
00:25:31
Speaker
these research funds from the federal government might not come to them anymore because of like Danielle Smith wanting to peer into each proposal and approve them with a political commissar, which I haven't read the bill. I don't know if that's actually how it's going to work, but like certainly how it's been presented by its opponents.
00:25:50
Speaker
And then you stack that on top of like, oh yeah, we can just get rid of politicians we don't like. It's alarming. And then you stack on top of this the fact that Calgary, I mean Edmonton, it's not as bad as Calgary, it's still bad, but there is this housing crisis.
00:26:08
Speaker
One of the big dollar figures, there's housing and transportation, too. Big money comes from the federal government to cities for housing, just recently, over the past few years. And then transportation as well. I don't think that's really been discussed either.
00:26:23
Speaker
usually they're split three ways on these big mass transit projects. And now Daniel Smith gets to be like, no, fuck you, we're not gonna take your money to build a trillion. Out of spite, which is- Yeah, and because we don't like Justin Trudeau, because Justin Trudeau, I don't like Justin Trudeau either, but I will take 500 to a billion dollars to build a fucking train, who cares? Yeah, that's been,
00:26:52
Speaker
Disappointing is like an understatement. It's been alarming. The other thing to think about is like other provincial governments do stuff when it comes to the housing crisis or funding public transportation. I know Danielle Smith probably doesn't like to look at the BC NDP and
00:27:13
Speaker
their policy book and be like, Hmm, should I do that? But like the BC NDP is doing a ton of housing policy and the feds are actually like modeling a lot of what they're doing based off of what the BC NDP is doing.
00:27:26
Speaker
Like the funding arrangements that the federal government are proposing that Daniel Smith got all upset about, it's like, well, you could propose your own funding programs, your own grants to make cities do what you want them to. Yeah, you could build your money instead, right? Like you could just put your money up and say like, no, I'd prefer you if you did this and cities could take it or leave it. There are other options there, but that's not what is being discussed or considered at home as far as I know.
00:27:55
Speaker
like Daniel Smith Rick McIver build the housing that you want to build man like if you don't think the feds should be in here uh shake loose a few hundred million dollars a few billion dollars of
00:28:08
Speaker
you know, fucking huge surpluses that you're running. And feel free to help out, because it is hard to get a house, especially if you're younger, because there aren't any afforded, there isn't any housing that's like, anyway, reasonable, especially because wages have been so shit and stagnant for the past decade or so. Like, get cooking, because like, people are worried about housing, and it is not an issue that's going away.
00:28:37
Speaker
It's also frustrating because I don't know if this is wildly idealistic of me, but having a functional society is part of what makes capitalism kind of possible. People having homes, being able to go to work and then rest and restore themselves so they can go work again, it's part of that whole process is having homes really helps the whole thing. And we're approaching a situation where
00:29:05
Speaker
You will have people who are unable to take jobs because the housing that is affordable is either not available or is too far from the job. You are approaching a situation where students who get into school paying ever-increasing tuition dollars to attend won't have housing available to attend the university. They're paying through the nose to attend. Or they're going to have to work too many jobs to attend classes and all this kind of stuff. It starts to get really, really dysfunctional, really, really quick.
00:29:36
Speaker
For what for what purpose for what reason is kind of a big question to me in my read of the provincial political scene is that like, oh, well, we want it to get dysfunctional so that we can blame the problems on Justin Trudeau or whatever and that's.
00:29:53
Speaker
choice I guess, but it just seems like really short-sighted in terms of like having a functional economy, having a successful society, making people somewhat happy about what you are doing in terms of government, all those things I think are maybe not being fully considered.
00:30:09
Speaker
No, I mean, the UCP are not interested in kind of like providing the most good for the most amount of people. I mean, their politics have been very clearly this kind of small minded, venal, you know, how can we and our friends profit from, you know, this powerful political position that we find ourselves in and
Critique of UCP Governance
00:30:30
Speaker
That's politics in Alberta, baby. That's the Alberta advantage, dare I say it. And so here we are with the province getting stripped for parts. Everything's falling down around it. And then the reaction from the provincial government is to be like, hey, federal government, stop trying to help. We're making things shitty here on purpose. Thank you.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean like the grand strategy, if you wanna assume there is one, is probably just to like make things dysfunctional enough to make people unhappy when it comes to the next federal and or municipal election so that you can leverage that unhappiness or dysfunction and pin it on either a city council or the existing federal government and leverage it for whatever change you wanna see. But I mean,
00:31:25
Speaker
Like it's Calgary, like we are like federally, we already vote conservative all the time. So I don't know why you have to miserable Calgarians to try to make sure they vote conservative again. Like that doesn't really seem like a strategy or that makes sense to me.
00:31:44
Speaker
I know. And in their haste to make things even shittier, the UCP did try to take away, what was it, like $9 million a year for this low-income transit passes in Edmonton and Calgary until, of all people, Rick Bell yelled at them and they were like, oh, we're sorry. We're going to bring back the money. But what's your take on that?
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah, that was odd because I guess it got noticed when the budget came out where there was nothing formally, no line item that was like, oh yeah, here's that funding again. So it was kind of a big question mark as to whether or not it was going to get funded again. Then yesterday, the story broke where it was like, good news, no more funding for low-income transit passes.
00:32:31
Speaker
that didn't go over well for a lot of people. And it's important to note too that like the provincial part of that funding was like, they didn't pay for the whole thing. They paid for like a portion of it, but they, yeah, withdrew their funding for it. And, you know, announcements came out from both Edmonton and Calgary mayors. Rick Bell writes his column.
00:32:56
Speaker
you know, within a few hours, we get word that, okay, it sounds like Jason Nixon changed his mind, he's going to find the funding for it. So, you know, you just have to hand it to Rick Bell and his intrepid journalism and his
00:33:09
Speaker
of incredible advocacy efforts on behalf of... He's just sticking up for the little guy, Joel, after all. The binger. Oh, fuck. I hate that guy so much. I want to close out our chat today with a quote from Dr. Jared Wesley. I don't know if you or our audience are familiar with Dr. Jared Wesley. He's a political science professor from the University of Alberta.
00:33:33
Speaker
I believe he's also a former relatively high level bureaucrat within the Tory government, Tory governments of old, I want to say like in the nineties and 2000s. I can't remember his exact bio, but he's not exactly what I would call a radical. This is a guy who does like lots
Need for Social Movements
00:33:48
Speaker
of opinion of polling and like kind of like meta analysis of opinion polling. He tries to, he does a lot of like trying to bridge the divide between rural Alberta and, and, and, you know, Edmonton and Calgary. Like, I don't know, am I, do you feel like I'm characterizing Dr. Jared Wesley fairly?
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, I follow him on Twitter and I've read some of his newsletter articles. Generally interesting, some takes are like, where are the good Tories? I miss them, which I'm not sure I agree with. But I assume you're referencing it.
00:34:20
Speaker
or will soon. He had a recent piece about like the growing authoritarian. Yes, and he has recently become, at least on Twitter, which is, you know, of course, where everyone's true thoughts are revealed.
00:34:36
Speaker
Um, much more militant and radical. Um, this, this tweet especially quote, stealing power from the legislature, removing voters' rights, ignoring the courts, firing critics, governing by vengeance. The UCP is an authoritarian force and we need to act now to stop them. I don't know about you, Joel.
00:35:02
Speaker
but that seems like a pretty clear war for a protracted people's war on the prairies. And I did not peg Dr. Jared Wesley as a mouse, but here we are. Yeah, I'm saluting him right now. Yeah, occasionally you'll have, let's say intellectuals that are like flirt with the left or whatever that like a line will just get crossed in terms of public policy and they'll be like, this is too stupid.
00:35:28
Speaker
And it's the red line, and they're like, this is it. This government's authoritarian or whatever. They probably have a very good argument and very good evidence. The fact of the matter is that you need a counterforce to this kind of stuff if you want to take on any kind of government, which means building social movements, which means building a labor movement. And so if you don't have any of those things kind of lined up, you're just writing angry,
00:35:55
Speaker
blog posts or tweets or whatever, which is fine. And honestly, they're nice to read sometimes. But the organizing piece is often lacking. Yeah, you can't just call for a general strike without having literally done years and years of prep work. You cannot engage in a protracted people's war on the prairies without literally doing
00:36:14
Speaker
years and years and years of prep. But, you know, I think that's a good place to leave it. Like, we salute you, Dr. Jerry Wesley, you know, I understand that you were very mad that
00:36:27
Speaker
the government was going to take away this research funding, and if that's the red line for you, fuck it. Everyone else is going to find the red line. I'm glad one person found it. Because, I mean, the UCB government is incredibly evil, and we do need to do everything we can to stop them. And like, you know, let's fucking do it. Talk to your neighbors, talk to your friends and family. It starts small, but I think we can do
Closing and Support Encouragement
00:36:51
Speaker
it.
00:36:51
Speaker
Joel, I really have to thank you for being on the pod, walking us through this insane Calgary municipal politics mess, as well as just for the general conversation on housing politics and politics in general. Thanks so much for being on the pod.
00:37:05
Speaker
Folks, if you like what we do here at the Progress Report, it's a very easy way to support us. Just join the 500 or so other folks who make regular monthly contributions, 5, 10, 15. Some people are even at 50 and $100 a month. I mean, if you can afford it. But if you just go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card, Jim, Jeremy, and I would really, really appreciate it. Thank you for listening and goodbye.