Transcript
Zain
0:01
This is a strategist episode 1075. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter. Guys, happy
Zain
0:10
happy Thursday. What's going on?
Corey
0:12
Why'd you lose, Zain? Yeah,
Carter
0:14
Yeah, Zain. Let me tell you something. We need to sit down and we need to find out all the details. Zain?
Zain
0:21
We overestimated the Alberta party. Okay.
Zain
0:27
Yeah. First, we thought they're going to be too good. Then we thought they're going to be not good enough. Turns out it was neither. The Alberta party was not a factor. And we just, I mean, trust me, you'll hear about this in the documentary that we're creating. But it's really tragic, Carter. Hang
Carter
0:45
Hang on, you're doing a documentary instead of doing a sit-down with the strategists?
Corey
0:51
strategist accountability session. No, there's no accountability
Carter
0:54
accountability session. You have to do the accountability session. That's in your contract. It's in
Corey
0:57
in our corporate bylaws. Yeah,
Corey
1:00
Do you remember when Stephen Carter dropped
Corey
1:04
dropped his pants and exposed himself to our listeners metaphorically for the campaign?
Zain
1:10
the corporate bylaws, correct? It was time that we contacted a lawyer. And while we were there for all his other charges, we decided to throw in the extra 50 bucks to get the corporate bylaws created. Do
Carter
1:21
Do we have a corporate seal? I feel like we should have a corporate seal.
Corey
1:24
mean, do you really want to spend money on a corporate seal? Like, you want to get, like, a stamp for the great corporation of the strategists? I'm quite certain.
Zain
1:33
as I said it, yes.
Zain
1:33
yes. You know, I do actually want that. Do you want a sexy seal that you could just include on all of your paper documents? Using just this hot wax? No, we want that. Yeah. You know, we need an offshore bank account. I've been saying this for a long time. It's getting... Hey, Zay. It's
Corey
1:53
getting... Hey, Zay. hey what's
Corey
1:53
what's up yeah i'd settle for an onshore bank account that works oh is
Corey
1:58
that yeah okay this is probably
Carter
1:59
probably where we should shout out cibc for making sure that we can't access our fucking money cibc
Zain
2:05
cibc is the flare airlines of banks uh and i'm
Zain
2:10
i'm sticking by it i'm sticking by it uh they are and i and i and i don't mean to exaggerate terrible uh at uh at both flying and banking, which makes both CIBC and Flair Airlines have the exact same core competencies, which is no core competencies. Corey, before we begin, anything that you want to get off your chest? Your headphones are drawing a lot of attention.
Corey
2:37
Yeah, I misplaced my other headphones, so I'm using these red ones, these first-generation Beats, brought
Corey
2:43
brought to you by Michael Phelps. You remember that? It's a good time. Oh, yeah, those were good. It's a different era. Yeah.
Zain
2:48
look like a white rap producer in the late 80s.
Zain
2:54
You look like the guy at the end of the movie that's going to get all the money, but had very little of the talent.
Zain
3:00
Well, that does, in
Zain
3:04
That's true. Carter, anything else before we get going on this doozy of an episode?
Carter
3:11
I got nothing. Here
Zain
3:12
Here we go. Let's
Zain
3:13
Let's move it on to our first segment. our first segment one restaurant for sale sandals worn once guys that is my that is my attempt at hemingway the poetry that i bring to the show uh i know you've missed it oh yeah no i mean it's literally
Zain
3:28
yeah what do you okay what do you want to criticize it want
Zain
3:31
want to criticize it with your here's
Zain
3:33
here's what happened go ahead analyst
Carter
3:34
analyst is far more far more critical doesn't do poetry right just ask questions and sometimes it lulls cory and i into a false sense of security like last episode when cory and i were like you know what danielle smith's not a bad person you know she's trying to help out in her restaurant and we got totally fucking bamboozled totally
Carter
3:54
totally bamboozled by danielle smith it
Zain
3:57
here's how you got trampled steven carter because after that that quasi-viral if i can even call it quasi-viral photo yeah
Zain
4:05
danielle smith is selling the rail car restaurant she owns with her husband that is right this unique one-of-a-kind restaurant which is 65 kilometers south of calgary is now available for purchase cory for just under 400k or for rent for
Zain
4:19
for 351 dollars per month which seems quite a reasonable amount wow for a podcast studio i feel like i feel like guys i feel like if
Zain
4:31
if we carpool we and you guys have electric cars if If we carpool, I think we could make this thing a go. We've made worse financial decisions.
Corey
4:41
We have made way worse financial decisions. We've made worse ones this week. We should.
Zain
4:47
Yes, we have. Side note to Carter, because I know this is in your lane, Carter. Let's put a request in to see what sort of sound barrier and insulation it has, because I think there could be a go for it.
Carter
5:02
Oh, I think we
Carter
5:03
we should do it.
Carter
5:03
I think we should do it. i've never been more excited about something in my life cory
Carter
5:07
cory and i well guys it's a rail car we
Zain
5:09
we doing dishes we could move it we could move it we
Zain
5:15
should move it to chay it should be in chay oh my goodness we should get it right are there
Carter
5:20
there any tracks in chay there's no tracks in chay there
Corey
5:23
there are tracks that go through the valley next to deerfoot trail so not in chay but next door in uh renfrew or what we call east chay there is uh there i personally
Zain
5:31
personally am a fan of putting it right in the heart of downtown che ensuring
Zain
5:35
that it becomes the primary uh monument uh in downtown che slash uh podcast recording studio carter
Corey
5:43
carter i think i meant how when you
Zain
5:45
you inquire also inquire about uh how we would negotiate moving expenses yeah
Zain
5:51
yeah it's good getting them right you get something to do yeah
Carter
5:55
this is a great crazy would it be
Carter
5:57
listen can we not let's not lose the fact that cory and i are still pissed though i mean even though we're doing this why
Zain
6:03
carter start with me last week the photo goes around you talked to uh on the previous episode you're talking to annalise about you know danielle smith you were defending her on on this particular photo of her taking a shift on when when her husband needed some help at the restaurant why is your mind changed now that she's wanting to sell the restaurant because
Carter
6:21
because it was a total publicity stunt it was a total we got used cory and i were used for to try
Carter
6:28
try and get her an extra you know fifty dollars a month on this thing like we were used we were abused it was terrible
Carter
6:37
i i just don't understand how we allowed ourselves to do that so
Corey
6:40
so it does fundamentally change the the tenor of it all right it goes from being like you know it's tough balancing these things working family trying to make ends meet uh
Corey
6:49
uh and isn't that nice she's she's helping out and her and her husband are doing this thing together and all of that too like oh you're just the premier using the premier social media account to showcase this thing that you're now selling right and even if those things are not like causal you know even if those are even if i've joined things that are independent things it changes the feel entirely right it starts to feel like oh
Corey
7:14
oh my goodness yeah so like this is it doesn't feel like a nice thing anymore it feels like promotion it feels like marketing it feels like exactly the kind of thing you would do if
Corey
7:25
if you were just like yeah we got to to get some eyeballs on this and i've got a pretty good profile well
Zain
7:29
well cory let me ask you the the most obvious follow-up question in the world was
Zain
7:33
was it effective marketing i
Corey
7:35
don't know if it was marketing i'm not going to go that far because that's actually quite a claim because i think daniel smith would get into a fair bit of trouble if she were using her office of premier to advance her private interests like that like that's generally not something
Carter
7:48
politicians what are you afraid of saying why are you afraid of saying that she
Carter
7:52
she marketed it just happened to to come out the weekend before she announced it was for sale it was fucking marketing are you familiar with the kardashians are you familiar with this influencer set she used her influence to try and get more money hey can i make an
Carter
8:08
for you my friend from now on i'm calling her can i make an
Corey
8:10
an observation for you okay
Corey
8:13
correlation is not causation and if you are about to sell a restaurant and you're down a dishwasher how hard do you think it's going to be to hire hire somebody for a job that's not going to exist in a couple of weeks. Pretty fucking hard, which is probably why she would end up having to do that shift. So no, I'm not going to go as far as you and suggest that this was all part of a staging. I think they could have the same root cause. She had to wash dishes because this thing was going to be listed. It was listed because this thing was going to be listed. Doesn't necessarily mean they're all part of the same bundle.
Zain
8:45
Carter, Corey's convincing me it's inevitable. It's going to become a podcast studio, whether it's us or someone else. I mean, at this point, I mean, oh, yeah. I'm in a bidding war right now with Curse of Politics.
Carter
8:55
Yeah, this is terrible.
Zain
8:57
terrible. One of the advantages we have, Carter, is zero
Zain
9:00
zero dishwashers needed on this podcast. We've actually had zero total dishwashers on this podcast. Yeah.
Zain
9:06
Carter, let's just give you the hypothetical out, okay? Let's just say that this was in the marketing, promotion, PR category.
Zain
9:16
Was it effective? We'll get to the ethics in a second. Was it effective?
Carter
9:20
Well, I mean, I think that there's a lot more people who know her restaurants for sale than would have known if she didn't do this. So I'm not sure it'll be effective in creating the outcome of the actual sale, but I think that it is effective. What's going on with my dogs tonight? I think it is effective insofar as more people know about it. And that's often one of the biggest challenges in selling anything is making sure that there's enough people who actually know about the sale. So I would say that it was very effective. more people we know about it the fact that we know about it is astounding because none of us are in the market for uh buying a restaurant i
Carter
9:58
i didn't think it was at
Carter
9:59
least well yeah i was gonna say maybe cory is carter
Zain
10:01
carter it's it's 351 a month uh you are going to lowball at something like 180 right like 180 is our starting offer and we're probably not going to go more than 195 my
Carter
10:10
my dad taught me that you
Carter
10:12
you know he came in and he's like you know if
Carter
10:14
if it says 35 000 you offer 15 cash and
Carter
10:18
and i never understood also
Zain
10:19
also offer the difference between in her case we might we might want to offer crypto uh but do we
Carter
10:26
we have crypto we should have strategist crypto that'd be great we
Zain
10:29
we should we should do a lot of things carter strap including getting on with this podcast corey is there is there a ethics question as it stands right now in its interpretation is there an ethics question or is this just one of those like on the line potentially an issue sort Yeah,
Corey
10:44
look, there are questions that come out of this pretty obviously and pretty evidently. You are not supposed to use your elected office to advance your private interests or the private interests of your family or friends. And using the office of the premier to sell something you own would be a pretty clear ethics violation if that's what was going on, right? Right. I mean, I think it's pretty clear cut, actually. I think you could maybe make the case that the social media is not like,
Corey
11:11
like, you know, your office. It's just, hey, it happens to be your social media. But that's pretty tough to do when you've just used it for 28 days in the campaign to promote your candidacy. So I think that's tough. That's a tough thing to do. But we are in unprecedented times. And I mean that not just in the sense of what we all know with like Donald Trump and all of those, you know, very clear self dealings that he was involved with when he was president of the United States. But also in the sense that our personal lives, our professional lives, our social lives, these are all blurred through
Corey
11:42
these various channels we own. And it's tough to say, you
Corey
11:46
you know, is this Stephen Carter, the campaign manager? Is this Stephen Carter, the private individual? Who's talking right now on social media?
Corey
11:54
That's tricky. I think we have to acknowledge there's a certain trickiness.
Carter
11:57
But yeah, like, it
Corey
11:58
It is rife with challenges from an ethics point
Carter
12:01
point of view. I mean, keep in mind that the person who will be writing this report, last time she wrote a report about Danielle Smith, called her a threat to democracy. So, you know, this isn't, you know, this is the same. It would still be the Office of the Ethics Commissioner that would be writing this report.
Carter
12:16
I don't think that Danielle Smith should be wanting to be called in front of the principal, you know, called back to the principal's office again. This is, I'm sure that there's already been a complaint lodged about it. And, Corey, you don't get to change hats when you're the premier. You don't get to change hats and say, well, I was doing that as the as the owner of this of this facility.
Carter
12:37
That's why we have the ethics laws. That's why the ethics laws are there, because you don't get to separate and say, well, I wasn't doing that with my premier's hat on. That's why the laws are there. now
Carter
12:49
i'm steamed about what he makes
Zain
12:49
makes is is interesting because
Zain
12:54
know how does a politician like especially in the role that you're suggesting that a premier is just singularly one thing all the time also do the things that we advise politicians to do like be authentic be textured don't be a fucking square like how how do you reconcile that in this case where she has a private life and a family life and all these things and the intersections can be can be messy I
Carter
13:17
I think that we were we were all on board with her being at the restaurant. I mean, she was technically promoting her family restaurant when she took that photograph. That that type of a distinct, you know, that type of promotion, I thought was well within the guidelines. I didn't think that, you know, there would be any direct financial gift
Carter
13:38
gift or anything that would directly come from that from that post. post uh i thought it was you know free
Carter
13:44
free and easy and we defended her quite staunchly because you know we really did think i think cory i'm speaking for you a little bit so so please forgive me if i if i'm getting this wrong but i think that we we thought this was well within the the realm of of allowable it's when it became something that was for sale and it didn't happen to like she didn't happen to put it up for sale next month or the month after it just happened to show up for sale the next day and and that to me is is is breaching the act that's going too far and that's putting now she's promoting something that she's trying to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and when i say it like that cory when i say she's trying to promote something that she's trying to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars does that change your mind sorry zane i took over your hosting job there for a second but it's only because i'm doing it better um Um, yeah,
Corey
14:37
yeah, look there, you can read these actions pretty plainly as being a violation, right? You can say exactly
Corey
14:44
exactly what you've said that the premier promoted something that the premier was intending to sell. That's, that's pretty clearly, including the use of the word premier in this context, that's a violations of the ethics law, right? You're, you're advancing your personal interest through that. But I do want to stress, I don't necessarily think it's so clear cut because I think it's a little trickier to prove intent in that case. However, whether she had that intent or not, I think it's still a matter that should concern Albertans greatly because it really calls into question judgment. If you know that you're listing this thing on Monday, why are you as the premier tweeting about it on Saturday? You are opening yourself to those charges. And, you know, you should have a little bit more judgment there and say, okay, that's not my intent, but I understand how this could be read. Certainly don't want to go there. And certainly when people start writing news stories about it, as happened, you might want to assess and say, maybe Monday's not the day to sell this. Maybe we need to rethink this a little bit. Maybe we need a little bit of space because this now looks really badly. So there's both the judgment of the tweet and there's the judgment of proceeding with the sale on Monday, which I think, even
Corey
15:56
even if you want to give this the most charitable read possible and say this is not an ethics violation, it's certainly something that should call into question. and
Zain
16:04
and here's a link i'm carter i want to get into like the issues management of it right so the best thing like i rarely offer my my perspective but i think oh yeah the best thing yeah the best thing i think the premier could do at this moment is get this off the the front pages right close on a quick deal 180 a month cash up front we're ready for it downtown che right that's the best thing she could do right now yeah it's really the only
Carter
16:27
only option yeah i have
Zain
16:27
have a question for you carter that that might take a bit of a walk but give me two seconds to try to get it out here here, which is really about political capital and
Zain
16:35
and honeymoon periods. She has won a mandate. Does this story burn any political capital for her? Is this a small nick in any way? Or if you were advising her as an issues management professional, would you tell her that this is actually burning a bit of capital or actually, you know, this is fine, the best thing to do, we ride it out?
Carter
16:58
Well, I think she's going to have no problem riding it out in the the short term. I think that, you know, it's barely a story right now. I think that she'll have no problem. She's got that political capital. We're far more interested in, you know, how she's going to govern what she's going to do. You know, those types of questions are far more interesting to the general population right now.
Carter
17:18
But I'm quite certain that there's been an ethics complaint made that ethics complaint will take X number of weeks to investigate. Once that investigation is over, And another report comes out. And instead of the ethics commissioner saying, I'm going to, you know, not punish the member in question until
Carter
17:40
This time there may be two punishments handed down, one for the previous infraction and one for this one. And
Carter
17:47
the issues management will come to play. And I think that if I was advising her, I'd say, let's get ready for that second one. let's make sure that we are uh crystal clear go to the ethics commissioner right now do a mea culpa ask her what she should you know what the premier should be doing to made to mitigate this and uh you know i think frankly what she should do is is uh donate the proceeds to a podcast um they could then buy the you know the restaurant and uh you
Carter
18:19
you know i think it would work it could work out really well but i think she's gonna be in trouble later yeah
Carter
18:24
yeah she's gonna be in trouble later cory
Zain
18:26
cory is there an issue to manage her if you're advising the premier i
Corey
18:29
think steven has put his finger on it the world's already moved on like we're talking about this because we feel a bit foolish because we were saying oh it's so nice and it doesn't seem to be clear to you
Carter
18:39
we're not foolish it's aggrieved it's we're angry aggrieved
Corey
18:42
aggrieved okay but and we weren't the only ones you know like charles adler he he also took a very similar track just to just to feel like oh shit nicely done with track that's
Carter
18:53
great yeah man he's good yeah because it's
Zain
18:55
it's a rail car yeah
Carter
18:56
yeah it's so good
Zain
18:57
actually even start a subsidiary pod called the track or from the from the track on
Zain
19:01
on the other side of the tracks oh my god guys the possibilities are endless yeah
Corey
19:06
yeah well i think it's it's a rail car it's pretty big we could have multiple podcasts being recorded at the same time in there
Zain
19:15
james patterson a podcast just fucking pump those things out like
Zain
19:19
like a fucking factory cory okay
Zain
19:22
okay finish up what's the issue sometimes
Corey
19:24
sometimes that we do yeah
Corey
19:28
here's the thing um
Corey
19:30
it's less clear to me that the ethics commissioner would actually rule that this was like a big infraction i think maybe a warning would be more marguerite trussler's style on this particular thing because there are elements like was
Corey
19:43
was any government resource actually used besides the good name of the premier office what would be the benefit like you you kind of like put things through and it's like do we think she's gonna get more money because she was the premier she used this megaphone but she owned the megaphone before she was premier it's her social media account there's a few issues that kind of confound this but i do actually really like what steven suggested about going to the ethics commissioner and saying hey
Corey
20:07
hey listen i uh you know we first of you know this was not our intention but the way timing worked out we didn't know the news was going to write a story about this this was just a picture of me washing dishes that became a thing and we didn't know it was going to become a thing because there's also a universe where there's just the picture and just the listing that seems a lot more innocuous than picture post media story listing right and you say look we didn't know this was going to be be a thing this was my social media account it was pre-existing from before i was premier of course as you know um but we we wanted to have this conversation with you first let you know the series of events that occurred so you're not you're not kind of trying to drag them out of us in any way shape or form we're happy to talk about it uh here's how i intend to deal with the sale here's why we don't think that you know like have all of that up front and just look like you're not trying to hide anything but in terms of like the public management i
Corey
20:58
i feel like that would be jumping back into a fire nobody's talking about it right now everybody now is talking about and you
Corey
21:04
you know probably not accidentally and maybe we should talk about the timing there uh but the facebook spat that
Zain
21:12
get to it in just a second here carter i'm gonna go to you on this um let's
Zain
21:17
let's round this out very quickly we like to leave our listeners with uh how would you have done it better often in politics we're told to do things we don't always have the optimal optimal solution of not doing them available to us. If the Premier said, I want to do this, this makes me look human, go fucking get it done, this picture, that is, what would you have advised her? Would it have been a simple act of saying, well, then if you want this, the listing has to wait? What would have your communications tactic have been on this particular side of things? And Corey, I'll go to the same question next, then
Zain
21:46
then we'll move on to Facebook.
Carter
21:48
I would have found a potential
Carter
21:50
potential donor who wanted to give a lot of money, who couldn't give money to the party directly or to the premier directly i would have called them and said listen we need you to buy a restaurant oh my god that restaurant's only going to set you back 450 um it's going to be public and then what we're going to do is we're going to post a picture of the premier afterwards after you've bought it saying last shift in the dish pit we just sold our our restaurant for $450,000 to some guy
Carter
22:23
guy who owns the Flames or something. Don't
Corey
22:25
Don't say any name. I'm
Carter
22:27
I'm not saying any name. One of the dozens of owners of... It may not be a bad idea
Zain
22:32
for him to say a name. We could update our corporate bylaws once more when we're going in for the libel. It
Zain
22:37
It may not be a terrible idea.
Carter
22:42
me that this isn't one of those situations that if you were trying to be dirty, If you were trying to be dirty, this is how you would do it. You would sell the restaurant for just, you know, a couple hundred
Zain
22:53
more than you want. That wasn't the question,
Zain
22:53
but I like that you've now taken on the, how
Carter
22:56
how would you try to sell it? Why would I even give a fuck what your question was? How would you choose the price
Corey
23:01
price of this fucking thing? Frank, Stephen, if you're trying to be dirty, why go through the trouble of the fake sale? Why not just take a bribe? You know, I mean, like, there's a whole thing. Well, the bribes
Carter
23:09
bribes are easy to track. You know, where'd you get this $400,000? That's true.
Carter
23:12
true. This is like a good
Corey
23:12
good laundering. yeah this launders
Zain
23:14
this is a good solid you
Carter
23:16
you idiot you've never done a bribe before if you're gonna do a bribe you can't have the money just show up how
Corey
23:22
would you stop breaking bad we appreciate that okay that's good how would
Zain
23:27
have done this better how
Corey
23:27
i have done this better
Corey
23:28
i think that i the secret for most things where you're like oh are they gonna think once they know the other thing that my intention was different at the first time like if if that thought passed anybody's mind if you actually got to a situation where your issue's managing it is you just close up front and and therefore it looks like there's nothing to hide so there's no fault and there's no error and so if you said something like in the same tweet like you know as we're transitioning to being full-time premier and first husband uh i'm you know i'm taking a shift at the uh at the old rail car or whatever right and along the lines of suggesting it was part of like moving out of this life like yeah we've still got a few things to wrap up here here and we don't have a dishwasher, but we're getting out of this life, right? That I think that it would be very hard afterwards to say, like, you were just trying to set this up and you could have had the same sort of human interest moment. And I didn't wordsmith it there, but I think the point is if you disclose it as part of your tweet, it is way less objectionable, right? Like, look at us. It's like the equivalent would be like a couple packing up boxes in their first department at that point that would be kind of the visual comp guys
Carter
24:37
guys i think we should buy this and then start a lobbying company pretty
Zain
24:42
pretty good it's very versatile
Carter
24:43
versatile i just gotta ask you guys like do you think that navigator would be interested in working with us um
Corey
24:49
we bought half the rail car yeah
Carter
24:51
yeah once we bought the rail car like we can call navigator what do
Carter
24:55
communicate us out of this one you fuckers let's go that'd be great we're
Carter
25:00
we're gonna a crisis communication our own crisis communications firm it could be wicked we
Carter
25:04
could do so much stuff you
Zain
25:06
have the imagination we have to put in a bid i think we have to put in a bit we have to put in a bit yeah i i we're taking suggestions on on what what best uh referring documents and
Corey
25:14
and reference letters we should include as part of the this is for sure a good time to remind steven he's not assigning authority of the corporation is this a
Zain
25:22
a patreon is anyone anyone is
Corey
25:24
just okay oh as anyone is a good question that's a really good question uh
Zain
25:28
uh thanks cibc yeah fantastic uh okay guys let's move on from um the the rail car to facebook and twitter daniel smith going after free speech big tech in the government and government censorship is becoming danger to free speech around the world as premier of this province with 4.6 million albertans if they can prevent me from communicating with you imagine what they can do to any of us This is, of course, what Danielle Smith said when she mentioned that she was not able to post from her Facebook account. Facebook said, no, that's just not true. It's not your account. It's just one of the managers of your account. We have flagged them, and they don't have posting abilities. Corey, are these two stories related, first of all? Like, you mentioned there's the relationship aspect. I didn't actually go there initially, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that first before we kind of dive a little bit deeper into some of the nuances of this particular story. I
Corey
26:21
I mean, yeah, absolutely have to acknowledge the likelihood. And I will say likelihood, not even possibility. And because this is Issues Management 101, right? You change the channel. Change the channel as Issues
Zain
26:34
Issues Management 101. So that's what you were implying, like this is just an onto something else sort of thing, pick a fight with someone
Corey
26:39
This is an onto something else. And it might have been, you had this problem, and maybe you would have made noise about it regardless. But maybe in a world where you weren't trying to change the channel, you would have tried to work it out with meta first, right? But instead, you're like, oh, let's go. Let's not look at the facts. Let's fucking go. Let's get it all out there. Let's change the channel. and maybe that's why you end up if you're daniel smith in the premier's office at this point with a little of egg on your face because it doesn't look like the facts were quite as you originally presented and maybe you knew that maybe you didn't maybe you didn't care because you were in such a rush to get something out the door to stamp on the other story that you didn't want to give any life to carter
Zain
27:18
carter was this the uh maybe
Zain
27:20
maybe not so far as the dead cat on the table was this a standard channel changer from from your perspective how you saw it it
Carter
27:28
it certainly feels like it i mean it's also a very convenient enemy i mean social media account you just go after the the zuck everybody hates the zuck you may as well go after him right so um facts be damned let's do it and they did it they went after mark zuckerberg and uh what's changed now right like this is this is from the from the playbook um you know it's it's fascinating that the guy who got you know The actual admin that got banned was running more Facebook accounts than the diner had customers last month. But, you know, that's...
Corey
28:04
Yeah, so the admin had 300... Let me
Zain
28:08
me get into that. But first, let me pitch you guys on something. Let
Zain
28:12
Let me pitch you guys on something. Live show in the diner, 500 bucks a spot.
Carter
28:18
This is great. Okay. This is great. I mean, it's
Zain
28:20
it's only going to be half the data because Navigator is going to have the other half as part of their co-working space. So we'll do like a standard like nine to five, eight hour show just to interrupt their workday.
Zain
28:33
have to ask you, if you guys both think this was a channel changer, talk to me about its effectiveness before we get into the heart of the story. Do you think it was an effective channel changer?
Zain
28:42
And then we'll talk about the admin and his pages, etc. I
Corey
28:44
I think it was an extraordinarily effective channel changer. And one of the things about channel changers that people need to know, well, let's just talk about this. There are lots of different channel changers. There are some issues if you're the government, you're like, I can do this any day and I'm going to use this next time I need a channel changer. Lots of times you'll keep things in your back pocket because you know they have a shelf life of three months. Anytime you need it, government always has reasons to change the channel. Sure. Can come up on much more innocuous issues along the way. The second type of channel changer is where I think almost you're just drowning and you'll reach for anything and you'll say, well, I'm going to make this the thing we're talking about here. And it is still related to events that are out there. And this, this I think would be that version of that. Like, I don't think they had, they obviously didn't have this forever. It was based on an event. And then you just try to blow it up. And then the third type of channel changer is the more generic kind of grievance one where you just create something that is, you know, just culture war stuff that comes out of nowhere. And that usually is tied to the issue, but like taking the issue, zooming in a different way, blaming a different group, whatever. And then all of a sudden you're off and you're talking about the blame of the group or whatever the issue might be. But this, to me, seems like the one where it's, hey, this is there, we can yell about this, and we can change the channel. And I think it was an effective one, because I don't see an awful lot of people talking about, like, I actually didn't see that story really even take life. It looked like it was about to, and then all of a sudden, everybody's running off on the Facebook.
Zain
30:13
And when you mean that story, you mean the rail car? Yeah, absolutely, the rail car story. Carter, was this effective in your mind?
Carter
30:19
Oh, absolutely, and I do think it was intentional, too. I mean, it wasn't an accident. incident um they
Carter
30:24
they were in a little bit of potential trouble they got out of trouble beautiful channel change super impressive carter
Zain
30:31
carter i haven't seen what the ndp said about this but do you have any thoughts on how an opposition party responds to a channel changer when they know it's perhaps happening to them not to them but it's happening that the government's in trouble they're changing the channel do you have any internal rules for how you think about responding when your opponent is doing a channel change do you just get out of the way do you try to battle them especially if it's on their terrain like what sort of rules do you have try
Carter
30:54
try and connect them if you can i mean ideally you're if it's a good channel changer they're not they're going to get their story so you've got to try and take the story that existed before and extend it into the story that exists now um so you know is there a way that you can make uh now that we've you know seen that she
Carter
31:14
she was wrong especially can we can we talk about you know her propensity to lie i mean I mean, even something as simple as the fact that she had her picture taken just doing the dishes in the diner car that is now suddenly for sale. I mean, we can't trust a word that comes out of her mouth. We can't trust anything about this woman. Everything she says, whether it's going after Metta or trying to sell her. These are just in the last weekend, you
Carter
31:44
you know, trying to sell Metta or trying to sell her diner car. and all of a sudden now she's going after meta like why
Carter
31:50
is she a pathological liar and and how do we deal with this as a province moving forward that could work you could try that you
Zain
32:00
quite well how do you respond do you respond to a channel changer as as an opposition
Corey
32:05
the the first thing you want to do is resist the channel change but once the channel change has occurred um then yeah then you try to tie the issues together or you say let's make sure we we have a way to go back to this and we don't get channel change. Like let's make sure we're keeping track of this ball and we're able to move it forward in ways that are advantageous to us. I like Steven's idea about tying them together. It would be super easy in this case to do it with, you know, a flip comment like, well, now we know the premier lost access to the account because the admin who lost access had 300 other Facebook pages. I'm told they were all putting reviews on her rail car diner because she was was about to list it and she wanted to make sure they were super positive oh
Carter
32:47
oh that's fine you
Corey
32:48
you know that's good yeah thank you that's
Corey
32:52
and that ties it in it also raises questions about what in the world's going on with all of these other matters but and then yeah elevate it make it about character have the conversation more broadly the reality is um a channel changer almost by definition is good for the person who's doing it that's why they're changing the channel So, and what you're ultimately trying to do, both in the resisting and then the tying later, is not letting them get a clean channel change. Because
Corey
33:17
even if it's a channel change to an issue that seems like a loser to them, they've made the calculation it's less of a loser to them than the thing they were talking
Zain
33:26
Carter, what do you make of the, let's get into the heart of the story, or at least what's an interesting tidbit of the story, and we'll see if then there's any strategy questions here. Sure.
Zain
33:33
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that people often don't understand the small ecosystem of folks that operate a lot of these pages.
Zain
33:42
Maybe that's the interesting, is that the interesting angle? I think to me, I mean, maybe it's so obvious to us, but the person who was flagged, who was trying to post vis-a-vis daniel smith's account also
Zain
33:56
also administered dozens of others yeah
Carter
33:59
yeah i mean there's this kind of small network especially in right-wing uh politics uh of people who are managing huge numbers of accounts and these accounts look like uh they are independent and unique um when really they're all tied together uh in fact we just got a note from one of our listeners in new brunswick about about Premier Higgs, who has hired from Saskatchewan the social media manager for...
Carter
34:31
Not Moe, the guy before Moe, Brad, Brad Wall. Brad Wall. And, you
Carter
34:36
you know, why would he do that? Well, because there was a training ground, essentially, that has been set up on the right to manage these complex social media environments. governments and uh if you have communications needs you're out of your mind not to bring in some of these super high well
Carter
34:57
well-trained uh huge network people who have access and control of of these massive accounts so you
Carter
35:06
you know good for good for them bad for democracy i suppose yeah
Zain
35:11
yeah cory in some ways like their their um specialty and and you know i've worked with these folks as well on the political left, is it's not so much the coordination, but it's kind of the gut instinct of having used this muscle so many times of knowing what's going to work online. These folks just have a good sense of like, this is in vogue, this is not, the algos love this, the algos don't. And a lot of it could be like, you know, licking your finger and putting it out like it, but they have a beat on it. They have a bit of a pulse on it. Talk to me about your sort of understanding of this ecosystem. And then even if you can just throw in how we found out that this individual had access to multiple accounts is also kind of interesting in its own right uh
Corey
35:50
uh yeah so when we think about the it's
Corey
35:54
it's like anything right if you do it a lot you get good at it it's why we hire consultants it's why we hire specialists we we know that they can do it in a fraction of the time it would take us it's why you hire a plumber rather than doing the plumbing yourself because you don't want to spend the next three months of your life on youtube watching how something goes together by the way
Carter
36:12
way apropos of nothing how's the rental going
Corey
36:16
it's in my head i don't know why yeah um
Corey
36:22
that's true so like it's not as though these people have some sort of witchcraft or there's something magical about them it's that they do it a lot and
Corey
36:30
as a result of doing a lot they start to get a feel for what works and what doesn't and i think when you talk about social media in particular that's always changing you You know, yesterday's cool meme is totally washed by, you know, by next week. And so they act nimbly, they incorporate these things. And Zane, really importantly, they're aggregating that information across hundreds of channels. Different accounts. That's right. So, you know, that meme is working in these 30 groups that have this sort of approach, and it's not working in these 10 groups that have this sort of approach in this audience. And that allows me, in aggregate, to kind of take this all together and say, I think this is going to work here. and it gives them just a better hit ratio than uh than people who don't have access to all of those channels and aren't constantly posting social media all of the time so it's just it's a very smart economy of scale and it makes a ton of sense that you would get experts in this space and like most things in life there's the sectoral expertise which they bring and then there's kind of the the expertise that's context aware which is what you would get from working with a premier's office or working with a political party in
Corey
37:35
a geography where they could sort of bring in some of that local flavor here in
Corey
37:39
in terms of you know how we know that there was somebody who had like a trillion accounts who was managing the premier's account and they were the person who lost access to it it's because as after the the post i believe correct me if i'm wrong zane but reporters started reaching out to Meta and saying, what's
Corey
37:59
what's going on here? And
Corey
38:01
And they say, no, it was one person who had a boatload of accounts. And there's five administrators to the Premier's page. The others did not lose access to this page. This page never went down. There
Corey
38:13
was never any desire to post it. And so then all of a sudden, it went from looking like Danielle Smith couldn't post on her page to a combination of Daniel
Corey
38:22
Daniel Smith doesn't seem aware of how this works. and like one person lost access for security reasons like totally different story it
Zain
38:29
it is a different story and carter you know the question i have here it kind of evolves into like
Zain
38:34
campaign social media organic social media which is what we call this the engagement and the memes and the and the stuff you generally don't put a lot of big dollars behind versus social media in government and it seems like as our political universe in canada starts mimicking the united United States, and in some ways, just outright emulating it with consistent campaign through and through. Do you think we're the era of community management and using social media as a tool to kind of get back to the electorate or get back to voters is just gone. And we just care about the straight up knife fighter meme culture, creep, keep creating the content, because that's what seems like and I and once again, I'm making a bit of a leap, but just for for the purposes of having this conversation. But that's what seems like this may be the bailiwick of this administrator in terms of the knowledge that they have gleaned through all these accounts and through this expertise work. Is the era of community management and actually using social media for governance purely gone right now?
Carter
39:33
Oh, I think so. I think I'm not even sure that it was ever 100% there. I mean, you have, because you could have multiple accounts, because you could, you know, there were, back in the good old days, I mean, these were these were all wild, wild west. And then at some point you kind of had to register, you know, your social media accounts so that people knew which which accounts were yours and and you weren't, you know, using government resources to to prop up your own your own accounts and those types of things. things um but right now i i would say pretty cleanly um that there are uh
Carter
40:10
uh that this is more a propaganda style tool and i'm not using propaganda in the evil type of sense we use propaganda that way in the evil sense last episode but propaganda also is kind of you know benign like us putting out our message so that you know unfiltered so you can you can see it yourself is is by many definitions, kind of a propaganda style of communications and social media gave us the best way of doing that. And by optimizing your, your, your
Carter
40:39
your communication structure, you are in a way better position to, to push that out and give that to, um, you
Carter
40:49
you know, push it out and give it to, to your audience. So, yeah, I think that the days of this just being a nice, another nice way to communicate are long gone, Zane. I think that if those days ever existed, they certainly aren't now.
Zain
41:06
Corey, you know, it might seem like a question to Carter's point that that was answered years ago. But I'm curious about your thoughts, because you often talk about a government or a politician's sort of duty to communicate. Can you reconcile that with where we are right now with perhaps community management and how social media during time of governance is used versus a campaign period?
Corey
41:25
Well, it's a super tricky area. And it's obviously one that I kind of saw up close and personal, and it evolved a lot over my time in government, right? Where, I
Corey
41:35
mean, Carter actually, you know, glanced against some of the biggest, weirdest issues we had to deal with in government on social media. But let me just kind of throw this out here for you. the
Corey
41:45
social media accounts of the various leaders are obviously where people go when they want information from their premier right during the wildfires rachel notley uh daniel smith and these more recent ones these are the accounts that people think are going to be speaking on behalf of them as premier but these are their personal slash political accounts that they have brought
Corey
42:07
the game here and the minute and so you're you're kind of stuck in government it's like well well, this is a big channel. We need to get this information out. Please get this information out there. But it creates this network effect. And all of a sudden, the government releasing information via these channels, even if being done concurrently on other more official channels, is going to increase the reach of their social media account, right? And that's reach all of a sudden that they're going to be bringing back into the game of politics, reach that was created by government. And that's an organic version, but there were paid versions of this as well. and there are all sorts of gray in between right so say the government creates what we'd call in government land like boards you know so social media boards that would talk about a program that was coming out okay
Corey
42:49
they'd go out on the government of alberta account or they wouldn't you know there's a lot of government of alberta twitter accounts but we ultimately got to a place where the rule at least at the end of my time there was you know the cpe communications and public engagement would create these non-partisan assets for the government channels if ministers wanted wanted to use them fine but you know they couldn't modify them they couldn't like take the government logo off or anything like that not that i think we actually had the power to stop them but that was the protocol and um and uh anything around it anything partisan they wanted to do was kind of wraparound but we have essentially created content with
Corey
43:26
with government dollars that they are then using on an account that their next tweet might be about what a bunch of shitheads
Corey
43:33
shitheads their opponents yeah
Corey
43:33
yeah exactly right and and getting into more of a partisan space and it
Corey
43:39
it got like i cannot tell you how many like murky gray area situations there were and i can i can tell you that both with like ndp and ucp digital leads the number of conversations i had were super plentiful and on both sides you know this is this
Carter
43:55
this was not like one
Corey
43:56
one party thing where they would say I want to do X. And I would say, I got a real problem with X. And we would kind of like feel our way to a solution. And you know, I would try to stand in this principle of the, you know, public service is nonpartisan, and the resources can't be to the benefit of politics. And they would say, yeah, but on the other hand, have you considered and they would bring up legitimate points the other way and how the media is used in all of this. And we'd sit there and we try to hash it out. And I'm happy to say that both governments generally respected those boundaries at the time of of like the use of government resources for non-partisan communications but man
Corey
44:31
man the issues were really tough i'll give you one here say
Corey
44:34
say sarah hoffman was the minister of health and wants to run a town hall right
Corey
44:39
right okay and that town hall is being promoted now government regulations for advertising say you cannot use the likeness of a minister um
Corey
44:47
um like any person basically right okay minister or premier even in advertising unless it hits certain criteria and one of them is a town hall okay
Corey
44:58
you know it's not against the rules to say there's an ad for a town hall now
Corey
45:02
now let's say you create a social media advertisement that's promoting sarah hoffman's town hall and that's just being used with the budgets meet with the minute and it's meeting with the minister of health to talk about health issues and it might be a town hall directly related to these matters and it's say it's four hundred dollars like it's not even a lot of money right standard thing government would do they would put the ad in the local newspaper let's put it that way and i don't think many people would have problem with that comp right well the minute you're then saying okay well we're going to put that out on a channel can
Corey
45:32
can you boost something that comes from a minister's account what
Corey
45:36
what if i said the minister only ever used that account for government business would that change your mind like
Corey
45:41
are so many edge cases here and it's so weird but the minute you do it you've created a valuable asset that they can then use for political like it's social media is a mess in terms of its interactions between public and nonpartisan. And, you know, good luck and congratulations to everybody who has to deal with it. It will be your misery, I'm sure, for the next bit. But these are really tricky issues, and there's
Corey
46:03
clear answers to them. Well,
Zain
46:04
Well, Carter, you can stay out of this because we don't need you. Corey, let's nerd out about one more area of this, one more dimension that I think is very interesting. Carter, you can tend to the dogs or whatever you need to do at this moment. AFL scores are probably they're not they're
Carter
46:17
they're not playing it okay
Zain
46:20
we'll bring you back in carter okay
Zain
46:22
uh cory on targeting was
Zain
46:25
was that ever an issue because if if you were to let's say target demos that are let's just say more likely to support your message as a minister let's just use this example of the minister of health hosting a town hall let's say you get through the you navigate to a conclusion that allows that person to post it on digital put some money behind it for advertising would Would you, as in your formal role, have any issues with the targeting if they said, you don't want to actually want to put this out to Calgary more so than to Edmonton for whatever reason, if that's the next battleground or to a specific age demo versus not? I'm kind of curious about that because it's not just the message and the messenger, the social media dimension that's also added to this, and I'm sure there's several others, is also the targeting, which I find quite interesting.
Corey
47:09
Yeah. And I want to stress that's not a new hurdle for government to have to deal with because that's true of newspapers. newspapers that's true of magazines where they buy correct radio
Corey
47:18
radio all of this and generally speaking as long as there's a legitimate government reason why you would want to talk to one group rather than the other like does the audience suggest that there's do we know from government polling there are more people concerned with health care in calgary or is there a bigger concentration of health care workers who are going to be interested in this issue in calgary then yeah that targeting is going to be totally fair ball and let's be really frank there's a lot lot of different ways that you can cut the pie and there's a lot of different justifications that our political masters would have for us why something should go one way or the other that they could cherry pick the results from and you
Corey
47:53
at it a little bit skeptically and you're like i don't know so much about that but you you might meet them in the middle a little bit and and frankly if their justification is legitimate even if you think it kind of is not what you would do in terms of media buy that's one thing although i really also want to stress we didn't generally really let the politicians determine what the most efficient effective media buy was either for the ndp or the ucp yeah
Corey
48:16
that's that's just not something that we was we would likely entertain obviously we would entertain something like them saying we think it's really important like the broader ones like we really think it's important that for this initiative in rural alberta that rural albertans are hearing about this yeah okay but if they start saying we want to hear it in And we want the ads to run in Grand Prairie, but we don't want them to run in, you know, Lacklabish. You know, that's probably where we start drawing some pretty hard lines and saying, no, I don't think that's really what we're going to do here, Minister. And it's important that you have a strong, independent public service that can actually put those lines out there. And again, I want to give credit to both the NDP and the UCP.
Corey
49:02
I butted heads with both premier's offices a lot on matters like this. And both premier's offices were very reasonable. You know, they didn't fuck about an awful lot. They had the things they wanted to do. I had the things I needed to do. And we kind of met on reasonable grounds there. So I don't want to be misunderstood on this matter. Yeah,
Corey
49:47
targeting didn't have the effect of violating another rule around being nonpartisan or looking at a geography during an election or something like that and so
Corey
49:59
so there was an awful lot of conversation about what are you trying to do here and a lot of the time there's innocuous answers but you know we would always we would also put up walls i
Zain
50:08
i unfairly cut carter out of the conversation i mean we
Carter
50:10
we just didn't do it like that at all we would just say you know we want ethnic ads well i actually want and no it's fine i'm not going to talk about it now though because i was cut out of the conversation so carter
Zain
50:20
carter what were you six months away from an election when you had to butt heads with your cory of the day as chief of staff to the premier yeah did you just blur those lines or did you just not give a flying fuck and say that what i want goes tell me how your experience i mean i
Carter
50:32
didn't run advertising by any stretch of the imagination lee funky was the the cory equivalent at the time yeah
Carter
50:39
um super good guy we had many many good chats i don't recall call ever directing anything um but i think that he was keenly aware that we were heading into an election and we wanted certain things known so i
Carter
50:54
think well i think more than anything we we would spend
Carter
50:57
spend less time talking
Carter
50:58
talking about what we should be doing and spent more time talking about how much money he needed to do what we wanted done uh because you know the the fact you know you
Carter
51:10
weren't necessarily using it to target your audience you were using it to talk to albertans and that's what you're supposed to do with um you know what's it called now cory the pb pp and jpe
Carter
51:25
pb and j and uh it's
Corey
51:28
it's been this for like seven years you're doing this like old man thing pb
Carter
51:31
pb and j the
Corey
51:32
the world's changed i don't know what it is anymore i
Carter
51:34
i don't know what I don't know what it is anymore. Anyways, you used the PB&J and, you
Carter
51:39
know, as long as you were doing like we were we were trying to communicate with people. So we were we were very much in tune with what Lee could
Carter
51:46
could do and wanted to do. And it really wasn't much in the way of conflict.
Carter
51:52
He was great. Corey, we've
Zain
51:52
we've got to move on, but finish us off here. And we'll discuss that one day, Carter. Now, what seems like the new reality, which is two months before the election call, are we just going to get used to multi-million dollar ad campaigns by the government of the day? That's not a new reality. It happened with
Carter
52:10
with every premier ever.
Carter
52:13
This is exactly what happened. Finish us off.
Corey
52:17
Yeah. I think that one of
Corey
52:21
I want to come back to is this is a rapidly changing space. Thank you, Stephen, for that. I'm sure that's an image that everybody's excited for. And the...
Corey
52:30
I don't know what you're talking about. Can someone explain that to me? no we're good no
Corey
52:34
no we're good the
Corey
52:36
premier's offices have changed a lot over the years too since steven carter used to randomly have meetings with mothers against drunk driving and there are now a lot more professional like the premier's offices have digital media specialists now who are every day in that space and if you're in that space you know you're gonna have a combination of earned and owned and paid and you're gonna go out and you're gonna do ads to To boost things that are organic, then you're going to have organic that you decide maybe to put some money to target. Anyways, the space is all blurred and they're right in there too. And they're an advertiser on the field and they're creating content that kind of looks like government content, but isn't government content. And
Corey
53:15
And there's just more rub points now than there ever have been.
Carter
53:19
that has only grown in the three years.
Carter
53:22
Tell me more about the rub point. I
Corey
53:23
I suspect it has only grown in the three years since I used to have that job. but yeah there are in
Corey
53:30
premier's offices now who
Corey
53:35
are responsible for some of these things that used to just not exist in premier's offices
Zain
53:44
didn't get the first one but then I clued in and the other two just made even more sense that's
Zain
53:48
that's how it worked
Zain
53:51
Corey you can find out more at allmelons.ca let's move on to our final segment our final segment over under our lightning round Steven Carter, Marco
Zain
53:58
Marco Mandocino, he is having a fucking week. We record on Thursday evening here. He has faced a lot of scrutiny for the situation that the convicted rapist, Bernardo, has been moved from maximum security, is on his way to moving from maximum security prison in Ontario to medium security institution in Quebec. back his office uh indicating that listen the
Zain
54:27
the minister and him the minister getting up in the house saying listen i did not know until after this was done the prime minister saying i didn't know until the day this was done but new resources and and reporting reveals that this was known months ago in the prime minister's office and months ago in the minister's office the question i have carter uh as we head into over under in our lightning round is
Zain
54:48
is marco mendocino a minister minister by midnight tomorrow night 11 59 p.m is mendocino a minister tomorrow
Carter
54:57
he should be but i again i don't know how many times i've said this query more than once i i think um could the this government be worse at crisis communications get your story straight um when did you know how did you know and you know what here's an here's another answer it
Carter
55:13
it doesn't matter if you knew because
Carter
55:15
because you shouldn't be interfering in the in the correction system we have that should be run by the bureaucracy that should be managed by the bureaucracy the minister of justice the prime minister should not be interfering in one prisoner's sentence and one prisoner's i don't give a fuck how heinous the crimes are that that person did we do not have a system where a prime minister or minister can reach in and change one prisoner's sentence because you think their crime is particularly heinous that's not the way it's supposed to be done but instead of that having having that discussion these guys have opened themselves up as they do every single time they face a crisis to process questions that make them look like fucking idiots and it's the idiocy it's the cover-up it's the hiding that's going to kill them they didn't learn a fucking thing from donald trump the cover-up always kills you don't try and cover it up boom
Carter
56:12
over to you cory cory
Zain
56:14
Medicino, is he administered by 1159 tomorrow?
Corey
56:18
D minus, Zane. And I'll tell you how I got to that answer there. Yeah. Everything that Stephen said is 100% correct. Damn right it is. 100% correct.
Corey
56:26
This is an interesting one. This is really pretty good examples of ready, fire, aim. Why they felt that they needed to say that they didn't have this hot potato is beyond me in the first place. Like, when did you know? I love Stephen's answer of it's irrelevant. relevant i know a lot of things that i don't have any authority over or power over you know like it's like this is not how our system works i personally would love to see a venn diagram of the people who are outraged about the intervention in snc level in which they should be who are now also calling for intervention in the pulpit oh
Carter
57:01
this is this is the last thing you want from a democracy is your elected officials to be able to individually reach in and and change outcomes they should set policy blindly this is what we should do in general and then when people commit these crimes it doesn't matter if you're the prime minister that and commits them or or paul bernardo you're going to get the same treatment in the in the justice system that's essential for democratic principles and
Corey
57:28
and you heard it here first stephen carter just compared the prime minister to paul bernardo right here on the strategist that's good sex
Zain
57:44
not going to ask you
Zain
57:46
no, no, I was going to say something too that would have been inappropriate, but then I also said no. Corey's right now thinking, do
Carter
57:51
do I have to edit this? How much editing is going
Zain
57:54
going to go into this? Hard to say. You guys, neither of you have answered my question. Corey, is he a minister by end of day tomorrow? Yes or no?
Zain
58:01
You're right. I didn't answer your question, Zay. Is he a minister by end of day tomorrow, Carter?
Carter
58:05
Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, Corey and I. Excellent.
Zain
58:08
Excellent. Annalise, you can pick up the scraps when you get back.
Zain
58:12
Carter, we didn't even ask Annalise
Carter
58:13
Annalise today. It was just straight to you saying that's how much we care.
Zain
58:17
Alberta NDP, they're calling for a special prosecutor to invest Daniel Smith over the ethics commissioner report that came out during the election. This is the resurfacing, a major controversy that dug the UCP last month. Are you in or are you out on this strategy for a special prosecutor to investigate this? Well,
Carter
58:34
Well, I'd be really interested if that's what the ethics commissioner recommended. You know, she Marguerite Trussler did indicate that she was reserving the right to step in and to punish the member, Danielle Smith, as per, you know, what she thought was appropriate. And if she thinks that calling for a special prosecutor is appropriate, I'm all over it. I don't understand why people feel like like calling for things that they don't have control over makes them look more powerful. I don't understand why calling for a special prosecutor that doesn't happen makes you look like you're better politicians. You
Zain
59:09
You know, it just doesn't. So, sorry, is your political strategy here that you only do it if you know it's going to happen so you can take credit for it versus something like this where you have not much control over? This
Carter
59:20
This is the equivalent of calling for someone's resignation. I called for your resignation. Well, they didn't resign. Now what are you going to do? Well, I'm really calling for it this time. You know, you look like a fucking putz. Stop looking like a putz. Look like you can actually do something, achieve something. Like Corey Hogan.
Carter
59:40
Corey Hogan is someone who looks like he can do something and achieve something. I mean, he's
Carter
59:44
he's wearing the same t-shirt for the fourth episode in a row.
Corey
59:48
This is the fourth episode. That's not even true. It's totally true. It's not even true. It's totally true.
Carter
59:52
But I'll tell you something. Fourth episode in a row. I'll
Corey
59:54
I'll tell you something. Yeah.
Corey
59:55
It's a good t-shirt. It
Carter
59:56
It is. You like that t-shirt.
Zain
59:59
Interrupt on the strategy.
Corey
1:00:02
Yeah, I don't really like it. I think it could have been better timed. I also feel that it probably would have been – this should have had some soak time and you should see what comes out of the ethics commissioner before you start making these calls because it would have been much more powerful if it came from the ethics commissioner. And ultimately now, the ethics commissioner, I feel like
Corey
1:00:23
like that's tough. Like now you're going to do the thing the leader of the opposition called for. Yeah,
Carter
1:00:26
you've undermined the ethics commissioner. Well done. Good
Corey
1:00:29
Yeah, I'm not so sure it was necessary. necessary and well i understand that in you got to keep in mind part of what's happening at this particular moment is that uh rachel notley is also kind of training up her new batch of mlas like this is
Corey
1:00:45
we stick it to the government this is what it looks like when we do x y or z maybe even quite intentionally right like i'm going to show you what these kinds of things look like but i don't think it was a particularly well timed or well thought out hit frankly because even if you're going to do it i just don't think that on june 15th is the day to do it no
Zain
1:01:04
no cory you'll remember that when volkswagen uh and the federal government announced their 13 billion dollar deal pure polyev said i'm going to reserve judgment until the pbo comes back with their analysis well they have cory and they say that it's actually going to cost us more nearly 16 billion dollars is that outcome by the pbo overrated or underrated viewed through the lens of uh how big of a bat it gives to hit the government with uh on this overrated or underrated the pbo finally coming back with their conclusion saying it's actually going to be three billion dollars more i
Corey
1:01:37
i think it's overrated um i i
Corey
1:01:40
i have lots of negative feelings about the pbo in general in terms of the mechanism but ultimately it just gives him the opportunity to do the thing he wanted to do if he wants to do it but actually it's a little awkward for him now if he doesn't want to attack it yeah
Zain
1:01:55
yeah right Right, because of the... Because
Corey
1:01:57
Because he's like, well, I was going to wait to see if these numbers came back, and the numbers now come back higher, and it's like, well, what were you waiting for, Pierre? Now it's even higher. It sounds like you've got to attack this thing. It sounds like you've got to be against it. And if he's made the political calculus that he shouldn't be against it... In the interim, right, which he could have. That's a little weird. Yeah. So he has sort of handed his agency off to a group that he didn't have any kind of control over, and so I would have overrated it. That's
Zain
1:02:18
That's a running theme for the last two questions. Yeah.
Zain
1:02:21
Carter, overrated, underrated. at PBO saying it's going to actually cost $16, Bill, not $13? Well,
Carter
1:02:26
Well, I think, first of all, I mean, we've
Carter
1:02:28
we've talked about how meaningless these numbers are in general. People just aren't able to wrap their head around how much money that is. And I just don't think that there's a huge constituency of people running around saying, I just can't wait to hear what the PBO says. I just, you know, Pierre will do what Pierre does. It will, you
Carter
1:02:48
you know, I don't see him taking a big swing at this because I think that he's going to want those voters.
Carter
1:02:54
you know, what are you going to do? I could have got a better deal?
Zain
1:03:00
Carter, I want to talk about this next question in depth in a future episode, because there's shit going on in New Brunswick, Carter. Oh,
Zain
1:03:06
The premier, Higgs, has lost another cabinet minister. This is all based on the premier's sort of commitment that schools should have to tell parents about their children's desire to change their gender pronouns. The premier is arguing that that is what it should be. This particular bill has been extremely controversial. The premier is saying, I'm willing to wage an election on this. And Carter, there might be some national data that supports this. I want to underline national because it's not data out of New Brunswick. where 57% of respondents to this Leger poll say they agree that schools should have to tell parents about their child's desire to change their gender or pronouns versus only 18% saying that schools shouldn't tell parents. From your perspective, Carter, maybe even, I shouldn't say park the issue because the issue is a sensitive and it's an important and a personal one, but I'd say focusing on the political strategy here, do
Zain
1:03:59
do you feel like Higgs has a a decent hand and a decent shot at winning an election on this issue from
Carter
1:04:09
Oh, I suspect that if the election question was, should this be disclosed to parents, then yeah, I think that that would probably be very good. If the election issue is, why is Premier Higgs running against children? Why is he using children as pawns? Why is he putting children at risk even further at risk i don't think it's going to look he's going to come out looking well um i think that uh you know it's all well and good to to come up with these things in theory that say you know in
Carter
1:04:41
in theory do you think that this should happen yeah of course i think that should happen that's that yes we should totally tell everybody um but then you know should should prime should premiers campaign against children i mean that's what's happening in the United States. Is that what we want here? I mean, there's a there's a whole bunch of different attacks that the opposition can take. Plus, he's he's bleeding support from his from his own, not from his caucus from his cabinet. You know, this is I think this is the third cabinet minister to step down from his cabinet so far. There are two more cabinet ministers in the wings waiting to step down, potentially step down, I should say, because they just simply didn't vote today they didn't go in and take the vote uh instead they stayed away from from the legislature um because you know you can't we talked about this a little bit uh in the last episode you can't take a position in someone's cabinet and then vote against them that's that's just not done you can't you know you have
Carter
1:05:42
have to have your full-throated support for the government and these
Carter
1:05:46
these people do not have full-throated support for this government and it makes me wonder if they're going to have uh if premier higgs isn't going to be trying
Carter
1:05:55
trying to fight an election about whether or not we should you know include parents in education and what he's actually doing is fighting a an election about whether or not his leadership style is an absolute disaster and we can see it because he's picking on trans kids uh and trying to run an election campaign using trans trans children as the uh the
Carter
1:06:16
the the wedge issue cory
Zain
1:06:19
cory carter saying that listen if it's an issue on the actual sort of question he has a shot but if it expands beyond that and it gets framed differently this could be trouble for higgs what do you think has he ever played his hand or does he have a decent chance looking at the pure strategy of of the situation from from as far as we are well
Corey
1:06:37
well this does go back to something we always say which is beware of novel concepts in polling, right? And the question framing matters so, so much. Stephen talked about this. I have no doubt if you ask a question, I'll tell you as a parent, like, should you know about what's going on in your child's life when they're at school? You know, the instinctive answer of parents is going to be, yeah, absolutely. You ask that same question, do schools have an obligation to protect children from harm that could occur at home? You're going to see percents that go pretty similar the other way. Like, you know, you're not going to have a lot of people say, say, oh, no, actually, I think it's parents' right to harm children, right?
Corey
1:07:13
And there's just so many fucking hairs on this issue. And all of these situations are so context demanding. You know, what is the child's home life like, right? What is the kind of the community vibe about all of these issues? You know, there's questions of safety, both physical and psychological, that need to be unpacked by people who know them and understand them and can support them. And what I fucking hate about all of this is that Higgs
Corey
1:07:40
Higgs is just using kids as a cudgel here to make some sort of culture wars point.
Corey
1:07:46
great teachers in this country. We are so lucky that we value education the way we do. And we have highly trained professionals who deal with the learning
Corey
1:07:58
learning issues and the social issues that spill out of being human beings in a place growing and developing, you know, in conjunction with each other. And we've got to trust the teachers a little bit more on this one and return some of the judgment and discretion to the classroom, where teachers can make those choices that are actually much more sensitive to the context. And the idea that we would create provincial legislation forcing a single course of action, in this case telling parents, it's
Corey
1:08:25
it's fucking crazy. It's fucking crazy. crazy and so i you know i think the problem that higgs ultimately has in this election is that when you stop and think about it and you start to think about some of the consequences of some of those actions in some of these settings and the scenarios that you can unfold that are not hypothetical that have occurred that have resulted in the deaths of trans kids suicides self-harm you know people who really just feel lost for far longer than they need to because they have just been outed and shamed and they're on the street as a result or something like that it's
Corey
1:08:59
it's it's nuts like i it's crazy to me that a man would be so callous and take these particular actions and ultimately that's why i think it's election poison to him because i think at the end of the day bad things are unpopular and this is a bad thing that higgs is trying to do
Zain
1:09:13
nicely said we're gonna leave it there who knows guys next time we might be recording from a rail car restaurant that's a wrap on episode 1075 of the strategist my name is zane velgey with me as always cory hogan stephen carter and we'll see you next time