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00:00:01
Sarah Hoffman makes her pitch
881 Plays8 months ago
In the first of our interviews with Alberta NDP leadership candidates, Duncan chats with Sarah Hoffman. Then, some analysis with Jim.
Show notes and more content, including our ANDP leadership tracker, can be found at our website, The Progress Report
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Transcript
Introduction to The Progress Report
00:00:12
Speaker
friends and enemies. Welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amisquatchi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory on the banks of the mighty Kasis Kasawana Sippy, or the North Saskatchewan River.
Interview with Sarah Hoffman
00:00:26
Speaker
Today features something a little different. We've got a feature interview with Alberta NDP leadership candidate, Sarah Hoffman.
00:00:31
Speaker
And I'm not going to take up too much of your time. I think we should get right to the conversation with Sarah. And then after the interview with Sarah, I'm going to be joined by my colleague, Jim. But without any further ado, here is my chat with Sarah Hoffman.
The 'Sewer Rats' Comment: Explanation and Apology
00:00:46
Speaker
All right. Well, you kind of infamously said the word sewer rats in the legislature. And that was seized upon by the UCP. It was seized upon by
00:00:59
Speaker
variety of conservative actors in this province. How are you going to repair and rebuild the relationship between, you know, yourself as well as the Alberta NDP with voters outside of Edmonton and Calgary?
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah, so that I did say those words and I regretted them as soon as they came out of my mouth it was a hot day in the house and there was a lot of tension I think everyone who knows the context of the other day and what was happening in Alberta politics knows that rebel media was the topic of discussion.
00:01:33
Speaker
at hand. A specific question wasn't about rebel media but that was exactly what we were talking about that whole week. It was a very heated moment. I made a rhyme that included hard hats and those are the words that came to mind in rhyming with it and I regretted it.
00:01:52
Speaker
Before anyone asked me to apologize, I came back into the House, I apologized, and I said I regretted the use of those words. And then the UCP and other conservatives jumped all over me. And when I say something I regret, I am going to apologize. That was many years ago now. And I will continue to apologize if people are still offended by it. That doesn't change all the other work that I've done and who I am, and that if I do something that I regret, I will own it.
00:02:19
Speaker
I know that that's unusual often in politics. There's a lot of politicians who will double down. And maybe some of the pundits will say I should have, but when I say things that I don't think are becoming of myself or the job I have, I will apologize. And so you apologized and that's good. You kind of recognize that, you know, I said something that was maybe not great, but like, say you become premier, say you win the leadership of the Alberta NDP, say you
00:02:46
Speaker
you know, win a general election, you know, how are, how are you going to kind of repair that relationship and really build the relationship between rural Alberta and the Alberta NDP to the point where you can become
Engaging Rural Alberta: Strategies and Shared Values
00:02:59
Speaker
premier? I mean, I think this is the question I'm going to ask every candidate is like, you know, there's precious few votes for the Alberta NDP outside of Edmonton and Calgary. And anyone who wants to become the leader of the Alberta NDP is going to have to answer the question, how do you expect to win outside of the big cities?
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, so just to clarify that was not about rural Alberta. That was a very specific comment focused on some very unethical folks who try to position themselves as a media outlet. I grew up in rural Alberta. I am proud of the fact that I came from Canuso community with just a couple hundred people three hours north of the city. I know that people who live in Canuso and other rural ridings have NDP values.
00:03:39
Speaker
They do currently vote overwhelmingly conservative, but when their neighbors need help when we need when a call goes out to join the volunteer firefighters Association like that, those, those values of new democrat values helping each other out being there for your neighbor when they need you.
00:03:55
Speaker
Those are rural values. And one of the things we learned in the last election is that when you show up for Calgary, Calgary will show up for you. We were in Calgary all the time. Rachel was there the most, but I was there a lot, including the four weeks of the election. But for the years leading up to the election as well, I was there. I was door knocking. I was recruiting candidates.
00:04:15
Speaker
I was doing fundraisers. And what happened is we won the popular vote and we won the majority of the seats. And if we can do that in Calgary, we can do it everywhere. And that's part of what I'm trying to model in this campaign. I'm leaving Edmonton again in a few days. Well, tomorrow, actually, I'm going to go to Stettler. I'm going to go to Medicine Hat, to Lethbridge, to Calgary.
00:04:35
Speaker
I've got a few other stops in and around the Calgary area, and then I'll be heading north. So I want to be everywhere. I want to build this party with party members and people who want to change the government. The leader can't do it on their own. They need to be part of a great team. But showing up for rural Alberta is probably job number one, and I'm very excited to do that. Well, thanks so much for indulging me on the horse race stuff. It's not why I got into journalism, but I think it's kind of inevitable that we kind of have to talk a little bit.
00:05:05
Speaker
about how you're going to win, even though ultimately one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on was to talk about policy. So let's get to it.
Addressing Homelessness and Affordable Housing
00:05:16
Speaker
The first issue I want to ask you about is poverty and homelessness. We have seen poverty increase tremendously since 2019, and cities across the province, not just Edmonton and Calgary, are struggling, really struggling to care for
00:05:34
Speaker
a growing number of unhoused people. If you were to become premier, how would you plan to house the houseless, you know, at scale in order to deal with this crisis?
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah, and the great news is that we don't have to start from scratch. There's lots of other jurisdictions and there's other times in Alberta's history when we've actually been really good at this. When I look at Canuso again, there's a number of homes were built there through a provincial program that brought skilled trades workers into the province to make sure that we had new homes being built there that
00:06:10
Speaker
people could afford to buy. So they were two bed, one bath, split level, unfinished basement houses. And that's the house that I ended up living in. Wasn't the first owner. Our family bought it from other folks. But that kind of infrastructure doesn't get built in a lot of these small towns without having public investment to make it happen. And there were those same houses built in cities right across this province, making sure that we take some of those programs that we had in the past
00:06:37
Speaker
that we look at other programs that are happening around the world that are making meaningful impact. And of course, one of the big pieces is addressing permanent supportive housing. When I look at how many unhoused folks are living really rough, particularly in Edmonton and Calgary, but in communities right across this province, it is not okay to me that we have turned our backs and that we've not seen housing as a fundamental human right.
00:07:01
Speaker
I know what makes moral sense. I know what makes economic sense for people to have an opportunity to live in a supportive way as opposed to having to show up to the emergency department or engage with the justice system. We can do so much better for people who are living really rough and we can also build a ton of affordable housing in communities right across this province. So
00:07:20
Speaker
I think that we owe it to party members and to everyone who lives in Alberta to be unapologetically New Democrat on this issue. There's no reason why we need to shy away or pretend like the market can solve this. It never has. We need to actually act aggressively and be proud New Democrats when it comes to addressing the housing crisis that we're all facing. I'm glad you mentioned permanent supportive housing. I know here in the city of Edmonton where I live, city council here has been asking for
00:07:49
Speaker
money for permanent supportive housing for quite some time. They see it as a real solution to addressing homelessness. You were a part of a cabinet. The Edmonton City Council was asking for money for permanent supportive housing back between 2015 and 2019. I think you're going to run into a bunch of questions like this for me. It's like, okay, you say you want to fund permanent supportive housing now, why wasn't it funded back then?
00:08:17
Speaker
I think some of it was definitely Ambrose Place opened either right after, shortly after we formed government. But I definitely visited some projects. What we needed to do was invest in even more and it's a crisis. Absolutely. So it was the housing investment that we made when I was sitting around the table was the biggest to date, but we need to invest so much more in affordable and permanent supportive housing.
00:08:42
Speaker
So yeah, I was one of the voices around the table. I wasn't the premier. I'm running for premier. And I'm telling you, this is one of my top three priorities, health, climate and housing. We need to be aggressive on making sure that we make substantial investments in this area. It's going to be good for all of us. And it's on the affordable housing side, too. We're going to have the only way that we keep people from losing their homes is for unapologetic and keeping the housing affordable for them, because there's so many others who are at risk of losing their homes right now.
00:09:11
Speaker
over 100,000 people in Calgary alone. So we need to be acting on the affordable housing side and we also need to be building more permanent supportive housing. Great. I mean, the way really that your political opponents, the UCP, have dealt with the housing crisis is that instead of housing people, they've instead decided to focus on public safety.
00:09:32
Speaker
And I think these two kind of files are inextricably linked, right? You know, UCP policies make poverty worse. More people end up houseless. And then the UCP come up with the solution, which is more cops, more enforcement. What role do you think police should play when it comes to dealing with unhoused folks and people who are dealing with that kind of crisis?
Police Roles and Harm Reduction in Drug Crises
00:09:59
Speaker
So the lens I play as a citizen is if I am actually unsafe, I'm going to call the police. But if I see somebody who's having a hard day and I might call 211, I might just check in with them and see if they're doing all right. Like I think police should be focused on threats of safety.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I think that that is more than enough work for them to have to do. But when it comes to dealing with people who are living rough, I think we need to do more to get social workers, counselors, mental health therapists, peer support workers. That's really why when I was a minister of health, we opened the first and several harm reduction centers, mostly in Edmonton, one in Lethbridge, one in Calgary.
00:10:45
Speaker
And it's because that when people get in the door where health care providers are available or social workers are available, when we fight to keep them alive, then they have an opportunity to make a variety of decisions, feeling respected and honored, and can get onto a path of long-term recovery if that's something that they choose. But we know that when we force people into these programs that their health outcomes are far worse than when they get there on their own.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you led right into my next question, right? When you were health minister, when the NDP were in charge, there was at least a recognition that harm reduction was a strategy that could help save lives. Now the UCP have really shut that down.
00:11:32
Speaker
swung very much in the other direction. This recovery-oriented system of care is the term they use, though. We know where they're headed legislatively on this, what you talked about, the forced treatment. If you were to become premier, what happens to
00:11:52
Speaker
harm reduction as a concept within healthcare and as a way to deal with these crises and what happens to the hundreds of millions of dollars that are flowing to these unaccountable treatment facilities that are kind of working hand in glove with the UCP on this.
00:12:11
Speaker
Well, I want to ensure that people are alive. That's my first point of priority. And then the second that they're ready to access a treatment center, I want to make sure that they're available. And I want those centers to be public. They're getting public dollars. They're serving the public. They should be reporting publicly on their outcomes and making sure that there's a level of transparency and evidence that's driving those decisions. So I want recovery for everyone who is open to it and ready for it.
00:12:38
Speaker
I want to make sure that we keep people alive who aren't there right now. And that's why I was unapologetic in opening harm reduction centers when we were in government and why that will definitely be part of the spectrum of care. Recovery is great for those who are ready, but I'm not okay with the fact that more people died this year and are going to die statistically if this continues this upcoming year than ever have before.
00:13:02
Speaker
that is a failure of the government, a failure to acknowledge that people deserve dignity and respect and stigma free care, including healthcare services. Okay. I mean, this issue, I think is, you know, the drug poisoning crisis is
00:13:20
Speaker
one of the single most important public health crises that we've ever faced. And it's been going for eight years now. More than 2,000 people are going to die of it this year. We've seen the UCP kind of very briefly talk about the success of their recovery-oriented system of care when there was a very brief dip in the numbers. And now that more people than ever are dying of drug poisoning, they don't really want to talk about that.
00:13:49
Speaker
Um, I do want to stay on this issue because people who use drugs are members of the public and they, their safety matters as well. Um, and, and would you commit to decriminalizing small amounts of drugs if you were premier?
00:14:11
Speaker
So today I announced my climate policy and I'm going to be in the next two weeks announcing the other two big pillars as well. So we will definitely have detailed policy positions as it relates to healthcare. And in my opinion, drug policy is part of healthcare. So we will have more to say about that in the next two weeks.
00:14:28
Speaker
Well, let's talk about your climate policy. Then you released it this morning. Um, you know, we're going to be updating our platform tracker shortly, uh, by the, probably by the time you listen to this podcast, your listener, you will be able to go to our platform tracker and see where Sarah Hoffman's climate, climate, uh, policy plan kind of how it compares to the other Alberta NDP leadership candidates. Um,
00:14:51
Speaker
Why don't you describe it for us real fast? I don't necessarily want this to become a campaign commercial, but you can probably describe it better than I can.
Climate Policy: Accountability and Public Investment
00:14:58
Speaker
Give me the cold notes, the tweet length version of it. You got it. The first principle is that the polluter pays. This is fundamental to making sure that those who are pulling carbon out of the ground also pull it out of the air. I think that public money should go into helping the public reduce their emissions and reduce their bills.
00:15:21
Speaker
So that is one of the biggest principles that's guiding the work that we're doing. I'm also committing to reducing emissions from today's levels by 35% by 2035. It's an aggressive target, but when kids can't breathe the air on a summer's day, when we're worried about the safety of our communities because of the dramatic impacts of drought and wildfires, we need to take aggressive action to be able to combat climate change. And the great news is that there's lots of jobs
00:15:48
Speaker
in that work too, in terms of responding to the immediate impacts of climate change. I'm proposing that we set up a youth climate core that hires young people and gives them great training to be able to do this work and get some good union jobs too. So they're doing something very similar in the United States and I don't wanna lose a generation of youth who wanna respond to the climate emergency, to other jurisdictions. I want them to be able to be employed right here in Alberta and do great things to protect their communities.
00:16:17
Speaker
and get great mortgage paying jobs. And of course, I'm going to immediately eliminate the ban on renewables that Danielle Smith and the UCP have brought in. Those large scale industrial renewable projects are great, often unionized jobs where people make a great living and they get to do great big energy projects. And a lot of the same people who work on the oil sands are working on building wind turbines right now. That won't be the case if Danielle Smith's moratorium continues
00:16:45
Speaker
And we will lose that work and those folks won't be able to pay their mortgages. So those are some of the big pillars. That's a pretty long tweet, but I appreciate you walking us through it. I mean, the other big thing that you didn't mention is that you would scrap the carbon tax and replace it with a cap and trade system.
00:17:05
Speaker
That's a big departure from government policy that was introduced while you were in cabinet. What's the reasoning behind scrapping the carbon tax and replacing it with a different carbon pricing system in cap and trade and why the departure from policy that you supported five years ago? I was incredibly proud of the climate leadership plan when we brought it in. The economists came in, they made lots of arguments as to why it was going to be successful and it was going to reduce
00:17:33
Speaker
emissions for the consumer-based carbon price. And I will say that they were right on many other pieces of the plan. The reduction in methane has gone incredibly well. The cool phase-out of coal-fired electricity industry met our targets even faster than the targets that we set. And also, I'd say tier has generated a lot of revenue as well for the province. Has it been spent in the right areas? That's a question that I don't necessarily agree with.
00:18:00
Speaker
But the piece that's been overwhelmingly rejected is the consumer-based price on carbon by the folks that we need most on board, the people of this province, who, when I talk to them on the doorsteps, talk about their kids not being able to go outside at recess because the air was unsafe. They want us to take action on climate. They are not content with a consumer-based carbon tax, particularly, I think, because when it was taken over by the federal government and then they exempted home heating from the formula for the East Coast,
00:18:28
Speaker
I think it really undermined the whole proposal. I want to make sure that we have tools that Albertans can get on side with and be excited and take meaningful action. I think cap and trade is the way we're going to do that. Climate policy, I think it's one of your three log lines, right? Climate, housing, and what's the other one? Health. Health. Climate, housing, and health. Yeah, again, those are your three things when you want to think of the Hoffman campaign, the three things you want to talk about.
00:18:57
Speaker
Fair enough, climate change is an extremely important policy, one that's extremely important for younger people. The youth climate core sounds like a great idea. I'm very glad to hear it actually. The legacy of the Notley administration and the administration that you were the deputy premier of is that the Notley administration held their own climate policy hostage.
Comparing Climate Policies: Aggression vs. Past Strategies
00:19:20
Speaker
The climate plan that you talked about, they held their own climate policy hostage in order to get the feds to buy a pipeline.
00:19:28
Speaker
How do you kind of square the circle between you being the deputy premier of a government that was like, we don't care about climate policy unless you buy a pipeline with now I'm introducing this great new climate policy? Well, I am proud to be proposing the most aggressive climate plan Alberta has ever seen because we are in a state of crisis and we need to make sure that we act urgently to address it. There's a difference between sitting around the table and being one of the people and I'm proud of the work that I did around that table.
00:19:58
Speaker
and running to be premier. I want to be the head of the government. I want to be able to say that we're going to be unapologetically aggressively new Democrat when it comes to solving these crises. And over the last nine years, we've seen them get worse. So it's important that and especially with UCP, you know, indifference, and in fact, I'd say hostility towards renewables, it's that much more urgent that we act on this. So I'm really proud of the campaign that I'm running the proposals that I'm bringing forward. And I
00:20:25
Speaker
hopeful and excited that people will buy memberships and vote for me to be able to implement them. Yeah. Let's, let's talk about the kind of unapologetic NDP stuff. Like you are, is it fair to say that you were kind of putting out yourself as the like NDP values candidate? Would you, would you agree with that statement? Oh yeah. That's probably, I got probably the biggest chair at my launch when I said I wasn't going to try to
00:20:53
Speaker
Give everyone some kind of repackage of a party that we were going to be And you know, like one of the things that is kind of a part of the New Democrat kind of DNA is the labor movement, right? And yeah when it comes to
00:21:13
Speaker
workers' compensation. How are you going to avoid the mistakes that the Rachel Notley administration made when they mandated zeros in collective bargaining for public sector workers? How would you approach bargaining with the public sector as premier?
00:21:31
Speaker
Obviously the time was very different than what the time I hope will be in in three years when I'm the premier $20 a barrel oil made things very difficult and there were a lot of people calling on us to lay folks off and instead when I was a health minister I made it very clear that we weren't going to be laying off nurses that we were going to be making sure that we invested in health care and expanded the services we provided. But when we called people to the table it meant that there wasn't a lot of money for salaries if we wanted to protect jobs.
00:21:59
Speaker
And I want to make sure that we're in a different economic situation, but also the crises that we've been facing over the last several years and the inflation that families are facing right now. I know we're going to need more health care workers, more education workers, and they're going to need to be paid more. The number of EAs, educational assistance in our schools, is not adequate. There are vacancies upon vacancies. And part of it is because most educational assistants, even if they work full time,
00:22:28
Speaker
can't afford to have, don't live above the poverty line. Most of them are living in poverty. Many are stopping at the food bank. That's not okay. If you work full time in a public service in this province, you should be able to live in the community that you work in, afford a home and a good quality of life for you and your family. So we're going to have to do a lot of work on wages. And we're going to have to make sure that people can catch their breath. The other part, though, of course, of that is making sure that the biggest affordability crisis that families are facing, which is their housing,
00:22:54
Speaker
has significant investment and that we build affordable housing and we keep it affordable so that people aren't turning their paychecks over to corporate landlords and can never get ahead. Continuing on the labor front, would you bring in car check like British Columbia has in which the Alberta NDP introduced a form of it when they were government as well?
Labor Policies: Card Check and Anti-Double-Breasting
00:23:15
Speaker
Would you re-introduce that? Yes, absolutely.
00:23:19
Speaker
What about double-breasting? This was something that the labor movement didn't get and was a frequent ask of the Notley administration, but as premier, would you get rid of the practice of double-breasting by those large construction corporations? Yeah, and for any listener who doesn't totally get what it is, often people will bid on a project and then break the company into two and have the non-unionized workers do the ones that do that work at lower wages than
00:23:48
Speaker
than the unionized workers get in their organization. It's wrong. It's immoral. And we did work with some folks in the building trades to develop some policy proposals. And now we definitely, I would be very keen to act on that. I will act on that. And we can look at leadership that we've seen in BC and in partnership with folks like the building trades to make sure that we end that practice here in Alberta and make it illegal.
00:24:10
Speaker
Okay. Final question before we get to the rapid fire. You know, we talked about how you are positioning yourself as the NDP values candidate. You know, the other person with perhaps the like, you know, you have a lot of profile. You were deputy premier people. A lot of people know who you are. The other candidate with perhaps the largest profile that has entered the race has not had an end sheet, former mayor of Calgary. You know, people are perhaps talking about how we would pull the party to the center, pull the party to the center, pull it away from kind of NDP values.
00:24:40
Speaker
you know, under when the party was when the Alberta NDP were government. I also saw a lot of a move to the center kind of what differentiates you and an NDP run by you from, you know, an NDP that's going to be run by Nahid Nenshi. I want to start by saying that anytime somebody chooses to buy a membership in the NDP, I celebrate that. I'm glad that he's decided recently that he sees himself in the NDP.
00:25:08
Speaker
I think that the NDP is the party that I've always associated with because I believe in our values. And that includes being pragmatic social Democrats and making sure that we fight for working people, that we protect the environment, that we address affordability, and that we have absolutely amazing public health care. So it definitely has given more attention to the race that he's entered it.
00:25:34
Speaker
The other thing strategically I wanna say is a lot of people think, oh, well, maybe if we pick somebody who hasn't been a part of this movement, we'll win. And I can tell you, I ran for the school board against an incumbent and I won, I ran again and I won, I ran against an incumbent cabinet minister, federal or provincial cabinet minister here, conservative, and I won, and then I won again and again. So I've won five elections. Nahid has won, the head has won three. And in his best election,
00:26:02
Speaker
Uh, the Alberta NDP and Calgary still got 34%, 35% almost more votes than he ever got in Calgary. So, uh, I know that we can win by being new Democrats. We can get more votes than by pretending that we're something we're not. And when I doorknocked in Calgary, a lot of people wanted to talk to me about affordability and particularly their housing. We lost by only 1300 votes. We can find way more than 1300 votes by putting forward aggressive housing policy.
00:26:28
Speaker
getting people inspired by it and making sure that they have something to vote for in this next election. I think that's going to be an NDP platform that a new Democrat leader has written and built with community partners. So I think that's what makes us different. Sarah, I want to thank you for coming on the pod, for answering my questions. I really do appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on Duncan. It was a really fun interview. And for anyone who's
00:26:56
Speaker
Wanting to learn more, get involved. We need your time, talent, and treasure. Please visit sarahoffman.ca. There you go. You got the last pitch in. Thanks so much, Aaron. Have a great day. Okay. And that was our interview with Sarah Hoffman. I am now joined by a friend of the show and my longtime colleague and friend Jim Story. Jim, welcome. Hey, everybody.
00:27:18
Speaker
So there we go. Our first interview with an Alberta NDP leadership candidate is in the can. Let's kind of get right into it. Um, I think the very first thing of any note that is kind of mentioned in the interview is my question to Sarah Hoffman about her kind of infamous sewer rats quote and how she plans to kind of build relationships with rural Albertans and to try and expand the base of the NDP. What, um, what was your take on, on kind of the intro and how she kind of kicked it off, Jim?
00:27:50
Speaker
Well, you called the Surratt's quote infamous, and I don't think the Surratt's quote should be infamous. The Surratt's quote should be famous. If you ask me, she should never have apologized for that. I don't know if everyone has the full context of what happened there, but she said that in the legislature during a time when
00:28:12
Speaker
uh, rebel media and the question of whether Ezra Levant and rebel media and their, their hangers on, you know, Sheila Gunn Reed and Key and Bexte and those, those people, whether they really belonged in scrums at the legislature, whether people should be treating them as legitimate press. Um, you know, obviously we have a pretty strong opinion on rebel media over here.
00:28:40
Speaker
And when she stood up and made that quote in the legislature, she was calling the rebel media sewer rats. I think it's pretty clear from the context if you go in and you read the transcript in Hansard, that's what she's talking about. And it is rebel media who then the next day came forward and were like, oh, Sarah Hoffman is calling all of us
00:29:04
Speaker
And by all of us, they mean sort of all conservative, all non-NDP people in the province, Sewer Rats. I mean, that was a total fabrication by the right. I agree, Rebel Media, trash organization, garbage journalism, bad people, and that she was talking about them. But I think even though, yes, the quote was taken out of context and twisted and politics happened.
00:29:29
Speaker
I think one of the things that Sarah Hoffman is going to struggle with is kind of building the base of the party outside of rural level, outside of the big cities and building that base and rebuilding that connection with rural Alberta.
00:29:44
Speaker
is the question around the sewer rats kind of quote. I think it's tied to that. I think we kind of need to keep that in mind and that she's going to get asked about it again. I think using it as a jumping off point to talk about how she's going to win outside of Edmonton Calgary is important because every single Alberta NDP leadership candidate is going to have to answer that question. How do you build the base? How do you win seats out of Edmonton and Alberta?
00:30:10
Speaker
And, you know, I hope everyone's thinking about that because if you want to be the premier, that's a question you're going to have to answer. You know, the next question that doesn't have a simple answer, unfortunately, I think that all of the candidates are going to run into the same problem out there. Nenshi may have a little bit of an advantage over the rest of them, because he can at least run on name recognition. Whereas the other ones are running on to where the new Democrats and that is
00:30:40
Speaker
that is tough out there. I mean, I've doorknocked for the new Democrats out in like white court and peace country and so on. And it is hostile, but it is also in a lot of those areas, the party has very poor organizational strength. And I don't want to sound like I am shitting on the people out there who are putting in an effort and trying to organize campaigns,
00:31:10
Speaker
But the bench is not super deep out there. They don't have these longstanding built up constituency associations like Edmonton and some parts of Calgary have. There's a reason why when you look at previous elections, there are so many name on ballot candidates out in those rural areas. They just don't have people to run. They don't have things built up in those communities. And if you ask me,
00:31:40
Speaker
Well, there, there isn't a simple fix to that. Uh, I mean, it's a, it's kind of a long-term power. It's a long-term project. Yeah. There are no magic words that you're going to say out in rural Alberta to suddenly flip people out there. And, you know, people out there, uh, it's not so much that they hate the NDP on policy. You know, if you go and you ask people about policy out there,
00:32:10
Speaker
I think the spirit of the old kind of agrarian CCF is still out there. It's very quiet. You don't hear a lot from it. The issue, I think, is just that there is a lot of doubt in the competence of the NDP out there, which again, when you're running names on ballot all the time and when you don't have these established party structures out in those areas, that shouldn't be surprising. All right.
00:32:40
Speaker
Well, let's run through the rest of what she kind of, uh, what we discussed policy wise in the interview, not just a horse race stuff and building the base stuff. Um, you know, the housing crisis, the drug poisoning crisis, I mean, broadly speaking, I think she did okay. I don't think she, she didn't dramatically impressed me, but she certainly didn't kind of like make me angry and kind of.
00:33:03
Speaker
and kind of talk nonsense when it came to kind of housing crisis, a drug poisoning crisis. What was your kind of take on Hoffman there? I would hope that none of the NDP candidates make us straight up mad on this file. If you ask me, this is the most important file of this election. Just to take a look at that CBC story out earlier this week about the fatalities in Edmonton.
00:33:30
Speaker
the rising death numbers, like it's turning into absolute carnage out there. Yeah, here in Edmonton, I think it was nearly an unhoused person dying nearly every day in 2024 was the CBC story, which we will link to in the show notes as well. Absolutely horrific out there, man. Absolutely horrific. You've got to have a good answer. You've got to have a good answer for this question, for this race. And I mean, more than that,
00:33:59
Speaker
If you have a great answer, you are destined to win this thing, I think, because this is such a massive issue in the two battleground areas, the crucial battleground areas, Edmonton and Calgary. And if you can come up with a good, legitimate plan to resolve the homelessness, to resolve the social disorder, if you can come up with something that is
00:34:28
Speaker
a compelling alternative to what the UCP are offering, which is we're just going to send police out to kind of suppress disorder. And that's what's really going to set you apart here. Sarah talked a bit about affordable housing and she talked a bit about permanent supportive housing. And I like one of those a lot more than I like the other one. Like affordable housing is, is okay. I mean, it is, is obvious that when housing is broadly unaffordable for everyone,
00:34:57
Speaker
that you will get over time more and more unhoused people. Okay. But in this dire emergency situation that we are in, building more apartments in downtown Edmonton that cost $1,600 a month to rent is not going to get people off the street. It's the permanent supportive housing that we badly, badly need right now. Like, like we are in triage mode. You have to go out and you have to help the people who are in the most dire situations now.
00:35:27
Speaker
And those people, they don't need an affordable apartment. They need a house that is like, it has supportive services built in. They probably can't afford to pay anything for it. And it needs to be there for them now. So I think we really need to be skeptical of not just Sarah, but all of the candidates when they come forward and they try to answer the homelessness crisis or the unhoused person crisis question
00:35:56
Speaker
with affordable housing answers, because that's not the same question. Affordable housing isn't the answer to the unhoused person's crisis. It's an answer to a different question. And if anyone is giving you the affordable housing answer to the first question, they're dodging the issue. But it was good to hear that Sarah did talk about permanent supportive housing a bit. I just want to hear more of a focus on that.
00:36:21
Speaker
Absolutely. We also talked to Sarah Hoppin on the day she unveiled her climate policy. It's not bad. I think the Climate Corps proposal, good union jobs for young people to combat climate change, great. In theory. Full marks. I mean, as an idea, yeah, as a campaign promise. I think it's, I don't really have any dog in the fight when it comes to
00:36:45
Speaker
carbon tax versus cap and trade. I think that was an interesting thing to disavow the policy your government brought in to great fanfare. I think we've seen, where are we at? Rocky Pancholy and Hoffman have both been like, let's get rid of the carbon tax. It's interesting to see two of the leadership candidates
00:37:06
Speaker
say it's time to get rid of that policy. I mean, again, I don't have any dog in the fight. I don't think that carbon pricing is the be all end all, and it's certainly done a lot of harm to kind of future climate action based on how kind of unpopular the policy is. But I don't know, I think broadly speaking, Sarah Hoffman's climate policy seemed okay. I'd be surprised if any of the candidates come out strongly in support of the current carbon tax setup.
00:37:34
Speaker
It's really politically unpopular. And I think they all think that there are easy points to score there. I'm with you on not being really excited about trading the one form of carbon pricing for the other. It's not like cap and trade doesn't have its disadvantages. The carbon tax regime has actually a really nice advantage to it, which is one that I don't think any of the candidates are going to say out loud.
00:38:03
Speaker
because it sounds bad to anyone who is right of, I don't know, David Swan, which is that the carbon tax regime right now has a redistributive element to it, right? It redistributes wealth down towards the lower economic strata, which is a good thing in this grossly unequal society that we have. You won't be getting rebates under a cap and trade system, right?
00:38:35
Speaker
No, exactly. I think the other thing that I regret not bringing up a little more and that was brought up at the end of the climate stuff was when anytime we're going to talk about climate in the NDP, I think we have to talk about the hard right turn they took towards pipeline politics during their time in power and how they essentially held their climate plan and legislation hostage federally so they could force the Trudeau Liberals to buy a pipeline.
00:39:04
Speaker
Um, putting a, putting a gun to your own head to demand that someone do something you don't want. And like, well, they really fucking wanted that. It's still not built. And we're, they wanted to have the UCP, uh, being in charge here in Alberta. Okay. Hold on. They wanted the political rewards of being seen as supporting the pipeline. I don't think they gave a shit whether or not it actually got built, but that goes for, that goes for the UCP too, on the pipeline stuff.
00:39:33
Speaker
Well, regardless of how they feel, I think the pipeline politics stuff was like, you know, ultimately very corrosive for the NDP and yes, didn't accomplish shit. And again, it's still not built. And so no dignity, just like you remember the, uh, the cold war against BC wine that was part of all of that. Oh my God. Don't remind me. Yeah. All
Climate Corps for Youth Employment: Critique
00:39:54
Speaker
right. All right. Really, really humiliating stuff. No, no, there's more, there's more on the climate that I want to talk about the climate core proposal, because this really reminds me of.
00:40:03
Speaker
uh, the efficiency Alberta energy efficiency program. You remember this one? That, uh, when that was implemented, that ended up being politically problematic in a few ways, right? Like it did not end up providing this, uh, this mass of good union jobs that people thought it would. And the government ended up contracting a lot of those services out to a company from, uh, from Ontario.
00:40:33
Speaker
if I recall correctly, I'm really worried that this climate core proposal is not as cool as it sounds to us. And that what we may end up getting is kind of an insufficient and also very, you know, private market based or private market reliant regime, just like the the energy efficiency upgrades. And like,
00:41:01
Speaker
Then on paper, uh, the improvements to energy efficiency were good. Uh, you know, they definitely helped a little bit, but, uh, I don't know if we should really be expecting like green new deal level employer of last resort. Great stuff. Um, I think we should be really careful about projecting our own desires onto this climate core proposal.
00:41:29
Speaker
Because in practice, it may not be as cool as it sounds. I think another part of the interview where Hoffman got a little defensive was when, you know, we talked about how the Nazi regime gave out zeros to public sector workers during their time in office. And, you know, I think the, that is something that, you know, anyone involved with the Alberta NDP of 2015 to 2019 is going to have to wear.
00:41:57
Speaker
and like you're gonna have to repair that relationship with labor. What did you think of Hoffman's comments on kind of the labor question? Well, she got a couple of things, right? I mean, committing to card check, committing to a double-breasting ban, those will please labor. Those are some nice improvements to the regime. Yeah, object card check is...
00:42:25
Speaker
Card check isn't even a small one. Card check is pretty significant. So I'm happy to hear that. But yeah, Sarah absolutely turtled up as soon as you started asking about the zeros that the public sector got year after year after year. She didn't have a great answer for that. It felt almost like she was not expecting to get that question even from us.
00:42:55
Speaker
Um, you should expect to get that question from us. I don't know if they're going to be get getting asked about that stuff by anyone else in media. I don't know if that's going to be big in the discourse, but no, absolutely not. No, no one else, no one else that like post media, the CBC is going to be like, Hey, remember when you gave out zeros to workers for four years? Like it's just not even on their radar. Yeah.
Defending NDP Austerity Measures
00:43:21
Speaker
And it, and it was very cynical stuff. Like I did not like.
00:43:25
Speaker
Hoffman's answer there where she talked about how there was an economic downturn and a budget crunch and they had to respond to that. Like you're governing Alberta. This is a place where you know that government revenue is extremely volatile and will jerk up and down with the price of gas and the price of oil every year. When there is a little economic downturn,
00:43:54
Speaker
or a large economic downturn because of resource prices, you don't immediately grab onto that as an excuse to do austerity. That's the Tories game, man. That's like shock doctrine stuff. You have to recognize that the budget is gonna, it's gonna heal up once those resource prices heal up themselves, right? And you have to be thinking in the longterm. But that wasn't really, I don't think the reason
00:44:24
Speaker
why they did that, you know, the reason that she gave, right? The reason of, oh, we had the budget crash, so we had to make the cuts. That's the justification, but I don't think that's the actual reason. Like I was pretty heavily involved in the party back then, right? Those were the years when I was working as a staffer and a really low level staffer. I don't wanna give a false impression to the listeners here. I was just like canvassing
00:44:52
Speaker
writing emails and doing office stuff. I was not a decision-making guy there, not high ranking, don't want to steal valor by any means, but I was, I was like there, right? I did see things happening around me. I was in the machine and the impression that I got of what was going on at that time was the whole reason that they deferred the raises year after year after year is because they wanted to push them into the next administration.
00:45:21
Speaker
so that they could be used as like a wedge or pressure against the conservative government that they kind of expected was going to come back in right after them, right? And so there was a lot of pressure from the party on labor people to just like, please like keep your powder dry for like four years, just like eat the shit because
00:45:47
Speaker
On the one hand, we politically can't run a big deficit because we're terrified of it. And I don't know, we don't have the spine or the rhetoric skills to stand up and defend deficit spending. And on the other side of things, we want to be able to use this as a cudgel against the Tories later. I really hope that Gill makes the time to do one of these interviews with us. I mean, we're going to try and interview all of these candidates, but I really hope that we get Gill on the mic at some point because
00:46:18
Speaker
Uh, I mean, Gil was right in the thick of all of that. And I definitely want to pose that question to him, you know, why did labor take that deal from the NDP? Why did, why did labor, you know, bend the deal, bend the knee and accept those zeros year after year after year? Yeah. Well, keep on the lookout for future podcast interviews with, uh, Alberta NDP leadership candidates. And that's all for today. Thanks for listening and goodbye.